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Talk to everybody and be interested in everything
People sometimes ask me why I'm always so ready to talk to those who are supposedly beneath me. The type of people they generally mean are those in low-paid jobs, the uneducated, those with low IQs, the uncool, the immoral and so on.
The reason is that there are very few people I view as being particularly inferior. I may completely disagree with somebody's views or actions, but I'm always interested in hearing about them.
I was born with a natural curiosity about the world, and I often feel that those who are different to me have more to teach than those who are the same.
Let's take the example of a poorly-educated, drug-addict prostitute. Provided such a person doesn't try to rob or attack me, I would find them very interesting indeed to speak with. How did they get into such a bad situation? What is the fascination with drugs and where does it come from? What do they think about the world and their place in it?
By comparison, a conversation with a white, suburban, educated male like myself can often be quite boring. I usually have a pretty good idea of who they are, what they think, and what their place in the world is before we even get started.
What's surprising about the supposed "losers" of the world is just how thoughtful and articulate they can be once you start talking to them. They can often surprise with their wisdom and depth.
They may not be good at maths or understand literature, but often they've had very interesting experiences - even if I wouldn't wish to go through such things myself! It's very rare for me to meet someone who fits the caricature dummy that many educated people imagine.
Of course, smart and well-read people can be interesting also.
The sheer variety of humanity often surprises me. Almost everyone I meet is a character in their own right. Thinking about such things helps to put a human face on the tragedies we hear about. The 100 strangers killed in the Middle-East in today's paper are probably just as interesting and varied as the people you choose to spend time with every day.
I grew up mostly in Canberra, which is a town of government-workers, students and academics. The average person there is bright and well-educated.
What amazes me about such people is the way they often close themselves off from the world. They hide away in their ivory towers with people who have almost exactly the same opinions and lifestyles, and concentrate only on one narrow field of learning. They read the same news sources, have the same conversations, and reinforce the same stale old ideas.
Experience has taught me that this is precisely the wrong way to learn about the world - which is what most intelligent people claim to be interested in doing.
For example, being bought up in a fairly secular, left-wing environment made me very suspicious of religious people and those with different political views. During my late-teens I viewed such people as most likely stupid, immoral or both. Almost everyone clever I knew felt the same way, and so I was sure I was right.
When I travelled to India, the Middle East, and England, I met a large number of people who were religious and/or right-wing. At first, upon encountering such "wrong-thinking" souls, I'd argue arrogantly with their views. I already knew they were ignorant, so their only possible use was to allow me to feel self-righteous by correcting them.
Gradually, I began to notice that people with such views could be very thoughtful, intelligent and moral. They were nothing like the caricatures I'd imagined from my little bubble in Canberra. Worse, they could often pick holes in my own carefully thought-out arguments with what seemed like little effort.
It was then I woke up to what a shallow world I'd been living in. I gained a new appreciation of just how little I, or anyone else, knew about things. I also realized that talking to those who are different can be an extremely educational experience.
I meet a lot of supposedly intelligent people, yet I often find they live in a similarly shallow world. Rather than going out to explore this wonderful, frightening and confusing planet we live on, they shelter themselves in a kind of virtual reality. They dismiss everyone and everything that doesn't fit with their simplified picture of how things are - or at least how they should be.
I suspect many of them believe they've already got 80% of it figured out and are busy filling in the missing 20% - which usually consists of pursuing one narrow subject.
This is a shame, because their heroes usually took the opposite approach. They challenged the status quo, dared to look into what others thought was unimportant or offensive, and expanded their horizons by speaking with those different from themselves.
The only way to really understand the world is to go out and experience it. Often this means considering ideas we may find abhorrent, or taking an interest in subjects we previously thought of as boring.
Don't join the superficial majority by cutting yourself off from reality. Talk to everyone and be interested in everything. The rewards in success, and even knowledge for its own sake, will make the journey well worthwhile.
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