Background

It's a difficult thing to examine something that one cannot see. Accordingly, I understand the challenge of attempting to take a close look at my blind spots. Technically, blind spots are not absolutely invisible, the real problem tends to be if they're at the point where they're visible in one's field of view, one has bigger problems.

Recently, I've found myself wondering what my "blind spot" is, in the sense of things that affirm the way I look at the world, such that I'm prepared to simply take them at face value. I suspect that it has something to do with complexity; I tend to be more accepting of stories in which people are doing something that makes sense for them, but has consequences for others, than I am of stories in which people are straightforwardly good or evil. The thing about such stories, I'm finding, is that they're unfalsifiable, for the most part. Even when they aren't anonymized, I simply have no way of looking into someone's brain and understanding what they're thinking. Accordingly, there's a lot of assumptions involved.

And the assumptions I make about the world are, generally speaking, true. The same as they are for everyone else, even when my assumptions and someone else's assumptions are mutually exclusive. And this is due to that same unfalsifiability. If I assume good intent, and someone else assumes bad intent, the "proof" of either of our assumptions tends to be our own readings of the reality of the situation. The same readings, it turns out, that created the assumptions in the first place.

Which is really just a long-winded way of explaining, at least to myself, why I think that my own blind spots would be difficult for me to see; they're born of how I see the world, and blend into it. Which is what makes separating them enough to actually examine them in detail difficult.