watertank | (no subject)

I wonder how people developed such a complex ability as "do not understand thy neighbor".

Consider dogs, for example. Their body language is pretty limited and fairly well defined: play, mate, fight, flight, etc. They can sniff each other's butts and genitals to make sure that the blog they found yesterday on the neighbor's lawn belongs to this particular hairy dude. For a dog not- or mis-understanding is not such a good quality to have, because if you misread someone, you end up with her teeth clenched on your nose.

But it's quite different with people. Our ability to communicate verbally and live in large communities creates a completely new problem: how to defend one's brain against other people's words. In other words ( see, I even have trouble understanding myself!), if I understand what everybody tells me, I am going to die from information overload, just trying to digest it all. Pure and simple. Understanding is like a TV channel, if you don't tune to it, you don't have to watch it and think about its content. Which is, by the way, a great ability to have, if you want to have time for ideas of your own. Or, alternatively, you can develop a special skill: understanding-without-accepting. This is hard and, generally, not appreciated by other people, since it is completely opposite to the much valued accepting-without-understanding, something that we do when we love or have faith in someone.

Also, it looks like that the modern media found a way to overcome the non-understanding barrier. All you have to do is talk to the audience in dog language: play, mate, fight, flight, and advertise, advertise, advertise...