Emotions have been extremely fragile these past few years, mostly due to our endurance of endless isolation, adaptation to new norms and having to deal with the bombardment of misinformation and mental noise from the media. If we could go back to the days of the great philosophers, we might experience some true common sense.
The world seems to have become one big junior high school locker room experience. Everybody seems to enjoy throwing insults at the “other guys,” with a variety of creative negative monikers thrown in among the half-truths and hearsay. When the second party doesn’t fight back, they’re called cowards. That’s one of the problems with hurtful language, when you’re judged not by whether the accusations mean anything or are remotely true, but by whether you have a better comeback.
I wasn’t much for comebacks when I was hurt or insulted in high school, which was a lot. I had acne, which was treated like bubonic plague. I also preferred to smile, which many took as a challenge to beat me into subdued misery. I was despised for knowing the answer, ridiculed for being on top of the day’s events, and dismissed because I managed to find a comfort zone of dress style which walked a line between fashionable and respectable. Sometimes, decades after school ended, I can still see clearly in my memory the images of some of my tormentors as they came up with the top insults which live on a chart, like a Top 40 of hurtful phrases, rent free in my head, probably for life.
One of my social media friends has been in and out of the “broken rules penitentiary” several times for being naughty with many posts, but a recent entry he posted actually did me a world of good, and I managed to shrug off the burden of those long-ago insults.
It was a brief post about Socrates.
The famous Western philosopher and teacher (circa 470-399 BC) did not write anything down himself, but his followers recorded much of his teachings. His ideas are relevant now, and we could learn a thing or two from him. He didn’t teach in schools or wear the latest fashions: the people then wore togas. They did, however, write about simple ideas in life, and some of it has made its way to social media.
In this particular entry, somebody in Athens was insulting Socrates, who merely smiled and did not engage the person. An aristocrat asked him why he tolerated such insults, and Socrates lead him to a warehouse where he located a ragged cloak, offered it and told the aristocrat that it suited him. The man was confused and wondered if the great philosopher was mad to offer such a filthy garment. Socrates told the aristocrat that just as he would not wear the cloak, so he himself would not wear the insults because they did not suit him. He posed the question, “When someone gives you something you don’t want, and you don’t accept it, who owns the rejected gift? Being sad and angry at the insults of others is like agreeing to wear the rags they throw away.”
Is anybody worthy of insults, such as the store clerk being berated by a Karen who unloads their negativity onto others to bear? Is anybody more or less human than somebody else? Do insults matter?
When you examine what this world truly is, you realize that we are all “somebody else.” We all matter.
Also, as Socrates said, our greatest gift is the knowledge that we actually know nothing. Somebody who insults us knows nothing about whom they are insulting. It does not suit the recipient, then, to be affected in any way by it. When we master our emotions, we don’t project anything onto others in a negative way. Our calm can project calm, in turn, in a positive way. We can smile and walk away, and the insult means nothing. It belongs to nobody.
After reading this worthy post from a (I hope) reformed social media acquaintance, I managed to take a cleansing breath and shake away decades of insults living on my consciousness like cobwebs. They don’t suit me. The persons who said them knew nothing.
I do know that this simple way of looking at life is worth our attention, especially today. If we go beyond the noise of the media, the banter of politicians and the permissiveness of misinformation, we can get back to the basics of life. We could all be like Socrates.
Just without the togas.
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