To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
 
Among the many reasons why people believe we have been dropped here on earth, one reason continues to present itself to me with frightening regularity: it is to teach us lessons. I am not quite sure of the end goal of learning those lessons; whether they are skills that would come in handy in heaven or whether we are given a chance to conduct ourselves better in our next lives, or whatever else it might be, the fact remains that you can’t mistake the lessons that keep punching you in the face. There’s no ignoring them even if one tried, and I do try, to put it mildly. And I do get punched in the face often, and hard.

In the present case, I am still reeling a bit. I have this habit of letting my love of arguing get the better of me. By get the better of me I don’t mean that I become quarrelsome or nasty or try to win at all costs, but I try to push the argument as far as it will go without considering who my opponent is. By ‘who’ I mean it doesn’t matter to me if the opponent is a friend, an enemy, a senior, a junior, a peer, a president, a cobbler, a king, an expert or a novice. This also means that in the context of an argument I meet the opponent as an equal and the validity of an argument to me rests purely on the weight and logic of the arguments themselves and not on who the respective parties are; if who they are, for example an expert, is relevant it would get reflected in the strength of argument itself and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter because knowledge or truth unfortunately does not bow to age or status or qualifications. Well as all this sounds in theory I have learnt that there are some categories of people who are more than happy to call you out for a bout of argument but are not comfortable when you argue with them as if who they are doesn’t matter! It is almost as if they are offended that you are not taking into account their very many years of experience, expert status, accomplishments, official accolades and all of the rest, and the little chit of a person that you are with none of all this grandiosity attached, dare to argue with them as if you are their equal! They are shocked at your presumptuousness! They have come to believe that the argument is only as good as the arguer and the arguer having made it in the world should at least now be able to put up their feet and not keep having to prove their position with troublesome arguments. Why, then, do you ask, do they invite you or provoke you to have a debate because everything they have to say is proven and nothing you have to say can match it? Indeed, why. Well, that’s where my lessons come in. I have time and again been misled into situations where I have had the horror of realising that the person who appeared to love a dialogue for the pleasure of knowledge or truth was actually not expecting someone to have an equal say at all… Most people quickly get a sense of this and play by the rules… but I have yet to learn.  
A thing that most struck me is that a person who reaches a certain position in life through long years of study in a subject may indeed claim to be an expert in it but just because someone else has not reached the same position cannot simply assume that that person lacks the intellect to grapple with or the understanding to grasp the subject. The fact that a person was able to achieve an exalted position may reflect on their abilities but it is not pure abilities and talent that take a person where they are (it would be extremely naïve to think so)…and by the same logic, if a person isn’t in the same league as you it may say less about their natural abilities and more about their opportunities and circumstances. We don’t know. But, the arguments stripped away from all those externalities and entrapments should be able to stand on their own if they come from a position of real strength. The desire to gag the supposedly weak would suggest the opposite.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 5:50 am 0 comments
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