I’ve been working on this aphorism for years, and I think I’ve found the best way to say it:

The bartender who politely listens to your story is not interested in who you are, but the bar brawler picking a fight with you is.

Americans generally believe it is good not not care what other people think.

Saying “I don’t care what you think” is often seen as a sign of independence, toughness and spirit. We say it with a tone of pride, as if we have demonstrated a virtue. When we are bothered that someone thinks poorly of us, we scold ourselves for caring so much what others think. We shouldn’t care about that.

But not caring what others think is a formula of disrespect — almost its definition. Look at the etymology of re-spect: back + look. If I look at you and I see someone who looks back and sees me, I respect you. If I look at you and see something whose seeing is irrelevant, I disrespect you.

When we say someone has disrespected us, what we mean is that they have *demonstrated* disrespect. But the disrespect was there prior to the act, and the suspicion that we are not respected is profoundly alienating. The sin of disrespect is committed in the heart before it is committed with word or action.

I find this exaltation of disrespect alarming. I am alarmed not only because disrespect is painful to the disrespected and degrading to the disrespectful, but because the institutions most vital and essential to our way of life are all ones that depend on respect to function and flourish. How is it that a nation so utterly dependent on respect has embraced disrespect as admirable? Can we really adhere to an ethic of disrespect and hope to thrive as a nation?

If you doubt that our national institutions all assume and require respect, here is a list of some key examples:

• Our market, at least when it functions properly, is a place where companies work to develop products and services that customers prefer over other possibilities. When competition gets fierce enough, companies will go to extreme lengths to figure out exactly how their customers see the world in order to do a better job of appealing to them. This is an extreme kind of respect.
• Our democracy, when it functions properly, forces candidates to figure out what their constituents want from them and to explain to them how they intend to deliver results. The incumbents must demonstrate how they have delivered or explain persuasively why they did not deliver or risk being voted out of office. The candidates must care how their constituents think and what they think of them. In a healthy democracy, disrespect costs a politician their job.
• Our judiciary system also requires persuasion. A lawyer attempting to persuade a jury of peers is by proxy attempting to persuade the public of the truth of her case. Again: respect.
• Our legislative process, despite what so many Americans have come to think is a collaborative design process performed legislators of differing opinions. All design processes require extreme respect among collaborators, each of whom looks for novel resolutions to apparent obstacles which permit miraculous possibilities of alignment where before there was only mutual objection and frustration. But our public — who believe a good politician is one who already knows what is best, who grandstands on Uncompromising Principles, and obliterates opposition through sheer force of will, and who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of it — elects leaders who exemplify the disrespect ethic, effectively hurling human monkey-wrenches into our delicate political mechanisms. Is it any wonder things have stopped working in Washington? And it seems that many of us think the solution to this problem is to find new, even more potent forms of disrespect so overpowering that they can just sweep aside what remains and get things done autocratically in the manner of a sole proprietor of a private business, who calls all the shots, makes hard calls and… doesn’t have to care what anyone thinks about it. “My way or the highway.” (Where is the highway in a nation? Deportation? Jail?)

These are some of our key liberal-democratic institutions, but it is not even a complete list.

Can we  afford to continue to exalt disrespect? Is it possible America’s worst troubles are symptoms of disrespect? Are we perhaps even dying of disrespect?

And can an individual citizen do anything about this?

I think much of the damage is done individual-to-individual. Like it or not, when we converse with other people, we represent our political positions. When we show someone disrespect, we do so on behalf of who they think we represent. When you converse as a member of a political party, a religion, a race, a profession, a generation, a philosophy, a stance on some issue, or whatever — you represent a group. You become a concrete experience — a touch-point, as we call it in the design business — of something otherwise abstract and intangible. To represent your group is an enormous responsibility if you think about it.

If you are persuaded at all by what I am saying, you might want to meditate on three questions:

1. How often do you catch yourself admiring disrespect?
2. Have you reflected on whether disrespect is a good thing to admire?
3. How many times a day do you feel or show disrespect, versus feel and show respect — especially to those who disagree with you?

I think this is the most important thing I have to say right now. Struggling with disrespect and overcoming it is more complex and difficult than it seems on its face — it is, in fact, a discipline on the order of religion — but simply questioning the ethic of disrespect is a crucial first step.

Our national elections are no longer about which person is most qualifed to lead or which candidate’s policies will work best in our pluralistic but unified nation. 

Increasingly, our elections are referendums to determine whose worldview defines our national identity, and consequently which of us are real Americans and which of us are imposters who wish to degrade or pervert it. 

Perception can miss a reality because of darkness, blindness, distraction, hiddenness, or remoteness. 

• Darkness is obsurement due to absence of medium. Absence of light makes dark. A vacuum makes silent. 
• Blindness is a failure of reception. Failure of sight is blindness. Failure of hearing is deafness. 
• Distraction is a failure of attention. The eye is stimulated but vision doesn’t see. The ear is stimulated, but hearing doesn’t hear. 
• Hiddenness is a concealment of a reality by other realities. An object is hidden behind another object. A sound is masked by noise. 
• Remoteness is a vanishing in distance. A faraway object is too tiny to see. A faraway sound is too faint to hear.

Understanding can also miss a reality because of darkness, blindness, distraction, obscurity, or remoteness. 

• Darkness is an absence of medium — ignorance — lacking language or concepts needed to comprehend. 
• Blindness is a failure of reception — stupidity — mental weakness. 
• Distraction is a failure of attention — inattention — non-detection of patterns and connections. 
• Hiddenness is a concealment of realities by other realities — confusion –interference between unconnected concepts and confusion of categories.
• Remoteness is a concealment by distance — incuriosity — failure to see relevance. 

Liberal democratic institutions stand on a foundation of liberal democratic popular philosophies. The liberal democratic philosophical foundation is sheltered by the liberal democratic institution built upon it. This structure is the home of liberal democratic life, the place that sustains the life of its inhabitants, but also a place maintained by them.

In theory, Yogi Berra should have said “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.” In practice, however, he did not say it. 

Nobody is the person you think they are; they are the person they actually are. Only the latter is a being who can be loved. Emotion toward the former, however intense, however positive, is not love. 

The root cause of today’s conflicts is what has been the root cause of conflict since the dawn of human existence: we do not know how to relate ourselves intellectually, practically or morally to that whom we are not. We do not understand metaphysical relation. 

Because we do not understand metaphysical relation we do not know how to think metaphysics, and we make the dire category mistake of thinking about metaphysics. Because… how else do you think anything besides thinking about it? And with mistaking failure to answer for receiving an answer we are trapped in transitivity, like a chicken trapped behind a chalkline. We do not know how to know otherwise, so we know the only way we know how, and that way is utterly inadequate. We cannot step over this chalkline, so we stand with our backs to it and look in the other direction. 

That is, we turn our backs on God. 

That is, we succumb to fundamentalism, that miscarriage of religion that cannot imagine it is not the epitome of religion. 

I am paraphrasing Levinas again. 

Micro-omniscience is knowing everything there is to know within a worldview with a frisbee-sized horizon.

ex. “There is no arguing with the micro-omniscience of a 23-year old libertarian.”

You defy [my current] understanding. I cannot continue both to understand my world and to understand you. You do not fit inside my soul.

I am faced with the most fundamental choice. Will I break open my soul? or will I bury you in mother-of-pearl?

If all reasonable and moderate minds (even ones in conflict with one another) hear your words as spoken by a friend, that might be a sign that you are on the right path. And if unreasonable minds, hearing those same words, all mistake you for their their vile opposite, that might be an even better sign.

Truth is a quality of assertions, not of that about which assertions are made. But the fact that an assertion can have degrees of truth with respect to reality is important. I believe this is what is meant when people insist that “there is a truth”: there is a reality about which true or untrue things can be said. 

However, I am a pluralist, and this complicates things. Worse, it is a metaphysical pluralism. This means that I believe in a reality about which true or false things can be said, but that this reality is not reducible to any truth or any number of truths. No matter how many true things are known about even the simplest realities, the truth of that reality is not exhausted. More true things remain to be said. 

Further, as truth is something that belongs to assertions we make, we can only assert the truths we know how to assert. What we know how to assert is limited by the conceptualizations we have at our disposal. Concepts are thought-making thoughts, used both for making realities intelligible and for making assertions made about realities intelligible. Understanding realities and understanding what others say about realities* is limited by the concepts we know how to use.

An average quantum physicist could tell Aristotle myriad new truths about a rock, but before Aristotle could understand these truths he would need several decades of conceptual infrastructure removed and several centuries of conceptual infrastructure bestowed. With this conceptual infrastructure he would grasp the truths of the rock and of the physicist*. 

The most unnerving thing about concepts is that until we know how to use it to understand realities, it is inconceivable. An inconceivable concept does not exist to us, until suddenly it does exist. And each time we acquire use of a new concept (perhaps in an effort to grasp some particular fact), the new concept provides us new understandings about myriad other realities, and maybe about reality itself, as a whole.

The best indication we have that something inconceivable exist to be understood is that someone tells us that it exists. But this is a strange faith, and a faith that rests on a foundation of another strange faith — that new truths can irrupt into our souls and change everything, all at once, in inconceivable ways. The entirety of existence can, at any moment, undergo a transfiguration that, prior to the new conception, is literally, technically inconceivable, instantly populating the world with new truths, new kinds of beings.

Mine is a metaphysic of profound and inexhaustible surprise.

—-

* To understand a person, to know the truth of who someone is, we must understand the truths of the person. Both are inexhaustible. We can never finally know another person. The best we can do is to want to know and to want to keep knowing forever. 

This desire transfigures what could be taken as epistemological futility into an inexhaustible supply of new, surprising and sometimes disturbing things to learn.

File under “New Ways to Think about Love”.

Or file under “TL;DR”.

Hello…?

Understanding a person means understanding how that person understands — especially understanding how that person understands other people, and how they understand.

These meta-refractions and meta-reflections of understanding understandings of understandings can extend only so far, and this extent might be a good candidate for that vague quality we call “depth”.

Language is a tool for making social realities. 

Epistemological privilege comes solely from working diligently and systematically to understand — accepting the help of qualified teachers, observing, asking questions, testing, revising and re-revising. This kind of effort is motivated by the realization that one’s current understanding is not yet good enough. People who think they already know everything worth knowing lack this motivation and do not put work into improving their understandings.

…Or at least, this is the general rule. As with all rules, however, there are exceptions. Here is a partial list of exceptions:

• Some people have the privilege of being born into a marginal category and get to see the world through the clear lens of otherness. These lucky unlucky people, deprived of hegemonic coddling,  get to experience a rawer world. Knowledge is the consolation prize for an uncomfortable existence.
• Others are born into a situation where the truth is known and taught. If you are one of the few who have been taught the true truth from an early age you are a truly fortunate person.
• Others are just somehow born wise. Are they “old souls” who won their understanding in past lives? Maybe the universe chooses some people to be teachers? Or maybe nature just produces genius for no reason at all? Rational explanation may be impossible.mNobody taught them what they already know, yet they do know.
• Others have had the truth revealed to them, usually through a shocking and traumatic event, sometimes chosen, sometimes inflicted. And part of this revelation is the insight that the event itself was destined.
• Others are humble and have realized that  what a person really needs to know is really not that hard to understand, and that things that are too hard to understand are things that aren’t worth knowing. This kind of simple humility is shockingly rare.
• Sometimes it is a combination of two or several of the above factors.

In is important to stress that these exceptions are so rare that it is safer to assume they do not exist at all.

I personally know only two people who definitely know the truth. I suspect five or six others might know, but I have not yet been able to confirm it. And, of course, I know many people who think they know but are definitely mistaken.

1. Hunch – a wordlessly sensed possibility
2. Intuition – a hunch made articulate (gate: articulation)
3. Hypothesis – an intuition supported by informal evidence (gate: evidence)
4. Experiment – a hypothesis put in testable form (gate: operationalized as test)
5. Theory – an experimentally-confirmed hypothesis (gate: affirmed by test)
6. Fact – a theory that has been tested sufficiently that a community regards it as true (gate: community acceptance)

To a xenophobe, any foreigner is repellant — but the xenophilic foreigner (who values foreignness as an important kind of transcendence) is exponentially foreign and deserving of exponential aversion.

“I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to say, but actually it is not relevant to this discussion, because…”

“I don’t know exactly what you mean, but it does not answer the question I posed to you, which is…”

Both of these statements signal an attempt to shift the mode of a conversation from pluralist dialogue to rationalist interrogation.

Menckenating – v. To believe that which one cannot understand cannot be understood because it is nonsense, and then to demonstrate how “the emperor wears no clothes” by exhibiting samples of apparently obscurantist language in order to justify refusal to seriously engage what is, in fact, ideas that are plainly fully-clothed to those who have successfully overcome the limitations of objectivist thought.