Posted: September 09, 1999 at 10:16:38: by Tim
There is a school of psychology which says that, when people have a major interest or concern, their subconscious mind actively searches for things related to that interest. For example, a few years ago, I bought a Peugeot 406 car and remember thinking "not many of these on the roads". All the time I had that car, I noticed hundreds of the things. My subconscious was searching for things which fitted in with the patterns of my conscious interests - the human mind/brain is a neural network; a very complex pattern recognition and matching system.Psychologists call this subconscious searching system the "reticular activating mechanism". My personal theory is that people who take an active interest in fighting racism (and I doubt that anyone here would say that is in general a bad thing) spend so much time thinking about the subject that they see racism in many things where other, less motivated/interested people wouldn't. People who have spent years looking for instances of racism have conditioned their subconscious to find 'racist' patterns and the mind is very good at finding patterns which don't necessarily exist. The McCarthy hearings in the 50's/60's took it to the opposite extreme - they had so conditioned themselves to finding 'communist influences' that they could find them in almost anything. Three quotes spring to mind; "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" - Freud "Gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss gazes into you" - Nietsche (I think) "I love humans - always seeing patterns in things that don't exist" - EMH, U.S.S. Voyager : Recently, I read a review of the Lord of the Rings, which claimed that anyone who bought the book was "funding racism", and that as a result the book should be banned! I don't propose to recite the arguments that have been put so well by Michael Martinez, and which completely demolish that argument. My question is why do some people who (presumably) have read the book misinterpret it so badly? : Sean
| 
