My Own Problem:
Personally, I have had trouble dealing with people all my life for a number of reasons. I think it’s safe to say that one of those reasons has to do with the way I was raised compared to the way “everyone else” was raised. For instance, the fact that I come from one of the 20% of non-dysfunctional families in America meant I started out with a fundamentally different concept of how people ought to interact with each other from 80% of the people I meet. Add to that the fact that my family is what you could call overly-functional, that we’re so functional that at family gatherings everyone (but me) gets so wrapped up in standing around being considerate of each other and agreeing with each other at least in principle, that it takes gruesome amounts of time for anything to actually get done. Add to that the facts that we look and act like a cross between the Addams Family and the Grateful Dead family, and that we’re an assortment of artists and engineers from just about every corner of humanity, and it’s pretty safe to say that my family is slightly less diverse than the United Nations and sickeningly more unified.
As you might imagine, that has given all of us a very distorted perception of what passes for reality for “everyone else”. Since whatever subjective reality is best agreed upon by the majority of people becomes the de facto subjective reality of the masses, that democratically elected semi-official cultural subjective reality is completely alien to me.
Of course, considering that the subjective reality of the masses has brought us 70 years of global conflict in the past 90 years, I’m in no hurry to join that subjective reality anyway. Unfortunately, since the people who do belong to that reality affect me and the planet that I live on, and do all they can to try to drag me into their subjective reality, if I want to evade that subjective reality, I have to figure out how to stay out of its way. Other people have tried to fight off the encroaching subjective reality of the world, but all they’ve done is to create more conflict in the process. Since the people who practice that subjective reality never stop trying to drag me into it, unless I want to spend my whole life running from it, I have to figure out how to turn their own force back upon them.
Because I’m just one person and the subjective reality of the world is the only way of life most people in the world have ever known, I can’t create a new subjective reality for the world simply by telling everyone, “Hey, your subjective reality is stupid, cut it out.” First all the people of the world will resort to a playground-mentality shouting match of,“Yuh-huh/ Nuh-uh!” Then they’ll demand to know what makes me think I’m so special that I should know a better way than they do. Then they’ll insist that my way doesn’t amount to anything special anyway because it’s just my opinion of how the world should work, and ultimately that’s just a new subjective reality.
Trust me, I’ve tried this…
While it is true in principle that my reality is subjective, the fact remains that my way of looking at the world is based entirely on modern objective science, logic, and mathematics, and most people’s aren’t. Even though my way of looking at the world is ultimately subjective, because it’s more objective than anyone else’s way, it has to be better, because it leaves the least amount of room for disagreement and conflict. One plus one will always equal two, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that, no matter how they feel about it, and no matter what they do to try to convince anyone that it should be otherwise.
Unfortunately, trying to convince the world that my subjective reality is better than theirs would require everyone else to un-learn their own emotional attachment to the only reality they’ve ever known and have faith in their intellectual ability to decide that they’ve been wrong all this time. That’s much easier said than done.