I have seen a major error made by people who are survivors. They think that because they had to survive they understand the realities of life, and that nobody else does.
In fact there are many ways to understanding life. I am not a survivor; however I have studied many things, and I have knowledge on a range of subjects. I have also had life experience, including experience of all sorts of things that very few other people have had.
Being able to survive hard things is a virtue; ignorance and arrogance are not. Many survivors think that they’re better than other people because of their experiences. And what they do not understand is that there are many ways to wisdom, and that because they had to find their way to wisdom in a difficult way doesn’t mean that they are the only people with wisdom.
In my case, I have known many wise people. Some of them were survivors, and some were not. I found that things stand to be learned from all these people, whether or not they were survivors.
I once knew a millionaire from a bad background who married a woman artist descended from English royalty. He was absolutely horrible to her. Maybe he thought that, because he came from a bad background and had to learn to survive and she came from a privileged background and hadn’t, he was better than her. However in dealing with him she had to learn to survive as well. And she became a very strong person while also remaining enough in touch with her talents to produce magnificent works of art.
Do many survivors have wisdom? Of course they do, and it is wisdom that can be instructive to many others. But they are not the only people with wisdom. I have seen wisdom in all sorts of unlikely places, such as American inner city and rural Australia. And dismissing this wisdom is not understanding reality. It is foolishness.
It has been said that people who had been survivors of the Holocaust became abusive parents. There can be any number of reasons why a parent would become abusive. One of the worst is that he thinks that he has the right values or understanding of life and that his wife or his children do not. So he behaves in hideous manner toward both while considering himself righteous. This must be confronted. Such a man must be made to know that he is not the only person with an understanding of life, and that there are many people of wisdom who disagree with him.
Dealing with such people can be a very difficult task. They are very set in their ways, and they are certain that they are better than others. However with people who think that they have monopoly on the truth, one needs only to reveal one of their beliefs to be wrong, and that destroys their whole system.
This means the following. All of the people involved have something to teach the other. Neither one however has the right to complete authority. The only thing one needs to do in order to invalidate a belief system is show one of its claims to be wrong. That being done, it becomes possible to avail oneself of all the wisdom that exists in the belief system and use it to make more informed decisions and have a fuller understanding of life.