pinkfloydpsw's Blog

Uninhibited and uncensored communication may never be possible. We are a complicated species full of contradictions and flaws in our reasoning and we are still somewhat in the infancy of our development. The things we ponder are constrained by the framework we ponder them within, abandoned to THE THEY we are born into a circumstance that shapes our methods of reasoning and creates misconceptions, prejudices and inherits truths and untruths. We labour under illusions, over or under-estimate the impact we have on others and frequently attribute to ourselves traits that we do not possess in the abundance we wish. This may be a necessity of the psychological self to be valuable to oneself first and always; with the resultant of this value being the avoidance of angst. I have read psychology but I am not a psychologist by any means, I do however think that there are common threads that run through the psyche of western capitalist consumers of the MTV age:

Everyone thinks, of themselves, that…

• They are open-minded – people believe themselves to be swayed by a better argument or point of view
• They are working harder than their co-workers – complaints about co-workers rarely have the thematic of anything other than having to carry someone else’s burden either physically or intellectually
• They are funny – this is a strange one, most folks are not funny anyway but each of us believes of ourselves that we are somewhat entertaining
• They are objective – we believe we can look at anything with impartiality, that we do not bring our prejudices with us
• They are intelligent – really smart, maybe in our own unquantifiable way or in an empathetic or sympathetic way but nevertheless actually really smart contrary to popular opinion

These failings to know ourselves lead us blindly into the hands of manipulators who have realised how to use them against us. Governments, marketers, priests, snake oil salesmen, charlatans….

To open the mind truly is to face the realisation that thoughts need not be restrained within this framework. Questions that go beyond the comfortable space created between the asker and the asked can be asked of the self by the self. That which would be considered inappropriate to offer for conversation can become internally rationalised. Knowing yourself by these processes must surely be more real than a judgement from another who bears all of the same of societies pre-programming faults also but cannot break from them into the freedom of the uncomfortable or vacuous space of non-consensus. We may fall into the trap of assuming that questions already have answers that are theologically or socially acceptable so we admonish our responsibility to discover ourselves and accept that we are what we have been taught to be, easy answers remove the ability to ask the questions or they banalise the questions. Dare to think opposingly, dare to examine the self, dare to be open minded and to dispose of all prejudice and you may be alone because you will likely not receive correlative responses from others who reside within the same societal framework as you, even though they may have come to the same conclusions through their own rationalisations. A society frames not only what we think but how we think concerning ourselves, it reduces the acceptable normality to that which is palatable to others through mechanisms of disgust, an emotion that is partly evolutionary and partly a learned response; it makes sense to be repulsed by that which puts us in danger such as illness but it is a learned repulsion when it comes to the picking of the nose or the public scratch of the genitalia. This affects how we emote our selves, how we conduct our interactions as adults around other adults, the ground work for this is done in infancy and childhood, it is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a construction and as such it shapes us much more than we would like to admit.

Language changes the thought because language has rules and boundaries. Imagine being able to think in the same space as others, without structure, with a pure understanding, the clarity of the thought would be alarming, undiluted. In corporations each level of management may unintentionally change information as it flows upward toward those that are decision makers. This positive spinning of information will affect the outcome of the decisions that then flow downward in the structure that pertain to production. Previous models of autonomous departments judged solely from above on throughput alone and without continual quantification may produce better production results even though they are less apparent to management. This leads us to question if information in all cases is subjected to change in the method of transfer like in the case I have stated of the corporation. Does knowledge of the self react in the same way when it is transferred from the sense to the thought as much through the psychological lens of society as the physical apparatus of the mind?

We think of ourselves as Autonomous but where does this perceived autonomy stem from, how does it arise? Are we Heteronomous and only distinct because our physicality of body and mind differs slightly from the physicality of others and our trajectory through existence is unique in that no two persons can have or ever have shared the same exact set of experiences between conception and adulthood or are made from identical material? This is not an excuse for prejudice or a justification for immorality although it may be an explanation for many things that are unpalatable or disgusting to the majority of us, it may simply be that a self is the way it is because it could not be other than itself given the unique set of parameters it has. Could you be other than you are? Are you not a product of everything you are and all that has happened to you? I am unsure exactly where all my ideas and my morals come from but I am as sure also that I suspect they may be less mine than they are other. I suspect that a very different individual would have written a very different piece if he had been in any way physically, societally or experientially differently composed than I happen to be.

Paul Simon Wilson