My truth or yours?

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is:

DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem – namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

This is a fascinating article, and I was sent the URL just as I was contemplating the veracity of our personal truths after reading a memoir.

I believe most of us are unaware of the unknown that we should know about ourselves – our blind spots. The baggage on our backs we can’t see.

Maybe the “Dunning-Kruger Effect – our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence…” is a blessing, but it could also be a curse: as Dr Phil is so fond of saying “We cannot change what we do not acknowledge.” “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” is certainly true of many in leadership positions the world over. And “…his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity” certainly applies to many politicians who are capable of poisoning a whole nation with their particular brand of arrogant ignorance.

I’ve always been in awe of people who seem confident of their own opinions, because I know that I will feel certain of something today, but due to a new experience tomorrow I will unknow it. What I think I know changes constantly, so that in the end I am never sure of anything.

When academics find all kinds of proof that mankind started here and went there, I want to shout at them “you don’t know what’s under the Antarctic ice!”, for example. And the chemical-neurological workings of our brains are so complex that I’m becoming more and more aware of the possibility that many of mankind’s ills are due to the experiential and/or genetic causes of imbalances in the brain: aggression, depression, madness, sociopathology, inferiority complexes, superiority complexes, and so on. The right balance of the right amount of serotonin and other beneficial chemical soups seem to make some people perpetually rational, positive, energetic and happy. I have noticed, though, that they are the minority. The majority seems to be ‘troubled.’

Jo Shapcott in her poem On Tour: The Alps (Phrase Book, Oxford Poets, 1992), wonders about love and its ability to encompass so much, …

…
even the cloud sitting on the mountain top,

the awfulness of the stars we can’t see,
the animals, walkers, cars rolling
across the pass, the very dark itself…

Maybe it is our self-love that preserves us and blinds us to the “awfulness” in the stars and ourselves that we cannot see.

I think that in between my truth and your truth there is a mutable truth that occasionally passes through the membrane of ultimate truth, which we glimpse only rarely in our peripheral vision. Maybe mankind cannot look at the truth, that awfulness, directly, because it will destroy us or we will destroy ourselves out of compassion, or horror, or both.

papRika

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