Giving to Get & Not Giving to Not Get

You know the feeling you get right after you say something that you did not intend to say? It feels a bit like shooting a jumpshot and knowing it's going to miss as soon as you let it go, or swinging at a hanging pitch and knowing you popped it up as soon as you make contact. And while it may feel like that... it usually isn't that, at all. In revisiting these tourrettes moments, I often realize that my only mistake was honesty. For me, shared language, whether spoken or written, is so tightly tied to my emotions that the culprit for my misspeech is almost always either memory or alcohol. So if I said it I meant it... And because that is how I am, I tend not to believe it when others claim to be otherwise.

The other day I was telling a friend of mine that I think of her as the most "human" of people I know. To that she asked, "what do you mean?" Though she was aware that the word human is used as a number of parts-of-speech, certainly as either noun or adjective, she was only really comfortable with it's use as a noun. As she was well aware, "human" as an adjective essentially means to be human-like; to exhibit charactistics that are, or should be, characteristic of humans. So her question to me was, at its core, what characteristics are, or should be, characteristic of humans and how and why do you feel that I exhibit those traits. I found myself as unclear as she was, so I spent some time trying to figure out what I meant. Had I misspoke? Again, probably not.

My immediate response was part of the truth: I told her that she has an incredible capacity for empathy. Despite having seen many of her friends do and say plenty of things for which many others would judge and probably distance themselves from, she always seemed to be able to put herself in their shoes. She seems capable of comprehending anyone's subjectivity... She has a sincere belief in both the power of personality and the moral neutrality of people; she practices a sort of super-personalized relativism and is able to, quite effortlessly, disassociate moral value from the human decision making process. In other words, she can understand how other people come to act as they do because they are the complicated people that they are, rather than understanding their actions as those of a good or bad person.
Digging further... I found myself wrapping my arms around more of the truth. Stuck on this idea of moral neutrality, I began to consider that moral neutrality is a bit of a hypnotizing concept. How can one judge something so nonjudgmental? Well, why not? Perhaps too little of something is just as bad as too much. Perhaps people don't judge because they don't want to be judged... the brother who gets his siter a barbie so that she'll get him a GI Joe... or better yet the guy who never asks how many she's slept with... it's giving to get, and not giving to not get. Why can't we just be...