The reason for this annoyance is that I do it all wrong. The other person will spend all of his or her time trying desperately to nail home the point that I’m wrong. I’ll spend all my time ignoring that completely and asking questions in an effort to determine how it is we arrived at a difference in viewpoints. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll shift into trying to determine if a unified perspective was even possible. If that still fails, I’ll move on to trying to see if it we started with the same assumptions. Failing that, I’ll try and discover if there is anything to be gained by continuing to spend energy worrying about it.
This tends to work out great if any of the following are true:
1) There actually is an undeniably correct position in the disagreement.
2) The isn’t any set correct position in the disagreement.
I think that’s why it pisses people off so much. I do pretty much the same sequence of things in any disagreement, and the results are either favorable or a stalemate that I (on my end) perceive as favorable. It’s sort of a cheerful neutron bomb. Let me give you an example of what this seems to be like (from my limited perspective):
Cold War-Era USSR (you): Capitalist pigs! Your civilian cruise ship strayed briefly into Soviet waters! We demand an immediate and unconditional public apology!
Cold War-Era US (me): Hmm? I thought we resolved this already. It was a cruise ship. The captain was drunk. As soon as we noticed the moron was asleep at the wheel, we got his ass out of there. It was a harmless mistake, our bad. But it’s hardly a big deal. The thing was in your waters for about five minutes. They didn’t do anything, and we’ve already corrected the mistake.
Cold War-Era USSR (you): Then you admit you’re wrong! I demand a full public apology!
Cold War-Era US (me): I think you’re missing the point here. If I were to make a public apology, it would sound silly. No harm was done, no one ever meant any harm, and the whole situation was about as threatening as renegade sea otter.
Cold War-Era USSR (you): I demand that apology!
Cold War-Era US (me): What would that gain you exactly? Don’t you think that turning this into a huge media sensation and involving all our friends would just make us look like a couple of children having a pissing contest? We’ve already corrected the problem here, and we did so quickly and cheerfully. Everyone should be happy. I’m not quite sure why you’re not.
Cold War-Era USSR (you): Your arrogance will be your downfall! This means war!
Cold War-Era US (me): Arrogance? My only positions in this have been that I have a moron drunkard captain in my civilian fleet, and that fighting is bad.
Cold War-Era USSR (you): You will pay for your refusal to cooperate!
Cold War-Era US (me): ::sighs:: If you don’t drop this, I’ll neutron bomb all your cities and add any relevant works of art I find to my personal collection. Just drop it already.
Cold War-Era USSR (you): You bastard!
Again, I type this jokingly, intending to highlight that things look a certain way from a certain perspective.
Now I’m going to show you why I feel so good about taking the position of, “Your chosen perspective matters in all arguments, and is really the only thing that matters.” At all times. It’s because we’re both crazy-ass weirdos who have no idea what’s right and what’s wrong.
I’ll bet I would not win any points with you if I started a conversation by saying, “We can’t trust your perspective on this because every time you move your head, you start to hallucinate.” That would be a pretty dick think to say. So I won’t say it. I’ll just offer it up as a hypothetical in that, if it were true, it would really cast some doubts on your perspective on things. While you think about that outrageous statement, focus on the dot in the middle of this picture, and move your head forwards and backwards towards and away from the screen.
If nothing unusual at all happened, we can conclude nothing about your perspective. If you saw something crazy, like the picture spinning to life as you moved your head, well, that would be crazy. It’s a picture. It doesn’t move. To prove it to you, I’ll post another picture.
See? It’s a picture. All the colors are clearly defined as being in exactly one place at all times. It’s fact! Undeniably true. Eminently provable. If you can’t even look at a picture and immediately conclude that it’s not moving, well, it might not be too wise to be spending a lot of energy insisting that you are undeniably right about the other crazy shit you might believe you know.
No comments:
Post a Comment