A Set of Fresh Eyes
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
March 20, 2012

Socrates, Jesus, Kierkegaard, and countless others have said some version of "The unexamined life is not worth living." or "Know thyself."

Well, I happen to have known many, many retarded people, psychotic people, uneducated laborers, people with various types of handicaps that kept them illiterate, and many similar groups of people whose conditions of life or mental equipment have prevented them from being able to ask such questions.　 Actually, most of these people had no status or possessions, did the lowest level of minimally skilled work or none at all, yet the vast majorities of them were kind, malleable, and did no harm.　 I even found that minimally educated prison inmates from horrifically deprived or dysfunctional backgrounds, when they had a positive prison environment, were non-violent, were pleasant, and were very grateful when accepted and not disdained or regarded as dangerous.  They all are our kin.  Those who look down upon such 'untouchables', those who exploit the weak, powerless, or ignorant are also out kin.  Those ghettoized in squalid life conditions, beset by maddening noise, and near starvation, preying upon one another as their only means of survival, repugnant and dishabille in appearance, they are our kin.  Men with powerful physiques, raging endocrines, oriented to what is virtually a formalized, legitimized gang mentality that make them prone to bully the weak and abuse women, and plunder and kill those in foreign lands, these men who join the military to do the bidding or callous, imperialistic, conquistador-like heads of state, they are our kin as well.  The rich, living in cloistered in gated communities, they who have mastered the complex skills for deceiving, cheating, using, and controlling the masses beneath them, they are our kin.  The hallowed leaders of religions and the well-respected heads of lucrative charitable organizations, they who are supported by the wealthiest in their communities while themselves living lives of safety and comfort as they preach, teach, and guide the unwitting and poor to live lives of obedience to employers and officials, of conformity and contentment with hard labor merely to gain subsistence while vulnerable to the whims of fickle fortune, these revered shaman-like 'saintly' henchmen or flunkies for the rich and powerful, they, too, are our kin.  The CEOs hidden away at the pinnacles of corporate power, remote from the predatory and lethal affects which their industries have on unsuspecting populace duped by clever advertising campaigns, they are our kin just the same as your family and neighborhood friends and all of the others up and down the many stations of life.

Almost all of these people have been reacted to by people above and below their station as though they were invisible; toward the lowly with repugnance and avoidance; toward the lofty with awe and fawning.　 I never met any of these outcasts or lowly who were not immensely grateful for any gift, especially the gift of positive regard for their mere existence.  I never met any of the lofty ones who did not regard those beneath them as existing merely to be at their disposal, even while treating them kindly when face-to-face with them.　

Some of my most valued lessons about life came from these people in tremendously varied stations in society.

So, now I would say to you intelligent, well-educated ones, those of you might be among my readers, go ahead and examine your life if you wish, persist in your quest for inner peace, security, material riches, fame, power, status, or salvation if you will.　 However, the truly noble thing would be to look beyond yourself and examine your world.　 Try looking at yourself and your world from the perspective of those invisible nobodies or from the perspective of the desensitized, entitled upper classes.　 Try looking at yourself and this entire motley world from the imaginary perspective of a social anthropologist from a distant planet. 　If you do not see, with a high degree of shock, a great deal about your world, or about your way of being as a product of that world, then I say that needs to be changed.  If you have never looked at yourself as others may be looking at you, then I suggest you take some time to brutally, honestly examine your life from such a perspective and mercilessly begin to try to "Know Thyself" from the perspective of the 'other.'　 If you have never looked at your world though the eyes of the vast masses of the victimized, look again.  If you have never looked at the people as though through the eyes of bureaucratic administrators concerned with their job security while executing the ossified, regimented, yet inhumane policies which are nevertheless couched in phrases that seem to be so safety and security oriented and so beneficial for the people; if you have never seen, really seen, how impersonal and even depersonalized, how inefficient and ineffective, are those policies and practices, then I say look again.  But, eventually, please come back to the task of examining your world and the structures, systems, institutions, and ideologies of your world.　 Look again outside of yourself with a new set of 'fresh eyes' with which to examine it that world.  Look again with objectivity but also with empathy and compassion.  A little of looking from such perspectives now and then might help, in a selfless way, the common good.