Of all the thoughts that terrify me in the darkness, one of the most terrifying of all is this –

Maybe good character really does grow out of suffering.

My childhood, and my early adolescence, were very very lonely.  I had some sort-of friends, sometimes, but there were always great gulfs separating me from even the closest of them.  I was an outsider to every group, even the groups that were more-or-less willing to accept my presence, and no one ever let me forget it.  My interests were universally understood to be fringe.  My opinions were universally understood to be outlandish, laughable, crazy. 

Then I get to college and find real friendships and real intimacy, yay, happy ending, cue confetti.  But of course those years of loneliness, of outsider-ness, are never getting erased.  The scars will remain.

And I don’t want that to be a good thing.  Certainly not an importantly-good thing.  I really, definitely don’t want to say anything like “maybe we should make sure that kids in the future suffer the way I suffered.”  I much prefer the “never again” way of looking at things.  That feels like the correct viewpoint, the noble viewpoint.

But.

The moral values that are most important to me – when captured in exhortation form – tend to be things, like, well…

* “Explore every idea, engage with every argument, even the ones that make you uncomfortable.” 

* “Remember that the world is a better place for having all sorts of people in it, including the ones who are frightening and alien to you.”

* “Integrity is the essence of nobility.  Stay true to yourself and your ideals, in the face of all the world.” 

…and of course these are exactly the values that it’s easy to cultivate when you’re an outsider, when you expect everyone else to disagree with you and to find you frightening, when it actually makes some sense to think of the rest of the world as an undifferentiatedly hostile force.  I’m pretty sure that it was not an accident that I settled on my particular moral code. 

It has not escaped my notice that the people who agree with me on these matters tend to be the people who had similar experiences growing up. 

Nor has it escaped my notice that these values have become less and less prized in the geeky circles I call home – that the kids-these-days are becoming more conformist, more intolerant of disagreement, in a frightening way – just as geekiness is becoming less and less an outsider thing.  The kids-these-days are mostly growing up feeling like they’ve got communities they can count on, like they can expect the world to take their thoughts seriously, like they’re properly integrated into humanity.  Way more than I was, at least.  And that’s a good thing.  But I’m pretty sure, in the face of it, that the values shift is not an accident either.  Their environment did not push them towards my preferred morality.

(And since the world is full of people who have suffered in different ways from the ways that I suffered – often worse ways, much much worse – I must assume that, in a similar way, they look at me and see someone who has failed to undergo proper moral development.  I don’t have Group Loyalty Instincts.  I don’t have any kind of physical toughness, and while my physical courage hasn’t really been put to the test, I see no reason to think I’ve got much of that either.  I am really not oriented towards practical hard-headed success-oriented thinking.  Etc.) 

I don’t know where this ends.  I don’t want future iterations of me to have to live through years of sadness.  I don’t want my values to be drowned by the tide of obsolescence.  I’m not sure there’s any way to reconcile those preferences.