Hidden Selves

Why is the truth of ourselves hidden so well within us?

I reached out to someone who uses arrogance as armor and they did NOT like me tapping on their shield.  Rather than ruminate with sadness over their lack of control, I will summon as much compassion as I can for their psyche as the journey they face is a losing one.

No one wants to hear that they are part and parcel of a losing cause.  It's certainly not an American ideal that we embrace.  We like to be loud and celebrate winning causes.  And because those causes make us feel better about ourselves, we are blind to the nature of them...blind to the fact that they may not be good for us.
In politics, the good of the people should be foremost in our hearts.  Yet our egos super cede that need and we embrace approaches that instead feed our own personal need for validation.  The science of statistics is the great power and as much as we want numbers to change their value, they remain steadfast.  Yes, when the odds are very close, there is room for tweaking the outcome.  When the odds are utterly disparate, a nontraditional approach to closing the gap is necessary yet today's politics leave little room for tweaking.

I once believed that men were superior in dealing with statistics as they were more adept at putting aside their emotions.  What I am finding is that they cannot put aside their hubris and therefore, they skew the outcome.  Ah, arrogance....Multi-sensory perception is being explored once again by the masses and is led by women who have proven far superior at reading emotions through body language and facial expressions.  The intrinsically poor are more adept at judging the outcomes of interpersonal relationships.  Why?  Theory is that the poor have depended on personal relationships for actual survival...they have honed their intuitive skills at reading others.  And so it may be women coming from poor backgrounds who will lead a true revival of democracy.

As I have been on both sides of the socioeconomic fence, I am struck now with how little progress our society is making to mesh the classes.  Could it be that we are content to cycle into an era of haves and have nots?  Is it becoming a badge of honor to be in either class and pride ourselves for hating the other?  We have entered the era of public shaming.  It's embraced in our social media, our workplaces, our daily lives.  Our celebrities, our politicians, our heroes must either be perfect or we will shame them into acknowledging their personal demons.  And if not done satisfactorily, punishment is quick and severe; the spanking is public spectacle.  What was once our private hell becomes fodder for a wider world of condemnation.

The greatest leaders are born within the groups that they must lead.  They share the experiences and they connect to the other side in ways that are nonverbal and completely intuitive.  Stepping forward to lead the poor and uneducated yet never having been subject to its daily grind might produce sincere thanks but it will not inspire a successful movement.  Instead, it might inspire public slaps from both sides of the fence no matter the intent.