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An authority figure starts to tell someone that a given rule applies, then remembers who he's talking to, and readily grants an exception.
There are a couple of specific examples -- grandfather clauses, pacifists under draft. A draft board might not simply say, "Oh, you're a pacifist. Never mind," but they are illustrations of a basic pattern.
When I read Please Understand Me (reviewed in my canon), I came across an explanation that both accounted for my actions (in a non-insulting way) and made sense of my feelings. The SJ (sensate judging) temperament, which comprises 38% of the population, including most of the people who create and enforce rules, tends to believe that "Having rules and seeing that they are followed is very beneficial to a community," while my temperament, NT (intuitive thinking), which comprises only 6% of the population, could state its perspective as "Rules exist for the betterment of community and may therefore be set aside when they do not contribute to that end." The difference in perspective could be stated as "Rules are almost always good" versus "Rules are good if they are helpful, and not good if they are not helpful." There are a number of times I have been in situations not anticipated by rules, in which the rules did not serve their intended purpose, and I was reasoning from an NT background that "If I show these people that applying the rules is not beneficial in this context, they will naturally make an exception." The assumption betrays a lack of understanding of SJ perspective on rules, of course, but it was appropriate given my temperament and what I did and didn't know at the time.
This impression is of someone in authority who looks at a situation, sees that applying the rules is not beneficial in that context, and readily grants an exception. It may be born more out of hope than experience, but it is a little picture of paradise -- a paradise that sometimes says to people who are different, "The rule in this case was not created in anticipation of your situation, and will not be applied." And who knows? Perhaps some people in authority might read this and exercise judgment so that rules do not harm those people for whom they were not created.
A child expectantly asks an adult, "You'll make everything better, right?"
The adult sadly answers, "It doesn't work that way."
There are a number of things that are, in the minds of people who do not understand them, magical. Among these may be mentioned adulthood, exceptional intelligence, computers, counseling, and medicine. People on the outside have certain expectations. Children expect adults to know what to do in every situation; people of normal intelligence expect a genius to have perfect grades and never make mistakes; people want computers to have humanlike intelligence; codependent people want to enlist the counselor's help in controlling everybody around them; patients want doctors to always have a pill that will make everything better. Those people who are inside the magic circle can only shake their heads and say, "It just doesn't work that way." Genius, for instance, is not an immunity to failure; a genius will actually experience more failure.
It doesn't mean that these domains don't have power -- all of them do. Rather, it means that this power isn't what people expect it to be. Christ came as the long-awaited Messiah -- and when he came to preach spiritual deliverance from sin instead of military deliverance from Rome, disappointed many of the people who were waiting for him.
With giftedness, for example, there is a common assumption that it is an automatic badge to success: perfect grades in school, and being better at everything. Not so; many bright individuals have terrible school grades (Einstein was failed at math), and their intelligence functions differently, so that they experience difficulties like those of a foreigner in a very different land.
It may be that, in dealing with a great good, we need to be open to its being good in a way we cannot anticipate -- even if our anticipation of its goodness is what draws us to it.
In Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Michael Valentine Smith is raised in Martian culture and then brought to earth as a young man. He experiences terrific difficulty in adjustment, but adjusts to human culture first in author Jubal Harshaw's den, and then explores the world on his own before creating his own nest -- a unique place that combines Martian and human culture. Inside it, there is little clothing, and no need for money -- but this is superficial; more deeply, there is a shared consciousness, a world that is entered when a person steps over the threshold.
Michael's nest resonates with me in a very strong sense of home. I do not have any physical place with the external distinctiveness of Michael's nest -- a thief who broke in would probably think I am a boring person -- but that is not the essence of Mike's nest even in Heinlein's book. It was almost a literary symbol -- and people who saw through the external strangeness found an internal wonder, itself even stranger, that was preserved when the people in the nest moved to a hotel hideout. My nest, which I have just begun to build, is found in part in scattered places (here, there, everywhere: in the schoolyard during first-grade recess; with the cherubim and seraphim; among the farandolae) -- most recently in the dance class I have started. I wrote above about there being a glass wall, and my having been burned again and again after inviting people to pass through it (perhaps I did not understand how difficult it is for other people) -- and I have found a few friends who have passed through it without me being burned. With two of them in particular (Robin and Heather Munn, a delightful brother and sister), I am now not intentionally building so much as living inside a nest.
This nest is a symbol of Heaven, and I will never before death be able to have it in full -- there are times when I long strongly for it, and am a bit closer, but this nest has the same fundamental beauty as the Romance described in Less-Wild Lovers: Standing at the Crossroads of Desire -- or a related one.
In a room full of men, one man challenges another. The challenged man rises and begins to sing the hymn, "Holy, Holy, Holy." Immediately other men rise, singing, until the room is filled with song.
The song is a symbol of the Christian faith. It is something shared, something great that is common to many people. It is worship -- that is to say, it is a touch of Heaven here on earth. The harmony among people -- a harmony that is assumed not to be there in the challenge -- exists in contrast to the classification of private, arbitrary beliefs, a sort of thing you can do as long as you hide it and don't make it anything public to be taken seriously. The singing is public and intended to be taken seriously.
There are other dimensions to be carried as well, although I do not recall them now. It is not an allegory, with exactly one specific meaning; the symbol itself is more ambiguous -- it carries multiple meanings, the primary one being the one referred to above.
A tall person in a black cloak sits in a large hole at the center of an immense circular chessboard, slowly, unhurriedly moving pieces in and out in an intricate and complex pattern.
This image is a symbol of genius, but not of my own gifts. My gifts mean experience of both spectacular success and spectacular failure; this image of genius is of a mastermind who has several projects in motion, giving attention to each in due turn. It is something I do in part -- but this image is an image of perfection.
A man puts on a mask and through it shows himself in a way that would not have come without the mask.
Some of this is hinted at in what I wrote about my Halloween costume. The terms I have used in my own thought (though I don't remember using them with anyone else) concern a "standard translation". In the ordinary course of events, a person reveals himself in certain standard ways -- which is not a straight copy, but a translation in which something gets lost. Sometimes nonstandard translations can allow things to be seen -- good things -- that are not shown in the standard translation. There are ways in which actions which are on the surface complete fantasy, allow the presentation of things that do not have occasion to be shown normally.
I think something of this is common -- acting is concerned not only with using the actor to reveal an arbitrarily chosen different person, but with the development and revelation of the actor (to those who know him) -- but my experience of it seems more intense than usual. I was surprised when some friends and I were playing a game I made, and one friend pulled a card from the deck that said to tell what about her she most wished other people knew, and she said that most people understood the things about her that she wanted to be understood. I had assumed that my intuitions applied to everyone.
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