Acceptance
“A game such as chess generates a habitable universe for those who can follow it, a plane of being, a cast of characters with a seemingly unlimited number of different situations and acts through which to realize their natures and destinies. Yet much of this is reducible to a small set of interdependent rules and practices. If the meaningfulness of everyday activity is similarly dependent on a closed, finite set of rules, then explication of them would give one a powerful means of analyzing social life.”
—Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.
Chess is a sociological analogy to the performance of everyday life. It’s a game filled with rules and definitions; and these different situations and acts are called “lines.” If life were like this game, and one were to know all of these lines, perhaps he might both discover the meaningfulness of performance and unveil the reality behind its curtain, thus providing us with a glimmer of hope into the discovery of self and society.
Meaning is always “social” because no piece moves independently. “But what about the self-interest of individuals moving toward his life-goal?” Never without the aid or impediment from, benefit to and at the expense of, others. “Social,” in any context, then, is a redundancy. There is not one man at any point in his life who is left alone from the world, even in the presence of himself.
This is why a man who has failed in maneuvering social situations is burying himself alive from profound isolation—he’s deserted the others, estranged himself from their personalities, from their wants; and even if his want was to be at one with them, he can’t expect to do so as a pariah. He must, even if against his temperament or personal intuition, be not at odds with portions of the world that find him, that is to say with those groups that he is most adept to be within—merely wanting is not enough. This is why he must also fight through any unreasonable desire to be a part of those with whom he is most unlike. Not only will he never be, but he will be undesirable in turn; and what greater cause for his own estrangement than rejection.
This is the origin of cynicism, which is not a general skepticism of who, or what, is accepted, but which procures its skeptical eye because it believes that people are not authentically motivated. Skepticism on its own is that inherent motivation to judge in order to discover, confirm or deny a truth, i.e., belonging. The in-group “feeling out” the outsider is reasonably skeptical—even the outsider may be. This is not a negative attitude or exercise as it stands. We may even presuppose this scrutiny to be mutually beneficial. The in-group scrutinizes others to see if the already established conventions are accepted, or at the least not unreasonably contested or gone against to elicit embarrassment or repulsion. Skepticism gives the group the prerogative to admit others, to determine who is and is not acceptable.
Though he may agree with the assessment, judging whether or not there is mutual acceptance, or even come to the conclusion that they are not for him, the outsider bears no prerogative to admit himself. It’s for this reason that he has very much to lose and very much to gain. His way out of aloneness is to be accepted; and with acceptance comes the potential to be recognized: to be seen, to be understood, to be wanted. And what does a man risk when he fails at the lines of chess, when he is a bystander because he cannot play the game? His social rejection leads not only to the penetrating undesiring gaze from his society that he must own, but to his feigned indifference (as a means of saving face) to those around him, which is really disdain for not having been a part.
What this means for him is that now his proceeding distrust of others negatively reinforces those lines and actions that made him undesirable to begin with. This is cynicism. No man ever gets laid by just asking. The game must be played, no matter with how many moves or lines that he made, even if it concluded in his asking and her saying yes. Of course, however, his resulting cynicism might be a gain as he sits on the periphery as a commentator. Chess, after all, has its grandmasters and Youtubers. There is profit to be made even when you’re nobody.
To avoid an unnecessary attitude of cynicism (as though any of it is “necessary”) a first rule is to avoid being in the presence of those unlike you. Only do so if you are able to separate that inherent desire to be a part. That desire must be reserved and expended on a successful attempt. This rule, obviously, is impossible and unhealthy to follow exactly. One must go out and meet others to know who they are, and who he is by contrast. But he mustn’t prematurely desire to want to be a part of who they are. It must be reserved; he must be prudent.
Everyone’s game is played with both nuance and predictability. There are, though seemingly infinite, established lines that we follow. Playing the game with nuance makes us unique; it is what people love about us. Playing the game with an inner un-need-to-be-spoken fidelity for our conventions, is what makes people acceptable of us. However, even in cases where one is not accepted but not quite rejected, there is still a mutual fidelity guiding the interaction. Perhaps one has no expressed desire for it to be anything more than what it is and the other with no desire to make it otherwise: their motivations are neutral, and this mutual sympathy engenders comfortability. But this is also the purest form of acceptance, because it comes from both parties tacitly. Tolerance is presupposed; comfortability a conditional produce; a common criterion at base.
I must think about this.