Alone

Every once in a while, something comes along and really, truly makes me feel... alone.

Not in the sense that no one cares about me. Not in the sense that I'm not getting the human interaction that I need. Not even in the sense that no one understands me. Just that... 99% of the people on this planet are different than me. And actually, 1 in 100 is probably grossly optimistic.

There's this concept of the sanity waterline. The idea is that while there's variation among people as far as intelligence and ability to reason correctly about the world, the average level has slowly been going up - at least for the past few hundred years. You may get the Newton's and Francis Bacon's on one end, and the Salem witch trials and English heresy laws on the other - but overall, everyone has figured a few more things out since then, and the average ability for people to figure out how the world works and behave accordingly has gone up since the 1600's. There are crests and troughs in the waves, but the water level is rising. We no longer kill people for believing the wrong thing, even if there are still some holdouts in parts of the world.

The name might be offensive - calling it a "sanity" waterline as if people who don't believe the right things are insane. But looking back on history, isn't that kind of how we view it? If someone today proposed that their neighbor was a witch and we should therefore burn them alive, we would consider locking them up in a mental institution. If they tried actually doing it, we certainly would. Given that we can look back at different periods in history and see beliefs that, by our standards today, are insane yet held by everyone of the time - it makes you wonder what beliefs we hold today that people will look back on and consider insane. There is, without a doubt, some belief that today is taken absolutely for granted by almost everyone, that down the road will be in history books for children to read about and wonder how people back in the early 2000's were so idiotic. They'll look back and say, "But it's obvious. How could they not see it?"

But of course, there are crests in the water too. In many of those periods, there were people who saw reality for what it really was. Some are known to us - though usually because they spoke their dissent, which made them targets to be taken out. People don't really like to have it pointed out that they've been wrong all along, and many times there are institutions and powerful groups of people who benefit from everyone being wrong.

More likely, I think, is the chance that these people - the crests in the water - were hidden among the regular populace; knowing that everyone around them was wrong, but pretending to agree nonetheless, because it was just a little too socially (if not physically) dangerous. To mix metaphors, the lower that crest in the water, the less the boat gets rocked. Better to hide your crest and be safe, than to speak out.

You can imagine that a person in that type of situation might feel a little alone.

There's a part of one of my favorite stories ever where the main character is being subtly questioned by a teacher to try to determine if he'd been abused, after noticing certain signs that reminded her of abused children. The teacher asks him for specific things that might have scared him as a child, and after recounting a story, the student replies:

"That's when I realized that everyone who was supposed to protect me was actually crazy, and that they wouldn't listen to me no matter how much I begged them, and that I couldn't ever rely on them to get anything right." Sometimes good intentions weren't enough, sometimes you had to be sane...

When the student finally realizes where the line of questioning is going, he tries to explain why it might seem he'd been abused even though he hadn't:

Children aren't meant to be too much smarter than their parents...Or too much saner, maybe - my father could probably outsmart me if he was, you know, actually trying, instead of using his adult intelligence mainly to come up with new reasons not to change his mind ... Adults don't respect me enough to really talk to me. And frankly, even if they did, they wouldn't sound as smart as Richard Feynman, so I might as well read something Richard Feynman wrote instead. I'm isolated. I've been isolated my whole life. Maybe that has some of the same effects as being locked in a basement. And I'm too intelligent to look up to my parents the way that children are designed to do. My parents love me, but they don't feel obligated to respond to reason, and sometimes I feel like they're the children - children who won't listen and have absolute authority over my whole existence.

Imagine if everyone around you kept saying the sky were green. Over and over again. If you ever were bold enough to point out that it was actually blue, you would be ostracized, perhaps abandoned by your family, criticized, and put down. If you pointed out that all of the evidence told you it was blue - that you could look at the sky, that you could measure the wavelengths of light coming down to us, that you could compare it to other blue things - instead of agreeing, they would argue about how your eyes are untrustworthy, or that the measuring tools are inaccurate, or that other blue things just aren't in the same realm as the sky and you can't compare them. Perhaps they'd tell you about how they just believe in their heart that it's green, no matter what the evidence. Maybe they'd tell you that their instincts tell them that they're right. But no matter what, they wouldn't believe you.

You can imagine that a person in that type of situation might feel a little alone.