CaringandReal
Posts: 1397
Joined: 2/15/2008
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quote:
ORIGINAL: CallaFirestormBW
While I can certainly respect that there was an issue with your situation, that does not automatically imply that -every- similar style of situation is "bad"... NOR does it even -remotely- imply that the people who get involved in such things are... how did Awareness put it?...Oh, yes... idiots.
It's hard for me to think of a larger (as in prevelant among the population) mental error than the tendency, when it comes to our personal lives, to generalize too much from specific cases. Circumstances, such as personalities, unspoken factors, spoken factors that express themselves in a different way depending upon their combination with thousands of other factors, and all of the complex and often unpredictable combinations that arise from their interaction always alter such cases. When you factor in the sad reality that people use even the words we do have to mean things vastly different than their original sense, then if the outcomes you experienced are exactly like the the outcomes I experienced, I view this as a bit more than a small miracle.
I guess generalizing from specifics is necessary when one's only means of communication is the highly impoverished/compressed method provided by speech, but so often it strikes me, when I see it in myself or others, as magical thinking or wish-fullfilment. We have a suspect motive: we want other people to be like us or, if they are not, to at least be understandable or capable of understanding us. That seems a given of human social nature and it does a fine job of greasing what might otherwise be tense interactions, so we gloss over (or do not ask about) the areas that point out differences. But sometimes this "useful for getting along with others who are essentially mysteries" trait, screws us over, royally, and results in dysfunctional social interactions rife with stupidity and intolerance. The grossest examples of this type of incorrect generalization are of the form you (rightly) critiqued above: "If it happened to me in this way then it MUST happen in this exact same way to everybody else...and if someone insists they didn't experience it in this way, well they are clearly untrustworthy lying scum trying to undermine my far better reality!" (a.k.a. the assertion of other types of expereinces threaten the fuck out of me, because I'm at core, deeply insecure) This assumption, in addition to being one of the clear indicators of deep or unconscious insecurity, is a terribly egotistical one, it indicates a highly imbalanced and extremely dangerous (to one's self, mostly) hubris, akin to that of Icarus's.
That's not to say there aren't patterns out there or ways of behaving that aren't common among people. If there weren't, we probably couldn't communicate at all. But these patterns, I think, are the tip of an iceberg, there's a universe of complexity behind them, in the details, that make one person's apparently cut-and-dried circumstance vastly different than another person's. I think at best when any of us offer advise to a stranger asking a question on a message board, we're guessing. We're making the best guess we can based on our individual experiences, but our experiences may not be their experiences. That's why a lot of different points of view are good to get in response to a question. While five people may respond with "don't touch that! I did and was burned," two may respond with "I touched it and nothing bad happened to me" and one may say, "Touch away! it's a blast!" But if the person given the conflicting answers doesn't follow up (and sadly, almost nobody does this on message boards--they're simply looking for the answer that confirms their own beliefs about the situation) by exploring what makes the first five experiences different than that of the other three and which, if any, matches their own personal situation, then nothing useful is learned.
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"A friend who bleeds is better" --placebo
"How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home." --thomas harris
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RE: Mind your own business - TPE and OSOs - 
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