On Questioning

Day 24

Why do people hurt themselves? Or prehaps, why do people do evil to themselves? I ask in this form because there is a saying I have heard that goes something like : 'No person believes that they are evil.' That is, nobody believes that they act without good intentions. I'm not entirely sure that is true, but I think that I might be able to weaken the idea to something that is mostly true. I might rather say that people always think that their actions happen for a reason. We might very well intend to harm ourselves or to act for 'evil' reasons, but it is rare that we truly say that we did what we did for no reason at all. After you do something, anything, I can ask you 'why did you do that?', and you will understand what I am asking. Now, people might try very well to get out of the question, saying stuff like “i don't know” or “no reason”, but I've found that if you dig deeply enough, we can, just about always, come up with a possible reason. We might not like that reason, but it is conceivable that there is a reason. With that in mind, I want to talk about a general phenomena that I have witnessed several times.

The phenomena I am talking about is that of talking to someone who takes everything you say to be an attack. They don't seem to understand that you can be asking with a neutral and unbiased point of view, out of pure curiosity, to be a devils advocate, in order to clarify, or because their logic actually has a problem. You can't get a single word across sometimes because they persist in either misunderstanding you, denying that they could possibly be wrong, or rapidly accuse you of being either dumb or some sort of 'ism' or 'ist' which obviously means that your ideas aren't worth entertaining in the slightest. I've encountered this attitude from bad teachers, armchair psychologists, conspiracy theorists, the pseudo-intellectual, political activists, racists, and a whole host of other people. I realize here that I am generalizing, but I think that mostly simplify it down to, in general, extremists. Extremists of one sort or another, for one cause or another. I think that this arises because of the maxim that “The more you fight your enemy, the more you become like them”. If you doubt and questions yourself, then your enemy is yourself and the more you fight yourself the more you become like yourself. On the other hand, if the enemy is not you, then the more you fight them the less you becoem like yourself. The more you take the brave path, the stronger your convictions become because they have been well tested. The more you take the fortress path to stronger your convictions become because they have a strong core, but the more fragile they also become. The more you take the path of retaliation the stronger your convictions become from the outside but the weaker they are to any sort of self-questioning, any sort of inside pressure.

I think that there is a general process that people follow when it comes to having these sort of views. Now, I don't know that I understand any of the sorts of people that I talked about earlier to a great extent. I can certainly talk to them and understand their point of view, but I don't always know the history, the reason why they became the way they are. However, I do know the history of the place that I grew up in. I think that the tendency to become a person who attacks every questions about their convictions is a sort of personality trait that takes a long time to form. Generally speaking, children are much more able to change their basic beliefs and to deal with deep questions. I think that this is because children know very well that they don't know everything. Of course every kid has some version of “but my mom says that...”, which you can't move them off of, but I don't think that is as set for the average kids as it can be for the average adult.

What I want to talk about is the type of person that I might say is living the ghetto lifestyle. I said that I grew up in a ghetto before, a place generally poor and run down with a generous amount of social issues. I also said that as I grew up I realized that, though we called it a ghetto and we had our problems, things could be much worse. While, me might say that: There's the ghetto folk, and then there's the deep ghetto. Generally speaking folk, what I might characterize myself and my environment as when I was a kid, I found to be well-meaning and nice. We had a rival town just down the road, but they were our rival because they were rich, not because of race. There was rampant theft, but generally with fists or the occasional knife, not guns. Marijuana was the street drug you heard about people trying in high school, not cocaine. The occasional crack house, but not an epidemic of them. We had homeless, not murder-hobos, and bad parts of town filled with apartments and run-down ruins, but also good parts of town that had nice lawns and people who had owned their home for the last fifty years. It wasn't paradise, but as a town full of ghetto folk, it wasn't that bad.

Now, most people growing up wanted to get out of town. Or at least, wanted to live in the nicer parts of town over the bad parts. I say again: most people. There were people who did not want that. People who were very happy living lives that appeared from the outside to be full of misery and stress. Lives where you relied on having kids constantly to get money from the government in order to live. Lives where you barely lived paycheck to paycheck, every single week for forty years, and bounced from job to job every six months. Lives where the only meal you regularly had was from your elementary school. Lives without the slightest veneer of a stable home life. Lives where you never learned to hold onto your money and so you spent every cent you had the day you got your paycheck. Lives where you were always a week late on rent, always begging for a ride from someone, always trying to run a scam, and always telling a 'poor me plz help its not my fault' sob story to everybody you ever met.

For a short while while I was in university, I worked at an after-school program at a local middle school. I particularly remember two bits of conversation that I had while I was there. Once, one of my co-workers told me a story about something that had happened earlier that day. He said that he had messed up something, thought there was a problem when there wasn't, and had to come down on a kid. He later found out that he was wrong, and that the kid had been telling the truth. So, he went over to the kid and apologized. According to him, the kid said that that meant a lot. In fact, that that was the first apology that the kid could every remember having from an adult. This was rather flabbergasting to me and my co-worker, but as I thought back on adults I had known when I was a kid, I could think of a few people I knew that wouldn't have ever apologized to a kid, to anybody, because that would be admitting that they had made a mistake. In short, I realized that I believed the kid when he said that he had never received an apology from an adult before. The second conversation was when I was talking with one of the kids I looked after. I don't recall the exact conversation, but I do remember that the kid said, during the conversation, that he used to be interested in making movies. Used to be, until his mom told him one day that he should stop because he had no talent and he could never become a movie director. With my upbringing, I was literally speechless for a few seconds after hearing this. I'd never been told that in my entire life. That there was something that I couldn't do? Absurd. My parents and the school weren't always the most supportive of my endeavors, but they certainly didn't tell me that they were impossible. The idea of work hard and you'll make it, and you can be president of the country if you want to be, were ingrained pretty deeply into my psyche as a kid. Whatever my dream was, if my mother or a teacher had looked at me and told me that I wasn't good enough and could never achieve such a thing, I would have looked at them like they had two heads. The idea that a parent would crush a kids dream like that by telling him he wasn't good enough and would never be good enough? While, without calling the kids mother all the things I wanted to tell her, I went ahead and told the kid that he could do just about anything he wanted to. Maybe not be the fasted or strongest person on earth, but he could certainly be faster or stronger than 90% of the human race if he worked hard, and that something like a movie director certainly isn't out of reach. I have no idea how deeply the message penetrated, but I tried a little.

That incident stuck with me for a while, and I thought about it for a few years. What I realized is that I recognized, if not the exact situation, very similar situations. Have you ever heard of someone being called not black enough because they didn't watch football, and didn't want to kill cops? I have. Have you ever seen a kid mocked by his 'friends' because he managed to achieve a good grade in a class? I have. Have you ever seen somebody being attacked for 'abandoning his roots' because he wanted a better life than his parent had? I have. What I have seen an heard is people being attacked for trying to be different. I don't mean being different as in being different, but different as in trying to be different: wanting something different. Having different ideas about the world, what it was, where its going, and what it should be like, then the people around them.

Occasionally, very occasionally, this goes in what I would call a negative pattern, where somebody just really wants to be ghetto, and really idealizes that sort of lifestyle. The rich white kid(Ed Wuncler III) from the Boondocks might be a good example of this. Normally though I see this in a positive pattern, where somebody, like me, wants to get as far away from the ghetto life experience as possible. Admittingly, I'm characterizing them as positive or negative because of my preferences. Well, the people who live like this, who try to live a life better then the one they started with, are not too difficult to understand. I think that we can all understand the positive drive for a better life. Sometime what people think is better for them isn't really, or they just don't understand what they need to do to have that better life, but that's more a practical issue than a theoretical one.

What is a little harder to understand is the group that wishes to pull them back. The group of people who, when you try to have a better life, keep trying to pull you back in. The ones who think that you're being fake or trying to be better than you are. Often these are the people or the social positions that you admired as a child, that you thought were good and grand. Now though, even if you don't realize it yet, you are aiming past them. You are trying to escape them and their influence, but they just wont let you. An uncle that needs money now or he'll lose the house, a roommate who can't pay rent yet can order take-out every other night, a brother who can't keep a job for more than two days, a friend who constantly invites you over to ditch work and have a drink, or an acquaintance whose every third sentence is a lie, or a neighbor with a wall-shaking base beat at 2am, on a Tuesday, just before your 6am class. People who degrade you for trying to be better, or who resent you for not having their problems. People who may very well be good people, but who just don't understand you trying to escape. Sometimes in order to achieve your goals you need to change yourself, and sometimes you need to change your environment.

Now this reaction of attack in response to somebody else trying to escape a lifestyle, is, I think, related to the automatic and excessive reaction of attack to any criticism that we remarked on at the beginning of this piece of writing. What I think happens goes something like this:

We have a world where we, and everything in the world, has a place. We think that the world works in a certain way, and that there are certain things in the world. When someone criticizes us, that person is criticizing the world. They are questioning the way we think things are, and thus this questioning of the world is an attack on the world. People on the brave path can handle these attacks with little issue, because they have been stress-testing their world constantly anyway. Existential, emotional, and physical doubt is just another Wednesday. They can deal with all sorts of questions. People on the fortress path can handle these attack fine, as long as they are not attacks on their fortresses, which are the weak points of their conception of the world. They can deal with certain sorts of questions. People on the path of retaliation cannot handle attacks on their world because their world is incredibly fragile and experiences high levels of instability upon any stressful testing whatsoever. They cannot handle any questions, and either those questions are ignored or they are outside the generally shell-like structure of their world. Any questions which are seriously considered by a person on this path are seen as threatening the structure of the world entire. As questions are gems and gems are things in the world, and things in the world are part of the structure of the person's shell of beliefs, either a question is old and already part of the shell structure, new and inside the shell structure threatening to bring the whole thing down, or outside the shell structure and will do great damage if it is let into the shell. In short, this shell structure is under great stress and the smallest disruption can be catastrophic. Unlike the fortress and brave paths, there is no fail safe. Its all or nothing for the world, and very hard to compartmentalize issues. Everything seems to be a big issue.

Now, remember that I said that in the world everything in the world has a place. So, for someone who is on the path of retaliation, you have a place in the world. By your color, accent, clothes or history they judge you, and judge you to be something. They think that they know you, and that you can't be something different. If you are something different, then that difference threatens the entire world. What is at issue is not your strength, but their weakness. This is why they attack, because by trying to be different, by being like them and by then trying to be someone else, you are not just being someone else. You are also, by your very existence, questioning them. Being is the action. When someone unendingly attacks for apparently no real reason over a tiny difference of opinion, drags you down because you want to be different in a way that in no way harms them, or refuses to acknowledge the possibility that your reasonable and pertinent point is worth replying to, then its not because they can't handle the truth. We don't know the truth yet. It is because they can't handle the question.