Colors and Ideology
Daily Meditation #162–8/3/2022
When you ask someone “what’s your favorite color?” and they tell you a color different than your favorite color, how do you react?
Do you get angry?
Emotional?
Frustrated?
“How can you be so out of touch?” you laugh at them, “How do you not know yellow is the best color, you complete and utter moron!”
Of course you don’t — because you picked your favorite color based on your history, preferences, and manner of living.
And they picked theirs based on their history, preferences, and manner of living.
So why do we get into such ludicrous fights over other things that we select based on our separate history, preferences, and manner of living?
You are so ready to put on some metaphorical armor and sword to go to war with the insistence your religion, political view, or opinion is correct and that someone else’s is wrong.
Are you so certain that your ideology is 100% flawless? Even 80 or 90%?
Of course not. You’re not so proud or foolish.
And are you certain you’re not ideologically possessed? How can you be sure you haven’t magnetized onto the “groupthink de jour?”
Would you be objective enough to know it if you had been indoctrinated?
Of course not.
Don’t be so certain that your way of life is the way of life for everyone else. That your politics or beliefs are so correct that it works for all.
All we can do is ensure that in our own, individual lives we are acting in a manner consistent with our own beliefs and aspirations!
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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
