Inhow and why "make us strangers to ourselves"?
Fora long time, human beings have felt that they are quite familiarabout themselves and able to learn more issues concerning theirpersonalities. However, the various decisions they make and actionsthat they stand for, go a long way to confirming they are strangersto themselves. The thoughts of people are shaped by experiences, andas well, they will have a certain orientation, especially for thosethings that they hold as being credible. In most situations, theoblivion felt real is usually more beneficial to man compared to theactual state of things that may not only be factual, but also lesspleasant to the person concerned. Severalauthors have explicitly shown that there is a relationship betweenunconscious action and reality. The paper aims to delve into the aspect of how and why we becomestrangers to ourselves posing various situations that shape ouridentities as well as the fundamental issues that we hold so dear.
Theone element of importance is familiarity. People normally tend tomove towards a certain direction that offers them a clear view ofwhere they are headed to. In such a case, they are bound to developan excessive credible view of an action than an inaction (Gilbert132). In such a case, they will base their decisions and actions onpast events, and some occurrences that would generally make them feellike the activities they are about to engage in will offer them thebest outcomes in the end. While providing an explanation to the same,human beings are bound to heal their ‘emotional side’ throughoffering answers to unpleasant things in a way that makes them feelgood.
Inthe article, “Immune to Reality”, Daniel Gilbert explains thatfor one to rely on certain views to be positive, then they need to bebased on facts gathered by the same person over a certain course oftime. He indicates that people achieve having an honest view ofcertain situations through, “cooking facts and then consciouslyconsuming them” (Gilbert 134). The process of developing the saidfacts is normally subconsciously done, but will resonate with thevery simple elements that a given individual will believe in.
Toconfirm the assertions that he posts, Gilbert indicates that whilebeing rejected by a large group of people is quite demoralizing anddehumanizing to a given individual, one may find it quite hard toshift the blame to such people. Gilbert also adds that explanation isusually key to helping people to have facts. He states that“explanations allow us to understand how and why an event happened”(Gilbert 141). With such view in mind, a given individual normallyhas the information to make right decisions. Inthe article, Ho also goes ahead to provide an instance of her friend,Kate Miller, who was black and felt that she had grown throughout herlife facing various levels of stereotyping and discrimination. Shefelt that the industry required people who are smart and herbackground, automatically, “renders her less smart and less kin”(Ho 184).
Theviews posted by Gilbert also touch on the concept of thepsychological immune system. The term refers to the situation wherebya given person, over time, learns to overcome certain stressfulsituations that may present themselves. The given person finds a wayto offer an explanation of the said cases in a way that would notonly make sense to the said individual, but also provide a chance fora reprieve and justifications for the actions that he could havedone, regardless of how bad they could have been.
Gilbertexplains that “the eye and the brain are conspirators” (Gilbert143). He goes on to indicate that just like any conspirators, thereis usually some level of negotiation between the eye and the brainbehind closed doors, outside awareness of people. The brain is,therefore, able to react to certain situations in a manner that wouldbe surprising to many as they could feel that they never saw itcoming.
Incontrast to familiarity, postedby Gilbert, Ho shows thatpeople fail to understand the importance that rareness hold. In fact,rare is quite noble, compared to familiar, owing to the fact that itnormally has a huge impact on someone’s life compared to the thingsthat people are normally used to. The failure to understand theimportance of rare is also easily observed among smart people such asinvestment bank executives.
Thepeople, for the most part, have felt that only students fromhigh-flying Ivy-league universities such as Princeton, Harvard, andYale stand a huge chance to make good investment managers compared tostudents educated in other institutions. As a result, most WallStreet companies will pitch tents in these institutions during careerfairs in a bid to identify the smart brains and get to woo them intoworking with them and offer them great benefits that they are afterin the form of profitability.
Inthe article, “Biographies if Hegemony”, Ho Karen explains thatSchools like Harvard and Princeton “naturalize students as beingthe best” (Karen 186). In such a situation, many companies get thefeeling that students from other universities cannot match up thebilling that is normally accorded by these schools in terms of thetraining and skills that they offer to their students. Thesame views are also averted by Nafisi in Selections from ReadingLolita in Tehran, where she indicates that the immunity of thepsychology of a given individual is normally based on multipleexposes to the same scenario that may request for a form ofadaptation. The case, therefore, predisposes people to some form ofsilver lining
She,therefore, could not perform well as an investment banker. Karenmaintains that the meritocracy that is adopted in the US bankinginstitutions is highly “dependent on the singularity of the apex”that it fails to consider other factors that are of equal importance(Ho181).Such institutions, therefore, fail to accord other people equalchances to prove their worth.
Inconclusion, it is evident that human beings tend to become strangersto themselves through basing so much on what is familiar to them.They will, for the most part, shy away from the idea that some of thethings that are rare in the world could be the same ones that are ofgreat importance to them. In the cases where people take the time tolook far into what is normally familiar to them, there is a chancethat they could have a better understanding of both themselves andthe world in which they live.
WorksCited
Gilbert,Daniel. “Immune to Reality” New Humanities Reader, FifthEdition. 2016. Pp. 129-147
Karen,Ho. “Biographies of Hegemony” New Humanities Reader, FifthEdition. 2016. Pp.65-191
Nafisi,Azar. Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran. New HumanitiesReader, Fifth Edition. 2016. Pp 278-298
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