As a result of faulty reasoning and unfortunate experiences, some people develop one-dimensional personalities. They become full of hate, rage and anger and live life on the offensive. For them, the fault of history can only be the one target to which they have dedicated themselves to oppose. This blame can fall on anything. It can be a person, a business type, a political party, an organization, a belief, a skin color, a nationality or an ethnicity. In a world of tremendous size, diversity and activity, there are plenty of opportunities to rage against straw-men, near or far. We follow our misjudgments as far as we can go, and when we get to the end, we embrace a change that we previously felt was impossible or ridiculous. Epiphanies are fair-weather friends.
Sometimes the one-dimensional personality can be the emotional opposite of anger. They are not full of hate and rage, but of concern and sympathy for a specific group of people that they wish to help. The target group may suffer from illness, ignorance, injustice or a social condition.
The one-dimensional person can be either an extreme pessimist or an extreme optimist, a demagogue or a prophet, a destroyer or a philanthropist. Given the nature of dissonance, there are often elements of both. One person's hero is another's villain, but more importantly, creating a victim requires a hero and a villain. We elevate ourselves as we condemn others. Triangularizations are common.
The best epiphanies are when the right hand and the left hand discover what each other are doing. The hand that loves heroes discovers the hand that hates villains. Suddenly, scapegoats and straw-men are not the enemy, but our own faulty reasoning. What somebody loves and hates defines how they understand the world. We create our heroes and our villains based on how we interpret roles and ideas. When we discover that our heroes and villains share the same characteristics, then we discover ourselves. That is the central idea that the Big History model hopes to illuminate. The drawing is a mirror of our prejudices and experience.
Mapping Anger
All anger can be mapped within the Big History diagram. For example, when an employee who is angry at his boss over wages.The disagreement is located within the for-profit business empire. The boss is at the top of the pyramid, and the employee is at the bottom. The complaint is that the boss is being unfair or greedy, which is a complaint with moral right/wrong intonations (which falls under the abstract/religion realm), but the boss is making decisions for the business empire, where profit is the defined virtue. His job is to keep expenses down, not make people happy. Fairness may be the virtue in politics or religion, but not in business. A fair business is open to overlap. An unfair business is not.
On the personal level, the boss is trying to maximize the revenue, the same as the employee. The conflict is because they are similar, not because they are different. Two dogs are fighting over the same bone. In this case the bone is money, but it could be power, respect, perks, job duties, God's favor or something else. People who are similar fight, because the same thing is important to both of them. While the conflict takes place within one empire, it is informed by the other realms. Fairness is a political concept, not a business concept.
Courts in the political realm attempt to adjudicate business disputes. An accusation of unfairness is not necessarily true. The worker may be greedy and self-aggrandizing. Disputes can rise to the point of being a legal issue, and lawmakers create laws that reflect the side which they support. The recent disputes between bankers and consumers, and the attempt at new financial regulations, is an example of how the two realms collide and change. Most disputes in court are related to business, including organized crime, which is just illegal business. The reason for a jury of peers, rather than a jury by superiors or victims, is that our peers are most likely to share the same experiences as ourselves. We are more willing to accept the judgement of an equal than of an enemy or a superior.
Balance is the ideal because theoretically there would be no conflict, no trial, no jury, no court. The thicker the book of laws, the greater the lack of balance in society. In America's case, the imbalance has been institutionalized into a dissonance called "checks and balances.' Ironic, since there is no balance, except in name and claim. The structure breeds conflict.
The worker versus employer conflict is an up-down divide within a business organization. Capitalism versus socialism is a left-right conflict within economic theory. There are many conflict combinations, including diagonal. Karl Marx blamed the religious leaders, thereby crossing from the bottom of economics to the top of religion. Workers can blame government for protecting abusive employers. The businesses can blame government for both taxes and regulations. It is common for someone at the top of one empire to complain about the choices made in another empire. For example, a music celebrity speaks out against politicians. There is plenty of hypocrisy going around, and we all get ensnared in it. It is difficult to discuss virtue without making someone or some choice an example of the lack of virtue. We need comparative analysis to frame our understanding, but hot disputes indicate a lack of understanding.
Silence is Not Harmony
A lack of conflict does not mean there is balance. A different priority could be the reason. There is no flash point to fight over. Similarly, silence is not an affirmation. Power-mongers and their toadies attempt to silence criticism. Their success does not make them right, anymore than a complaint is always true. A boss can compel silence by non-verbal cues. If he threatens anyone who questions his choices, like vendors, then the workers internalize his behavior as a threat if they disagree. Fear compels silence. Workers may agree with a complaining employee, and will view him as a hero, or crazy, because of his courage to speak out.
Some people have the courage to speak out. Others do not. The same words that make him a villain for management make him a hero to others. To have empathy for a villain makes one the equivalent of a villain, so most people opt for silence. This is tragic. The only way to teach the next generation right from wrong is to stand up for what is right and speak out against what is wrong. The lack of a vigorous debate gives all errors the most opportunity to flourish. Yet, we need to disagree respectfully, or we are teaching that it is okay to be disrespectful.
Children are often indoctrinated to be afraid. They are taught to obey and not to think. Being wrong is not very different than being silent. Both error and a lack of courage have undesirable consequences for the formation of virtue in young minds. We learn the most when we disagree. While the goal is to agree, the means are to disagree. It is an odd tension. That is why free speech is so important. To have a right and to not exercise it is the same as not having it. The challenge is to be as intellectually honest with ourselves as we are critical of others. We have to be open to learning and being corrected, as much as to teaching and correcting others.
Enlightenment
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