Recently, I was at a wonderful party with people of many different backgrounds and ages. People were very nice and everybody tried to be pleasant to each other. There were music, dance and, of course, drinks. It was like a fun U.N. meeting without age limits.
Come to think of it, the party was definitely better than a U.N. meeting. Amid a great fun and a few short well delivered speeches, the question, "Do we truly understand one another?", came to my mind. It became clear to me that understanding another person, or the other person is fluid and, always, a work in progress. At the same time, the question nudged me to rediscover Socrates and his "know yourself." I had forgotten the phrase but, at that moment, it came back with uncommon wisdom, insight, and clarity. That is why we need those great historical figures who could express an idea clearly, for all ages.
The questions of understanding another person and knowing yourself came to me that beautiful night because I was already ready to ask those questions. Looking at the world from all four directions and finding problems everywhere, the question is "why." There are historical, economic, social, philosophical, and institutional answers to that question.
But to solve that problems, the most important factor is understanding the people you are dealing with and knowing yourself. The only thing is that it takes a life and more to understand others and yourself. That beautiful night, I had many people I have known all my life and it was wonderful to rediscover all those dear people one more time. That, in turn, gave a great opportunity to find out myself a little more, especially so, when I find myself in them.
Learning, knowing, and understanding history is the integral part of understanding myself and others. The essential fact is it starts with one's own family history. Once starting to look closely, the history speaks itself in the people you love so much and extends out to the whole world. The more you understand the world, I'm sure, the more you understand yourself, good and bad.
The world history is full of the stories of "us against them." Good leaders(?) use them to create something positive and bad leaders use them to utterly destroy the humanity. The examples so numerous, past and present, I don't have to list them here. I just want to point out that there are books recently published that tries to explain why the polarization of people--good people--happens. It was interesting to note that the polarization, the difference and the conflict happen among good people.
One way of looking at this was emotion and reason. The main idea is that people decide with emotion and use reason to justify that decision. A young man I know mentioned that "I fell in love and then I was thinking about why I fell in love." The only thing I want to point out is that we have many different emotions and we are not quite sure, many times, which emotion will prevail. Once an emotion makes the decision we can pick and choose the reasons to justify the decision.
Another way is the character and ideology. Here the character implies emotion and the ideology, reason. This character and ideology carries extra weight this year because the Presidential election to choose between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney depends very much on understanding their character and ideology. Yet another way, among many remaining, is commonality (emphasizing communal interest) and individuality (emphasizing self-interest).
As I learn more about life, history, politics, economy and culture and as I encounter the differences in people, I have been asking where does the differences come from. There are many reasons but the most important answer I came up with is that they must have been born with it. It is like "know yourself," it is so simple we think we know until it hits with a great force.
At the present time--but just like any other time in history-- we are facing some very interesting issues and many solutions are being proposed. The examples of the current interesting issues are fairness, what we really mean by equality, what is the constructive vision, how to close the gap between needs and wants of the humanity, what is and how to decide what is the acceptable living standard, and what it is going to cost to have that living standard. These are some of the rather philosophical issues, then there are many many real time issues.
The solutions will come slowly, but surely. Just that, the beautiful night inspired me to rediscover that all the solutions have to stand on the firm understanding of the people we dealing with and understanding of ourselves. The only thing is that the task of understanding us is always a work in progress and there lies the eternal hope for humanity.
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