"When a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake."
-Shimon Peres
How much time and effort do you think is required to substitute lousy 2-way Black & White solutions such as: "Either diminish the friendship because of mistake(s), or ignore the mistake(s) for the sake of friendship" with a profound one as a third solution: "Keep the friendship as it is, AND admit/correct the mistake(s)"? What's the required level of maturity held by two friends that enables them to find (or at least, examine the possibility of) The Third Solution?
Monday, July 27, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Independent (Free) or Selfish?
In this post, my focus is on selfishness as a potential side-effect caused by achieving independence or freedom. I think the level of independence or freedom we attain is positively correlated with the amount of attention we pay to our “selves”; therefore, highly independent people are prone to selfishness.
Think about a neighbor whom you depend on for a daily ride to work. The dependence creates a bond between you and your neighbor, and the bond brings in the attention to the “other”; thus, selfishness steps back.
On the other hand, in our odyssey to independence, the main point of interest is the “self” and we seek routs that provide it with freedom. We may lose, break, or replace many of our ties to people, society, organizations or any other entities that we depend on. As the ties loosen up, the amount of our interest and attention is reduced: We don’t care about those subjects as much as before. At all decision points, independence of the self has the priority #1; therefore, we are heavily concentrated on the “self” and oblivious to the “others”. That’s about the time when individualism kicks in, followed by selfishness.
Talking about the sequence of Dependence->Bonding->Caring, some people fake independence by reversing this sequence. To pretend to be independent individuals, they replace Caring with attacking, invalidating, or humiliating the entities that they depend on - or seemed so in the public eye. It’s similar to an exaggerated state of denial. Let’s take an example from a larger segment of the society: governments. Iran is certainly dependent to the west to restore its economy. Foreign investments are needed to renovate oil wells and industrial infrastructures; modern technologies to upgrade communication networks; or even fuel to get the cars moving on the roads. However, the Iranian officials pretentiously claim independence by challenging the west and considering the sanction resolutions as “pieces of trash paper”. Such fake independence is only a big lie or a result of self-justification.
Moral of the story? We need some extra effort and attention not to be driven by the selfish side of our nature in our journey towards independence to avoid the sweetness of independence be ruined by the bitterness of selfishness and isolation.
Think about a neighbor whom you depend on for a daily ride to work. The dependence creates a bond between you and your neighbor, and the bond brings in the attention to the “other”; thus, selfishness steps back.
On the other hand, in our odyssey to independence, the main point of interest is the “self” and we seek routs that provide it with freedom. We may lose, break, or replace many of our ties to people, society, organizations or any other entities that we depend on. As the ties loosen up, the amount of our interest and attention is reduced: We don’t care about those subjects as much as before. At all decision points, independence of the self has the priority #1; therefore, we are heavily concentrated on the “self” and oblivious to the “others”. That’s about the time when individualism kicks in, followed by selfishness.
Talking about the sequence of Dependence->Bonding->Caring, some people fake independence by reversing this sequence. To pretend to be independent individuals, they replace Caring with attacking, invalidating, or humiliating the entities that they depend on - or seemed so in the public eye. It’s similar to an exaggerated state of denial. Let’s take an example from a larger segment of the society: governments. Iran is certainly dependent to the west to restore its economy. Foreign investments are needed to renovate oil wells and industrial infrastructures; modern technologies to upgrade communication networks; or even fuel to get the cars moving on the roads. However, the Iranian officials pretentiously claim independence by challenging the west and considering the sanction resolutions as “pieces of trash paper”. Such fake independence is only a big lie or a result of self-justification.
Moral of the story? We need some extra effort and attention not to be driven by the selfish side of our nature in our journey towards independence to avoid the sweetness of independence be ruined by the bitterness of selfishness and isolation.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Self-Assurance or Self-Justification?
“I am a good driver, he jump out of nowhere”; ”I studied hard enough, the test was a wack”; ”I was qualified for the job; the interviewer was a dumb”; ”I am a responsible employee, the company is a zoo” …
Have you ever been in any similar situation that you needed to justify an event? Do you think it is a positive attitude to justify our actions in one way or another? I think that to some degrees, as long as we are in the arena of self-assurance, Yes! Maybe, I am a skilled driver, and the accident had nothing to do with me; I was well-prepared for the test, and the examiner did not have enough time to come up with a well-designed test; I maintain all the job qualifications, and the interviewer had a different background; … maybe …
Self-assurance is an optimistic view of events that protects us from regrets and losses, and helps us to stop blaming ourselves and move on; however, if we incautiously exceed in applying this attitude, we’ll end up in the other side of the spectrum, which I call self-justification or self-deception. It happens because taking an action or occurrence of an event that is in dissonance with our beliefs or self-image creates internal "irritation"; therefore, we tend to use self-justification to fade the irritation by interpreting the action as a match to our beliefs, instead of admitting the action was a mistake or the beliefs were wrong.
Self-justification is a negative attitude because it wipes out the opportunity to learn from the mistakes by running the vicious cycle of mistake-> self-justification-> action. Self-justification gradually enters us into this loop, and without our notice, it starts rotating us in this circle so fast that not only it makes us blind to the reality, but also it gets the chance to create its own fake world of evidences and beliefs. Judgments and decisions are powerful tools employed by self-justification engine to label and categorize people and events (“out of nowhere”, “wack”, “dumb”, etc.) to create a false reality. Then, it convinces us believe in the false simply by making us close our eyes to the truth or distorting it. Self-justification also enforces the memory to distort or purely forget the past events that do not fit in its world. It’s always amazing to hear a self-justified person’s version of a story!
Finally, I think self-justification is similar to brain-washing: The influenced person either is blind to the truth, or distort it in a way to proof his network of erroneous beliefs; therefore, he always resists to leave his world of fallacy.
Have you ever been in any similar situation that you needed to justify an event? Do you think it is a positive attitude to justify our actions in one way or another? I think that to some degrees, as long as we are in the arena of self-assurance, Yes! Maybe, I am a skilled driver, and the accident had nothing to do with me; I was well-prepared for the test, and the examiner did not have enough time to come up with a well-designed test; I maintain all the job qualifications, and the interviewer had a different background; … maybe …
Self-assurance is an optimistic view of events that protects us from regrets and losses, and helps us to stop blaming ourselves and move on; however, if we incautiously exceed in applying this attitude, we’ll end up in the other side of the spectrum, which I call self-justification or self-deception. It happens because taking an action or occurrence of an event that is in dissonance with our beliefs or self-image creates internal "irritation"; therefore, we tend to use self-justification to fade the irritation by interpreting the action as a match to our beliefs, instead of admitting the action was a mistake or the beliefs were wrong.
Self-justification is a negative attitude because it wipes out the opportunity to learn from the mistakes by running the vicious cycle of mistake-> self-justification-> action. Self-justification gradually enters us into this loop, and without our notice, it starts rotating us in this circle so fast that not only it makes us blind to the reality, but also it gets the chance to create its own fake world of evidences and beliefs. Judgments and decisions are powerful tools employed by self-justification engine to label and categorize people and events (“out of nowhere”, “wack”, “dumb”, etc.) to create a false reality. Then, it convinces us believe in the false simply by making us close our eyes to the truth or distorting it. Self-justification also enforces the memory to distort or purely forget the past events that do not fit in its world. It’s always amazing to hear a self-justified person’s version of a story!
Finally, I think self-justification is similar to brain-washing: The influenced person either is blind to the truth, or distort it in a way to proof his network of erroneous beliefs; therefore, he always resists to leave his world of fallacy.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Choice or Decision?
This topic is sort of relevant to my previous post. I was talking to a friend about the similarities and differences between Choice and Decision, and found it interesting to post it here. I don't emphasize on the terms I use, but the concept.
The similarity between Choice and Decision is obvious: You pick one (or many) options out of a pool of available options.
But, here is the difference:
In making a choice, you make the above selection, while you are still "open" to other options. You are still capable of seeing and acknowledging them.
In making a decision, you make the selection, while you "kill"the other options. You are blind to a portion of reality - which are the omitted options. It's interesting to know that the root of "decide" is "-cide" which means "the act of killing" in Latin. Some other words with the same root are suicide, homicide, and pesticide.
When I value the openness to the omitted options, I am NOT suggesting the hassle of continuous re-evaluation, the feeling of dissatisfaction with the selection, or the hesitation of time and energy required to pursue the selection. Here, I am talking about acknowledging all options, regardless of the selection result.
Finally, as usual there is no clear line between the two; they are pretty much located on the two ends of a spectrum. I think living in the Choice side of the spectrum helps us to avoid being Judgmental and protects us from Self-Justification. Judgment and self-justification occures when we can't live with many paradoxical options or signals around us; thus, we make a decision, not choice, to eliminate the internal dissonance. That's why I think this topic is related to my previous post.
The similarity between Choice and Decision is obvious: You pick one (or many) options out of a pool of available options.
But, here is the difference:
In making a choice, you make the above selection, while you are still "open" to other options. You are still capable of seeing and acknowledging them.
In making a decision, you make the selection, while you "kill"the other options. You are blind to a portion of reality - which are the omitted options. It's interesting to know that the root of "decide" is "-cide" which means "the act of killing" in Latin. Some other words with the same root are suicide, homicide, and pesticide.
When I value the openness to the omitted options, I am NOT suggesting the hassle of continuous re-evaluation, the feeling of dissatisfaction with the selection, or the hesitation of time and energy required to pursue the selection. Here, I am talking about acknowledging all options, regardless of the selection result.
Finally, as usual there is no clear line between the two; they are pretty much located on the two ends of a spectrum. I think living in the Choice side of the spectrum helps us to avoid being Judgmental and protects us from Self-Justification. Judgment and self-justification occures when we can't live with many paradoxical options or signals around us; thus, we make a decision, not choice, to eliminate the internal dissonance. That's why I think this topic is related to my previous post.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Smart or Judgmental?
I guess most people are proud of their aptitudes in identifying the personality types of people around them by observing their behaviors and habits. After all, who does not want to be skilled in the magic of instantly knowing everything about a newly-met person, or predicting an acquaintance’s behavior under certain circumstances?! This aptitude is usually found in a group of smart people known as socially smart, street smart, or a trendier name such as emotional intelligence adept.
Here, I’d like to talk about the side-effect of being smart in dealing with people and their personalities. I use Judgmental as a term to describe the negative side of this aptitude. Precisely, a smart person is judgmental when he rushes to conclusion using limited number of observations or “signs”. In the first sight, such definition of judgmental sounds positive, and to benefit from the “less is more” rule, in which I believe; however, this rule has some prerequisites that are not usually satisfied in the process of perceiving personalities. That’s why a judgmental mind leads to false conclusions.
Smart people are capable of recognizing very tiny details in the behavior of people around them. They capture these “signs” and use their smart minds to analyze the signs and transform them to a higher level piece of information: Facts. The smart mind works based on a set of pre-defined facts and trained rules. I’d like to use terms “analysis” and “perception” when the smart mind is running consciously or unconsciously, respectively. The judgmental mind kicks in when the smart mind “overweighs” the sign, rules, and facts while analyzing or perceiving.
The judgmental mind is blind to the latterly arrived signs that oppose the former signs. Already built up facts based on the former signs, the judgmental mind misses the opportunity of reexamining all signs side-by-side. It sees the reality in one way, but not the other, only because it happened to receive particular signs sooner.
The judgmental mind sees no difference in the validity of an articulated fact and a genuine one. Therefore, it rejects any requests to scrutinize an articulated fact or review the reasoning process. It believes so hard in its pool of facts, and at the same time, feels so proud of its capability in finding the “truth” using minimum amount of input, that it is blind to the reality.
To summarize it, I think smart people are prone to making mistakes by the trap of judgmental mind for the following reasons:
1. Trapped by rules: As explained, smart people are skilled in collecting signs and clues, and packaging them as facts and models. The articulated facts are saved to be used and referred to in the future analysis. After a while, the person is trapped in the web of facts and beliefs he weaved around himself. The web of facts, categories, and models disconnects the person from the reality and fuels the vicious cycle of creating erroneous facts and models.
2. Rush to conclusion: The egoistic mind in smart people expects them to make a conclusion in a short period; otherwise, it reminds that their intellect might be in question. Therefore, they do not have the patience to wait for further evidence, and they tend to rush to a conclusion without a second thought.
3. Lack of empathy: Smart people witnessed their outperformance in compare to people around them for years, so they are not usually well-trained as empathetic beings, capable of being in other people shoes. They only see one version (their own version); therefore, they miss to recognize the hidden causes behind the signs they observed in people. In most cases, an observed behavior is meaningful only if it is considered jointly with some background information.
4. Missing the big picture: Smart people are capable of capturing every tiny sign around them. Therefore, they are surrounded by myriad of detailed signs, which mostly could be just a “noise”. Smart people are so busy with processing huge amount of, possibly low-quality, data they collected that they are prone to miss the big picture.
Furthermore, I believe the same argument is valid in most cases that any sort of “analysis” is involved. Smart people are prone to be trapped by their judgmental minds; thus, make mistakes when analyzing a situation at work, their relationships, social and political issues, etc.
Here, I’d like to talk about the side-effect of being smart in dealing with people and their personalities. I use Judgmental as a term to describe the negative side of this aptitude. Precisely, a smart person is judgmental when he rushes to conclusion using limited number of observations or “signs”. In the first sight, such definition of judgmental sounds positive, and to benefit from the “less is more” rule, in which I believe; however, this rule has some prerequisites that are not usually satisfied in the process of perceiving personalities. That’s why a judgmental mind leads to false conclusions.
Smart people are capable of recognizing very tiny details in the behavior of people around them. They capture these “signs” and use their smart minds to analyze the signs and transform them to a higher level piece of information: Facts. The smart mind works based on a set of pre-defined facts and trained rules. I’d like to use terms “analysis” and “perception” when the smart mind is running consciously or unconsciously, respectively. The judgmental mind kicks in when the smart mind “overweighs” the sign, rules, and facts while analyzing or perceiving.
The judgmental mind is blind to the latterly arrived signs that oppose the former signs. Already built up facts based on the former signs, the judgmental mind misses the opportunity of reexamining all signs side-by-side. It sees the reality in one way, but not the other, only because it happened to receive particular signs sooner.
The judgmental mind sees no difference in the validity of an articulated fact and a genuine one. Therefore, it rejects any requests to scrutinize an articulated fact or review the reasoning process. It believes so hard in its pool of facts, and at the same time, feels so proud of its capability in finding the “truth” using minimum amount of input, that it is blind to the reality.
To summarize it, I think smart people are prone to making mistakes by the trap of judgmental mind for the following reasons:
1. Trapped by rules: As explained, smart people are skilled in collecting signs and clues, and packaging them as facts and models. The articulated facts are saved to be used and referred to in the future analysis. After a while, the person is trapped in the web of facts and beliefs he weaved around himself. The web of facts, categories, and models disconnects the person from the reality and fuels the vicious cycle of creating erroneous facts and models.
2. Rush to conclusion: The egoistic mind in smart people expects them to make a conclusion in a short period; otherwise, it reminds that their intellect might be in question. Therefore, they do not have the patience to wait for further evidence, and they tend to rush to a conclusion without a second thought.
3. Lack of empathy: Smart people witnessed their outperformance in compare to people around them for years, so they are not usually well-trained as empathetic beings, capable of being in other people shoes. They only see one version (their own version); therefore, they miss to recognize the hidden causes behind the signs they observed in people. In most cases, an observed behavior is meaningful only if it is considered jointly with some background information.
4. Missing the big picture: Smart people are capable of capturing every tiny sign around them. Therefore, they are surrounded by myriad of detailed signs, which mostly could be just a “noise”. Smart people are so busy with processing huge amount of, possibly low-quality, data they collected that they are prone to miss the big picture.
Furthermore, I believe the same argument is valid in most cases that any sort of “analysis” is involved. Smart people are prone to be trapped by their judgmental minds; thus, make mistakes when analyzing a situation at work, their relationships, social and political issues, etc.
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