Insight on perception over break

Over our extremely elongated break,  I came across an advertisement video while wandering aimlessly in YouTube land.  The video was about a magician, or illusionist, playing magic tricks on this famous Indian Guru. After demonstrating the magic trick, the magician and the guru had a really insightful talk about perception. The magician said that his job is to alter how people perceive things to make them seem magical and furthermore asked the guru what he thought about perception. This is what the guru said, "The word perception in social transactions are used as my perception compared to your perception. In reality it is my distortion to your distortion...  perception means to grasp something by the way it is." there is only one perspective in this world and it is the literal state of how everything is.  Each person has different distortions of the reality of the world they live in. Some may believe that eventually people will achieve equality and there will be no sexism and racism , while others may over exaggerate reality and think that there will never be equality and those who try to achieve it will fail and suffer. Notice how I projected a distortion while presenting the two examples, maybe people never will achieve equality and it wasn't over exaggerated after all. How one see the world will always be different from how others see the world; our distortions are formed by many factors such as denial of what is too painful to acknowledge and lack of experience or insight.  Everyone carries a distortion of perception and it's possible that nobody will ever perceive our world with the true perspective.

The Cost Of Peace

Alexie's portrayal of his father in the in class reading sends an important message about how to obtain peace. In his autobiography, he ironically illustrates father beating on a national guard while protesting for peace. The irony in this incident is that Alexie's father is using violence to obtain peace. Even though this may seem ironic and hypocritical, it does seem disturbingly accurate considering the history of the human race. Like many other organisms,  humans have been fighting against each other since the beginning of time. Therefore, it is natural that we are still committing violent actions towards each other in present day,since it is almost innate for us to do so. There is one flaw to this design though; unlike other organisms, people have technologies that are capable of inflicting devastating damage to each other and also to nature. Therefore , the consequences of human to human fighting becomes out of balance. Nature can no longer bear the collateral damage that modern warfare inflicts and thus becomes scarred by the aftermath of war. Does this mean that we will eventually stop fighting each other? Highly unlikely. Through the recount  Alexie's dad,  we learn that the most likely and easiest way to achieve peace is through violence. Therefore we are stuck to choosing whether to do nothing and go to war, or try to obtain and still go to war. The depressing truth is that either way, the world will be damaged heavily because humans roam on it.

The Power Of One

Through the various in class discussions, our class has concluded that the achievements individuals can determine the reputation of an entire community. However, the question arises of whether this should be considered a legitimate representation of a community of people. The generalization of a group or race can lead to severe and unjustified actions and treatments towards that group. Such scenarios have occurred to American-Japenese people after Pearl Harbor;and also to Arabic people after the nine-eleven incident and the war on terrorism in the Middle East. Sure, Louis's boxing match helped the Black community gain power in society;but Joe also had the choice to display his race as weaker than his opponent and worsen the situation for the Black community. The fate of multiple individuals depending on the actions of a single person simply seems unfair; especially since our country lives by the belief that everyone has their own freedom to decide the outcome of their lives. Even so, the human mind has a tendency to engage in procedures such representative heuristics to judge people by the stereotypes and instinctively create a potentially fake profile of a person whom they never met before. This is a curse and a blessing in ways, since it saves time and lets the brain operate more efficiently while it can lead us to misjudge some people. Thus, we as humans may never escape the cycle of misjudging and mistreating people.