Over the past few days I have pondered various aspects of what is a consistent problem, namely the fact that we are beings with both a rich interior life and a major lack of ability in understanding what goes on inside others.  We express this gulf between our self-awareness of our own depth and complexity with our lack of awareness in the depth and complexity of others with a variety of metaphors.  We speak of icebergs with only a small part above water and the rest menacing beneath the surface.  We speak of onions or artichoke hearts where layers have to be peeled off, sometimes with a good deal of weeping (as when one handles an onion the wrong way).  We speak of prisms where different facets cast off different frequencies of light, and so on and so forth.  These metaphors, which are insightful as far as they go, help to remind us that we and other people are complex and have far more going on than what is visible at the surface.

Having discussed questions about the difficulties of changing and regulating behavior, even that which we know to be harmful, such as our consumption of foods, and our attempts to manage problems through technology rather than through moral suasion, the roots of our hypocrisy towards others, and the fundamental asymmetry between self-government over that internal world and efforts by external governments to control from the outside in, it should be apparent that all of these issues spring from a common source, namely the presence of an interior life that has repercussions in an external world but remains fundamentally separate and often at odds with that external world.  To the extent that we lack empathy with other people and appreciate the interior world that they have, and respect their own thoughts and feelings, even if we may (especially if we may) disagree with them, we will be unjust towards others.  When I was young, I thought quite meanly of my younger brother that he was all surface and lacked any sort of interior depth because I saw him seeking to please people and did not see any sort of integrity of character in the way that he would frequently lie in order to make someone else feel better.  In turn my brother saw my restrained personality as proof positive that I lacked an emotional life and was an unfeeling robotic person because my own emotions were not very visible to him.  Nor are such misjudgments all that uncommon.  We see the surface and so we judge by it.  If we even acknowledge that there is a heart and mind beneath the surface, even where we lack understanding of its contents, we fancy ourselves to be people of great wisdom and compassion, and so we are, at least if we are graded on the curve.

In many ways, this fundamental gap between our self-awareness of our own immense depth and interior existence and our inability to properly recognize the same qualities in others is a consequence of our design along with our own native bent towards being unjust to others.  It is not so uncommon for us to live in a world full of black boxes.  We regularly use technology that we do not understand.  We hardly care if we can understand a cell phone or computer or some other technology so long as we can make it do what we want.  When something goes wrong with our automobile, we take it to someone who is mechanically inclined and they can tell us what part is going wrong and if we have an O² sensor that is malfunctioning or if our serpentine belt is causing problems or something else of that nature.  Our concern is that what we have does what it is supposed to do, and that is the extent to which we are interested in the interior life of our possessions.  Yet we are black boxes ourselves.  We often do not understand how we work, and it is not necessarily to our advantage if we do understand our inner workings if we cannot get what we want out of life, because most of what we want depends on the operation of other black boxes that we do not understand and who have a will that is quite at variance with our own.  Unlike our cell phones or automobiles, though, the interior workings of other people, while they are mysterious to us, are of deep importance because it is those inner workings that drive behaviors that either infuriate us or that restrain behaviors that we would wish to cultivate.  If my calculator does not like me, it matters not at all, so long as it continues to calculate accurately what I ask of it.  On the other hand, it matters a great deal if a friend or spouse or child or parent does not like me, because that will carry with it consequences that could be deeply unpleasant and offensive and hurtful to me.  A malfunctioning piece of technology where one has hit the wrong buttons can always be replaced.  Hitting the wrong buttons with a person can have deeply lasting and even fatal consequences.

What can we do about this?  There are a variety of approaches that we can take towards this reality and all of them have tradeoffs.  We can cultivate an attitude that pleases others, but that often creates a great deal of internal trouble to the extent that our exterior appearance does not match our interior reality.  We may cultivate our interior life of intellect and feeling to excess, making it hard to relate to others.  We may value other people only to the extent that their behavior is pleasing to us, and totally neglect any interest in their interior life, only to rage against the way that others use us for their own benefit without caring one whit about who we are either.  Our efforts to understand others and to relate to them may be met by resistance as they wish to preserve their privacy and protect themselves from our intrusive awareness and involvement.  Likewise we may pull away when others wish to become closer to us than we are comfortable with.  To the extent that our lives are entangled with others, we may find our happiness dependent on the wishes of others, but to the extent that we are isolated from others we may not find life very worthwhile or pleasant at all, or if we are content we may find ourselves confused that other people are not content to be at arm’s length with us while present in our lives at all.  What these tradeoffs reveal, though, is that our interior life and that of others exist in an essentially reciprocal state.  If our understanding is asymmetrical, our relations are symmetrical, and this means that our happiness and ability to relate to others does not depend on us understanding them, but rather on mutual love and respect between beings who imperfectly understand ourselves and others, but whose fondness and rapport does not depend on knowledge but rather on doing what is right and proper and good even when we do not fully know what we are about.  For if we wait on perfect knowledge and understanding to behave as we should, we will forever be putting barriers between us and the happiness that we seek.