People > Ideas
“Now that we have won the means to express ourselves, our responsibility to ourselves and to the country is paramount. . . . The task for each of us is to think carefully about what he wants to say and gradually to shape the spirit of his paper; it is to write carefully without ever losing sight of the urgent need to restore to the country its authoritative voice. If we see to it that that voice remains one of vigor, rather than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity, then much will be saved from ruin.” — Albert Camus concerning the responsibility of journalists and writers following the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation; an excerpt from Combat, a French resistance newspaper.
I read this in a biography on Camus yesterday, and it reminded me of the responsibility we have now that our thoughts and ideas have been “liberated”, in a different sense, by social media from private journals and conversations we, as private citizens, would have otherwise only had with people we already agree with.
The differences in opinion have always been there, we just have access to them now. And now, instead, of those differences being negotiated by professional editorial writers, journalists, etc. we are each charged with this responsibility. At some point in the relatively near future — although by ‘near’ I mean I will be an old man by then — we will gain a more objective and even-handed understanding of how to use this technology without aggravating and antagonizing each other. Instead, we will use it as a means to actually negotiate and actually change people’s minds concerning the problems of a world of such vast complexity that it is no wonder we so often resort to fear and anger.
We, as individuals, are the most complex entities in the known universe which gives our societies a capacity for complexity that is greater than any single person can know or understand by staggering orders of magnitude, and, needless to say, the discovery of the unconscious mind has only served to make things… well, much much more complicated for us.
Complexity to the uncomprehending mind is synonymous with uncertainty and uncertainty is often synonymous with fear and then anger. But of course it is. Because we so often associate our worldviews with a kind of deification, particularly when we have little else in our personal worldview that we have deified. We must choose what we deify or it will be chosen for us.
In a world of such vast and unknown complexity we most often negotiate the problems we see by emotion and faith because as much as you may not want to believe it, we are emotional beings, not rational. Rationality is a tool that can be learned, and, like a hammer, if we are not holding it, we are not using it, and if we have not read a book on it or been taught rational thinking, we are not using it very well, and perhaps not at all. But, luckily, we can.
If I’m invested in changing someone’s mind, using anger and resentment has never once accomplished that task for me. It took me 37 years and a shitload of reading to realize that. I may have momentarily quieted someone, but when I think about the times anyone has used anger and resentment to undermine my opinion, though quieted at the moment, I’ve worked through their accusations and hyperbole on my own only to find that I have further entrenched myself in the opinion I presume they were attempting to relieve me of.
When I look around and see other people yelling and screaming at each other, I do not see the mature, intelligent people these screamers and yellers would have you believe they are. I see small people who are doing little more than distracting themselves from the terrifying vastness of the world they are surrounded by; they have misconstrued or disguised what is underneath it all a lamenting of: “Can’t you see I’m suffering!!” as their words are parroted back to them by their perceived enemies. That, I’m sure, is a hard pill to swallow. But please, read more books and disagree with me.
In the meantime, let’s take derision at face value: Considering how often we use anger and resentment to accomplish our goals, you’d think it would be working by now. We keep using it as if it had been working over the previous millennia. If we are, nonetheless, rational and it was presumed to be accomplishing what we say we desire it to, you’d think more would be getting done as quickly as the anger indicates we want it to be done. But, obviously, that is not happening. If that is not an indication to us that anger and resentment is not gaining anything that we are using it for, then what, exactly, will change minds?
Such a question seems to me to be profoundly rational.
So, perhaps, we should start somewhere else: Humans are emotional, not rational beings, and people are greater than ideas. The ideas you choose are predicated on the love you feel. If you don’t feel well-loved, you will have bad ideas or use counterintuitive tactics to enact what would otherwise be good ideas. I am subject to this just as much as everyone else. So send some love because the good ideas will come only after the good love does.
