On Getting Along With People

One of the most important things in life is learning to get along with the people we have to live with. The question of peace—at home and world-wide—revolves around this being able to get along with people. Living literally alone is seldom possible and seldom desirable, but living in daily association with others means either fighting with them or learning to get with people.

There are many apparent ways of getting along with people, some of which are acceptable and some of which are not. One of the most plausible but also one of the most fallacious is to eliminate all differences—to make everyone think and act alike. Another way is to give up our own principles and preferences and try to do everything that everyone else wants us to do. Such extremes, of course, are unacceptable, and offer no real solution to the problem of getting along with people.

Less extreme, but still fallacious, is the assumption that getting along with others requires compromising our own standards and ideals and convictions. But compromising principles isn’t getting along with people. It is merely self-surrender. It is appeasement, buying peace at any price; and appeasement where principles and standards and morals are concerned is but the beginning of more problems.

And so the question still remains: How to get along with people who don’t think alike, who have different standards, different interest, different beliefs? That it is practical and possible to do, as is daily demonstrated. Countless men and women who live in the same world, in the same town, and even in the same homes, with different likes, different interests, different convictions, do get along together without compromising principles.

But the moment we compromise any of our principles we stand in danger of compromising all of our principles. The moment we eliminate the line of principle there is not clear cut guideline in life. After the first such compromise all others are merely a matter of degree.

And so, keeping peace and getting along with people involves, whenever occasion calls for it, making known what we stand for and why, and staying squarely with our own ideas and convictions, and respecting others who do the same.

In short, the way to get along with people is to know what we ought to be, to be what we ought to be, to give respect and to demand respect, and not resort to bluffing, appeasement, or departing from our own standards or compromising principle.