Pretend I'm Your Friend

 

On Relationships

Most people have two or more "personas". They adapt to their environments by filtering their speech. At work, I have one filter and when I'm at home I have another. Sometimes I omit certain words because they are crass in one environment but perfectly acceptable in another.

My friends and I play a game sometimes. The goal is to shock the other person or people in the group by saying the most offensive, gruesome, or blasphemous thing possible. The more heinous the better. But it also has to be clever and in an attempt at humor. If someone says something stupid they are ridiculed by the others so the horrible things uttered have to be something the others will understand and appreciate as purposely horrible. The idea is to make fun of the easily offended, ourselves, and to challenge and understand each other's perspectives.

I would say that the quality of a friendship is marked by the level of freedom you have to communicate and be honest. The lower the filter the better the friend. This is why some siblings are not friends. Why some husbands and wives are not each other's best friends. People play roles in relationships and being honest can break the role and challenge their place. If someone does challenge their role in the relationship and the relationship can not adapt to this change then it will suffer.

Your best friend is oftentimes the person you can talk about you're family and spouse about in a way you might not be able to with anyone else. This is why high-quality friendships are so valuable. It gives a person a refuge to experiment with their thoughts as we don't always know what we think about something until we verbalize it and doing this with someone who can listen and offer constructive analysis will allow someone to understand their thinking better than just blurting out something in a moment of emotional distress toward someone they usually use a filter for.

Honest communication is about trust because our secrets are only secrets because of the perceived judgment of others. We hold back and filter our thoughts to hedge our bets about how others will respond. We don't use taboo language around people we don't know very well because we know that words can start fights. So we slowly test the "waters" using language. We throw in a lesser curse word like "ass" or "butthole" in an effort to gauge the other's reaction. If we are safe we might throw out a "shit" or "fuck" or a somewhat controversial idea to see what happens. Good communication is a dance with each person reading the others' moves and attempting to engage in a harmonious way. A bad conversation is the opposite, where both try to lead or one isn't paying attention or one is trying to antagonize the other.

As the dance continues the two will start to feel freer as they have created boundaries around what language works. The content of the conversation is only part of the equation of communication. Each person is doing at least two things. One is attempting to understand what the other person is saying. This can take focus and conscious effort. Listening is a skill. Although at times it can take less focus and comprehension can be effortless if the words are familiar and the topics mundane.

The second thing that a speaker is doing, other than listening is watching and reading the other person's body language and tone. Facial expressions, eye gaze, stance, and other factors are all being subconsciously attended to and studied in an effort to discern friend from foe. To see a potential attack coming or to find signs that make it safe to loosen up the filters and become more friendly. Although this instinctual process is far from perfect and we are often lead astray evolution has honed these instincts in the direction of survival so they are more often accurate.

When a person pushes the bounds of common etiquette with harsher words than would normally come out of a stranger people can often be perturbed. The normal behavior of strangers is to tread lightly until rapport is established. By being polite and respectful with their words and physical space they are saying to others that they know how to play the game. When someone treads too hard against these social mores they are testing the boundaries of others. If someone pushes too hard they can be met with any amount of disdain. From a look of contempt to a shot to the head, people don't take kindly to being tested or perceived disrespect.

Friends, on the other hand, can look past the words used and look for the spirit in which they were said. People infer meaning and intent when communicating. Sometimes people do this so much that they try to finish each other's sentences. This is rude in that it breaks up the flow of the speaker's thoughts and can derail a thread of thought. The person who is being interrupted has not established boundaries with the person who keeps interrupting them. This can often be because the speaker is also prone to interrupting and so allows it in others. Hypocritical people who interrupt others often don't like it when you interrupt them. This is due to a lack of self-awareness or some kind of narcissism where rules apply to others and not to the self.

Friends will typically give the benefit of the doubt when someone says something that is either uncharacteristically or surprisingly rude, harsh or offensive. 

People also know how to pretend to be friends. This is oftentimes what is happening between two new coworkers. They have the pressure of filtering themselves correctly in the workplace environment, which is actually at least three environments. The first environment is the one that involves clients. The second is the one that involves peers. The third is the one that involves hierarchies and bosses. And there are more I'm sure. The new coworkers also have the added pressure of trying to get to know their coworkers. They have to be able to pretend to be a stranger's friend. This is usually awkward as real friendship is gained over time and with experience and so the awkwardness that is felt is due to the inauthenticity.

A stranger is not a friend and so pretending someone is a friend in the workplace is a kind of guise. A ruse that if played wrong can be disastrous. Navigating this type of scenario is probably best done by not caring about making friends but instead caring about being a good team member. By volunteering to do jobs and help others one creates the best kind of coworker relationship, one that takes the job seriously. If one never tried to be besties with others they remain neutral and honest. They should have a plan in mind as to why they are working there and part of that plan should be to cooperate with others.

A friend applies their morality to their friends and a friend should be honest about their moral philosophies and stand by them enough to disavow a friend that strikes too hard at the values they uphold. This does not mean that a friend shouldn't be open to new ideas or be challenged but it does mean that there is a certain point at which a person should make a stand. A moral pushover or weakling can not be respected by people being honest.

Pretend I'm Your Friend

When looking at the intellectual work of others it is nearly impossible to not immediately judge the words through a filter of judgment based on current biases. This is an impediment to understanding the content from the perspective of the person communicating it. This means that the meaning and purpose of the content will probably be misinterpreted. In order to learn from others, we must lower our subjective judgemental filter and attempt to ingest the content from a more objective perspective. A great way to do this is to pretend that the other person is already your friend.

This means that you take the stance that the other person most likely thinks of themself as smart enough to have an opinion and morally righteous enough to offer advice. If it were a friend you would at least start from a place of respect and attempt to hear the spirit in which the content is being communicated. Is the person trying to help? Is the person uniquely qualified to know something about the subject? Is the person just hungry or upset or drunk? Suppressing your own instinct to react immediately, especially in a defensive way, can allow the person to express their idea fully. If you allow someone to express their idea fully then you can expect to express your rebuttal or thoughts fully as well. If you interrupt them then you can expect to be interrupted back. Or in reading something contentious or from someone you disagree with, you can better see where the person is coming from by pretending the person is not an evil person but instead just a type of friend. Maybe not your best friend but at least someone you can listen to.

When I hear something or read something that seems on its face to be completely ridiculous and wrong I try to remind myself to pretend that the other person is a friend and see what happens. Sometimes this doesn't change the outcome of the experience but it at least allows me to not immediately create a villain in which to fight. This helps with controlling the emotions that I experience that get in the way of understanding. Many times the result is as dismissive as it would have been but it doesn't take over my mind and allows me to move onto something else without so much energy wasted. Sometimes doing this actually allows me to understand the other person in a way that gives me a glimpse of their perspective, leading me to empathize or relate to them in a way that leads toward a paradigm shift. Even if just a small one. The best-case scenario is you make a new friend. I worst-case scenario is that you understand your enemy better.  

Hero Problem

The problem with the story of Jesus and any other Hero stories is that we start looking for them in real people today. We look at famous people and categorize them as either the Hero or the Villain because we're so used to integrating stories into our thinking and communication. The truth is that real people are almost never all good or all bad. Stories try to simplify morality in a way that is easy to understand for many ages. The simplest and most effective parables are directed at children. Stories create context without requiring real turmoil and so can teach lessons "the easier way".

Maybe the hero story is meant for children to have someone to look up to. Heroes exemplify the virtue of the culture and teach children the values of the culture. Whether that means to be brave, physically fit, intelligent or trustworthy, children can learn how to be useful adults and understand hierarchies with stories. While these stories are useful for children they can also create a heuristic that models the world in a far too simplistic way. As we mature we should be more and more critical of our tendency to simplify and gloss over important details. We should try to see the world as it is instead of as it might be imagined.

I am sure that those that have interacted with immediate danger will learn a valuable lesson but if you can prepare someone or help them avoid something bad then they are more likely to survive and pass on their genes. Those that listened to stories and comprehended them, as well as applied their lessons, would have had an advantage in our past which has led to a species that is prone to hold storytelling as a major virtue. The vast majority of humans can understand the lessons that come from stories and we value those that write and act out compelling stories. We are primed to seek out stories as they may help us to survive. This is why the entertainment world has amassed so much wealth, especially in the US.

The problem is that stories would be boring and confusing if they were too realistic. Real-life is oftentimes slow and most of the time nothing interesting happens, especially in the relatively safe 1st world countries around the world today. So, stories must be simplified and made interesting and an easy way to do this is to create a hero versus villain scenario. This creates drama, conflict and an opportunity for a lesson to emerge. Some clever writers play with this theme and will have the hero and villain roles swap or become ambiguous during the story. This is difficult to pull off but if done well can become even more compelling as it illustrates some of the actual vagueries of life. If it is done poorly it leaves the audience with nothing concrete to learn and just creates confusion as to who they should root for.

The reason this concept came to me was that I was watching a video about Jordan Peterson "wrecking" people with his words. It seems ridiculous to take a few excerpts from interviews and think of it as some intellectual victory. Even a long debate between two expert communicators may only result in a minor positive effect on the cultural landscape. Taking a few minute-long clips out of context that makes one person look smarter than another is misleading and disingenuous unless your goal is to attempt to idolize them.

Jordan Peterson could be more humble but if he is as qualified as I believe he is then he has every right to state his case as an expert in the fields of study that he speaks on. Also, he is probably in the minority of those with high IQs and so when interacting with most people on earth he will be the more intelligent and since he usually only talks about what he knows about he seems even more intelligent. He is confident and listens intently. He thinks about his responses more than most but he is not a hero or some kind of perfect human. He gives advise that many people need and they are benefiting from it and he has a great deal to say about humans but even he isn't completely aware of all the variables related to how humans behave. No one person can know everything about psychology or philosophy or any other complicated abstract pursuit.

The real key to our success in the modern world is not the efforts of individuals on their own but of individuals working together. We rely on specialization and the integration of a variety of disciplines to gain real insight into reality and in the pursuit to maximize prosperity. This does not mean that the efforts of individuals such as Elon Musk or Thomas Eddison did not have a major impact on the world but they were not alone in their projects and they were and are not devoid of failures.

Real people are fraught with inconsistent beliefs, personal flaws, and other unbecoming attributes. We often neglect these aspects in ourselves and those we deem heroic. We do the opposite with those with villainize. We focus on their flaws and inconsistencies and deem them unworthy. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

The judgment of others is a crucial skill in that we live in a world of both free and compulsory association with others. We must attempt to accurately judge the character of others in everyday life as well as in the more disconnected realms of politics and foreign relations. This article is not an attempt to deny the importance of assessing others' virtues and vices but the understand the gray and unsteady nature of such endeavors. Really, it is in the pursuit of personal understanding that we can see the nebulousness of others. If we can see ourselves more accurately we can see others as having many good and bad qualities and respect the vagueness of judgments.

At some point, we do need to act on these judgments and sometimes it comes down to deeming someone slightly more good or slightly more bad but we should be careful of our confidence in our judgments. We should seek wisdom in our understanding of our own frailties in an effort to understand the frailties of others and we should be wary of our desire to deify and hold others up above the rest. The inclination to idolize others can blind us to reality and create obedience when the moral act would be defiance. The opposite is true of course.

Munk Debate about Political Correctness and Podcast Link

On May 18th the organization known as Munk Debates held a debate with the premise: be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress. On the pro side were Michelle Goldberg and Michael Dyson and on the con side were Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry. Unfortunately, the premise was a bit vague and neither side gave great definitions or examples of how political correctness is either a force for good or bad in the world or how people call progress political correctness in an effort to limit progress.

On the pro side, Michelle Goldberg was the only participant to attempt to argue for progress as she explained that it is important for marginalized groups to voice their concerns and that while it may be uncomfortable for others it is an important aspect of progressing rights to those who may not have had them in the past. Michael Dyson made little to no effort to talk about censorship, free speech or political correctness and instead hijacked the debate to talk about historical racial oppression as if he were giving a sermon to inner city black kids in an attempt to incite hatred and blame toward all white people in America. He personally attacked Jordan Peterson as being a "mean mad white man" which seemed to come from his insistence to make the conversation about white supremacy, targetting Peterson, who at no point was particularly mean, mad or white.

On the con side, Jordan Peterson lectured about the negative consequences to collectivist theories and identity politics. He discussed the potential for hierarchies to become corrupt and the how treating each other as individuals is the best way to organize social interactions and society. Stephen Fry eloquently talked about the failure of the left to accomplish the goal of championing progressive values and that the left's insistence on political correctness has led to a resurgence of the right. He called for fighting for rights using civility and decency as opposed to attempting to control words and shaming those who think differently. My favorite quote from Fry was, on the left, "they are somehow undiverse in their call for diversity, you can be diverse but not in your opinions, language, and your behavior".

I think that the con side would have been better off introducing examples of how the left has gone too far with political correctness such as Antifa at Berkely rioting, along with other riots, and how staff members were taken hostage at Evergreen College. Or examples of people being shamed or compelled speech in Canada. The pro side could have brought up examples of how the certain words or phrases should be made taboo or how speech can incite violence. Michael Dyson could have brought up examples of modern racism and how language allows for a lack of consequence for those who perpetrate racist behavior.

Ultimately the debate was a success but not in addressing political correctness. I think it was a good example of how conversations about controversial things can go wrong and how hard it is for two opposing sides the get on the same page and actually discuss solutions. By the end, the two who were supposed to be pro political correctness essentially denied that political correctness is a force for good which is a failure of the organizers of the debate to come up with a good premise and to find people who can argue each side of that premise.

This is a short synopsis but if you want to hear more about my thoughts I posted a three-part podcast where I listen to and commentate on the entire debate. Check that out here:

Part 1: http://fleetingthoughts.libsyn.com/episode-131a-munk-debate…
Part 2: http://fleetingthoughts.libsyn.com/episode-131b-munk-debate…
Part 3: http://fleetingthoughts.libsyn.com/episode-131c-munk-debate…

Thoughts on Postmodernism

If Postmodernism can be characterized as a philosophy predicated on the denial of logic, science and reason, then by what standard do they substantiate their claims?

Without a standard measurement tool to judge the validity of a claim all claims are valid, therefore, in order to decide which claim should be followed one must rely on some form of scheme or model that becomes a mechanism to reach an ideal outcome.

There have been no better tools for exacting change in the world than those of the logical and scientific kind.

Why should I believe that logic, debate, math, science and capitalism are only tools of "the oppressor" without appealing to some attempt at a logical argument?

You can't just say that it is true because you say it's true. Then anything anyone said could be true. "That's a rock," one could say. "That's a tree," another might say. But if they are both pointing at the same thing and have distinct definitions of the words rock and tree, then both cannot be true. If there is any kind of truth it would be one that helped people navigate the differences between a rock and a tree.

The degree to which two people can communicate honesty and accurately is related to the degree to which they agree on the definitions of the words they use. In other words, the less agreement in definitions the more communication breaks down, and without rational discourse the only options left are fight, flight or submit.

If one person defines freedom as freedom to forcing others to act and another person defines freedom as the freedom from other people's actions and another defines freedom as freedom to act then a discussion on freedom between these people will most likely become contentious. Especially because they all prescribe their own boundaries of the others' precious freedoms.

In order to persuade others, in a world where the value of intelligence is increasing, you would be advised to utilize the tools of the intelligent.

A reason that Postmodern believers are achieving so much at certain Universities, in that they are achieving violence, suppression, destruction, etc., is because that type of behavior is strictly prohibited in the normal world outside certain Universities. The Universities that allow for mayhem to occur on their campuses are not setting a good example to their students about how the real world works.

In the real, working world, you don't get to foist your opinions on others by way of force. In order to succeed in a free market economy you have to get along and cooperate with others. If you want to use force then you will be met with force and if you break the law you will be met with an unbalanced return of force in order to swiftly punish those that cause violence.

If a Postmodernist were to propose laws that infringe on other's freedoms then they will be making the claim that their laws are just and lead to some ideal outcome. Luckily there is a mechanism for determining how strong this statement is. Unluckily though, the mechanism is logic, reason, science, debate and all the things Postmodernists believe are only tools of the oppressors.

Isn't someone who is currently oppressing others' freedoms, such as the freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom from violence, a tool of the oppressor?

If you want to fight oppression then at least fight the real oppressor, the government, not fellow citizens trying to pay their rent and shit. Taxes, unjust acts, wrongful imprisonment, corruption, etc., all all products of the governments around the world. What mechanism is in place to squelch these indiscretions in the government? At least in capitalism one can opt out of supporting a business regime they find destructive and immoral.

If words can oppress then any words a Postmodernist says can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion.