August 02, 2011

What do you know?: Selfishness and saber

Re-watching Tron: Legacy on Blu-ray last night got me thinking. It wasn’t the stunning visuals or superb score that got me. (Buy the Daft Punk soundtrack on Amazon and you get a bonus track.) It was Jeff Bridges’s pseudo-Buddhism.

The Dude’s philosophy is pretty much the same outside the Grid as inside it. In the film, Olivia Wilde tells Sam Flynn that the Dude’s been teaching her ‘the art of the selfless.’ (Yes, I refer to movie characters interchangeably as their character’s name, actor’s name and character’s name from other movies. Essentially, I just call people what they’re most known for. That’s why, as an actor, you have to be a larger personality than your role or you’ll be forever typecast. Sorry, Daniel Radcliffe. You’ll forever be Harry Potter.)

I get that Buddhism strives to annihilate self or, rather, realize that selfhood is an illusion. I can’t get on board with that. But I can get on board with the diminution of the self. (Is ‘getting on board’ a train metaphor? I guess, then, I’ll take the midnight train headed for Humility City.)

Selfishness can take many forms. At one extreme, self-worship is pride. Secure people roll their eyes at the proud, but insecure people flock to the proud like Harold and Kumar to White Castle. (I’d give an example of a proud person here, but I can only think of real people I’ve placed in my Acquaintances circle on Google+. It wouldn’t be very nice to name them. Then this would turn into a gossip blog. Also, I’m being highly parenthetical this post. I’ll stop.) On the other hand, self-hate can attract secure people and drive away the insecure. Gregory House can hardly move for the number of doctors catering to him at Princeton Plainsboro, but many of his weak-minded patients can’t bear him.

I think it’s a good practice to go through your own thoughts and writings and, metaphorically or literally, underline the pronouns. How often are they first-person?

I think self-absorption traps people in their own minds and keeps them living only present wonderings. Memory and anticipation kind of fall away when all you can do is think about stuff on your own. Insulated in thought, it’s difficult to experience things outside of yourself. In fact, for all the thinking going on, it’s really difficult to know things.

Spanish and French both have two words for the verb ‘to know.’ While referencing the French words would be more academic — I hate that — it would also be plagiarizing Lewis scholar Michael Ward’s lectures on his book Planet Narnia. So, I’ll still use his ideas but I’ll translate them into Spanish.

Saber is to know something as a fact. Conocer is to know someone or some place personally. Conozco South Kensington.* Yo sé a Señor Cornwallis. But, and this is important not just to this blog post but my senior thesis, espero que conozca a Señor Cornwallis.

*Now’s as good a time as any to link to this YouTube video I found of Conan touring London. It aired on his old Late Night program. If I’m being real, he really hasn’t been as funny since he left New York.

  
As C.S. Lewis, the patron saint of Protestants, once said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.” Thinking about yourself less means you can think outside your present time, remember and project. But selflessness also allows you to really know other things and, more importantly, other people more fully.

I really think it’s just the economic principle of the Crowding out effect applied to the individual. You can only know of things if you’re selfish because your person is too crowded to let anything enter in. You can only Know things by allowing them to enter into yourself. (Yes, I just distinguished between the two ways of knowing by capitalizing the conocer. And while I’m sorry for the parenthetical, I’m sorrier English doesn’t have two different words to express the difference.)

So, go out there and learn something. Hopefully you can gain some Knowledge, because I’m pretty sure knowing stuff doesn’t really help you relate to people. Knowing stuff, however, does, because the personal can more easily be shared than the abstract and impersonal. Plus, Knowing stuff is good practice for Knowing people, which is probably a better end than Knowing stuff anyway.

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