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Edward Hall : The Natural Act Of Thinking

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Edward Hall is convinced that the natural act of thinking is greatly modified by culture, and that’s why every individual and each culture have different thought processes, because culture is also inconsistent. He provides what seems to be a great concern for western civilisation. He explains that western people only use a small portion of their mental capacity, so even though there are many legitimate forms of thinking, the west value the linear system of logic above all other legitimate ways of thinking. The average Western person sees their system of logic as identical with the truth. For us it is our only construction of reality.

Hall talks of this linear thought as delusion, and one of the delusional aspects of this is the institutionalized necessity to control everything, an the widely accepted notion that the bureaucrat knows what is best; never for a moment do they doubt the validity of the bureaucratic solution. He makes reference to Laing, and that they both introduce the perception that the western world is mad. However, it is not people who are crazy so much as our institutions and those culture patterns that determine our behaviour. We in the west are alienated from nature and ourselves. We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because

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