How not to meet our opposites

1501: 

We meet as opposites, with opposite views on a particular matter.  We have a totally different view of life, me interested in pursuing an ideal, you the non-idealist, the pragmatist, mainly interested in your healthy bank balance.  To me you seem antediluvian, but I know you are a provider.  What you produce intends to make my life more comfortable.  But I can't overlook the fact that you don't seem to care how you make your money.

Take the animal farmer.  They are not service-providers for people like me, but are making money in order to comfort their own life.  It's not that much different to any capitalist venture, but in doing and profiting from what they do, it clashes with the idealist's ideal.  They do what I believe they should NOT be doing.

They and I hold two distinctly opposite life-attitudes, each pursued with equal enthusiasm.  If we need to come together over this difficult issue of using animals, it's because we need to meet, if only to stop the 'drift'.  And if we work hard enough, for long enough, we may come closer together.  But one thing's for sure, that if both sides don’t work at coming together, we’ll simply move even further apart.  And in our attempts to put space between us, we'll mutually value-judge until we each come to dislike each other.  After that, the stress of being on unfriendly terms with each other sucks any constructive energy out of us.  Nothing useful will be achieved since we are now relating on a toxic level.

Feelings get bruised and egos hurt, and of course this mightn’t matter if we could let all 'oppositions' pass over us.  But they press our 'insult' button.  There's a knee-jerk reaction (and there needn't be).  If we could accept that 'what others think about us is none of our business', then we’d almost welcome the opposition they give us (not take it personally).  At least a voiced-opposition is better than indifference.  With opposition, we have something solid to spar over.  However,  today perhaps there's not much interest in sparring, nor does much thinking-about-this-issue ensue.   But things do have a way of rising to the surface, and our differences of opinion can only be avoided for so long.

So let the insults flow.  Eat ridicule.  Drink-in the ignorance.  Don't take umbrage.  Any hostile response we give looks as if we aren’t confident of ourselves.  We mustn't be reacting badly to being thought badly of.  It's that sort of reaction which marks the start of things going wrong between two people of opposite persuasions.  Once we start to retaliate to criticism, we start to use ever more value judgement.  Then we broadcast our moral judgement.  Then there's retaliation.  Then all communication goes sour.

         

Along with sweeping generalisations, exaggerations and value-separations, we always insist on  being right.  Both sides are 'right'.  We end up a million miles from any chance of having an intelligent exchange of ideas, and out of this mess there's only one thing to learn - ‘how not to meet’!