Humans are weird and dealing with complicated relationships is hard. File this under ‘life lessons I’m still learning’.
Winona Ryder is an award-winning actress, one of the most successful of the 1990s. Since her twenties, she has supported the American Indian College Fund, which sends low-income indigenous peoples to universities. In 2001, she stole $5,500 worth of designer clothes and accessories at Saks Fifth Avenue.
Albert Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Princeton, where he campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans. He considered racism America’s “worst disease” yet Einstein’s travel diaries from his 1922-23 visit to Asia reveal xenophobic and racist judgments on the people he saw.
Ben Carson is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan Medical School. He was the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland from 1984 until his retirement in 2013. Carson performed the only successful separation of conjoined twins joined at the back of the head, pioneered the first successful neurosurgical procedure on a foetus inside the womb, and developed new methods to treat brain-stem tumours. He was received more than 60 honorary doctorate degrees, written over 100 neurosurgical publications, and was bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Carson is a vegetarian because he believes it’s healthier and better for the environment. Carson also believes that Charles Darwin was inspired by Satan, that the pyramids were created by a Hebrew slave named Joseph to store grain, and that the United States will play a big role in the coming apocalypse.
People are complicated
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we’ve been hearing about post-truth politics. This refers to the idea that debate is framed by appeals to emotions. Details, truth, facts, and expert opinion are secondary if they matter at all. The internet makes everything old new again and this is no exception. According to Oxford Dictionaries, “post-truth” has been with us for a while.
Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’. There is evidence of the phrase ‘post-truth’ being used before Tesich’s article, but apparently with the transparent meaning ‘after the truth was known’, and not with the new implication that truth itself has become irrelevant.
A book, The Post-truth Era, by Ralph Keyes appeared in 2004, and in 2005 American comedian Stephen Colbert popularized an informal word relating to the same concept: truthiness, defined by Oxford Dictionaries as ‘the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true’. Post-truth extends that notion from an isolated quality of particular assertions to a general characteristic of our age.
Social media makes things look new and notable, but humans have been irrational since there have been humans. It’s a tough lesson because we like to think that we’re logical and rational and that this is what separates us from other animals. We also want humans to be kind and compassionate. We struggle to understand human cruelty.
Boundaries
Some behaviours, such as the sexual abuse of children, should never be tolerated. But, hopefully, that isn’t the sort of thing we’re dealing with. It’s more likely to be someone who is mostly normal and nice but has some ignorant racist, sexist, or homophobic beliefs and behaviours. How do you deal with people like that?
Cut them loose
Evaluate the relationship against the behaviours. Some issues are more important than others and people don’t have to tick all your boxes. Maybe you don’t want to cut your father out of your life over his antiquated belief that men should be the breadwinners and women should stay home to raise children. But do you really need to be Facebook friends with your third cousin twice removed that you haven’t seen in six years who is always posting InfoWars conspiracy theories? And lunch with Jaxsen, the racist gothic hipster from the customer service team, is definitely a no.
Focus on common ground
Give yourself and your loved one a break. Centre on common beliefs, interests, and relationships. And give yourself permission to have a complicated relationship with a complicated person.
Don’t let them off the hook
It’s okay to have relationships with problematic people. However, don’t apologise for your beliefs and don’t make excuses for theirs. You may want to avoid certain topics or keep debates from becoming a fight, but if you have a good relationship with a person, it should be okay to ask them difficult questions and challenge their perspective from time to time. You may need to ease up on your expectations though. People don’t change easily or just because you present them with facts and logical arguments.
Find your tribe
It can be infuriating, exhausting, and demoralising being around people like Jaxsen, the racist gothic hipster from the customer service team, or your fat-shaming Uncle Jim. At the end of the day, you need time to relax and restore yourself. Self-care is important and one of the best things you can do for your wellbeing is to find your tribe, that special group of people, that second, magical family, that gets you.
