Reflection: A Thing and its Opposite

There are multiple reasons a person will sometimes allow another human being to insult him: It might be that he believes what the other person is saying, or it might be that he believes none of it. It could be that he lacks ego strength -- or it could be that he has enough ego-strength that the insult wasn't an issue. Many things look, on the surface, like their opposite, and I think that's one of the biggest barriers to understanding between and among human beings. I wrote in an earlier post that I thought Dr. Laura blurred the distinction between attachment and dependency -- two things that, as I see it, are not only distinct, but often functionally opposite. We're all constantly making inferences about one another, often at such a subconscious level we don't even realize we're doing -- yet in that split second in which we infer, we may, in fact, be choosing between opposites. Here's an example of how tricky it gets: Those repetitive motor behaviors associated with autism and other disorders... well, according to neurologists, they can reflect one of several things, like 1) a massively overstimulated nervous system, or 2) a massively understimulated one.