How not to meet our opposites

How to relate to non-idealists, the dry-as-dust pragmatists who only see through dollar eyes. The antediluvians we live with are often oblivious to a certain quality of life which seems so obvious to so many of us. It makes living amongst them uncomfortable and frustrating. When we find resistance to our ideas, even hostility, it’s usually because we are each proposing two opposite life-styles. There’s a great gulf between us and if we work hard enough we may come closer. If we don’t put the work in we move further apart - in our attempt to put space between us, we make value judgements of each other and end up in mutual dislike. The stress of being on unfriendly terms sucks energy out of us and makes it that much more difficult to pursue any worth while goals. It makes life toxic in terms of human relating.
So, if we do separate from others, for whatever reason, and then compound that by making personal value judgements, it comes back to bite us. Fairly or unfairly, we become the subject of criticism and our feelings get bruised and egos hurt. Of course this mightn’t matter if we could accept that: “what others think about us is none of our business”, but we don’t. We can’t. We are involuntarily part of a collective belief system that makes us all react badly to being thought badly of. And that reaction marks the start of things going wrong - we retaliate to criticism with more value judgements; those we judge retaliate back; any communication we may have enjoyed goes sour; we make sweeping generalisations in order to create even more separation, to get a surer sense of being right. And we end up about a million miles from an intelligent exchange of views. How not to meet!