Seeing how I haven't blogged for ages and I keep bugging mu to, it's only fair that now she has blogged, I should do so also.
I've been thinking about this for a long time now, but due to some recent issues, it has sparked my thoughts to float back to the front of my mind (sadly this is distracting me from studying for eco T___T)
Consider this: Is what we see or hear really the truth? Can we really trust our eyes and ears to bring us the real story behind it? Even if we see something with our own eyes or clearly hear something with our own ears, how much truth value is there in it?
Human beings hold a range of emotions which cloud our better judgement, leading us to see or hear what we would like, rather than the truth itself. These emotions can lead us to jump to conclusions which leads to misunderstanding. Here I shall draw an example from my good friend Shakespeare (=D), Lear was so focused on hearing how much his daughters loved him, that when Cordy spoke the truth, he was so thrown that he refused to believe it.
Sometimes when one tells someone something, the receiving end may already have a certain expectation of what they are going to say. This is an natural reaction, and possibly subconscious as well. Say Person A's cat gets run over by Person B, B may automatically assume that A would want revenge, hence if B sees A approaching B with a $20 butcher's knife, (=D L for love, L for lies reference) B would automatically assume that A is about to stab him, rather than offer to cut fruit for him. When in natural fact, A may be considering to cut up fruit for him. (With his $20 murder weapon).
Or a more realistic example, if I see my sister at a bus stop with some random dude, I will have an automatic reaction to run up to him and take him out. Rage has clouded my better judgement, and I may only realise when the only person being taken out is me.. on a stretcher to the hospital.
By just seeing this image of her on the street with some SOB, I jump to the conclusion that he is an evil evil boy who will lie and cheat my sister, when in natural fact he may be a really nice boy or even just a random who she is standing next to while waiting for a bus.
So can we say that we can't rely on just simply one shot of the bigger picture the bring us the truth? What we hear, no matter how reliant our informant is, may not bring us the whole truth, because how do we know that the whole truth was told to our informant by the source itself? After a big shock, people generally are expected by others to react in a certain way. So how do we know that our informants didn't just jump to a conclusion by hearing only a segment of the story. Similar to my being carried out on a stretcher, it just means that if we jump to conclusions, the only one being hurt would be ourselves.
So to finish off, in the words of Shakespeare,... see better.
Posted at 01:22 pm by x__anita``
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