FRACTURE

How blind can a person be, even when they can see clearly with their own eyes? Even when they possess the most complex and extraordinary mind on the planet? Even when they know that what they think or believe might be wrong? How can they still become willing to sacrifice their entire life simply to ignore the truth?

I don’t truly know the reason behind this kind of stupidity. Maybe everything we live around eventually becomes a part of us. And perhaps we are never truly ready to give up a part of ourselves for something that offers so little in return—even when that thing is the truth itself, and even when accepting it might give us the greatest chance of making our lives better than the ones we live today.

Perhaps the problem is not that we cannot see, but that we are too quick to decide what we have seen. We see a moment, fill in everything that came before it with our own assumptions, and then treat that assumption as a fact. Once we’ve built a story in our mind, even the truth can struggle to convince us otherwise.

And that’s another kind of blindness—not the inability to see, but the inability to question what we think we’ve seen. Perhaps the most dangerous assumptions are the ones that feel so obvious that we never think to question them at all.