Perceptions Not Always Accurate

"Oh, what power the giltie gie us, to see oursells as others see us."

-- Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Usually an editorial is the first thing I write for these newspapers. But some editorials are harder to write than others. This one is the hardest yet. Why? Because I keep changing my perceptions on how I see myself, and how I should discuss the images I have.

Do wish you knew what other people perceive in you? Like the gift of second sight, that kind of gift might be a horrible curse. Your personal approval rating might be WAY below that of President Bush and you might not even know it. Conversely, people might think you are a great person and you yourself think you're down somewhere near the bottom of the barrel.

You can even play a game called "How to Lose a Friend in Nothing Flat." It's disarmingly easy if you are good at it. Just say something from your heart that offends that friend. Works like a charm. Never seems to wear off.

Here's an example of two people who weren't particularly friends, but were in the same boat and came out with very different perceptions of who was right and who was wrong during the encounter:

May 10, 2006, was the 10th anniversary of a disastrous climb of Mount Everest in which eight people died during the descent and the survivors' lives were permanently altered. You may have seen "Into Thin Air," by journalist Jon Krakauer, a member of one of the teams, on various bookstore shelves.

I've read that book cover to cover, as well as one, "The Climb," by a guide on one of the other expeditions (most of the writing was done by the guide's translator), and a man who got lost on the way down and barely survived ("Left for Dead"). You'd expect to get multiple perspectives on that climb, and you do, but the perceptions clash with each other – sometimes violently.

A second edition of "Into Thin Air" contained an afterword written in 1999, describing the extremely bitter war of words between "Into Thin Air'"s author and "The Climb'"s translator, each of whom lashed the other for inaccuracies in perception.

Excuse me, but the strongest cases either book make are for me to NOT go to Everest. Camp Four, where people start their summit assaults, is just less than five miles above sea level, with a little over one-third the oxygen in the air that you'd get at sea level. It's another vertical half mile to the summit, with corresponding oxygen depletion, and you're mighty lucky to avoid getting whipped by winds of 100 mph or more, with wind chills of 100 below zero or less.

The climbers weren't lucky, all getting caught in a storm on the way down. Pardon the armchair quarterbacking, but how good do you think their perception WAS?

As an example, Krakauer himself during the downhill climb said hello to one of his guides as they approached a particularly dangerous patch above camp. The guide went down the patch unaided, flipped over, and slid to the bottom, miraculously avoiding injury. He got up and headed toward the camp -- but nobody saw him arrive.

Krakauer went looking for him the next day and found some boot prints trailing to a ledge where, if you fell off, you'd tumble seven thousand feet to your death. He assumed the guide had done just that.

But the man Krakauer saw WASN'T the guide. He was a climber from another expedition. And the boot prints Krakauer saw were those of a third man entirely, who went down earlier, lost his bearings, and climbed UP to the ledge rather than falling off DOWN it. The fellow climber was a foot shorter and two-thirds the weight of the guide, and was from Texas (the guide was from New Zealand), with corresponding accents.

The real guide, whose oxygen line had been fouled (causing him to think there were no working oxygen bottles left on the mountain), finally found some bottles that worked and went BACK to the peak to help out the organization leader and a client. The guide and the client were never found; the leader died a day later when nobody else could reach him.

Krakauer found out all this AFTER his first article for a magazine was printed (the Texan client and several other guides talked to him only after the article went to press), and it hammered him between the eyes.

No wonder he got mighty touchy when the translator of the second book lashed him in print. The translator had been nowhere near Everest in his whole life -- all his information was from the Russian guide, who had since died. Scores of eminent climbers who had likewise never been near the mountain took each side.

After I wrote the first draft of this article (not including this paragraph and the ones about Krakauer and his acquaintance), still another controversy sprang up on a 2006 expedition. A man descending Everest foundered and collapsed in the snow. Numerous people passed him, including people on his own team, but all of them passed him by. They didn't think they could afford to help him.

(In a sad case of déjà vu, another section in "Into Think Air" describes another expedition on another side of the mountain a day after the disaster on his side. An Indian team trying to summit came upon a Japanese team in dire straits, and ignored them, saying later: "Above 8,000 meters is not a place where you can afford morality." All three of the Japanese climbers died.)

The man left behind on Everest – both of them, counting the author of "Left For Dead" -- survived, and scores of people who weren't there (including the man who first climbed Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary) gave the passers-by a venomous tongue-lashing for failure to stop and render aid.

I have very little sympathy for those people myself, but I can't tell you what I would do if I was trying to get down the mountain myself and get to camp alive. I used to dream of climbing Everest, but I've put that dream away with very few regrets!

That's a complicated and rather extreme example. But the fact is that all of us perceive things in different ways. Perhaps we judge people by their appearance – my girlfriend told me that most people perceive me as a wealthy man because I always wear clothes that could pass for business formal, and because I can be pretty generous at times.

It sort of explains how come panhandlers hit me up in various parking lots, and why various other people hit me up for loans.

The thing is, I am not wealthy, never have been, and don't expect to be. I am generous (to some people anyway) out of a perceived sense of obligation. I was born during the Kennedy administration, the "Ask What You Can Do for Your Country" time, and spent my youth in the era where civil-rights pioneers for almost every group (except white, Protestant, Republican males, who were perceived as corporate fat cats anyway) sought to get benefits from the Government or private donors.

Somehow, I got the perception that I was supposed to not only "give until it hurts," but to give what I couldn't afford. I had the perception that because I was male, white, Protestant and Republican, I had to be "taxed" to support others – sometimes via the law and sometimes via being made to feel guilty.

What do I have to feel guilty ABOUT? Well, sure, there are some things, not that I have to tell them to you. Anyone who doesn't feel guilty about something is in serious denial and likely serious trouble. But still ...

I had a "discussion" with my girlfriend over whether employees are vital to the organization, with me issuing a firm negative. She's finishing up her fourth year as a high-school teacher, and for a number of years before it worked for a magazine publishing and distribution company. She avowed that if she was away from any of the jobs, nobody could do them as well as she did, at least not without a lot of training.

She cited a poor substitute teacher for one of her classes as an example, and talked about how her replacements (plural) at the newspaper company couldn't do nearly what she did. She had a good perception of her abilities.

On the other hand, I had held a lot of jobs where I was the extra thumb, not really needed for anything except to fill out a job quota. In those cases, my ability didn't matter very much in the best cases. I had to do as I was told, right or wrong, or be shown the door very quickly.

Rightly or wrongly, I think absolutely nobody is indispensable. You can be buddies with your co-workers one day and sitting on the sidewalk the next, and I've been there. In a few cases, my position was simply eliminated; in others, they wasted no time in finding a replacement.

I won't tell you what salaries I made, but it was never a lot of money. In many cases, though, the company had a personnel budget which another employee (me) would stretch, so I was always under the gun to be a superstar or be unemployed. Some people don't downplay their own abilities in those situations, but I did.

Am I a good writer? Yes. Can I help a lot of people? Yes. Do I make mistakes? Also yes.

As indicated at the top of this column, I don't really know how other people perceive me. I also am concerned about whether I will lose friends each time I become outspoken (which is growing more and more frequent as the years go by). I also become concerned that the outspokenness of people I know (which is also becoming increasingly frequent) will touch a raw nerve with me.

I can take a lot of criticism (more of myself than of people I admire), but sometimes I bristle, snap something back, and the relationship appears to be ruined.

People need to understand more about how they are perceived, and the way they perceive other people. I don't have a good way to do it, at least not at this point.

In the end, all that will be left of us is how people perceive us. I would rather have people perceive me as a gentlemanly guy who can't do everything but will try. How about you, what do you want?

Answers will come over the next century or so. They will probably change. A lot.

This paragraph was also added at the end, when the preceding paragraph seemed too abrupt. To expand on it, I have to say that we can have self-perceptions that are wildly divergent -- one way or the other -- from others' perceptions of us.

A hundred years from now, most of us will be remembered not at all, except by a few descendants. If we wind up in the Bad Place, we may want all people to forget us and be tormented by our own loneliness. Or we might wind up in Heaven in part because of the effect we had on others. We really don't know, do we?

If we knew what others thought of us, I don't know what effect it would have overall. We might -- or might not -- have the ability to consciously change people's perceptions of us and of other people.

But we can try. Try to let people believe in us, and for them to have no reason to be disappointed.

Let's see what we do.