Respect as aloofness, instincts before consciousness

Last time you argued how circumstantial evidence leads to richer interpretations of events.

Since we cannot remember all such pieces of evidence and describe them well, it is difficult to convince others of our interpretations.

Even if we could remember and describe well, most of us do not have the patience to listen to them. Somebody was complaining about the three-hour monologue on a family funeral, the other day...

You are right. That means we should forget about asking others to integrate the information that we give to them.

And yet, they tell us that our judgments are either too optimistic or pessimistic!

If we give a concise summary of an exchange or an event instead, that would necessarily be based on our view of it. For example, we could say, "He was very angry when he left the room," instead of recounting how his eyes looked, how he was breathing, how he turned around, how he grabbed the door knob, how he closed the door, and so on.

Whatever we do to explain better, we will be told that we are looking at it in a wrong way.

And you do look at an exchange in a wrong way.

Are you saying that you are unbiased, but I am?

It was a generic 'you,' comrade.

Why did you dropped the generic 'we,' then?

You see, these small things matter, but we usually do not remember them.

You have changed the focus of our conversation ever so slightly... Anyway, we tend to retain in our memory only the overall impression that the details give us. Plus, there are historical elements in most exchanges.

For all these reasons, I respect the interpretations of the persons involved.

If you are only indirectly related to the exchange or event, your view should matter less for that fact.

Unless you have a very strong reason to present yours as the more plausible, or you happen to have the obligation to rule over them. You could be a guardian, instructor, judge, supervisor, leader, and the like.

Aren't we back to the issue of personality, then?

I'm afraid we are. There will always be people who are pushy enough to tell others that they are wrong.

Overconfident souls do not see anything wrong in bulldozing their way with their opinions. Many are unaware of their might. The ones who are aware nonetheless push through, because they are so convinced of their goodness.

You know, many people like being told how they should think. For them, a person like myself is totally useless, because I don't tell them what they should be doing.

Even if they ask your opinion?

I would offer it if asked, but I always add that the final decision is theirs.

I bet they don't like that either.

To me, they are effectively asking me to play God. I refuse to accept the request because I do not believe that there exists an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent being. If it did, I am certainly not that being.

How can they ever think that you are?

Some are quite desperate. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that they are so unwilling to think for themselves... The conclusion is that when you are decent enough to refuse to be God, people may resent you for that. They will say you are unsympathetic, cold, aloof, heartless and so on.

It's surely ironic that being respectful comes at a price. But I think the problem is that your definition of respect is different from others'.

Talking about respect, I have discovered lately that my instincts in that department are very much---how should I put it---developed. I always thought I had the tendency to overreact in general, but not so.

Comrade, you must admit that there are benefits to getting older. We become so sly that we find justification for everything we do!

Once in a while, I notice that I am acting angrily or offended, and surprised by my own action.

Slyness comes easily, but not maturity. Is this what you are getting at?

What you said is true, but that's not the point here. In the cases that I just described, I examine the situation later and realize that I was reacting to lack of respect.

If that is not an excuse for being rude, I don't know what to say.

Such a self-effacing and self-doubting person that I am...

An oxymoron, comrade. Would you ever trust someone who describes her/himself as nice?

The paradox is that a nice person ceases to be one by admitting so, but it is not rare that we encounter such declarations.

How easily people say, "I am nice," depends on the culture. Whether your "nice person" label should be confiscated upon reading it out loud yourself is culture dependent, too.

We need to make some kind of judgment, and in my world, uttering that line is an unmistakable proof to the contrary.

I thought you have been watching too many Hollywood movies, but you never get used to that one, eh?

Let's say I am so ruthless in my self-examination that most think I lack self-confidence. What they do not realize is that it is my self-confidence that allows me to disclose the results of those examinations.

I can't tell whether this is better than the earlier assessment of yourself. You are obscuring the true nature with convolutedness, ahem.

During an interaction with a person, I sometimes realize that I am all of the sudden angry for seemingly no reason. I am surprised by my own emotions, and that surprise sometimes shows as well. I am struck by feelings of remorse for exhibiting anger, especially because it does not seem to be justified. After the event, I think about it carefully and cannot but conclude that the person that I was with lacked respect and my behavior was in response to that.

How could anyone agree to that kind of argument?

This is exactly what we talked about last time. The other persons' gesture, eyes, tone, etc. indicate that they have little respect for me. They are certainly not aware what these details reveal. In most instances, they do not even know how little respect they have for me. But my instincts pick up the clues before I can clearly formulate in my mind what the attitude of the other party is.

As I recall our previous conversation, you know that it is almost impossible to convince others of your interpretation.

They'll just say I am paranoid and/or rude. But trust me, because I am loathe to be self-congratulatory, I had thought about this mechanism of mine for the longest time.

And you have come to the conclusion that your actions are provoked by others...

You should be happy; I fully accept that many will not understand the mechanism.

Do not despair, the American Psychiatric Association is to release the new version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders very soon.

Did you want to talk about the Americanization of the fields of psychology and psychiatry? If you are diagnosed ill according to that manual, it simply means you are not an average American. As we all know, that can be a very good thing. Most likely, you will be making contribution to world peace for being who you are. Or, you may be labeled mentally ill even when you are not. Think about their aversion to unhappiness and pessimism---it's unhealthy!

Now, now, let's just say that psychologists and psychiatrists need to talk more to anthropologists and sociologists, but they have not done so yet. About being average, we are all ambivalent about it. We find both comfort and boredom in being surrounded by people who are more or less like us.

By definition, most of us cannot escape the fate of being average.

It's more precisely called 'mean' for good reason, my dear comrade.

It shows, here and there

Have you ever noticed that we reveal more of our thoughts than we intend to?

Not all of us experience such under-the-influence moments, you know.

I'm not talking about dropping the guard.

Including the occasions when we become too carried away with the subject and blurt out what we tried to bury deep down?

We may become so engrossed in talking about the effects of unhealthy lifestyles on public finance that we forget that a burden case is standing right next to us. Is this the kind of incident that you have in mind?

We may even exclaim, "We have to do something about those people!"

Do you have a nightmare on that theme, once in a while?

I utter the f- or s-word out loud, and everything stops, as if it were a movie and the projector went on strike. It takes a moment to realize that everyone is looking at me with expressions of anger or horror...

Anyway, we don't have to go that far to say that we communicate more than we plan to. As I said in our last meeting, we can't hide our true feelings. It shows through the way we say things. The voice is one obvious factor. The eyes tell an awful lot as well.

It is easy to see excitement, joy, surprise, sadness, boredom, indifference, annoyance, contempt, fear, and so on in them.

What we look at as we talk is another.

The floor/ground, the ceiling/sky, the face of the interlocutor, the object around her/him, her/his body parts or our own, etc.

Our gestures count, too. We can fiddle with the object that we happen to carry. If you have long hair, wearing a ring or mustache, you can play with it. We may cough, we may straighten our clothes when we start or finish talking, and they all say something about our mood, our true feelings behind the words. We usually don't plan those gestures and most of us have little control over what our eyes convey to others. How the talk was initiated and by whom, what was the topic before and after the part in question---these reveal not so much of mood, perhaps, but related thoughts.

And that is why we always reveal more than we intend to?

When we recount the conversations we had with others, we often fail to communicate the full significance of them because we omit the details.

The look in the eyes, gestures, etc., you mean?

Someone may say to me, "You're overly pedantic," but...

You still have hard feelings about that one, eh? I can see it in the movement of your facial muscles.

The problem with people who give me such evaluation is that they don't let me be me.

Are you saying that the negative remark was based on stereotypes?

Not necessarily, considering the fact that it came from my own mother.

Why did she say such a thing?

She meant it as a piece advice for enriching ma vie sentimentale. But what good is it to attract people by pretending to be a person that you are not?

Isn't that a problem that you have with almost anyone? That people do not like you any more if you reveal your true self?

I wouldn't say 'my true' self, because that sounds like I am deceiving others.

Let's say 'your core,' then.

Don't you think it best if we accept that any relationship is community service for each other?

You mean, all of us tolerate each other and nothing more...

Getting back to the topic of factors besides words, we are not so bad at integrating the unspoken elements. That is, we know from them whether the statement is meant as a joke, serious advice or even revenge. The curious thing is that we are hopeless at reproducing them.

That's why actors can keep their jobs, I'd say.

It doesn't have to be reenactment of the scene. We hear the tone, see the gestures and postures. In theory, we should be able to describe them.

We are bad at putting them into words?

What is mind boggling is that we forget the details in most cases. We cannot recall what we noticed and only remember the overall impression that they gave us.

Someone may complain that her/his lover said s/he was too pedantic, but s/he may not get the sympathy that s/he deserves unless s/he can explain how it was said.

I told you, it was my mother! I myself have experienced and also witnessed others go through the same process over and over. We are certain from the non-verbal cues what the true intentions of the interlocutor are, but because of our inability to explain them convincingly, we are told that we are interpreting people in a wrong way.

Isn't it usually the case that if we insist on our take of the event, we are labeled obstinate at best and psychotic at worst?

Or wishful-thinkers, scaremongers... I had been wondering for some time why quite a few people tell us that we should trust our intuitions and gut feelings.

I thought we are not supposed to.

We are taught to avoid emotional and impulsive reactions. These days, I am inclined to give such responses more credit than before.

Are they the same, intuition, gut feelings, hunches, emotions, and impulses?

They are similar in that they are considered irrational and cannot be explained neatly.

You are saying that so-called irrational responses should not be taken lightly, and quite a few people are of the same opinion.

We are very much influenced by what the ideal scientific methods are. That is, if something cannot be proved with evidence and reason, it has very little or no value.

But if we go astray from that principle, we will be allowing witch hunting.

There is that danger, but ignoring circumstantial "evidence" is also dangerous. The huge problem with those fuzzy factors is that they escape communication, and often memory as well. Our interpretation of a specific event is often based on the observation of similar ones over the years. Usually, we cannot remember enough of them to make our case convincing.

Doesn't it depend on how much your interpretations in general are trusted?

It does. In other words, neither credibility of our hunches to ourselves nor that to others can be established in an instant. To complicate matters, nobody has a static set of reactions, so we are never able to deduce with certainty whether interpretations of reactions were reasonable or not.

A bigger problem is that we tend to think that we know ourselves best, but that is not true. We may inquire a person what s/he was thinking, but the answer can be far from what it really was, and that without attempting to lie.

Another danger is that a manipulative person can sell her/his interpretation to a less manipulative one. For example, the former can ingrain in the latter that s/he is useless.

Didn't you imply above that we have the capacity to detect malice in such cases so as not to believe in it?

I guess we differ in that ability. Most of us certainly become more adept at it as we accumulate various experiences in this world. Anyway, we should not underestimate how much people can pick up clues. I can't conceal disgust and contempt when dealing with insincere statements, and that has been a problem.

What about writing, does it come with circumstantial evidence as well?

Writing is a tough one. It is very easy to give an impression that you did not intend to and be totally unaware of it. Writing has a greater variation than the use of voice, I think, and it is much harder to find out the unwritten elements.

Sometimes little correspondence means laziness on one side or both, not necessarily lack of caring feelings.

That can work in the opposite direction as well. As I said before, if we write frequently to each other, that gives an illusion that we care and understand each other well.

Such illusions are backed by solid evidence such as the number of correspondence per month, whereas intuitions and hunches are devoid of proof of that sort...

I find it interesting that incidental details are often more powerful than our summaries of them, such as "He was very angry," "She was clearly shaken," etc.

But we tend not to remember the details that have contributed to those conclusions!

A few more snags to our claim that instincts should not be taken lightly...

I knew it, I knew it. It's your "Snag Time."

One is that deep-rooted prejudice can be misunderstood as legitimate instincts. Examples are ones based on appearance, including race, gender, and so on.

That one...

Another is that one bad incident can form and dominate our instinct.

A severe case of food poisoning would make you physically allergic to what caused it.

That's a good one. The last snag that I can list at this moment is the cultural dependency of incidental proofs. The other night, I was listening to the dialogue between Karen and Denys in the film, "Out of Africa." At that point in the story, they were in love with each other, but did not know whether their feelings were mutual. I felt a bit confused because their conversation did not seem to indicate that one was interested in the other.

If you mean that there were no too obvious, sugary lines, isn't that the only way of declaring love that you approve of?

I have been watching too many of more typical Hollywood movies lately that I didn't even recognize my preferred way of courting.

Mais quelle horreur !

Exactly... It goes to show that cues may not serve their purpose if you are not used to them.

Are you sure that we should trust our instincts after all?

Maturity transcends cultural boundaries, remember?

'Maturity,' our catch-all word are here to save us!