Finding the fine line between the drama and the statistics.
It’s long been said – “The death of one is a tragedy, the death of 20 000 is a statistic”.
Excuse my brash intro, but that has been an important problem for decades. There are people who argue that the bosses/politicians should be more involved in the single lives of people, while theoreticians argue that the macro scale is the important one for an efficient decision making. We have witnessed various public people vacillate to both extremes and as it is usual with all extremes - neither prosper. Therefore logically we should seek some trade-off ratio, where you are neither too remote from the real world, but still not affected by single case tragic emotions.
As of now we will refer to those extremes as left and right for simplicity. Admittedly it could be argued that right side really has a broad view, because those people have voluntarily depraved themselves from the larger part of the happening in the world, so they can focus on the aggregated figures. On the contrary though the left side is unarguably narrow-minded as their interests reach as far as their day to day problems and comparing them with others everyday life issues, in order to get peace of mind.
For me the ultimate picture of a left person is one who goes to work for money and home to sleep, watches soap opera TV to fill his empathy needs, usually his kids are his only friends, they listen to him and unnoticeably get inducted with similar mind set and problems. He or she usually finds relief in alcohol, preferably beer, doesn’t really care how the world works, continually becomes poorer and poorer as he spends more than his income and owes money to many people. The list could go on, but that should be vivid enough.
A person from the right side would usually live alone in his apartment in relative comfort; he will struggle for money, but will make ends meet. Those are usually men with long beards, old clothes, sociopaths – usually referred to as “know-it-alls”, who normal people avoid, due to their relentless babbling. They find joy in finding the “right” solutions, achieving mastery in a theoretical subject and learning things, usually with no purpose or intent of measurable benefit to anyone. They hate drama movies or books, cannot stand manual labour and could have overestimated self-esteem.
At this point maybe you expect to read the solution to the problem. Ohh it would have been wonderful, but unfortunately I am not certain where it is, but as an advice you can use: If you know one of those types of people, you better reconsider your relationship with him, weigh the pros and cons carefully and decide.
As long as the perfect balance goes, most people would say – “Go for the golden middle”, but not me. The perfect middle is never stable in the nature, it is hard to maintain and there are no evidence that it works well. If you ask about me, I have moved left and right on the line in the past several years, have been moving left lately, but as anyone who would write such and essay, I am still leaning to the right. There pros and cons about any position (but the extremes :D), which I might cover in a follow up, but my honest opinion is that the key is in the flexibility. If you have the experience of different ratios you could empathize with wider variety or people and thus face day to day issues accordingly. That expands you capabilities and gives you more freedom to pick your options, but then you become inconsistent and dependant on your own decisions, which are never guaranteed to be good.
Whatever you do there are pitfalls, life is so complex that a single fit-to-all solution could never be computed. It would be great, if that essay is not interpreted as a statement to the insignificance of personal choices, but as a catalyst for a discussion in attempt to close in on clearer perspective on the issue, so we could try and chose sanely for our better future.
