To The Best of Our Knowledge

"A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us." - attributed to Donald Winnicott

"We believe our interpretations of reality intensely, and we want other people to join us in our interpretations to make us feel secure. We believe our interpretations are reality and if we can get enough votes we will prove it."

(For the gentleman we encountered last night.)

As usual, this blog post reflects a combination of things that have crossed my path or been on my mind recently. This post is about, in a word, skepticism. More specifically, it is about the intersection of skepticism and compassion/empathy. And the point I'm trying to make is illustrated in the following (true) story...

Some time ago I found myself in a conversation with an older gentleman during a reception. Having never met this man before, we began with the usual exchanges - where do you live, what do/did you do for a living, etc. Nothing about his responses was out of the range of the perfectly ordinary. But at some point (and I forget what the trigger was) the conversation took a distinct turn. He began to talk about UFOs, and then about shape-shifting aliens that lived among us.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, there are no shape-shifting aliens living among us. Which is to say, I have never met a shape-shifting alien. I have never personally known anyone (other than this gentleman) who had met or believed in the existence of shape-shifting aliens among us. And I had never seen any pictures/videos, etc., that suggested to me that there might be shape-shifting aliens living among us. Granted, I had never gone looking for such evidence, nor had I ever really given the matter much thought.

Curiosity runs strong in me, and this gentleman seemed sincere, though part of me suspected that he might just be waiting to see how long it would take me to call 'Bullshit!'. But it mattered not a whit to me that he be convinced that my view about shape-shifting aliens was the correct view. He seemed to want/need to talk about the topic of UFOs/aliens at some length, and something about me seems to say 'sympathetic/non-judgmental ear', so the conversation continued with a minimal amount of back channeling on my part. An occasional 'Wow' or (my personal favorite) 'I don't know what to do with that' was all that was required to keep him talking, until we were joined by another gentleman who was more insistent upon redirecting the conversation.

Perhaps the point I'm getting at with that story is that, once I was not concerned about establishing agreement about 'the truth' of the topic under discussion, I was free to enjoy (or at least try to understand) this person for who he was. Perhaps the point I'm getting at is that agreement about 'the truth' should not stand in the way of compassion. Perhaps the point I'm getting at is that I find myself experiencing a growing distaste for the sale of 'the truth' to one group of people at the expense of another. Or perhaps it's just a growing distaste for the dogmatic insistence upon one's own particular view of the truth.

Perhaps I'm just acquiring a new appreciation for the phrase "to the best of my knowledge"...