dated models
Ξ July 22nd, 2008 | → | ∇ Culture, Friends, General, Philosophy |
It’s a little past 11. I should be on my way to bed but I’m not really tired. I’ll get there eventually. I spent most of the day at work trying to wrangle a misbehaving server into functionality. No luck yet. We’re going to try rebooting and possibly reinstalling some components tomorrow morning. Hopefully that will resolve the issues. If not I’m going to be very very stabby.
I’m in kind of an odd mood. I’m working through some shadows tonight. The moon is barely waning and already I am getting depressed. I’m not sleeping so well either. The next two weeks promise to be challenging. Which is good, but also hateful.
I wonder if it’s always this hard to reconcile self-perception with the perceptions that people have of you. The person I am can only be self-defined. If I am to have personal strength I can not let myself be defined by the people around me. I can not let ascribed motivations supersede actual motivations. Self-definition, self-awareness is the core of individuation.
I think I see a hole that a lot of magicians before me have stumble into. It has me caught because I haven’t found a way around it yet. Must everything be a tight-rope walk? It would be really easy for me to isolate my perception of self and deny the veracity of perceptions given to me by others. In the core of things, this must be the goal. Nobody else has the right or power to define or constrain the person I am.
But I have no desire to be alone in my life. I have no desire to estrange those few people close to my heart, and their feelings and thoughts are valuable to me. It’s hard to tell someone you love that you aren’t the person they think you are. Or that you aren’t acting from the motivations they place upon you.
It’s harder to try and take criticism or observation at face value and try to reconcile it with self-perception and memory. All perception is valid, even the perceptions of others. But what about perceptions that don’t reconcile, or don’t appear to reconcile in magnitude?
There’s no easy fix. I have to take what I’m given at face value and evaluate it’s place in my self-perception. How to change those perceptions that are inaccurate though? If someone brings something to my attention that is accurate it’s important to learn to observe it. That’s tricky but it is a matter of self-awareness.
But how do you change the perceptions of others that are inaccurate, and stem from their conceptual model of the person you are? I suppose people have been struggling with this since before the dawn of time. It’s hard to get a sexist to see an actual person behind the gender-identity they’ve assigned them. It’s equally hard to get a racist to see through the race-identity they expect.
Is it more difficult on a personal level? People create behavioral and identity models in their heads of all the people they meet. They use those models to interpret how you will react and how they should treat you. The accuracy of those models depends on the persons skill at creating them, the prejudices or blind spots that are in effect, and the rate at which the person they are modeling changes hir behavior. How can you break out of the models that people are placing on you gently? How can you be respectful and sincere, yet still let people know that they have some flaws in their model, or at least some dated components?
