I’ve been reading Scott Adams lately; How to Fail and Nearly Everything and Still Win Big and Reframe Your Brain. As I said, he was a notoriously brilliant man, such that even when his conclusions were wrong, his insights and the lessons he draws from them are often worth considering.

In particular, he deals a lot with cognitive bias and what he calls the ‘bubble of subjectivity’ that most people live in. One of his key ‘reframes’ is that most people at most times do not think rationally. That is, they don’t see the world as it is, they see it through a lens of interpretation that may be wildly different from reality. This can reach the point, as we’ve seen over the past decade or so, of literally watching the exact same footage of the exact same event and not only reaching wildly different conclusions, but considering their own the obvious conclusion to be drawn.

The different political parties in America don’t just disagree on policy; they are almost literally living in different worlds.

Adams was, of course, an atheist most of his life and his conclusion is that people did not evolve to perceive truth but what seems useful to them. My own conclusion is that this subjective bubble is just another example of a naturally good faculty corrupted by the fall.

God made Man in His own image. That is, He made man to be an image of Himself. Since God is infinitely greater than Man, however, no one man (well, with one obvious exception) can fully comprehend or reflect God as He is. Therefore, God made each of us to perceive Him and His creation from a slightly different perspective and so to reflect a different facet of Him. Hence why the Saints can be found in all walks of life and all time periods, hence the great variety of personality and taste and understanding: each person is intended to see and understand God in a slightly different way and to present that image to Him.

“Each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star
Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of Things as they are!”

As Mr. Kipling put it.

Following the Fall, this subjective capacity has become massively inflamed, to the point where we can perceive things as actually contrary to what they truly are. This is why past ages wisely emphasized the need to submit one’s judgment to reason and objective truth (though of course they often failed in this, especially later on). Because the natural tendency is to create a subjective ‘bubble’ in which your own perspective is presumed to hold good for any and all cases.

We moderns have very stupidly encouraged this through pluralism and skepticism.

There are two conclusions which I draw from this; first being, as Mr. Adams emphasized, that convincing some of the truth is not simply a matter of presenting rational arguments. If someone so wishes, he can re-contextualize just about anything in order to save his subjective bubble. This is why Faith is a virtue: because it takes an act of the will to accept the Truth and to submit one’s own perspective to its judgment. People only accept rational arguments if they have been trained to do so.

The second is that the difference between healthy subjectivity – having a wholesome difference of perspective – and unhealthy subjectivity is whether that subjective perspective is still accurate to the thing perceived, as far as it goes. I may see merit in a given film that others write off as trash. Whether I am correct or not depends on whether the merit I identify is in fact in the film.

So (to take a couple rather odd examples), if I read Julius Caesar as being ultimately favorable to Caesar, that is a legitimate point of view because the content of the play can support that, as shown by Caesar’s “constant as the north star” speech, the disastrous outcome of the plot, and so on. It’s not the only perspective, but it’s a viable one because it’s based on what is in fact in the play.

On the other hand, when people say that the bugs in Starship Troopers are innocent victims, they’re reading something into the film that simply isn’t there, since at no point are the bugs shown to be anything but mindless killing machines (the closest they come is one particularly grotesque bug getting tortured at the end…said bug having earlier sucked a human’s brains out through a spike).

Which is all to say, God intends us to to have different perspectives, and there is a degree of subjectivity in our perception of the world. But we always have to submit our perspective to the truth.