It would appear that despite voluminous evidence, a surprisingly large number of people (including many of my own relatives, who ought to know me better) have an entirely mistaken view of the relationship in my thought and writing between the abstract and the particular.  For these people, to talk about general issues is merely coded language for talking about a specific person or situation (when quite honestly most of those issues never even cross my mind), whereas for me a specific situation is an entrance into a more general (and usually intellectual) examination of abstract and general principles.

This is not to say that my examinations are entirely unrelated to issues I feel passionately about–quite the contrary.  However, the personal is merely the starting point for my own thinking and reasoning and musing about larger issues and the interconnections and relationships between them.  What this means, in practice, is that while people tend to think I have personal axes to grind, most of the time the personal experiences are merely the entrance into a serious attempt to wrestle with the larger issues at stake without seeking to make things personal.

It is hard for me to understand why people (many people) so consistently and perversely reverse the process and assume that my abstract examinations of issues are veiled personal attacks.  If this just happened one or two times, it would be easy to ignore such a thing and dismiss it as people being overly prickly, but this is an extremely common problem, so common that I wonder what would allow people to see things as they are, since who I am is who I am and that’s not going to change.  I may at times be a very indirect person, but that’s not because of subtlety but rather because I don’t like to do the work of other people in drawing out all of the implications of my thinking, because I find it rude to insult the intelligence of other people.

Despite the fact that a lot of people react very harshly to what they see as personal attacks that are not meant in that way whatsoever, it is nonetheless striking that their actions are not entirely irrational, and are often based on what is a very real difference.  Often, despite the fact that no personal insult or attack is meant by my examination of subjects, often very contentious and controversial ones, given my concern for objectivity and my high willingness to examine very unpleasant truths that make a lot of people very squeamish, the hostility has at its core some very real differences.  Despite the fact that no attack is meant, my very strong presentation of my own views does reveal some very serious differences with other people that can lead to serious conflicts if they are as passionate about their positions as I am about mine (as is often the case).

Therefore, in seeking to correct any sort of incorrect view about my specific and usually nonexistent agendas, there must be at the same time a very real admission that there are almost always very serious disagreements in worldview and perspective at the base of the misunderstandings about my intent or purposes.  In one sense, the conflict is real, even if the offense is largely imaginary and in the mind of the offended person only and not an intentional one on my part.  In order to prevent that from happening, it would appear a lot of people need to be educated about the way I see the world and communicate, often dryly, on it.  It is for this reason that I am very open in talking about my own personality and perspective, because I do not want people to misunderstand me.  Likewise, I am also willing to go to considerable measures in understanding where other people are coming from, no matter how alien their own perspective is from mine.

It is a difficult matter, though, to deal with the perversity of misunderstandings that lead people to take specific and personal offense to what is meant as a general examination.  Though my general examinations often do have serious implications that can be applied in a great many ways, it is my purpose to let other people do the work of taking those implications and working them out for themselves, not in beating them over the head with my own judgments.  How to communicate this combination of fierce intelligence and a high regard for intellectual and moral consistency with a nearly total disinterest in despotic enforcement of my own conclusions and opinions on others is a most vexing problem, especially given the fact that a large number of people take my abstract intellectual musings as direct personal assaults despite all the evidence to the contrary.  If anyone has any good ideas about how to deal with this problem, I would like to know.