Live and Let Live Is Not the Same as Look Away

There is a particular sound a small town makes when it starts to come apart. It isn't shouting. It's the quiet that arrives first — two people who used to speak at the post office finding somewhere else to look, a table at a potluck that stays half empty, a name left off a list that was never really a list.

By the time anyone says the word divided, the dividing has been happening for months.

I have been thinking about this because it keeps happening, in towns all over, over things that would sound almost comic if the cost weren't so real. A class at the gym. A book on a shelf. A song at a service. Somebody stands up and says this is dangerous, and somebody else hears you are dangerous, and within a fortnight people who have buried each other's parents are no longer speaking.

I want to talk about why this happens so easily, and about the one question that separates a community worth defending from an argument not worth having.

Certainty is a comfort, not a virtue

Start with the part almost nobody says out loud: being certain feels wonderful.

When we are anxious — and we are all more anxious than we were — the mind narrows. Ambiguity becomes expensive to hold. The world is complicated and moving fast and much of it is genuinely frightening, and into that arrives a simple story with a clear line down the middle of it: this is good, that is bad, and you are on the right side. The relief is physical. Something in the chest unclenches.

That relief is not evidence. It's just relief. But it is easily mistaken for conviction, and it's why the loudest certainty in a room is so often coming from the most frightened person in it.

There's a second thing worth knowing. When someone holds a value as sacred — genuinely sacred, load-bearing, the thing their life is built on — then any suggestion of negotiation doesn't register as discussion. It registers as betrayal. You cannot trade a fraction of a sacred value; the arithmetic is offensive. So a conversation that one person experiences as let's think about this together is experienced by the other as let's discuss how much of your soul you'd sell.

Two decent people can be in that conversation and both come away certain the other has behaved appallingly.

And a third: we save our fiercest arguments for the people most like us. Not for strangers — for neighbors. Freud called it the narcissism of small differences, and anyone who has watched two churches on the same street fall out will recognize it. The closer the resemblance, the more the small distinction has to carry, and the harder it must be defended.

Why condemning your neighbor's practice almost never works

Set aside whether the objection is right for a moment, and just look at what happens mechanically.

Tell a person that something they find helpful is in fact evil, and you will not produce reflection. You will produce defense. It's one of the most reliable findings we have about human beings: when we feel our freedom to choose being closed off, we push back — often by valuing the thing more than we did before the conversation started. The woman who went to the class twice a month now goes weekly, and tells her friends why.

You will also, without meaning to, have told everyone standing nearby something about yourself: that you are willing to describe your neighbors as a danger. Some of them will have known that neighbor for forty years. They will not conclude that she is dangerous. They will conclude something about you, and adjust.

Nobody's mind is changed. The account is simply debited.

The cost never stays where you put it

Here is the thing about a small town, and I say this as someone who lived in one for many years and loved it: a fracture doesn't stay in the argument. It travels.

It reaches the school, because the children hear it at both tables. It reaches the businesses, because people start choosing where to spend on the basis of what side someone is on. It reaches the ordinary infrastructure of daily life — deliveries, favors, lifts to appointments, the hundred small acts of trust a town is actually made of. Some places in this country still carry the geology of a division that happened forty years ago. You can see it in who sits where.

The people who start these things almost never intend that. They intend to make one point. But you don't get to choose how far it goes, and in a town of a few thousand there is no distance for it to dissipate into.

And now the part that matters most

Everything I've written so far could be read as an argument for keeping quiet. It isn't, and I want to be as clear about this as I know how to be.

Live and let live is not the same as look away.

There are communities that have paid a terrible price for peacekeeping. Where someone was being harmed, and people who suspected it decided that raising it would be divisive, or disloyal, or bad for the town's reputation — and so it went on for years. Where the ones who finally spoke were treated as the problem, because they were the ones who broke the quiet. There are places carrying that history, and the survivors of it are still among us, and they are owed better than being made into a parable about the dangers of disagreement.

The division was never the tragedy in those stories. The disbelief was.

So the question is not should we avoid conflict. The question is:

Is anyone being harmed?

That is the whole test, and it is sharper than it looks.

Someone stretching on a mat at the gym is not being harmed. Someone reading a book you wouldn't choose is not being harmed. Someone worshipping in a way you find thin, or loud, or wrong, is not being harmed. You may believe they are mistaken — you are entitled to believe that, and to say so about your own convictions, in your own house, to your own people, all day long. But mistaken and endangered are different words, and treating the first as the second is where the damage begins.

Whereas a child who isn't safe is being harmed. A woman whose account is being disbelieved because believing her would be inconvenient is being harmed. Someone with no power, being hurt by someone with power, is being harmed. In those cases silence is not neutrality. It is a decision, and it has a victim.

Moral authority is a finite account

Which brings me to the practical reason for restraint, and it's one I think even the most certain person can accept.

Your credibility is a limited fund. Every time you call something a danger, you spend from it. Spend it on a yoga class and it is gone — not returned, gone — and the day something genuinely dangerous appears in your town, you will reach for that authority and find the account empty. The people you most needed to persuade will have long since learned to discount you.

The person who objects to everything has no way left to object to anything.

How to hold a strong conviction without breaking your town

If you believe something deeply and want to say so — and you should be able to — a few things make the difference between witness and warfare:

Speak for your own practice rather than against theirs.This is what we do and why it matters to us travels. What you do is evil only recruits people who already agreed.

Distinguish "not for us" from "not for anyone." These are wildly different claims and one of them is enormously easier to live beside.

Ask the harm question honestly, and be willing to hear no. If the answer is that nobody is being hurt, then what you have is a preference — a serious, sincere, deeply held preference. Preferences can be stated. They don't require a warning.

Leave people a way to disagree and remain your neighbor. If the only exit you offer is agreement, you have not made an argument. You have issued terms.

Notice if you're frightened. Certainty that arrives with heat is usually fear wearing better clothes. It's worth asking what you're actually afraid of before you hand the answer to everyone else.

The word we keep forgetting

Nearly every tradition I know of asks something of us regarding our neighbors, and none of them define neighbor as the person who agrees with you. That's rather the point of the word. It means the person whose life is arranged next to yours whether either of you chose it or not — and who will still be there next spring, and whose children will sit beside yours, and who will show up with a shovel when it snows, if you have left that possible.

You can be entirely convinced and still leave that possible.

That isn't weakness, and it isn't relativism. It's the discipline of holding a conviction with an open hand, so that the hand is still free to reach out — and still trusted enough that when you finally do say this one is real, this one matters, listen to me —

people will.

Jill Lien is a Board Certified Clinical Hypnotist and behavioral coach. She writes about the things people find hardest to say out loud.