Only Friends will Understand

It is hard for someone like me, who places a high value on thinking, to live in a culture in which most people believe that thinking before acting does not matter much. People who believe ideas do not matter much.

Most people around me jump into action before they even understand what they are doing. It is difficult for them to understand people like me because I function differently. I want to know what I am doing before I act.

In politics, the only question many people ask themselves is whom they will vote for. They treat the immediate outcome of an election as the only thing that matters.

At work, people rush to solve the problem at hand rather than analyze what is happening so they can not only fix the current problem but also prevent future ones by identifying the essential root cause of most of the issues.

There still are many great people out there, but the fact is that I live in a pragmatist culture in which the immediate result of an action becomes the standard by which its merits are judged. I struggle to be understood because most people are pragmatists, and, as such, they end up rejecting the need for understanding and the use of principles for actions. Of course they are not fully consistent with their rejection of knowledge, else they would be already crazy or dead. But for the most part, they are increasingly rejecting principles, becoming increasingly more confused.

At work, it is easier to demonstrate the effectiveness of looking for patterns, identifying root causes of problems, and acting to eliminate these causes. People are more likely to recognize my value. Suddenly, recurring problems disappear, and they know that if I were not there, things would remain broken.

In politics, and in many other areas, however, this is much harder to demonstrate. While I often look for the principles that govern things, most people around me do not even understand what I am trying to do. I find the few who care and stay close to them. But I know people like me are unconventional. I am not sure how much evidence I can offer to prove my point, other than asking people to look at the public debate surrounding politics and the partisan, tribalistic madness it has become precisely due to the fact most people truly believe thinking does not matter.

I watch people discuss politics simply by comparing politicians, as though the available options were not themselves a consequence of the beliefs the culture holds about what is right in politics. Politicians merely offer what people want. Politicians are not offering their answers. If politicians were to offer their own answers with integrity, they would risk losing votes. So instead, they offer whatever will make enough people feel good about electing them. In a pragmatist culture, politicians appeal primarily to people's emotions, not to their reason.

When I discuss politics, I usually approach it through more fundamental questions, such as:

- What makes a human life good?

- Why do we need a government?

- Why does honesty matter?

- What is worth fighting for in politics?

I ask because I am really interested in finding out good answers that will allow many problems be largely solved. But not many people are interested. The time when these were the questions asked by the culture at large—and when people honestly sought their answers—is long gone. It belongs to a distant past, about 250 years ago.

In today's pragmatist culture, I realize that most people do not really care about these questions because they believe answering them will not solve their immediate problems.

The same thing happens when I stop to think about how to organize my team to solve a problem. People, in general, seem to care more about taking action than about thinking about solutions. They genuinely believe there is no time to ask questions about the essential cause of a problem or about the best way to approach it. That tendency has only grown stronger over time.

Most of my colleagues seem to want results without the need for thought. So they act, they experiment, they fail, and eventually someone who has carefully thought through the issue brings greater order by turning sound ideas into reality. Or things improve by chance because they happened to try something that worked.

When good ideas finally prevail, many of these pragmatists believe that simply because they were executors of the plan, they were solely responsible for bringing about the solution.

Thinking is hard. It requires effort. It requires method. It requires asking questions precisely because you do not yet know exactly what is going on and you are trying to find out.

Of course, experimentation is necessary, but that is not my point. My point is that what one does with the data that experimentation provides is often deemed irrelevant. And doing that requires intellect and method.

I live in a culture in which most people do not even agree on what thinking really is. People either happen to have their own answers they take for granted, or they never even ask themselves what thinking actually means.

So what happens when I ask broad, difficult questions such as what thinking is, what happiness is, what is the purpose of government?

Silence.

Three possible explanations come to mind:

1. They do not believe these questions can be answered. At most, they think that on certain topics one can only offer personal opinions.

2. They do not believe finding answers to these questions matters.

3. They consider the questions important, but they do not believe that discussing them with me is worth their time.

The best thing I did during this process was to assume that the third possibility was the correct one.

For far too long, I believed I would be the one offering them answers. That was a contradiction. They were not even asking me questions, and whenever they encountered a contradiction in their views, I offered them a lecture. It did not work. The fact is that either they are interested in what I have to say, or they are not. That is simply reality.

So I concluded that if my ideas are ever to become interesting to them, I first need to understand what is happening in their lives. I need to understand their interests and investigate why they do what they do. I need to find what about them interests me, and finally become interested in them. Only then can I ask questions they are willing to explore because I will understand what matters to them.

In doing so, I may discover values I share with others. I may discover what is good about them and why they are interesting people to me. Only then will I be able to act as their friend.

Only friendship creates enough trust for me to offer my opinions and challenge their mistakes. But if correcting people's mistakes is my primary goal, I will not make many friends. Most people are not looking for a coach or a teacher on answers I care about when they talk to me.

So the next time I speak to someone, I need to ask myself a simple question: Am I looking for a friend and ally, or am I looking for a student?

Depending on the answer, I will either become more effective at making friends or more effective at making people avoid me. The fact is that most people are not looking for teachers who are striving to be understood.

It is hard to find honest people who cannot tolerate holding falsehoods and contradictions. But it becomes even harder to find them when, upon meeting me, they conclude that the only way to deal with me is to become my student.

So let people confront their own contradictions, with my help if they ask for it. I expect this from my friends when they deal with me. Why should I not expect the same from myself?

I confess that this realization has made me think that finding friends is not as difficult as I once believed, even in a culture like ours. After all, philosophy helps me live; but philosophy shall not be life itself. There are many values in the world that others share with me, answering big questions may not be one of them for them at a given time.

Looking for students did not work for me. I now prefer looking for friends. Only them will have interest in what I think, afterall, they share certain goals with me, want to know how best they can find them, and may even have better answers than mine to share.

Only my friends will understand me. If I want to be understood, what I need is not students. What I need is more friends.