On Perspective
There has been a lot of noise recently in the news and elsewhere about fairness, value, and what people feel they deserve - especially in the face of challenging economic or professional realities.
To which my initial response was “have some perspective, others have it tougher” only to find my words echoed back to me. Shock, horror - I was caught in my own hypocrisy. It is all about perspective, but what is it?
Perspective is a truth
Perspective is a view of what and how we see the world. It is what makes up the truth we witness, but a perspective, our perspective, is scoped only to us. The truth we build off this perspective is limited, so in order to get a richer, fuller truth we must consider other perspectives.
This is not to say that we should adopt a Panglossian approach to considering other perspectives, as it is most certainly true that someone else has it worse than us. If we don’t like the circumstances we find ourselves in, we are free to change them. Whether that is through collective action, individual choice, or acceptance of the situation. But getting other perspectives allows us to understand why the situation exists in the first place.
How can we gain perspective?
We already have our own perspective, so why do we need others? Gaining perspective is really a matter of gaining truth, by piecing together different views that exist of an event.
Ultimately, we can only gain perspective through openness and curiosity. If we’re not open, any additional perspective will be closed to us. If we’re not curious, we’ll never find additional perspectives.
But a word of caution prevails - perspectives are as flawed as the humans that create them. They are ingrained with our biases and our belief systems, so untangling all that will provide clarity, even though the task to distill truth from perspective is difficult and a skill that needs constant practice.
In Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (the font of philosophical knowledge), one character apologises to another character for ruining their life. The other character responds by saying it’s all a matter of perspective, if the first character hadn’t done what they did, then this character would not have lived the life they had. It’s a surprisingly powerful reminder.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself
So… I got caught up in my own hypocrisy because I was too focused on comparisons and numbers, rather than the people behind the situations. And I had to pause, assess my own perspective, and to realise that everyone has their take on a situation.
For myself, I’ve had to acknowledge a degree of privilege. I live comfortably. My wife often teases me about my fixation with the ‘plight of HENRY’ - a concept mostly tied to the complexity of tax policy, but that’s a topic for another time. In short, by focusing on my own perspective, I am blinded to the perspectives of others and start becoming resentful of others - filled with my own self-righteousness and indignation.
I had to check myself before I wrecked myself.
Will it change my perspective? Probably not, my perspective is still my own - and I own it. But I do have a responsibility to gather perspectives from those who are not in the same position as me, to understand their perspectives and to empathise with their situation.
The truth will set us free
By holding dearly onto our own perspectives, we are blinded to other possibilities and a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. By only focusing on ourselves we end up creating friction with others when previously there was none. A cynic would say that the friction is an intended consequence of an event, but that denies us our own agency.
Nothing that happens to us, the decisions that we make, or our reactions to events are predestined (which is really to do with salvation). We have agency in all of this, and to deny our agency is to deny our humanity, and to shrug all responsibility off to someone or something else - at which point we are no better than machines. Perspective shapes us, but it is not us.
By seeking out diverse perspectives, we catch glimpses of truth - of why things are the way they are. We may not always like what we find, but at least we’ll have approached the world (and one another) with a bit more understanding.
And in that, perhaps, is the start of freedom.