'Surrounding SOLO'

There once was a local standup routine in a West Coast pub (of all places) and in attendance was this small group of German tourists. After the show the comedian came down to the bar and the Germans wanted to buy him a drink. One of the visitors asks him, "You really have a great routine going, how come we don't have anyone as funny as you back home?". The Coaster set down his beer and says, "Because you killed them all."

In any normal distribution of numerical facts there tend to be abnormalities at the extremities. 70% of us (if not more ) think the same thoughts, watch the same TV, laugh at the same jokes, eat the same food, hold the same opinions. Only very few members of a population have the extra je ne sais quoi to be extremely funny, extremely revolutionary physicists, extremely revolutionary novelist-philosophers. Among these extreme deviants are the great benefactors of we mere standard deviation population members. It doesn't do for us to kill them off.

However, one doesn't have to be an extreme outlier to bring to one's group the benefits of diversity. Plain old ordinary garden variety disagreements are very much a blessing and we should be glad to find them. If I am in the right then the perspective I disagree with is an indispensable whetstone for showing me just how right I am and how I can understand and explain my own view better. But if I am wrong then the disagreement draws my attention so that I can correct the mistake. Disagreements are a win-win situations. Why then do people not choose to win? They frequently choose instead to be provoked by disagreements into fighting with each other, taking disagreement as a personal affront rather than personal boon. We evict, abandon, fight, kill and die instead- and these aren't things we work ourselves up to they are our default positions!

I decided to register with solohq.com a few months back. It coincided with the assent of our present editor's predecessor, this was no accident on my part. My ideas and my ways have been in disagreement with Mr Perigo in the past, so this was my chance to bypass him (admire him as I do.) All the same, I thought I'd be long gone for good by now. Turns out I'm not, but the old editor and a swag of others too (who you'd never have guessed) have hit the trail and all because of disagreements they and we choose not to resolve. What a waste of a win-win opportunity! This can happen again unless we all mature in our regard for disagreement and respond to it first with a little charity and understanding, not claws. The ones that go are always authors, always high-rating members and distinguished by being outside the pack.

Wrote a great playwright- 'If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.' Who shall you choose to surround SOLO with?

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I submitted this to the article queue on the old SOLOHQ forum two years ago. As it was rejected, I simply posted it to the forum months latter. It refers to the change-over from SOLO executive Jason Dixon to Andrew Bissell. However, the sentiment hasn't dated so much as not to apply equally to the change-over from SOLO executive Jason Quintana to Mitch Lees. The more things change....