A Taxonomy of Blind Spots
Blind spots and the Three Musketeers
T McCabe
November 2018
Blind spots reveal themselves in our everyday grammar. People talk about blind spots in a generic abstract manner without seeing the connection to our sentence structure. Our English sentence structure inherently defines the categories of blind spots. This helps us discern what we are blinded to and can give us a path to see beyond and through the blind spots that limit and constrain our empathy and perspectives.
A blind spot is something we cannot see, think of, or consider. An aspect about a particular subject one won’t or can’t consider.
A feeling or intuition only manifests once we consider doing something with it. Like pursuing a dream, like avoiding a disaster, like changing a lifestyle or diet. When Intuition and feelings become real, we consider them in some concrete context and express them as a thought. We express such a thought in our native language; in English, a thought becomes a sentence which has a subject, a predicate, and an object. For a symbolic shorthand, we denoted this: S,P,O.
Here’s how blind spots manifest themselves.
We know by McCabe’s Dihedral Complexity ( see Expanded Consciousness, McCabe, Amazon.com) that any thought has a six-sentence presence --- the original thought plus its five corollaries. These implied corollaries are additional perspectives and derived empathies that emanate from the original thought.
Blind spots happen when a person cannot consider corollaries – won’t consider them, won’t think of them, won’t contemplate them, won’t admit them as a possibility. They are closed out, dismissed off hand, reacted to, regurgitated.
So, how does this happen? It’s best told by a story. Let’s witness the three Musketeers of yore when they were considering the cruelty and absurdity of the hereditary monarchy and the feudal system of the French nobility of 1844. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis adopted a manifesto, ‘we the populace will strip the King of all powers’.
Athos, Porthos, and Aramis had strong personality types. Athos was ego-centric, seeing everything from only his perspective and requiring to be the subject – this was so pronounced that he was renamed Subjetos.
Porthos identified with the process, renamed Pathos for his pathos for the process.
Aramis only believed in objective reality, to such an extent that he was renamed Objectus.
You can sense the impasse that the three Mustekeers are headed toward. Since group theory had been around long before the mid-nineteenth century a prescient contemporary, Knight Sir Dihredal, expanded the French manifesto into its full epistemological presence.
Ego-centric Subjectos could only consider the truths where he and his French populace were the subjects. He was blind to the rest.
Pathos could only see reality from a process, or predicate, point of view. He was all about the stripping of power.
Objectus would only believe that the totality of reality was based on what happened in objective reality, i.e. what happened to objects. His perspective was limited to what happens to the King.
Now that we know the blind spots of the three Musketeers, let’s see how this played out and affected both their revolutionary manifesto and the French Revolution.
The protagonist of the Three Musketeers, who appeared serially in pre-revolution France in the 1840s, was d'Artagnan. He was highly empathetic, broad-minded, and could see all the perspectives of any given issue. D'Artagnan loved the passion of the three Musketeers but tried to expand their empathy beyond their obvious blind spots. With the popular uprising rapidly approaching d'Artagnan was forced to give up on this – – he found the intense passion of each of the Musketeers somehow blinded them to perspectives beyond their eccentricities. D’ Artagnan proclaimed, ‘Nous sommes aveugles à propos des angles morts’ – ‘we’re blind about blind spots’. Regrettably, d’Artagnan had to accept the limited vision of each of the Musketeers, accepting as immutable their respective blind spots. Blind spots as immutable black holes of their consciousness.
Apart from the original manifesto, Subjectus identified with just one other perspective. He could grasp the corollary with the subject first: SOP – ‘From the perspective of the populace, the King personified the act of stripping’. Subjectus ranted that this corollary is what caused the people’s uprising in the first place. But, alas, that was all that Subjectus could see.
Pathos was conscious of the corollaries where the sentence was from the predicate’s point of view. Besides the original manifesto, he espoused PSO and POS. Pathos’ two slogans were chanted down the Champs-Élysées: ‘Stripping the populace has led to stripping the King of all powers’, ‘Stripping the King of all powers was the destiny of the people’. But, alas, that was all that Pathos could see.
Objectus identified with corollaries that were from the object’s point of view. Objectus shouted from atop the Bastille, ‘The King with his powers stripped us the populace’ and ‘The King with his powers from our perspective has stripped us of all rights’. But, alas, that was all that Objectus could see.
As the French Revolution gathered momentum, d'Artagnan was conflicted. He both loved the passion and commitment of the three Musketeers but was very upset and frustrated by their obvious blind spots and tunnel vision. D'Artagnan frustratingly tried to get consensus from the Musketeers across the six corollary truths of the original manifesto – – with absolutely no progress, the intersection of all the Musketeers’ perspectives was only the original manifesto. Big on passion, lacking in consensus.
Such being the case, the French Revolution unfolded in a messy, bloodied, uneven traumatic upheaval. There were many years of bloody revolution with more blood and more revolution to come. Some literary historians claim the root of this protracted upheaval was the combination of glaring blind spots and blood passion of the revolutionaries.
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Note 1: Let SPO denote the subject, predicate, and object of any sentence. The Dihedral expansion of any original sentence looks as follows.
SPO
SOP
PSO
POS
OPS
OSP
