Eodnhoj7 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 21, 2017 1:09 am
I look around and everyone, both on this forum and in real life, is accusing someone else of some wrong. The truth is that all of us, myself included, do not know what we are really doing.
What would happen in society if people just let people strike them, verbally or physically, and did not respond but kept going? Is simply turning the other cheek the only viable solution for our times?
I know I am guilty of verbally or physically lashing out at people, however even when I "win" I still notice that I still lose. Is it time people are just frank with themselves and admit noone knows what they are doing, because all the things we "know", do not appear to work?
Is mercy the only justifiable solution, considering we are all brothers and sisters stuck with eachother whether we like it or not?
There are two or three principles (or social etiquette / behavioural response principals) to keep in mind here:
1. You feel better when you are contrite, after a period of being feisty.
2. Feisty feels good when you do it, but when you stop, or even during it, you feel bad about yourself.
3. In our social arrangement prevalent in the species, across cultural and international boundaries, you have to strike a balance; too much power will corrupt you (too much bashing of others), and too little power will make you depressed (when you are everyone's stepping stone or whipping boy).
Human emotions are reactive. If I am nasty to a person, and I feel justified in being nasty to him, and I feel good being nasty to him, I can only do it at a price of empathizing with him, how difficult or hard it must be for him to endure my nastiness. Thus, my nastiness reflects back on me, I poison my own self's emotional ambiance by being nasty to others.
Being good to others feels really good, but it makes you vulnerable to other people's nast. So tread carefully, you may become a victim very easily. It is true that other people also feel better when they are good to others; but there are plenty of other considerations why one can't always be nice to everyone. Such are greed, a fight for survival, sexual desires and their fulfillment, fighting for promotions or for a better job in the job market, getting favours from your parents, teachers or superiors. And sometimes good is boring; you just want to stop it, because you are getting sick of being good.
So while good is good, it is mostly counter-productive in advancing your social standing if you dish good out indiscriminately.
Being fair to others (both turning the cheek and selectively not turning the cheek at other times) may be the answer, but you can't practice this randomly: best if you are nice to those who support you, and whose behaviour you want to reward, in a hope they shall continue, and nasty to those who oppose you or hinder you in your endeavours, in the hope that they will stop their (to you) disruptive, damaging behaviour.
However, in some cases you feel very, very strong in your desire to disrupt or diminish other people's opinions, and if they feel reciprocally but their opinion is opposing yours on the topic, then there will ensue a great deal of bashing each other without any resolution. No behaviour will be changed in these instances due to positive or negative reinforcement. These instances come up when the topic comes to fundamental world view questions. Such as a belief in a god or not, abortions, smoking, liberal gun use by the conservatives, the belief or rejection of the mechanics of evolutionary principles, and sexism, racism, politicism (when hatred is generated by the mere knowledge that there are other parties out there with different platforms / leaders from what you prescribe to), and religionism (this is a fight between sects of a religion, not between believers in gods and atheists).
An interesting experiment was observed by one of my acquaintance. He noticed at a national Monopoly tournament that the guy who won was a nice guy, a genuinely nice person. His liking everyone was immediate, not forced, not faked (unless he had learned how to do it flawlessly -- a salesman's most powerful sales tool). When he first looked at me, he gave me a hug, and said, "Hi, (my name)", without any pretense. He was taller, and I suspect he was gay, but there was no forwardness in this hug; this was a display that he was genuinely happy to see me.
So he won the tournament, because INDEPENDENTLY OF THE GAME he was nice. People gravitated toward striving to be liked by him. His display of nuggets of liking someone was precious to the person. Maybe he would not pay money for it, but it was precious enough to pay Monopoly money for it. People paid social "money" to him, to extract nuggets from him. Social graces are not bought by money, anyway, but by return kindness. (A sole exception to this is prostitution.) This is why friendships are precious: the currency you pay for them is so totally different from what we normally value high as having worth or a price in our society today.
The lesson of the story is that if you slap someone on the face, and give him a broad and happy smile at the same time, a sort of reassurance that your slap did not come out of anger or other motives that drove you to intentionally harming him, THEN AND ONLY THEN will he turn the other cheek.
(P.S. This works in child rearing: a six-to-twelve year old child's behaviour will be easier to control, by you, if, at a time when punishment is dished out to discipline him or her, you explain that the disciplining action is not due to anger, and you still love him/her, but you are forced by the "rules" to dish out this disciplining action, in order to make him or her behave properly. Whether it's to make him or her look both ways when crossing a busy street, or to make him/her not touch strange people's genitals on the street.)