A Little More On Seeing What You're Looking At

So many problems can be traced to interpreting perceptions as facts

Why is it always hard to sleep after having a really nice day? Is the universe punishing you or imposing bad karma of a sort for having too much fun?

Why does it always take everyone so long to sit down at the table when you’re eating something good for dinner?

Why is everyone always extra annoying when you’re tired and impatient?

I genuinely don’t think I quite grasped the answers to these questions—because you’re awake and energetic; they’re not, you’re just extra hungry; they’re not, everything is annoying when you’re tired—until well into adulthood. I wonder how many people go around with a faulty mental model of the things they experience like this. And of course this extends to politics and bigger ideas too.

I remember once, back in the Iraq war era, we watched Flight 93, a movie that dramatized (not that you much needed to) the hijacking of the titular plane on 9/11 and the passengers’ attempt to thwart it, which they did, by getting the hijackers to crash the plane in a field instead of into the Capitol building.

At the end of the movie I said something inflammatory, which is now a thing I realize I often did at the end of movies, when the ending surprised me or made me feel tricked or something (not that I didn’t know how a 9/11 story ended).

It’s funny, when I think of “watching movies” I think of “yelling and arguing,” partly because I instigated that, and partly because I guess my parents took the bait. But anyway, what I said was, “This movie is anti-Muslim propaganda.”

That doesn’t make much sense, but what I meant was “Thinking about 9/11 makes me want to hate Muslims, and I know that’s wrong, so the only way for me to not become an Islamophobe is to pretend 9/11 didn’t happen and to never remember it.” In my simplistic kid’s mind, in those Dubya years, I don’t think I understood how it was possible to acknowledge that 9/11 happened and not want to, like, nuke the entire Middle East. People talked that way back then, and you absorbed it.

Of course, I understand now that the terrorists represented themselves, not the Arab world, let alone all Muslims. But what I’m zeroing in on here is that what I said—an absurd declaration that merely remembering a terrible thing done to our country was tantamount to hateful propaganda—was sort of the tip of the iceberg of a faulty mental model I had built to interpret that event.

When I talk about “seeing what you’re looking at,” this is sort of what I’m talking about. It’s a similar thing to what I referred to in another piece as “the final filter”—i.e., the last subjective impression/inference/assumption/contingent idea, before you get to the absolute bedrock of what you actually think about a thing. My sense is that we rarely do this—not only with people we’re arguing with, but with ourselves. We don’t even know what we think about many things.

To go back to my 9/11 reaction, my statement would (and if I recall, did) spark a whole debate over memorials and nationalism and stuff like that, without actually addressing the underlying idea I held that led me to say the thing in the first place: how do you face evil and not become vengeful and vindictive? How do you force yourself not to paint in a broad brush when you’re the victim of something unspeakable? (Innocent Muslims who faced harassment after 9/11 would have some of the same questions. And I’m now, of course, aware of that.)

Sometimes, I think of a thing Donald Trump reportedly said…