We Are Not All Alike

Here's the reason I will never be a practicing Buddhist. Well, there are other reasons, I'm sure. I've studied Buddhism and agree with many of its principles, but I won't ever say, "I'm a Buddhist." And one reason is the whole we're-all-one thing. We are not all one. We are not even close to being All One.

You hear a lot of people claim that we're all just alike, that we all want the same things and dream the same dreams. They believe that, down at our core, we are the same. OK, if you distill it down to the very essence, maybe: most of us want to live, to be free of pain, to have the things we want.

Not even that is universal, though. I don't know about y'all, but I have known people with a death wish and people who were miserable and didn't want to live. My mother, for example, who attempted suicide multiple times and told me she would have tried it again but was tired of failing. Not everyone wants things--ascetics, for example. They don't seek to acquire things the way most people do. You could claim, if you're going to nit-pick here, that not wanting things is the thing they want: they want not to want, and not having things fulfills this desire.

I'm not going there with you, though. You can go there by yourself. Good luck, and don't forget to leave a trail of crumbs so you can find your way back.

What set me off this morning was actually two things. First was something I read about how we are not overpopulated and are, in fact, in danger of having too few people as our tax base to support government programs.

I had to read this twice. I assume the commenter is living in the US and speaking of her/his experience in seeing things as both local and immediate: what applies only to this place at this time. If there aren't enough babies born here, now, there won't be enough money taken in to support the current aging population.

Such short-sightedness is astonishing. It's not about the future, where we're going to have real trouble with things like, oh, space. Arable land. Potable water. And it's not about anywhere else, where there's severe overcrowding most of us can't even imagine and not enough of anything to go around. And this person believes that all thinking people agree that we need more people, not fewer.

Then I read something else (what am I DOING here, people? Why am I online reading stuff? I have no idea) that said everyone is creative. When I read that--as I do, over and over--all I can do is think the writer is another one of those people who spends all her/his time with people who are exactly like s/he is. Now, we may all be born with the potential to be creative, but we are most decidedly not all creative. Oh, if you're going to nit-pick and say that any decision made by anyone, including whether to wear brown or taupe socks, is creative, then fine. I'm not going to argue with you about that, either, because, well, it's not worth it. I'll just go ahead and concede that, on that level, you are right: everyone is creative.

But I don't think that's what they mean. They mean something larger, and they think it's true. And it's because they don't spend time with people who are not like they are. People who have absolutely no interest in creating anything, not even a meal, and would be lost even trying to start and wouldn't want to, anyway.

We'd like to think that everyone is like us, if we kind of like ourselves and think we're doing a pretty good job of things and have a benevolent bent, but the truth is that there are herds and herds of people who are nothing like you. Nor like anyone in your circle of friends. There are, for example, millions of people who are merely existing. Have you spent time in the public schools lately? If you have children in a Nice School somewhere with a circle of charming friends, all of whom come to your house in the afternoons and build science projects involving advanced technology, I'm guessing you have no idea about the larger mass of children being "brought up" (and I use that term loosely) by parents who have no more idea of how to raise a child than they do of how to build a particle accelerator. Do not think I am talking here about one race or one class or one location. It's much, much larger than that.

Midland, as I might have mentioned a time or two, is a very wealthy place. There's oil money flowing through it like water. Oh, wait. There's no water, so that's not a good analogy. OK--there's a lot of oil money. How's that? But even here, there are people who are lost. Lots of them. We have known kids who killed their friends. Both of us have been in the classroom with a kid who stabbed his friend to death with a pocket knife. I have sat in the same room with other murderers, people who were not drooling on themselves and ranting like madmen but who seem perfectly normal if you don't know their story and the charges against them.

Or not even that--not even the cases of bad people, but what about the masses of people who go through their days on autopilot, eating, going to school or a job, coming home to watch television. Day after day after day, not thinking of any other life. Have you ever spent time eavesdropping on the conversations of people who are not like you? Who maybe didn't finish school and have no desire to go back? Who really have nothing in common with anyone you know? I have, because I am a bad person who likes to eavesdrop. The things people talk about might astound you.

What about people who want to be president? There seem to be rather a lot of those people, and I don't know about you, but being president is down there next to "being dead" on the list of things I want to be. I can't imagine a worse job. All that responsibility for so many other people's lives and welfare. I'm smart, but I'm not anywhere near smart enough to be president. Hell, I'm not smart enough to be mayor. Nor do I have any desire to be, but there are lots of people who do, people for whom power is worth almost any sacrifice. Are they like you?

Or what about the people who don't bathe, have few teeth, haven't washed their hair since last month, but who have jobs and seem to be functioning normally--what about them? Are they like you? Do they want the same things you do? Do they seem to you to be of the same species you are? Or is that just me?

What about those with power who are willing to step on anyone--lots and lots of anyones--to get more? They have a lot of power and a lot of money, but it's not enough, and they'll do just about anything to get more. Are they like you?

Or what about the people who abuse animals? Children? Each other? Are they like you? I have known kids who would hurt people just for fun. I saw things at animal control that still haunt me. Are these people fundamentally like you?

Maybe at some point we were all alike, at some moment after conception. Before hormones and maternal drug use or lack of stimulation or whatever intervened. Before childhood and adolescence and adulthood set us on this path. Perhaps on some level we are alike now--not wanting to feel "pain," whatever pain feels like to each of us (but don't forget to think of cutters, some of whom cut to blunt emotional pain, or body alteration artists, or those people who suspend themselves by hooks inserted into their muscles. Masochists. Submissives (we're talking S&M here, sorry)). Or wanting to be with those we love and wanting them to be safe, only then you have to ask: what about the people who profess love and then abandon those they claim to love? Leave their partner, their kids, their families? Swindle people who thought they were friends? Sleep with their friend's spouse? Kill their relatives? Drown their children? We want to say they're mentally ill, to distance ourselves from them. But if you say we're all alike, then what?

See? Anything you want to use to say, "We're all just alike," you can find not just a few exceptions, but many.

One little mind game they sometimes have you play here is to imagine a race of space aliens landing on Earth and trying to take over. Then, they say, you'd see that we Earthlings are all just alike and that we'd all be banding together for the same goal: to overcome the space aliens and save our home.

I'm willing to bet you there. While the majority of people might be fighting the space aliens, there would be those who were sneaking around in the background stealing the DVD players from the houses of those who'd gone off to do battle. Others would be plotting with their friends, all highly-placed, for how they'd benefit from this invasion and how they could seize more power once it was over.

There would be people doing unimaginably kind things, self-sacrificing things. There are people doing those things now, people you never hear about, people who are willing to suffer to make the world a better place, at least in their minds. Some of them we'd agree with; some of them we wouldn't.

And, on the other hand, there are people right now cultivating stuff in labs solely for the purpose of killing other human beings. They are being paid for doing that.

But this isn't about doom and dire predictions and stuff. The reason I use bad examples more than good is that bad examples elicit that, "You're right. We're not all alike. There's no way I'd kill my entire family and loot the Bank of Finland," whereas good example are more likely to make us hallucinate, as in, "Well, I'm no Mother Teresa, but we truly are a lot alike. I'm a kind and compassionate person who's willing to sacrifice to help other people. In fact, now that you mention it, I'm really a *lot* like her, just in Kansas instead of somewhere icky."

This is about--it really did start out as being about, I swear!--how simplistic it is to claim that we're all anything: good, evil, creative, kind, self-aware. We're not all anything. We are not alike, not in any real way you can claim. And if you argue that this isn't true, then what you're showing is that you don't know anyone who doesn't share your core values, your beliefs, your lifestyle and goals and dreams. If everyone you know does, then what about those you don't know?

I know it's a marketing tool, telling people we're all alike so that you can then tell them, "Hey, this is what everybody wants, so you know you want it, too!" It's at the core of social media and our hive/tribe culture. We all want to be a part of a group of people just like us. But it's misleading, and I think it's dangerous. When we believe we're all just alike, we start to believe we have nothing real to contribute, that we're all just worker drones, interchangeable and expendable. It's what the army wants you to believe, what big corporations want you to believe, what any too-big society needs you to believe. Because if you believe you're unique and that you have unique talents and capabilities and interests and desires, you're not quite so willing to fit in, to be malleable and to make yourself conform. And conformity is important, especially in an overcrowded world with two few jobs and not much room for individualism, never mind that first guy's worry about our tax base

I read another comment last week where someone said privacy was a 20th-century concept, implying that there's no room for privacy any more, that it's not important and not useful. Privacy, individualism. Are we really ready to declare them obsolete? Do we really want to live in a post-private, post-individual society?

Man, I hope not.