Truth in the views of others

It was midnight and the Knysna fire was raging.

I was getting news from that well-known branch of the media, Twitter, and I was reeling at the horror. Who wouldn’t be? Well, a few folk on Twitter, for starters: for them, the fire was a source of amusement, because, don’t you know, it was only affecting rich white people, so that’s hilarious, right? RIGHT?

Luckily the twitchfork mob – black and white – took them down. Shame, hey. And they thought they were witty vigilantes.

Now that the ashes have cooled, it got me thinking about self-perception. And self-deception.

These folk obviously reckoned they were knowledgeable and brave, daring to say the unsayable, though a quick detour via Google would have revealed that Knysna’s population is actually 79% nonwhite, so they weren’t even factually correct.

Not that it matters: fire is fire, burning is burning and it takes both property and flesh blindly.

“Unfair,” the renegade tweeters doubtless wailed, and “I am misunderstood!”

That, at least, is an emotion most of us can sympathise with, for who hasn’t felt misjudged? But the fact is how we see ourselves and how others see us are almost always very different.

Researchers have found that 95% of folk consider themselves selfaware, yet fewer than 15% have a realistic grasp of how the world perceives them.

One study of 13 000 professionals found very little correlation between how they assessed their performance and how others rated them.

Another study showed that even prisoners – violent men doing hard time – judged themselves more trustworthy and kinder than other people and, startlingly, considered themselves equally law-abiding!

Ultimately, the truth about us is not what we feel but how we are: other people see and hear only what we do and say. Meanwhile, we’re lost in our own stories, in what we tell ourselves, because we live in our own heads.

We know our intentions are good, forgetting that the road to hell is thus paved, and others can smell the brimstone. erhaps we should all take aboard what people objectively tell us about ourselves, good and bad, because there’s truth in it.

And if you’re laughing while Knysna burns, you’re an ass.

Jennie Ridyard

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