This is an important post because I am going to discuss what may be my most important and practical personal philosophical perspective. If you wish to interact with me it is essential to understanding my personal sovereignty.
Rules are ubiquitous. They provide structure to life figuratively and literally. When rules are promulgated by nation states they are laws. A law means that to continue existing in the jurisdiction covered by the law, you must obey it. Such laws can get very complex. Laws can also be more profound, asserting the ethos of an entire people.
But it is not necessary to confine laws to nation states. We all have our own personal laws. I have many guidelines such as please don’t feed me cauliflower or MS Word email attachments. But those are just helpful tips for optimal relations.
After a lifetime of contemplation I have discovered that there is only one law that those who interact with me must follow. It is not optional. I have paid a huge price to enforce this law and will continue to do so. If you flagrantly violate it, our interaction will terminate.
The Law is quite simple really. The Law has three parts which are to be taken as a whole. The Law is as follows.
Part One: (You may) Treat me like an idiot.
Part Two: (You may) Be an idiot.
Part Three: (You must) Never combine one and two.
It’s that simple. As Steven Wolfram demonstrates, astonishing richness and complexity can emerge from simple rules and I have found that pretty much all acrimonious interactions I’ve ever had involve a violation of the Law.
At first glance the Law may seem rather obvious or uninteresting or even a bit grumpy. But that is not the case. Obviously people don’t like to be treated like idiots but what the Law is saying is that I actually do not mind it as much as other people. I am not immune to errors and incorrect beliefs and I am quite happy to have them corrected. During that process if you are compelled to treat me like an idiot I’m actually rather willing to overlook that. It’s not optimal to be sure and we won’t be best friends but I’ve learned a lot from supercilious wankers who’ve treated me like I was stupid, i.e. when I was being stupid. But the key ingredient was that these people were extremely competent relative to me on the topic in question.
There is a second point to stress, which is much more germane to my daily life of interacting with people who, for example, must use computers but have not dedicated their lives to understanding them. If you self identify as an idiot or a dummy, that’s absolutely not a problem for me. I actually very much enjoy helping people, especially the underdog. I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to train people how to use rather complicated software where I slowly realized that the learners were functionally illiterate. Never mind fancy computer concepts, they could not read. Their respect for me caused me to really take extraordinary measures to help them out.
Finally, the Law suggests a profound truth that we can all probably strive to live by. Ideally one treats others with respect and invests in the intellectual wherewithal to be helpful. Although I envision directing future violators of the Law to this clear statement of my policy, most people who casually read my writing are my good friends. I want to say to them that the Law also correctly predicts exactly why we are friends, precisely because you have very rarely, if ever, committed either Part One or Part Two.