Delphic Maxim 47: Speak well of everyone
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
47. Speak well of everyone
One of the biggest challenges we face from day to day is the instinctive, emotional reaction we get when people frustrate us. It’s a definite thing that as we get older we find ourselves frustrated by idiots everywhere we seem to turn (I’m in my thirties now and I noticed it creeping on more and more over the past five or six years). But even more than that, I think there’s a sense that we don’t need to care anymore — let me explain a little bit about why.
When we’re young, we tend to form a huge number of social relations very quickly. In the same way that our young brain is densely packed with neurons, our social drives are densely networked as well. As we get older, the synaptic networks in our brains are optimised — pathways that are meaningful are reinforced into our memories, and pathways that are less useful are pruned away to conserve energy, space and support for the active things we learn. This doesn’t mean we get dumber, not at all — it means that our mental hardware becomes more efficient.
In a way, the same thing happens with our social networks! We start off by intensely socialising — in fact, Soviet educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that these kinds of social interactions are a necessary and vital part of our mental development. As we get older, and responsibilities become intensified, and our interests become more refined, we tend to engage in a kind of social optimisation. Again — this doesn’t mean we are becoming antisocial or less friendly, it just means that we tend towards more efficient and deep relationships with people. This can only be sustained with a smaller group — it’s hard to have a level of intimacy and close friendship with teeming multitudes.
I wonder whether a part of this process of social optimisation also involves a degree of, to put it pretty crudely, low-key ruthlessness. Maybe this is why we become less patient with people we encounter? Regardless, we definitely lose that youthful obsession with being liked. When we are young, social status and friend networks are bound up in the passionate, unregulated emotions of that age — so most of us think it’s important to be liked. As we get older, we care less about things that don’t impact us at much — our ethical focus shifts, is elevated in a sense, and we don’t stress about the minor things.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that as we get older we tend to care less about how we’re treated, but at the same time we can become more casually callous. In short, where kids are passionate and social, adults can sometimes be arseholes. I know, because I see myself do it all the time.
Bitchiness isn’t a good quality (though it’s sometimes a cathartic release). A lot of these maxims are inviting us to behave in ways that run agains the grain of life in the contemporary world (not that I think people weren’t bitchy in ancient Greece, I imagine they were and they expressed it in different ways to us). However, it’s good to remember the maxims so that from time to time we check ourselves. Am I being bitchy? Am I being unnecessarily negative right now? Have I let my cynicism get the better of me?
The process of mental and social optimisation is useful and efficient, but efficiency often sacrifices redundancy, the protective mechanism of having backups and inefficiency duplication, and at worst it can be deeply boring. Children tend to speak well of everyone — at first — and they learn to dislike others. Maybe that’s the lesson of this maxim: try your hardest to speak well of everyone, give everyone the benefit of the doubt (even if you can’t do this always — I have a hard time speaking well of someone like Pauline Hanson). Create space in your life for some social redundancies, but most important of all: project kindness into the world, it’ll make you feel better.
