From the Darkness, the light of Reason. "Earlier, I had spoken of the four (or five) Idols which impede perception of the Truth. The Idols of the Tribe, of the Cave, of the Marketplace, of the Theatre, and possibly, in our case, of the Blood. Today, I shall speak briefly on the Idols of the Tribe - those impediments of perception which stem from our being human." "What this means is that, as human (or human-derived) entities, we all carry certain ways of thinking and perceiving that stem directly from our evolutionary and genetic heritage. All humans, to my knowledge, tend to binary thought - that is, unless they make a conscious effort to do otherwise, they perceive reality in terms of "black and white", "good and evil", "old and young", "big and small". Even when they manage to overcome this hard wired track, their "alternate" perceptions are parsed in terms of these dichotomies - grey is "both black AND white", medium is "neither big NOR small" - rather than as a full-fledged third state of being." "Another major Idol is that of vision, of sight. Humans are visually oriented creatures, with auditory perception coming a distant second. So, we *think* visually - we can "see with our mind's eye", but how many "taste with their mind's tongue"? Very few, I'd imagine. This is why the lupines are so alien to us; they carry within them the Idols of the Wolf Tribe, and thus they "smell with the mind's nose", so to speak. This is wholly alien to 'normal' human processes, but ingrained completely into their thoughts and perceptions." "So what, I hear many of you ask, and don't think I don't know who said it, and we *will* be speaking after class, trust me. What does this mean to the Malkavian? *We've* stepped beyond those Idols, you say, *we're* not constrained like the Sane. And in that very question, we show that we are. We still divide the world in Sane and Insane, which is just another rephrasing of the classic Good/Evil, White/Black, Light/Dark, Apollonian/Dionysian Idolatry." "We continue to accept whole-heartedly hallucinations and visions (there's *that* word again) simply because we see and hear them, but can we touch, taste, smell, prioperceive them? And why do our Pranks involve visual shock and sight gags? To shock someone out of their everyday perceptions, you don't need to break the sense they already use... that's just continuing the Idolatry of sight. Force them to acknowledge other senses, and you've changed the way they look (and there I go with my own continued Idolatry, although this is technically an Idol of The Marketplace...) at the Universe just as surely as if you'd driven them to see every mailman as Simon Magus, or to perceive the hidden Pattern that underlies all reality." "For ourselves, we must walk down the path of our madness, and find a world within ourselves wherein dichtomies are not the default, in which we can think of, say, "young, old, and adult" as three seperate and unique entities..." "Or perhaps we should see them as ONE entity, perceived differently. Either way, the Idols of The Tribe are difficult to break, and may always be with us, but with a determined application of Reason, may be circumvented. Maybe this is all we can hope for..." To conclude, I quote Sir Francis Bacon himself: "The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions, as well of the sense as of the mind, are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it."