An unexpected force of nature: Contempt
I have no idea what brought this thought about today, but all of a sudden I was thinking “contempt.” And I was thinking, what an incredible amount of energy contempt sucks from us, and feeds into the overall grid of human scurrying. The more someone is something the more contempt he (she, it) feels towards those people who are not of the same ilk.
Leaving religions aside for a minute, I am thinking of the various successful businessmen I know. Some of them – my god – the level of contempt they have towards anyone who has not followed a similar path and who cannot measure their lives in monetary denomination give me the shakes (it was also pretty amazing how smarmy they could be towards people the completely despise, yuk). They look at you and they don’t see a person, they see a bank account of a certain size. This is not an exaggeration, I am speaking of specific individuals whom I know. Whenever they talk of someone who is not doing things “as they ought to be done” it sounds like they are discussing someone with a terminal illness.
Then I got into a series of conversations with a guy I met at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, during their Sunday poetry slam – you read your stuff with a jazz band improvising in the background (very neat stuff). The guy was completely into his poetry and Kantian philosophy. I could not believe the contempt with which he spoke about his own brother. The contempt stemmed from the fact that the brother was having a career and raising a child, rather than exploring his inner artistic self.
The above are two extreme examples of events that actually took place. It strikes me as interesting that in this day and age of supposed hyper tolerance, humanity finds way of being as intolerant as ever, albeit on a more personal level. It makes me think that there is some kind of intolerance quotient that must be exercised, and if we repress it in one venue, it will find expression in another. But I hope I am wrong, dead wrong actually. I think that what is missing is a realization that our preferences, likes and dislikes ultimately apply to ourselves only. There is a human tendency (of which I am as guilty as the next person) to think that what is good for me is good for my brother. An extreme example is a real life instance when a friend of mine bought a car (Toyota Camry as the case may be). His brother was in the process of buying one himself. The wife of the Camry guy insistent rather violently that the brother buys a Camry as well. She did it with such a maniacal fanaticism that was really scary.
This is not an exhortation to love each other. On a personal level, I like to keep most of humanity at arm’s length (conversely, those who are close to me are really close). And I think this is very important (I am a misanthropic snob with patrician pretensions, but that is my problem). What I do think is that we should realize (and hopefully some bleeding heart social justice types will pick it up as a worthwhile cause) that other people have the god given right to pursue their own happiness in their own fashion, a happiness that were we to pursue it, would spell unmitigated misery for us. Hey, it’s OK to be obsessed with nothing but money and keeping up with the Johnses. I may not understand it, I may despise those people who fashion their lives that way, but it’s their lives, not mine. It’s OK to sell beads on the street and live in a hole in the wall with two hundred roommates when you are 45, not having “made anything” of your life. It’s not a question of absolute common right or wrong, but of the absolute individual measure of how good you feel about what you have accomplished, you being the ultimate and only arbiter of your choices, and I being the absolute arbiter of mine.
I am sorry about the tirade, but I’ve just had enough of people deciding how someone else should be living their lives.
I’ll be in New York City all weekend, so if anyone is around, fire off an e-mail and maybe we could get together for a drink.
12:32:09 PM 
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