Balancing Perception With Relativity
Everything, without exception, is relative - one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. Our descriptions of all things must be tempered with the knowledge that they would change depending on the perceptions of different observers.
If the buses stop running and I’m ten miles from home, I see myself stranded, whereas a marathon runner sees an opportunity for training and practice. 1,200 lbs. would make for an enormous human, but a tiny truck. Most people couldn’t budge a 500 lb. boulder and as such would call it heavy, but an elephant can play with it like a toy.
Douglas Adams touched upon this relativity as it relates to probabilities in his novel “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. He observed that nothing is impossible, but that all things have varying probability levels and that some are exceedingly improbable. On a galactic scale, however, infinite time and space decrease those levels of improbability, making them likely to happen eventually some time, somewhere. Relatively speaking, what seems impossible on a small scale becomes merely improbable on a large one, and more probable the larger that scale becomes.
Some expand this notion to include that there is no actual good or bad, but only what is perceived by others.
This conundrum is obvious in our views on vigilantism. It has been criminalized by society, even in cases where it appears to serve obvious justice, for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is that it violates constitutional due process and that if we allow untrained and unrecognized individuals to get away with revenge, the end result would soon be chaos (where would the lines be drawn?).
That said, who doesn’t root for the avenging father/mother/spouse in countless movies to be successful in meting out their own brand of punishment on the ones who victimized them or their families? There is universal appeal to such characters not only succeeding but getting away with it. Nobody watches a revenge movie and thinks, “This broken man, who’s lost everything, should just sit back and rely on the court system for justice”. No - they want blood.
So while we know that violence is bad, in certain contexts we perceive it as good.
Much of nature is designed this way. Animals victimize each other in horrifying ways, which must seem evil to their prey. But to the predators, it’s simply a means to survival. Everything’s relative.
Some animals, like orcas and cats, torture and play with their food - cruel from our point of view. But for orcas, it’s often necessary training for their young. And for cats, it’s…well, cats are just jerks, apparently.
We think we know right from wrong, but without relativity, we’d have no frames of reference to determine them from each other. Without darkness, we wouldn’t know light. Without adversity, we wouldn’t know comfort. Without sadness, we wouldn’t know happiness. Without fear, we wouldn’t know security.
The list is infinite, and it applies to all of the things we think we know.
Our views about our fellow humans are heavily influenced by how the relativity of our experiences colors our perceptions. It is widely hypothesized that the same child if raised in different places in the world, would result in two vastly different adults. Our experiences change our perceptions, and our perceptions change who we are.
If I had been born in the slums of Calcutta, I might have learned to steal to survive and thought no ill of it. If Mother Teresa had been born in Southern California in the late 60s, she might have become a valley girl. A thousand years ago, it would have been perfectly reasonable to believe diseases were demonic possessions, and that the earth was flat and at the center of an orbiting universe.
We often have a hard time recognizing this distinction when judging the views of others. We assume our points of view are correct because usually from our point of view, they are. But we fail to recognize that views which seem bonkers to us are often also correct from the relative perception of those who have them.
This is why I so often lash out at extremism. The sheer hubris of presuming every aspect of one’s views would be beneficial to everyone, without any flexibility, is both authoritarian and monumentally close-minded. It’s also why history is so replete with confrontation over religious beliefs because they leave no room for nuance. “If I thought for myself, this would seem stupid, but who are we to judge what (insert God) wants?”
Lack of ability to acknowledge the legitimacy of opposing perspectives results in the lazy and myopic alternative of applying disparaging labels on those with views we oppose. Rather than opening our minds to the experiences of others, we take the shortcut of dismissing them out of hand and calling them crazy, Fascist, Nazi, or whatever other hyperbolic term-du-jour is in vogue. We pigeonhole the “other side” into caricatures, steadily convincing ourselves it’s all true.
And we lose our collective balance as a society in the process.
I don’t have all the answers, only the answers that work for me. I like to think that moderation is the key to balancing out all the disparate perspectives, resulting in a less confrontational world. At least, relatively speaking.
Zephareth Ledbetter’s latest book, “A White Man’s Perspectives on Race and Racism - Rational Thoughts on an Irrational World”, is available cheap at smashwords.com/books/view/1184004
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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False premise: everything is NOT relative. Perception may not always be an entirely accurate measure of reality, but objective reality nonetheless exists regardless of the accuracy of our perception of it.
Likewise, "History is so replete with confrontation over religious beliefs because they leave no room for nuance" is an absurdly reductionist and historically illiterate claim. Look at the past century: the World Wars and the greatest genocides in living memory were largely perpetrated by decidedly secular regimes. The removal of ancient religions from society tends to result in the same passions being directed into less suitable vessels, such as politics, almost invariably with disastrous results. Moreover, the confrontation between religions generally has little to do with lacking nuance and everything to do with making mutually exclusive claims. They ARE logically incompatible.
The post then finishes by endorsing a fallacy. The fallacy of the Golden Mean (or fallacy of compromise, or fallacy of moderation) takes the form of assuming that the most valid conclusion is that which accepts the best compromise between two competing positions.
Marc Stiegler illustrated the flaw of this view wonderfully in David's Sling:
The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
"History is so replete with confrontation over religious beliefs because they leave no room for nuance. “If I thought for myself, this would seem stupid, but who are we to judge what (insert God) wants?” I would add to that with in our current era, we are replete with agnostics and atheists who disparage those who follow a religion. The shutdown of all sorts of places of worship during covid is an example of this arrogance.