Small hearts and small minds

 

I was thinking about the way that some people's minds work, and about in particular the individuals you come across who seem to have a small mind and a small heart. Maybe you should write that as 'small-minded' and 'small-hearted', as it is certainly not anatomical, it's just the way they roll. 

And I'm not saying there is much that they can do about it. Maybe something deep in their childhood just forced them down this particular alley, and they have never been able to turn from it. But even though you cannot blame them for their history, you can blame them if it makes them do the wrong thing in their present. 

I think the 'smallminded' and 'smallhearted' are very apt to describe them, because what you notice most is how limited their view of the world and of other people is. Maybe they don't see other people as truly real (or as real as they are) because they don't have the imagination to do it. They can talk to and talk about others but you sense quickly that the only person who is truly real in their mind is the owner of that mind. If you said, "What do you like most about X (insert name of family member or friend here)?" they would not have a ready answer. Because other people's strengths are by definition a threat to them. Why would I want to tell you what was good about someone else? The answer is of course 'because is makes you look more like a normal human being', so the small mind will always make an attempt to answer this one. 

But if you are like this, you don't really care much about other people, and you see the world as a zero-sum game, in which praise of someone else can only be paid for at the expense of someone's praise for you. 

I was teaching a class of five-year olds many years ago and there was one unfortunate boy who, when someone else won a game against him, or completed a task more quickly, would always say 'He cheated!' It was some kind of defence mechanism, which presumably came from the way that he observed others behaving at home, but he simply could not bear to admit that someone was better than him at anything. Because of this, he was also quite slow to observe how the other person had beaten him or succeeded. Which made him less likely to not need to reach for his 'cheated!'. I found it quite strange, and sad, in a five year old. But some people take this attitude with them into their adult life, and even to the end of it.

The 'smallhearted' side of such people is a lack of emotional generosity and emotional range. I think that they distrust all emotions (except perhaps their own pride) and they see emotions as risky and possibly dangerous. They may talk about their own feelings, but they are describing the hamster in the cage of their hearts as if it were a real beast. But their capacity for love, or sympathy or even sadness is, I think, severely curtailed. And that's the way they like it. And I suppose if you throttle all emotions in your own heart, you can hardly believe that it is strong in the hearts of others. I can barely imagine how they would respond to something designed to affect your emotions. I can imagine them listening to a concert or watching a great play and being baffled about the expressions on the people around them. Catharsis is not for them.

They are also stuck in the same trap that a selfish person is (which they may also be), in that the selfish person sees others in their own light, so even when other people are not being selfish, the selfish person is convinced that they are and feels appropriately harmed. Because they  can only see motives in others that match their own. So the smallhearted and smallminded person reads another person's genuine emotion as the kind of perfunctory emotion-naming that they indulge in. And they see any  genuine ambition for a better world as being insincere, as their own words are. So they miss out on so much glory in this world because they cannot permit themselves to believe it exists. 

I genuinely feel sorry for people who have this view of life. It's as though they live in a black-and-white version of the story that the rest of us see (occasionally) in colour. I am very glad that it is not the way that I see the world or the way that the people I love see it. If you are not limited by your own mind, then the world has all kinds of possibilities, and people have all kinds of potential. I never cease to be amazed by how wonderful some people are, how open-minded, how full of optimism, hope and hard graft.  It makes me feel happier to be sharing the planet with them (and I can think of two or three examples of people I have met in the last month). But the small-minded and small-hearted person will dismiss anyone else's wonderfulness without bothering to find out. 

As I said, it is a terrible burden to see the world in this way, and generally I am sorry for them. But the only point at which my sympathy for them stops is when such a person has some kind of influence or control over others. Because they will reliably make bad decisions which come from their stunted hearts. They will be the petty tyrant managers, the parents who enforce all the most useless of rules and forget the important, the neighbour who never helps and always complains, the bureaucrat who is perpetually unmoved by the awful effects of their stunted actions. 

There should be a special law to keep such people away from any influence or control whatsoever. But we do not live in a perfect world.