All of us seek perfection from those around us - our friends, our families, our colleagues and so on. Some of us acknowledge that perfection will not be found, and hence we accept imperfections in those around us. However, our criteria for such forgiveness are often very blurred. There is no consistent framework within while we can put our life experiences.
I will put this article into two sections. The first will deal with the theoretical underpinnings of what I mean to say. The second is the practical application of these theoretical underpinnings. For those of the readers who aren't quite fans of deductive logic, I would suggest that you skip the first section.
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Hence, the sense in which I will be talking about 'perfection' here is not professional perfection, but perfection in our social interactions. Also, the 'framework' that I talk about is deductive logic - the formation of certain exogenously-given premises, and using a small set of fairly axiomatic steps, arriving at a conclusion based on those premises.
Beginning with this framework, the first step is to acknowledge that every human has a different set of premises. While I have said that this is exogenously given, we can qualify it better. I would believe that every human's set of premises is determined by his experiences, and also his reaction to these experiences*. Even if the experiences were the same, the reactions would most probably not. This could happen for several reasons - a person might be constrained in several spaces (especially true of children and women, the elderly, poor individuals, unhealthy people), there might be a 'random' component to any social outcome and that the external environment might not remain constant, such that the outcomes are not the same. While I have used a fair amount of jargon here, the point to be emphasized is simple enough - no two individuals start with the same set of premises.
Even if we assume that all humans are rational (and I don't see any reason not to) and that they employ the same set of axioms (this is where disagreement is more likely), this will lead to different conclusions. Hence, conflict is inevitable in modern society. Note that we made barely any assumptions here - even the assumption of rationality and uniqueness of axioms is merely intended to show the power of the argument. Relaxing these assumptions will, in fact, further strengthen the argument that I have made. However, I must make a qualification here. Divergence of premises is no reason to assume divergence of conclusions. These conclusions might end of being the same. Here, I diverge from deductive logic in saying that the probability of such an occurrence is low.
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In practice, each one of us falls into several disagreements with our friends and colleagues. Since we do not know what premises/beliefs that lead to a particular action, we take the action itself as a proxy for the belief system. For example, if I convinced my friend to join me for a movie, and then my friend called me up at the last moment to say no, then I do not have perfect information as to what lead my friend to make that particular decision. I would use whatever knowledge I have of the action of his not coming to reach a judgement.
It would seem better that I should rather just acknowledge the lack of information and then move on with life, rather than being miffed with my friend. However, how many of us actually do that? None whatsoever. The reason being that, in practice, perfect information will never be available. Hence, we will never reach a judgement. Even if our friend is actually the bad guy in the picture and keeps repeating his actions, I will never have enough information to indict him, and to take necessary action.
For this reason, such an outcome is never observed. As humans, we all would have certain preferences between certainty and information. The example we have considered in the previous paragraph is one of a person who prefers 100% information. On the other hand, if certainty was the only thing I cared about, then to say that 'life exists on mars' would be the best outcome - since it is 100% sure. However, most of us would be quite uncomfortable with such an assertion.
We thus choose a point that has both uncertainty and lack of information. This is where our preferences differ. Each one of us would accept different levels of uncertainty (and by corollary, of lack of information) given how much information we have. Hence, this is a matter of preferences.
For this reason, perfection in social relations can never be seen. Even if I personally want to be as rational as possible, I would never be able to be perfectly rational unless I am ready to accept being a weak, indecisive individual who can be taken for a ride by virtually anybody. All of us wouldn't, and this is why perfection is never an outcome in social relations. We all forgive some, and don't forgive some. How much we forgive is given by our own preferences. Our acquaintances will never agree to how much we forgive, because they have different preferences. Hence, conflict will always be present.
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* this is somewhat similar to Karl Marx's dualism in that man's experiences and his response to those experiences form the complete set
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