This post and the last one have been in my head for a couple of days now – only getting to them tonight. I wanted to blog about another interesting theory regarding criticizing people. It seems to me that in order to criticize a person, you assume one of two things:
1) They are in fact incapable of doing whatever properly – or more specifically incapable of doing whatever to your satisfaction.
2) They are not doing their best.
The second thought really fascinates me. It comes into play for lots of people when they criticize people (and/or their actions) and get very passionate about it. I have two major issues with this reasoning. The first is how can a person honestly know where another person is at. The second is that people in glass houses sure do throw lots of rocks.
It’s like back-seat drivers who live in the world of fantasy, the world of imagination. What is criticizing and blaming, other than trying to put someone else down? Think politics, think our childhoods (our horrible parents), think high school, think our neighbours, think our children, think everyone else but me. I think that criticizing is usually a sort of masturbatory mental game isolating one specific aspect of a little corner of life and showing how much better we are at it than whomever we are criticizing.
It’s essentially a waste of time unless somebody outright asks us to do it some constructive way for them – or if they work for us, at which point they just have to do things our way.
But to get back to my point…it’s that imaginary moment in our heads, when we think about the person doing or saying something or other. Our caricature of them is usually laughable. We need to create a dramatically exaggerated thought or image so that we can even believe our own storytelling. It’s a really good thing to keep in mind when we get upset with another person – to try and maintain something real in the mental game, it will usually protect us from saying nonsense (or worse, actually believing nonsense).
