There's a funny feeling in the air this week.
Two of my friends have ranted on their weblogs about arguments, people who either don't understand or refuse to listen, and how it has negatively impacted their lives.
I've had an ongoing rant about this for years, and since two of my friends are choosing this week to air their views, I thought I might make the attempt at offering my viewpoint based on my experiences.
NOTE: This is not a rant. This is an observation.
First, check out what my friends have to say: Quixote at his website and Petra on her livejournal.
Quixote mentions a couple of things in his article. "Some years ago, before my exile, a group of friends and I..." followed later on with "...I have an undeserved reputation for being argumentative."
Now let's have a look at one of Petra's statements: "...don't you fucking sit there on your smug little twenty-something ass and fucking tell me I'm negative. You have no right to say anything at all until..."
To my mind, both of these people are actually talking about the same thing. Allow me to illustrate with a chapter from my own life:
A recurring theme with me used to be the Inability To Shut Up When Silence Would Best Serve Me. Most notably, these instances would involve my opinions about people, which is why it's relevant to the above two cases.
The first such case was a guy Quixote refers to as "Eeyore." The guy is fucking negative, okay? Also paranoid and damn anti-social. I was the first person in our circle of friends to say "Hey, this guy is always a downer and is always throwing cold water on everything." I confronted the guy about this-- and he stalked off in a huff, saying he was now "quitting the group" of friends. Well, fine and good, right? Not so fast. Half the people in the group ran after him to console him, and only the most passive stayed behind with me.
Later on, I was called immature and an asshole for being so "cruel," and was "socially disciplined" by being ignored for a few weeks.
Today, years later? Most people avoid this person and agree with my sentiments.
Another case: There was another guy I knew who hit on every single girl in our circle of friends, stole other guys' girlfriends, cheated on them, manipulated the guys so THEY felt guilty about him being bereft of the girl he'd stolen, while he then began hitting on the latest girlfriend of whoever happened to be in the room.
I called him a manipulative bastard and manage to catch him in a lie and prove, empirically, that it was so.
My best friend told me to quit being such an asshole and to grow up. And the kicker? This was the guy who'd had his girlfriend stolen. Once again, I was cast out of the social circle and avoided like the plague.
Years later, this guy is now again one of my best friends and Mr. Manipulative is commonly referred to as "an asshole", a "black hole," an "emotional vampire" or quite simply "the worst point in my life."
See the pattern here?
It's happened twice more since then. And both times, I suffered pain, ridicule, and scoffing-- with utterly NO support from my friends, leaving me alone and out in the middle of the lake where the ice is thin-- all because I spoke up.
So what's this have in common with Petra and Quixote? Hang on. I'm getting there.
In his classic The Prince, Machiavelli said: "...there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm (indifferent, uninterested) defenders in those who may do well under the new. "
Simply put: "If you rock the boat, be prepared to be thrown over the side."
Let's distill it down even further: "Don't rock the boat."
Which is really the crux of my problem, and Quixote's and Petra's. It's not that we were wrong to say what we said. It's not that we had a weak position to our arguments. It's, quite simply, that our timing was off.
Is it Newton's Laws of Motion that state: "An object at rest tends to stay at rest?" Regardless of who said it, it holds true not only for universal physics but for humans as well.
We don't want to move when we're comfortable. And yet, it's also easier to keep going once we've started. Put these two opposing factors in the same room and you have irresistible force meeting immovable object-- and well, you can see where this is going.
Quixote's problem of arguments is, to me, this: He may have been right, but he didn't weigh the cost of how much the argument was worth vs. the desire for his friends to remain undisturbed. His "exile," as he puts it, is directly the cause of the human "pack" mentality to shun those who disturb the peace, whether it's a false peace or not. Quixote rocked the boat and so Quixote was ostracized, as in the case with me and my friends.
Petra says negative things as a response to the negative happenings around her. Whatever else is going on, people notice only this: What she speaks makes them uncomfortable-- and so they'll do whatever they can to shut her up. The reasons for her negativity aren't important; only the fact that she says them out loud and so therefore she must be silenced.
Also check out her response to this stimulus: "You have no right to say anything until..." She does to others what is being done to her because what they're saying makes her uncomfortable. She's in motion, y'see-- and she's going to tend to stay in motion until the force that moves her is removed and she's once again at rest. Until that time, other forces moving against her are attacked.
Like me, she behaved in a manner contrary to her peer group's comfort-- and so she's been ostracized.
You may remember in a previous post I referred to a passive-aggressive Cult Of Lies.
This is a lot like that.
Was Quixote wrong to argue his point? No. Was Petra wrong to decry that which caused her pain? No. Was I wrong to point out the negative or destructive behaviour around me? No.
And yet we were wrong; we chose the wrong time to say what we said.
Human acceptance is, and always has been, a function of time. It's easy to say Vietnam was an unjust war NOW; sure, people will disagree with you but they won't try to censor you the way they would have done in 1968.
It's easy to say Hitler is a bad guy NOW, but try saying that if you were a German -- especially a JEWISH German-- in 1938.
What we say is accepted or rejected based on when we say it. So what we need to understand is this: If no one else seems to be voicing our opinion, then we must assume we are alone in it, and realize that the time isn't yet ripe to speak out.
If our opinion is being voiced and agreed to in quiet groups or behind closed doors, the time is not right to speak out.
If the situation is intolerable and we feel we must say something, we need to realize that such an outburst could cause us to be cut out of the herd, chased from the pack, ostracized.
It all comes down to picking your battles, and asking yourself how important the issue is to you. And what I've learned from my own experience is that most of these battles just aren't worth it-- so I keep my mouth shut and I stay happy and comfortable.
Just like everyone else.
In closing, I'll mention my latest encounter: I waited five years before I decided that the issue was important enough-- and I still got ostracized for it, although I was prepared for that eventuality. Once again, it involves a person-- this time the girlfriend-soon-to-be-fiancee of a former best friend of mine.
She is, and continues to be, the most immature, crass, classless human being I've ever met. She is utterly without intelligence, wit, or charm. She is devoid of worth. In short, she's a bitch.
Everyone agrees with me. Even when they're being nice! But since I spoke up first, all the evils of the world are laid at my feet. And they continue to whisper behind her back, to complain and rant about how disgusted they are with her and her behaviour, but they do nothing.
Eventually, though, I expect to receive a phone call telling me that the ice has been broken and everyone agrees with me and hey, how have I been all these years? And I can wait.
After all, I've got time.
Of course, this isn't necessarily so. It's just an OBSERVATION.
It's time to tackle a topic that has been pissing me off for years: So-called "Open Marriages."
And let's not confuse "Open Marriage" with Polyamory.
Polyamory is a stable relationship between more than two people, ie. a man and two women, or any "threesome", or the whole Mormon seven-wives ideal.
Please note that I used the word stable.
An "Open Marriage" is when two people want to get married but leave their options open to the possibility of having sex with people outside the relationship.
What an utter, total crock.
I've got to ask: Why bother getting married? Why don't these couples just stay unconfirmed and remain "open?" Why go through all the bother of a ceremony? After all, isn't marriage supposed to be a closed relationship?
Oh heck no, not in today's progressive age of cooler-than-thou flexibility and you're-just-not-hip-enough-to-get-it social trends.
See, these people think they've reinvented marriage. They must. Otherwise, they'd just stay roommates or common-law or whatever the relationship was before they Tied The Knot-- a slipknot that can be easily undone, by the way, to accommodate other people walking in an out. Hell, why not just call it the New and Improved Revolving Door Marriage?
Now I've seen these relationships in action and I have to admit, for the most part, they seem to work. The people in them are, by and large, happy. Or at least they think they are.
But are they healthy? Mentally and emotionally? Now there's a question.
Closed marriages (for us boring run-of-the-mill people) take work. They take effort. And I'll grant you that not many of them succeed (what's the statistic these days, fifty percent of all marriages fail within the first year? Right.) But at least the people in them are invested in each other. They made a commitment that's supposed to last, even if in reality it doesn't.
Now, open marriages don't have that commitment. How could they? There's no pressure whatsoever on anyone. Hey, sure, they've got the same piece of paper that says they're a couple, but when the going gets rough they can go shack up with their boy/girlfriend until they feel like coming home again.
"But the relationships last longer because they're more flexible," argue the New Age Marrieds.
Of course they would. There's zero pressure in them. And if they do get pressured, they can always get a new boy/girlfriend to go have sex with to ease the tension.
Open marriages are an insult to the institution of marriage. They're a slap in the face to those of us that strove, cried, and actually worked things out because to us, there was no option of just saying "Whatever!", throwing up our hands and finding solace in our latest Flavor Of The Month.
There are two huge factors that I'm noticing in the open relationships I've observed: Laziness and Fear. Laziness as in one partner not wanting to bother with the demands of the other partner; they just wave the partner off to go satisfy themselves with whomever so they can get back to doing what they were doing.
Fear of being abandoned if they make any demands whatsoever or impose any boundaries on their significant other. Folks, that ain't healthy. In a relationship, you should feel SAFE, not passive. You should feel you have the right to say "unacceptable!"
(Note: Having "Veto Power" over your spouse's choice of girl/boyfriend of the week isn't safety. It's compromise in the face of being alone and having to find a more stable spouse.)
"You crabby old bastard, Agent M," the new age relationship fluff bunnies say. "You just don't like it because it's new/you didn't do it/you're unhappy/ it's not something you would do!"
No, kids-- I don't like it because it's unhealthy. It enforces no boundaries, does not promote responsibility or maturity, and pretty much lets you get away scot free with things no real marriage could possibly withstand. Grow up.
Hey, this is only an opinion. But at least it's MINE.