My view is that we live in a culture -- this present day 20th century culture -- where we are not accustomed to knowing ourselves. Given that our age has embraced Kant's philosophical notion as a basis for avoidance of psychology (for we cannot know "the thing in itself", as postmodernist theorists are prone to teach us), and generally we are too busy to bother to know ourselves anyway, we have a problem. It is this: Since we are generally, as individuals, in no position to claim to know ourselves very much, we are also not in a very strong position to differentiate between what we really know and what we think we know. If we don't know who and what we are, as human beings, and as individuals, we might assume that we know all sorts of things (that we actually do not) since the limits of our knowledge are unknown to us.
This is why ancient peoples often mistook their dreams or hallucinations of some kind of reality. Our situation in the world today may not be so grave, in terms of the kinds of errors we might make in differentiating what is real from what is not real. We have access to all sorts of artefacts of the sciences and humanities, to help us along with this endeavour of knowing ourselves. Yet we are taught no psychological skills in schools these days, as teachers rely upon operant conditioning, dealing with the students at arms reach, which deprives them of the capacity for internal self-regulation, and in turn, deprives them of useful self-knowledge.
Due to the cultural conditioning we experience within contemporary society, so many of us assume that self-knowledge is either not desirable or not possible. In workplaces today, "emotionalism" is eschewed. Yet is is common to label anything that one doesn't like or understand as the "emotionalism" of the other person. That which one dislikes, one tries to get rid of, by labeling it thus. The approach of labeling as "emotional" that which one has simply failed to understand (due to lack of adequate training and capacity for reflection) is a moral blight on society today. The cultural enforcement of rigid social conformism (on the basis of psychological blackmail, that not to conform implies an out of place emotionalism), is founded on a lack of personal insight into oneself and others. Who are those who suffer from the hallucinations that are projected onto them -- if now those "cultural others": women, blacks, and those of another cultural origin. We claim to know them, when we emotionally resort to labeling them, but what we know is often only a figment of the imagination, a projection of the parts we dislike about ourselves. As a society, we have been sucked into a social mire,which does not differ, as much as we would like to think it does, from a more antiquated and benighted religious consciousness. We think we know the other type of person, but we betray that claim to knowledge when we do not use reason and attempt to investigate the nature of the psychology of the person whom we see as being different from us. Rather, we merely project something onto them, so that we become reason itself -- and they become the disliked parts of our mentality (our unreason).
This is why ancient peoples often mistook their dreams or hallucinations of some kind of reality. Our situation in the world today may not be so grave, in terms of the kinds of errors we might make in differentiating what is real from what is not real. We have access to all sorts of artefacts of the sciences and humanities, to help us along with this endeavour of knowing ourselves. Yet we are taught no psychological skills in schools these days, as teachers rely upon operant conditioning, dealing with the students at arms reach, which deprives them of the capacity for internal self-regulation, and in turn, deprives them of useful self-knowledge.
Due to the cultural conditioning we experience within contemporary society, so many of us assume that self-knowledge is either not desirable or not possible. In workplaces today, "emotionalism" is eschewed. Yet is is common to label anything that one doesn't like or understand as the "emotionalism" of the other person. That which one dislikes, one tries to get rid of, by labeling it thus. The approach of labeling as "emotional" that which one has simply failed to understand (due to lack of adequate training and capacity for reflection) is a moral blight on society today. The cultural enforcement of rigid social conformism (on the basis of psychological blackmail, that not to conform implies an out of place emotionalism), is founded on a lack of personal insight into oneself and others. Who are those who suffer from the hallucinations that are projected onto them -- if now those "cultural others": women, blacks, and those of another cultural origin. We claim to know them, when we emotionally resort to labeling them, but what we know is often only a figment of the imagination, a projection of the parts we dislike about ourselves. As a society, we have been sucked into a social mire,which does not differ, as much as we would like to think it does, from a more antiquated and benighted religious consciousness. We think we know the other type of person, but we betray that claim to knowledge when we do not use reason and attempt to investigate the nature of the psychology of the person whom we see as being different from us. Rather, we merely project something onto them, so that we become reason itself -- and they become the disliked parts of our mentality (our unreason).
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