Pet Shop Boys

I love the cat and dog comparisons as members of families live under the current societal restrictions.  The general suppositions are that dogs love having their owners working from home or exiled from school and that cats are sewing masks in the middle of the night and begging the humans to bug out of the house. They make a fantastic parallel to human personality typing.  It doesn’t really matter if it’s technically true, i.e. “not all dogs” etc. ad nauseum.  What matters is that individual personality affects the way people interpret data.

The pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer puts it like this, “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”  It is easy to see this in the age of social media and individual commentary.  I’m not talking about armchair economists or physicians or anyone who is engaged in the world and making conclusions on the state of affairs.   That is just part of life, similar to moms and dads making medical and economic decisions year after year.  We take in the information we find and do the best we can with what we have, getting help from the professionals when we need it.

This opinionated cat learned the hard way that a claim to certainty without taking into consideration where you came from in the pet shop will always be skewed.  Well, I’m not a fan of any claim to certainty as a general rule, but have learned that once we can be mindful of our own and our neighbors’ general bent, we can hear each other much better.  We can be less offended and less judgmental towards opinions or decisions that are counter to our own.   Knowing that everyone around us has a worldview that has been affected by their innate personality and environmental conditions can give great insight into why we say the things we say and do the things we do.

Of course I love the age of social media and sharing and hearing other voices, and believe we do each other a great disservice when we knock each other out of the running as a voice to be listened to because we don’t, for example,  “wear a mask,” or “vote …”  Oh sure, I believe in freedom as well, to listen to who you want to listen to and block who you want.  I think, although I’m a cat, I’m also a bit of an idealist so my bent will be to challenge myself to listen to the dogs.  They see the world in a way that I don’t see it and they can teach me something I would otherwise never see.  But if a dog doesn’t know he’s a dog, I can’t take that barking.