Why Do You Want to Share Your Ideas?

This morning I heard an author being interviewed. In my humble opinion, the radio-person asked a strange question: “Why do you want to share your ideas?”

in order to visualize for yourself just how strange this question is, consider how every human being is brought into this world. Even before we are born we seem to be aware of human conversation. Parents give their children names — they speak to them by name. They narrate everyday life, every day. They introduce their children to society. They bring them to schools, and these schools teach children the “proper” way(s) to use language(s). The entire social fabric of humanity is interwoven with languages, with expressions and with many techniques for sharing ideas with one another.

And so when this radio-person asked: “Why do you want to share your ideas?” I found this shocking. I gasped and was taken aback, and wondered: how would I answer this question if it were asked of me?

I think my first “gut reaction” was something like “I wish to communicate” (or maybe “I wish to practice communication” or something like that). Yet words often have quite multi-faceted connotations and therefore such expressions can have quite unintended interpretations. Later I thought maybe “I wish to express myself” might be a better way of putting it, but now I feel “I wish to participate in humanity” might be best of all.

And now I have to chuckle — because of an insight that occurred to me at least a decade ago already: I myself am not particularly proud of the species I apparently “belong” to (see also e.g. “Sometimes I Feel So Proud to be Maladjusted“)

It is widely accepted as an established fact that some of the most severe (and perhaps also cruel) punishments known are things like ostracization or solitary confinement. Nonethless, one of the first things that occurred to this radio-person was to ask: “Why do you want to share your ideas?”

When something as absurd as this happens, I become flabbergasted — even (almost) speechless. Yet there is indeed an Internet-Abbreviation that seems to hit the nail on the … um, head … namely: SMH.