Perspective: How Our Lives Get Channeled

Copyright © 2017 by Lee Thayer.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017915369

ISBN:      Hardcover            978-1-5434-5727-8

                Softcover             978-1-5434-5728-5

                eBook                  978-1-5434-5729-2

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Rev. date: 10/19/2017

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CONTENTS

Perspective 1 A Perspective on Perspective

Perspective 2 Sources and Consequences

Perspective 3 Core Perspectives

Perspective 4 Relevance

Perspective 5 How We Think about Things

Perspective 6 How We Feel about Things

Perspective 7 Words, Numbers, Measures, & Logic

Perspective 8 A Brief on Lexicon

Perspective 9 Assessing the Efficacy of Cultural Perspectives

Perspective 10 Epistemic Communities

Perspective 11 Choices and Decisions

Perspective 12 Life’s Problems

Perspective 13 A Life Worth Living

Perspective 14 Playing the Game

Perspective 15 On Knowing vs. Doing

Perspective 16 An Afterword

Perspective 1

A Perspective on Perspective

Every human mind is created – and subsequently maintained or altered – in some form of human communication. The stuff of the mind is meaning – what things mean to you because that’s what things generally mean to those around you, as nearly as you can determine from observing and inquiring. What’s at play in the most ordinary everyday conversation all the way to the symbolic posturing of nation-states or bands of true believers of one stripe or another are the minds (and thus the meanings) that the people involved bring to bear.

No two minds are exactly alike. The less contact there is with other minds that may be different from yours, the more convergence there is in the group you belong to. The more contact there is, the more divergences emerge, sometimes violently. Human groups speciate by the social protocols they invent for discerning who belongs to their group from those who do not. Every community is an epistemic community – those who belong to them know roughly the same things, and they employ similar ways of arriving at the knowledge they share. This is as much the case for scientists as it is for garbage collectors. They both have an argot, a way of taking about things that is intended to differentiate them from other epistemic communities. Accountants talk and think like accountants, and physical therapists talk and think like physical therapists. Rich people talk and think like rich people, and Marines talk and think like Marines. Chefs talk and think like chefs, and rock music fans talk and think like rock music fans. Amateur gardeners talk and think like amateur gardeners. Etc.

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It is not exactly myopia, depending upon how central and exclusive these orientations are to the lives of the people involved. They are simply ubiquitous perspectives that make our minds more or less unique. People who immigrate to America have a very different perspective on America than those who were born here. People whose native language is unrelated to English have a different perspective than do those of us whose only language is English. People who struggle and achieve virtuosity in any field of endeavor have a very different perspective on life than those who are content with the mediocrity of their lives. Those who survive a near-fatal illness or injury have a different perspective on their lives, and often on the world. And those who have lived lives where nothing much has ever happened have a different perspective on life than do those to whom much has happened. Helen Keller’s perspective on the world she came to know only later in her life was significantly different from those whose began life with their eyesight and hearing intact. The surgeon’s perspective is different from the farmer’s perspective, while the perspective of both is different from that of the airline pilot and the miner.

When people shared the same world as their clan or their neighbors, their perspective – the place from which they viewed the world in their mind’s eye – was very similar. A community was a place where people thought very much alike, felt very much alike, and behaved very much alike. There are still remnants in many Amish communities. A special child in such communities might grow up wondering if there is a world out there which might be very different from his or her own. They are free to go find out. If they want to return, it may be under quarantine. They can’t be admitted back as a member of the community in good standing unless they abide by its collective beliefs and practices. They have to be vetted as if they were aliens seeking admission to the community.

There was a time not so long ago when every human who arrived on earth was brought up in such communities. We belonged to them. As those communities have disappeared in the onslaught of modernization, so has the perspective we once had of belonging to one. We moderns are more likely to belong to an occupational group, to some sort of organization, or to those with whom we share leisure-time activities. As communities of people have disappeared, we have lost some or all of our sense of belonging. We moderns belong more often to anonymous groups – such as those we experience vicariously when we watch television, or when we attend a ball game or a pop music concert. We are there, where it’s at. But there is no there, there. In a few hours, it is over. We may gather with our buddies at a bar to watch the game and imbibe, but all of that ends when the game is over, except for our desperate replays, when we try to keep the camaraderie going so we can belong to something. The belonging felt by forming into us and them categories fades in modernity to something more like me and them – the them being the rest of the world that has no more than marketing interest in my existence. The me becomes an anonymous part of some kind of demographic, which younger people try desperately to distinguish themselves in. There is no community to socialize them, beyond a local gang or a larger cause like ISIS. We belong to a category of consumers, within which we struggle for status by how we talk or what we wear or where we hang out.

When we talk we represent the perspective of some ideology or other. We would speak for ourselves. But we are less and less certain of who that is. The rise of me-ism coincides with the decline of community. In a community, we know who we are. In the modern world, who we are is always negotiable depending upon who we are talking to. We fit our perspectives to adapt to those we happen to be with.

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Because we are humans, we have to see ourselves and our worlds from some perspective. It is impossible to be cognizant of our worlds or ourselves except from our own perspective. Nor is it possible to be routinely cognizant of the world from others’ perspectives. It is part of the human condition. The perspective we use to comprehend the world and ourselves in it is socially constructed and maintained. It is what we stand on to conceive of and understand the world we inhabit. Without a perspective, we would have no mind. Our perspective, immediate and long-term, comes from how we mind the world and ourselves in it.

Mind is a noun. We should think of it as a verb. It is not a place. It is a process. It is the process that determines what we see and how we see it – in terms of the meaning it has for us. The mind is what converts the raw data of the world inside or outside of us into what it means to us. It is the process that determines not only what we see in our world, but how we see it. It is as well what we use to process how we present ourselves in our worlds – not only what we say or how we comport ourselves, but how we explain those worlds and ourselves in it. We do this more by what we do than by what we say. Just as we are incessantly reading other people and the circumstances, they are incessantly reading us and the circumstances that provoke our attention. This is what minds are for. It is useful to think of this as minding the world.

We don’t mind the world according to what it is. We don’t perceive the world as it is. We perceive the world and perform ourselves in it according to the way we are. It is not the way the world is but the ways in which we explain it that drives our psychological and social machinations. Our destiny – both personal and collective – lies in how we explain things. We explain things according to our personal and cultural perspectives. We are not obligated to perceive the way the world is, but we are destined to perceive the world according to how we and our cohorts explain it.

Our perspectives trickle down to us from our predecessors (who train us not in the world’s ways, but in their ways). We stand on those perspectives to formulate our own interpreted experiences in life. This conglomeration, always in process, may be good for the individual or good for the collective. It may also be deleterious for the individual – and for the collective. The mind is not beholden to any truth beyond human truths. Of the making of those, there is apparently no end. There are no facts that any mind is obligated to defer to. Minds defer to other minds, not to any facts.

How we have come to see the world (and ourselves in it) determines how we will see the world. The world does not determine how we perceive it. Our perspectives do. We are far more likely to perceive the world the way our social cohorts do than to perceive it as it is. We can’t know the world as it is. We can only know it according to how our collective/individual minds work. We have no choice but to interpret the world according to the interpretations available to us in our own minds. Our perspectives may be similar to those we cohort with. But the perspectives of other cultures alien to ours are perspectives we do not have because we are not one of them.

If you are not thoroughly immersed in their ways of explaining things, and the vocabulary in which they do so, you cannot grasp fully what they mean by what they say…or do. A perspective on the world which is not habitual and inescapable is not a perspective. It is an anomaly. If you are not a regular golfer, you will not fully understand what regular golfers are talking about when they talk about the game. If you are a Shakespeare or a Packers fan, others who do not share your perspective will be incapable of any real understanding of what that means to you. If you are in love, a person who has not been in love has no way of seeing the world as you do when you talk about it. Talk is not so much about what you are purportedly talking about as it is about the social relationships in which you are talking. The first and vital function of talking is mental copulation – of trying to be of the same mind about things. It never fully comes about. People cannot share the same perspective. They can only share talk about it. This may lead them closer to you, or away from you. You may like the people who seem to be coming from the same place you are. But because they cannot, and you cannot, we have to pretend we are (to use a popular cliché) on the same page. The same page does not and cannot, of course, exist. It’s just a metaphor used socially to facilitate moving on. We want to think and feel like others in our purview do. That’s because we are (or want to be) related to them in some way. We will never be of exactly the same mind about anything. A mind is not a commodity to be filled or emptied at will. It is the cumulative process that underwrites every individual life. There are no two individual lives that are identical. People inevitably harbor different perspectives about what they presume to be the same things.

A perspective is what we stand on in order to interpret the world. You are not free to see the world in any way you might want to. What you are capable of seeing – or how you feel about it or comprehend it – is a function of who you are. What you are incapable of seeing – or how – is also a function of who you are. People see the world from their own private perspective (no matter how influenced by their culture or the subcultures they belong to). What complicates the process is that it is an amalgam of three levels of perspective: (1) That of the larger culture into which they have been thoroughly or haphazardly socialized; (2) That of the epistemic communities* they belong to on purpose or by default; and (3) That of their own experiences and how they have more or less creatively interpreted and explained those experiences to themselves.

*(An epistemic community is a set of people who have more or less similar perspectives on things. They more or less know the same things, and they more or less use the same kind of perspectives for knowing.)

Like most mammals, humans have an inherent need to belong. Belonging is a form of social control. When an individual is rejected or fails to fulfill the reciprocal imperatives of belonging to a group of some sort, he or she becomes a kind of free radical in society – belonging only to an epistemic community of one. They become idiosyncratic, taking their clues about thought and behavior from themselves. They become not just disjunctive, but minimally a threat to the social order. Some become a threat to themselves. A few become a threat to others. This was rarer in traditional communities, because they did a better job of socializing their young. In modern societies, this becomes more prevalent. The combination of poor socialization added to the pull of fashion and of alienation (from any belonging-to) is a breeding ground for both sociopaths and psychopaths. To belong is to belong to the fate of the whole. Not to belong is a failure to have a perspective on life that puts the life of the group first and oneself second. Their self-made perspectives are often toxic to others whose perspectives come from the subcultures to which they have a vital sense of belonging. Self-control comes from the imperatives of belonging. People who don’t have those perspectives are led into the dark areas outside of self-control. They become the judge and jury of their own feelings and actions.

Such failures to belong, along with the reciprocal obligations of belonging, seem to lead people to life without a conscience. One’s conscience is an internalization of the norms and values of the group(s) one belongs to. With it comes all sorts of prescriptions and proscriptions about how to comport oneself in life. The less sense of belonging one has, the more impoverished his or her conscience. It isn’t that they don’t have a conscience. It is that their conscience is constructed from their personal perspectives, not those of the social groups they do not belong to. They seek to belong to a group that seems to share their personal perspectives. It is the norms and values of that group they want to align with. If belonging to that group helps them to shuck off the beliefs and values of the group they want to escape from, so much the better. There is always a group for pariahs to belong to. If there isn’t, they will invent one. A person who doesn’t want to be like her parents will find comrades who will induct her into a group having that perspective. There are very few hermits in the world. That requires some competencies most people don’t have – such as a tolerance for solitude, which most believe to be loneliness.

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It is perspective that creates our differences. It is likewise perspective that creates our similarities. When we have what John Gardner referred to as Common Cause, we come together. Lacking that, we dissimulate. We assume that it is better to be a hypocrite than not to be a member in good standing of some social or religious or occupational group. Prospective employees often fib to become a member of any organization that will have them – and pay them. People who want something from other people will readily deceive them about their intentions. Some people who wanted no more than a one night stand end up with a commitment for life. Some people who wanted a lifetime commitment got no more than a one night stand. A car salesperson or a diamond ring salesperson might sell you what you don’t need. That’s because it is about what they need, not what you need.

In our culture, there are always people out there who are Phishing for Phools, as Akerlof and Shiller entitled their book about the economics of manipulation and deception. If people want something badly enough, they are likely to forget the principle of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). By and large, we do not equip our children with adequate immunity to such manipulations and deceptions as are practiced daily. That may be because parents and teachers and friends are themselves likely practitioners of manipulation and deception. Most people wouldn’t even know how to seek advice that might be good for them. We are not open to advice that might require any significant changes in the ruts we are making on a daily basis with our lifestyles. How we perform our lives may not be good for us. But they are normative. And we would much rather be good consumers than good people – if that is what is required to belong. First we import our perspectives from people or groups we are compelled to – or desire to – belong to. And then those perspectives create us. They are our master habits. We live by them. Most people seem content to die by them. Why? Simply because that is their perspective on things.

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It is impossible to comprehend the world – or to comprehend oneself in it – except from some perspective. For example:

• We start conscious (self-reflexive) life in the context of those who nurture us in infancy. The change from non-language existence and language usage in society (as Helen Keller so eloquently expressed) may be the most radical change of perspective in all of our lives. We begin to comprehend the world (and us in it) from the perspective of those who guide us in this second birth – into how we explain the world linguistically and behaviorally.

• Perhaps the next most dramatic (though tacit and gradual) change in perspective occurs as we age. The longer you live, the more past you assume you have. The longer you live, the less future you assume you have. Over the years, you cease learning how to comprehend the world and begin comprehending the world according to the familiar (from repeated use) perspectives that have become embedded in the way you see the world (and yourself in it). The mind, as plastic as it is, ossifies. We don’t grow mentally. We plateau. As a result, at some point in our lives we begin the slippery slope of cognitive degeneration. The mind flourishes only when it is growing. When it is not growing, it degenerates.

• From infancy, the next most notable change in perspective comes when we begin to relate to peers of a similar age. If we like them, we begin to entertain the possibilities of comprehending the world from their point of view. A friendship is a willingness to experiment with seeing the world as the other person sees it. A failed friendship is a failure to do so. We create common ground in sharing our perspectives on the world (and us in it). We create shared realities by explaining them to each other. When actual friends won’t do, we create imaginary friends who will. We begin to see ourselves as others see us. This is often such a frightening perspective that most people guard against it the rest of their lives. We grow up (sometimes) in the maelstrom of differing perspectives on who we are.

• At some point in our early lives, another radically different perspective begins to dawn on us. There are really two kinds of people in our worlds. One kind is physically like us. The other kind is physically different from us. Boys and girls are different. They even have different perspectives on the actual world we sometimes have to share. What to make of this, and what to do about this, becomes a major project of puberty. At the outset of the realization, the other gender is alien. The accommodations we make are largely serendipitous. They simply occur. We’re curious about these different creatures. They look different. They smell different. Their voices come at us in a different range. It is like learning a foreign language. One is hairy. The other is not. It isn’t until later that you learn why this is so. In puberty, you don’t yearn to rocket into space. You already are.

• Somewhere along the time that you discover that there are two very different kinds of human creatures, you are also introduced to the mass media and to your electronically-connected worlds. When not distracted by the special effects of movies or television, you begin to perceive that there is not only a natural world you do not control (or comprehend), but that there is a human-made technological world that brings you entertainment and games of every sort (whose instigation and delivery mechanisms you are also not privy to). We learn to comprehend our worlds more superficially, more literally, and more consumptively. We become indentured to the fashions of the day – what feeling are in or out, what beliefs are in or out, what ways of comporting oneself in public are in or out, etc. As we are developing minds of our own, we begin to see that our minds are not our own, but are manipulated by others, especially our personal celebrities and those that we otherwise trust. We learn to deceive…and to be deceived. In a free world, we are as likely to be a victim as we are to victimize others.

• As part of the epiphanies we have growing up, we begin to realize (if we have had competent parents, teachers, and friends) that perspective is a function of the cultures and subcultures that people belong to. Or have belonged to: Those who preceded us in our society had different perspectives than we do on life and the worlds in which they had them. That doesn’t make either set of perspectives right or wrong. Just different. The critical issue is… where do your perspectives lead you? Are they efficacious for you and those around you? Are they efficacious for the destiny of your society? If not, shouldn’t they be?

• We acquire the perspectives we stand on to comprehend our worlds and ourselves in them. It is never obvious to us – any more than our breathing is – how vital and influential is the matter of who we hang out with, who or what we have mental intercourse with. Friends influence the way we think. Good friends influence us more. What we read influences the way our minds work. If you read junk, your mind will turn to junk. Commercial advertisers are influential. They provide us with short stories that we may try to live out ourselves. The premises of the