People, People, People

In the classic Oscar-winning movie My Fair Lady, linguistics professor Henry Higgins asks his colleague (in a song), “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” As chauvinistic as this clearly sounds, we find through the course of the movie that it isn’t just women that the good professor has a problem with. Actually, he is an equal-opportunity humbug: he expects everyone to be exactly like him! Similarly, in the Twilight Zone episode The Mind and the Matter, comedian Shelley Berman plays a middle-aged big-city office worker who is fed up with “people, people, people”, as he puts it. By following the precepts revealed in a self-help book, Berman succeeds in willing the whole world to be full of exact duplicates of himself! And then finds out what a monumental drag he must be to others!

I wonder what the world would be like were it full of “me’s”. Aside from lasting only a generation (cloning not having yet been perfected), the human race would be so totally devoid of diversity that the specialization needed to sustain us as a species would be nonexistent. Also, we all need others who fundamentally differ from ourselves in a multitude of ways, if for nothing else than to hold our beliefs and behavior to standards worth living up to. For in a vacuum of diversity, how can we really know what’s best?

I am not known as a social mingler, preferring either solitude or small groups. It has been my experience throughout my life that when I have been in the midst of noisy crowds, I have had difficulty processing the audio input and often suffered panic/anxiety attacks from the sensory overload. But over the years, I have learned to separate this problem from passing judgment on people themselves. After all, each of us was thrown into this life, without (as far as we know) ever asking for it. And each of us must also figure out ways to get ourselves through life the best way possible. Everyone has their own path to follow, each one being unique, but also sharing commonalities with others. So I feel great empathy with my other fellow humans on this planet, but at the same time still harbor relatively hermit-like tendencies. And that’s all right, as long as I consciously fight the occasional impulse to shut out the world with its “people, people, people”!