Perception, Violence, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

The basic premise of our discussion about sensation (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and so on) is that our sensory organs deliver notes to our brains about external energy (light, sound, pressure, chemicals in the air, etc.) and our brains go to work telling a story about the world. Perception is the word we use to describe the story that our brains tell about what’s going on out there. We relate the notes that we receive from the sensory organs to experiences we’ve had before and make some sense of them that way. Sometimes the sensory inputs are not information about the world, directly, but are spoken or written descriptions of it that other people provide us. We can accept those descriptions as reality or we can reject them as incorrect, based on any number of reasons, like whether we consider the source credible or not or whether those descriptions are consistent with our own personal experiences. The bottom line is that whatever we perceive to be true is something that we construct. Arriving at some perceptions of truth occur quickly and without us using much mental energy. Other perceptions of truth we develop very slowly and painstakingly over the course of a lifetime, accepting certain perspectives temporarily and then revising them as new information comes available to us. Whether perception occurs quickly and easily (e.g., being able to tell the difference between a coffee mug and a flower pot) or slowly and deliberately (e.g., figuring out whether one is a cat person, a dog person, or a people person), it is all just a story. It’s our best guess based on what information a person has available to them and errors in perception can and do occur often, because the information any one person has available to them is ridiculously incomplete and our personal experiences and narrow viewpoints introduce biases that can lead our perceptions astray. For better and worse, these narrow perspectives emerge from the particular places we come from, the perceptions we inherited from the people who helped educate and raise us, and the tendency for us all to perceive things in ways that make us feel better about ourselves and that make us feel superior to others. These biases can be minimized by doing things like making reference to scientific consensus and evidence and, for those of you who are interested, here are some of Dr. J. Leboe-McGowan’s comments about that:

http://www.jpleboemcgowan.blogspot.ca/2012/05/truth-vs-truthiness-in-origin-of-belief.html

The contents of that post will not be tested on any exams, but 2-3 questions for Exam 2 will be drawn from the text within this post.

So, perceptions are stories that we tell ourselves. Although there is some chance that they are completely riddled with error, they do guide the decisions we all make and the things that we do. This essentially constructive, creative story-telling nature of perception that all humans share helps to determine all instances of violence that humans engage in, which is why we are making such a big deal about it in the context of a post about Intimate Partner Violence.

Breaking a rule established in an earlier post, we consider it useful to adopt a perspective that is a broader than the focus on IPV permits. We want to discuss an event that we are a bit reluctant to talk about, mainly because of the deep respect and admiration we have for the person involved and the extremely horrible and traumatic experience that they went through. We do not want to exploit the experiences of this person. Instead, we sincerely hope that this post will succeed only in honouring them and expressing our sadness for what happened to her. We think it is a worthwhile goal to try to understand the worst instances of human behaviour. Not talking about such events and not trying to understand them at all is certainly not going to get us very far in reducing the chances of those events happening in the future.

Lara Logan is an extraordinarily brave journalist who commonly rushed into the most unstable parts of the world to deliver her stories.  For example, she was embedded with American combat troops during their operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. People like Lara Logan courageously risk their safety and lives to allow people like us and most of you, who mainly find out about the world by sitting at home and watching television, to become aware of events that we would not be made aware of any other way. Needless to say, Lara Logan is a hero, and that is the only sensible perception a rational person could have about her. In February of 2011, Lara Logan was reporting for CBS from Cairo, Egypt. She was reporting on the Arab Spring uprising, which is already regarded as an extremely important event in world history. After delivering a broadcast from Tahrir Square, which was the major site of protests that ultimately forced the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Lara Logan was ripped away from her team by about 200-300 men. This vicious mob then proceeded to sexually assault her in a more horrific way than it is even possible for most of us to imagine. Here is a link to a Youtube clip of Lara Logan’s 60 Minutes interview several months after the assault took place, in which she describes what happened to her, in her own words:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_-V-Mmn9i8

Our perception is that Lara Logan is among the most admirable humans in existence. Her job was to bring people information that they were unable to get themselves. Most of the people who do have the time and money to go out and get information about happenings in the most dangerous parts of the world would choose not to. It’s extraordinarily hard work and it’s too scary for most. That is our perception of Lara Logan and there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do to her that could ever change that. What about the perceptions of the men who attacked her? What is in the minds of those men that would compel them to try to destroy her in the most degrading way possible? Something we might sensibly assume is that a person cannot physically attack someone that they truly respect and admire, so we can safely assume that the perceptions of the men who attacked Lara Logan couldn’t be more different from our perceptions of her.

There really are only two main reasons why people behave violently toward other people. First, people engage in violence toward another person because they PERCEIVE them as some type of threat. Second, people engage in violence toward another person as a way to impose their will. They do it to control the behaviour of that person or the behaviour of observers. We suppose that those men in Tahrir Square attacked Lara Logan for both of these reasons, and the reason they assaulted her are not all that different from what often causes violence in the context of intimate relationships. Lara Logan is a respected woman of status and her occupation deviates from traditional roles of women, not only in the Middle East, but also in Western countries. (Manitoba was ahead of the curve, since it was the first Province in Canada to acknowledge that women should have the right to vote in elections. Even so, Manitoba didn’t formally permit women to exercise this right until 1916, which isn’t really very long ago in the grand scheme of things.) Many people all over the world are content with the way power has tended to be allocated throughout most of human history, in that men tend to have more wealth and power and opportunities to acquire wealth and power than women. For this type of people, a woman like Lara Logan is a symbol of processes of reform (i.e., the global movement toward gender equality that has been going on for some time now) that they find both frightening and disgusting. Nevertheless, it may not be simply fear and disgust that would motivate that kind of violent assault. Another motive for that kind of attack is strategy. Destroying someone like Lara Logan sends a message to all other women who might wish to participate fully in the public life of their society. It might succeed in discouraging them from filling roles in their society that have traditionally been filled by men. We suggest that it is the perceptions of Lara Logan held by those men in Tahrir Square and their perceptions of what ought to be done about women like her that guided their actions. We also expect that many acts of violence that occur between partners in an intimate relationship emerge from the perceptions of the participants in that relationship that have to do with power and control.

We want to leave you with the following, regarding the consequence of a violent attack by one person (or persons) against some other person (or persons) who have no desire to engage in violence. whether or not the violence occurs in the context of an intimate partnership. Our perception is that it is completely impossible for a person to lose any dignity from being victimized by a violent physical or sexual assault. A person can only gain dignity from going through hell and surviving it. Our perception is that, in any instance of violence, the assailant is the only actor who suffers a loss of dignity, no matter how extreme they are in their efforts to degrade their victim. If a person cannot achieve their goals without violence, we perceive them as not worthy of achieving those goals and their need to resort to violence is pathetic and the ultimate expression of a weakness and defect within themselves, at least on every dimension that matters.