Perspective and Division

Avoiding Collisions in Idealisms

Everyone in this world has some idea of what an ideal society should look like, and we often place our impossible concepts of perfection into competition with the impossible conceptions of others. Because of this, we divide ourselves, pushing us into narrow paths of thinking.

By learning about the perspectives of others, however, we are able to enrich both ourselves and the communities around us. Yet, if you think about one person’s ideal society, it becomes apparent that there are some concepts that just won’t fit into that person’s world.

 Looking at it from another perspective: If we try and build a structure out of circles, blocks just don’t seem to fit – and vice-versa.

This kind of rigid thinking/worldview isn’t anyone’s fault particularly. It’s just baked into who we are. Recognizing patterns is how we understand and interact with the world. Everything from walking, to language, to complex arithmetic are just different kinds of patterns.

Illustration by Leo Decklar

Some are easy to understand, because we come across it often and naturally, like walking; some we come across regularly, like language; and some we are rarely exposed to at all, such as higher math. Most times, the less exposure we get to something, the less we understand about it.

The cultures we each grow up in are typically what shapes these individual conceptions. When we are raised in one environment, we end up expecting certain things to be true, but when we are exposed to others who understand a different environment, we find that they have different expectations.

To say it simply, we all expect different things. Some of those things align closer to others, while some differ wildly, based on where and who we were raised by.

At first, when we encounter new ideas, we may be quick to dismiss them, either thinking that the other person doesn’t understand something, or we are ignorant of outside prospectives. When we are exposed to these different ideas, we often view them from the bias of our own perspectives and may fail to identify the point or meaning behind them.

The worst of this collision can happen when two people encounter a problem, have two different ways of solving it, and neither can accept any solution other than the one they were taught. Regrettably, most of the time the two are looking for the same, or a highly similar, outcome but simply cannot come to an agreement on how to get there.

In application, we can see this kind of behavior leading to things like resentment, frustration, and on a larger and more terrible scale, war. In recent national and international events we can see that conflicting ideals blow up into large-scale division, in areas such as our politics, or dissolving alliances. Sometimes we even let ourselves become divided within our own families and spend more time arguing rather than trying to understand each other.

But there do exist ways to overcome our own personal biases. By exposing ourselves to different ways of thinking, we are able to see things more easily from the perspective of others. Absorbing these new ideas is vital for thinking outside the box.

There are lots of different ways we can go about exploring perspectives from people who come from different backgrounds. The most obvious way would be to explore different regions of the internet, but we should remember not to get sucked into a few specific sites and trap ourselves in an echo chamber. Another way is to explore places in our real world we wouldn’t usually go to, like going to a new grocery store, church, joining a new club, going to public events like festivals, or just saying hello to strangers on the bus.

If we only follow one narrative or idea for our entire lives, we will never end up trying anything new. Absorbing different cultures and people into our lives and communities helps us develop as individuals, by exploring ourselves from perspectives we may not have thought of before.