Back on my original website, I once did a running series called "The Seven Deadly Bullshits," on the various flavors of irrationality and illogic that suppress our primate instincts toward forming working community interrelationships and bring out that other instinct for flinging feces at each other. Just as with the Seven Deadly Sins I was ripping off, there was one flavor that I tagged as the "original sin" of bullshit, and that one I called "Solipsism."
There were a lot of essays I wrote on that site that, if I had to do them over again, I'd have had to tweak, or overhaul or throw out. But I still think, more than ever, that I was onto something with that "Solipsism" essay.
If you're not familiar with the term "solipsism," it comes from philosophy and metaphysics, where the literal meaning is the argument or belief that only you yourself truly exist (well, from my perspective, it'd be "only I myself truly exist"), and everyone and everything else that appears to be around you is essentially a figment of your imagination.
Obviously, literally believing this to be true leads to results like being fitted for jackets that fasten in back and being liberally fed whatever medication is in vogue for treating major psychosis. There's a less literal sense of the word, though, defined as "extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption," and that one comes closer to what I've been seeing.
To be clear, I'm not dragging this term out as a five-dollar synonym for "selfishness"; that's a somewhat different thing as far as I'm concerned. Selfishness and self-interest are built into our DNA (and into the genes of every other species with a survival instinct) — we're all geared up to maximize success at surviving for ourselves and the others we identify with, whether they be family, demographic group or just the folks who share our chosen obsessions. And if you identify with a group that doesn't remind everyone else of, well, you, you'll often get the benefit of being labeled "selfless," even if you're still trying to stick it to the groups you don't identify with. So when you get down to it, the differences between "selfishness" and "selflessness" can frequently just depend on which vantage point you're observing them from.
No, what I'm talking about is something more akin to what rationalists and logicians call the "typical mind fallacy," the belief that your worldview is the way everyone else perceives things too. If you're running this particular bit of junk code in your headspace, then when you run into other people who appear to perceive things differently, you'll tend to assume that either it's just a observation error ("There must be part of that story that I'm not seeing, and if I did, I'd immediately identify with what's going on"), or a glitch on their part ("This'll all be smoothed out if I just explain this to them my way"), or, more ominously, a wrongness in the world that you need to stamp out real soon.
And the other reason I focused on the label of "solipsism" is this notion I see more and more in people's heads that, while it may not be literally true that you're the only one who really exists, the people around you are supposed to be behaving as if you are — that everything they do ought to be done for your benefit. You can see at least one yutz of this type on any given season of any reality-competition TV series: the person who's about to be voted off the island or whatever and is absolutely flabbergasted that even apparent allies might be voting or working against them. "Wait, how could they do that to me? It's ... it's ... almost as if they wanted to win the million-dollar prize themselves rather than rig things so I could win it! What were they thinking? How could that be?"
Or, a little more topically considering how much bickering is still going on over the last Election Day ... well, you think I'm going to pick on the people who are upset that their Chosen Candidate didn't win (even if their party did), or the ones who get upset when, despite the victory by their side, they realize they're still not going to get everything they want. And I'll get to them someday, but in the meantime, they're already being verbally ass-kicked by plenty of snarkmeisters. But what about all those people we meet or hear about who've decided they aren't even going to vote anymore because "my vote just doesn't make a difference," the usual translation of that turning out to be "I don't pick winners often enough"? Let me get this straight: With somewhere around 225 million people eligible to vote in the U.S. — or, to get real, the 132 million or so who actually did it last fall — there are people out there who expect that their ballot choice for president should make a noticeable difference to the result, and if it doesn't, that means "the system is broken." I can't imagine a more thorough rejection of the concept that Other People Exist than this right here, that someone can be incapable of accepting that in a nation of hundreds of millions, made up mostly of states with populations in the millions, the vote of a single person is always, and should be, just one drop in the waterfall.
A society, any society, is a consensus of its members; otherwise, it's a civil war in progress. When you start to realize there are a large and growing mass of people who aren't even equipped to perceive the other members, much less accurately understand how they tick, it becomes a lot easier to understand why we're having such trouble keeping our society running reasonably smoothly these days.
While it might be fashionable to lump this latter-day navel-gazing as one of the Things We Can Blame on the Internet, let's face it; we've been heading in this direction in this country for a long time, possibly since World War II ended. That was the last era when events actively conspired to throw us together with people who were our fellow nationals but otherwise might be nothing like us. Since then, our neighborhoods, our upbringings, our workplaces and our interests have been busy pressing Like together with Like, and sifting the various Unlikes apart from the others. Hell, the interactive parts of the Internet might actually be introducing people who share one common interest but differ on all the others ... at least until they bring up some social or political stance and all its opponents scream out allcaps obscenities and flee to friendlier comment threads elsewhere.
And it's the solipsistic outlook that drives the speed of that flight; that puts us in situations where we think things have been "worked out" if 51 percent win what they want while the 49 percent remainder get the friendly suggestion to go fuck themselves; that makes us forget that there's even such a thing as a "positive-sum" solution, an outcome that goes beyond "I win, you lose" to reach "we've all won something more than what we had, even if nobody won everything they craved."
So how do we get past that outlook and start striving again for more than win/lose zero-sum outcomes? I'm not entirely sure, but I know it's the topic I'll keep coming back to on this blog, because, like I said, it's our Original Bullshit, the one that will sicken and kill us if we're unable to flush it.
Note One: You'll notice I didn't take any political stances here myself. That's because which stances any given yutz is yammering about are irrelevant to how we might stop yammering and return to negotiating. And also because I don't believe there are any saints out there, politically speaking. I'll no doubt sum up my own beliefs eventually, if only for the public service of giving anyone who's reading here an accurate sense of why I piss them off, but for now let's just say my political philosophy boils down to "I'm everyone's asshole, and I'm fine with that."
Note Two: In case anyone's curious about what my original list of Seven Deadly Bullshits included, they were: Solipsism, Inconsistency, Pretension, Overgeneralizing, Oversimplifying, Inflexibility and Intolerance. Read into each one whatever you want; it's not worth recycling that whole series here just to explain how I chose and defined each one.
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