We all look at the world through our own little lenses. The elements that are closer to us are thus largest and most important, while the elements that we rarely encounter are mostly background noise. Speaking for the majority, we enjoy our granular space within the universe and rarely venture out of it. To do so would mean two things: first, we would have to admit that we are not as important as we think we are and, second, we would struggle to imagine just how deep the rabbit hole goes. It is in our nature to be insular because our understanding of the world starts to break down the further we remove ourselves from our own perspectives.
Let’s try a visual thought experiment. Can you imagine what a billion years is like? Even if you acknowledge that evolution is true, even if you are a damned geologist, a billion years is a mind-blowing concept. Even a million years is equally fuzzy. If you were to stretch your arms out as far as you could from your body, with your wingspan representing a billion years, your lifetime wouldn’t even equal the amount of fingernail shaved off by a single swipe of a nail file. Now consider that your lifespan, being that it is most familiar, is your primary gauge for long spans of time.
Over the last 200 years, scientists have struggled to reconcile empirical observations with imagination because reality is stranger than fiction every time. Before the tools that allow us to accurately determine fundamental properties of our world were invented, early estimates of the Earth’s age wildly swung between thousands of years to tens of thousands. There was a time when the suggestion of a million years was preposterous. Science often tells us about things we cannot perceive from our personal perspectives, so it is no wonder that there are so many people who distrust it.
Here’s another visual comparison. Imagine all of the biological mass on the planet, every living organism, clumped up into a single ball. That means all the elephants and the orangutans and the eucalyptus trees and the sea anemones and the amoebas... all clumped together in a giant orb. Can you believe that 80% of that ball would be comprised of micro-organisms? That’s right, tiny life forms that we can’t even see, and didn’t even know existed until 400 years ago, make up 80% of all living matter on Earth. And you probably can’t even imagine what it would look like to have them all mushed together.
When I began thinking about the problem of self-induced ignorance, the main factor that I saw in most examples of it was perspective. People are simply afraid, on some level, of seeing the world in a light that doesn’t highlight what they’re most familiar with. We see examples of people supporting systems that fuck them over (American labor practices, politics, etc.) and we wonder why they don’t realize it. I don’t think that they are blind to their situation, but I certainly think that the prospect of abandoning their perspective in favor of a foreign one is far more frightening than holding on to the familiar and making the most of it.
I believe perspective training is the angle to take when educating people about reason and reality. When we hear about deconversion stories, where people abandon their faith or their superstition, it is usually after a steady stream of information that the person has received. Even if they reject the information at first, they begin to understand the perspective of the people who hold opposing viewpoints. It is important to understand that reason versus superstition is not always a battle of intelligence. The second perspective is always the hardest to adapt.
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