Image by Christine Sponchia from Pixabay
We all know things about this world that we’re sure of, things we’ve learned through experience, things we’ve learned through someone else, adopting someone else’s opinion as our own. These opinions become our faith and religion, if you will, our “true selves”, parts of our belief system.
Our belief system defines our world, from the smallest things to the major ones. Whether you believe there’s a god, that our planet is round and moving through space, or if you get sick when someone close to you is, this is all part of your belief system, an invisible web that designs and controls our private world. If you’re willing to accept what I just said then even the size and shape of your fingernail is part of your belief system and it is governed by it.
There are no two people alive that are 100% alike, each and every one of us has his or her own tweaks, like behaviors we learned during childhood, army, painful moments, etc. All these “tweaks” go straight into our belief system and stay there, which means something that works for one person doesn’t necessarily work even for his biologically identical twin.
This causes a problem for most human being and to our current measurement process of what we call science. If you find something that works for you and want to share your experience with someone else, it won’t necessarily work the same way for the person you are sharing this information with (unless their willing to adopt it into their belief system, basically adopting your point of view). Two people can react completely different to the same experience so how can someone say that his experience is “better” from the experience of someone else or “correct”? This might raise the question how do you educate children then? How do you teach them about the world they have just entered into and you’ve lived in for the past 20, 30 or 40 years?
The simple answer is, you can’t.
If what you know is “true” to you alone then how can you share this experience with anyone else, how can you tell them what to do or what will work to recover from, let’s say, the common cold?
Let’s take it a step further. Think about the world around you and the world we think we know governed by certain rules. Concepts like Statistics, Psychology and Healthcare (medicine) are part of your individual perception, defined by your belief system and cannot be generalized to fit more than a specific person.
Like most mammals, we tend to stick to people that are like minded to us and share a mutual understanding or a set of concepts as us. We form a community to learn from each other or teach each other and protect each other in time of need. Usually, a strong individual becomes the leader of the pack and suddenly his opinions matter more than the ones of others, he defines the belief system and values of the entire pack because according to the community he knows best, the stronger of the pack, either mentally or physically or both. Naturally the opinions of the one become the opinions of the pack, and the rest just fall in line.
Same thing happens when we meet new people, we immediately search throughout the conversation for common things and understandings so we can connect more easily to a similar point of view, our ‘frame’ of mind. When the person we meet does not share our point of view (belief system) or a close approximate of it we feel something is “wrong”, whether with this person or the interaction with them, we say we couldn’t “understand” them when, as a matter of fact, they didn’t agree to adopt our belief system, the way we see it.
The art of misconception refers to the notion that we project our perspective, our point of view and belief system, onto another person as we fully believe in it, without any doubt that we have learned something that is true and crucial in this world that might serve and might even save someone else so we must share it, sometimes, serving only our egos.
It is my personal opinion that if you wish to share your experience with someone else you should learn to present it as a suggestion, rather than a fact, and be prepared to learn and perhaps change your ways according to the suggestions of your conversational partner. Teaching always comes as a learning process and vice versa.
Thank you for reading.
