The title says it all, but the details get fuzzy. It is easy to say that perception is reality, but to understand the implications is more difficult. We want to believe in reality. We want to believe that people operate on a reality based level, but perception is not about reality. Take, for example a cat and a mouse. The cat’s perception is that the mouse is good to eat and the killing and eating the mouse is a good thing. The mouse, on the other hand, perceives the cat as danger, as bad. Which perception is correct? Whose reality is correct?
When we speak of the political, social, religious or other aspects of society, we speak with a perception of reality that is the formed by our own education, our experience, and by the culture in which we live. We see with the eyes of our own past, hear with the ears of our experience, and feel with the emotional background of our lives.
A favorite historical figure that people like to use in comparisons today is Adolph Hitler. He came of age during the first world war, a war waged with mustard gas and which cost millions of lives. He came of age seeing how individual lives were worth only their use as “cannon fodder.” He experienced the post-war damage caused by horrific reparations imposed on Germany and Austria, reparations that destroyed whatever economy was left following the armistice. He was also a product of a society that was historically anti-Semitic. Invariably, he had read the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabricated document supposedly reporting a meeting of Jewish leaders and their plans to take over the world. His perception was that Jewish people were the cause of the economic disaster facing Germany and Austria. To further this perception, he developed the theory that the Jews of Europe were an inferior race of human beings. Germans (including Austrians who speak German) were superior. Eliminating inferior humans was good for society; the inferior races of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs needed to be either eliminated or enslaved to preserve the purity of the German people and it was the natural destiny of the German people to rule over the inferior races of men. Thus everything he did was for the betterment of the German peoples and therefore good. His perception of reality was that Germans were better than others and had a right to rule over all.
New we can sit back and say that Hitler was evil. That is our perception, based on a totally different set of values. Yet, how many of us remember or know that Henry Ford distributed thousands of copies of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and that this country refused entry to many German Jews before the war. While our perceptions about Jewish people may not have been as extreme as Hitler’s, it still did not accept them as brothers and sisters in the family of man.
In the weeks to come, I will be exploring more about the concept of perception as it relates to the current political climate in the US and around the world..