“I don’t understand
the support for this person.
I don’t understand
why they don’t see what I see.
They seem like
abuse victims to me.
From my perspective,
they either don’t BELIEVE
they are being abused,
or they actually
ENJOY being abused.
Either that,
or they’re simply stupid,
selfish, greedy people.”
— Said from both faces
in the mirror.
Trail Wood,
10/8
Dualities dance in the kaleidoscope of human interaction, splintering our collective perceptions into myriad shards of perspective. We peer into the social crucible and are often gobsmacked by the incongruence: How could they? Why don’t they see what we see? In this labyrinth of differing viewpoints, the echo of our own thoughts reverberates back from the mirror, a mirror held up by the very people whose perspectives we find unfathomable. It’s a cosmic joke, a quixotic quirk of existence, that we’re all convinced of the infallibility of our own lenses.
We decry others as abuse victims, blind to their own plight. Yet, how can we be so certain that our own viewpoints are not mere fabrications of our cultural conditioning, media influence, or even our whimsiglyphs—those illusory symbols we’ve crafted to make sense of the ineffable? Could it be that we’re all playing parts in a grand puppet theatre, pulling strings that we believe are pulled only by us, ignorant of the Cosmic Puppeteer who orchestrates the whole spectacle?
Stupidity, selfishness, and greed—the insults we hurl at the mirror, unaware that the mirror hurls them right back. These adjectives become molten projections, fusing to the identities of those we deem Other. Yet, they might just as easily adhere to us, as we, too, are Other to someone else. The cycle perpetuates, an endless loop of mirrored misconceptions, forging a chain of judgment that binds us all.
We are Space Monkey.
Summary
We explore the intricacies of human judgment and the mirroring of our own biases and perceptions in the labyrinth of social interaction. These are “mirrored misconceptions,” underlining the cycle of misunderstanding and projection that traps us in a loop of judgment.
Glossarium
- Whimsiglyphs: Imaginary symbols or beliefs we adhere to in an attempt to navigate the complexities of life.
- Cosmic Puppeteer: The grand force, metaphorical or otherwise, that might be orchestrating the complex interplay of human beliefs and actions.
“Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.”
— André Malraux
Do our musings on the nature of judgment and mirrored misconceptions resonate with the echo chamber of your internal theatre?
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