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...