It's All Relative

Sometimes you fit in, sometimes you don't.

Where do you belong? It’s all relative.

First, let me give a plug to Sam Alaimo, creator of the Substack “What Then?” He and I agree at some basic levels, yet he makes me think. That means he is seeing things that I haven’t seen. That means I have to process what he is saying and do something with it. I can neither simply accept nor reject what he says. That’s how we grow.

In today’s post, Sam contemplates, as we approach the 4^th, why intellectuals never miss a chance to condemn the USA, while offering little in their own right to be proud of.

It’s all relative, right? Who is the good guy and who is that bad guy comes down to perspective. And almost invariably we measure the world from our own perspective, as if our perspective is the one that really counts.

As part of his essay, Sam gives us this:

“The Pygmies called anyone who was not a Pygmy an “animal.” The Yanomamo thought the white ethnographer living among them was a “subhuman”. Everyone else fell into some lower form of Homo; something other, something inferior, something they could kill.— We are we, they are its.”

Betcha never quite saw it from that perspective before. Primitive tribes think that the anthropologist living with them is inferior? Do they not marvel at our advanced technology? Our computers, cell phones, airplanes that fly us almost everywhere? How could they think of the anthropologist as an inferior human? But when you think about it, how could those primitive people think anything different, when they discover that he doesn’t know how to start a fire without matches, doesn’t know which snakes are the dangerous ones, can’t shoot a bow and arrow worth a damn, and can’t make an arrowhead? I can envision them laughing about him behind his back.

Face it, that anthropologist is plain uneducated and dumb. If the anthropologist tried to live in this environment without the aid of these ‘primitive’ people, he would most likely die. So, yeah, that anthropologist is the inferior one. By a lot.

But only in that environment. A primitive trying to live in the anthropologist’s native environment would suffer also. He would be the curiosity.

So, it’s all relative. No absolutes, when you get down to it. I excel in my world, you excel in yours. What do we do with that? Did you think we are all in the same world? No, you didn’t. At least not when you think about it. Can a welder function easily in a college classroom, studying Kierkegaard? Can a philosophy major weld? Can an electrical engineer assess the rise and fall of the Roman empire? Can a history major develop a power grid?

There is not just one world, there are multiple worlds. In some of those worlds, you might fit right in; in others, you are strange and unfamiliar. Do yourself a favor, wherever you go, whatever you do; do not presume that you are the standard by which all others must be judged. Do not presume that your world is the one, superior world. Remember that others think that you are the primitive one. And in their world, you are.

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Why the Fourth of July Still Matters-Sam Alaimo

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