Q : Playing The Devil’s Advocate here. Today there is a lot of fervor around Identity, and there is one strong of thought that people can never truly understand what it is like walking in the shoes of Others.
Some may ask why A White Man would seek to tell the story of a Woman, from her perspective, instead of just sticking to what he knows, Being a Man.
How authentically Real is that Character or Story, etc.?
GM: It’s important to air these feelings for debate.
I must admit, with all respect, that I COMPLETELY disagree with the idea that We cannot understand one another.
Firstly, there’s a major obvious problem about coming at things from this perspective — if fundamentally, we cannot •truly• know or have any meaningful opinion on what it feels like to be X, then we may as well STOP LISTENING to ANYTHING ANYONE Else has to say about their personal experience, on the basis that it can only be irrelevant to our specific lives!
If I can never •truly• understand you without walking in your shoes and vice versa, WHAT’S THE POINT OF LISTENING or talking to anyone about our experience?
WHAT’S THE POINT of writing stories, or protesting, or making art if experience cannot by its nature be communicated and UNDERSTOOD by ANYONE who has NOT shared the experience of The Artist, or The Writer?
I think we all know it doesn’t really work that way in The Real World. We don’t need to BE a thing to have some understanding of how it operates.
People can be great veterinarians without personally experiencing the day-to-day inner lives of dogs and cats.
I can read Solzhenitsyn and shed empathic tears for the inmates of the Gulag without having to reprise their exact experience.
To think otherwise might be, I suspect, a Symptom of Narcissism Painted into its Inevitable Corner, its Private Echo Chamber – destructive, divided, atomized, individualistic to the point of self-abnegation – and indicative of late stage Osiris pathology
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And you know, we actually DO understand one another in so many ways. We can imagine what it’s like to live someone else’s life –— or we can have our imaginations enflamed by well-told tales of Other People’s lives and thrill to the ways they resonate exactly with our own lived experience. As a Writer, I KNOW this to be True.
We’ve been observing one another’s behavior and drawing conclusions since The Dawn of Humanity. People AREN’T so complicated or new that the basic functions remain a mystery.
All our plays, poems, songs and stories are a record of our attempts to understand ourselves and one another.
The fact that Greek drama or Shakespeare still speaks to us is evidence that basic human nature has remained fairly consistent for thousands of years.
We figured one another out a LONG, long time ago.
And ultimately, I’ll say again, We are ALL the same organism. What we’re seeing is ring fingers fighting with thumbs, eyelashes screaming that eyebrows can never understand them! To point that out is probably an anathema in this current time of narcissistic inflation but it will be understood as a fact of nature in the end.
Maybe I’m Wrong and we’re all fucked because humans are a kind of cancer-creature and our only purpose is to destroy each other and all other lifeforms on Our Planet… there’s still time for Agent Smith to be proved right!
I think everyone should have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We can all learn from one other but that means communicating; that means starting with the assumption we do have a common basis for genuine understanding even if our specific circumstances can never be repeated or totally understood by anyone other than ourselves.
We all hurt, we all feel joy, we all get turned on, or scared.
We all experience loss, and lack of self-worth and feel badly treated by The World at times.
And I understand why everyone should talk and tell stories from their own position you know but it’s also very useful – and a major human talent – to imagine how other people feel and consider how the world might look through their eyes.
And you do that by staying informed, listening to voices even when you disagree with them –—and by employing empathy and imagination to put yourself in their place as best as you’re able.
These are difficult times. I’m not a guru. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. There’s seven in a half billion people and it often seems they all fucking hate each other! Yet they all want everyone else to agree with their tiny, restricted, localized points of view.
And they’ve all got a piece of ground to defend against perceived foes. I get it, but ultimately, we’re all one thing, one massive organism that’s going through difficult growing pains at the moment, so maybe we need to start thinking about what makes us alike, rather than different.
I hope so
GM: Well, this is part of the boiling process. Capitalist consumer culture has clearly reached its limits and we either advance to a more efficient, stable, less suicidal and aggressive engagement with other people and our environment or we go extinct as a species, taking all the whales and tigers and gorillas with us, before we even figured out how to talk to them and hear their stories! There are few options remaining.
The current questioning, the judgmental audit of where we are and how we got here, is a Horus thing. We can only hope we sublimate from here via Ma’at into something more nurturing and sustainable.
It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.
GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. The echoes of the Inquisition, accusations of ‘wrongthink’, the return of Original Sin, the demonic glee taken in any stumble or falter from the approved path seems almost mediaeval. It’s terrifying. The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by rules that grow ever more authoritarian and specific every day. Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading power by the Osiris energy of the last 2000 years, now gone rotten and unsustainable but trying harder to keep everything and everybody under increasingly deranged levels of control in every area of our lives.
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