I remember being invited at a Filipino social gathering and noticing how some of the women there were complaining about the fact that their husbands were drinking too much alcohol...while they were snacking on a lot of junk food.

In a lot of Filipino families the wife blames the husband for drinking too much or for being too aggressive and the husband blames the wife for getting into too much debt.

A lot of Filipinos blame corrupt politicians but they cut other drivers off in traffic, they tailgate etc.

This whole game of blaming others for a particular behavior stems from lack of ability too discern the deep seated underlying structure behind those seemingly different behaviors.

If in a couple the husband is drinking too much alcohol and the wife is getting into too much debt they both have the same structural problem: they both lack self control and they both think short-term, that same underlying structural problem manifests itself with different contents but the deep-seated structural issue is the same.

And the same goes for the poor Filipino driver who tailgates and cuts people off in traffic and the corrupt politician: they are both being selfish.

What about religious people who argue and debate over a doctrinal issue and get very emotional about those issues? Are they being more dogmatic than two scientific people who are getting emotionally involved in a debate about science? Not at all: the content they are clinging too is different but the dogmatic clinging to that seemingly different content is the same. Again there is a difference in content but the structure behind the content is the same.

What about learning foreign languages?

My wife knows more Italian words than I know Tagalog words but while my wife cannot even write a text message in Italian I can write blog posts in Tagalog because I know the structure of the language.

And what about dysfunctional marriages?

There are people who migrate from one partner to another but they keep falling into the same kind of abusive relationship. Why? They don't change their "structural" issues of neediness and selfishness and they keep changing the "content" of their relationship.

And what about people who quit a bad habit just to replace it with another one? Maybe they quit smoking and they start drinking too much soda? Again is the same problem.

How understanding structure vs content can make us more forgiving?

If we became more aware of how some of the patterns of selfishness, short-term thinking and so on that run the behavior of the people who wrong us are basically the same underlying patterns that run us we would probably be much more forgiving and much less prone to blaming others.

I believe that if we want to elevate the quality of our lives we need to develop the ability to make advanced and nuanced distinctions.

We need to think in terms of principles rather than rules, we need to choose wisdom and discernment over mere knowledge, we need to seek emotional intelligence rather than mere intellect and start thinking in terms of structure rather than content.

If we fail to make these fine distinctions and, particularly, the one about structure vs content, we become like a fool who tries to stuff a small drawer with too many clothes and because the drawer is not big enough he changes the content and tries to stuff the same drawer with some other object.

If we want to rise above mediocrity we definitely need to focus on how to change the structure of our life and not just its content.

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