Photo Credits: Balancing Act

We are creatures of habit.

Instinctively, we always look for patterns and signs. We tend to believe that everything is interconnected and that all events happen for a reason. Our deep curiosity on things around us, despite our natural ability to fear the unknown, inevitably leads us to seek answers, whatever and wherever they may be.

These natural instincts that made us human, and what made us more evolutionary advanced as a specie, made us naturally predisposed to believe in signs and unseen forces beyond our common realm.

We connect the dots of random events and then infuse those patterns with probable intentional agencies. Add to those the confirmation bias which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believed in the first place.

It’s like for example the assassination of JFK. One would think the American government, who had the capacity to initiate such act, was behind it. It may be the government, but with all the theories behind it, it may as well not.

But since we initially think it is, small details that may in fact unconnected to the case would somehow push us to believe otherwise. And our personal observations will ultimately lead the investigation to our predisposed conclusion.

When something momentous happens, everything, even the most trivial of things seem to glow with significance.

Our brain is hard-wired to believe in the unseen forces at work. It does not matter if it is religion or Physics.  That is how we emerged victorious against our natural predators. We tend to believe that the movement on the bushes is caused by a waiting predator instead of the breeze caused by the unseen wind.

And that makes us more aware and consequentially… alive.

This natural tendency of our brain, add to it the cultural, social and political inputs we received since we first laid our eyes on the natural world, makes us biased on mostly everything because we have our own opinions on everything.

It is, as I may say, quite hard to be balanced because we are naturally biased. We can try to be balance, but we can never be unbiased.

In this regard, I think it is but right to concur with Bluepanjeet’s new suggested tagline for the barrio, “Balanced News, Biased Views”.

Kala mo seryoso post ko ha.

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BURAOT is your quintessential skeptic but a not-yet-so-hopeless pessimist. Impatient most of the time, hence the name, he yearns to discover the magnanimity of the universe and the infinite folly of human stupidity (yep, that was Einstein's). And yes, oo.. he also want world peace. You can stalk him out at Anak ni Kulapo and I Am Buraot.