Indigo Lantern

  Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour;
  Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree,
  All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy.

-The Aeneid, Virgil, Project Gutenberg

*This post continues a line of thought from the previous post, exploring how we as a society are reluctant to give credence to situations in which people bear witness to truths that we prefer to pretend do not exist. I opened the previous post positing that the original Cassandra could have been a woman or girl accusing someone of rape.

Even today such accusations are immediately met with doubt if not wholesale disbelief.

Why is this subject so difficult? If I told you my watch was stolen, you’d most likely believe me. You’d have no reason not to, and you’d have no reason to suspect that I was not telling the truth. In fact, I can tell you a true story about a theft I experienced.

I visited a friend of mine in Washington, D. C. several years ago, as I was passing through on a trip back to school for my senior year of college. My car was broken into, and my computer, suitcase, and backpack were all stolen. I filed a police report, but of course nothing was ever recovered.

Other than that incident, I’ve been fortunate. I can’t really think of any other instances when I’ve had something significant stolen. In any event, I’ve told you about the theft, and there you have it. Truth. You believe me.

But why do you believe me?

Maybe you believe me because you’ve heard of other people being robbed, so you know it’s possible. Or perhaps you’ve been robbed yourself, so you’ve had direct experience of it.

(I wonder, if you grew up in a society where there was no such thing as theft, would you believe me? You probably couldn’t even understand what I was saying at first, because how do you explain theft to someone who doesn’t know what theft is?)

When you think about it, believing someone is an act of faith on our parts. Everything someone tells us could be untrue, but we act on faith that it is true. We assume when people speak to us, they are telling us the truth: their name, their age, the work they do, the town they live in, their marital status, whether they have kids, etc.

In fact, when people don’t tell us the truth, we tend to get upset, because an important social system has gone awry. As a society, we don’t have time to fact-check everyone we speak to.

“Hi, my name is Bob,” says the person you’re just meeting.

You: “Hi, nice to meet you. Can you show me your driver’s license, please? I need to verify your name before I can call you Bob.”

Bob hands you his driver’s license.

“Okay, Bob, nice to meet you. My name’s Scott,” you say as you return his driver’s license and give him yours to verify your name.

“Hi Scott,” says Bob.

“Hi Bob. By the way, how old are you?” you ask.

Bob tells you, “Twenty-five.”

“Gosh, Bob, I’m sorry, but I forgot to look at the date of birth on your license. Let me see it again, will you?”

Etc.

Since we can’t verify everything someone tells us, we have to take it on faith that they are telling us the truth. Eventually, as we get to know someone, we witness or experience things that confirm the information we have been told by a person. We may also know other people who know the same person, and those other people may have information that confirms what we’ve already learned. Eventually, we develop a sense of how truthful a person is and we use that as a guide for how much to believe of what we are told by that person.

Truth and its companion, belief, are established socially as well as intellectually over a period of time. As more and more of what a person says proves to be true, you develop greater confidence that that person will continue to tell the truth. They are now “trustworthy”, or, they have “earned your trust”.

The difficulty comes when someone says something that challenges our understanding of what is possible. If someone you trust tells you something improbable, threatening your world view, you are faced with a dilemma. You must weigh the danger of your world being turned upside down against the potential loss of friendship should you disbelieve your friend.

Usually, our psyches react violently when threatened by challenges to our sense of the world. The choice between a friendship with one individual and one’s ability to maintain one’s world view is no choice at all for the psyche. It must protect itself at all costs, even at the cost of greater understanding, friends, morals, etc.

Thus, we deny the truth when we hear it or even when we suspect it, in a doomed belief that by maintaining our ignorance we can hope to control our environment.

Cassandra’s difficulty lay in the reluctance of her audience to believe her words. A rape victim’s difficulty, beyond the sexual assault itself, is similar: convincing her/his listeners that something bad happened. Whereas Cassandra’s compatriots were compelled by the god Apollo to dismiss her warnings, we have no such excuse today. If we fail to hear someone’s cry for help or if we disbelieve that something bad has happened, then we have already abdicated the humanity and compassion we could offer not only to a fellow being, but also to ourselves.

Our post earlier this week linked to Yale scientist Laurie Santos’ research on choices humans make, especially the foolish ones related to money.

Santos and her team invented a monkey currency of sorts, to see how monkeys fair at the market.

In addition to studying how monkey make economic decisions, Santos observed that the monkeys had many of the same vices as human beings: they stole, they tried to deceive the humans involved in the experiment, etc. Furthermore, Santos noted, they didn’t put money aside for a rainy day.

However, I was thinking, if monkeys don’t have pockets and if other monkeys steal, how would the capuchins actually save? Where could they keep their money safe?

I know if I had a choice between spending money on myself or having it stolen by another to be spent by them, I might just spend the money myself.

Of course, according to Santos, there’s no expectation for me to act all that differently from my primate cousins anyway…

English. What an interesting language.

I’ve heard that prepositions are some of the most difficult things to learn in a second language, and I can well believe it. Although “up” is the opposite of “down”, when I ask you to “sit up” I am not asking you to do the opposite of “sit down”.

When I was studying Spanish, I never could figure out whether I should use “para” or “por”. Both can mean “by” or “for”, as well as a couple of other meanings. Eventually, I came up with my own set of rules for determining when to use which, but I wouldn’t bet a plugged nickel as to their accuracy.

I started thinking about those crazy prepositions when I realized that I “backup” my computer before “updating” the software. Why does the combination of “back” and “up” lead to “backup”? While “update” may seem intuitive, who’s to say it couldn’t have evolved to mean moving a date “up” in the calendar?

All this to say that the site has been backed up and updated.

Now, on to updating the backups and backing up the updates…

Back to Radiolab.

A show called Oops, about errors in judgment and/or execution, and the consequences of those errors.

Very uncomfortable.

But, of course, since it’s Radiolab, thought-provoking.

Once upon a time a little girl walked through the woods.

She came across a berry bush.

Her mother had told her never to eat the berries for they were poisonous. Her father had told her never to eat the berries. Her grandmother, aunts, uncles, older cousins, neighbors, and so on, had all told her never to eat the berries.

This particular day was heavy with warmth. The little girl’s clothes were sticky, her feet were sweaty and blistered, and her throat was parched.

The girl came across the berry bush in the shade of a tall tree. A cool breeze ruffled her hair as she studied the juicy plumpness of the berries. The berries were ripe, red, and looked sweet. The girl’s mouth watered.

She took a step closer to the bush. Her hand reached toward the berries. Her fingers brushed the berries. But that was all.

She sighed, turned around, and continued her walk in the woods.

After about an hour, she came to a clear brook and quenched her thirst. The water was sweet, fresh, and clear.

As she was drinking, a fish spoke to her.

“Why didn’t you eat the berries from the berry bush?” asked the fish.

The girl was taken aback, although she didn’t know if she was more taken aback by the fact that a fish had spoken to her or that it had known about her encounter with the berry bush.

“They would make me sick,” she stammered.

“How do you know?” asked the fish.

“Because my mother, my father, my grandmother, and all my aunts and uncles told me so,” replied the girl.

“If your mother, your father, your grandmother, and all your aunts and uncles told you the sun will rise at midnight, would that make it so?” asked the fish.

“No,” said the girl, uncertainly.

“Why not?” pressed the fish.

“Because I’ve seen it rise during the day, but never at night,” answered the girl.

“So you’d trust your perceptions above the words and warnings of your elders?” asked the fish.

“Yes,” said the little girl.

“Why not trust your perceptions with the berries, then?” asked the fish.

“Because the berries might make me sick and die! Even if I found out the truth of the matter, it might be too late,” answered the girl.

“Good girl,” said the fish. “You and your mother, father, grandmother, aunts and uncles are correct. You would die if you ate those berries. You must never eat them.” The fish said no more.

The little girl left the brook and continued her walk.