Personal Zeitgeist

On an internet forum I participate in someone started a thread called “personal zeitgeist.” She asked,

What do you think contributed to your own current set of intuitions, worldview, etc.? For example: 


- Noteworthy historical events that really made an impression during a formative period in your thinking 

- Pop culture of the time 

- Personal experiences 

- Geographic region you were born in/local culture/travel, etc. 

- Personal values, as in it was part of your nature to value critical thinking, emotions, religious beliefs, etc.

I found it quite an amazing process to write a list in response. In We Are all Innocent by Reason of Insanity I talk about what I call My Story, and how we all write narratives that define our lives. The beliefs and assumptions that we form in our early development become filters of our perceptions; these filters construct our mind-generated reality (and it’s the confusion of our mind-generated reality with actual reality that makes us insane). This mind-generated reality is our narrative, our Story. 

In the book I talked about the influence of my family and some of my personality quirks, but her question helped me frame My Story in a broader sense, based on the cultural influences of my time. Here’s what I posted:

1. Childhood in the 60’s. I thought revolution was normal and liberation (of all kinds—race, gender, sexual) should be easy.
2. Travel to the Soviet Union in 1979. I realized my government had been lying to me my entire life (trust me, it was obvious to a 21-year-old that the USSR at that point was not the threat it was made out to be).
3. My parents’ divorce when I was 14. Agony at the time but started me questioning everything. My family had seemed like “Leave it to Beaver” and then it all crumbled overnight, out of the blue. Nothing seemed dependable anymore, but I also became less interested in living like everyone else.
4. Learning, when I was about 12, that Jesus was a special case, the only son of God, and the rest of us are cursed with original sin. This really pissed me off; I couldn’t see any point in Christianity after that.

After I wrote the line, “revolution was normal and liberation (of all kinds—race, gender, sexual) should be easy,” I realized what a defining influence that perspective has had on my life. It has certainly skewed my perception of politics; I’ve been angry and bitter about what I saw as lack of progress because I couldn’t understand why things didn’t change faster/more easily.

What also comes clear to me from this list is a problem with trust—numbers 2, 3, and 4 are all about feeling betrayed, lied to, made a fool of. And the truth is a good portion of my adult life was spent trying not to be a fool—I was a cynical skeptic distrustful of any organization, be it environmental, political, or spiritual. I never wanted to be a member. I didn’t want to get trapped in the conventional world because it was, I believed, built on a pack of lies, so I have lived an alternative lifestyle on the fringes of society. Those perceptions made before I was 21 have had an enduring effect on my life. Now I can see why I’ve never been a “joiner,” the pejorative term I used when someone asked why I wasn’t part of a local environmental group. 

What I learned from this little exercise is that understanding your personal zeitgeist is a good idea—it can help you become more aware of the assumptions and beliefs skewing your perception.

Virtual Reality

This is the first chapter of the manuscript version of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity, by Kathleen Brugger.

Thomas Jefferson is revered in the United States, in part for his inspiring language in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Noble words, but ones which reveal an astonishing cognitive dissonance in the mind of the man who wrote them. Thomas Jefferson is infamous for being a slave owner. Clearly he could believe in the ideal of liberty and equality for “all men,” yet simultaneously believe that some men could be enslaved and treated unequally because of their skin color.

Today we congratulate ourselves that we’re beyond this kind of confused thinking on race, but most of us still believe in the concept of race itself. We think there really are “Caucasian” and “Asian” and “Black” humans. But, according to the majority of anthropologists, the concept of race exists entirely in our minds; there is only one race, the human race.

Yet this mind-generated reality of separate races has caused enormous suffering for millions of humans through our history, and continues today. People are still killed, imprisoned, and discriminated against because of a completely illusory “reality” that racial categories exist.

Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately. That is not true at all. Each of us creates, and lives in, our own individual reality.

A friend of mine shaved off half his moustache one morning, and then walked around all day enjoying people’s reactions. He couldn’t believe how long it took most people to become aware of his half-moustache.

People “saw” him with his moustache intact—entirely missing the reality that half of it was gone—because they were seeing a mind-generated reality, not the objective reality in front of them. When they finally noticed that half his moustache was missing their faces always registered shock (realizing how out of touch with reality they were) before dissolving into laughter.