Conversation

 As a way of solitude and deep thinking. 

I remember reading an article long back about how facebook and other instant messaging media deprive us of real conversations and deep friendships. This was before "The Shallows" and before it was fashionable to deride social media. The article spoke about how important it is for us to cultivate solitude to better understand ourselves. Counterintuitively the article also suggested that conversation with a friend can also give you the same kind of understanding and richness, as solitude does. 

I could relate to it, since I have/had a couple of friends with whom those kind of conversations happen. With almost any good friend, conversations leave you feeling wholesome but with some people, conversations lead me to understand things about myself that I may not have been fully aware of. It is rarely anything groundbreaking, more like having a fuzzy idea snap into focus, or something hazy from the background coming to the forefront of my conscious. 

It is very rare for these to happen in group settings, on video calls etc, though I remain hopeful that we will soon develop tools that enable almost an in-person feel even through tech. 

Understanding the other

 Its really easy to bunch a group of people who disagree with you and label them as idiots. Thats what most of us do. Its far more difficult to understand why they have reached this stance. Maybe they dont have the in-depth knowledge of the subject as you do, maybe they have had an experience that has let them to believe that the un-truth is the truth. In a lot of cases it may also be that the information diet they consume presents a different world view than the one you consume. 

Mainstream media and liberals sometimes take a condescending view of trump supporters as racists and idiots. Partly from a desire to be contrarian and partly from curiosity I try to figure out why Trump supporters /anti vaxxers are the way they are. Surely they arent a group of low IQ individuals, surely the spread of good people and bad, super smart and super not-smart people is the same in that cohort as any other large group you take. What then leads an average person to be so rabidly anti-vaxx? Its personal experience or what they have heard growing up( that they havent found enough evidence against, to invalidate). 

I got a small insight into that recently. Anti-vaxxers strictly believe that pharmaceutical industry is out to get everyone. While that seems like standard anti-capitalist, I have always wondered where this mistrust stemmed from. And why just this industry? Surely every indsustry is out to get everyone? 

While reading Empire of Pain- the history of the most abused prescription Oxycontin, I got a vague understanding of why this perception might have built up. One of the most succesful pain-relievers, it ended up being the most abused drugs because it developed a dependence even with low doses/low frequency of usage. And the company continued to advertise and push the product even as evidence was mounting against it. Thousands of normal people with minor injuries who were prescribed a simple pain killer ended up addicts.

The company specifically targeted suburbs in certain areas where family physicians were common, where people tended to trust doctors and would not question them. This I suppose ties in nicely with the traditional Republican states, which tended to have more veterans, ( and thus more injuries,disabilities and pain) and were target areas for the company. 

In a small city, when anyone dies abnormally everyone feels it, as if it were one of their own. Oxycontin abuse deaths would have reached a level where everyone knows someone who lost their lives to addiction. The fact that the company exhibited no regret and continued promoting the products, is enough for everyone to decide that Big Pharma just does not care. A mistrust in one company extends to the entire pharmaceutical industry and the fear manifests itself as a general mistrust of everything they do. 

Of course, people with other agenda feed them misinformation that they beleive because it aligns with their world view, but the basic reason for this mistrust is not stupidity but simply that it is a different world for them than it is for us.