Vintage thinking?
One of the magical things about books is that they are frozen in time and we get to travel back to see the world at that moment, how the authors thought, the context that they were operating in and the language that they were using. You can recognise the vintage by common characteristics of their time, and sometimes it can taste off to our modern palates, the period between the world wars was full of very uncomfortable ideas about genetics and superiority that tainted many books that were nothing to do with the subject at hand. However do you throw the whole barrel out because of a single bad apple, it might be wise if you think you are too likely to be infected by their casual acceptance of common ideas of the time, though if you are able to cut away the rot that leaves you with a lot of apples no one else has, and that is a unique advantage.
There does seem to be a fearful attitude out there that people are not able to discriminate between good and bad ideas, that if you read a book you have to accept every word or none of them, and that author are figures of authority that you chose as your master and you must submit to all their teachings. If they sin in any regard you must then wipe out their existence from the record, purging them as punishment for their crimes, this gives author a cult like leadership role in our thinking, you choose your teacher and that is your team, which is ridiculous if you have ever met a writer, most of them are lucky if they could lead an unwrapping of a sweet and make a cup of tea without serious spillage, disorganised messes of human beings who are divorced from the real world and prefer to spend their lives in their heads, no practical use except as a chair warmer.
If you then dismiss authors as leaders of thoughts, you are left with a collector of idea, people who chew them over and past on the ones that interest them, that does not mean every idea is actually useful, some are just pretty or worse clever. Clever ideas are the charming ones that are great on paper, such as “everyone should have equal access to resources” that are very hard to disagree with until you hit practical reality and you end up with seventy years of communism, economic collapse and tens of millions dead, be very wary of clever ideas that gaslight you into bad actions. If your action hurts a single person it is a reason to pause and consider if it is the right idea, that is not to say action has to be harmless, free speech is the right to say things other people do not like, for a long time gay people where considered harmful to society that does not mean their free speech was wrong. Wronged feelings and actual harm is two different things, if you feel hurt by words that is a matter for self-examination not censorship of others.
Obviously emotional harm is real and in personal relationships it is damaging and abusive, though often it is the result of a long chain of poor actions going back for generations, and the hope is both that we learn to do better than our parents and that this is the overwhelming reaction of most people, we want to do better not worse (though the minority who do not do a huge amount of damage). However if you are allowing someone you have never met to emotionally harm you, that is your responsibility to change, that is a weakness which should not be allowed to persist because it so harmful to you to be constantly in pain and at the mercy of others. True courage is the ability to do the right thing whilst being afraid and pained, being able to speak up against the majority despite the social cost, to be able to empathise with your enemy so that you can find the common ground between you and build relationships with them, that is how you find understanding.
You have to build spaces outside of you, where everything is not about you and that begins with have a solid sense of yourself, a stronghold that is your own self-identity that can not be changed by the actions and words of others, where your actions are not weakened by your own emotional reactions. You could be the greatest sword fighter in the world but if you are too weak with fever that you can not lift your sword it does not matter you are still losing the fight, the same is true in the world of ideas, if your sense of the truth is so weakened by your emotional inability to cope with ideas that offend you, you will never be able to untangle what is good and bad in the ideas of others. You will lose out on the growth that is possible when you take the best of thoughts and turn them into action in your life.
That ability to view the world from the eyes of others is vital for our growth, it is the compost that feeds it and the birth of new ideas. It is the skill of empathy without taking on the pain of other people that allows us to view ideas from the source of their creation and what issues they were addressing, ideas can right in one circumstance and quite wrong in another, you will never know if you can only see thing from your own point of view, especially if it is a view that you have taken on without thinking about it, if you think that there is only ever one correct answer to a problem or issue, that is dangerous one dimensional thinking that results in unthinking cults where mantra replaces constructed arguments and ideological purity is more important than facts. If everyone around you, says and thinks the same thing, that is a cult not a thinking, living and evolving community, where there is only one way that is a stagnant dead end.
What we also need is forgiveness for the mistakes of the past, often they were dealing with problems we have to give no thought for, it is easy to go around calling everyone a Nazi now, it was a lot harder when there were actual Nazis running around, you did not have room for subtlety, it was kill or be killed. There were good Germans but when the price for calling them out was your life not many did and you can only judge them by the standards of the time, you do not know what you would do if faced by the same situation, and you certainly should forgive them for being less than perfect. Especially as we do not know how we are going to be judged by history, a lot can change in a short amount of time, what was acceptable ten years ago could get you cancelled today and if you are making harsh judgements now, know that you will face the same in the future when the next evolution in Wokeness happens, once the purges starts there is no finishing line it is a repeating pattern.
If there was one vintage kind of thinking I want to return to, it is tolerance not for those who you like and agree with, but tolerance for those who you hate, not for their benefit, it is for the your own peace of mind, as hate only brings more hate. Human have never had a shortage of hate in the world, it is a self-sustaining fire that sucks everyone in the inferno, hate attracts more hate, it makes you hateful and the only solution is to give up that hate, it has to burn out in your own heart before it stops hurting others, the problem stops with you.
It only by loving, yourself first, then others, then the past, that you are able to start feeling compassion for everyone, and the incredible, imperfect path that has led to the present, and we have an amazing inheritance, we have the possibility of a free and fair world where happiness and joy are our measure of success, but only if we learn from the past and stop treating it as a strain on our character. We all make mistakes and we learn from them, the same is true for society, we have a huge wealth created by the past generations, an intellectual legacy at it's high point and relatively peaceful society, and if we stop pulling ourselves apart and if there is a will to, we could build something better, something great by doing so together but it only works if we are as one in demanding greatness both from others and ourselves, now how is that for some vintage thinking?
