UNDERSTANDING OTHERS

    Understanding Others

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 25, 2014

No one knows what strength of parts he has ‘til he has tried them, and of the understanding one may most truly say, that its force is generally greater than it thinks till it is put to it.  Therefore the proper remedy is, to set the mind to work, and apply the thoughts vigorously to the business, for it holds in the struggles of the mind, as in those of war, that to think we shall conquer is to conquer.

John Locke (1632-1704) An Essay on Human Understanding (1671)

             

In his book (quoted above), Locke follows the custom of his time by explaining the path of human reason and its obstacles. 

Locke was a practical philosopher and believed philosophy ought to be built upon reasoning and common sense rather than metaphysical speculation.  He believed also that the mind is a blank sheet of paper, upon which our experience is imprinted. 

Understanding is not based on something innate in our perception, which causes us to know and understand a situation when it confronts us, but rather our experience of the material world is filtered through ideas, which we create to cope with that world.  He insisted that ideas are not absolute representations of our knowledge because our biases, which are the filters of our senses color our knowledge. 

Viewing the world only through our impure ideas may be too limited for contemporary philosophers, but Locke’s philosophy did become the first comprehensive exposition of empiricism and the foundation of modern social science.  A broader view is that of Julian Johnson in Path of the Master (1939) which states:

             

No one can gain even an intellectual understanding of his own interests, until he has some comprehension of the universe of which he is an integral part, and with every part of which he is in some manner related.

The basis of empathetic understanding in any case is love.  Without love, the possession of all knowledge is for naught.  St. Paul describes the nature of love:

Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things; love never faileth; and now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8, 13).

If these opening remarks make you uncomfortable, I suspect it comes quite naturally from your social conditioning.  We are in the scientific age, the age of empirical knowledge, where the secular authority of things has supplanted the spiritual authority of things as once understood. 

Our spiritual side (social systems) has thus been separated from our material side (technical systems), as if the soul had no body, and the body had no soul.  Since the soul cannot be conceived, isolated or studied as a discrete phenomenon, it does not exist in the realm of science, but is a pesky holdover of times past where superstition, the occult and the mystical had some purchase. 

Those by nature spiritually bent are seen as unworldly, whereas those of a material inclination are considered worldly.  Yet, for a person to be fully human both the spiritual and material come into play as we, alone, are conscious beings and part of rather than separate from nature.  Only through wholeness can we truly understand each other, our place in the cosmos, and why nature only knows best.

Empathetic understanding involves reason as well as feeling.  It is not mechanistic reasoning, not a mathematical construct that determines in quid pro quo fashion what constitutes the getting and giving involved in understanding.  It is rather a “letting go” of the self in free flowing trust with significant others that listening registers at the thinking level to accurately interpret what others mean in what they are saying.  The fact that this seldom happens indicates the gap between speaking and listening in normal conversation. 

People, unfortunately, do not behave the way they appear in conversation with gurus on television, are portrayed in television dramas, films, the theatre, novels or, indeed, in comic strips.  These venues are approximate apparitions of behavior, and provide a convenient shorthand to register consistent with internal biases dancing in scintillatingly fragments across our narrow attention span. 

People, as experience repeatedly tells us, do not behave as projected in media; nor do people behave as we would have them behave. 

Even so, there is an overwhelming urge to categorize people to comfortably fit into comprehensible little mental boxes.  This is our quest for control and often a relative index of our cognitive dissonance.  It makes it easier to say, “Jimmy is smart but arrogant and opinionated,” rather than saying, “Today Jimmy is full of himself.  He must be having a good day.”

To get through life with some reasonable aptitude, and not be constantly anxious, it is sensible to understand others from their perspective, not ours. 

Love gives us the patience to do that.  If we allow ourselves to listen with our whole body, not just our minds, people will tell us what we need to know to serve them.  Try it.  Try to feel, yes feel, what a person is saying beyond the words to what they are truly trying to communicate. 

It may be quite the opposite of what they are saying.  We tend to exaggerate when we attempt to impress another with our assessment of a favorite.  My brother was fond of saying that when my mother spoke of me, “Divide what she says by four and believe half of that.”  He had a point.

Decoding the element of frustration in speech requires active listening, which is displayed nonverbally in our posture and attentiveness.  Sometimes a person needs an audience simply to quiet the mind. 

Sigmund Freud was the first to identify psychosomatic disturbances as real illnesses.  He did so in World War One having success with his “talking cures” (i.e., psychoanalysis) with “shell shock” soldiers.  Before he intervened, the French and British saw such soldiers as “slackers” and considered executing them before military firing squads.     

People are dissemblers.  They cannot help it.  From the earliest moments of our existence we are trained to behave as if postgraduates in verbal inventions (boldface lying), histrionics (playacting to cover a faux pas), defensiveness (playing the victim) and manipulation (turning accusers into defendants).  Dissembling is the way we get through the day.  The average person from breakfast on lies at least 634 times before dinner, starting with saying “Good morning.”

Life is a dramaturgic psychodrama played out to win friends and influence others, collect sympathy for our point of view, justify unjustifiable behavior, or appear on top of things when nothing could be further from the truth. 

What we do in this theatre is not always pretty, sometimes morally repugnant if exposed to the light of day, but it is how many of us restore a facsimile of equilibrium.  We can’t help ourselves from comparing and competing, always trying to get an edge without realizing it is a losing proposition.  Like it or not, we are stuck with ourselves.  There is no point in competing with anyone other than ourselves for all other endeavors are simply imitations after the fact.  No cage is more confining than the cage of self-contempt and envy for not being or having or accomplishing what someone else is and has and has accomplished. 

People with empathetic understanding process information appropriately, which I find uncannily relative to the definition of a noun: The name of a person, place or thing.  A person has a personality (sense of worth), geographic (sense of place) and demographic (sense of self) profile, which I have designated as The Fisher Paradigm™©.

What is surprising to this is that our reptilian brain still has the capacity to warn us of pending danger as it did 12,000 years ago.  The fear instinct is real and calibrates what is genuine from what is not, who is credible from who is not.  To ignore reptilian warnings is to do so at our peril.  Messages are pulsating at our temples telling us “this is not good” -- “this is not right” – “this doesn’t compute.” 

Recently a man came to me, a man who works very hard for a living, a man who is frugal to a fault, a man who prides himself in his cognitive skills, a man who was duped of $27,000 of that hard earned money by a con artist. 

A big man, he was in tears before me, trying desperately to justify giving the money to a man to invest for him because “he had this huge yacht with a lavish clientele of celebrities and high rollers on board.  He had made a fortune himself, why shouldn’t I have trusted him to guarantee a 10-20 percent return on my investment? Why not!”

The “why not” was that everything was too perfect.  The yacht was rented, the high rollers were part of the con, and the man’s fortune was a fantasy to which this investor was blindsided because the con played on his greed, which put his reptilian brain to sleep.  

The man was not listening.  It takes listening with the third ear, or the thinking level.  The first ear is the hearing level, the muddled noise we call “talking.”  The second ear is the listening level.  We hear what the person is saying, but fail to register the message.

This allows the con to manufacture the moment to his purposes, creating the theatre of affluence in a rented yacht.  Were our reptilian brain not to have come into play thousands of years ago, we would not have survived as a species.  The danger is still real only today it has moved from primarily physical danger to psycho-physical danger and economic survival. 

One of the great myths is that we think before we feel.  Our reptilian brain would suggest otherwise (see Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error,” 1994).    

Four Keys to Understanding

Confidence comes from interaction.  You cannot expect to have confidence without working hard to understand others, because in understanding them you better understand yourself. 

It takes time and experience to comprehend the implicit messages behind all the verbal noise of conversation.  Typically, conversation is taken at face value instead of being decoded to understand what we are trying to say.  Rarely, if ever, do we say exactly what we mean.  When we do, especially in this electronic age, our most intimate thoughts can be secretly recorded with devastating consequences.  Incendiary implications can be magnified to throw the situation into such a rumble that a clash of sentiments can result in people acting more like unconscious animals than intelligent human beings.

Television soap operas traditionally fill the needs of those with a vicarious appetite for a storyline of love and hate, revenge and betrayal, lust and envy, jealousy and hurt. 

It can get quite dicey, however, in the exclusive real reserves where billionaires reside.  Then, once the contretemps becomes public, misadventure and misunderstanding saddle the same horse and ride it wildly into our living rooms.

Donald Sterling, 80, the billionaire owner of the National Basketball Association (NBA) Los Angeles Clippers, was in a private conversation with his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, 30, in which the owner made disparaging remarks about NBA Hall of Famer Irvin “Magic” Johnson, now retired, specifically, and African American basketball players in general.

The spat was apparently about her associating with black athletes, having her picture taken with Johnson and others, and bringing them to the owner’s  games.  He wanted her to cease and desist, sounding more like a plantation owner of the antebellum South than a twenty-first century entrepreneur, which he is.

Sterling had provided his girlfriend, fifty years his junior, with a $1.8 million home, expensive cars and clothes, including select seats at the Clippers’ NBA home games.  He cancelled these tickets, Ms. Stiviano being miffed at this action, egged the owner on in a private conversation to make embarrassing and incendiary comments about African Americans, which were secretly recorded. 

During this conversation, Sterling not only expressed his biases and prejudices against black athletes specifically and blacks in general, he questioned her association with them.  The temper of the remarks left little doubt that he was a racist, a racist being someone who believes one race is superior to another, or the white race, in this case, superior to races of color.  

Fully eighty percent of NBA players are of color, so it wasn’t a surprise when the new NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, fined Sterling $2.5 million and banned him from the NBA for life.

Mark Cuban, 55, NBA owner of the Dallas Mavericks, in an attempt to tone down the conversation to a more rational level, unwittingly added fuel to the fire by first saying the banishing of Sterling from ownership of the LA Clippers was “a slippery slope,” to compounding this by saying, “If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street, there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face - white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere - I’m walking back to the other side of the street.”

What was heard, magnified, and characterized as the essence of Cuban’s message was the reference to “hoodie” in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case.

On the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American high school student. George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old mixed-race Hispanic, was the neighborhood watch coordinator for the gated community where Martin was temporarily staying and where the shooting took place.  Nearly three years later, the nation has not made its peace with this unfortunate tragedy, especially as Zimmerman was acquitted on the grounds of the Florida law of “stand your ground.”

Reduced to its essentials, however, overlooking the precipitous draconian finality of the NBA’s judgment, and the court of public opinion, we find a lonely old man jealous of the companionship of a beautiful young lady, in a lover’s quarrel.  He expected the same control over her as he exercised over everything else in his life, and was willing to pay for it, but as we see, she would have none of it. 

Is Donald Sterling a racist?  Probably.  Is he a despicable human being?  Probably not, perhaps closer to pathetic.  Is he an isolated case?  Absolutely not, especially in these declining days of white supremacy in virtually all avenues of twenty-first century society.  Will the self-made billionaire go peacefully into the night?  Not on a bet. 

This incident reveals how little variation exists between the high and low brow, the affluent and impoverished when it comes to emotions as both are capable of behaving equally juvenile. 

Being understanding and understandable, pivotal to interpersonal success, can be explained in four simple keys:

We are all self-centered. 

We are born egotists, and since our egos are fragile, we will do just about anything to protect them.  This makes meaningful exchange difficult and bizarre behavior common if not always predictable.

We are all more interested in ourselves than anyone else in the world. 

We invariably attempt to turn any conversation around to what we think, feel and value.  Failing that we become bored, stop listening, or excuse ourselves from the conversation. 

Some of us hate small talk with a vengeance.  If it is important to the other person, then it behooves us to be an accommodating listener.  On the other hand, if the person hates small talk, and you understand that, it would be well to honor this proclivity. 

Every person you meet wants to feel important. 

Treat people with respect, whatever their station in life.  Respect is returned tenfold.  Be condescending in manner and you create an adversary.  Show you care and the balance will fall in your favor.

We crave the approval of others so that we may in turn approve of ourselves.

Self-hating is a cultural condition elevated to a chronic disease.  Essayist Murray Kempton asks the rhetorical question: “And why, America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves.”  Why, indeed. 

The hardest person to win our approval of, and make friends with is ourselves.  To escape this handicap, you must rebel against false modesty and self-recrimination to establish a healthy sense of self. 

When our interaction with others is not motivated by love, when it is not a result of self-acceptance, it is likely to be driven by manipulation.  Enabling others to be themselves is a function of accepting them as they are, not as we would wish them to be. 

Billionaire NBA owner Mark Cuban considered himself sincere, I’m sure, when he offered his conciliatory remarks regarding the NBA’s case against another billionaire owner, Donald Sterling, who also happens to be a friend.  But as we have seen, his use of the fear analogy to illustrate his point only complicated the issue, as fear is personal, ambivalent and has no anchor in the storm when “hoodie” is the only word that registers.

It takes a healthy ego to see past our limitations.  Those who fail to display empathetic understanding have had an incomplete education no matter how much money they have.  But for those who have healthy egos they have consistency with this passage:

I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall not be put out.

2 Ezra XIV, 25

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