Always and in everything to correspond to yourself, to justify expectations … Isn’t it boring?
This is how our tradition of communication has developed, that we value a person for his loyalty to his views and beliefs. It may even be boring with him, because it is known in advance what he will say in the next minute. But such a person is recognizable and always definite. In this sense, it is more convenient with him.
Often these are the people who become authoritative. You can refer to them: “Even Ivan Ivanovich always says that …” There is no talk of love, but they cause respect.
Meanwhile, in this tradition, it is easy to read, oddly enough, forensic psychology. It is in court that the price of consistent testimony is high. If the witness is confused in the testimony, then he either does not clearly imagine the picture of what happened, or simply lies.
In essence, all trade union, public and party meetings were held according to the same scheme during the Soviet era. The man was always suspect. Therefore, consistency was valued, or, to use pathetic Soviet slang, conviction. At the same time, a citizen could lie as much as he wanted about his loyalty to the party, factory or family, but if he lied from time to time, then in the end he was perceived as a whole person.
This is how human psychology works. In the revealing years of the 90s, it was customary to say: “Soviet man.” But now we understand that not only Soviet. We all know from the school curriculum that man is woven from contradictions, that the entire dialectic of Dostoevsky’s artistic world, for example, rests on pro and contra. Moreover, people who are light, wrong, contradicting themselves are much more pleasant and amiable to us, but … The psychological strength of tradition. Still, we think about it, as if we were really present at the trial, some kind of confusion in his head or a peasant lied.
Meanwhile, a living person, that is, a thinking and feeling person, is necessarily contradictory and must naturally contradict himself. I am reminded of a funny and extremely significant episode from Gorky’s memoirs of Tolstoy. They sat on a bench, talking about this and that. Above them, on a branch, a finch sang. Tolstoy told Gorky that the finch sings the same song all his life. At the same time, he remarked: “There is one song for life, but he is jealous. A person has hundreds of songs in his soul, but he is condemned for jealousy – is this fair? … There are moments when a man tells a woman more than what she should know about him. He said – and forgot, but she remembers. Maybe jealousy is from the fear of humiliating the soul, from the fear of being humiliated and ridiculous?
Gorky replied to Tolstoy that in these words he sees a clear contradiction of his own “Kreutzer Sonata”, which is all built on humiliating, nightmarish, pathological jealousy. Tolstoy “spread a radiant smile over his entire beard and replied:” I’m not a finch.
Great episode. A living person, like all living things, develops. This means that he may not agree with himself yesterday. In addition, an opinion is not something that is stored in some secret place inviolably and gets out of there only as needed. There are situations, circumstances, moods, in the end, which force us to treat the phenomenon differently, to see it from the other side.
In principle, I (conditionally) do not like, for example, old men who behave inappropriately for their age: they allow themselves dangerous jokes, are childish, seriously flirt with young girls, eat and drink greedily, and lead. A person must feel his age, otherwise there is a suspicion that he lived his whole life somehow unnaturally. But this one is so good today, there is so much true goodwill and fun in it, so much human curiosity about what interests and what upsets his neighbor, such an irrepressible thirst for life that it seems to him that the whole evening is justified by him, and life itself is justified. Did I say something else yesterday? Forget it. Wonderful old man.
PS I must make a reservation: I am not talking about those people who are not true to their word. Today he gave his word, tomorrow he took it. Changed my mind. Not about those who are today this, but tomorrow this, about whom they say that they have seven Fridays in a week. This is not a contradiction, but a whim, selfishness, a complete lack of a sense of responsibility in relation to another. I want to get to know them as soon as possible. In their variability, they are just too predictable. Therefore, it is difficult with them, yes, for real, and not interesting.