The Unreliable Narrator
This is a term used in art to describe a protagonist whose account of their own story is inconsistent with itself to such an extreme that it cannot be trusted by the viewer. Some of the more well-known examples of unreliable narrators in modern cinema are Fight Club, American Psycho, and A Beautiful Mind, in which the main characters are revealed later on in the storylines to be suffering from mental illnesses of sorts. So many of the events that we've seen up to this point in the film may not have occurred as they were portrayed through the character's perspective.
Over the last few months I've written a handful of blog posts in which I claim the following: that some event occurred that spurred self-revelation, and because of this event, I could suddenly see myself clearly. These events (and the blog posts about them) just keep coming, so clearly no one of these revelations has shown me all of myself...I'm merely peeling away another layer.
This metaphor for uncovering the nature of what's in your mind, and the impact you are having on the world, is misleading. We don't actually remove deceptions and suddenly see ourselves clearly. You cannot stop perceiving yourself to be one way without putting another perception in its place. What I've done in the last few months is not eliminate a set of self-deceptions; I've reframed these self-deceptions to take another form. My sense of self has merely shifted.
I don't suffer from extreme mental illness; I'm thankful that I haven't developed schizophrenia, for example. For the most part, I'd like to believe that I perceive reality as it is.
There was a study done by a psychologist that asked people to choose a pair of socks from amongst a group of pairs. The socks were all identical, but the participants were led to believe that they were different. When asked why those one pair over another, the participant would come up with a reason. We invent stories, even ones that aren't true, to explain the world around us. Connecting dots, drawing lines in the gaps of understanding, releases dopamine into our brain. We're wired for understanding even in the face of things we cannot understand.
In speaking about scientific discoveries, and as an admonition to the scientists making them, physicist Richard Feynman once said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." I'm the narrator of my own life story, but more often than not, I'd suspect that my own story is a lattice held together by fabrications.
So what hope is there? To paraphrase an aphorism from the field of statistics: the stories we tell ourselves are always wrong, but some stories are useful.
Over the last few months I've written a handful of blog posts in which I claim the following: that some event occurred that spurred self-revelation, and because of this event, I could suddenly see myself clearly. These events (and the blog posts about them) just keep coming, so clearly no one of these revelations has shown me all of myself...I'm merely peeling away another layer.
This metaphor for uncovering the nature of what's in your mind, and the impact you are having on the world, is misleading. We don't actually remove deceptions and suddenly see ourselves clearly. You cannot stop perceiving yourself to be one way without putting another perception in its place. What I've done in the last few months is not eliminate a set of self-deceptions; I've reframed these self-deceptions to take another form. My sense of self has merely shifted.
I don't suffer from extreme mental illness; I'm thankful that I haven't developed schizophrenia, for example. For the most part, I'd like to believe that I perceive reality as it is.
There was a study done by a psychologist that asked people to choose a pair of socks from amongst a group of pairs. The socks were all identical, but the participants were led to believe that they were different. When asked why those one pair over another, the participant would come up with a reason. We invent stories, even ones that aren't true, to explain the world around us. Connecting dots, drawing lines in the gaps of understanding, releases dopamine into our brain. We're wired for understanding even in the face of things we cannot understand.
In speaking about scientific discoveries, and as an admonition to the scientists making them, physicist Richard Feynman once said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." I'm the narrator of my own life story, but more often than not, I'd suspect that my own story is a lattice held together by fabrications.
So what hope is there? To paraphrase an aphorism from the field of statistics: the stories we tell ourselves are always wrong, but some stories are useful.