OrcmidKnows

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Orcmid Knows About Reflection Without Us-Them

Here are some things I think I know, even though I don't know. But sometimes I have this smugness about knowing. And I don't know. Here's where I stand and the practice that I am continually recreating:

1. "Act so as to treat man, in your own person as well as in that of anyone else, always as an end, never merely as a means." -- Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Morals (1785)
2. When I become present to judgment, upset, or agitation, become present and observe that the world is holding up a mirror of who I am being and showing me how I operate. (This seems similar to what Nancy pointed at.)
3. Then remind myself that it is all a loveletter from God.

~~ orcmid, 2005-08-21T05:11Z

I've been thinking, today, about vulnerability and willingness to be vulnerable. I've been thinking about how giving up distrust is our access to trust. So there is no act of authentic trust without vulnerability. And that happens out of commitment. Then I am left with what is it that I am committed to that I am willing to trust. (I think something like this is in John McCain's article about courage.)

Then I am thinking about how much polarizing mutual distrust is being feasted on these days. I think that is different than trolls and flamers, except for the common theme of being right about the evil of others.

Is civility an act of trust? I don't see why not.

~~ orcmid, 2005-08-23T06:11Z

This morning I noticed two more aspects of this.

The first (thought of second) has to do with operating in a space of no-agreement or in out-and-out disagreement. How do we behave when we find absent agreement or 100% disagreement. What happens to our resolve to create the world we say we want to live in when confronted by that.

The second (thought of first) has to do with learning to not have things be personal and listening for value no matter what. It is very easy for me to become indignant and seriously positional and go assertive from there on newsgroups and discussion lists. Conference calls too.

I notice two things: when I am somewhere and all I'm getting out of it is getting off on that, so I take myself away. More importantly, I think, is I learn to not have it be personal (with the mirror practice related to that).

Extrapolation: Good training in an area of life that I think may be important to all of us is around political and civil disagreement. As much as I bristle every time that Stefan Sharkansky says "Die, Monorail, Die" (related to the Seattle Monorail Project), I continue to read the Sound Politics blog. If you are more conservative than I, you might agree with Sound Politics too much, so you should find a liberal blog that offends you. Try subscribing just to the RSS feed of a blog that advocates something that has you be indignant (Intelligent Design, uh, taking God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, Secular Humanism, whatever arouses your ire), and once you can read that without upset, try reading the comments. After a little training at resisting comment (almost any objection you post, not being like-minded, will be flame bait, and at some point you'll give it up as wasting at least your own time), try comparing the comment threads of a blog having a strong and apposing viewpoint. Notice how self-satisfied each group is about demonizing the other. At some level, do you see that the problem isn't with the viewpoint, but with being positional? (I am not asserting this, I am wondering about this.)

I recall from a course on Social Psychology that making of attribution errors is a common human mistake. When we extrapolate and generalize beyond a specific incident to what that makes the persons involved, and how it is evidence of what-and-how they are, etc., that can be an attribution error. Attributing motives is a common form of it. Then the stereotyping and insistent positioning is almost a pathological form of what is actually a simple psychological mistake. I had a wonderful exchange on a blog comment thread once that shows how, once we have a rigid position, everything becomes evidence for it. (Hmm, could that be a rigid position. OK, enough clinical pontification for this morning.) But I want to share the sequence:

1. I made a comment post, on a fairly heated thread, where I objected to some assertions of facts not in evidence. Now, I knew that this was not likely to be well-received, but I was in a devil-may-care mood and did it anyhow.
2. As I feared, and it was part of the subject matter of my comment, someone posted a set of attributions to me of my political leanings, who I voted for in past elections, and what partisan organization I was a drone for.
3. I commented in response that there was no evidence for that claim and that I found it surprising from someone who did not know me at all.
4. The rejoinder was, "ahah, see, there you've proven my point! Exactly what a flaming-raging liber-conservo-republicrat pinko-chauvinist demican would say" (or words to that effect).
5. Lesson: It does not do much to toss grenades into an echo chamber -- the return fire is part of the self-repair and healing smugness mechanism. Even a playful water balloon is met with mortar fire and assault weapons.

(Huh! I was just spammed by someone mining the whois database and wrote to me as the owner of worthiness.com, a site for which I have published no web but which lets me have trust@worthiness.com as an e-mail and digital-signature-associated identity. Not exactly the domain I want to associate with some weird advertising partnership program, aye?)

~~ orcmid, 2005-08-23T15:52Z

Here's something from an unexpected quarter, on Hollywood Theology that touches on the unbearable seduction of being right.

~~ orcmid, 2005-08-23T16:19Z

Lots of good stuff here, orcmid. THANK YOU! - Nw

I am reflecting on when this conversation became important, as a shocking realization that distrust is killing us. I think it was brought home in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 Election. It came up in the generosity of John Perry Barlow, and how he broke through his immersion in conspiracy theory to get to know his neighbor. Then there's this to ponder.

~~ orcmid, 2005-08-23T17:47Z

Wow. Just Wow!

That was a great call. I have minimal notes -- too busy listening -- and don't want to stop the conversation. Dang.

Because it came up in the conversation, I did a lot of reading on a blog that we discussed. Actually, I thought the narrowness of viewpoint was not particularly abrasive, and the writer made a clear statement of position without calling anyone names. There is a stronger statement about BlogHer and its demographics and it also reflects a certain fixed position on gender identification being confused and physical sex being the whole story. Not a unique point of view, but one that the writer is honest about claiming. And the name of the person that was a surprise is not given in anything that I've found. Lots of other claims to the truth (Michael Jackson is really guilty, etc.)

=== Wow. Just Wow! === (I had to ditto that, sez Nancy) Some of the learnings are starting to emerge for me. My responsibility at the heart. Reinforcement that we all see the world differently. Generalizations are so tightly woven into us they are hard to see. Etc. RICH RICH RICH.

InnerOuter

I want to follow up on something that I was reminded of in today's Us/Them #2 discussion. It has to do with internal state and external appearances and other psychological "stuff." I'm going to start a topic on that. ~~ orcmid: 2005-08-30T21:42Z