Added later:
a little further into the perceptual modification of events.
Perhaps I ought to clarify this a little - especially since it is just that impulse to remember incorrectly that is probably setting into your mind about now.
In some regards it is an offshoot of cognitive dissonance theory which in turn is an outgrowth of the single strongest propensity of the human mind in terms of perception. That which it does not like, or like to think about it pretends does not exist. The primary culprit in this is death.
We don't like to think that life, having come into being, should simply vanish- end. So we suggest it does not end rather it goes somewhere else - to another plane of existence called the afterlife.
Likewise in comparing what is with what we said would be we don't like to consider the possibility that we could have been wrong. Confronted with facts we often find it easier to change what we said about something then the known facts. If we lived in solitude and everyone else disagreed with us from the beginning it might be difficult to pull this little switcheroo off, but we don't/
In the same way after the end of the second world war it was discovered that the vast majority of Frenchmen were in the resistance. Since no one cares to think differently the fiction is allowed to continue. Emile Durkheim called this phenomenon "the collective memory".It is a way of understanding and perceiving according to what is believed to be the greatest good - but it is *not truth.
What is more and much more dangerous is the greatest good is rarely expanded beyond the scope of a particular group and hence is often used to justify the extermination of those beyond the definition of same.
No comments:
Post a Comment