Do you stay in a comfy bubble? Does anyone in your life strongly disagree with you about any major issues? Do you only accept opinions that are closely aligned with yours, and malign any that stray too far? If so, do you wonder why?
Maybe it’s my personal history. I’ve been an individualist for literally as long as I can remember, and I say that literally; several severe knocks to my head in adolescence left me with a host of memory issues. As a result, I only have short, sporadic memories of most of my life until about age 23 or so. This has, if I may diverge from my point for a moment, made my recent adoption of Facebook a challenge. I don’t remember some of the people I knew in high school. I’ve been heavily relying on my yearbooks and mostly only accepting friend requests from people I remember or for whom some recollection can be jarred from looking them up. Anyway, I’ve always been the one pain the ass that doesn’t agree with the group, wants to do something different, or refuses to participate at all. Had I voted, I never would have picked a president, congresscreature, city councilidiot, HOA officer, or singing competition participant who won a popular vote. OK, that last one I don’t think is strictly true, but you get the point. As a result, I have always had to defend myself and explain that I don’t want to prevent anyone else from doing what they want to do, I simply want to be left alone.
For the democrats out there (government not party), this is simply not tolerated; if there is a vote, the majority rules and the vanquished must suck it up and do the thing they voted against. I have opposed this type of thinking and had to defend against it as long as I can remember.
People would attack me for not wanting to stay with the group, as if belonging was more important than pursuing my own interests. I didn’t particularly desire the acceptance of my peers, but they set the rules of the game and I was forced to go along. This informed my early anarchism and got me into some pretty bad habits like faking illness, forging doctor and parent notes, and similar shenanigans I would engage in to avoid unpleasantness like going to school. However, I only did that kind of stuff because I could never argue my way out of whatever it was as I was arguing with bureaucrats, and they are the antithesis of individualism. There are few creatures in this universe as immune to a well-reasoned argument, and I smashed my head against that particular wall enough times to realize I just needed to go around.
All of my early attempts at meeting the problem head-on was to make me pretty good at defending my position. I remember specifically that I didn’t want to join debate class because I could never argue a side I disagreed with in a convincing manner. It’s like an old Janine Garafalo bit where she talks about never getting hired for endorsements due to her ironic delivery, “Janine, you sound like you don’t like the product.” I really have a hard time taking the side of an issue I don’t agree with. I have certainly studied opposing viewpoints, I just can’t make it sound like even I believe myself. And at last we reach the point.
I read a post from an old, very dear friend of mine that said this person would not read another page of a book because one of the characters said something absolutely evil and the author was a complete scumbag asshole for saying it. Now, I chose not to engage this obviously childish reaction online because I’d rather have a civil discussion in person the next time we see each other. But the problems I see with the statement are manifest. For starters, the book was written in the early 1960’s (context is important, no?), the character who said the naughty thing spends almost the entire book evolving into a better human being from being a chauvinistic asshat, and finally “the author” didn’t say it; he didn’t even believe it. According to all of the available scholarship on the issue at hand (misogyny), the author considered his wife (and women in general) to be more practical and of a superior intellect to his own, with better reflexes and judgement, and surrounded himself with as many smart, capable men and women as possible; I was lucky enough to meet some people who knew him, and he did not appear to fit the mould in which my friend placed him.
And that is my bias talking, because I greatly esteem the author and I have been reading his books, again, for as long as I can remember. However, the complete shutdown left me with no option to open my friend to the possibility they were wrong and should give the rest of the book a go, especially since their bubble rapidly started posting about how much they agree and how no one should ever read that kind of garbage. I’m a little over 99% sure that if any of the people responding had ever read the entire book they were trashing they might change their minds. But many people have become so insulated from discomfort of opinion that it makes them stop reading a work of fiction because even a character in a goddamned book can say something that hurts their feelings or makes them too mad. I used to think it was the hallmark of good writing to stir an emotional reaction that strong!
Hell, I’m reading The Iliad right now and it is a terribly written and crushingly redundant bit of nonsense, but I refused to read it when I was in school and have chosen to do so now because I felt it was important (I’m still trying to convince myself of that; any help is appreciated). You want to talk about misogyny and non-politically-correct behavior? You can’t do better than the classics. Now that I think about it, haven’t they now been purged too?
