My Old Rusty Filing Cabinet

watch original V-Blog in Persian

I don’t know how it pans out exactly, but sometime during the first 6 or so years of our life a lot happens that forms our character and what I’d like to call our mental “filing system”. You can also call it paradigm or world-view. Everything that happens, everything we hear or see gets filed according to the files we have created.

Say Amelia grows up in a family she feels safe in. She develops trust and is taught to believe in the nobility of the human soul. So even though she’s 25 and she’s not met the man she wants to settle down with yet, she doesn’t take her trouble with men as anything but “it hasn’t happened for me yet”. She simply feels that she hasn’t come across the kind of guy she’d like to spend the rest of her life with. When her first serious relationship doesn’t survive she views it as a great character building experience. Her guy turns out to be somewhat of a liar and she feels sorry for him. She wonders what has caused him to become so insecure and decides that he is not for her. But she’s hopeful and generally optimistic about the future.

Rita grows up in a home environment that is a little different. One of her earliest experiences involves an unfortunate incident at the ocean. She’s swept upside down in her baby floaty and it seems like an eternity before her parents are able to rescue her. Their family life is less united than Amelia’s. Her father never shows affection to her mother and mother has little self-esteem. Rita also comes from a religious background, but in her case she’s taught about original sin and that man is constantly on the verge of falling from grace. It all turns her off completely and she goes from one unhappy relationship to another. When she breaks up with a man it only confirms her belief that men are all liars, she is worthless, and that life is one torturous game of winners and losers.

In both examples the ladies categorize a similar event according to their own paradigm. Amelia believes that people are essentially good. She interprets her boyfriend’s shortcomings as a weakness he has not yet championed, but she doesn’t want to be the one to help him grow up so she decides to break it off. The incident, while it sucks, doesn’t affect her deepest convictions about the essential goodness of people. Rita has the same experience with her boyfriend, but she files that experience into the “people are essentially sinners” category. That’s just how her cabinet has developed.

Most of us categorize our experience in similar ways. All the media we consume, the news, the music videos, our daily experiences with customer care or with in-laws - everything we experience is categorized according to our very own, largely sub-conscious filing system. Even our “aha” moments, when we think we’ve had an epiphany are usually still filed according to the master catalogue. We may change our mind about something, but that is usually just a little reshuffling of the paper work inside the files. The framework is still the same.

But what is the value of our “values” if they’re formed sub-consciously and passively? If we can’t step back and consciously decide what we believe, can we really call ourselves mature human beings? Should our values be something we inherit from others or a carefully considered commitment to the truth we take time to seek and find?

I think that it is essential for us to step back at some point in our lives and to consciously look back into and onto ourselves, thus becoming aware of the filing system we have created. If we become of aware of it, we can understand and accept how we’ve come to view the world as we have and we stand a chance to actually change it. And there is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong with Rita and Amelia standing back and Rita deciding that despite her experiences, there is a chance that humanity is not always predicated on selfishness? What harm is there in that? If her existing paradigm has only served to make life more miserable, how can it be bad for her to reassess her basic assumptions and beliefs?

Unfortunately we’re not encouraged to seek truth independently or to question the basic assumptions underlying our relationships and how we organize them both on a personal and on an institutional level. That’s why we wage war over our religious and political interests. That’s why we throw in the towel as soon as our girl/boyfriends or spouses seem to want something else than we do.

If, however, we were to become aware and actually own our beliefs consciously, we might end up with a brand new way of approaching things, shed some light into the dark corners of mass ignorance and create an age of true enlightenment. I say we chuck those old, rusty cabinets and spring clean our beliefs and assumptions. It might be a scary process at first, but I’m sure we’ll all be more attractive and happy for it.