Seeing the Pig in the Mud

CORE DEFINITION

From the Kui hexagram of the I Ching, the image describes a man who, already estranged and suspicious, draws his bow at what he sees as a mud-covered pig and a cartload of ghosts, only to discover a rain-soaked in-law arriving in peace. The core proposition is that distrust does not merely bias interpretation; it manufactures hostile percepts out of neutral events. The key qualification is that the distortion originates in the state of the relationship rather than in the information itself, so verifying the fact without repairing the estrangement leaves the misreading intact.