Swan, Cuckoo and Parrot Perception | Stressed Perception
Hawk Vision | Pigeon and Peacock Vision
| Chicken Vision
| Swan, Cuckoo and Parrot Perception
We’ve seen how stress shuttles us between attraction and repulsion - thanks to compulsive desire, one minute, and fear
and anger, the next. These “stress forces” polarise our beliefs and conquer us through divide and rule. The same push and pull is gone through by THE SWAN, with its positive attitude towards those bearing food, and its sudden switch in mood when the same visitors start to seem rude.
“Swan vision” sees the world as divided into “good” and “bad”. While such labels can, of course, be useful, sometimes they lead to our holding simplistic views, and leave us confused. To quote Harvard Professor, Matthew Desmond, “There’s two ways to dehumanise people; one is to cleanse them of all virtue, and the other is to scrub them of all sin.”
“Swan vision” takes us nowhere close to knowing a human being in truth. None of us belongs to the company of saints or villains exclusively, and it strains credulity to assume that a person can’t improve.
As babies, we see eye to eye with others like they and we are on the same side. Soon, however, compulsive desire
focuses us just on what’s “ours”. In our mind, identity markers like favourite movie actors and sports stars can be idealised and imprinted with our autograph - like they belong on our side of “the fence”, with all “outcasts” excluded and barred (these being those whom fear
finds alarming or anger
offers the shoulder-barge).
When things progress this far, “stress forces” (from their home in our unconscious) put us into the care of a certain bird that dips into nests unobserved, to unseat and usurp. CUCKOO BIRD throws the book at those she subverts, by having them take her
chicks and eggs as the ones they prefer to nurse. Stress’s disguise works likewise, so we’re blissfully unaware of raising its brood, like compulsive desire-made ego trips and possessiveness, and anger-fuelled grudges and feuds. So well camouflaged are these that we can confuse them for ours.
At the same time, the feelings, beliefs and memories that stress invokes can snare us with such a hook that they loop in our mind and social group (see the cultural cognition theory developed by Dan Kahan et al.), trapping us in an echo chamber of PARROT-esque déjà vu. This effect is explained by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book
Thinking, Fast and Slow; “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”