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Brain-Directed Animals
Charley Reese
Lew Rockwell.com
Thursday Aug 30, 2007
Do you realize that every human being on this Earth
alive today believes he or she is right?
It's true. The Wall Street millionaire, the villager in Somalia,
the Chinese general, the Amazonian Indian, the homeless wino in
Chicago, the president of the United States, and you and I all
are doing what we think at the moment is the right thing to do,
based on the belief that our perceptions of the world are correct.
This is a built-in defect in the way human beings are constructed
by nature. Human beings are brain-directed animals. We can't lift
a finger or speak the simplest word without directions from the
brain. Yet the brain has no source of information except the human
senses – sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste.
Throughout the millennia, humans have developed elaborate codes,
called languages, with which to describe and process the data
we receive from our senses. We have an irresistible impulse to
name things. Using the English code, we name a certain segment
of reflected radiation "yellow." If we use the Spanish
code, we name it "amarillo." These names are chosen
arbitrarily, vary from language to language and, as we often forget,
are not the things they name.
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The president's "axis of evil," for example, is neither
an axis nor an evil. It's a judgment he (or his speechwriters)
made about three countries whose governmental policies he disapproves
of. The countries were not allies. In fact, two of them (Iraq
and Iran) were enemies. North Korea has a different culture, different
language and different interests than the other two.
As we grow up, we grow up in a particular place, using a particular
language code, learning a particular history and a particular
set of customs. The concept of the universal citizen of the world
is just that, a mental abstraction that has no counterpart in
reality. A common mistake we Americans often make is to assume
that people in foreign countries think the same way we do. In
fact, of course, people in our own country do not think exactly
alike.
The cornerstone of human existence is perception. We normally
act on the basis of our perception of reality, which easily can
be defined as the way things are. The perception, for example,
that we can beat a train to the crossing has life-or-death consequences
if we act on it. Prejudice is the offspring of misperceptions.
Millions died because of the perception that yellow fever was
caused by noxious vapors from swamps. I don't think it is an exaggeration
to say that 90 percent of human conflicts and tragedies are caused
by misperceptions of reality.
Therefore, we all should attempt to sharpen our perception of
reality in an attempt to make it as accurate as humanly possible.
For the same reason we don't wish to drink dirty water or eat
contaminated food, we should be careful about accepting other
people's perceptions of reality as fact. Generalizations and excessive
verbalization both hinder accurate perceptions. Propaganda, which
is a deliberate misstatement of reality, is voluminous and constant
in our times.
Ayn Rand said it well when she observed that we can evade reality,
but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality. Dogen,
a great Japanese thinker, pointed out that "flowers die and
weeds flourish without our permission." Our ability to affect
reality is quite limited. We age and die whether we wish it or
not, for example.
The point of all this is that conflicts are difficult to avoid,
even under ideal circumstances. A good start would be to set harmony
and balance as our goals rather than domination.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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