A filtered worldview

In the sympathetic series 'Over leven' Coen Verbraak talks to all kinds of people, about how their lives have gone after something drastic. I listened back to a few old episodes, always nice when you are cooking, and heard Jolande Withuis talk about her communist youth and how, unlike her classmates, she knew all sorts of things about the Siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad, but had hardly heard of D-day. That was not something we talked about at home.

"When did you realize that you had such a filtered worldview?" Verbraak asked. Logical question, every strict believer, and Withuis described the communist environment in which she grew up no differently than children from orthodox Protestant families do, for example, has a worldview that is guided and filtered by faith in a truth.

Those who do not live in such a world are soon convinced that they themselves have a much broader view, more unfiltered. We are lucky then.

In the fascinating interview Michel Kerres and Steven Derix had with former British intelligence chief Alex Younger, he said: “We have to acknowledge – as difficult as it is – that Russia fears for its security and we have to listen to that, if we want to find a long-term solution. But that does not absolve us of the need to put pressure on Putin.”

That is an instructive mixture of strength and openness. It is quite normal to think that Russia should not feel unsafe ('Nonsense!'), even though we know that there is little point in approaching such feelings with more or less rational arguments from our own worldview. There are simply emotions, historical developments, fears and convictions that do not care about 'Yes, but that is not logical'.

The realization that you don't always get there with your own logic and your own vision (which, that's what your own vision is for, comes pretty close to the truth) doesn't always help to really look at the world unfiltered and broadly. Spies (that's what Younger called himself) have to be able to do that.

We did too, of course. It's funny that we heard a lot about D-Day and Normandy and the Americans and the Canadians at school, but not that Stalingrad was a turning point in that war thanks to the enormous Russian effort and equally enormous losses. That wasn't the point. After all, they had become the enemy during the Cold War.

Even on a very small scale, it is difficult to still like people with different beliefs or people who have done something wrong. A good friend recently said: 'I have resolved not to lose anyone else alive'. That means not neglecting any of your more or less close friends or not seeing them out of annoyance, or getting into a fight that is not settled. In short, not letting your view of them be filtered by an opinion that you consider to be the truth.

You often use your opinion as a justification for your behavior, then you are nicely free of all kinds of obligations, including those to maintain a friendship, if you want to see that as an obligation. Then you have a value with the power of truth that you want to believe in, although truths do not have to be believed, you only have to see them. Through an unfiltered view…

Without filters, without values, it simply doesn't work, we can't perceive the world as it is without our gaze. But it is good to try it regularly. Take off your glasses and see that much is blurry.