It seems that something[s] have fundamentally changed in my philosophy. Example:
I have known Bob pretty closely for a while. I feel intimately familiar with his opinions and his perspective. I have noticed lots of [what I perceive to be] flaws in Bob, but except for a couple of occasions where I called his words condescending, I have not even hinted at calling him out. Why might that be?
Possibility 1: I see Bob as a mentor figure, and so calling him out seemed against the unwritten rules of authority, or something.
Possibility 2: There is a woman on my private blog whom it would be an understatement to call brutal. I had never seen someone quite like her in action before. I’ve seen brutal people, but not brutal people who were simultaneously sensitive, unstubborn, and likeable. That was a combination I didn’t realize was possible.
Possibility 3: Philosophically, I had been a typical unreligious, liberal-y type, believing that ethical standards and vague concepts like “character” were cultural constructs that had no inherent backing by any objective standard. Now my philosophy is that there *is* something that gives us an objective-ish standard of beauty and goodness, it just isn’t a god (because it doesn’t need to be). It’s evolution. This new philosophy makes me feel less uncomfortable evaluating the goodness of people’s actions.
Possibility 4: Like any good child of the self-esteem generation, I believed that you shouldn’t hurt people’s feelings. Things like guilt, shame, embarrassment, and insecurity are nuisances to be expunged from our otherwise pristinely confident and secure core, I thought. But my new philosophy is that those nuisances, if listened to, can be both informative and motivational.
Possibility 2: There is a woman on my private blog whom it would be an understatement to call brutal. I had never seen someone quite like her in action before. I’ve seen brutal people, but not brutal people who were simultaneously sensitive, unstubborn, and likeable. That was a combination I didn’t realize was possible.
Possibility 3: Philosophically, I had been a typical unreligious, liberal-y type, believing that ethical standards and vague concepts like “character” were cultural constructs that had no inherent backing by any objective standard. Now my philosophy is that there *is* something that gives us an objective-ish standard of beauty and goodness, it just isn’t a god (because it doesn’t need to be). It’s evolution. This new philosophy makes me feel less uncomfortable evaluating the goodness of people’s actions.
Possibility 4: Like any good child of the self-esteem generation, I believed that you shouldn’t hurt people’s feelings. Things like guilt, shame, embarrassment, and insecurity are nuisances to be expunged from our otherwise pristinely confident and secure core, I thought. But my new philosophy is that those nuisances, if listened to, can be both informative and motivational.
I think there is truth to all of these, but I suspect the biggest reason is this one:
Possibility 5: I didn’t realize until recently that I had been more concerned with being liked than being caring. A quote from the last post:
Caring about people is very, very different from caring about relationships. If you care about relationships, then you probably care about being charming, about being likeable, about avoiding conflict. But then you just care about acquiring resources or feelings for yourself. I.e., you care about yourself.
That, I would say, was a good description of me. I went out of my way to avoid conflict, but I didn’t realize until recently that that was because I valued relationships more than I valued people.
I feel a stomach-sinking shame and disgust with myself. I feel humiliated. But paradoxically, I feel good, because the shame/disgust/humiliation is motivation to change, and I want it to keep motivating me.
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I am going to make some clarifications on this new philosophy of mine because I think it can be easily misinterpreted:
--My version of calling people out is substantially different from the philosophy of radical honesty, which basically says that you should say whatever comes to your mind. I despise that philosophy, and I think it’s every bit as selfish as trying to be friendly and likeable. If you care about people (more than yourself), then you will measure your words to try to have a positive effect.
--By “measure your words,” I don’t mean being gentle. The balance I try to find is being gentle enough that they won’t put their psychological barriers up but not so gentle that it won’t hurt, because if it doesn’t hurt then it’s unlikely to do anything for them.
--This doesn’t have to be just negative stuff, though. Sometimes people don’t realize positive things about themselves, and you ought to be helping them see those, too. Well-placed feedback will likely feel either hurtful or exhilarating to the communicatee, and that’s because we tend to feel either hurt or exhilarated when we get unexpected and (crucially) reasonable-seeming information about ourselves.
--I am not going to call out just anyone. If I don’t know you well, if I don’t think you can handle it, if I don’t *care* about you (and yes, I’ll freely admit that there are plenty of people I don’t care about), then I’m not going to call you out.
--There is a real risk of getting arrogant with this philosophy, of thinking that you know the answers and it’s up to you to inject them into naïve people’s skulls. The goal is not to convince people of your opinions but to challenge them to think about things differently, to raise difficult questions rather than giving easy answers.
--By “measure your words,” I don’t mean being gentle. The balance I try to find is being gentle enough that they won’t put their psychological barriers up but not so gentle that it won’t hurt, because if it doesn’t hurt then it’s unlikely to do anything for them.
--This doesn’t have to be just negative stuff, though. Sometimes people don’t realize positive things about themselves, and you ought to be helping them see those, too. Well-placed feedback will likely feel either hurtful or exhilarating to the communicatee, and that’s because we tend to feel either hurt or exhilarated when we get unexpected and (crucially) reasonable-seeming information about ourselves.
--I am not going to call out just anyone. If I don’t know you well, if I don’t think you can handle it, if I don’t *care* about you (and yes, I’ll freely admit that there are plenty of people I don’t care about), then I’m not going to call you out.
--There is a real risk of getting arrogant with this philosophy, of thinking that you know the answers and it’s up to you to inject them into naïve people’s skulls. The goal is not to convince people of your opinions but to challenge them to think about things differently, to raise difficult questions rather than giving easy answers.
I feel like I’m becoming adult-y.
(Either that or a mega dick. Hard to tell.)
