Episode 51 - When What Other People Do Just Doesn't Make Sense

Thanks for reading Gregory B. Sadler - That Philosophy Guy! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Today I had an interesting conversation with somebody who I would call a colleague, somebody working in my building who was hoping to actually get some advice from me about a situation that they had to deal with earlier on in the week.

And it’s the sort of thing that comes up, at least in one respect that I’ll tell you about in just a second. 0ver and over and over again. I think that going back as far as I can remember, there have always been people (including myself at times) who had raised this sort of complaint about the bad behavior of another person.

So here’s what it’s really about. They say: “I don’t understand why they did this, or do this sort of thing, or behave in this sort of way. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

And that is a pretty common reaction to the kinds of situations where we feel like somebody has treated us or somebody else that we care about wrongly. We might feel hurt. We might feel disappointed. We might feel irritated. We might even feel afraid or sorry. We’re sort of resourceless. We don’t understand how this situation came to be, because here’s the crux.

We’re attributing to the other person the same sort of motivational structure and evaluation of things, and the ways in which they see good and bad, right and wrong, their own responsibility, as we ourselves have.

And if you think about that for a moment, you step back from the situation and you think, is this a rational thing to do? The answer very clearly, quickly and clearly, is No, because people are indeed different from each other, and they have been throughout all of history.

I mean, whether you go to mythological stories, or whether you look at history, or whether you look at other things, or just consult your own experience, if you’re really being honest with yourself, people don’t always see things the same way, value the same things, behave in the same way.

Their characters are sometimes established in good or bad ways, or not even really that well established. So it would be rather imprudent to hold on to a deeply set belief that I think many many people carry (I won’t estimate what the percentage could possibly be), and this deeply held belief is that at bottom we’re all basically the same. Now we are the same in certain important respects, but that sameness maybe doesn’t go as far up from the deep-down as we might expect it to.

So when somebody does behave in