Herman's Guest

Herman is visited for an encouraging talk over coffee with someone who has a larger view of what is going on in the world. A bit like an homage to Childhood's End.

The world is not a pretty place. Some things in it can be lovely, but on the whole that's just decoration that serves to disguise the basic ugliness of your emotional, mental, and social landscape that makes up the bulk of what you experience as the world; the actual natural and human-made things that you see are, in the end, of a much lesser importance. This lack of beauty, naturally, has an effect on the people who live here. In these statements, I am not trying to say that this world is any worse than any other specific world, and indeed there are a few places I've worked that have it even worse, though not a lot of them. It is true, though, that there are worlds with more time for people to work with, so there's a better sense of perspective, and that of course helps its people to get a better sense of how things work and how to make them work towards a course of improvement. That's neither here nor there now, but just so you know, there are ways of achieving a better condition that you humans seldom get access too...though with all the wisdom of the ages that has been recorded, it is truly ironic that so few people read and are able to 'connect the dots.' As it were.

Ah, thanks, yes, this is quite nice. Piping hot, too. I'm glad you've cultivated this skill.

Well, you see, in my line of work, I get the chance to see what goes on "behind the curtain." Your fellow Shakespeare had it right when he had one of his characters say that all the world is a stage; because people just don't communicate in full honesty, they seldom realize that almost everyone's social personality�"and I really ought to say 'personalities' because these vary depending on context�"comes out as a sort of dramatization of what goes on in their minds. This is a complex mix, but we can essentially say that it expresses your inner interests and enthusiasms in a way that is meant for public consumption...and this expression is tempered by the same sense of being watched, of performing, that inspires the performance: you think about how your actions will be perceived, mostly in terms of being judged by the "audience."

You all have this morbid enthusiasm for being liked and approved of, it is humanity's primary desire. You want to be liked...but this comes from fear and so all the signs that are offered by the audience are filtered through this fear, too. Very few people can overcome this, and most of those who can, seldom do. Probably this is because of your own personal knowledge of the falsity of your own social signals: since you pretend to be more enthusiastic than you really are, and this again is because we want to be liked by those who are performing, you doubt that the other people really approve of your own dancing.

It's odd, because most of you do, in fact, really like some things and some people, which is something we approve of, but so few of you can tell the difference between earnest signs of approval and feigned ones...I meant in others, but it's equally true of yourselves. And the better you are at being social, the harder it is for anyone, including you, to tell how much you really like something. For most of you, more inept than those last, what you really ought to look for is clumsiness and artlessness in expressions of enthusiasm, because your art in trying to impress others with how much you approve is forgotten, lost for a moment in the strength of your ardor for whatever it is...which usually is exaggeratedly strong, the result of you yourself being tricked by more skillful dissemblers. Although you're such complex creatures, you don't even realize it; sometimes you start out entirely unaware of your own unmonitored emotional responses, but then you feel ashamed that it will not impress others favorably (even imaginary auditors) so you modify your responses. Silly, really. Personally, I feel like your species' greatest moments are those when you lose your awareness of being watched and just let yourself focus on the enjoyment...which, interestingly, is very often during a literal performance of some sort of arts. It happens when people fall in love, too, but that is a much more complex set of interchanges and I don't have time for that now.

You are now thinking about how people behave when there is no audience. Very well, I expected that; I know you think that when you're alone your 'true nature' comes out. I wish I could tell you that you have a discernible 'true nature,' but I cannot. It's a mixture, again. Sleep time usually includes dreaming, briefly but intensely, and most of that is the same stuff, rehashing what you have worried yourselves sick over. Waking time on your own is little different, really. On average, about half of that waking time is spent in rehearsal, a sort of imaginative preparation (or a review) of actual 'performance.' A good deal of this is a sort of imaginative revision of some interaction that had not gone ideally; with a misty awareness that it was a sort of improvisational theatre to begin with, you tinker with the dialogue and stage directions in an attempt to improve the scene's effectiveness, its impact on the audience...which in most cases is a sort of closed-set audience: the players' impact on each other.

And in the absence of any real audience, you simply judge yourself...and you also add in a batch of judgment for the conversation partner's failure to perform in a way that would best please you.

Selfish, you say? My dear creature! What else is there in your minds but self? Very little of your time is spent otherwise than deciding how well others please you, and thinking of what sort of actions on your part would best please them...or, alternately, how to achieve a greatly desired effect … if they behaved thus and so, and you responded thus and so...interminably. Since these are never explained to the other imaginary participants, who have different goals and thus never behave just as imagined, there is no real goal to such thinking aside from pleasing oneself to picture these things happening. The imagination is as far as these things usually go.

It's true, the real things that you want out of human interaction are held to yourselves as private thoughts, seldom expressed to others. This is why there is such a problem with fixing the world and making it a more habitable one for its residents: there is no unity in your goals, and anyhow, very few of you can even imagine how, if you all were unified, or even if you had your own group with a shared purpose, your group of humans would set about achieving these goals, especially since other groups' goals would again conflict with yours. I wish you would just make the effort to share your real wishes with everyone else. You would, and I'm sorry that I cannot morally justify simply telling you, discover that in fact there are a few things that practically all humans do want, all together, and that if you but said so, you could work together to achieve these things quite easily, though of course not quite rapidly�"well, not what you would think of as rapidly, not that it matters to us.

Well anyway, I appreciate you inviting me for this coffee and I find it's pleasant to be able to actually speak out these conclusions to at least one of you. I hope you aren't judging me for bringing you bad news, of course I know you are, but you are clearly the sort who can distance yourself from that judgment and appreciate that it is about your own faults and that I am simply an objective observer who shouldn't be blamed.

Oh yes, you wanted me to address the subject of prejudice, as if I hadn't already covered it. Well, I can fill in some blanks for you if you really want. And of course I know you do, even though you've thought of it on your own and made your own guesses. There you are again, insecure about your own conclusions, which are entirely obvious or should be to you by now, after all I've given you plenty of briefing already. I know you just want someone else to confirm what you already know at heart, and that is nothing more than a weakness of your species, not a personal fault. You see, I can think at the meta level as well, you are not to blame and I know it. Don't feel bad.

Now, prejudice. Prejudice is the result of facing a social void, most of the time: there is a sort of gap in the imagination that comes from lack of personal experience. The judgment that goes on is often based on hand-me-down or precedent, after all it is a cultural tradition to fear and hate things you do not comprehend, a lack of you humans which falls to you naturally.

It is possible to overcome this pattern merely by withholding judgment...but since your social interactions are mostly governed by a framework of judging others and yourself, it is hard to think, as you like to say, 'out of the box.' I'm afraid that your solutions will all be accessible only if you do distance yourselves, though. Within the situation you cannot see what is beyond the walls, and therefore your sense of context has that barrier as its limit. If you only knew more of the larger picture...but that time will come, don't worry.

When you, no, I'm sorry, I should make that sound less accusatory even though it is about you, well then, if a person encounters a type of person or situation that is unfamiliar to them, and I'm using the plural them since your language is not well equipped to handle this semantic situation, they feel threatened. They cannot imagine how they will be judged by this other party. One could certainly wish for a movement here that would strengthen the imagination! Odd that the imagination is, more and more, leached out of the individual and out even of education, and seen as the demesne of the entertainment industry, which must perforce now be a committee endeavor, lacking in personal vision and marked by blunting the individual participants' ideas from just the fear of being disapproved of! Really, you people used to do better. You are letting the Internet do your thinking, and your judgment, for you, and that really won't help things, you know.

At any rate, here's this new situation and the 'person' here feels pressure to perform, only they do not know how this audience will respond, what might please them. They can but imagine, in the deficit of data, that anything they do will be found unimpressive...a fearful sentence. Further, they can find no reliable indicators of what they've judged before, it is unlike other performances they have responded to. Something, they feel nervously, must fill this gap! And what comes in but hearsay, equally uninformed claptrap from others who have experienced this sort of aporia before...or, just as often, from what people call 'the media.' Nasty, unhealthful stuff! As long as this sort of misinformation remains and fills these gaps before actual interpersonal communication can be achieved, prejudice must continue.

The thing that would be best is to destroy the misguiding media that spreads such unsubstantiated lies and rumors, but the law is set up to protect lies from expiring, so other means must be found to make it happen. Well, that, and the courage for people to dare to learn firsthand what these unfamiliar figures are really like through interaction, conversation of whatever kind. You can learn a lot more about people by becoming their friends than by acting as a rival or enemy, from whom truth and relaxed intercourse is always intentionally blocked. That's why sneaky double-agency is a favored method in times of war and disagreement. Rascality! Not honorable, but dashed effective.

Appearances, and people's attitudes about them, are interesting, aren't they? Or have you thought about them? People's personal appearance, obviously, are about costume, about packaging, they're a bid for acceptance, only that never works on everyone because you can't fool all of the people all the time, as a great and able liar has said. Or rather that was before your time, I forgot. No matter. Now one's personal space is also a chance to be judged, so people who care make it wear a costume as well. Even those who think of themselves as 'slovenly' are making a point, they wish to be judged so, they have come to feel they have a moral advantage because they feel they have moved beyond petty vanity, moved above it, when really they are just seeking to please a different audience. Don't you see what I mean? Oh good, well I'll take you at your word for now, I've got to be going soon and that should be enough if you keep thinking it over.

People will only care much about what a place looks like if they feel it has some advantage for them in status, in how they will be thought of. You can see their choices related to property exchanges as value judgments, especially when it's a choice between leaving a place natural and pristine or using it for a structure of their own. They will anticipate admiration in either case: they want to be liked for being new and flashy, or else 'deep' and 'concerned.' They feel that seeming to love Mother Earth, which by the way is not that far off a term, will make them seem sophisticated. No, of course there are exceptions, some really do love the earth, and they are made that way on purpose, their work and their struggles are vital but as a means to an end. Likewise, abandoning some property is a statement too, it shows that the place is scorned now, lost favor, to some other place's advantage.

People like popular things because reinforcement of one's taste is easily come by; they like obscure things when they have the goal of approval by a niche group who claim to like that oddball thing. Usually these are those who show favor for the less popular thing because they feel, along with the slovenly person, that they have thrown over the vulgar popular in lieu of the unpopular because it seems to be a mark of distinction, of having higher levels of taste or a more distinguishing palate. Half the time they are aware that it's a lie, but some like to lie to themselves and it's tough to disengage those fibs. Never mind, in time they will have those ideas dislodged, when it's time for a higher level judging to take place. Time enough.

Learning to be unself-conscious about food, that is a moment for one to let true, unmitigated tastes come into the open. People are very self-conscious too often. They worry about what people will think, almost invariably. All products, commercial ones I mean, are bids for a certain group to be judged. You tend to buy things that go along with the image that you want to maintain, as if it were paint for your home. What will my body look like if I eat these things, and what will Stefanie think if I gain weight? As if that mattered in the end. Dear kid, it does not. You can take that one home with you, it's a freebie.

Food should be pleasing to oneself. That's all. We simply decided that we'd make at least one aspect of life entirely free of things to judge yourselves on. We underestimated, I admit, your spirit of competition and your craving for favor. But look, Herman. Face it, you'll all end up dying anyway. Sooner, later, it's immaterial. If you need more time to reach your goals, well you'd better maintain that body so you won't run out of time, right? But otherwise, achieving a long lifespan isn't commendable in its own right. It isn't worth eating badly, which is to say eating what is not to your delight, because that body of yours just won't last. If you can grow up, and help others to grow up more, during your life, well that's enough, you see? Nobody will care that you've planted a thin, musclebound bit of dirt after you die, or a fleshy lumpy one. It's the packaging, it'll be thrown out. It's the contents that matter. The contents of this. Sorry, did I knock too hard? I am not used to handling you humans, I apologize. What I was trying to impress upon you is how little that all matters. This is true: You won't need your property, your body, or your art of pretending to accomplish the things that make your life something that's worth the effort. It's all in this head of yours, the rest is simply a support system so that you can use your head for speaking and thinking and remembering. Mostly what you should do is discerning and evaluating the world and identifying what you are, yourself, able to fix or to improve. There are a million things, and we have a lot of backups, duplicate talents in hopes that at least one of you will actually make it.

You all have your purpose, don't you feel that? You're all different for a reason and the differences are the differences of different attachments for the human 'tool.' What? No of course not, and to answer that other thought, yes, that means everyone. Right, even those people. Well no, nobody's disqualified. Didn't it occur to you that things like depression are just a sort of customization? That helps those people in their jobs, it may cause other obstacles but you have to realize that this lifetime thing is so temporary, it's not seen as a significant obstacle, certainly it's no hindrance in achieving what you are meant to do. If you or others can't see that, you have more to learn about how to perceive value in other humans, or in yourself. I wish you would get over this need to impress each other and stick to the point. Why are we even trying to refine you? It's partly because we know that it's possible and that you can, potentially, progress, graduate if you wish. This isn't the final stage of your game! I suppose few of you even remember the previous sessions, but it doesn't matter in the end as long as you all get there at last.

No, there's no real hurry, but remember, you're not alone, as you now know. Don't hold up the line, would you? Come together, please, work together, don't be so divisive, and above all forget what others think about you, forget trying to 'win.' Winning must be done together, no individual can do it, so quit mucking around.

I'm sorry, I really should go, I don't mean to get all testy. I need to work on patience myself, it seems! Well, well, I am sorry and I mean no harm. I know you won't bear a grudge, you will forget all this...well almost all of it, you'll remember some of it and I bet you'll think it your brilliant inspiration or insight...and try to take credit for the ideas, as if they were yours, to gain favor with others. No, sorry, my stars, I get a bit cynical, too much time around humans, I need a vacation, it's been a long eon and I need a break.

But really you as an individual are quite a good chap and maybe I can ease things for you: you really do not need to worry about being judged or misread. You know who you are, I accept that, to other people it doesn't make a lick of difference, but yes you are male and if others don't accept that it's really not important, it's not relevant in the end and you don't need their admiration or acceptance to accomplish what you need to do. You've got this special set of characteristics because we needed you to have curiosity and interest in certain specific things to help you get along with the world, and you're nearly there, you have to put the pieces together yourself and make the rest happen, and I wanted to talk to you because I wanted to see what you were like before your great success. Actually male and female are null concepts in the first place, more costumery and roleplaying, pretending, part of the old mutual judging act, but it really doesn't matter in the end to anyone unless you personally feel it is important, for maintaining your mental equilibrium and contentment is so much more vital than that of the body.

The best thing I can urge you to do is to stay focused and on target. In the end, dear, it will seem that you and your situations will lose detail as you join the group effort and make things better not for yourself, not to impress others, but because it helps you all. It is, after all, all about learning, discerning, and problem solving. Think of it as a game, if you wish...a team game, and there's no other team to defeat. Encourage others, don't try to beat them or to win their admiration; that is counterproductive. I wish you well, you could think of me as your coach, or otherwise as a sort of rancher, getting you and the others elsewhere to steer through a rather narrow gate into a much larger pasture.

Yes, thank you, one more sip before I go, I know you'll sleep jolly well now, take off your shoes first, no sense adding to your discomfort. I'm sorry this has to end, I'm sorry you've fretted so over inessential things, but I mean for you to be a bit adjusted now, you will be remembered later as a facilitator and encourager and I'm glad to get into the bitty little details for a moment just to appreciate what we have here, you're a good fellow and I do appreciate what you are doing now, we all do, we will toast you, or something analogous, tonight.

Cheerio then, Herman, please yourself and keep productive, stay curious and�"

You know, in your language here, it's an interesting thing. I was going to say that you should be selfless, by which I meant, be giving and generous of your effort and help others. The irony is that the way to accomplish that is by being true to yourself, treating yourself right, by not comparing yourself to others or trying to curry their favor. So being selfless really involves focusing on yourself and your own needs...within the bigger picture. Facing towards other people points you in the wrong direction! Go your way and you'll find the stairs to the next level on your own. Following other people who are simply following more people will just get you lost.

So yes, get to know yourself, try to make out what it is that you are capable of, don't stop learning, stay curious, and don't lose yourself amid the mirrors. You will succeed anyway, this is set, I just want to help you out and encourage you because frankly I'm so proud of you. I think you've always been my favorite, I just wanted to tell you so because you deserve it.

Be well, stay true, dear Herman, it's always a pleasure. You're going to graduate soon and we'll all be tossing our mortarboards skyward.

Sleep now. Enjoy finding your path. Never doubt that you'll get there. Don't forget that, in our fashion, we love you, we love you all.

Fare well. Thanks for the coffee.