How to Make Sense of Other People
(or, How to Make Sense of the World, part II)
Other people. I only just scratched the surface of other people two posts ago. I had been thinking about something else before I started to write that, and then I got overruled by the logic of my ideas, and just went with it.
Where I want to go with the idea of relating to other people is to consider what it means that everyone has freedom and responsibility for their own feelings and thoughts, and to some extent their actions. First, let me just admit that having personal freedom does not mean absolute freedom. We all exist within limits and boundaries, both environmental and internal. We are all ignorant of things, by the nature of the physical and mathematical limits of information storage imposed on our brains. Our knowledge of facts and our understanding of those facts are always limited. We all start out knowing virtually nothing, having only instinct and wiring to start with, and from there, the information flows in and we process it as best we can.
There is good and bad information, too, so that in itself is a limit we must work within. But I am not an absolute pre-determinist. There’s no fun in that outlook, and logically it goes nowhere. (Emotionally, it’s a cop out excuse for absolving oneself of responsibility, so I don’t feel predisposed to follow it. Read my last post.) If life is in fact pre-determined, so what? There’s nothing you can do about it, in that case. By observation, I can act in response to my decisions, and I am aware of making those decisions, so whether the outcomes of my decisions are fully determined by my instincts, coupled with the nature of the information I have my disposal, is not that important to my argument. Recognition of personal responsibility is an attitude. One can either adopt it or not. I recommend adopting it. One’s sense of personal power and ability grows enormously.
By adopting an attitude of personal independence of mind, one can then take a new look at other people in order to understand how they behave, and consider new approaches when trying to relate to them. The most important one, which I admittedly forget frequently, is that people generally do what feels good to them. They do things that they like doing. If you consider this as a premise for observing human behaviour, you make all kinds of interesting discoveries, or at least you’ll invent some interesting explanations. As with freedom and determinism, there’s a fine line that can be walked. The most immediate observation about whether people like what they are doing is that it contradicts my premise, because people are often likely to deny that they like all of the things that they do. They don’t like the tasks that their jobs involve. They don’t like their own bad habits. But if you don’t immediately reject my idea, then an interesting conclusion that can be drawn from it, which is that, in fact, people are usually ambivalent or conflicted about most things (maybe everything), and that somewhere in the maze of their minds they have threads of like and dislike for things. However, the most important conclusion is that, despite contradictory feelings and thoughts, if they do something, it’s probable that they prefer that action to some other action. That, in some sense, they like what they are doing.
In any case, in the world in which I and most people I know live, the opportunities are many. People usually have a choice, and you can usually take it for granted that they are going to chose the choice that they think is best for them, based on their instinct, their knowledge and their understanding of their options. People do what they want to do, within the context of their situation, as they understand it. The idea can be reduced to the interpretation that most people do what’s in their interests. You only have to figure out what their interests are. By that, you might have a chance of understanding them.
In contrast to the idea of the human tendency to act selfishly (and I’m sure in that phrasing, what I’m saying isn’t remotely radical), is the fact that many people do not like what other people do, at least some of the time. In other words, we are acutely aware that other peoples’ interests are not necessarily the same as ours. Also not a radical concept. But it’s easy to forget that people don’t simply do things to thwart us. They do things for reasons which to them seem completely reasonable, sensible, and natural. Not always, assuredly. The better we understand ourselves, the more we come to understand our own limits and that often we work under the influence of feelings that may not be strictly rational, and with information that is usually far from complete. But we do our best, or so we like to think.
The most difficult problem with trying to understand people is to acquire enough information about their mental state in order to follow their logic. Those people need to be able to communicate to us, and we need to be able to interpret what they tell us. What is often a problem in human relationships is the continual assumption that our motivations are obvious and that the reasons for our actions are self-evident. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. People’s behaviour is astounding, and their thinking is inscrutable. If you assume anything else … you know the saying. Or do you? How can I know, unless you tell me or I have some sense of your origins and your experiences from observation?
People do what they think is right, usually because they like it or at least prefer it, or possibly because they prefer the outcome from doing it. Obvious, but not simple. So despite the fact that I don’t like advertising, and it amazes me that people willingly watch advertising and work in the advertising industry producing advertisements, the world is full of advertising. Undoubtedly, other people must like advertisements. People follow bizarre religions, participate in strange relationships, commit unspeakable crimes, work at insufferable jobs, and do many, many other things which I would never consider doing. They like to do those things for some very difficult to understand reasons, and I simply do not like to do those things at all. I do like doing things that many people would find miserable. Life is like that. People are like that.
From making sense of people we then should consider trying to get along with other people, which is the point of understanding them, I believe. I have more thinking to do before I can discourse on that subject.