Critical Thinking’s research and analysis revealed the limitations of abstraction which is how most people derive their understanding of the world – abstraction is how we’ve been trained to manage complexity, ie. if we are considering a complex issue or event, we’re wont to isolate the elements we can grasp or appreciate to focus on these to derive our opinions or views; often what we choose to abstract to justify our world view is determined by our ideological perspectives. Thus we ignore “inconvenient” evidence or information as irrelevant or wrong because it doesn’t “fit” with our world view. Furthermore, we tend to dismiss information from sources outside our cultural comfort zone, ie. from those with whom we feel we have little in common.

In the last post, I referred to how we’ve been trained out of our human essence to become aspiring consumers – in other words, we’ve been isolated from our fundamental context as individuals interacting with other individuals to form human bonds of common interest mandated by universal consciousness – we have lost the middle ground; as Laurie Anderson explains: