No. 7 of Nelson Mandela’s lessons is that nothing is black or white in this world. There is never just one answer to a situation. Life is full of gray areas. Nelson Mandela’s own life, in which he was imprisoned for the vast majority of it, is testament to this. The narrator of the video talks about how he was so surprised that Nelson Mandela wasn’t bitter after years of incarceration, only to find out that he actually did have a deeply seated anger toward the system that had done him wrong. To take things at face value is “bias of the human brain, but it doesn’t correspond to reality.”
This rule has applied in my own life on numerous occasions. There have been times when I assumed that what I saw was the sum of the situation or the whole of the person. To understand the bigger picture, rather than to only notice certain perspectives, is essential not only for our own individual lives, but also society as a whole. If we could learn to objectively view situations without injecting our own predispositions, we could no doubt make better decisions. Although we generally view public figures such as Muammar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro from a negative standpoint, Nelson Mandela still maintained loyalty to them, so I’m sure that he was able to see through the adverse stigmas that these men held, and recognized the good of their ideals. Nelson Mandela’s outlook was always to realize what the overarching circumstances were, and to choose the most pragmatic approach to it. If he didn’t consider all viewpoints, he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish all the things that he did.