PSYCHOLOGY OF DISPARATE PERCEPTIONS

Continuing the theme of The Full being no Friend to the Hungry from an earlier entry, here is an immensely valuable insight from Nietzsche’s Menschliches, which I am happy to make an extensive quote of, although with a few minor cuts:

“Misunderstanding between the sufferer and the perpetrator. When a rich man takes a possession from a poor man (as when a prince robs a plebeian of his sweetheart), the poor man misunderstands. He thinks that the rich man must be a villain, to take from him the little that he has. But the rich man does not feel the value of a particular possession so deeply, because he is accustomed to having many. So, he cannot put himself in the place of the poor man, thus, he is by no means doing as great an injustice, as the poor man believes. Each has a false idea of the other. The injustice of the mighty, which enrages us most in history, is by no means as great as it appears. Simply the inherited feeling of being a superior being, with higher pretensions, makes one rather cold, and leaves the conscience at peace. Indeed, none of us feels anything like injustice, when there is a great difference between ourselves and some other being, and we kill a gnat, for example, without any twinge of conscience. So, it is no sign of wickedness in Xerxes (whom even all the Greeks portray as exceptionally noble), when he takes a son from his father and has him hacked to pieces, because the father had expressed an anxious and doubtful distrust of their entire campaign. In this case, the individual man is eliminated like a pesky insect; he stands too low, to be allowed to keep on arousing bothersome feelings in a world ruler. Indeed, no cruel man is cruel to the extent that the mistreated man believes. The idea of pain is not the same as the suffering of it. It is the same with an unjust judge, with a journalist who misleads public opinion by little dishonesties. In each of these cases, cause and effect are experienced in quite different categories of thought and feeling; nevertheless, it is automatically assumed that the perpetrator and sufferer think and feel the same, and the guilt of the one is therefore measured by the pain of the other.” (From Menschliches #81.)

As applied to modern times, and considering the exceedingly unfavorable impression America makes on the rest of the world, when this rich and powerful nation wishes to meddle in other peoples’ affairs (which is, of course, an everyday occurrence), the good news is that America’s guilt should not be measured by the pain she inflicts on others, in other words, it means that she is not really evil, as so many others assume about her, but that this is a case of some misunderstanding, and she is not actually terminally bad, to the point of being beyond redemption. But the bad news is that she is thus esteemed by the others, hence the shocked aversion of the world, and something has to be done about it. That something is simple: she must educate herself in psychology, where Nietzsche might serve her as an outstanding teacher, and learn how the realization of the fact of disparate perceptions, that is, of the simple fact that others do not think like her, nor view the world in her categories, may help her, on the one hand, to become, say, more tactful, and then, usefully, to develop a better predictive capacity about other people’s logical reactions, which is currently close to nonexistent, not so much through some chance neglect or some kind of psychological block as through a willful, deliberately sustained ignorance.
Ironically, a quarter of a century ago, as I was, rather naively, envisioning my way of "fitting in," within this nation’s framework of political thinking, and contributing to world peace as a result of this, I saw my own main importance not just in the uniqueness of my political and historical knowledge, but, even more so, in the uniqueness of my perspective, opening Washington’s eyes to what it misses the most: the psychology of disparate perceptions. Alas, never had I realized, how self-assured Washington was in its superior magical powers, how unwilling it was to learn about the ways of others, as long as it had a constant supply of those happily obliging sycophants who had learned one thing about this country, which I the fool never set great store by: that the surest way to succeed as an immigrant in today's America was to tell them solely what they wished to hear, and never-ever to commit the worst capital offence of all--- of telling them the truth.