The other night I had a conversation with a friend that was sparked by him expressing his disgust with and contempt for the anti-Obama crowd in many of its incarnations — the "birther" crew, the "tea party" people, etc.
It was actually an entry point for him into a far more universal flavor of disgust, since his next comment was along these lines: Given that people are gonna believe what they want to believe anyway, what's the point of bothering to try and tell them anything?
It took me a good long while to respond to that.
People believe what they want to believe. Okay, why? Because they have a certain sensibility about themselves, a specific self-image. When the self-image changes, so do the beliefs.
Most people vigorously defend their images of themselves as a specific kind of person — and I'm willing to wager at least some of that is because if they change, they'll feel like they've broken a covenant with the people around them who depend on (or expect) that self-image to persist. If your mother suddenly throws her travel valise into the back of a rented car and disappears for a year to "find herself", you might think of her that much less as "mother" — especially if she says the same thing.
Self-images are mutable. They can change without warning, from the outside or the inside, for good or ill. We get into the habit of reinforcing certain views of ourselves — typically for the sake of survival, but sometimes because we perceive (however inaccurately) that certain traits need to be preserved at all costs. If you're lucky, you can wake yourself up from that kind of reverie. Sometimes you need more than luck, though; sometimes you need a push from the outside to have your perceptions changed.
This is why telling them something matters. You have no way of knowing what sorts of changes can come about from even the most incidental interactions between people. You're a part of a process of remaking everyone around you, even if that process is invisible.
The older and more cynical part of me, the closet Andrei Codrescu if you will, has his own rather jaundiced view of this: Somehow we went from having friends for the sake of having friends, to having friends for the sake of improving ourselves and each other. Part of our compulsion to root out everything Bad For Us, I suppose. Time was we accepted the fact that people were flawed and ignoble creatures with something approaching saintly grace. Now anyone who is not stepping out of a confessional or into a twelve-step program is trouble. It is the compulsive Puritan wine of old poured into a new bottle, probably with a California label. If you have a friend who is always and forever trying to make you a "better person", run like hell. He has probably spent so much time on the analyst's couch that he thinks everyone else will end up there in time, too.
As much fun as I had writing something that curmudgeonly, I know it's only partly true. Self-improvement does not have to inevitably spiral towards Therapy Culture, and one of the unspoken corollaries of "acceptance" as we used to know it was "acquiescence". The truth's in a halfway house somewhere between these poles, as always.
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Honestly, I think people are too self-centered to worry about breaking a perceived covenant they've made with their friends and family. Why? Because I've seen people alienate themselves from family with a belief system rather than attempting to fit in. Not just defend a belief but become defensive about a belief that wasn't shared.
Instead I think they're afraid of the discomfort of uncertainty...
Whenever I have extremely existential conversations with people I always have one or two ideas that make people say I'm uncomfortable with that, I've been set with a certain type of ideals for a long time and I don't want to consider anything else, and the truth is I get this as much from liberal thinkers as conservative thinkers. It doesn't really matter, nobody seems comfortable with anything that changes their world view.
Even the atheists are religiously devoted to a simple world view and are adversely disposed towards to thoughts that go beyond the readily observable, and the religious are atheistic in that refuse to encompass simple truths into a preconceived notion.
People have sooo much anxiety about the idea of not knowing that they'll give strangers bad directions for no other reason than to deny their own ignorance or defend a idea they're certain of to the death.
A lot of it, I think stems from the ego. We build ego as we go along, and I think ego reaches it's height in late adolescence, after that point people use the ego as a frame of reference for everything that they see going on in life. It forms a series of prejudices, like you mentioned.
And unfortunately we begin to lack the ability to perceive the world out of context. Psychologists have a terrible time trying to separate us from the experiences of our past to see things as they truly are.
It's like the Zen idea that your first experience of a given event or thing is the purest. This is true, I think, but it must be your first idea, something you experience without any prejudiced thought at all, and then intuitively, I think we that we can see experience something true and accept it.
But I also think that, like most Zen ideas, it's a largely impossible thing to do...but that's rather the point, it's a path you're on rather than a destination you've reached.
But it seems that in order to change you have to undo the ego, you have to go from being to becoming and embrace that as a way of life, which in turn means embracing the chaos of uncertainty; better sooner than later as well, since chaos will sneak up on you if you aren't ready for it.
Then again I tend to think trying to become a "better" person is flawed as well, since then you put a value on everything you do and you attempt to become this other set person that you envision off in the distance of your life. It's better than that if a person is to attempt to change, that they embrace the idea of changing for their entire lives and just adjusting to each new piece of unavoidable truth that they see in their lives.
It's kind of the essence of wabi-sabi, isn't it? Seeing what you might think is an ugly little flaw in life, and then accepting the beauty in it's truth. But at the same time, not becoming such a scab-picker that you can't get past flaws to see true beauty. But the idea of it is that revulsion is as, or perhaps more, enlightening than admiration. Maybe because revulsion is the shock that awakens you to something you would otherwise simply accept without any contemplation. It forces you to recoil and regroup.
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