How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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If a belligerent neurotic shakes his fist in your face and tells you that horses have three legs, and you know from experience that horses have four legs, it will not help your argument to shout back at him and tell him he is irrevocably wrong. It is better to say : “I agree with you and your excellent experience. In the great majority of cases horses do have three legs, but to my mind, in this particular instance, this chestnut mare has four legs.” In nine cases out of ten you will gain your point and win a friend. Trivial quibbles about right and wrong are most apt to occur between parents and children, between husbands and wives, and between business partners, and in our experience nothing is so well calculated to upset good social relations as a useless argument. If these arguments cannot be entirely avoided, we caution those who would be happy, to allow their opponents to have their say, agree with them completely, and then proceed to do what they think right without further comment. Usually controversial actions are not nearly so soul-destroying as the conversations that accompany, precede, or follow them. If you are dealing with a man with an exaggerated Jehovah complex, let him play Jehovah to his heart’s content, and bend your energies to the more objective task of getting out of his environment. Usually the Jehovah complex is manifested in minor matters, because few men can carry their ideas of omniscience or infalli¬ bility into the major spheres of, human activity. It is better to concede, to smile, and to run away. Here, surely, discretion is the equivalent of social valour. Remember that in twenty-five years it will make very little difference whether you smoked only ten cigarettes a day as your father desired or forty as you wished, that no one will remember whether you drove your golf ball into the bunker at the fifth hole or laid it up to the green, whether you should have spent only two guineas for a pair of dancing pumps, or whether you were wrong to kiss Mrs. Smith in her husband’s presence. Develop a