You can't change the world until you feel at peace in it

Or: people don't care what you think unless they think that you care

A long time ago I thought that it was my job to confront and defeat all irrationality in the world - I saw myself as being thrown onto this dud of a planet with superhuman intellectual power and urgent moral responsibility, and so I would approach pretty much anyone and anyone and challenge them to justify their beliefs. They couldn’t do it! And what’s more they would then avoid talking to me, clearly soaked with cowardice and intimidation.

Looking back, whatever the virtues of what I had to say, the way I went about things made it very difficult for people to support what I was up to. As I write this today I see myself as being shaped less by good ideas and more by good people, drawn more to how people are than what people think. 

And so I was demonstrating a lot when I was going around frantically challenging people, my behavior demonstrating a lot more than I was asserting and a lot more than I was aware of at the time. I had all of the power and dignity of a chihuahua barking at a fence. I was demonstrating that I was wildly insecure and that I needed to feel superior to someone to feel normal, that to engage with me would be to perpetuate that sad part of me, and that on some level what I was asserting and this insecurity-superiority which I had were connected with each other. “Believe what I believe and you can become like me” is in the background of a lot of intellectual arguments, unacknowledged but always doing a lot of work. Even if what I said were completely airtight, why would anyone want to join me in being a miserable asshole? 

Being an insecure, confrontational jerk left me being quite isolated, alone and in pain in a way that I couldn’t think my way out of. I was lucky, very lucky, to find people who knew how I felt and who accepted me even in that bankrupt way of being, and so I found myself open to and attracted to things that before I’d been sure were beneath me. I’ve discovered a lot in the way of being human less by sheer logical-or-whatever force and more by “hmm, maybe this healthy, happy person has something figured out that I could figure out too”. 

There are plenty of things wrong with this imperfect world of ours, and I saw my misery as being a necessary reaction to these imperfections. My misery was a sign of my brilliance, of my acute moral awareness. My aggression was a sign of my force of will, my strength to change what others merely accepted if they were even aware of it at all. But my world didn’t change until I confronted my misery and aggression head-on, rather than the world out there that I saw as their cause. As my misery and aggression changed, so too did my world, through my relationships - I became easier to be with, easier to live with, easier to work with, and my material security grew with my relationships too. My enemies became fellow sufferers, baffling to me but nevertheless people I would need to live with as I asked them to live with me. Places I formerly saw as truth-telling world-changing spaces now became places where insecure people torture each other forever, affirming and deepening each other’s pain in a pointless way. 

The facts never changed, about myself and the world, but the story I told about them did, which made a much different future possible for me. 

This doesn’t mean that change isn’t necessary - just that acceptance, paradoxically, is the first step in change’s direction. You can’t change the world until you feel at peace in it, at least a little bit.