Eccentric Flower:199905/us and them
From Eccentric Flower
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may thirteenth us and them Haven't you heard it's just a battle of words I was talking with Amy today about a lot of interesting things - sex and love and self-worth and all sorts of things. Amy is another one of my friends - Amy is a friend, even though I've just barely met her - who doesn't think much of the majority of the population. That's not meant to reflect badly on her, but it'll sound like that, no matter how I try. So let me talk in generalizations. It seems like almost all of the people I associate closely with - the people I consider my friends - think that the vast majority of the humans on this planet are Notice that I am not saying anything about my own intelligence or imagination. I think I'm a pretty smart person. Moreover, I believe that I love ideas. I like to use my head. It's fun. Furthermore, I tend to surround myself with other people who like to use their heads ... because it's really hard for me to have any sort of companionable feelings about someone I'm incapable of holding a conversation with, someone who doesn't intuitively understand the joy of using their brain (because it's impossible to explain if you don't already get it). Okay? So I'm a smart person and I like being around other smart people. But that doesn't say anything about the percentage of other smart people in the world. I mean, I know only a handful of people, and the world's a big place. How can anyone make meaningful generalizations about what's out there? Even with some of my innate biases (against men, for example, about which more in the next postcard), I would never have the audacity to say "most people are pretty stupid," a phrase I'm pretty sure I've heard from Nonelvis. (If not, it was something close to it, because I remember we had an argument about it.) Yet almost all my friends seem to think that. If they don't think that most people are pretty stupid, they think that most people are pretty boring, a less controversial statement but still not one I feel qualified to make. - - - When I have this discussion with one of the friends in question, they invariably start presenting me with a mountain of evidence to prove their contention: They make the case (often convincingly) that most people are stupid or dull or non-creative or whatever. It wasn't until today, talking to Amy, that I realized: This misses the point. I don't really care if the statement is true or not. Let's assume, for a moment, that most people are grey and lackluster. Now, what are the consequences of believing that? For one thing, it immediately makes the world look like a worse place, without actually changing the nature of the world a whit. It depresses one to accept, but produces no tangible benefit whatsoever. Furthermore there is no disadvantage in denying it. In short, sometimes it is actually a good thing to have illusions. I don't want to think that the world consists of a handful of sparks and a lot of greys. It makes the world a sadder, more tragic place for me. It also increases the chance that I'll end up in a 4x6 cabin in Montana, writing manifestos and building bombs. The instant I accept this, I suddenly have a lot less to lose. But that may just be a personal philosophy, so I'll give you another reason, one which affects everyone. In the latter third of the Robert Heinlein book Friday, Friday's boss asks her to research the signs of a sick culture. Think what you like about Heinlein's politics or the remainder of this book, but the three pages where they discuss this are very important to me, and I agree with the ideas therein, in a general if not absolute way. I have already mentioned one such sign several times in these entries - an increase in minor rudenessess, a decline in civility. As Friday's boss says: "A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot." Here's another: "I did start making tallies. It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population." "A very bad sign. Particularism. It was once considered a Spanish vice but any country can fall sick with it." I take this with a grain of salt. Sometimes the separatism is actually the better course of action and sometimes it's not - the question being, as I discussed when I wrote about Kosovo, how artificial the "nation" was in the first place. Make a Kurdish state that grabs land from several established countries, as the PKK wants? Probably not a good idea. But the Basques never really were a fully incorporated part of Spain, never wanted to be, and their separatist movement is one I'm more inclined to listen to. Meanwhile, back home, I grow worried every time I see a group espousing "us vs. them" philosophy. Us vs. them is a dangerous attitude, because it allows you to dehumanize the other side - and then do nasty things like kill them off. Littleton was an "us vs. them" scenario. - - - Now, I am not proposing seriously that all my smart friends are going to band together and kill off the dumb people - but stranger things have happened, and the attitude carries dangers even if nothing that severe ever happens. Maybe most humans are stupid and dull, but I prefer to think of them as ignorant and unenlightened. Instead of building a wall and automatically rejecting whoever's on the other side, I would prefer to try to teach people first, show them that things are more colorful and more complex than they know. I'm not saying I don't ever give up on trying to reach someone - I have, often - but not until after a few attempts. I feel that everyone should get the benefit of the doubt. About intelligence, at least. (About social skills and some other related matters, it depends on what sex they are - so you see I'm no paradigm of fairness.) I will not believe that most of the world is moving more slowly than I do until I get a stopwatch and measure fifty-one percent of humanity myself. © columbine |
