How To Donate
What we “see” is a mixture of two completely different streams of information — a top-down and a bottom-up one. One comes from sensory organs, the other from our expectations — and they can blend in the most bizarre ways. When reality is very bad, when there is neither strength nor desire to engage with it, and there is a desperate longing and expectation for improvement and hope — then we begin to go blind. We stop seeing reality and start seeing our own desires, taking what is wished for as what is real. This self-deception effect is well described in the writings of people who survived concentration camps (both Nazi and Soviet). Prisoners begin to believe that the guards actually sympathize with them and are completely on their side — only secretly. Their brain, like Skinner’s pigeon, begins to interpret the most ordinary gestures and words as hidden codes of support and sympathy. And the cruelty of the guards is interpreted by these prisoners as a form of disgui...