Imagine that people around you play a board game, but you don't play it, don't know how to play it, have no desire to play it, and don't much understand the its appeal. Since so many people play this game, you hear about and began to recognize some things having to do with it. Sometimes, you come across tokens of the game like you would come across dice or chess pieces someone had left about. These tokens are terms: "less than," "superior," These words have no concrete meaning to you, but they seem like a big deal in the context of the game; they are very important to the people who play the game and you see them throwing these tokens around more or less depending on the context.
This is what it is like for me when I come across people saying that everyone is "equal" to everyone else, that people have some sort of objective "value" or "worth," or claiming that others see them as "inferior." These terms have no meaning to me. What does it even mean for one person to be "better" than another? Better at swimming, better at writing, better at parenting: those make sense. But just unqualified "better than?" Also, there is no such thing as objective value, because what is valuable is in the eyes of the beholder. One person's useless rock is another person's gold nugget.
However, these clearly mean something to other people. I think of them as playing a game called Social Hierarchy, and these terms are a part of this game like tokens. I recognize the terms as part of their game, but I'm not playing the game, don't want to, and the tokens have no meaning to me personally. The thought processes of the people who are trying to win the game by playing these tokens are just as foreign to me as the thought processes of the people who are getting upset (and even feeling bad about themselves!) because of having the "inferior" token played on them. I'm not even capable of being upset at someone calling me "less than" because I can't attach any meaning to it. I have a vague sense that it's supposed to somehow be something negative, but not much more than that. It's like somebody coming up to me and threatening to beat me with a Charizard card. It's just a game that people play in their heads; I can't take it seriously.
I know that the game is important to some people because they believe that the people playing the "inferior" tokens on other people might bring the game from the world of thoughts to the material world and treat them badly: abuse them, fire them, assault them, sabotage their affairs. I think that those are legitimate fears that should be protected against, but I can't say the same about playing the game by trying to convince people that some group of people is not "inferior." It seems doubtful that the players who believe others are "inferior" were reasoned into that attitude, and therefore doubtful that they can be reasoned out of it.
I also have a personal reason to suggest people stop wasting time playing this game. People sometimes accuse me of playing it, of playing an "inferior" token on them. This is very frustrating because I don't even understand enough to play their stupid game; I understand it so little, in fact, that I don't even know how to respond to them and defend myself. I recognize that they are talking about the social hierarchy game, but my unfamiliarity with the details renders me slow to understand exactly what I'm being accused of and why. Imagine some angry Monopoly player coming up to you and suddenly yelling that you cheated by not giving everyone $2000, they should have known not to let you be the banker, it's not fair that you get to be the car, and you ruined their strategy by buying Tennessee Ave. If you don't know how to play that game, you'd be like WTF? That's what it's like to me.
03 Jun 2015, 6:17 pm
