Unrigging the game

The only reason I say the game is rigged is that only a few even get to play. We're made to believe that we can play, but in reality, we -- the rest of us, the bulk of us -- were benched long ago. I suppose there was a time when the economic and political systems that we have today had their value and their place, but whether we like it or not, things have changed, yet too many of our perceptions have not.

I can't say it enough: perceptions are powerful things, and most of us don't realize just how powerful they are. They cause us to do things, at times, that may not be what we should be doing. For those who might have trouble following this, let me explain what I mean in an analogy.

You get up at sunrise one morning and see the sun just above the horizon in the East. It is a beautiful and inspiring sight, to be sure, and you feel exhilarated and inspired to make this a good day. That evening, at twilight, you go out again, and see the sun just over the horizon in the West. It is a beautiful and inspiring sight, to be sure, and you feel exhilarated and inspired because today was simply a good day. Our experience; that is, that which we saw by going outside, "tells" us that the sun rose in the East and set in the West (and that's how we even describe it in English). We know, however, that the sun really didn't do anything, rather the earth turned and made it look like the sun rose and set. Except for a number of flat-earthers still running around, we know that reality is different from our experience, but the feelings associated with the event remain, and the real knowledge of what is at work is simply pushed into the background. What is more, even though we were inspired by (or at) these events, we also know -- somewhere in the back of our minds that there are others who saw the same sunrise and sunset but whose days were anything but inspiring or uplifting, they were full of pain, misery and maybe even death. Yes, we "know" this, but we keep it out of our awareness as much as possible.

It's really no different in other areas of life, like economics or politics. Our experience tells us one thing, but we know deep down that many other people's experiences are not as positive as our own. We may have got a new and better job, but how many others had the misfortune to lose theirs, maybe forever. Our party may have got elected to government, but we just assume the other folks will we see the wisdom in this and "get on board", though we know, deep down, that they may be made continually unhappy by the policies being made. In both of these cases, we tend to think that that's just the way things are, that there are immutable (not hidden, but most often not-thought-about) laws at work that makes things the way they are. In other words, our perceptions are one things, but we "know" that the reality of it all may be something very, very different.

You might say that things have always been this way so what are you going to do about it, but if you take a serious look at the unfoldment of the presence of humans on this planet, you can't help but notice that there was a time when the perceptions we had couldn't even be challenged. Ask Galileo or Copernicus. Today, however, things are different. We know they are different, we can relatively safely challenge others' perceptions, but we too often still act as if we lived in the Middle Ages or even earlier. Much of what we "believe to be so" today is, of course, a product of the Enlightenment (certainly our political and economic systems), but we've moved on. It's time we owned up to this fact and simply acknowledge that perhaps not everything we think, that our perceptions, may not be best suited for our own times.