Bias Buffering

It’s amazing how people hardly remember the good things you’ve done, but remember even the most trivial mistakes with the clarity of a modern DVD.

You wouldn’t notice an article, perhaps even a Palanca-award-winning story, written with the precision all Athenean knowledge can endow. You would, however, notice a typo from the same writer, and forever curse his mediocrity.

Indeed, if you want to find fault, you will. It would even be aureoled in flame if you harbored enough contempt. Bias can scew the most crystal clear of vision.

It’s even harder to find the good in something that has undergone Mitzu Mahkung. Already the seeds of hate have taken the initiative to defile every virtuous quality like a virus. It digs up soiled pasts as poison for the present and future.

In truth we can never really be unpartial. Things will always be subject to our own values; values which are different for every person.

Now whether the new pontiff will suit the world, or vice versa, remains to be seen, irregardless of what he’s done in the past.

One’s only chance is for redemption is to drown all memory, at least temporarily with exemplary deeds today. A flash of professionalism can hide even the most sophomoric of actions. At least, that’s what I hope.

I also hope the contempt I harbor doesn’t restrain me from seeing the light in what currently looks like a dead end tunnel.

Or maybe I’m just cynical.

And while on the topic of cynicism; a friend brought to light the benefits of being such: a mix of cynicism and a bit Machiavelli. And I decry those who say that we are such silly creatures. It’s a blight of passage we must all endure.

Call it fatalistic, mid-life, or in my case, quarter-life crisis, but there is some truth to it. Calasanz, my philosophy professor after all says, “We’ve been dying seen the day we were born.”

He’s in France now, pursuing the one thing that will never disappoint him – philosophy.

Find fault in this philosophy, if you will. We all know you’ve decided against it beforehand.