Meeting the Adversary

1193:

Communication is the trickiest thing.  It can be so wonderful when it works and so awful when it goes pear-shaped.  Getting shitty with someone, turning the mood, separating even momentarily - Is that, somehow, ‘breaking every rule of friendship in the book’?  I mean getting ‘shitty’ with someone, going suddenly hard on someone.

 The kids at home.  The switch of tone in the voice of a parent who sees danger or rule-breaking coming up. Switching from affection, intimacy and love, and going in sharply.  “No”, or “Stop”.  It’s okay between kids and grown ups. It’s much less okay between adult and adult.

It happens most when dealing with differing viewpoints, and, for example, my becoming brittle when I feel aggrieved.  Feeling aggrieved isn’t the problem, just don’t show it, I often find myself saying, in my head.  By showing it (by noticeably changing my mood) it’s as if I’m casting a blow at a person’s head.  It could be a king-hit.  It could fracture friendship.

In other words, taking the hard, defensive way isn’t the most intelligent way to go, since it shows up our own deep-seated lack of self-confidence.

The Buddhists are always talking about the ego - and it’s never truer that in the Animal Rights Activist’s camp.  When we plump up our ego to defend our views, what is it we’re really defending?  Are we not so much defending the animals as defending ‘my stand on this issue’.  I don’t want to appear wrong, or stupid or violent. All this defensiveness is a green light for my ego to stomp in and make me look foolish.

Whether we are the givers-out of value-judgements or recipients of them, we usually react badly to being thought badly of.  And that reaction marks the start of things going wrong, communication-wise.  We begin to resort to ‘short tactics’.  We make the most sweeping generalisations and we use dodgy statistics and subjectivities to exaggerate the separation between us, to give ourselves a surer sense of being right.   And that’s a long way from having an intelligent exchange of views.   This is ‘how not to meet’ our adversaries.