BASICS: AN INDIVIDUAL POINT OF VIEW | nationalsalvation.net
One reason I see things clearly is because I see them from what Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago called "an individual point of view." Few readers and no intellectuals understood what he meant by this.
Up until his time in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn adhered to the established religion of his country, Marxism-Leninism. He thought Stalin was a thug and said so, which is what got him into the Gulag. But he considered Lenin the greatest man in history and it was his life's work to write the definitive biography of that Saint.
What Solzhenitsyn meant by an "individual point of view" was what he later became: a Russian, not a Marxist. He saw himself as an individual with a, repeat A, meaning ONE, personal point of view: "an individual point of view." Only then was he able to observe THE REST of the world accurately.
If you are part of the established religion, regardless of what that institution may be, you are not a part of the world or the people you are analyzing. You look down on others in the light of your own Final Truth.
Everybody is a provincial, but you cannot understand anything about real people unless you face the fact that you are a hick, too. The people who cannot understand reality at all are those who THINK the INSTITUTION they are part of does not have a "point of view."
Those who have an institutional view analyze everything as a step up or down toward their Final Truth. They are the most extreme form of provincial. They possess a hickdom no real hick could even imagine.
And, unlike a normal hick, the institutional hick cannot imagine that he IS a provincial.