ESL Blogs

Is there any other better thing to do in a lazy Sunday evening than reading a psychological theory that can make you explode your brain?? Hell no!

Have you ever said the phrase 'How could I have been so blind?'
We usually think about that after a failed love relationship. That's something very interesting related to the willful blindness*: "One of the subtlest manifestations of our willful blindness is our choice of mates. Data from 25 million online dating site questionnaires reveal that “we mostly marry and live with people very like ourselves”

If you still wonder 'why', you're going to find this reading exercise very interesting:

"We all want to feel that we have made our own choices, that they weren’t predictable, that we aren’t so vain as to choose ourselves, and that we are freer spirits... We don’t like to feel that we’re blind to the allure of those who are not like us; we don’t like to see how trapped we are inside our own identity.

We like ourselves, not least because we are known and familiar to ourselves. So we like people similar to us — or that we just imagine might have some attributes in common with us. They feel familiar too, and safe. And those feelings of familiarity and security make us like ourselves more because we aren’t anxious. We belong --> Our self-esteem rises -->We feel happy.
Human beings want to feel good about themselves and to feel safe, and being surrounded by familiarity and similarity satisfies those needs very efficiently.

The problem with this is that everything outside that warm, safe circle is our blind spot.

When we love someone, we see them as smarter, wittier, prettier, stronger than anyone else sees them. To us, a beloved parent, partner, or child has endlessly more talent, potential, and virtue than mere strangers can ever discern. Being loved, when we are born, keeps us alive; without love for her child, how could any new mother manage or any child survive? And if we grow up surrounded by love, we feel secure in the knowledge that others believe in us, will champion and defend us. That confidence — that we are loved and therefore lovable — is an essential building block of our identity and self-confidence. We believe in ourselves, at least in part, because others believe in us and we depend mightily on their belief. As human beings, we are highly driven to find and to protect the relationships that make us feel good about ourselves and that make us feel safe... Love does the same thing … and that seems to be just as true even if our love is based on illusion. Indeed, there seems to be some evidence not only that all love is based on illusion — but that love positively requires illusion in order to endure.

Nations, institutions, individuals can all be blinded by love, by the need to believe themselves good and worthy and valued. We simply could not function if we believed ourselves to be otherwise. But when we are blind to the flaws and failings of what we love, we aren’t effective either… We make ourselves powerless when we pretend we don’t know. That’s the paradox of blindness: We think it will make us safe even as it puts us in danger.

The most crucial learning that has emerged from this science is the recognition that we continue to change right up to the moment we die. Every experience and encounter, each piece of new learning, each relationship or reassessment alters how our minds work.

We make ourselves powerless when we choose not to know. But we give ourselves hope when we insist on looking. The very fact that willful blindness is willed, that it is a product of a rich mix of experience, knowledge, thinking, neurons, and neuroses, is what gives us the capacity to change it. We can learn to see better, not just because our brain changes but because we do. As all wisdom does, seeing starts with simple questions: What could I know, should I know, that I don’t know? Just what am I missing here?"

'Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril' by Margaret Heffernan.

*Definition: "Willful Blindness" or "Willful Ignorance" has come to mean any situation in which people intentionally send their attention away from an ethical problem that is believed to be important by those using the phrase. - either because the problem is too disturbing, or from the knowledge that solving the problem would require extensive effort. This phenomenon is closely related to the aphorism, "Ignorance is bliss."