Eeyore is different.  He is not like any of the other animals in the hundred acre wood.  He is not cute or cuddly.  He doesn’t hum or make up songs.  He is gray, a little disheveled and stands with his feet too wide apart.  And his tail is not attached very securely.  Not unlike some of the rest of us.

This is not a big problem for either Christopher Robin or the other animals in the forest.  They all seem to accept Eeyore for what he is.  They are usually kind.  There were a couple of exceptions.  One day Pooh discovered that Eeyore’s tail was missing.

“That Accounts for a Good Deal,” said Eeyore gloomily.  “It explains Everything.  No wonder.”

“You must have left it somewhere,” said Winne-the-Pooh.

“Somebody must have taken it,” said Eeyore.  “How like them,” he added after a long silence.

How like them, indeed.  Eeyore’s friend Pooh found the tail serving as a bell-pull at Owl’s house.  Owl had found it hanging over a bush, rung it soundly, and when it came off in his hand, taken it home for his own use.  Thoughtless and silly surely, but not really malicious.  Nor was Tigger’s bouncing malicious, even though it got Eeyore very wet.  Tigger doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body.  But then he really doesn’t have any bones in his body.

Often it is just thoughtlessness.  The assumption that everyone is like you, that everyone wants to be like you want to be.  Too many people can’t bring themselves to believe that anyone would want what is not popular and fashionable. Would not want what we want.  But some of us are greatly attached to our very unfashionable and poorly attached tails.  For me it was a black cowboy hat.  I was five and the cowboy hat was part of me, part of who I was.  It was an ugly hat, crumpled and bent.  So my mother was understandably reluctant to let me wear it to Kindergarten.  And when after many tearful battles she finally relented, my teacher would not even argue the point.  No cowboy hats allowed in class.  Not now, not ever.  Since it was not firmly attached, I lost.  She didn’t use it for a bell-pull, but she might as well have.  How like them.

Sometimes having strange tastes actually works in your favor.  Eeyore had pretty well decided that everyone and forgotten his birthday.  But Pooh and Piglet scrambled around to find presents.  Unfortunately Pooh got a little distracted and ate his honey.  This sort of thing happens to Pooh quite a bit.  It makes you wonder if it happens to other Taoist sages.  What Piglet’s Virtue was becoming in this case was all tangled up in his own feet.  The sad result was the bright red balloon he had intended to present to Eeyore popped and became a limp piece of rubber on a string.  So Eeyore’s presents were an empty honey pot and a broken balloon.  Not what most people want.  But Eeyore was delighted because he had something to put something in and something to put in it.  One advantage of pessimist is that they are really easy to please.  Or not very smart.

On the whole the animals in the hundred acre wood were kind to Eeyore and willing to accept him as he was.  But in the outside world things are not always so rosy.  That nice gentle gentleman from Oregon who turns Pooh and Piglet into Taoist sages, goes on to blame most of the ills of the world on Eeyore.  Everything from pollution, to mis-applied technology to radical feminism.  What did Eeyore ever do to him?  How can you make a flop-eared donkey the heavy?

It’s that pessimism thing again.  In fact, in the real world, it is more than just that Eeyore is pessimistic.  It is that he is different.

And for most of the world, different is bad.  There are a variety of reasons for this, of course.  One reason for this is the belief that there is a single standard of goodness.  One formulation of this single standard of goodness was done in classical Greece by Plato.  This concept has filtered down into the cultural sub conscience of western man and become cookie cutter metaphysics.  I doubt that this is really what Plato intended, but the messages of our wise men often are twisted to meet our less noble needs and desires.

The concept of Ideals has a strong epistemological basis.  The fundamental questions of epistemology are what can we know and how can we know it.  One of the puzzles is where concepts and ideas come from.  Take the concept of an elephant for example.  I was amazed many years ago when my two year old son recognized an abstract purple figure on a billboard as an elephant.  Where did he get the concept of an elephant that was flexible enough to recognize even a very abstract representation?  He had never seen an elephant and had only seen a few pictures of them.  Plato’s answer is that there exists an Ideal elephant and because my son had this concept in his mind, he was able to recognize even an abstract instance.

At a simplistic level these Ideals are the metaphysical cookie cutters.  They are templates like the bar in Paris that defines the perfect meter, except that they define elephants, dogs, etc.  The physical elephants we see in the zoo are stamped out with this cutter and baked.  In baking they grow and shrink and distort and become imperfect.  The Ideal contains the essence of being an elephant.  You can also think of it a prescription for making an elephant.  Or a prescription of what an elephant should be.

The problem comes when you apply the concept of Ideals to people.  You end up with the Ideal Person.  While this may not seem too bad, the next step is a disaster.  It is to define goodness as conformity to the Ideal.  The more different someone is from the Ideal, the worse that person is.

Of course each culture, each community, and each individual can define the ideal to be like themselves.  Thus everyone different than us is different than the Ideal and is bad.  This is obviously not what Plato intended.  And there are enough other factors contributing to xenophobia (the more general form of pessimiphobia) that people probably would be pretty much the same even if Plato had never articulated the concept of Ideals.  But the Greeks were not known for their tolerance and it is hard to imagine a Greek statue of a broken down old man — or an Eeyore.

Many more recent philosophical schools (and some ancient ones) have denied the existence of these Ideals.  Their claim is not only that there is no metaphysical Bureau of Standards where Ideals are kept, but also that there is no prescription of essence anywhere.  All that we can do is abstract a description of classes of objects based on real world examples.  This view recognizes diversity as a simple fact of nature rather than as a deviation from an Ideal.  Arguing the epistemological and ontological issues of Ideals is way beyond the scope of this work and would make even Christopher Robin’s head spin.  But in any case, that is even if you adhere to the reality of Platonic Ideals, there is no philosophical justification for claiming that anyone who differs from your own personal view of goodness is bad or strange or weak or weird.

In fact, the worst example of a society which sought to impose a single standard of goodness on itself and the world did not come from anything like a Platonic background.  The Nazi’s claim to a monopoly of goodness did not come from any claimed insight into Platonic Ideals, but rather from survival of the fittest.  Similarly the monolithic value system of communism has a pragmatic origin in what is deemed to be best for the state (by a small and powerful ruling elite).  Narrow and repressive societies can, in fact, derive their claim to a single standard of what is right, proper, and good from almost any source.  Some even claim divine sources.  The issue is not the source, it is the single standard.  Forcing everyone to march to the same drum.  Military parades become the most sacred rites of some of these societies.

Some people have a naive belief that a free market society insures diversity.  I have my doubts.  But then what would a pessimist be without doubts.  A few years ago I stopped into a department store in Munich to pick up a present for my kids.  I took the escalator to the first floor and then to the second.  As I got off on the second floor it suddenly hit me.  I suddenly realized I could be in any department store almost anywhere in the world.  It was the same stuff, arranged in the same way, the same advertisements, the same sales people.  There were Sony tape players and Adidas sport shoes and Fisher Price toys.  Have you ever noticed that every city in the country has the same radio stations?  That everywhere you go there is a Chevrolet dealer who sells his cars in a sicky sweet voice with elevator music in the background?  How long has it been since you have seen a store in a mall that you couldn’t find in a hundred other malls?  We are witnessing the homogenization of western culture.  And the Japanese and Chinese seem more than anxious to pour themselves into this blender.

Ironically, we have learned in the last few years that it is similarity that signals the end of an endangered species.  For many species about to die out the fatal step is that the individuals become too much like each other.  This lack of genetic diversity can often be fatal for the whole species.  If they are all the same they have almost no ability to adapt to changes in their environment.  The real danger is not from being too different, but rather from being too much the same.

The same argument, though much harder to prove, can be made on the social level.  It is in diversity rather than in sameness that our potential lies.  And it is too many people too much like us rather than people too different from us who pose the real threat.

This is not to say that there should not be bounds.  A society cannot treat murderers or rapists as interesting variations in the human spectrum who should be left to do their own thing.  Nor can we allow someone to practice medicine whose only training has been a series of dreams following late night pepperoni pizzas.  But we are better off to set the bounds as wide as possible and abandon forever the concept of an Ideal Person and the practice of judging people by measuring them against our private view of the Ideal.

What I am really saying, of course, is that the bounds should be set at least wide enough to let us Eeyore types in.  We don’t want center stage.  A place in the bog will do fine.  A little damp is OK.  Come by on our birthday once in a while with a pot and something to put in it and we will be happy.

When we hear the phrase “not like us” we think of skin color, religion, or gender.  But it applies much more broadly.  It is people who are poorer, richer, went to different schools, have different jobs, have different priorities in life, wear different clothes, live in different neighborhoods, eat different food, read different books, or read books at all.  It shows up in formal and informal clubs, in homogenous suburbs where people who all went to University live in little boxes all made out of ticky-tacky, anywhere we can retreat from the diversity of the world and relax with the good people — the people like ourselves.

Pooh and his friends set the example.  They were a diverse lot with different personalities, different likes and dislikes, different abilities, and different species.  With them it is not just a question of tolerance.  Too often tolerance is simply “Do what you want, but stay out of my way.”  They were friends, they were a community.  They did things together.  The worked together and played together.  In each tale, a unique characteristic of one of the animals saves the day.  Their diversity was their strength.  And their charm.

Learning to deal with people very different from ourselves is not easy.  Especially pessimists, who by their nature are somewhat standoff-ish.  But befriending an Eeyore can be very rewarding.  We are really quite sweet, eager to please, easy to please, wise, insightful, and above all, interesting.  A life without one or two good pessimistic friends and neighbors is like a garden without turnips.

Whatever you are, pessimist or optimist, Coptic scholar or mud wrestler, do what you believe is right.  (Note that this is very different than simply doing what you want to.)  Sometimes the pressures are tremendous to conform to society’s standard or fashion.  In all cases you loose your individuality when you conform.  In important cases you loose your integrity.  Make your life’s decisions based on your own concept of good and bad, right and wrong, lasting and temporary.  March to the drummer that you hear even when you walk alone.

There are however, dangers in non-conformity.  The first is taking a stand and fighting on trivial ground.  Nothing is more trivial than my Sunday tie.  All the other men wear their ties.  Most of them even wear suits.  I save mine for special occasions.  Funerals, weddings, that sort of thing.  Part of the reason I don’t wear a tie is to protest the judgments that our society makes of people based on their clothes.  But most of the reasons have to do with multiple chins.  I find it easier to concentrate at church if I can breathe.  But it is really pretty silly.  I should just admit that I am a middle aged, overweight Mormon, buy bigger shirts and wear a tie.  Maybe even a suit once in while.  But then there are limits.

The second danger, which I am happier to say is not on my top ten list of flagrant faults, is to react to the pressure to conform to one group by conforming to a reactionary group.  Many things can be said about the flower children of the sixties and early seventies, but non-conformist is not one of them.  Conforming to a smaller or less powerful group does not make you a non-conformist.  It just makes you less popular.  You are still letting someone else make your decisions.

The third danger is to try to make decisions that you are not qualified to make.  Deciding at the age of six to live entirely on Cocoa Puffs may seem like a brave assertion of your independence at the time, but is not really wise.  Deciding at twenty to live on rice is not a lot better.  The next time you want to do something weird, ask yourself if you really have any idea what the hell you’re doing.  It is easy to lie to yourself in this circumstance.  To tell yourself that you are different than other people.  You may in fact, be different, but different does not imply better or smarter.  The weirder it is, the better your reasons should be and the surer you should be of them.

The final danger is to think that you are better than the group just because you don’t conform.  They could be right and you could be wrong.  In fact, they probably are.  The statistics are all in their favor.  Or their decisions could be right for the members of the group even though they would not be right for you.  You should be as tolerant of them as you expect them to be of you.

What I am saying to other Eeyore types is that it is OK to be different.  But only if you are different for the right reasons.  Your worth as a human being is determined by what you do with your life, how you contribute to the families and communities in which you live, and how you relate to those around you.  Not by some measure of how you compare to some imaginary Ideal Person as defined by society, your boss, your coach, or your hairdresser.  You can stay a pessimist.

But don’t expect much on your birthday.