Ask A Genius 739: Iphigenie auf Tauris from 1787
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/25
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is from Goethe; Iphigenie auf Tauris from 1787. Number two; the quote is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – “Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others.”
Rick Rosner: Life teaches us to be to be less harsh with ourselves than with others.
Jacobsen: And with others…
Rosner: And with others. Okay. I like the way I said it first because we’re right now living in a time of assholes but to take his actual quote, he’s basically saying as we gain experience of the world we forgive people including ourselves and their inadequacies. Okay, I buy that because you know, Carol and I have been in couples counseling for decades, just about once a month because I have excellent insurance through the Writer’s Guild. So, like 85% of it is paid for and it’s good to kind of work on potential issues together in a refereed environment every so often. It’s like I’ve called it here before a bunch of times relationship push-ups; it shows your commitment to the role.
Anyway, one of the things that I work on with Carol, one of my not so hidden agendas, is when she you know finds shortcomings in me I try to get her to put things in a statistical framework which is a fancy way of making excuses for not being perfect at the same time its pragmatic. We were just talking about being pragmatic and in our early days of counseling she’d go after me for saying well you’re not romantic enough.
Jacobsen: You aren’t romantic enough?
Rosner: Right, and then I’d say “Okay, tell me about a couple you know who’s romantic enough.” She had a hard time doing that because nobody’s fucking romantic. It’s a very you know statistically unlikely thing. So to get back to Goethe, it’s like as you gain experience in the world you kind of learn what people are capable of including yourself on the good side and also on the fallibility side. Statistically when I worked in popular bars, about one person in 90 would be lying to me, would be underage and trying to get in with some kind of fake ID or just with bullshit. So that was the index of human fallibility in that particular context. And then people varied in terms of dickishness.
The one bar I worked at Mom’s Saloon, across from where the Goldman kid worked who had his throat slashed by O.J Simpson in Brentwood. There was no place to dance near UCLA. This was the closest place with a dance floor, UCLA. So it had a huge long line and sometimes it would take 45 minutes to get in or even longer and people had actually pretty standard reactions to being forced to stand in line all this time. There was a standard level of annoyance and then there were the statistical outliers; the people who were extremely nice about it and understanding and you wouldn’t remember those people because they were nice. But then the people on the other side, the people who were huge assholes about it will be like “Why’d they get it?” They work here; they’re showing up to get their paycheck. “Oh yeah? Really? Somebody who’s two or three standard deviations from the mean and mean in terms of being an asshole you remember those people because they’re fucking assholes.
But with experience, with thousands of nights running a line of people wanting to get into a bar, I got a pretty good picture of the average human and then the variability in human behavior around this in this one situation but in general people learn what people are capable of. Everybody wants to be a pro athlete if they’re a decent athlete in high school or even if they’re not a decent athlete and then 99.8% of those people get shaken out, maybe even 99.9, without making it to the pros. Time and experience educate you about what you can do in a whole bunch of areas and if you don’t want to go crazy, you have to forgive yourself for not being able to live up to your earlier hopes and expectations. You can strive, every time I drive I strive to be less of a dick when I’m driving and sometimes I succeed and sometimes I run that fucking yellow light. It’s not really running a yellow light you’re still allowed to be in the intersection when it’s yellow but if I was super conscientious I’d see the fucking thing ticking down and come to a stop.
[Recording End]
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