Link to H.G. Wells The Land of the Blind text PDF
Danger of Correcting the Distortions of Perception
Quotes from Democracies Stepchildren Chapter 6 On Values
Bolded text is comment
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. There is truth in the adage but falsehood too, for the one-eyed man may not be king, he may be an outcast and a menace. H. G. Wells says this very well when he has the people who live in the Valley of the Blind label the seeing stranger as insane. Sighted, his perceptions differ largely from those of the other members of the group; he is abnormal, a deviant, perhaps even a dangerous one. His troublesome difference shakes the pillars of the universe–the sense of reality.
Disagreement with fundamental notions is very threatening.
For all of us, beliefs serve to place the world where it is and to define its contents. Through our beliefs we identify the objects, ideas, and feelings about which there is agreement. We identify the actions which are appropriate toward them. More even than identification-a cognitive map of the environment-belief is an emotional commitment to knowledge, common or personal.”
Being a solitary individual pointing out errors is things everyone else sees as foundational reality might begin hopefully. Such a person might expect to be thanked and admired but end up rejected with hostility and shunned without mercy.
“Inextricably interwoven, cognitive functioning is not apart from affective responses; one is the counterpart of the other. The two components vary together. They have an isomorphic, one-to-one relationship which adheres through the process of gathering data, testing, and transmitting it.
This relationship is not merely a matter of theory.”
Knowledge is in reality belief, and we all feel compelled to defend our beliefs.
“Our everyday experience supports these studies, for in the United States the persuasion professions have parlayed this unity into a multi-million dollar public relations industry which attacks beliefs through feelings.
Values accumulate concurrently with concepts and their heavy equipment of affective sets and attitudes. Both cognitive and conative [action] components of attitudes may be viewed as beliefs. Beliefs are not neutral; all contain some degree of favorableness or unfavorableness toward the object.) The tendency to cathexis (cathexis = A concentration of mental energy into a channel.), to value either positively or negatively, is made up of conceptual beliefs about the valued object. Furthermore, whether one values, how one values, and how strongly one values are all correlated with the content of the associated cognitive structure, with human emotion and thinking together forming a complex set of interactions.”
“Feeling is the subsumer. The “entire psychological field -including human conception, responsible action, rationality, knowledge-is a vast and branching development of feeling…. Value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing is felt, nothing matters.”
Change at this level is difficult.
“In his discussion of Jewish reaction to the Nazi terror, Bettelheim (1960) points out that Anne Frank’s father, like other Jews who made the disastrous choice for business as usual, was defining his environment and actions by compelling and no longer relevant social values. Children who do not survive to use them do not need to have middle·class possessions. They do not need to know their high school lessons; they need to learn how to stay alive in an intensely hostile and threatening environment. The values which had served Frank in the past distorted his perceptions of a changed situation.
Values, then, as the basis of conscious or unconscious choice, direct our thoughts, as well as our perceptions, into certain channels. They label, as Alfred North Whitehead said, “matters of importance” as opposed to matters of mere fact, define, limit, and delineate them. By providing an orientation toward the phenomenal world, they determine, indeed, whether a thought will be thought, whether an experience will be perceived and the stimuli received, as well as how it will be perceived, that is, whether positively or I negatively. Values, it might be said, are a goodly portion of the I / stuff that thought is made of. How one feels about something, how strongly, and in what order of importance among the saliences of life are all inextricably interwoven with the cognitive use that is I made of values in the individual’s map of reality. In this sense, values are much more than how things ought to be. They are also how things actually are. They represent the real-a view of the world, as well as of closer, smaller, matters. The concept or construct of justice, for example, could not be valued without the belief that operational referents of justice had existed sometime and somewhere (or that life would be unbearable without this possibility). The present study of adolescent values shows this very clearly. By and large, these youngsters believe in the American ideology of equality, self-reliance, tolerance, justice, and freedom. Their belief is part of a meaningful cognitive structure.”
We live by belief and anything that contradicts what we assume to be reality threaten us at our core.