A guide to suffering fools gladly

My personal goal over the next 10 or 20 years is: to suffer fools gladly.

Not excessively gladly. A person should never set their goals impossibly high. Just moderately gladly. Reasonably gladly.

I settled on this goal when I began to notice an indisputable pattern. Whenever someone says, “One thing’s for sure: That person doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” that person invariably turns out to be a jerk.

People use that as an excuse for a person who is either mean or rude, or, alternatively, both mean and rude.

Then it occurred to me: I have heard that phrase used about myself a few times. I’ll bet most of you have, too. Which makes us mean, rude, etc., etc.

So lately I have been thinking about the inherent, built-in flaws of being a person who does not suffer fools gladly. The first being: It implies that we are the supreme judges of who is a fool and who is not.

Which, of course, we believe we are. But we are wrong, for the simple reason that out of 100 people we think are fools, 50 will be people we happen to disagree with about politics; 20 are people who don’t share our personal taste in, let’s say, music; and 20 are people who are actually so much smarter than us that their brilliance is undetectable by our brains.

The other 10 truly are fools. But the point is, we have no way of discerning which 10 those might be.

So that leads to the second inherent flaw: Most of us may, in fact, be fools ourselves. We never think so, of course, but we have already established that we are lousy judges. So, in all fairness, this should put us in the awkward position of not suffering our own selves gladly.

Which leads to the third and most important flaw: Everybody on Earth, at one time or another, has been a complete and utter fool. Shakespeare put it best when he said, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

Assuming you are mortal, then you are, at least in some percentage, a fool. So if I persist in not suffering fools gladly, I end up not suffering anyone, and that makes for a long, sad, lonely life of being superior.

Being superior has its appeal. But that appeal wears thin with age.

My role model in achieving this goal is my own father. I remember asking him once, late in his life, how he could stand to put up with a certain bunch of people that I considered fools.

“You know,” he said, “I have become a lot more tolerant of people’s foibles as I get older.”

“But … why?” I sputtered.

“You just begin to realize that nobody’s perfect, everybody has their quirks and few people turn out to be as dumb as you think they are,” said my father. “You just start to enjoy people more for who they are.”

That’s what I call fatherly wisdom. A lot of people grow sourer when they get old; my dad showed me that it is possible to grow sweeter.

So it is in my father’s spirit that I am making this vow to suffer fools as gladly as I can for the rest of my life. If the above arguments have not convinced you to join me on this quest, let me add one more: In a world where people can be cruel, cold and downright evil, being a mere fool is not such a crime. Being a fool is usually just entertaining.

Rest assured that I don’t advocate taking all of this tolerance stuff too far. For one thing, I have no intention of suffering the cruel gladly.

The cruel would need to improve dramatically to become, like the rest of us, mere mortal fools.