While I was in college, I showed up for work one morning very early, dressed as I normally am. A younger lady, student worker on the softball team, who came dressed for practice turned and looked at me and said, "How cute! You tuck in your shirt and wear a belt and everything." Apparently, that's not normal. I'm ok with that.
People who know me routinely praise me for sundry details of my character. I have good habits and good routines that make me who I am. When they do so, I remind them that I am an ordinary man, that I do nothing special. I do what I should.
However, in the last ten years, I have seen an explosion in the frequency of people who want to be recognized. No matter what people say, what they really want is attention. Thus birthed the reality shows like Survivor and the Bachelor and American Idol, juxtaposed across from Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger. Everyone wants to be noticed, and some people, like in the Duke Lacrosse case, will do anything, including lie.
You will note if you look at my Facebook, that I reveal very little about myself. The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly warned against giving out information over the internet, especially to complete strangers. People can say anything they want on the internet, like this fellow I happen to know. Pay attention to his education and activities in his profile. Yet, some people reveal anything and everything to Google or people who scroll the internet in search of identities to steal.
Most people really just want someone to pay attention to them. You see it with children at the grocer, in the park, on TV, in the classroom, in meetings, etc. People vie for attention, and if they don't get enough, there is no payout. What makes them think they deserve attention? Frank Lunz presents at the end of his book What Americans Really Want, Really, a series of surveys he conducted in the population. What struck me most is that when asked most people think they're above average, in intelligence, in looks, in their need of public assistance, in their influence among their peers, etc.
Most people think they are unique, which cannot possibly be true. That is why they think they deserve our attention. Chances are someone else somewhere has written about this same topic on a blog, however articulate comparable to me the article may be. I am not the only person to say and do these things, even if I am the first. CS Lewis explains the truth of human value in the Screwtape Letters thusly:
We are often told to trust in the educated and in those who profess the blood of nobility. They often have no credentials to support their claims of superiority, and patens of nobility are easily forged, and so why should we surrender to their claims? Like Sir Thomas More told the Duke of York, if the world were flat, the command of the king could not render it round, and therefore he refused to sign and died for his beliefs. Most people want to think they are important, and while they are philosophically, they are, quite frankly, in the grand scheme, completely irrelevant. Ask an astronaut if he can tell they exist from orbit. Now ask God why he cares about us from his vantage point.
Who are you? Do you know who you are? Are you a stranger to yourself? What about that woman at the checkout or the security guard in the hall? Who are they? They are glorious and excellent people too, even though they seem strange to us perhaps. The poet wrote that strangers are nothing more than friends you have not yet met. While I appreciate the poetry, I do not think I will be 'friends' with everyone I might ever meet. If you read my blog, you know Harry Reid and I are barely even acquaintances, and I am not sure I'd be friends with Heinrich Himmler, Henry VIII, or any random resident of Sodom.
What I do believe is that strangers are people we have not yet met. They are strange because we know only that about them what others tell us or that we can observe in a brief window of time during which they expose some small part of themself to us.
In the Arbinger Institute's book Leadership and Self-deception, the authors explain that we put people into the box when we stop treating them like people. We mistreat others when we stop thinking of them as glorious and wondrous beings. At the time of their birth, people coo and aww over babies as they have for all of recorded time. The babies grow into adults and then we judge them. Again, I turn to Screwtape because we participate in this campaign:
I remember well the last time I ever went Toilet Papering. Being in my youth, I went along for company and shared enjoyment, but it was anything but. See, I knew the man who owned the house and admired him, and as I knew it would fall to him to clean up our mess, I returned to his home the next morning (he was only a few blocks from my house) and offered my services to help him clean up the mess. I never confessed that I had a hand in it, but I wanted to make it right. The man was not our intended target. The man was a man, and I could not dishonor him by allowing that to be. As a consequence, I have avoided company since then that insisted that such things were 'fun'.
We are able to commit crimes against other people only when we dehumanize them. Think of the guy who cuts you off on the freeway. He doesn't know you; he sees your car. He doesn't know your face, your race, your age or wage, or any other demographical information. All he knows is that there is another car where he wishes to be, and that he, as a human, is far more important than a car. It is easy for people to abuse inanimate objects, and however rightly so that may be, we often forget that at the end or inside of those objects there is another human being. You think nothing of pocketing a $20 you find on the street. What if you knew, without a doubt, to whom it belonged, and that person was a near and dear friend, or moreover if that specie were attached to a line connected to the owner's pocket? Robbers who steal break into houses; they do not think they are breaking into homes. They care little for the sanctity of the refuge. They do not break through our grip or slip past us at the door. They break doors and windows, often when we are not home, and so they can justify their intrusion because it didn't directly affect a person. Even if they mug you, they take your wallet, not you. So it's ok.
Such is the philosophy of genocide. They do everything they can to dehumanize the targets of their violent aggressions. Look at the cartoons of Jews, who are depicted as goblins, buzzards, and wine-bibbers, for these depictions were the only way to encourage a nation to villify and erradicate an entire race of people, because man can only act inhumane towards that which we do not consider human.
We focus too much on what separates us and not enough on what binds us together. I saw this video of a trip into the upper Trophosphere in a U2 spyplane. While I disagree with the narrator's conclusion that if we could all do this, we would all end war and poverty and all that, I do think it gives men perspective that cannot be found in any other way.
We emphasize our differences over our commonalities to the detriment of civil society. Uniqueness isolates and makes strangers, who are really nothing more than people you don't really know. In the end, we have far more in common than we have that is truly unique. Our enemies want us divided. If we think we're alone, then we make much less of a threat. Perhaps that's why Jesus encouraged us to look out for, befriend, and welcome the strangers at our gates. Who knows when we might entertain, assist, befriend, or simply smile at our Creator?
People who know me routinely praise me for sundry details of my character. I have good habits and good routines that make me who I am. When they do so, I remind them that I am an ordinary man, that I do nothing special. I do what I should.
However, in the last ten years, I have seen an explosion in the frequency of people who want to be recognized. No matter what people say, what they really want is attention. Thus birthed the reality shows like Survivor and the Bachelor and American Idol, juxtaposed across from Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger. Everyone wants to be noticed, and some people, like in the Duke Lacrosse case, will do anything, including lie.
You will note if you look at my Facebook, that I reveal very little about myself. The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly warned against giving out information over the internet, especially to complete strangers. People can say anything they want on the internet, like this fellow I happen to know. Pay attention to his education and activities in his profile. Yet, some people reveal anything and everything to Google or people who scroll the internet in search of identities to steal.
Most people really just want someone to pay attention to them. You see it with children at the grocer, in the park, on TV, in the classroom, in meetings, etc. People vie for attention, and if they don't get enough, there is no payout. What makes them think they deserve attention? Frank Lunz presents at the end of his book What Americans Really Want, Really, a series of surveys he conducted in the population. What struck me most is that when asked most people think they're above average, in intelligence, in looks, in their need of public assistance, in their influence among their peers, etc.
Most people think they are unique, which cannot possibly be true. That is why they think they deserve our attention. Chances are someone else somewhere has written about this same topic on a blog, however articulate comparable to me the article may be. I am not the only person to say and do these things, even if I am the first. CS Lewis explains the truth of human value in the Screwtape Letters thusly:
[God] wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. [God] wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.We are glorious and excellent, but not because of what we do. We are great because of who we are.
We are often told to trust in the educated and in those who profess the blood of nobility. They often have no credentials to support their claims of superiority, and patens of nobility are easily forged, and so why should we surrender to their claims? Like Sir Thomas More told the Duke of York, if the world were flat, the command of the king could not render it round, and therefore he refused to sign and died for his beliefs. Most people want to think they are important, and while they are philosophically, they are, quite frankly, in the grand scheme, completely irrelevant. Ask an astronaut if he can tell they exist from orbit. Now ask God why he cares about us from his vantage point.
Who are you? Do you know who you are? Are you a stranger to yourself? What about that woman at the checkout or the security guard in the hall? Who are they? They are glorious and excellent people too, even though they seem strange to us perhaps. The poet wrote that strangers are nothing more than friends you have not yet met. While I appreciate the poetry, I do not think I will be 'friends' with everyone I might ever meet. If you read my blog, you know Harry Reid and I are barely even acquaintances, and I am not sure I'd be friends with Heinrich Himmler, Henry VIII, or any random resident of Sodom.
What I do believe is that strangers are people we have not yet met. They are strange because we know only that about them what others tell us or that we can observe in a brief window of time during which they expose some small part of themself to us.
In the Arbinger Institute's book Leadership and Self-deception, the authors explain that we put people into the box when we stop treating them like people. We mistreat others when we stop thinking of them as glorious and wondrous beings. At the time of their birth, people coo and aww over babies as they have for all of recorded time. The babies grow into adults and then we judge them. Again, I turn to Screwtape because we participate in this campaign:
Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.By the same token, we can be made to justify ill behavior by convincing ourselves that other people are less valuable than we believe or that there is value in fase modesty, false humility, false piety, and, most of all, false joy.
I remember well the last time I ever went Toilet Papering. Being in my youth, I went along for company and shared enjoyment, but it was anything but. See, I knew the man who owned the house and admired him, and as I knew it would fall to him to clean up our mess, I returned to his home the next morning (he was only a few blocks from my house) and offered my services to help him clean up the mess. I never confessed that I had a hand in it, but I wanted to make it right. The man was not our intended target. The man was a man, and I could not dishonor him by allowing that to be. As a consequence, I have avoided company since then that insisted that such things were 'fun'.
We are able to commit crimes against other people only when we dehumanize them. Think of the guy who cuts you off on the freeway. He doesn't know you; he sees your car. He doesn't know your face, your race, your age or wage, or any other demographical information. All he knows is that there is another car where he wishes to be, and that he, as a human, is far more important than a car. It is easy for people to abuse inanimate objects, and however rightly so that may be, we often forget that at the end or inside of those objects there is another human being. You think nothing of pocketing a $20 you find on the street. What if you knew, without a doubt, to whom it belonged, and that person was a near and dear friend, or moreover if that specie were attached to a line connected to the owner's pocket? Robbers who steal break into houses; they do not think they are breaking into homes. They care little for the sanctity of the refuge. They do not break through our grip or slip past us at the door. They break doors and windows, often when we are not home, and so they can justify their intrusion because it didn't directly affect a person. Even if they mug you, they take your wallet, not you. So it's ok.
Such is the philosophy of genocide. They do everything they can to dehumanize the targets of their violent aggressions. Look at the cartoons of Jews, who are depicted as goblins, buzzards, and wine-bibbers, for these depictions were the only way to encourage a nation to villify and erradicate an entire race of people, because man can only act inhumane towards that which we do not consider human.
We focus too much on what separates us and not enough on what binds us together. I saw this video of a trip into the upper Trophosphere in a U2 spyplane. While I disagree with the narrator's conclusion that if we could all do this, we would all end war and poverty and all that, I do think it gives men perspective that cannot be found in any other way.
We emphasize our differences over our commonalities to the detriment of civil society. Uniqueness isolates and makes strangers, who are really nothing more than people you don't really know. In the end, we have far more in common than we have that is truly unique. Our enemies want us divided. If we think we're alone, then we make much less of a threat. Perhaps that's why Jesus encouraged us to look out for, befriend, and welcome the strangers at our gates. Who knows when we might entertain, assist, befriend, or simply smile at our Creator?
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