Class by Name, Class by nature

One of the problems when trying to achieve something is that people see you and your ability in terms of what you and the society you inhabit have demonstrated. This can be a really annoying process, such as starting to write a blog and then someone tells you 'it was very interesting, but I think I found some grammar errors." Yes, well, thank you, does anyone remember how many keyboarding mistakes Beethoven made when writing his music? Is it of any importance? Why do people see things in terms of society's belief? Is it because they fear to express their own feelings or do they simply lack the practice or even the facility to do so? These and many other questions clamour for some kind of response.

After a long phase of metaphorically headbutting the walls of my understanding, I began to notice that the pattern of cracks on that wall had some regularity. Understanding began to flow through me, I had been like a child brought up in a prison cell with no experience of the outside world that grows to realise that the regular pattern on the wall were made by individual blocks built by men to limit the child's experience. In my case, these cracks outlined the blocks built by humanity, but was it to limit what could be understood, or was it to protect us from an unnamed danger out there? Had anyone been to check recently? Was the danger still there, had it receded or had our ability to understand increased enough to create newer walls further out? If the latter was true, maybe it was time to build those walls further out and give ourselves new thinking space. Perhaps the time is ready for humanity to make a mental change as significant as cave painting, making tools or telling stories to create history.

Now that I could see the cracks, I could see the blocks, but I could also see the holes punched through the walls by other thinkers. I examined the blocks more closely, they were not made of an ordinary material but of the raw elements of the infinite possible human experience, rough hewn and individually named. When I indicated the structure to the people around me they often responded with fear or confusion in their eyes - this is how it has always been, they said. But these blocks were hewn by man, were still being hewn, this is not always how it has been, it is merely how it is now, the result of the best techniques known by previous generations.

The infinite totality of possible human experience is larger than our minds can encompass, and because it is larger we cannot deal with it, not even to make basic communication possible beyond pointing. To expand the mind to try and encompass it all would burst the mind. What we do instead is to chip out a chunk of the totality that expresses what we mean. That chunk can be positioned on the wall so that others can refer to it as well. Um, wait, we are putting new things on the wall? That means the world we have built has no roof. Understanding crystallises further, the ones with fear and confusion in their eyes are the ones afraid to look at the new parts of the wall, their understanding of their world was created early in there lives by memorising their surroundings, their prison - by making changes you either force changes in their minds or leave them feeling confused when the model of their world and the actual world no longer correspond.

There are people busy adding to the wall, and each time a child is born it begins to memorise the environment that exists during its early years, but this is not the same environment memorised by earlier generations. This makes sense, we are constantly bombarded by older generations telling us how things were better or harder-therefore-better in the past, but what they probably mean is that they felt more comfortable in understanding the world that existed then. Only the other week someone of my generation told me that 'life is going down in Britain these days', but perhaps what he meant is that the Britain in his mind and the Britain that exists in the present are moving further apart and that this made him feel increasingly uncomfortable?

The easiest blocks to examine are those of words, which seem to exist separately from the blocks that are concepts that we name using words. Take this block here: "cup". We think of a cup as a drinking vessel, of pottery, metal or plastic, and we can recognise one when we see one in our friend's kitchen. Do you have a favourite cup? Do you remember when you first got it, do you get pleasure from using it, and does it say something about you? If a thief broke into our house then they would see just a cup, all those feelings we invest in 'our cup' would mean nothing to the thief, it will be just a cup unless it is wrought from a precious metal or is an obvious work of art to the thief. We value more our own things, the things we understand, than we do those of others, partly because we invest individuality in them, they move from being to mere 'cup' to 'my number one coffee cup which my wife gave to me on our second date'.

If we replace 'cup' with 'concept' we find that we can invest the same feelings in our favourite concept and have no little or feeling in our neighbour's. Our political beliefs are right and those of other people are wrong is a typical example of caring more for our own 'cup', as is the belief that our nation is better than other nations. In the latter case we can see that the defense of our own nation frequently gets in the way of attempting to solve or seeing problems within our own nation, especially when the comment comes from another nation.

Going one stage further, now let's replace 'cup' with 'person'. We can see how we invest individuality into the the people close to use, and less into people distant. However, now we are not talking about mindless objects or concepts, but about people, individuals who have self-determination beyond what we may or may not give them. Cups can be put away in cupboards, but we cannot do this with people as they may open the cupboard themselves, and are quite likely to do this at a time not consistent with our desires.

Our prison walls are therefore not just constructed of blocks made of stuff, but also blocks that are individual people. We are imprisoned by the people who surround us, both in the present and in the past, alive and dead. We both construct our walls and become part of the walls for others. If we move yourselves from one wall to another the people who thought they knew us often cannot deal with this change, because we have a set position in their internal world image.

As people we have complete bodies, fully visible. Our minds are not fully visible, and not even fully explored by ourselves, and what people see is based largely on early contact with us where they attempt to compare us with other people they have known, seen, read about etc. They attempt to fit that model they have in their heads onto us. Even when we have known someone closely for a long time they continue to surprise us, which we can call their 'out of character' behaviour. Perhaps, though, they are not being out of character, maybe it is our lack of understanding of their full character? Problems arise when we expect people to meet our expectations without us first trying to understand their character in terms of them as an individual instead of them as our perception using an incomplete generic model.

In Poland I struggle every day to show people that I am me and not 'generic English-person, generic foreigner'. I try to have conversations with people, they try to have conversations with Johhny Foreigner and they then fail to understand what I say because I am forever a cup from someone else's cupboard, my words are distorted or ignored. The idea that I could now be a cup from their own draining board is a concept too alien to consider.