A Neighbor Makes a Power Play
A new tenant moved into the apartment building next door to me recently and a controversy soon developed - over my three cats. She believed they had been leaving droppings in the back yard included in her rental. We talked briefly about how to solve the problem, possibly by engaging a professional “pooper-scooper” service that I’d pay for. But then the woman became more encompassing in her complaint and stated flatly, (“plonkingly” as the British would say) that she didn’t like cats – period. She didn’t like to smell them, see them, or think that they were anywhere in the neighborhood.
Well, that was quite a challenging exclusion she was posing. I smiled at her in an indulgent, conciliatory fashion - and assured her I would do everything possible to keep the cats away from her territory.
But afterwards, I began to think about what had just happened there. Although the woman had staked out a wider claim against something than most people would have, her basic proclamation of an aversion was not at all an unusual conversational gambit. I thought of how often people introduce themselves with some sort of assertion of likes and dislikes. They wear these preferences for and against as identifying badges. “Hello, I’m Susan,” is, somehow, almost immediately followed with, “I hate spicy food.” Susan knows herself by the kinds of things she likes or dislikes, and she expects her listeners to similarly identify her, and to identify with her, according to such lists. What’s more, her remark floats the tacit expectation that people will dance to the tune of her preferences. That’s because, in addition to announcing preferences as a key to their identities, people also often make these announcements as power plays in their eternal game of one-upmanship.
To have a preference, especially in the form of a strong and definite dislike, is to shape the social environment around you. It makes others curve their behavior in accommodation. You become a strong magnet dropped onto a table of tiny iron filings. With the slightest nudge against the table, all those random little filings are compelled to start jostling into an arc around you, until a nice, neat little pattern of propitiation is achieved, with you at the center. That’s another reason Susan will make sure you know soon after meeting her that she hates spicy food Her assertion puts you on notice that she’ll require special treatment and will obligate you to make special arrangements on her behalf. “Oh, that’s right, Susan can’t stand hot peppers. I’ll make a separate batch of chili rellenos for her. That means I’ll have to go out and shop for mild bell peppers for her batch.” And so on and so forth. Thus, without firing a shot, Susan put herself in command. She achieved the ultimate in “passive-aggressive” conquest.
In the same way, my new neighbor put herself in command and achieved ascendency over me with her one utterance about cats. She thereby sent me into a scurry of deploying litter boxes and monitoring feline movements. She sent me into what could be a lifetime of watchfulness and worry.
Common Complaints
So it is with so many of the sensitivities and distastes that people are more and more proclaiming. With all their various thrusts of aversion, they leverage themselves into positions of control. Social gatherings become contests about who can pour the biggest speed bump into the flow of conversational traffic:
“I can’t stand cigarette smoke. So go outside and back off 50 feet!”
“I only drink Coke. Take away that Pepsi!”
“Yuck, I don’t know where that fork has been. Get it away from me!”
“I don’t like jazz. Can’t you play something else?”
“But we’ll have to do something about this green paint. I want a nice clean look. Let’s redecorate and paint everything white.”
“I have a headache. I can’t stand the noise. Can you talk more quietly?”
“Can you stop those kids from bouncing their ball? It’s driving me crazy!”
All these statements are like hand grenades lobbed into what might have been simple conviviality. Such statements of predilection refocus everyone else’s energies on the complainant, at least temporarily. Augustin Burroughs, who wrote some award-winning accounts of the domestic dysfunction he experienced growing up (Running with Scissors), wondered why it’s always the person with the dislike or the disability who must be accommodated. Why do the presumed needs of the person with the headache take precedence over the need that the healthy person has for ebullience? Why does the whine always trump the unfettered outburst of the wine?
Well, in cases of the most serious “handicaps,” that often doesn’t happen. Despite all the last decades’ worth of “Citizens with Disabilities Acts,” the world still is a difficult place for anyone in a wheelchair or with some other major nonconforming physical condition. When I made a trip downtown last week, I tried to do it from the viewpoint of someone in a wheelchair. I was stymied right away. The rapid transit station where I’d naturally board a downtown train had no elevator. The elevators at other stations were “Out of Order.” There were unleveled curbs and bumps on every block along my route.
However, when it comes to the peeves of house and garden, it’s the complainer who usually wins the day. The utterance, or the mere look, of a “Yuck!” marshals people to do the individual’s biding. “Are you getting a chill? I’ll close that window right away.”
Domination through Desire
However, statements of positive preferences can be just as powerful. By expressing her like of something, Susan can gain popularity. It gives others something to do on her behalf. “Oh, Susan collects souvenir mugs. I’ll have to remember to get her one when I’m in Madrid. I don’t think she has a Madrid one yet.” Whenever and wherever the traveler sees a mug, he will indeed think of Susan and assess the object in terms of suitability for her collection.
Having an enthusiasm, a positive preference, at first might seem a more benign a way of controlling people. Most people are downright happy to be given the knowledge of Susan’s love of souvenir mugs. It gives them a goal and a focus on their travels. What’s more, it gives them a handle on Susan. It makes Susan easier to relate to. Rather than being confronted by a sort of amorphous, ectoplasmic entity at social gatherings, people have a ready-made way of opening conversation with her. “Oh, you’re the Susan who collects souvenir mugs, aren’t you? I have one my father brought back from Morocco. I’ll bet you don’t have any from there. I’d be glad to give it to you for your collection.”
This is a feel-good transaction all the way around. On the one hand, Susan is going to add a pretty mug to her collection. On the other hand, Susan’s new acquaintance will be able to unload a cluttering tchotchke from her house, and at the same time get the feel-good rush of being a benefactor.
And yet, both Susan’s positive and negative preferences are tacit ways of exerting control over others. By her preferences, she activates people into service on her behalf. The statement of a preference can be a subtle controller, even a welcome one – and yet, it does fence off and limit the possibilities of each person’s ability to be in the world. It narrows the definition of who each person is and of what those around them are aimed at accomplishing. By definition, preferences are “partialities.” They turn a whole into a partial.
Give Me a Little Caesar
Maybe this is one reason the gangster has been such a popular anti-hero in the media. From Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” up to the more modern incarnations of mobsters in “The Sopranos” - the charm of such utterly anti-social characters is that they take what they want – fast and furious. They don’t slowly, insidiously deflect other people’s lives by wielding the pincushion of preference. The mobster dominates with the decisive move, with the threat of and the actuality of sudden execution. He doesn’t slowly drain the other person’s life away with the on-going necessity of having to accommodate his wishes in a million little ways. If a neighbor’s cat is bothering him, he shoots the cat – or the neighbor. And it’s done. He doesn’t make the neighbor scuttle around securing door latches, deploying litter boxes and baffles ad infinitum.
I’m certainly not advocating or condoning the shooting of cats or people. I’m just pointing out that as a fantasy, we enjoy being briefly reinvigorated by entering into the mobsters’ way of coup de grace. Mobsters represent escape from what’s likely become the tiring quality of most of our routine associations. We can forget about all the trivial, petty exclusions and inclusions that our co-workers impose. We can briefly step outside our marriage to Susan and the decades’ long abstention from pepper that has entailed. For the span of the movie, we can keep company with someone who doesn’t prefer over the long haul, but who demands in a flash.
Without George Foreman Grills, What Have I Got Left?
But readers might object here – if we exclude mention of preferences from our lives, what’s left? If we discourage Susan from stating or from even having preferences, how will we know what to buy her for her birthday? What’s more, aren’t preferences primary conversation enablers? What would we talk about with our neighbors, if not our preference for a George Foreman Grill over a XXX Hibachi? And doesn’t the jargon that arises from having a preferred hobby grease the wheels of conversation? When two model railway buffs get together, they can have the immediate mutuality of discussing gauges and voltages. What’s more, how could we ever post an ad in a “Singles Seeking” forum without reference to likes and dislikes? If not “SWM, likes skiing, snowboarding, absinthe, the Dave Matthews band, working out. Looking for same” – then what? How could we introduce ourselves, become solid to other people, and hope to find matching pieces of the puzzle?
The Eastern Alternative
It’s true. The kind of selflessness that follows from having no distinct preferences can pose a problem socially. It can actually alienate a person from this society, which is so geared towards fashioning and legitimating consumer likes and dislikes. True followers of many of the Eastern religions might find it difficult to meld into the mainstream of Western society’s emphasis on stated preferences. That’s because Eastern wisdom often encourages the opposite of identifying with any strict, prickly little set of preferences.
Rather than sporting armored plates of preference, Eastern sages try to model porousness. They encourage their disciples to let the world flow through them, to open themselves to the whole experience of life. They point out that the constant critic separates himself from the full experience of life. His bristling assessments separate him from the world. It prevents him from seeing the universal divine in all things and from realizing his oneness with that inspiration.
It’s difficult to imagine a devout group of monks standing around weighing the relative merits of Nikes over Addidas shoes. They simply wear the cast-off sandals that fall their way. But in a more general sense, it’s difficult to imagine anyone who sincerely espouses an Eastern philosophy ranking potential mates on a scale of 1 to 10, refusing to do some task because “it is beneath” him, or appraising every morsel of the world offered to him and then apprising all the rest of us of his predilection in the matter. The sage doesn’t stand outside every experience, giving it a thumb’s up/thumb’s down. He hopes to stay available to all experience, to stand before the world, awash in the pure experience of it. He hopes to know it as something in and of itself, not in relation to any personal reaction for or against it.
But indeed that’s where East doesn’t meet West. The West equates having strong preferences with being a properly ambitious, productive, interesting person. While Westerners might occasionally find statues of the “Laughing Buddha” cute, that kind of merry embrace of “the all of it” just isn’t a pose any right-thinking Westerner would seriously consider imitating as a way of life. In fact, most Westerners disdain a lack of self-assertion, an inability to dominate by making other people attend to your preferences.
Born Buddhist
I know because, through some fluke of biology, I believe I have been a disciple of Eastern philosophy born in a Western body. As a young person, I couldn’t at all get the hang of choosing or wanting to choose, especially when it came to the array of items offered by popular culture. I wouldn’t have known how to prefer Barbie over American Girl, 401’s over Calvin Kleins, Pepsi over Coke. There wasn’t anything at all I wanted for Christmas. For me, the Holidays loomed as a sort of devotee terrifying invitation to become a member of some frenzied cargo cult. While others eagerly waited to have specific dolls and dishes and little model cars delivered to them, I scrambled to my retreat behind the Christmas tree, hoping I could make myself invisible to the rain of distraction and clutter. I certainly wouldn’t have become the appealing subject of any classic tale such as Jean Shepherd’s “Christmas Story” about little Ralphie Parker’s fierce machinations to be the recipient of a BB gun as a Christmas present.
This failure to manifest the kind of desirousness that would make me a force to be reckoned with did make it difficult for people to know me or even to want to know me. People were handed no ready way of celebrating me. I carried that alienating aura of anomaly into adulthood. I had no recognizable story of trials and tribulations to tell others. I never spent nights pondering what college I wanted to go to and how I would manage to get in. I never gave much thought to whether I’d go to college at all. But when one was built down the street from me, I happily walked there and eventually got a degree. I attended just for the joy of learning, not with any career goals in mind. I never considered choosing a career. I just fell into step desultorily lending a hand in my parents’ printing business. And then after that waned, I got by on savings, which were sufficient, since I had never dissipated my meager income by buying stuff along the way. I never struggled with any form of addiction or had any other dramatic narrative of failure and triumph I could present to people.
My un-wanting personality did not endear me to anyone, and in fact tended to make me rather unwanted in the larger world. If I had in fact been an Eastern sage, I might have been attended to as someone who could impart wisdoms along the way. But I couldn’t claim any such official standing. So I was discounted. I was just seen as a weird teenager who came out of left field, not wanting to drive, not concerned with school or grades or with branding myself into a future distinguished business career that would generate a loyal group of consumers. Then later, I was a cheap date, a boringly undemanding person in place of the date my companion would have preferred - as stated in his singles profile, someone “sassy and self-assured.” I didn’t have the vividness or vivacity of lust. My lack of assertiveness was occasionally interpreted as a lack of self-esteem. My un-wanting was seen as a constricted inability to enjoy myself. Both conditions were seen as something to be corrected, for the few who even considered taking the time to correct them.
Meanwhile, I had just the opposite of the wishy-washy self-denying personality that most people characterized me as having, if they thought about me at all. In reality, I was always the secret hedonist, inwardly aglow with pleasure.
How To Be a Flicker in an Inferno
The sort of misperception and devaluation I suffered will likely be the fate of anyone who doesn’t concentrate on evincing definite preferences. It will leave you as a difficult person to pin down, and therefore as someone others might avoid. It will leave you without a power base in a world that relishes and respects the drive for power – either in the way the gangster seizes it, or in the way most others craftily leverage it with their partialities.
But I still maintain it’s worthwhile to at least consider limiting proclamations of preference. I don’t advocate adopting Eastern wisdoms as a placarded, T-shirted announcement of oneself, in the faddish way many of the hippies of the 60’s and 70’s did. That would be a subversion of Eastern wisdom from the start. And I don’t advocate becoming artificial and extreme in disclaiming all preferences. I recognize how having likes and dislikes are unavoidable, even necessary and positively admirable when it comes to standing up for truth and humanity. After all, a good percentage of this Blog has been, and will be, about advancing my opinion of what is the better way. This Blog is itself primarily aimed at commenting on and commemorating what I think is better, in terms of what I think is more interesting and has more heart.
If attempted in a temperate, innocent way though, a relatively open-ended, open-minded approach to life might not have that many disadvantages after all. You won’t be left as speechless, as featureless as you might at first suspect. You will still find things to talk about with other people. But instead of proclaiming your fervid dislike of some past or present movie stars, you might offer some interesting insight into some of their unsuspected talents. “Did you know that Hedy Lamarr, glamour girl of the 40’s, also had the brilliant insights of a physicist and mathematician? During World War II, she invented a way of preventing the jamming of radio signals – a method we use today in wireless communication.” Instead of skimming over each other by comparing trivial lists of likes and dislikes, we might get to the substrate of what others have experienced in life. “How did your grandfather survive the hardships of the Dust Bowl, having to start his farm over and over again like that? I know if I have a hangnail, I get discouraged. Where does a person get the fortitude to persevere in the face of such large adversity? Do you think you’ve inherited that survivalist spirit?”
The Path of TV Sitcoms
I’m reminded of an episode of the popular TV sitcom “King of Queens.” The starring couple of that series are reluctant to make a long-term financial commitment because they aren’t sure they will still be a couple in twenty or thirty years. They decide they’ll each privately make a list of favorite things. Then they’ll compare lists. If there isn’t at least one match on their lists, they’ll take it as a sign they might not be compatible for the long haul and they won’t take out that mortgage. As they compare their respective lists, they find a jarring disconnect – “wrestling vs green tea,” “sloppy Joes vs sunsets,” etc.
They call a halt to their comparison just short of the end of their lists. They float the fiction that that last item on their lists will be a match. Of course, we in the audience know that there’s no way that last item will match. And really, they know it too. But it doesn’t matter. For all the seasons of the show, Doug and Carrie have been a good couple. There’s been something satisfying about their togetherness that overrides their having so little in common in the way of trivial likes and dislikes, or even in the way of weightier elements of a common outlook on life. They simply have that X-factor that makes them so right together.
The ultimate importance of the X-factor is what defeats so many dating websites in their attempts to match people on the basis of checklists of mutual likes and dislikes. An ability to embrace each other, and the world in some special glimmering way, is, in the end, more important than sharing hobbies and hates. It’s more important even than that often cited “chemistry.” It is based on an ability to have an openness to each other that goes beyond assessment. It’s the ability to be light and delighted in love with what presents itself. It’s Edith Bunker and Archie; it’s the lilies of the field that “neither toil nor spin”; it’s yin and yang.
The Middle Way
So to get back to the point of this essay – I’d encourage people to place less emphasis on identifying themselves by what they label “cool” or “lame.” I’d encourage them to cast off those name tags that limit them as surely as they limit other people’s interactions with them. My advice would be to - step outside the box, stretch the envelope, go beyond those boundaries and be boundless.
What’s more, I’d encourage people to be willing to be relatively small and powerless at least some of the time – by wielding fewer preferences. I’m reminded of the mysticism of the closing lines of that classic cult movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. As Scott Carey dwindles down, down to a biologically impossible, but dramatically poignant speck – he reflects that by becoming infinitely small, he’s actually becoming infinitely large at-one with the universe.
That’s a sort of steep philosophy for everyday life. But in its exaggeration, it brings home my more accessible point. That point is: Don’t make a life out of pondering what you prefer and then seeking only that. Take a few breaks; take what’s given and appreciate the unique experience of whatever comes your way. Don’t be like Susan who, behind her sweet, seemingly apologetic smile - always has a discommoding chill, always hates peppers. Certainly forego that more extreme sort of bid for power that my neighbor made when she asserted her loathing of anything feline. That sort of tyranny will ultimately limit you as much as it limits the person you harry with all your provisos.
Besides, by voicing such dominating preferences - you’ll get me seriously mad. I can’t stand people who hate cats.
