Perception

Maybe because perceptions can vary so often it's not as important what we see as what we think we see, or what we think when we see it.





Rorschach tests, the infamous inkblot tests used for psychological evaluation, prove that perceptions can vary greatly. How we perceive things is an indication of, among others, our personality, our state of mind, and our culture.



The world is filled with deep-seeded prejudices that, although we may not be consciously aware of it, are present in most of the population.

Most sub-cultures indicate prejudices about people not like them- be it ethnicity, religion, class or something else entirely.





But all people have perceptions of others and prejudices are just negative perceptions.





Think back to the two men who were arguing about what color a certain nondescript object was. What if I said that it didn't matter because the object in question had an entirely separate purpose? That it happened to be a bomb, but neither of them noticed because they each wanted to win the argument for sake of pride?





Maybe instead of letting our preformed perceptions kept in place by pride and cultural stigmas mar and inhibit our judgment and our society, we let character come before ruling, trial before verdict. Better yet, why not let character be the verdict? The belief "Innocent until proven Guilty" can only go so far if we're prohibited by our subconscious to accept only what our culture wants us to accept. For that matter, why are we putting people up on trial anyway? As a population, have we really sunk so low that a person needs to be put on trial by her peers, and found worthy before she can be accepted into the popular culture?





Culture: it's just a nice word for socially transmitted behavior patterns, or the traits considered as the expression of a particular period, class, community or population. So why not change the pattern? Instead of letting the marks of a culture define and restrict a community through stale ideas and patterns, why not let our communities define our cultures? If people make up a community, and the behaviors of a community define "culture", why let a word stop us? Why let a word, filled with outdated ideas of segregation, war, discrimination and prejudice, define our community and the people of it?