How NOT to meet our opposites

Friday 25th September

How do we relate to non-idealists, to 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, and they to ours, 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 work at it together we’ll inevitably move further apart - in our attempt to put space between us, we make value judgements of each other and end up in a state of mutual dislike. The stress of being on unfriendly terms with each other sucks the very life out of us and makes it that much more difficult to pursue any worth while discussion. It’s 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 inevitably comes back to bite us later. 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 bruised reaction marks the start of things going wrong - we retaliate to criticism with ever more value judgements; those we judge retaliate back; any communication we may have once enjoyed goes sour; we make sweeping generalisations in order to create even more separation. We desperately want a sense of being right. And we end up about a million miles from having an intelligent exchange of views. This is how NOT to meet!