Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

visceral sense of outrage and violation. If only – we might speculate – if only people got as upset as this by war, torture, rape, cruelty and the like. For these really are violations of the sacred – the sacredness of human life. But no! Often we are outraged by the trivial and indifferent to truly global problems. What to make of this?

Well, so often we are led into believing that we are sensible creatures who seek positive outcomes for ourselves and others via reasonable means such as education, employment, careful financial planning and deferred gratification. We are – on this view – primarily rational beings. We learn and observe, we consider and then we decide how best to act. But the angry gibberings of someone outraged by some trivial thing – well, that paints a different picture. There’s a sequence of things that defines how we REALLY see the world. The sequence goes – SENSATION, PERCEPTION, IMPULSE, IMAGE, SYMBOL. In many ways it’s a disturbing sequence, and I’d like to try and explain it a little in this essay and to try to draw some conclusions.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that the sequence also occurs in many other creatures besides the human – with the exception of SYMBOL. IMAGE occurs in only a few creatures besides our own. But SENSATION, PERCEPTION, IMPULSE – they occur in all creatures we would properly call conscious.

So let’s start with SENSATION. The word is

used here to mean not only information reaching us by our five senses, but also our inner emotional state. But, as the reader is

probably aware, we are flooded with sensations every moment of every day. Perhaps all of

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