The people we are….with

After I shared the “We, the storytellers” post on Twitter, Surekha sparked off this interesting discussion on how we could persuade others to be less judgmental and more compassionate. I really didn’t have a fix-it-all answer and felt that it was more important that we simply practice this ourselves. That, however, did not stop me from thinking about it.

The next day, my reading list had this post, which touched upon things that get people to change their behaviour. I remembered this William James quote used in the post from something I had seen a while back at Brain Pickings.

That is a tough statement to argue against because at one level we have different identities, and at another level, we have personas that interoperate (borrowed) with these identities depending on whom we are dealing with. (Arguably, and generalising) we do this because we crave acceptance from others, it is how we are wired. So we consistently work on our “latitudes of acceptance“. That conforming is probably what has led to what Umair Haque calls Youtopia – a cheap, easy illusion of conquest over the self. In the post he writes about how we have chosen identities and personas that we think are desired most. We think we are in control, but we aren’t. (read)

IMO, the truth is that we judge ourselves on a regular basis, and I still believe that the path to being non-judgmental and compassionate (to others) starts from being that to oneself. But is there a way to scale this on to other people? A possibility occurred to me when I was reading Colin Thubron’s “To a Mountain in Tibet“. In a thought he unfortunately doesn’t spend more than a line on, he mentions how he misses someone because “For a long time I have lost the person I was with you” It may not be the only reason, but do we like to be around certain people because we like who we are when we are with them? Is that self somehow what we really are, beyond the Youtopia model we have created, and is this feeling mutual? If that is so, can we objectively or intuitively work out who these people are? If we can, maybe there is a way to spread this.

I came across the concept of Limbic Revision via Brain Pickings. To put it simply, it is a sort of emotional contagion. So, in addition to being conscious of our choices and actions, and being as objective as we can, if we are also conscious of the kind of people we spend more time with, maybe the persuasion to be less judgmental and more compassionate can spread easier. Not a complete answer, but maybe a potential start.