In my own head, I'm king...

It's an amazingly popular delusion that you do your opponents some sort of "favor" by listening and trying to understand their point of view. With that attitude, if your opponents are as wrong as you think they are, you deny yourself information which which to oppose or debate them more effectively. If they turn out to have a point, which is at least partly valid, by not listening you make a sad fool out of yourself, and you give up the chance to learn, and to put a stop to a frustrating argument. Standing firm no matter what can make you feel like the most "right" person on Earth, in the little world of one's head, but in the larger world, you might be just another pompous self-righteous ass, bragging about his supposedly open mind. Or maybe not a full-blown pompous ass, but just a bit of one, who misses the point frequently, and doesn't know it.

The possibility of appearing like that to people would be such an embarrassment, that it serves as a very good incentive for me to keep listening, or trying to. Lots of people settle for being the always-right king of one's own head, though.... they close the shutters, and never look out the window. Mixed metaphor, sorry.

Aliens Must Come and Spank Us, Throw Cold Water in Our Faces, Something...

Compassion and empathy are treated as the most human of human qualities. I think that these aren't particularly human traits, though, and aren't all that common. It seems otherwise because we keep [i]talking[/i] about how we embody those qualities! We belong to the only intelligent species on the planet (unless we're wrong about that), without any other verbal species around to dispute our claim to be so wonderful and compassionate and noble that these are our defining characteristics. We do love to go on and on about that. And we love to talk!

I can't wait for real First Contact, where we might meet aliens who can disllusion us of all this... I'm not saying people are "bad", but that there's a great mass of people in the middle of the spectrum, hovering in the middle of the scale, at around zero: not especially good, not especially bad. A lot of evil gets done by people who are just doing their jobs and don't really care...

Where did the cool misfits go?

When socially awkward characters are presented on TV, even when shows or films are making an honest attempt to deal with them respectfully and in a three-dimensional way, to some extent they're treated as buffoons. We're supposed to feel for their plight as "misfits", while laughing (gently perhaps, but patronizingly) at them, at the same time. Barclay on Star Trek: The Next Generation is one example, and there's a character on Six Feet Under...

I miss the concept of the cool "misfit". We used to have the idea in the culture that the mainstream could sometimes be an unhealthy, self-alienating, even destructive place... and that perhaps it's not necessarily a bad thing not to "fit in" with all that, that such people might have an awareness of some things that others lack. I'm thinking of the late 60s and early 70s, mainly.

There's no real "fringe" message being presented in the culture now. The characters we're meant to identify with always are careful not to look, sound, or think differently, so as not to be seen as "freaks". Yet, with every year that goes by, I identify less with mainstream characters, and feel more ill at ease amongst people, and it's not just because my neurological condition makes communicating harder. Society and I are diverging.

I'm fine with not being a very typical sort of person; I just don't want society to push me so far beyond the fringe, by how it sees me, and by keeping its distance, that I'm made to feel as if I should not or can not exist. If you know what I mean...

I know what I mean, not you

It's incredible to me that there are so many people who feel totally free to decide for other people what it is they mean, by what they say. This happens to me all the time. While I'm trying to describe or discuss my unusual (possibly unique) medical circumstances with people, first they'll translate what I'm saying into something much milder and much more familiar and everyday. Well, that certainly doesn't help them to understand, since it's not an everyday, mild sort of condition. They'll announce, yes, I understand perfectly, it's such-and-such, something very different from what I have... and expect me to feel reassured. It's a terrible thing to hear, when so much depends on other people coming to comprehend what's happening to you.

Next, I have to try to explain better, letting them know how they've misinterpreted, as respectfully and diplomatically as I can. Then they dig their heels in, sometimes politely, sometimes not. They're absolutely certain that they understood me correctly the first time. They know for a fact that I meant what they thought I meant. Sometimes they insist I must have misinterpreted them, but I keep looking for any ways I might have misunderstood them, and try to discuss it, while they don't with me.

Communication is impossible, if one party feels free to decide what the other party means, and won't accept any clarifications. That's a debate that's over before it starts, and it's all going on inside one person's head. It's a closed system and therefore it can't ever change.

People get this way about politics more and more these days, especially the Right, but no one's immune. The conservative Right has a whole world-view set up in which the Left plays a certain malevolent role, believes certain things it does not believe, and is trying to impose Soviet-style Marxism on us all. Someone on the Left can say, no, I don't think that, I don't want that, but the Rightist feels free to say no, you believe what I said you believe, basically.

When someone tells me: "You misunderstood me", I prick up my ears and pay attention to that. That's important. It's a red alert saying I'd better re-assess fast, because I may have missed something or gotten something wrong. I hate making mistakes or appearing stupid, so that's one motivation, but I also can't stand the thought of living according to fantasies, or mistaken information. I'd feel like a fool.

Others have found a different solution for that. They just put up a wall, a defensive line that protects them from ever having to find out that they were wrong about anything. They just say no. Their ideas are just the truth, and anyone denying that is evil therefore what he says must not be listened to. They have the exact same insecurity that I do, not wanting to be made a fool of, but we deal with it in exactly opposite ways.

This goes way beyond politics though. When I talk about my medical situation, the people I'm talking about are often very nice people. I'm not talking about some malevolent trait, which is only true of "evil" people. In a lot of cases, it's an unconscious habit. People are convinced they're listening, without realizing that listening can be hard, and can involve second-guessing your instincts and first impressions. A lot of people even think that simply sitting silently and letting the other person talk is "listening".

Facebook's Onslaught of Glee, or Rose-Smelling Parade

This is my current source of bile, and I suppose this is the only place where I dare say it... people on Facebook going on and on about how wonderful their days were, and how much they appreciate everything and everybody in their lives.

What could possibly be wrong with that you say? Well, appreciation is great. We appreciate others and life in general far too little. I've realized, though, that trumpeting that appreciation of happiness from the mountaintop, as done almost non-stop on Facebook, is not only unnecessary (private expressions of appreciation to individuals being enough), but if done in the presence of others with big, intractible problems, can come across almost as gloating. It's not intentional, but everyone shouting on Facebook about how happy they are to be smelling a flower or eating an Egg McMuffin is really over-doing it. I KNOW people don't stop and smell the roses enough, but on Facebook they're doing it too much. It does seem as if they're rubbing our noses in it....

It's this TV-era attitude that nothing's real unless it happens on a screen, in public. Suffering's not real unless you go on a daytime talk show and weep on camera. And maybe God or fate watches us on Facebook, and marks it in a ledger, if we're not registering our true appreciation of the blessings of life.

I'm suffering from positivism overload.

Passing thought

I should be used to it by now, but I'm constantly astounded that so many people are not bored with what is simple, and not suspicious of what is simple.

Evolution

Some anti-evolutionists just happen not to believe in it, and though I happen not to agree, I'm not going to impugn their reason or sanity, as some seem to do. They're just listening too much to the wrong people I think. In the case of the really vehement anti-evolutionists, though, it seems to come out of a near-frantic desire not to be made uncomfortable by having one's simple sense of reality, taught to them when they were kids, messed with.
Nothing in evolution says not to believe God created everything. We don't know why our hearts keep beating. We have no idea why life struggles to reproduce itself, and keep itself going. God is a perfectly viable explanation for all that.
Evolution just means organisms gradually change in response to the environment. How on Earth could you STOP evolution from happening? The poorly adapted die off, the well adapted survive. Of course. If the Bible says it all started 6000 years ago, why couldn't it be millions? Why couldn't some human have written it down wrongly? Not because God said it would be sacrilege to think so-- I don't think he's supposed to be telling us that. It's really because people's mommies and daddies and preachers told them so when they were kids, and people's whole lives and selves (and security) rest on their basic assumptions.
Maybe it's not so much the particular belief, but a matter of it being threatening to have core beliefs questioned, whatever they happen to be. I often hear people saying they can't question this or that, because their parents brought them up not to.