Are We Playing with Poison?

If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those people who has quite enjoyed the smorgasbord of information and opinion that has become available to us through things like Facebook. There are some amazingly positive things that have come of that, but over the years, there are a some things that I think have kind of crept into our horsey culture of information-sharing that could be insidiously poisonous.

One of these, that to me feels frighteningly poisonous, is “Someone else has to be wrong for me to be ‘right.’” These are the videos, or photos, or writings where the person offering the information is basing their whole premise of sharing on pointing out how someone else (or a whole discipline or culture) is wrong, and how, because that _____________ is wrong, that, obviously makes the person sharing ‘right’.

Someone does not have to be wrong for us to be ‘right’. I mean, some things are just not debatable (like, debating whether a horse has a clavicle or not would be a waste of time because it’s an accepted and demonstrable fact that he has no clavicle). All else is our experience, our previous teaching, our “opinions”. There’s also a slippery slope from “Someone has to be wrong for us to be ‘right,’” to “I’m the only one out there who is ‘right.’”

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.”― Plato

Our experience, our previous teaching, and yes, even our “opinions” are valuable. They can be very helpful to others, especially when they save someone else from perhaps making the same mistakes others have. Or maybe, by sharing our experiences, our previous teaching and our “opinions”, we connect with others with similar ideas or lives, and we feel less alone. Someone else does not have to be “wrong” for our communications to do these good things.

There’s a poison in someone else having to be wrong for me to be “right”. It’s kind of a “cheap” way to come off as an expert. It’s lazy. And don't get me wrong, I used to do it a lot myself, and people used to "bait" me into it by constantly asking me what I thought of "so-and-so" or "clinician X" or whatever. I suppose it's just human nature.

“I’m here to get it right, not to be right.” ― Brene Brown

So over the years, I’ve slowly removed these people from my FB newsfeed and therefore my everyday life, because it’s felt like a slow drip of poison, just a little bit here and a little bit there. It’s a choice one makes of how we’re going to communicate what we have to say, and that choice says something about us. Denny Emerson, for instance (Tamarack Hill Farm on FB) refuses to use photos of others for negative examples in his posts. He will only use photos of himself as negative examples. That’s a choice he has made, and it says something about him.

I think the other thing this does, besides feeding us this slow drip of poison into our daily lives, is it dilutes our outrage when there should really be outrage. I mean, this clinician or that clinician, or French dressage versus other classical traditions, we are wasting our outrage on these things. Because while we are griping and spewing negativity about those things and debating these matters of “opinion” and personal choices that are really quite morally neutral in the grand scheme of things, some Tennessee Walker somewhere is having stack pads and acid applied to his feet and legs. Or horses at a horse show are spending the night tied with their heads way up so they’ll carry their heads low the next day. There are REAL things we really should be b*tching about. There are things we should be debating that are NOT morally neutral in the grand scheme of things. Those things deserve our outrage.

25 years ago, we had our global discussions about horsemanship via these super clunky e-mail feeds. I was just a fly on the wall back then, desperate to learn and absorb, and learn the language and the history. So as a “people”, we have been at this a very long time. That old e-mail list, that kept me connected to this world, because no one else around me knew anything about it. That was my tiny thread that allowed me to stay a part of that culture.

Today, we do a lot of that in other ways, staying connected with our culture, or the things we’re interested in. For me, I’ve chosen to shape my news feed and my social media experience so that I’m receiving information from people who are sharing information without that slow drip of “someone has to be wrong for me to be ‘right.’” There are lots and lots of those people sharing very interesting and enriching experiences, teaching and “opinions” without that slow drip. I really enjoy experiencing these people’s thoughts, because they leave me room to explore and think and experiment and make the things they’ve brought up my own. Or not.