A new pandemic is gripping us. By our egos! One which is a hell of a lot more dangerous than Covid….
In fact, narrow mindedness is a disease which occurs naturally. It probably affects some 10 percent of the population in ‘normal’ times. When things are no longer normal – and people become nervous because uncertainty does all kind of ‘funny’ things to our minds, narrow mindedness becomes an opportunity. A golden opportunity for those who ‘professionally’ fish in troubled waters.
“The Petersons weren’t wearing pro-police T-shirts,” notes Churchill. “They weren’t carrying a banner, holding a sign or waving a black-and-blue flag. They appear to just be listening. But merely listening to an opinion that some Skidmore students find objectionable is apparently enough to get a professor in hot water.”
Professor Greg Patton at the University of Southern California (USC) was telling students in a communications lecture last month about filler, or pause words, such as ‘err’, ‘umm’ or ‘you know’ in English. Footage of his lecture, which has now gone viral, shows Prof Patton saying: “In China, the common pause word is ‘that, that, that’. So in China, it might be na-ge, na-ge, na-ge.” Enunciated, na-ge sounds like the N-word, which led several of the professor’s students to complain to the university. Responding to the complaint, the dean of the university, Geoffrey Garrett, told students that Prof Patton would no longer be teaching the course. “It is simply unacceptable for the faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students,” he said.
As a mediator, I was trained to differentiate between needs and wishes. Between something which will actually make your life easier and something you just fancy. And to understand the fact that everything we do has consequences.
A father has asked me the other day: ‘What had I done wrong? My only son hardly ever speaks to me…’
‘When did the rift became apparent? How early?’
‘Things went fine until he had become an young adult. OK, we had some ‘misunderstandings’ when he was a teenager but he seemed to had overgrown them… Until sometimes in his early 20-ies when he really rebelled. And told me everything he couldn’t tell me – his words, about how he felt while growing up.”
‘And what exactly were his grievances?’
‘He was cross at the manner in which I was telling him things. At the manner in which I was trying to stimulate him. He’s very bright, you know, only didn’t do much in his life. Not by a long shot! And I kept telling him that. I still do, as a matter of fact.’
‘You see, no matter whether you go to the church or to a brothel, the soles of your shoes will get thinner. This doesn’t depend on where you go. It only depends on the road you chose and the manner in which you shuffle your feet. Same with words. What you’re trying to say is, indeed, very important. But even more important is the manner in which you try to get the message across. Whenever your ‘target’ becomes angry at you … the message will be truncated in the process… Even more importantly, the ‘target’ will retain a ‘bad’ memory of the whole incident. And if more and more ‘bad’ memories keep piling one on top of the other… But not everything is lost! The very fact that he took the trouble to talk out the matter with you means he was not ready for a ‘divorce’. Not then, anyway…’
“For a proposition to be true, it is not enough for it to be logically correct. It also needs to make epistemological sense.” Oscar Hoffman
Ricky Gervais is right, right? There’s no logical connection between being offended and being right… There’s no doubt about this!
Only Gervais is wrong. Wrong in saying it, not in what he said.
Yes, there are people who declare themselves to be offended in an attempt to get something. Sympathy, some slack… or even the others to accept their version of things. That ‘they’ are ‘right’.
But this is not always the case! Some (other) people are so offended by the manner in which things are unfolding that they actually need to express their feelings. To send the warning ‘don’t continue in this manner or you’ll loose my attention/will to cooperate’.
In this sense, Gervais is actually wrong. His saying had been used by numerous meme builders to create a bubble inside which callousness is actively encouraged. ‘Go on disregarding other people’s sentiments. They’re nothing but pussies. It’s just words, not sticks nor stones.’
Here’s a more detailed analysis:
So fucking what?!? Somebody just told you they are not going to stop paying any real attention to what you are trying to say to them and you don’t care? Why did you start communicating in the first place? Or ‘performing’ the ‘offensive’ thing in public? Was the ‘offense’ premeditated? For a reason or just for fun? Then it’s not ‘so fucking what’ anymore… Or you just hadn’t thought about it beforehand? And you’re looking for an easy way out?
No, you don’t have to pretend to like people when you don’t. But, in the longer time frame, it pays to honestly respect those you get in contact with. All of them.
Let me start by attempting to answer this question in a logical manner.
Theoretically, individuals have the right to defend their lives. And properties. In some jurisdictions, the defender might even shoot the trespasser. On the other hand, it is a lot harder to identify an example where property might end up purposefully damaged in a lawful manner while life is being defended. ‘Purposefully’ as in property being targeted in an attempt to fulfill the goal of defending life. When groups of people are involved, things are even more complicated. Is a community entitled – using the police force, a “well regulated militia” or even ‘spontaneously’, to inflict bodily harm to a group of people who randomly destroys property? What becomes different when the destruction occurs during a protest ‘gone wrong’? The way I see it, things are more complicated at the social level because of the number of people involved. At the individual level, things are simple. The guy who trespasses is the one who gets hurt. The defender is the only person who might inflict injury and the one who will answer for the act. When there are more people involved…. Some protest peacefully, others do the damage… and who knows who gets clobbered – or shot, by the police?!? Same thing looking from the ‘other’ side. The owner of a property might have decided to protect it in a different manner than the police … or even not at all… To wrap it up, there’s no single answer for this question. On the individual level, the actors/agents must decide on the spot. Considering the specifics of each incident. While being ready to accept the consequences. On the social level, neither murder nor property damage are acceptable and must be dealt with in a very thoughtful, but firm, manner.
As usual, logic can take us only this far. Far from the essence…
What are we doing here? How can we even attempt to compare life with property? Do they belong to the same category? Can we sell a human being? Do houses have souls? What’s happening to us?
While everything mentioned above is absolutely true, we must also remember that it was the whites – who had first reached the ‘proper stage of development’, who had given up slavery and invented ‘human rights’. On the other side, it is also true that the whites did reach the ‘proper stage of development’ by exploiting the rest of the world. Only ‘this’ wasn’t invented by them! I don’t want to go into the finer details. All of you know, very well, what had really happened ‘on the ground’.
So. What are we going to do next?
‘Delete’ everything the white people have contributed only because they have been the last to exploit the rest of the mankind?
Or accept the fact that evolution works in an oblique manner?
Culture is to human communities what DNA is to biological species.
It transports vital information from one generation to the other. Hence providing a venue for survival. Furthermore, both culture and DNA can change in time. Hence providing a venue for evolution.
The difference between culture and DNA being, of course, the fact that culture is way more fluid than DNA. DNA changes only once for each generation – what you get at birth is what you’re taking to the grave, while culture is in constant flux. No individual organism has anything to say about their genetic information but almost every human is capable of learning almost anything.
Now for the historical part.
Stage one.
Veneration of the elders. The elders were the depositories of the common knowledge. Hence everybody took good care of the ‘data bases’.
Stage two.
Somebody learned to write. Elders were no longer indispensable. More and more information could be ‘warehoused’ in alternative ways. A structure was needed to manage the new ways of dealing with the vital information.
Stage three.
The state is born. At first the structures which insured that culture was passed from one generation to another had been rather empiric: kingdoms, monasteries, etc. Soon after the Enlightenment things had become more rational. Cultured people became nations and the academic scholars gave us the state. As the structure charged to make sure that culture and people stay together. Hence providing for the nation’s survival.
States who had been in constant contact – read rivalry, kept each-other fit. Or else. States ‘removed’ from reality – geographically, by becoming too powerful to care or both, had experienced a natural decay. The people at the top of the food chain had forgotten about those at the bottom and those at the bottom had lost faith in their leadership.
States too weak to survive – for various reasons, have succumbed while those too powerful for their own sake have eventually imploded.
Psychology to the rescue.
Culture is more fluid than DNA for a reason. DNA follows exclusively the laws of nature while culture is heavily influenced by us. We, men, are the measure of all things. All life heavily transforms the place it inhabits. So do we, humans. Only we do it willingly. On purpose, that is.
Now, that we have amassed so much information – about life in general and about how we relate, as agents, to the entire process, we have reached a reckoning moment. What next?
Are we going to choose the path of the cuckoo or that shown to us by Hokule-a?
There is no such thing as a soul? OK, then how do you explain what happened the last time you encountered a soul-less person? You didn’t? Good for you only I have my doubts.
Either a divine gift or an emanation of the human mind, soul is what separates us from the animal realm.
Or this is how we see things…
After all, we are the ones who believe it is normal for us to eat animals and who consider it a tragedy for one of us, humans, to ‘return to nature’. In any circumstances…
Anyway, things are complicated… Until recently – historically speaking, some of us were comfortable with the notion that skin colour determines the ‘quality’ of one’s soul. Caucasian plantation owners used black slaves to work their land and Arabian rulers used ‘white flesh’ to adorn their harems…
Further complications spring up when we consider the fate of the soul. Is it going anywhere after it’s ‘host’ passes away? To some other place? Does it come back to fulfill its Karma? Or it literally goes to meet its Maker? As in ‘for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:18)’?
And when does this soul appears in earnest? The moment when we leave the womb? A few years later, during the process through which we become conscious human beings? Or, as some people choose to believe, in the very moment when each of us has been conceived by their parents?
As an aside, what about those conceived in a lab? Do they have a soul?
What about sexes? Are feminine souls equivalent with the masculine ones? What happens to a transgender soul?
Are we a natural occurrence? A product of evolution? In a constant process of ‘improvement’? Obviously imperfect but, generally speaking, striving to ‘fail better’?
Or are we an imperfect ‘artifact’?
Cause this is the only issue on which there is a consensus… Everybody is convinced we’re ‘defective’. From the staunchest believer to the most rabid atheist…
I really have to stop. And go comfort my soul with something nice.
How do you determine the scope of a conversation? What the other guy has in mind when talking to you?
You interpret whatever ‘comes’ from the ‘other’ side… there’s no other way, right? But what if both of you have opposing views on the subject? If you don’t seem to see eye to eye on the matter? Do you give up, considering the other party as too ‘thick sculled’ to matter?
‘OK, and what alternatives are there?’
The way I see it, people who speak to others might be driven by any combination of ‘trying to convince the other’ and ‘trying to learn something’. Let me deal with the extremes first.
Somebody is trying to mess up with your mind if/when your arguments are dully noted only to be later dismantled, ridiculed or both at the same time. When you are never asked to elaborate. When you end up feeling that the other guy doesn’t really hear what you have to say.
Somebody is trying to learn from the encounter – not necessarily from you, if … the opposite is happening. If you end up with the impression of having been heard. Of an exchange having had happened. Both of you might end up entertaining the very same ideas each of you have started with but…
In practice, most people do learn at least something from each conversation. No matter how determined they were, at the beginning, to convince the other.
But sometimes I do wonder… what if the real goal of too many of those who ‘surf’ – pun intended, the social media is to keep the rest of us busy? As in ‘waste our time’? Slow us down in our attempt to learn? To make at least some sense of what’s going on around us?
For subjects to become free, they must first remain alive. As soon as individuals die, whatever freedom they might have enjoyed vanishes.
Individual liberty is a matter of degree. No matter what any of us might do, none of us – well, almost, will ever escape gravity. We are all pulled towards the center of the Earth and this is how things should be. Otherwise… can you really imagine us drifting freely through the Universe and still being alive? There are some constraints we might escape for a while. While gravity stays with us forever, we need to breathe only once every second or so. If needed, some of us can go without air for almost five minutes. Most of us can go without water for days and without food for a couple of weeks. Without friends… is more complicated. My real point being that individuals will start considering freedom, in earnest, only after reaching Maslow’s self-actualization stage. Until then we remain subjects. Subjected to our needs.
Liberty, as a function, is a social matter. According to Berger and Luckmann, ‘reality’ is a social construct. Going one step further, we realize that freedom – like money, is also a social construct. Something we all contribute to. Help building it. Or tear it apart by negligence/carelessness. Help building it by encouraging others to become free. As in helping them to lead a decent enough life. For freedom to happen, the society – as a whole, must remain functional enough for each of its members to have the opportunity to reach the self-actualization stage.
We must constantly remember that each time somebody puts our lives in danger that somebody attempts to hurt our freedom. Every action which ultimately reduces the opportunities for each of us to reach the self-actualization stage – or to remain there, is hurting the liberty of our entire society.
This Covid thing is an excellent opportunity. For us to reconsider.
Everything. Our past. Our meaning/role in this world… our future… We have the time, some of us also have the means.
The means to socially distance ourselves from the fray. Hence increasing our likelihood to survive. Increasing our confidence that tomorrow will actually happen. Increasing the need to ‘actualize’ ourselves. To be able to cope with what tomorrow might bring.
This whole thing reminds me of the fact that Maslow’s Pyramid is nothing but a succession of steps which might be climbed. Might be climbed…. There’s no one there forcing us to step up once we’ve ‘fulfilled’ the one we’re standing on. And no one to tell us what to do once we’ve ‘upgraded’ ourselves.
And another thing. Covid also taught us, the hard way, that our planet is limited. That it’s hard to live apart and that everything which happens anywhere eventually influences all of us.
Thank you for reading this.
Later Edit Some use ‘physical distancing’ instead of ‘social distancing’. The rationale being that the distance is only physical and not social. The way I see it, ‘social distancing’ makes a lot more sense.
‘I keep my distance because I care about you, not because I fear I might catch something from you. We are together in this!’
