I was at, of all things, a Christian Rock concert last night. It wasn't that the music was bad - it was very good - and it wasn't that the people involved weren't talented; far from it. It isn't even that this applies to anything that was said or done last night¹. It just came to me that people have their very own Reality Filtration Systems (RFS) that sometimes can be seen on a more social scale. A Reality Filtration System is something that is a precondition for the Somebody Else's Problem field that Douglas Adams brought to the fore in his own amusing way:

An S.E.P.,' he said, 'is something that we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That's what S.E.P. means. Somebody Else's problem. The brain just edits it out; it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.

-- Douglas Adams

The RFS allows the SEP to exist. Put plainly, people ignore some things and act as if they did not or are not happening - and also, people pay more attention to some things than others. And then there is my personal favorite: RFS as an excuse.

Some people lose themselves in religion, which is fine. They'll be happy together, singing and clapping - all of these are good things. Maybe someone will say that God, whose different aspects are the leader of most religions known to man, will solve something for someone. Really? I'm not saying 'no', and in extreme conditions such as terminal illness this is something I could understand. To me, though, it seems that any particular sort of Godhead would have given people the tools to handle things themselves in many instances. Some people ignore these tools, rather just tossing themselves off the religious cliffs in a brazen example of the Reality Filtration System. They become divorced from the immediate by the allure of not having to deal with the immediate. It's easier.

The same applies to education: It is easy to say, when seeing data that does not support a result, that something went wrong. Why? It is too difficult for some to allow their education to be challenged. The RFS keeps all the challenges at bay.

Many other things are used as RFS: culture, language, gender, color, and whether one plays cards naked or not. It's an interesting thing because it seems that every RFS becomes stronger based on how many people share the RFS.

The bad news is that we all do it, to some extent. The good news is that some people are interested in removing the illusions associated with RFS... and others, not so. In pondering why some are more prone to RFS than others, the only thing I could come up with is confidence in one's self.

I don't know that this is right, though.

¹However, I have found that Christian Rock concerts just aren't for me. I prefer a bit more anarchy in my music.