Contempt

If one reads almost any news feed these days, one can’t help but notice that contempt is much more prevalent than it was before, and that the volume of that attitude is increasing.

Contempt means to feel that another person or thing is worthless or beneath consideration. It also means to disregard something or someone—leading to the concept of disrespect or disobedience, out of which comes contempt of court. Ultimately, the word derives from the Latin, temnere, to despise.

I’ve experienced another’s contempt—not often but often enough. That being said, I also know what it is to feel contemptuous—to believe that one is justified in treating others as if they were less than human.

But what is contempt really? It is an opinion translated into a feeling that we express as an attitude. It is not solid like a fact, or pervasive, like a truth. It is at its heart, mere opinion, and that is all.

Still, opinions are important. They make decision-making easy and quick. We have a great deal of mental machinery that is specifically dedicated to that purpose and with good reason. Our survival as a species depended on it. Discovering and acting upon whether someone or something was harmful or not had to be determined quickly. Those who hesitated were eaten, so it is no wonder we learned to make quick decisions. The easiest decision to make is liking, or not liking, and deciding which requires little analysis.

It is interesting to note that any ability, or capability, even one as simple as forming an opinion, can be an asset that turns into a liability when taken to extremes. Take the ability to sing. That seems fairly safe, but if that was all one did, one would quickly make oneself unwelcome.

Can the same be said of forming opinions?

Consider this: celebrity followers on social media now number in their millions. Such admiration and its opposite, contempt, have followed identical trajectories in terms of popularity on all media platforms. It’s as if by advocating only one side of the love-hate dichotomy, we bring about the other. That may seem counterintuitive, but one can’t define what is good without inadvertently defining what is bad. It’s like drawing a circle. One may be focused on what is inside the circle, but one has simultaneously brought into being all that is outside the circle at the same time. In effect, all that ramping up of likes and hearts is ramping up dislikes just as much, and like that part outside the circle, we don’t seem to notice.

Given this phenomenon, perhaps the middle path is better.

And as for contempt, what handled that feeling for me was the realization that everyone is trying to do the very best that they can, just like you and just like me. We all do so based on the information we possess, the past we have personally experienced, and what is happening in our present situation and set of circumstances.

It is easy to judge but harder to observe. We are experts at judging after all. The former is almost instant. The other takes more time but can be the more important.