A Bit of Grey
Most people today have a strong sense of right and wrong. It strikes me that this sense — which is essentially, as you say, a moral judgement — that it’s infiltrated every realm of our lives and that it’s risen to a sort of fundamentalism, not just in moral or religious issues, but in politics and intellectual matters.
How often have you categorized something/someone as the following:
Right /Wrong
Introvert /Extrovert
Success/Failure
Love/Hate
Quite often? And how conveniently have you chosen a particular side and have become envious of the opposite one? Again the answer is same.
So if I think I’m right about something and you’re wrong, there’s a lot of friction, and I might think of you as an enemy or at least a rival. I may even sever ties with you. When we start thinking of everything in an absolute manner, it messes up because it makes our emotions more extreme than they need to be. And it definitely invites more conflict.
Now, another choice would be to compromise, to say, “Look, I think you’re wrong, I think I’m right, but let’s meet in the middle.” It seems to me like the art of compromise has really been lost. So, forget about even admitting that you’re wrong. I’m just talking about having the ability to budge a little bit. The most obvious examples are in politics right now, but I see evidence of it everywhere. There is such a hesitation to go back on things that we said before just because of our inability to compromise.
We either think that we are having our best time ever or on some days we are so burdened by our emotions that it feels like the world is coming to an end.
In many ways, social media has been a big enabler of this. A divide has been created in every possible domain.And once we have a disagreement on values and facts ,there’s not plenty of room left for agreement on anything. Perhaps covid-induced lockdowns too have been an enabler of this. It has simply inflated our existing traits and have made us more rigid to a certain type of behavior.
We need to be able to find more common ground. Disagreements can be turned into negotiations. Conflicts can be turned into compromises. Everything need not be a zero-sum game. As the saying goes, you don’t always need to agree, so long as you agree on the ground rules of how you disagree.
Perhaps we can take some lessons from the Yin Yang which is a Chinese philosophical concept that describes how obviously opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world. And how they exist in harmony with each other rather than in contradiction.
Maybe some of my points would have resonated with you, maybe some haven’t but it's better to end this with a “maybe” rather than a “surely” or a “no-way”!
