The Blind Spot That Crashes The Plane in anticlimatic

Anyone who finds themselves shouldered with the responsibility of seeing anything through to completion will back me up on this I think. A specific fear, or humility, born of experience. That thought in the back of your mind, as things play out beneath your hands, that you missed something. Some tiny overlooked detail that you didn’t know was pivotal. Some great and difficult impasse, perhaps an unseen product of tactics you haven’t even employed yet in your quest. Just the knowledge that something, anything, at any point- can creep up out of nowhere and absolutely crater any of your hopes for success.

The blind spot that crashes the plane.

I experience this fear on the job constantly, and it’s bled into more cerebral matters of life and philosophy. Sure, I believe this, I believe that, this value, that value- but what if I’m missing something? What if it’s all wrong, actually, because of something overlooked that I don’t even know about?

The problem is that there are certain bits of Truth around humanity that, when taken together, form an alarming picture. Wish casting is tempting, but here is what I know to actually be true:

1) We make decisions based in unobservable chambers of our minds (faith based/unconscious), and only then deploy our reason and our logic to erect supports around it.

2) Anything we THINK we don’t like in other people is really just something we don’t like in ourselves- once again rooted in those unobservable mental chambers, and we will project that war within ourselves onto a war with others.

3) The only parts of our brain that REALLY matter, the sub and the unconscious, cannot learn vicariously- only empirically. History repeats itself constantly because there quite literally is no way for the subconscious lessons learned through experience and wisdom to be handed down to subsequent generations. Everyone has to make the same mistakes and relearn the same subconscious information.

Taken together, the picture of The Human looks somewhat bleak. More Poe than Emmerson. We progress through our lives and are shaped by similar but different experiences, in different orders and different levels of severity, and from these very simple unconscious lessons and subtle variations therein we extrapolate ourselves, our identities, and our values, into wildly different characters- often characters seemingly at odds with one another.

We can’t all together be both correct AND contradicting, can we? Somewhere our chain of learning must get perverted. Somewhere it skips off the rails of reality. Universally. As a rule. Somewhere.

Some blind spot that can crash the plane.