(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)
It’s People
People cannot give you objective truth, only their own experience of it. That was inherent in my caveat at the beginning of this book. I’m inviting you to share some part of my experience and I make no pretense of objectivity. Instead, I openly confess to characterizing things.
We can characterize our experience of other humans in this world in the sense that we react to others on three basic levels. Some people are significant to us, demanding a sizable chunk of our attention. It won’t matter whether the interactions are negative or positive, only that it consumes our attention. Others are useful but not really a part of our lives. Again, there may be fondness or dislike, but their individual significance in our existence isn’t that great because they are interchangeable on some level. Beyond that, most of humanity is just that — humanity at large and of no personal significance.
This is entirely normal. It’s not a moral valuation of other folks, but a simple matter of our own personal limits. We don’t have the energy and resources to address more than a certain amount of humanity at any given time. We can’t invest deep personal value in every human, so we should not try. Otherwise, we end up feeling guilty about things that we cannot possibly change.
It also has nothing to do with objective facts. We cannot usefully address anything until we shed the chains of our mythology. Don’t confuse a genuine capacity for empathy with some false moral burden of valuing every human life. The latter leads only to a frantic chase to sacrifice our very selves for nothing. We come to the point we must use the language of not caring again, because despite the richness of our tongue, we have allowed manipulators to hijack the narrative. Let’s break that spell and tell ourselves first quite bluntly: Human life has no intrinsic worth.
Let’s replace it with something better: Every human you encounter has potential value. Not for the fact they exist, but their value arises from the encounter. God becomes the ultimate Real Person for us and we adopt His viewpoint of humanity. Lacking His divine insight into individuals, we simply wait until He reveals to us how we should interact with each one. We can even extend this into the virtual world, though any virtual encounter must shed many of the cues we use to guide how we engage them. Note: If the encounter is one-sided, with no real interaction, that other cannot be for us more than merely useful. They cannot be a real person for us unless we are for them.
That is, unless we want to invest that person with a broad authority in our lives. It’s too easy to turn a one-way commitment into a religion, making the other an object of idolatry. That way lies madness. Humans aren’t deities, nor are imaginary constructs that serve as objects of devotion. Still, there is a sane way to recognize authority.
Everyone serves someone. Most of us serve a lot of someones, which tends to dilute our loyalty and confuse things greatly. We aren’t wired to answer simultaneously to a dozen chiefs with functionally equivalent authority. We can give each one a limited and somewhat distinct dominion within the whole, but we can’t even split our genuine loyalty between two without suffering serious internal damage.
The sane approach is conditional loyalty, contextual obedience with an assurance we must endure the ire of folks who imagine they own more of us than we can give. You probably realize that such problems arise when other folks perceive us as less than fully human. There is a broad evil in our society which cripples the meaning of human significance and perverts human relations by encouraging people to elevate themselves to something they are not.
Inherent in Western Civilization is the elevation of some imaginary standard of reason and logic which serves only as a proxy for the self. In other words, we are taught to make ourselves gods with no equals in humanity, using the excuse that our logic is pure and objective, in theory at least.
We end up with the false notion that things people say are either truth or lies, when virtually all we see and experience is some mixture of both. Even that is misleading, since objective truth does not exist in any useful meaning of the concept. Rather, everyone is sharing their narratives.
While we will surely encounter folks who are consistent only in getting us into trouble, it’s totally wrong and unnatural to classify people simply as liars or truth tellers. That’s unfair to our own human existence, never mind unfair to other humans in general. Lumping people together as the opposition in some particular conflict is where we surrender to unjustified hatred. Thus, we are easily polarized because we insist some communication is either true or false. Even if we discern the difference between fact and falsehood within a statement, that someone would offer a mixed bag like that makes them a liar and an enemy to our Western minds.
It’s not a sane way to operate, in that it ensures we are easily enslaved by those who are talented manipulators. We end up leaving the decision of commitment and service to folks who consider us cattle at best.
