Live Life With No Regrets!The Strangeness of Human Nature
Despite all that is taught about there removing discrimination. It exists in the minds of everyone.
I noticed this when I was looking at Malaysian billboards and tv ads. There is a tendency to go for the "pan-asian" look. A mix of gweilo and asian features so that you don't really know what race the person is. Hardly do I see any ads of Indians despite them being 10% of the Malaysian population.
Why do some advertisers choose people of a certain race to promote certain items? If people are not racially prejudiced there wouldn't be any difference who you put in an ad to promote it.
The realities of life is that preferences based on race, sex, beauty do exist.
Despite saying "what's outside doesn't matter as much as the inside", people do judge based on appearances. Somebody once said, "only ugly people say 'what only matters is the inside.'"
Despite all the teaching of logic, people in reality do not make decisions based on logic. 99.99% of people make decisions based on their emotions.
Unfortunately, this fact must be learned from experience. I have never really read any textbook that said, "humans are make decisions emotionally." But declaring that out loud by a teacher in primary school implies, she being a human herself makes decisions emotionally and treats people emotionally and even has prejudices.
Somehow, learning the uncertainties, the foibles and vagaries of human nature is often left to chance. Perhaps the best source of understanding it is from creative works like literature and drama.
Marketers and sales people must understand human nature and what influences decision makers.
I hear that certain sales departments actually map out a prospects decision making hierarchy and who the real decision makers are and who are the influencers and what are their buttons.
For example, the CEO may be the decision maker on paper, but it may be his right-hand man that's the one who really runs the show together with his mistress. These things are never written down on paper but they must be learnt. Learning to read in between the lines is something that isn't taught in school but is a necessary school.
In a majority of people what a person says is 95% never what he does. But you can't say this to a person's face. Nobody likes being called a hypocrite.
A lot of humans don't really say what they want. They say what they think they want. Most don't really know what they want.
A lot of humans also believe that they are the center of the universe. Which is also untrue but is an unfortunate illusion that is shared by 95% of the population.
Why do people in authority teach subordinates when they make a mistake to promise, "It will never happen again." Looking at it logically, noone can promise anything with absolute certainty (the word "never") what happens in the future. You might be able to say, "I will do all that is within my power to make minimise the chances of it to not happen again. However, the future is not ours to see." But replying that would make you look like a smart-aleck. What the authority figure wants is really reassurance and perhaps some grovelling on your part to feed his own inflated ego in the illusion that he can order someone around.
Which brings us to the point, since people by nature believe they are the centre of the universe, they hate being upstaged by anyone else.
Another strange belief that humans have is that they have control. Which isn't true. You can't control anything except what you think, say or do. You can give orders to your subordinates, but he may choose not to do it.
In reality, there is nothing we do control. We only control our choices, our thoughts, our values, our attitudes.
Another strange concept humans have is this thing called "ownership". It permeates our language, words like "my car", "my house", "my wife", "my children", "my life". There is nothing we own in this world. Not even our lives. We have to give it up permanently one day.
We don't own our wives, we don't own our children but people sometimes want to force their children to be their own fantasy doll to live out their own dreams and to do the things that they themselves never dared risk themselves.
And when confronted with truth, humans will deny it.
Strange creatures these humans.
