Acceptance

This is a thought that’s been floating around my head for nearly a year now. There are people who regard themselves as incredibly socially liberal and have no qualms about sex, drugs, social mores and basically live as if no one else’s opinions mattered. While there is a certain admirable freedom to that kind of outlook, I find that those individuals also tend to spout out sanctimonious rhetoric, insulting and belittling more conservative mentalities and ways of life. I’ve noticed I keep running into these people and as a way of bonding we criticize Greek life, religious fundamentalists or simpletons in general. We agree that small-minded people really should lighten up and see there is more to life than their own little world with its little rules. At this point they’re golden, but almost inevitably they will make some gradually sweeping generalization that everyone who isn’t like them are intolerant, unenlightened fools.
This is the problem; people who criticize those who they identify as closed-minded are just as closed-minded themselves. Simply because they enjoy doing a lot more things than other people might not they feel this makes them somehow more evolved. They will often accuse those who find their way of life unappealing of being intolerant of other ideas and imply, or sometimes outright state, that they are accepting of so many lifestyles and beliefs. But when it comes down to actually demonstrating this universal acceptance, they reveal that they are just as repelled and baffled by the very people they accuse of being unable to understand them. Certainly extreme social conservatism leads to a lack of understanding and intolerance of other practices, but extreme social liberalism is just as bad. It’s tempting to make the analogy of conservatism=intolerance therefore liberalism=tolerance, but if one actually applies this logic the end result is a seemingly open society where no one is outright judged for behaving differently, but are incessantly pressured into conforming. Like they said in Serenity: “We’re not telling people what to think, we’re just trying to show them how.”
I think the best way to go about achieving this acceptance of other lifestyles (aside from yoga and Buddhist philosophy) is to start out from an initially socially conservative and open up your mind from there, rather than being raised to think anything goes. That way, you can then understand the mindset of those who are less open to certain ideas having been there yourself rather than just regarding them as antiquated and stuffy.