In the past year I have been confronted with the same term multiple times in reference to several of my expressed positions and—well, any time I speak seriously. And it's begun to gnaw at me a tad.
I do not understand the concept of "oversimplification".
It has always been my impression that in order to fully understand a concept or an idea or a situation, one must start from the base elements of said item and, once done, combine each element in context of each others, and all the others, until you have achieved the whole. This is the way I have learned since my childhood. Looking at the whole situation first is only done to give perspective so that when you break down the pieces you still remember your goal.
Thus when understanding people I not only have to look at the data of a situation, but also the emotions, temperament, and motivations of each person involved, as well as the inherent irrational factor that occurs with everyone AND the logic which underlies the irrationality.
Because, from what I have observed over the eleven years I have watched people, every action, without exception, has logic behind it. Actions can be as simple as "I did it to do it", in which case the motive is personal amusement; or "I don't know why I did it", in which case the motive is either a defensive or instinctual reaction.
So with understanding people, then, I have to operate on a paradox of logic meshing with illogic. Every decision is unpredictable, and yet its unpredictably nature lends it to being predicted to a fairly accurate margin.
I sound completely self-possessed, I know, but suffice to say that I am almost never surprised by situations (partly because I can back-trace the logic), and when I do start to predict, I am quite often correct. (I'm human, so I screw up, mostly by stepping beyond myself. Also I try not to ever dive someone I don't know; it's presumptuous to work with data you don't have, and working with people is the same.)
But I was only able to do this because I took the time to understand each aspect from the bottom up. Through eight/nine years of observation (which still goes on) I watched situations develop and culminate, and when similar ones arose I either noted the differences or made differences of my own. I broke apart (not on paper; good grief!, that would be tedious) everything to its base level and understood it before I allowed myself to even think about predicting people.
So how one can "oversimplify" is beyond me. Yes, the basic pieces of a situation will be noted without taking other pieces into consideration. But without understanding the base, root concept behind a situation, can you every hope to decently appreciate it?
When I make a statement about what something is, I am doing nothing more and nothing less than making a statement about what that something is. I present no context, no judgments, no outside considerations of my own. I do this because once I see something objectively, I can better comprehend it subjectively, and I can do so from various viewpoints aside from my own.
A friend recently told me that when he first met me and I said I was a music major (which I was at the time) that he immediately thought that I was useless for anything. On the one hand I thought to myself that such a judgment was completely unfair, and on the other I understood how a person might view musicians that way—it is unfortunate, but a large majority of artists are not very good with concepts mathematical or scientific, mostly because they see them irrelevant. In his case, the band students at his high school were a bunch of apathetic twits who spent a large amount of time, er, shagging. (According to him. I have no idea of the truth of the statement, though knowing who said it I doubt it was quite severe. Still, you never know....)
I am a very blunt person. So when I say something that might seem ignorant of a large amount of additional factors, or something that might be unnecessarily harsh, chances are high that I recognise this and I want you to hear what I said regardless. I often feel that the root concepts of situations are completely disregarded in an effort to appreciate the sheer variety of situations possible, and I do not believe that understanding the former mandates dismissal of the latter. Rather, I believe that once one understands the root causes of situations, one is better able to understand and work with the individual variants as they arise.
So I speak to things, like Fear, that lie underneath many different situations. Taken alone, citing Fear as a root of everything is foolhardy. But once one understands that Fear is the base, one can understand how Fear is the base, and one can reconstruct why the specific situation occurred because of Fear.
I suppose, then, that I really do understand why someone would call my actions "oversimplification", if all they see is me stopping once I have achieved the base. But the point to remember is that once I go down to the bottom, I do not sit there repeating "Apathy" over and over to myself with a pleased expression on my face. I must come back up to the top, or my delving has been for naught.
