Sept. 3: Stuff I know

In one of my old notes of the day, I wrote that I still believed the same things I believed when I was a teenager. A colleague upbraided me for this, calling it irresponsible and stifling.

Yes, and even the great Dale Carnegie confessed that he was constantly re-evaluating what he believed to be true. In How to Win Friends and Influence People, he says that about the only thing he still believes from his childhood are the multiplication tables. (He joked that he even wasn’t sure of that.)

-

I counted myself a Christian when I was a teenager and I count myself one today. Back then, I would have signed my name to the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed and I doubt a second has passed in the ensuing time when I would have revoked that signature.

We recited the Apostles’ Creed every week at church and I remember my first Mass as an altar boy (I was eight) saying those words out loud with the rest of the congregation at St. Gerard’s.

At the time, I also believed the following:

-          That Santa Claus visited the homes of every good boy and girl on Earth on Christmas Eve (I had no concept of differing traditions.)

-          That aliens were real and that they visited Earth frequently.

-          That one day I would play in the National Hockey League.

I no longer believe the first item on the list and it’s obvious that I no longer believe the latter. I am agnostic about extra-terrestrial life. I don’t think about it much anymore.

-

Somewhere in there, I visited the library and got a book that was all about New Age beliefs. The book argued for reincarnation, insisting that you ever entered a building and new the layout even though “you had never been there before,” it meant that you had lived before.

I was still quite young and my critical thinking skills weren’t completely in place, so I believed that if it was written down in a book somewhere, it had to be true. I asked my father about it and he told me that deja-vu was a much more likely explanation for the aforementioned phenomenon. He also told me that the doctrine of reincarnation does not gel with Christianity and I vote with him.

-

Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936 with he was 48 years old. I made the mistake of bringing that book to school with me when I was in Grade 7 and reading it during our class reading period. My peers mocked me; one girl even stole the book so she could show her friends what geeky Shteevie had been reading. I was embarrassed but I shouldn’t have been. Most of the girls in that class were reading Sweet Valley High, the literary equivalent of Archie comics. How to Win Friends and Influence People was certainly more illuminating.

One of the things Mr. Carnegie said was that you shouldn’t be a know-it-all if you want people to like you. If you always “need to be right” or you feel that your opinion is the correct one and that you will devote all kinds of energy to proving it, you will find yourself relatively friendless. This is likely why pundits, pastors, and the late Christopher Hitchens are only liked by a select few – their contrarian natures but them in personal conflict with the masses who disagree with them.

It is hard to correct someone and not seem like a braggart. A good solution might be to ask questions rather than simply rebuke.

An example: an acquaintance of mine once criticized his municipal government for spending money on expanding the liquor store instead of using it for something more practical, like fixing the road. As a journalist, I knew that (a) the government was not spending any money on expanding the liquor store, (b) that the money came from the coffers of the liquor store, which had done some market research and learned that the store in this particular region was too small to serve the community’s needs, and (c) that a larger store would mean higher property taxes, which meant that the municipality was actually making money on the bigger store, not losing it.

So we have two options. We can dismantle the entire argument by assaulting him with facts, or we can ask questions that will lead him to the truth. To wit:

-          How did you hear that the government is spending money on the liquor store? What’s your source?

-          Do you know how much the government is spending?

-          You know that the liquor store is a crown corporation, right?

-          Do you really think the local government would give money to a crown corporation to expand its own property?

Now we couple that with some assumptions like “yeah, I know you’re too smart to believe that our mayor would give the liquor store money so they can grow. Can you imagine the scandal that would create in town?”

Mr. Carnegie tells us that people would rather believe they figured out the truth themselves rather than being corrected by someone smarter than them.

-

The Bible might not be a friend to Mr. Carnegie.

“Preach the word,” 2 Timothy famously charges. “Be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.”

The Bible preacher is likely not that concerned with winning friends or influencing people. Nor should he be. He must contend for the truth. Let that two-edged sword fly and let the Holy Spirit do the influencing of people instead.

-

Mr. Carnegie points out that we are wrong about so much, but that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, he says that if we could be right 55% of the time, we could make a killing on the stock market.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I “know” but I might “know” things that are not right. Indeed, there are three levels of knowledge. There’s what we know, what we don’t know, and what we don’t know what we don’t know. By comparison, “things I know” might fill a teacup, “things I don’t know” might fill the entire province of Ontario, “things I don’t know that I don’t know” might fill the milky way.

-

Kierkegaard said that paradoxes are “the passion of thought” and wondered if it was possible to think something that cannot be thought. I have tried to think about a colour I have never seen before, what is at the edge of space, and what happened before the first second. I can’t. My feeble brain can’t grasp these things. What I can do is think about things that have never been thought of before. Here is a partial list of things I have never thought about. You have never thought about them either:

-          Former US President Jimmy Carter, the pitching coach for the Baltimore Orioles, and a Basset Hound named Barney selling blueberries at a roadside stand somewhere in Guatemala.

-          A bathtub filled with cottage cheese orbiting Galatea, one of the moons of Neptune.

-          Wonder Woman plucking out her armpit hairs with a golden pair of barbecue tongs while Orville Redenbacher plays the accordion.

-          Aretha Franklin, dressed in a nun’s habit, going down a waterslide with your best friend from Grade 2.

-          A hardware store in Shreveport, Louisiana where everything is purple and the whole store is staffed by ducks.

-          Mahamat Deby (President of Chad) reciting Dante’s Inferno while walking a tightrope over the tallest building in Rosetown, Saskatchewan.

-          Taking banjo lessons from Lionel Richie while showering in pink lemonade on the international space station.

Kierkegaard would be so proud of me.