Here’s Why You Should Disagree MORE
It’s the most natural thing, so why be afraid to do it?
On one my early birthdays, perhaps when I turned 11 or 12, I asked my dad for money so I could get myself a gift. Upon receiving the money, I asked him for more. “It’s my birthday after all!”, I thought. To that, my dad replied, “You are not modest”.
Hearing those words me made me feel shitty and devastated, and it turns out, those words affected me for a long time. I had a girlfriend in college that complimented me often, and I would always downplay her compliments. I would respond with “no it’s not that good” or with “I got lucky”; I had built an automatic response to receiving compliments. Eventually, she said to me, “why don’t you just say ‘thanks’?”. Why didn’t I just accept the compliment? I realized why. I thought that accepting those compliments meant that I thought of myself in those ways and that therefore, I was not modest for thinking so highly of myself.
So, one little experience as a kid changed how I responded to compliments many years later in college. Today, I think about all the experiences that happened to me growing up, and I wonder which still affect the way I think and behave. All of those experiences essentially make up who I am, and it would be foolish of me to not think that everyone else also had their own little experiences shaping up who they are today.
We are different
Few people would read the above story, relate to it, and say something like, “I had a similar experience with my dad, bla-bla-bla…” No, I don’t think so. Many other people would just say “thanks” to compliments because they didn’t have that same thought pattern. In a similar way, I probably can’t relate to most experiences from other people. I can try, but I likely won’t have the same exact thing happen to me.
All of this is to say that each of our individual life experiences so far are unique, so we are different despite all the things we have in common. Even with my siblings and with all us growing up on the same house, we don’t agree on everything. Doesn’t this mean, therefore, that we are more than likely to disagree?
I think yes. I disagree with my relatives, with whom I spent most of my early and most defining moments of my life, so it should be surprising that I disagree with everyone else I meet. Given a particular topic and given that we all have unique life experiences, we shouldn’t expect to think the same way about that topic. We should actually expect to each have our own unique and nuanced take on it. That is the most natural thing.
How this manifests itself
For some reasons, it’s hard to disagree for a lot of people. This has manifested itself in my life in the following ways.
The “nice guy”
I used to be a nice guy, and I’d like to believe I’m past it. Still, to me this feels like a battle because I was a nice guy for most of my life.
What’s a nice guy? Usually in the context of a guy with a romantic interest in a gal, the nice guy behaves in “nice” ways for the sole purpose of getting with her (or even getting in bed with her). In particular, the nice guy doesn’t respect himself in the process by crossing his own boundaries (doing things that are against his values and principles), by having covert contracts—doing things expecting things in return, not necessarily because he wants to do something nice—and, what’s relevant to this article, by agreeing with 100% (or most) of the things that she says.
If you’re a nice guy, you should reflect on this. Usually for us men, unless we’re in a position of power or have something other people want (which for the majority of guys never happens), we don’t know what it’s like for someone to be “nice” to us because they want something from us. Women, on the other hand, experience this much more often. The thing is, you should never 100% agree with someone, and as we’ve established, you should in theory be in constant disagreement with people. So, a woman can easily feel something fishy when you, the guy, are agreeing with 100% of what she says. Even 90%, 80%, or I might even say 70%, is fishy. Maybe at 60–70%, you would consider yourselves a good match. Still, I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of a woman that experiences this constantly, and any form of agreement in the early stages of meeting someone would come off as fishy: does this guy actually agree with me or is he just trying to get under my pants? It’s hard to know, and that’s why the concept of shit tests make sense.
All in all, I’m not telling nice guys to try to get to 60-70%—that’s not the point. Instead, I’m saying to be true yourself and stop being deceitful! Agree when you agree, disagree when you disagree—don’t pretend to agree. You’re actually expected to disagree. When, however, you find someone with whom you agree on a lot of things, then maybe you can consider that person a good match for you.
The “good person”
The “good person” is a close relative of the “nice guy”. This is a person that is afraid to tell the truth to others because they’re afraid to hurt them or because they want to maintain a positive or “good” social image. This is also someone who is afraid to stand up for themselves because they don’t want to make others feel bad. Simply put, this is someone who is afraid to disagree.
I also used to be a “good person”. In fact, my family used to believe that I would never speak. To be completely honest, I’m not sure I’ve moved past this completely yet. I still have work to do. The Congolese culture values eldership / seniority. As a kid, I thought it valued it too much. The Congolese culture also values physical punishment, and having grown up on it, I honestly sometimes still am conflicted on whether it was a good thing or a bad thing because I feel that the person I am today—the good things I see in myself—was partially a result of that. Still, I find it mostly negative. Those two things made me believe that I wasn’t allowed to disagree with my elders—that is, I would get whooped if I did. Even if that wasn’t true, there were enough samples in my naive 10 years old brain to believe that to be a rule. So, it was “good” to sit there, do nothing, and agree, and it was “bad” to fight back for my own case and to stand up for myself.
So was my belief. As I grew up, I realized that that was completely wrong. First of all, as I’ve established, it’s natural to disagree with people. Secondly and finally, only through disagreement can we find the truth. That’s literally what the scientific method is all about, and we all know that the scientific method is responsible for much of the technological and societal improvements that happened over time. In addition, we best arrive at the truth when we have arguments with people where disagreement is the norm.
So, stop being a “good person”. There’s nothing good about that. Instead, be an honest person that disagrees because disagreement is nothing but normal and expected.
Yet, we still mostly agree
It’s actually hard to find someone that I disagree with on a lot of things. This could either be social conditioning, or it could just be that we’re all arriving at the truth over time, or that we’re each living in a bubble where we only associate with people that we agree with. I’m not sure. Still, I find that with most people I interact, either old friends or new acquaintances, it’s easy to have a civil discourse. A civil discourse is one thing we should all agree on because that way, we can disagree and come to the truth of things, and I find solace in knowing that disagreement is natural.
