Perspective

It's very hard to train our intuition to have an increasingly broad perspective. In the first world, we are pushed instead to have an increasingly narrow perspective, a specialization. If we want to get greater perspective on the world outside of our specialization, we can't do it just by reading our favorite news and analysis sources and saying 'Oh, that sounds right. I agree'. Those are not our perspectives. They belong to other people. We mimicking them, with very little examination, at our peril.

We know we should be suspicious of someone who is bing dogmatic, or who treats the world like a bin of clichés, repeating things that 'everyone knows'. Don't let their insistence on normality, which is perhaps their genuine conviction, persuade you. Persuasion of that kind is indeed a kind of attack, even when we agree with it easily, because we have to resist it even to judge it properly. We must resist the rhetoric, the conformity, the charisma, the group they're in, and the track-record of the messenger.  The presented clichéd arguments must be considered on their own merits, and questioned mercilessly. 

There are some things in life that provide us perspective just by existing. Certainly this is most true of nature itself, of which we are only an aspect. The more we can learn about nature, the better our perspective may be, if we are careful to pay attention to our various innate dogma-inducing human tendencies. These can be overcome with humility and sensitivity. It's a sensibility. Literally. The word 'sensibility' comes from a Greek word that Aristotle used to describe perception, as in 'the senses and perception' or 'sense and sensibility'. Perception is where we work hardest on broadening our intuition: our senses can't be much improved (well, they can a little), and our cognition needs to mostly be trained to stay out of the way while our perception is at work, so that our subconscious can use its findings to actually generate ideas and deliver judgments to our consciousness. So sometimes it's our perception that we are trying to help by obtaining a broader perspective.

Although they aren't necessarily separate from nature, there are plenty of human artifacts-and-ideas that provide perspective. Some of them are rather surprising.

Speaking of training your intuition: pay most attention when you are surprised at what people say. It doesn't matter whether they are wrong or not. If you look closely at your own surprise, and the cause of it, you will always learn something. The same if it makes you angry, or happy, or warm.

Here's an example of one human artifact, or institution, whose very existence broadens our perspective. I'm not saying it's the biggest or most important, or anything like that. I'm just surprised how much perspective can be broadened just by considering its existence. 

I sometimes consider the idea of the 'one big union', the IWW, or the Industrial Workers of the World. It inspired this essay for the several reasons, but here's one:

There are 5 million deaths a year globally due to climate change. The richest countries of the global north are responsible for 90% of greenhouse gas emissions, including proxy emissions by making poorer countries do our factory work (much to everyone's detriment). Also, the global north consistently extracts 40 times as much wealth from the global south than any cash it delivers to the global south. In other words, the rich countries are responsible for global poverty, as well as poverty in their own countries. Which leads to death. It is a continuous extractive occupation, and it is violent, because it kills more people than even the horror and criminality of war.

How do we stop this? 

Well, we could join a global union of workers. 

This means we, in the first world, would join together to fight the exploitation of the third world -- whether that's supporting worker power, fair trade, equity, peace, or cooperative ownership. 

All of which are the directions we need to take to resolve most of the world's problems.

Now, I'm not saying the IWW will save us. I'm just saying that its existence is one of those things that gives us perspective on the world's problems. If we all join together in one big union, we can overcome the militarists, the executives, the plutocrats, the autocrats, the profiteers, etc.

It's just something to consider, when looking for human artifacts that provide genuine perspective on our relationship to nature, and our individual and institutional behavior towards each other.

Greg Bryant

2022