There is a universal sport that we all practice, however lazy and unathletic we may be: trying to change the way others are. We began to bond with parents and reached our highest levels of dedication and dedication with siblings, friends, partners and children. What is not an obstacle to stubbornly demanding that others love us as we are. These contradictions tend to make us warlike and cause looping scenes: modeling someone else’s character is a high-risk modality.
Aristotle stated that the most characteristic feature of the human being is reason. In other words, always wanting to be right. After years of home training, writer Shirley Jackson published a short instruction manual titled How to enjoy a family discussion. All families, he writes, at some point become groups of loud-mouthed brawlers. To participate in the battle it is necessary to bring a great indignation. It is important to use a basic repertoire of resources with agility: denial and immediate counteraccusation, the caricature of the opponent, the history of grievances and alarming predictions as a threat. Only parents are authorized to say: do what I say, not what I do. Once these ground rules are clearly established, the family discussion flows quickly and effortlessly.
In this type of tournament there is no possible victory, only degrees of defeat. At some point in the fray, the discussion inevitably runs aground on a past event about which there are conflicting memories. Ted Chiang offers in his book Exhalation a technological solution to this recurring problem of good family drama. Remem is a personal camera that captures a continuous video of your entire life, an accessory that promises to help you pronounce the most exultant words in our vocabulary: do you see how I was right? “Remem displays events in the lower left corner of your field of vision. If you say: ‘Do you remember when we danced the conga at the wedding?’, Remem retrieves the video and shows it to you”. The recordings allow us to resolve those discussions about who had said what or what, and thus prove their mistake to others. However, having an exhaustive record of what has been experienced has some drawbacks. Looking at himself through the impassive eye of the video camera, the protagonist must face disturbing discoveries about himself. Almost nothing happened quite as he remembered, he almost always behaved worse than he believed. Thus he understands that one of the main tasks of memory is to choose what to forget, that is, to soften the harshness of the past —such as filters or retouching programs— to allow us to continue walking.
Once upon a time there was a sculptor named Pygmalion who was obsessed with creating a statue in the exact shape of his dreams. When he finished he had fallen in love with her, and he prayed to the goddess of love —in ancient Greece the divine powers were already clearly transferred— to find a woman identical to that cold block of marble. Aphrodite agreed to her plea by bringing the stone to life. Since then, this legend symbolizes the possessive love that needs to sculpt the world in the image and likeness of her desires. In the most modern versions of the myth, from the stage adaptation Pygmalion, from Bernard Shaw, to Vertigo, de Hitchcock, o The Skin I Live In, of Almodóvar, those stories usually have a bad ending.
From the opposite perspective, the philosopher Epictetus believed that it is we who must adapt our expectations to reality, because the transforming passion clouds our relationships. He stated that we should not waste effort criticizing or opposing the way others are, so we will save ourselves the monotonous pain of avoidable disappointments. The people around us are what they are, not what we wish them to be or what they seemed to be. As even Pygmalion knew, who carved his longings in marble, shaping the living is impossible. We all want to change our neighbor to avoid changing ourselves: we are non-conformists who cannot stand insubordination
The country
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