Outlook

"It's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves." - Ender Wiggin, Ender's Game

"...But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart." - Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead

Talking is always interesting. Sometime it's fun too, but overall not so much. The more you talk to people, the more you understand, the more you realize just how different everyone is. Of course, this is not as scary as it sounds - after all, a discussion in which everyone agrees is at best an ego boost, and at worst a waste of time. But I'm not talking about views on this issue or that. I'm talking about how people think, how people analyze the world around them at a fundamental level. People with very different methods of analysis can still argue and talk in a more or less uniformly logical language, even though it seems like they shouldn't be able to communicate at all. This leads, as you might expect and have probably realized yourselves (at some level) to very interesting exchanges.

Most (if not all) of you are familiar with my reverence of the Ender Series. This, in and of itself, is not particularly special – I follow a fair number of things avidly. But this goes somewhat deeper. I can appreciate and even sympathize with many of the characters in the shows I watch and the books I read. Through Ender’s life story, however, I gained something much more powerful, an approach to living in some sense. Don’t get me wrong, I am not crediting a series of novels with shaping the entirety of my person. Nonetheless, these books, and in particular the sentiment quoted twice above, has become a critical part of my personality.

This has been rolling around in my head for the last two days, and after much examination I think I can truthfully say that I don’t actually hate, or even dislike anyone. There are people I don’t know well of course. Of the people I do know well, most do not think even remotely like I do. Nonetheless, without exception I like and respect them. Truly, when you know someone sufficiently well, even if you don’t quite understand their justification for certain actions, you can always understand their base desires, their underlying motivations, and you will always find these same things within yourself.

It became clear to me that this belief, this attitude as it were, is not as widely held as I had thought. I was talking with a friend of mine, and the conversation turned to a mutual friend. I use friend here to mean “person that you know well”. It quickly became clear that, while I enjoyed the company of both friends, they were no longer friends, in the colloquial sense of the word. It seemed as if they had had a falling out of sorts. Typically this is caused by some misunderstanding, or else some unforgivable offense that has not been justified or explained to the victimized party. In this case, however, there seemed to be no such event. The two had simply grown to be annoyed at each other. They could not, or were not willing to, consider that perhaps the other party had some justification, some understandable motivation for which they had acted in a certain manner.

As I was having this conversation, I began to feel strange. I grew more and more uncomfortable, without understanding why. Finally it grew unbearable, and I simply walked away. Thinking about it later, I realized what was bothering me. I didn’t understand how two people could come to know each other so well and yet miss this essential underlying truth, that everyone wants the same things. I have thought about this some more, and I have been unable to resolve it, but I am fairly certain that if this is a fundamental difference between people, i.e. if I am somehow strange in my appreciation of everyone I know well, then people who do not have this strangeness must (on average) be much more unhappy than I am. I feel that I am still somewhat shaken by this, though, so it’s possible that I’m not thinking clearly. In any case, your thoughts on the subject would be greatly appreciated.

Perhaps someday I’ll start writing about things that actually happen again.

Till then,

~jnub