Forming our Perspective

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths." Proverbs 3:5-6

How is your vision? What characterizes good vision over bad? I think we would all answer that question something like: good vision allows one to see many things both at substantial distance and up close and bad vision cases to inability in seeing either at distance or close by, and may affect what one sees even if clear perhaps there are calcium deposits or clouding in our eye. If we have bad vision we no longer see the world as we ought to. The same can be said about our perspective. Our perspective is the eye through which we see the world. We know that sin darkens our eyes, and we can begin to see light as something foreign, things interrupt how we see God, our neighbors, and even creation. All the same, we still have agency about which fundamental premises we consider true and why. Do we actually seek out the surest truths, that are universally applicable or do even believe such a thing exists? The media we consume is tragically a primary formator of our perspective. 

In the interest of improving ratings, media companies tend to produce both (over)simplified and often negative content. Social media networks use algorithms to change what populates our feeds, based on what we tend to view. The effect of this is what our textbook refers to as social amplifying since instead of encountering opinions contrary to ours, these algorithms associate us only with what we agree with.  This reinforces what we think is true regardless of its implications and associates us with those who believe similar things as us. This effect is called tribalism/“ingroup/outgroup phenomenon” encouraging us to join together thinking we are more infallible than we actually are and thus objectively superior to those that disagree. This is an example of informational social influence.

An example of attribution being affected by normative social influence is that various crime shows depict erratic/violent mental illness victims in an exaggerated manner. Since every person believes themselves to be normal, we tend to think we are impervious to mental illness, unless we admit that we have one. When such people view these shows a stigma against those that have any sort of mental illness/inability is formed. Being labeled as one who has a mental illness or being afraid of being labeled as such tends to decrease the rates of those that seek help and may even decrease emotional wellness (and thus in certain situations contributes negatively to the severity of the mental illness). 

In conclusion, our false self-superiority bias inhibits our empathetic interpersonal mode. Misattribution of the behavior of others, i.e. the attributing of another’s action to either an imagined event or one/some that are not correct, blinds us to who we are actually encountering. False narratives plague society and the true narrative becomes hostile to social flourishing. When it comes to interpersonal conflict, we tend to imagine ourselves as the protagonist, resulting from the ingroup bias. This effect is incumbent upon our nature but is also enhanced by polarizing media such as caricatures, news, and social media algorithms. The social atmosphere(s) we put ourselves in and those we happen to be in can influence our motives and the means we employ in their response. These perspectives can be very unhelpful to actually forming a universal perspective. Furthermore, what is the above missing? Charity, without this there will be no perspective which brings harmony only greater conflict, whereas we used to seek the collective good collectively, we now seek the individual good individually. This lack of love we find in our media continues to darken our vision and moves us away actual goodness, true, and beautiful toward what our disabled vision considers “highest” and “best”. In our myopia, we have lost sight of the good that lies beyond ourselves.

Written by Carter Carruthers

The struggle of the Christian

laden with hard choices.

Seeking great virtue,

we ignore bad voices.

The pull of each nature,

the good and the corrupt.

Which will we follow?

and which to interrupt?

Two paths,

one of light and one of dark.

Which would we choose,

until the moment, with on we continue absolute, 

and from the other must part?