Every room is a theater

As I get older I find myself meeting new people and discovering different views on how the world works and how it should work, which I wrote about in the System of values essay.

I wanted to elaborate on one of the many consequences of that: everyone has their own education, background, culture, or personality (i.e. what defines their system of values) that can partially explain one’s behavior in a specific situation.
Most people will agree that this is acceptable; this is why diversity is generally pushed as a good thing.

But another part of the explanation for one’s behavior is incentives and constraints, and I believe that is not as widely understood as it should be.

I think a good way to see it is to treat every room as a theater. Each person in each room has their own objective (defined by their incentives and constraints) and their own way of obtaining it (defined by their system of values), essentially playing their own role in what happens in that room.

Of course this requires a bit of meta thinking, but I really believe people suffer from refusing, voluntarily or not, to read each person’s role when they are in that room.

An important downstream effect is that you may agree or disagree with the other person’s objective, but disagreeing with the role they play is pointless. Everyone, including you and me, enters each theater and plays their role.

A small piece of advice I could give is that you can still remind other people in that room that it is really just a theater.