David Foster Wallace's concept of a "default setting", mentioned in his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, is the belief that a human being is wired since birth to believe that they and they alone are the sole focal point of the universe. This belief is based on the idea that a person's knowledge and understanding of the world comes from their own direct perceptions and experiences. People tend to give their own experiences greater precedence than the experiences of others as a result, and this innate mentality continually grows and feeds into itself as time goes on.
Wallace explains how this mindset comes naturally to humans and how most people do not even have to actively choose to think this way for it to take hold of them, hence
The way a person is taught from a young age often times affects his or her values and perceptions throughout their life. A person is taught how to think and what to think about but is rarely given the choice of how to perceive this information. This can be seen in Plato 's “Allegory of the Cave,” “Learning to Read and Write,” by Frederick Douglass and the speech, “This is Water” by David Wallace. Each of the three pieces talks about characters being born into enslavement either hypothetically or literally. Being born into enslavement resulted in each of them to seek for freedom in different ways. Only knowing one way to see and think due to the environment arises self-centered thoughts by the protagonist.
Because Chris was fixed on living his life the way he wanted, he was intransigent towards the useful opinions from others. Although Chris was an intelligent individual, his brilliance was detrimental for his own good. More specifically, Westerberg, one of Chris’ closest friends, explained how passionate Chris’ mindset was concerning different aspects of life: “He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing” (4). Gradually, Chris’ restlessness in consistently wanting to discover the correct answer veered him onto a path of becoming adamant. Hence, he empowered for his premature demise because he never acknowledged the possibility of any situation being too laborious for him. Regrettably, Chris’ father confirmed that his son was a self-absorbed person because he never showed concern for the thoughts of others: “If you attempted to talk him out of something, he wouldn’t argue. He’d just nod politely and then do exactly what he wanted” (8). By neglecting the time to reflect on the opinions of others, Chris illustrated how irrelevant he perceived the mindsets of others to be. Chris conveyed that he more so preferred to risk his life in doing something that he loved as opposed to listening to the sheltered and helpful advice from others. When a person is receptive to differing suggestions, they abate their discourteous behavior towards
It is common for human beings, as a race, to fall into the comforts of routine – living each day similar to days before and days to come. Unfortunately, it is often too late before one even realizes that they have fallen into this mundane way of living in which each day is completed rather than lived, as explained by David Foster Wallace in “This Is Water”. This commencement speech warned graduating students of the dangers of submitting to our “default settings” of unconscious decisions and beliefs (Wallace 234). However, this dangerous way of living is no new disability of today’s human race. Socrates warned the people of his time: “A life unaware is a life not worth living” and who is to say he wasn’t completely right? A topic of long debate also includes the kind of influence that consciously-controlled thoughts can have on the physical body. A year after Wallace’s speech, neurobiologist Helen Pilcher, published “The New Witch Doctor: How Belief Can Kill”, which explains the influence of the mind and individual beliefs on the quality of one’s life. Together, both authors illustrate how detrimental a life lived unaware of one’s own thoughts and beliefs can be on the body and spirit. And though it is easy to live by
Many centuries ago, people started thinking about the question “Who we are, where did we come from, and where are we going?” While seeking for the answers, many standpoints developed. Everyone has an opinion; when confronted with life’s decisions, even on what not to do and how to best stay away from regret. Then, another question was raised: can the individual ever be higher than the universal? Lead by the famous philosopher John Stuart Mill, many people believe that all are born selfish hedonists and get shaped by the culture and environment and eventually live for the society.
In his essay, “Deciderization; 2007,” David Foster Wallace Argues: Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filter, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high- entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; its continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That’s about as clear as I can put it. What Wallace is trying to say that the people of today’s world are either Objective or subjective and nothing in between; therefore, the objective type of people are all
Have you ever questioned someone’s behavior and wonder what makes them behave the way they do? “Lord of the Flies,” by William Golding introduces a group of boys stranded on an island with no adult supervision which means no rules or authority. The group of boys face many conflicts and complications due to the situation they are in. Their behavior is to blame due to the environment and the situation they are in, however many believe that their behavior comes from internal “genetics” not external the “environment”. A person’s behavior can be influenced by their inner self which comes from our heredity, but in most cases I believe that behavior is influenced by the situation and the environment that is faced.
that human are easily to change thoughts as human mind is flexible. Human mind tends to
accept the choices we make in life whether good or bad. The next possible interpretation
Caves believes that people should and must accept that life outcomes are determined by disparities in nature and nuture so people can take practical measures to remedy misfortune and help others to fulfill their potential. “Free will and determinism are not the opposites they are often taken to be; they simply describe our behavior at different levels”, stated Stephen Cave. People should focus on their ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for theirselves, and to decide among them without having the feeling of restraint. If people give up their beliefs in free will, then their behavior will be viewed as a natural phenomenon. In the idea of cause and effect, a belief in free will may not inspire people to make the
According to Bacon, Idols of the Tribe come from the physiology of human race. They are false statements based on “sense perception.” There are several causes and forms of these idols. First, there is the cloudiness and limits of sensory perception. Second is the desire to establish a prior cause, even when such a cause cannot be confidently established. The third cause is the tendency to assume that there is more order and reliability in the world then one actually finds. Finally, the forth cause is the failure of due attentiveness, that is, immediately believing what one wants to be true, impatiently rejecting difficult findings, or giving more attention to positive evidence than negative evidence (Article 1, 1/3). In my everyday life, the idols of the tribe can cloud my mind through past experiences. For instance, when I first drove in a car, I was very afraid. Since that day, I have had impression that driving is a scary experience.
The point the speaker, Noah Yuval Harari, is attempting to make is that humans as a species have been able to survive as long as we have due to the unique characteristics and behaviors we have inherited from our ancestors that have allowed us to cooperate more efficiently and expand our complex cognitive processes through imaginative thinking.
This same idea appears in Fredrick Douglas story. When Fredrick Douglas started to understand what he was reading around him, his mind stared creating his very own opinions and feelings. As well the same idea comes to surface in Richard Rodriquez story when he starts to understand the underlying theme in all of the books he has ever read and applied to himself as a person. When both writers began to truly be able to understand anything and everything, they both started to find what their every purpose was in life, and understand the person that they were.
In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Emerson calls for each person in society to be wholly true to themselves. He claims that it is most rewarding to the individual and the society for people to believe in one’s own thoughts and not in the thoughts of others. Emerson believes that conformity will ultimately lead to an individual’s demise because by living for others, people are not being true to themselves. Therefore in order to have a well-formed society, citizens should focus inward and have confidence in their own ideas before beginning to look towards other individuals; moreover, Emerson calls individuals not only in “Self-Reliance,” but also in numerous essays to act independently from conformity and to live for themselves.
The difference between comfort and open-mindedness is the difference between cowardliness and truthfulness. The mind that is open is open to the truth, whereas the close mind invents whatever truth it is comfortable with, so that it may persist in its delusions. To be truly open-minded, we must renounce the religion of our parents, and deny our cherished beliefs. Comfort is seduction. Better it is to suffer the pains of uncertainty, and the insanity of lost identity, so that we might open our minds to a firmer foundation, a deeper truth. Close-mindedness is afraid of reality. We need reality. Therefore, close-mindedness is a form of death worship. It denies our needs. Open-mindedness allows us to embrace the alien and discover what others will not discover. The distinction is between fear and love; life and death.
to the fact that not everything is as well as it seems and that this