Laager Mentality

What is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagel asked this in an essay exploring the limits of our ability to understand things beyond human concepts. We can’t be a bat. Even other humans are hard to understand. The world we see, and understand, is cumulative. Words get shared meaning. Sentences reflect experience. Big ideas tie small learnings together. Conversations build on each other. Which makes it hard/impossible to understand people without that work. A “Laager” is a fort made of a circle of wagons. Laagers were used by the Boers during the Great Trek of the 1830s. After the Napoleonic Wars, the British took control of the former Dutch Colony on the South West tip of Africa. Clashing worlds led to a mass migration of Dutch-inhabitants to avoid British administration. When the wagons came under attack, they would draw into a circle with the cattle and horses on the inside. A Laager Mentality is a defensiveness, however valid the complaint, to circle around your own to protect them. To protect the world you understand. Right or wrong. Bat or man.

Heads or Tails

You can’t tell if a coin is biased with one spin. A coin biased to Heads can still fall on Tails. That is pretty compelling evidence that the coin is not anti-Tails. Even though it is. Spin a biased coin 7.8 Billion times and you will be able to tell very clearly that it is biased. 60 million times. Still clear. As the group gets bigger the compelling evidence in the defence of the coin will get weaker. The same is true of racism. An individual can try being “colour blind” and letting people “put the past behind them”, in order to treat people equally *from this point forward* “based on merit”. The first problem is treating people equally, who haven’t been treated equally, isn’t treating people equally. The second problem is we only see the strengths we are looking for. The words we don’t understand are just noise. The experiences we haven’t had don’t stretch us if they don’t connect, in some way, to the experience we have had. “I don’t see colour” is a form of racism. Racism with a compelling defence. Spin the coin a few more times and perhaps you’ll see the problem.

Which is Heads, and which is Tails?

Misunderstood and Judged

I hate getting things wrong. I hate being on the wrong side of people. I find it particularly frustrating when I don't think it is justified. This makes me have to work really hard at not being defensive. The easiest way around this, is not to engage with people. I love engaging with people. The easiest way around this, is to only engage with people who think like me. I love engaging with people who don't think like me. Worse is when people think I am 'one of them' in conversation, and say something where I am the judgey one! 'No! I don't think that!'. Most of us listen with little nods and ahas that signal agreement. Just listening neutrally while encouraging someone to carry on speaking, and genuinely exploring their idea is hard.

‘’Justitia’’ by Maarten van Heemskerk, 1556