I know I'm not alone when it comes to that timeless advice from parents: "If you can't take it don't dish it out."* More accurately, the expression is a demand of recognition. A perspective shift from childish self interest devoid of understood consequence to that of acknowledging the value of another person engaged in the situation and understanding the impact of ones own actions as they parallel the presently aggrieved behaviour of others. In short, my introduction to the concept of my own hypocrisy. We called it being a crybaby and it is a bitter pill. It is also invaluable as a tool for becoming happier, more productive people. For me this awareness shifted the onus from the other person to myself in terms of insuring appropriate conduct both in deed and language respective of what may be warranted by our relation in that particular situation. This is a long way of explaining something we all understand. A human condition we're all familiar with. But it is also human to need an occasional refresher.
When it comes to identifying myself publicly I prefer the term apostate for reasons I will elaborate on later. It would be just as accurate to classify me as an atheist, skeptic, humanist, and free thought advocate. Of these labels, each of which have established communities that often overlap, skepticism is distinct in that it is a methodology rather than an ideology. It is not a perspective, world view, or set of beliefs but an evidence based system of determining whether a claim is supported or not. Skepticism does not include critical reasoning, it IS the critical process.
The issue of hypocrisy is a natural sore spot to be discovered and picked at when skepticism is employed. This is healthy and most often merely informative. Other times it is like stepping on an unseen land mine. When we lift our foot to examine the problem our world explodes, our sense of person is brutally destroyed. On a day like any other, an ordinary walk, a tiny device. Boom. This can be called a paradigm shift and people will subconsciously protect against it due to its potential catastrophic harm. This is our instinct to avoid pain. An effect of cascading collapse within one's perceptions of the world, self, or even the meaning of life and it can lead a person into a great deal of suffering. Depression, dysfunction, perhaps destructive tendencies. It can be like a sudden loss of gravity and the sun going dark. Not that up is down and down is up but that there is no up, there is no down. The laws governing our understanding in life, challenged, can simply dissolve. We ought keep this in mind when entering into discourse regarding another person's pillar concepts bearing the weight of their ideological world view and not underestimate the gravity or the intensity of the defencive response likely to be marshaled to ward off the threatening incursion.
Of course most hypocrisy is merely a desire to be selfish or lazy and acknowledging it won't shatter our world but we all have our deeper held ideas. I have noticed that people who most aggressively attack the person rather than the arguments of those with whom they disagree are often the most belligerent towards the suggestion of opening their own ideology up to skeptical debate. They label and dismiss all opposing opinions as inflexible, ignorant world views, mental pits that trap the opposed mind thereby rendering its owner's notions inferior and fit to be offhandedly discarded. At best worthy of pity, too often deemed barbaric and deserving of intolerant rebuke. After all, why strain an open ear to such nonsense?
Without the process of timely consideration due potentially superior ideas, it becomes necessary to assemble a mass of stock replies and dismissals. These are depended on both as armour and shield, the visage of champion and deflector of all threats to this identity, while simultaneously acting as sword and arrow to target vulnerabilities in the enemy. Stock replies that serve as missiles to stun opposition and savage blade to carve up defenceless non-combatants. Primary instruments not of learning and self transformation but of external social terraforming.
When it comes to identifying myself publicly I prefer the term apostate for reasons I will elaborate on later. It would be just as accurate to classify me as an atheist, skeptic, humanist, and free thought advocate. Of these labels, each of which have established communities that often overlap, skepticism is distinct in that it is a methodology rather than an ideology. It is not a perspective, world view, or set of beliefs but an evidence based system of determining whether a claim is supported or not. Skepticism does not include critical reasoning, it IS the critical process.
The issue of hypocrisy is a natural sore spot to be discovered and picked at when skepticism is employed. This is healthy and most often merely informative. Other times it is like stepping on an unseen land mine. When we lift our foot to examine the problem our world explodes, our sense of person is brutally destroyed. On a day like any other, an ordinary walk, a tiny device. Boom. This can be called a paradigm shift and people will subconsciously protect against it due to its potential catastrophic harm. This is our instinct to avoid pain. An effect of cascading collapse within one's perceptions of the world, self, or even the meaning of life and it can lead a person into a great deal of suffering. Depression, dysfunction, perhaps destructive tendencies. It can be like a sudden loss of gravity and the sun going dark. Not that up is down and down is up but that there is no up, there is no down. The laws governing our understanding in life, challenged, can simply dissolve. We ought keep this in mind when entering into discourse regarding another person's pillar concepts bearing the weight of their ideological world view and not underestimate the gravity or the intensity of the defencive response likely to be marshaled to ward off the threatening incursion.
Of course most hypocrisy is merely a desire to be selfish or lazy and acknowledging it won't shatter our world but we all have our deeper held ideas. I have noticed that people who most aggressively attack the person rather than the arguments of those with whom they disagree are often the most belligerent towards the suggestion of opening their own ideology up to skeptical debate. They label and dismiss all opposing opinions as inflexible, ignorant world views, mental pits that trap the opposed mind thereby rendering its owner's notions inferior and fit to be offhandedly discarded. At best worthy of pity, too often deemed barbaric and deserving of intolerant rebuke. After all, why strain an open ear to such nonsense?
Without the process of timely consideration due potentially superior ideas, it becomes necessary to assemble a mass of stock replies and dismissals. These are depended on both as armour and shield, the visage of champion and deflector of all threats to this identity, while simultaneously acting as sword and arrow to target vulnerabilities in the enemy. Stock replies that serve as missiles to stun opposition and savage blade to carve up defenceless non-combatants. Primary instruments not of learning and self transformation but of external social terraforming.
Some may consider presenting ideologues as being so aggressive and ruthless an unwarranted characterisation. Surely only monsters can stoop to treat their fellow human beings with such cold strategic indifference. What I suggest is that this assumption is actually a false dichotomy. It stems from a remaining lack of sophistication from a time when determining another person's potential threat could be the difference between life and death, therefore creating a primitive lens through which the swiftest response to danger becomes possible: "good" or "evil". Anyone, where time is taken, can discern that the reality is that human beings are more complex than this. With maturity, individually and collectively, we learn to weigh the regularity and intensity of a person's destructive and constructive actions because of an increased capacity to recognise the terrible consequences that can result from simple hasty prejudice and condemnation.
I draw attention to these dynamics not only in hopes that we might reduce our number of unintended conversation meltdowns wherein we carelessly violate other people's inner sanctum but, perhaps more consequentially, to provoke a conscious awareness of our own emotional sacred ground. It should not be underestimated how empowering this comprehension is, once we recognise this innate fear, should we choose not just to consider the proposals of challengers to our perceptual fixtures but to become a tester of ourselves. Decide to become an agent investigating and striking at our own holy securities. When one eliminates the stifling inflexibility of dogma in favour of the fluid changing state then, as Bruce Lee used the image of water to illustrate, we become more agile in adaptability and increase our maximum potential. In the humility of the thought which entertains doubt, as with water which seems weak, we unleash a powerful force of change. It doesn't just break down barriers, over time it will completely alter the landscape. Life is change. Embrace this.
Now here's the rub. There are more people than ever before "dishing it out" thanks to the rise of the Internet. Some can take it right back either for the desire to have free exchange or because they are open to the potential to learn something new from someone else. Either way they do not sit aloft a mighty mount of moral or intellectual superiority casting down their bolts on the inferior masses. Feeling great and mighty, and in terms of influence or notoriety they may for a time be, such an attitude robs this person of meaningful growth and their targets an example of transformative disposition and the human decency with which it might be promoted.
As Christopher Hitchens would say, your personal experiences don't impress me. Whether your ideology is political, religious, or social, I am not impressed with stock rhetoric or indignant finger pointing. Seize my attention with personal integrity and offer me evidence to digest. I am fallible and strive to be open to change. I embrace apostasy for this reason. Not just toward religion but to be an apostate to all forms of restrictive ideology that I have held or may still hold. To me this is an expression of fearfully breaking free from conceptual chains and embracing free thought.
If you decide to throw a fit because your only wish is to dump on people, well go ahead and cry about it. If you can't take it then stop dishing it the fuck out.
Feel free to take a nap. You've had a big day ;)
Dedicated in memory of PZ Myers' brain.
You are sorely missed.
You are sorely missed.
