what i want to talk about is the transitive paradox. i don't have a good noun yet -- i've got some adjectives which can be nouned, like "brilliants" and "utmosts" -- but there's this group of people who i consider qualitatively above other people i've met. probably the salient feature of these people is that they think and perceive, always, though it comes out in very different ways. whatever it is, it's always, which is the key adverb for these people, although the adjective varies from person to person. yes -- that is precisely what i mean to say.
anyway, in my mind, these people -- my closest friends, and probably the only people whose deaths would really bother me -- are distinctly set apart from everyone else. none of this is news.
the paradox here is that every single one of these people has someone that they appreciate far, far more than i do. usually someone i think is worthless or has a finite amount of worth with whom they're fast friends. i don't understand how they can see so much in these people when i see so little. adding to the trouble is that i'm pretty sure all of these people feel the same way about me that i feel about them with regards to this stratification, so it's not like their value functions can be that different than mine.
at current writing (and this doesn't change much), i have six of these people. i will go through all the examples, omitting names and altering enough relevant details that this should be relatively anonymous (except for a few of you, who will figure everything out.)
bachelor number one has a friend who i find entirely vacuous. this friend does not think before acting seemingly ever, and their actions betray a seemingly complete lack of intuition as to what is appropriate or flowing. it's possible that because i feel that this friend is extremely unattractive, this colors my view, but i don't really think so. i don't see any of this person's ideas as original or groundbreaking. i don't understand why bachelor number one does.
bachelor number two has a friend who is a casual acquaintance of mine -- not someone i've really met, but someone who i've seen enough of independently of bachelor two to appraise not in the context of their relationship with bachelor two. i don't understand what the hubbub is. bachelor number two and this person are fast friends. they share insight, this sort of thing. i don't understand how this person is capable of lending much insight; in my experience, this person says nothing particularly incisive. in my opinion, this person has a fair number of skills, but none of them are rare, and i don't see why you would have this sort of insight-sharing relationship with someone with no rare skills.
bachelor number three and i have never had particularly overlapping social circles, so nothing i can come up with is particularly persuasive there. this bachelor might be the counterexample; i can't really think of a person we both know who we have particularly differing opinions on. but bachelor number three has shown me email correspondence with one of their best friends, and while bachelor three contends that their relationship has value largely as one of contrast, i don't really see it.
bachelor number four is probably the most discriminating of this group of people, which makes it all the more baffling that the people that bachelor number four has highlighted in their life are not the people among their crowd that i would highlight. again, i don't know the crowd that well, but there are people in this crowd that jump out at me, and they are not the people in the crowd who bachelor number four has chosen to focus on, so to speak. it really seems to me that bachelor number four would be happier with somewhat different friends, although one requisite to appear on this show is that you are nontrivially inscrutable, so this general statement doesn't carry as much force as i would like.
bachelor number five has several friends who i find outright annoying. they vacillate. they don't say the right things. all of these people have one surprising thing in common -- they're pretty sure who they are. among all the people (friends of friends) i know this well, they seem to have incredibly unfickle personalities. but i don't like the personalities. they're unique, but they seem so off, so low-dimensional. not all of bachelor number five's friends are this way -- of all the people on this list, bachelor number five probably has the friend-of-bachelor who i'm most willing to accept as an utmost -- but the fact that any are suffices for this discussion.
finally, bachelor number six has tastes that i find to be frankly off the charts. as the most fickle of this set of contestants, bachelor number six seems to constantly like the wrong people for the wrong reasons. this is sort of a different beast -- i find bachelor number six's close friends to be satisfactory, but i find their acquaintances, the people with whom they spend a significant amount of time with who are not close friends, to be replacement-level. people who i would dismiss immediately, people who are in my 90% (see the typology over here, which is today's installment of Classic Mike.) i don't understand how they make it into bachelor number six's .9%.
with most people, i'm perfectly able to understand what they see in people i see nothing in. but with the utmosts, my soulmates if you will, i'm not. i don't understand how these people, who mostly have good qualities but are not unique, or who are unique in the wrong way, or whatever, can make it into the upper echelon of esteem of these people who i consider the pinnacle of human evolution.
the thing is, i like to think that the arguments presented above don't apply in reverse. that i have the Right People, and that none of these bachelors think the same thing about each other that i do about their other friends. or would, if they knew each other well enough. but this simply doesn't make sense; i'm perfectly willing to grant myself superiority of judgment in most cases, but not with these people. not with my particular oligarchal brand of arrogance.
why? my definition of the utmosts includes, whether for self-reassurance or based on conscious mathematical knowledge, some deep level of isomorphism with me. liking people for similar meta-reasons that i do. in a sense it's constructed to be transitive -- the reason i like these people isn't because they have similar interests (some do, some don't), or because they have similar tastes (ditto), but because of the adverb always. whatever they do, they always do it. they're into life. and i don't understand how they can appreciate people who, in my mind, are not doing a bang-up job of whatever it is they're trying to do.
i feel like there's a part three in this series of pieces.