I think you're mixing up several things that need to be separated out.
First is the difference between my internal responses to something said or done to or about me, and my external responses to that.
If someone tells my boss a lie about me, yes, I may need to confront that to avoid undesirable consequences. But that does NOT mean I have to get angry about it. I can decide to be quite dispassionate about the lie within myself, but recognize that some damage control is necessary and go and do that.
A few years ago the wind blew a tree over onto my shop and did considerable damage. I had to take immediate steps to close off the roof and protect the interior. I had to take later steps to arrange to repair the damage, deal with the insurance company, etc.
The action done required response.
But as to the tree itself, and the wind which blew it over, I had total control over how I thought about it. I could shrug my shoulders, say bad things happen to good people, and get on with the response. I could have gotten despairing at the exent of the damage, curled up in corner, stuck my thumb in my mouth, and refused to deal with the problem. I could have cursed God for bringing this evil on me. I could have thanked God for the blessings of wind and rain. The next time the wind blew, I could have been afraid, or cautious, or uninterested, or whatever I chose.
The second is the difference between 3d and SI worlds.
Yes, in the community I live in, it can matter what people think about me. Therefore, if people tell lies about me here, I may need to confront and deal with the lies the same way I had to deal with the fallen tree. BUT, and this is a key but, that does NOT mean I have to be angry at the person who told the lie. Whether I get angry, whether I forgive, whether I resent, whether I seethe inside, whether I shrug internally, is entirely up to me. Maybe the lie is actually beneficial to me in getting me a platform to make a better case about myself to people who wouldn't have otherwise listened. (In his election campaigns, Clinton's response team elevated this to a fine art, so that in many cases attacks on him which were intended to be cruel and hurtful wound up being beneficial to him and his campaign. That, IMO, was extraordinarily smart of him. He controlled both the internal and the external response to his own advantage.)
(Sometimes, indeed, it can be advantageous to pretend a very negative response to something when you don't feel that way at all in fact. Some spouses I deal with in divorces are expert at this -- for example, if one spouse says they demand the oak bedroom set because no other woman will ever sleep in that bed, the husband may not care at all, but may pretend a huge amount of caring in order to negotiate a better deal for something else. There, the internal and external responses are different in ways very much controlled by the person. )
That's in 3d. In the artificial world of SI, however, we can indeed be indifferent to our reputations without any harm to ourselves. I would like you to think well of me, but if you choose not to, there is no real harm to me. jla's hatred of me does far more harm to him than it does to me because it is SI hatred; if it were a local colleague who were publicly saying those things about me to current or prospective clients, yes, you're right, I would need to respond, but here on SI there is no cost at all to just ignoring them.
So I think your response needs to be pulled apart and looked at in terms of those two dichotomies. First, internal response vs. external response. Second, SI world vs. 3d world.
If you do that, I think your argument is valid in our 3d lives, but not here, and that it fails to distinguish how we choose to feel internally about something said about us and how we choose to react externally to it. |
