Simply complex it all its simplicity

So.

I spent this week starting uni.

It's a pretty cool place, but I don't really want to chat about that.

No, today I wish to speak of something that I was presented with in my sociology lecture.

Apart from my lecturer having a wonderful Scottish accent (or is it Irish...I'll listen more closely tomorrow), he also has an obsession with this cartoon that he discovered, the "understandascope" by Leunig. It's a great cartoon that one would imagine being in the AST - you know describe and interpret the following picture.


Image Source: http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/advancement/assets/images/understandascope.jpg

He was talking about perspective, how one views the world, and how important it is to realise that each of us views the world through a different lens. Not entirely a new concept, but he expressed it well.

We all seek to understand the world - and wish that we had something similar to the understandascope, something that we could look through that would somehow make everything clearer. But here is the irony of the picture - we seek to understand the world, and and would love to have an understandascope, yet the understandascope itself is flawed, due to it being only one lens, in one place, in one society, in one world.

This one cartoon expresses and highlights the complexity of human nature with almost childlike simplicity.

Which perhaps raises another irony.

Are complexities really that simple to grasp?

And does that make them, in essence, simple?

Hmmm.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

-Carl Gustav Jung