I worked on a programming project about a decade ago that fundamentally changed the way I look at myself. Sounds a little odd, doesn’t it? How can a programming project affect someone in that way? Well, the project involved human psychological evaluation. As part of the project I learned a lot about how people perceive themselves as compared to how they perceive others. Since I’ve had a decade to meditate on and observe the principle, I think at this point I can safely say that I believe that the fundamental principle is sound.
It goes something like this… Because we live in just our own world and can’t truly walk a mile in others’ shoes, our perception of the world is skewed based on our own experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc. And because of that skew, we tend to project our innermost characteristics on others, as if society in general thinks, behaves, and believes the same way we do at a fundamental level.
The net result of this is that our core beliefs about human nature tend to be a direct reflection of our own characteristics at their deepest level, independent of the way we actually perceive ourselves. Thus, if we believe that people are fundamentally honest then we ourselves are probably honest. If we believe that people are generally dishonest, chances are that we may have honesty issues we are dealing with. If we believe that people in general are kind, we probably in actuality are kind to others. If we believe that people are generally greedy, we likely suffer from greed ourselves.
I think we all tend to believe individually that we are generally honest, generous, kind… possessing many of the virtues that we would like to have, regardless of how we perceive others. But because we can’t be objective about our own attitudes (we live in our own worlds and have no other experience to compare against) we really can’t be sure of how we are doing in any of those areas. Thieves may believe that what they are doing is okay because they have concocted up some rationalization for their actions, so they don’t feel that they themselves are dishonest. But most likely they believe that other people are fundamentally dishonest as well (and this probably even plays into their justification for their own actions).
So it boils down to taking a look at how we look upon society to learn more about ourselves. Do we believe that people are fundamentally honest? Do we believe that people are generally charitable? Generous? Trustworthy? Do we believe that people are fundamentally good, trying to do what they believe to be right? Or do we feel otherwise? If we tend to believe that society needs to improve upon a particular virtue, maybe we ought to work on that ourselves first.
The difficult part of doing this analysis is separating individual people from our attitudes of society in general. We all know people who don’t measure up to what we would like them to be, and we have to exclude these people when trying to figure out how we feel about human nature generally. If we were to compare our attitudes about one individual specifically the process doesn’t work. We can always pick out someone we know that doesn’t possess any particular virtue; the trick is to exclude them from our attitude of people on a fundamental level.
In the 10 years since I learned this principle I think I can safely say that I have learned a lot more about myself, and I hope it has made me a better person. At least my attitudes toward human nature has changed anyway. So maybe I’ve made some changes too.
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