Written by: A.S.

Everyone goes into every conversation initially assuming they’re smart / rational / unbiased / spiritually aligned. And they do not give that assumption to others (unless they know in advance that a certain other person is genuinely well-informed on this particular topic).

So everyone is inherently biased by assuming positive things about themselves and not granting those assumptions to others.

If someone hears disagreement from another normal-seeming person: that triggers a little bit of cognitive dissonance, which is typically resolved by just thinking “oh, apparently that other person is dumb / uninformed / biased / spiritually unadvanced.”

On top of that, people are heavily emotionally invested in defending their current worldview, and in defending themselves and their group as being good and reasonable people. This is why you see, for example, people taking a messy situation where everyone carries some fault, and fabricating a clean narrative about how the other person is the villain (perhaps admitting to a small fault themselves to seem reasonable). They may, for example, start their story at the exact point in the timeline that makes them look good and the other person look bad, ignoring the bad things they did before then.

People have conflicting values, such as kindness and speaking the truth, and they’ll just point to whatever value serves them in that moment. If the person said something harsh, then they label speaking the truth as the most important value. If someone said something harsh to them, then kindness is the most important value.

A person who today says “kindness is the most important thing” to put the fault with another person, will happily say “truth speaking is the most important thing” tomorrow to put the fault with another person.

Some people, yes, are genuinely smarter / more aware / more spiritually advanced / have genuinely accomplished more in their lives than others — but that in turn leads to a huge trap where they weaponize that to think “I’m the only reasonable one in the room, everyone else except a handful of peers aren’t on my level and are automatically wrong if they disagree with me.”

Plus, smart people are better at rationalizing their own nonsense.

This makes smart / aware / spiritually advanced / successful people often even more close-minded, more blind to their own misperceptions, and more blind to genuinely good idea that some “normal” people may have.

Basically: people think of themselves as truth seekers, but in reality almost everyone engages in ego defense first and truth seeking only second.

And if you can’t see the ego defense patterns / urges in yourself, that doesn’t mean you’re enlightened and have grown beyond that — it means you’re completely blind to your own shadow.