Seeing is Believing or Is It?

Why is it that people believe they have to see things to believe them?  On one hand, you don't want to be naive.  But on the other hand, how can you see everything the world has to offer in order to believe in it?  And why is that people take their personal experiences and try to apply it as a universal truth to the whole of humankind?  I hate it when people do that.  Just because it's in their personal experience does not mean that it exists everywhere; but somehow, people grow up and still believe that they are the center of the universe.

I once had a coworker from Colorado, whom I was trying to convince, during the 2008 Presidential Election, that Obama would carry the state.  This I gathered from all the polls the media had been doing.  He had a slim lead, but a lead nonetheless in Colorado, and that had remained unchanged for several months.  But this coworker said to me that Colorado was a conservative state and that Obama would not take it because everyone she knew didn't like him; and everyone those people knew didn't either.  And so how could he possibly win when everyone she knew wasn't voting for him?  I tried to tell her that the data was telling another story, but she countered that if she couldn't see it with her own eyes, she wouldn't believe it.

And so I said to her:  "Do you believe in Siamese Twins?"  (By that I meant the conjoined twins that must sometimes undergo surgery to be separated.)

"Yes," she answered.

"And have you ever seen Siamese Twins in person?"

"No," she said.

"But you believe they exist," I said.  "Even though you have never personally held one, you believe they exist.  You don't believe that the media just made them up."

And to my surprise, she relented and said, "Touche," that my point was valid.

And it is.  Just because it doesn't happen in your sphere of knowledge doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  Consider how many things in life would not exist just because you would not be able to personally touch them.

My friend's mother had the same point, when she said that she didn't think Obama would win the election.  One or some of her Latino friends told her they didn't like him, and neither did any Latino they knew; so she declared that Latinos didn't like him.  Even when I told her - according to the news polls - that he was leading by a majority in the Latino vote, she still believed her few Latino friends were right.

My guy friend started saying that it looked like McCain would win because he didn't believe people would vote for Obama for such and such reason.  And that's when I said, "I think Obama will win."

"By how much?" another friend asked.

"By a landslide."

That shocked everyone and my friend that had asked the question said, "You're really optimistic."

And maybe I am.  But the truth was that I was following the polls every day, and even though polls can be wrong, it would be hard for them to be that wrong, given that he had such a big and steady lead for several months.  And I had a good feeling about him.  People generally liked him as a person, which has often boded well for a presidential nominee.

The thing is though, I believed the data and the stories about his wide base of enthusiastic supporters; and everyone else believed their own personal experiences.

On another topic, my guy friend has the same mindset.  He'll say, "All guys are like this.  All guys are like that."  And he truly believes it and thinks he's right.  And the disturbing part is that he convinces his girlfriend to accept this fact.  But the truth is that "All guys are not like that."  But he hangs out only with guys who act the way he believes all guys act, so that's the truth he sees.  And his girlfriend hangs out with those same guys, and sees the truth he sees as well.  Fortunately for me, I have had a chance to hang out with other guys and see guys who are not like "that", who are the complete opposite of "that", and so I know that this universal truth he tries to impose on every guy is not true.  But the thing is, when you believe something, you set about trying to find ways to prove yourself right.  And if you try to do that, most times you'll find ways to prove yourself right.  But that doesn't mean it's the truth; not the whole truth, at least.

I also often have had debates with my good friend who believes in being realistic.  She also is one to say that she needs to see it to believe it.  Otherwise, she's very skeptical of it.  But I said to her once, "That's fine, but does that mean that things can only exist if you see them?  What about the things you don't see?  Do they not exist because you can't see them?  And what about the things that don't exist yet?  The things that someone imagines and brings to life, like televisions and airplanes once were, but don't exist yet?  Does that mean that these things can never exist because they are not real now?"  And after that line of questioning, she started to relent her staunch support for being realistic.

People often say I'm unique in my thinking, but I often think it's other people who are unique in their thinking.  It boggles my mind to think that they can be so engrained in the idea that things don't exist without their experience of them.  Because the world is so big and there are so many things in it which boggles the human mind, I wonder if it is their way of feeling that they have some control over the world.  To limit the number of things that can exist to them perhaps helps them to deal with their life, and makes it less overwhelming and scary.  Maybe this perspective makes them think that they matter more because everything needs to be filtered through them to be real.

That I can understand.  But it makes me wonder why I don't believe the same.  Why it makes me actually happy to know that lots of things exist beyond what I know.  Maybe it's because I like to think that the world is huge, and that there are so many things to learn and discover.  And even if I am a small cog in the vast space of the universe, it's a good thing because there are all these ways that the universe can surprise us.  Maybe it's because I read so many stories as a kid and so my imagination and world-view expanded.

Or maybe, it's just because I'd like to believe that anything is possible.