“We process our reality through our limited bandwidth”

I am really not that skilled.

I can’t even drive and use the phone at the same time. I think they made the law against driver phone usage just for me.

The need to know

If I need light, I flick the light switch. If knowledge of how electricity makes light is a precursor to using a light switch, then there will be hardly any lights on.

When my young grandkids ask me where babies come from, I would just tell them that mommy grew babies in her tummy. They have no need to know any more.

Coffee is served as a result of waving a bit of plastic in front of a machine. If you keep looking for the money stored in the plastic jumping across to the machine, you will have a long wait. You can get by using money all your life – without knowing how money works.

We can only process a limited amount of data. This small amount is enough to string our lives together from day to day. Everything else is useless because our brains cannot process it.

Simplicity is the key

Most of our money is just a combination of two numbers. Zeros and ones. Our whole digital world only use these two numbers. From this simplicity, the complex web of modern communications is birthed.

I ran a red light the other day. The green arrow flicked on and I thought it was the green light. I can only process red or green – plus amber as a buffer. In my mind, anything green means go. In this case, the green arrow made me blind to the fact that the red light was still on. Red and green cannot be on at the same time. It is too complicated for my simple mind.

Chunking down the ‘many’ to ‘just one’

When racing was shut down, I approached Ian and suggested a season of blog posts to stop the cobwebs growing on the club website. It only needs one person visiting the website to clear the cobwebs.

If just one person reads this post, my job is done.

When ScoMo took the stage to speak about his response to the COVID-19 threat, I don’t know if he was addressing the nation or just me. But I know that when it was question time, he only spoke to one reporter at a time.

Ever since my childhood days, I have been scared of talking to people. Even the phone made me tremble… and the fear of having to use the phone lasted over a decade.

As time went by, I was forced to speak in public.

It is scary talking to a big audience of THEM.

I bombed badly … until I was given one bit of advice.

“…find one person in the audience and talk like there are only two of you present.”

Turning them into ‘just you’ is a tool that collapses a sea of people into just one relatable person.  We can only cope with one person at a time. Any more is a strain on our attention deficit minds.

The fight against them

It is way easier to fight against an organisation. One on one combat is too personal. Simplifying a nation of vastly different individuals into a collective of identical beings is essential for a fight.

Trump says the fight is against China. They made the virus and spread it around the world. No persons were named. Only the ‘Chinese government’.

Floyd is murdered by a white policeman in USA and the ‘them’ against ‘us’ war erupts. Whether it is blacks against whites, or ‘pigs’ against citizens, a war can only be successfully staged when individuals give up their own identity and take on ‘group – think’.

“We are fighting them.”

This is ‘chunking up’… turning individuals into identical peas in a giant pod and calling it ‘them’. Put uniforms on them and they will become more identical. Uniforms certainly makes it easier to pick who the enemy is…

But speak to any recent war veteran, and the picture of finding the enemy is not so clear. ‘Them’ are no longer in uniforms. And many of them are not soldiers on a payroll. Just civilians with weapons…

There is no ‘them’ doing things to ‘us’

The CCP (China Communist Party) is not China. China does not make the iphones that many of us love using.

A person born in China operates a robot in the iphone factory. A handful of other Chinese workers add their inputs, and the iphone 12 is ready for shipping. The individual Chinese workers aren’t even in the CCP. They are just like you and me. Being productive.

When our politicians safeguard our privacy by banning ‘Huawei’, they state that it is the CCP who is doing the spying. But who exactly in the CCP is listening in?

Humans have attention and perception deficit. It is far easier to focus on one thing only. From an evolution perspective, this strategy works. Movie makers also make good use of this by restricting the field of vision. The audience can only see the camera angle. And this is enough to create cinematic reality.

Our leaders use generalisation to restrict our vision of reality. Create a common enemy and we are suddenly united in a cause. Now it is them against us. And we fall for it.

But if we take the time to chunk everything back down to the fundamentals, we will find that ‘them’ and ‘us’ are not real. There is just you and me.

If you are reading this, it is just me talking to you. I don’t really know your tribe and it does not matter. You are not ‘THEM’.

‘THEM’ is for lazy minds.