How To Write Human Perception

Imagine a child marooned on an island. All memories she has are of her parents. What are the chances are she’d grow up to have low self-esteem? Would she be introverted or extroverted? Chances are she’d grow up to have no particular self-perception. She might not even remember her name when she gets older.

People’s self-perception is a summary of their past. Ask someone if they are introverted or extroverted, they’d look back to scan their past. They would wonder if their past actions fit the description of introversion or extroversion. Their conclusion would become their self-perception. What they don’t know is that the reason they acted introverted (let’s say) at a certain moment in the past had to do a lot with the situation and much less with their inclinations. The same can be observed when you ask their favorite color or food. They scan their past to look for a color they always wore or a food item they ate the most.

Therefore, If you control their past, you can control their self-perception. Put them in situations that demand extroversion, such as speech competitions in school. They would grow up to think they are extroverted. Put them in situations where they have to lie, cheat, or still, they would grow up to think they are evil. Put them in a situation in which they have to build up character, they would grow to be proud of themselves. Most people live in the illusion of their self-perception when it is almost entirely programmed.

Centralized planers do it on a macro scale. School is a controlled experiment where children can be made to do things teachers want them to. Whatever they do ends up becoming their self-perception. The same can be said for places of worship, where people can be made to do things repeatedly. Instead of thinking that they were driver by external factors, they would change their self-perception to fit their absurd behavior.

Most people attribute more to themselves than they should. They severely underestimate situations they were put in and how those situations caused them to behave in certain ways. Almost all of their behaviors could be explained by a few variables: place of birth, religion, culture, and public policy. They think that attitude drives behavior when people respond to situations pretty much instinctively or intuitively. Then, they merely adjust their attitudes to explains their actions.

Here is the road map. Put people in situations that incentive behaviors you want to see --> keep them busy so they don’t know they are getting played --> as they age, they would build an ego that can explain why they did everything they did. They would keep updating it to make their actions look reasonably consistent. This is the trap of ego or self-perception. So long their actions and attitudes are not too far from each other, they would stay trapped. They would want to make sure their actions can be reasonably and consistently followed from their self-perception when their self-perception itself is the consequence of holding on to past actions.

Back to the marooned child. She may not develop any particular self-perception. She may not even organize an ego. She may not even remember her name when she gets older. She may get enlightened because she has not received any indoctrination from society. She hasn’t yet eaten the fruit of knowledge. How can she? It belongs to the city of man.