COLUMN: How to be inoffensive
I live in fear of being “offensive.”
In fact, very few people I’ve come across want to be the originator of something “offensive.” If you’re an especially neurotic sort like me, you take painstaking precautions to ensure your actions or words aren’t offensive, and you obsessively worry about how others, especially strangers, feel about you.
However, I’ve recently come to realize that it’s impossible to be completely inoffensive. But, darn it, that won’t stop me from trying!
In an effort to make the world an absolutely inoffensive place, I have come up with a new idea. I’ve decided people shouldn’t have opinions anymore. (For those of you who believe the previous sentence expresses an opinion, fear not. I will soon prove otherwise.)
According to my research, every instance of someone being offended in the history of civilization was the direct result of an opinion held by either the offended or the offendee, so we need to stop this epidemic of having “beliefs or judgments that rest on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.” Since they cause people to be offended, we can be certain that opinions are a bad thing; therefore, the prudence of abolishing them becomes a fact.
A world without opinions, and therefore no offended people, would be a very peaceful place. Since subjective judgments would be a faux pas, conversation would consist of agreeing upon the fixed properties of certain objects. For example, one person might say “that chair is red,” and since the chair would be inarguably red, the other person would be forced to concur.
Sure, to those of us who are still burdened with opinions, this type of conversation might seem a trifle boring, perhaps even robotic; however, once opinions are a thing of the past, nothing will seem like anything anymore, and we’ll all be free to perform our perfunctory life actions in absolute neutrality.
Living without opinions might sound like an impossible paradigm shift, but the key to success here is apathy. If nothing particularly tickles your fancy or grinds your gears, there’s never any need to formulate or express an opinion.
Why ever take the risk of being offensive when it’s much safer to abandon sentience? Stating personal preferences, making evaluative judgments or striving for some sort of lasting mark on the world might sound like fun, but any opinion, no matter how innocuous, is guaranteed to be offensive to at least a few people on earth.
I’m not going to speculate on how fulfilling this existence will be, since any speculation results in the formation of an opinion. All I know is that opinions cause people to get offended, so I encourage everyone to stop perpetuating the problem by having and expressing them.
