None of us looking at what’s happening in the world sees things exactly as the next guy does.

And that’s OK. Like most people, I have chums with whom I disagree, yet we remain friends.

Now, I am well aware that there has never been such a thing as perfect amity among any people, including Americans. And yes, differences can and do pop up that destroy the closest relationships we have — up to the primal bond that exists between mother and child.

I am not faultless in that area, but in my best moments, and for the same reason I dig variety in a salad, I dig varieties in people. Makes a salad, and a life, more interesting, don’t you think?

Today, I am struggling with the depth of the hate that increasingly bursts out of many people when any behavior, or belief, or opinion stares them in the face, however slight, differing in the slightest from the absolute, strident rectitude they claim for themselves.

I find these people a flat-out bummer.

But why this anger? And where is it coming from?

I believe the Greeks figured out at least part of the answer to my question in the philosophical maxim inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek precinct of Delphi: “Gnothi seauton,” that is, “Know thyself.”

Know thyself? What does that mean? And does it matter 2,500 years later? It does.

In an excerpt from her book of poetry “The Bell-Branch Rings,” American poet and dancer Dorsha Hayes lays out why human beings should take an unflinching look at themselves, and the terrible things that can happen if they don’t in a poem called “Fire Hazard.”

“Filled with a clutter of unsorted stuff

a spark can set a man ablaze. What’s there

heaped high among stored rubbish at a puff

will burst in flame. No man can be aware

of how inflammable he is, how prone

to what can rage beyond control, unless

the piled up litter of his life is known

to him, and he is able to assess

what hazard he is in, what could ignite.

A man, disordered and undisciplined,

lives in the peril of a panic flight

before the onrush of a flaming wind.

Does it now seem I seek to be profound?

I stand on smoking ash and blackened ground!”

At this moment, I have to confess something.

The poem I just quoted makes me think of all the marriages that could have been saved, the lives that have been unnecessarily lost to road-rage incidents, school shootings and other crazed outbursts, if someone had just looked inside and realized that the blame was not on the other guy, but on themselves.

I know the causes for our actions may be more complex, but this is certainly an important one.

For most of my life, I was unaware of my own latent anger, yet everyone else could see it. I could sit for a discussion that may have begun calmly enough, but ended in screaming, face-red-as-a-beet rage. Even as I adamantly denied I was upset. My wife, Ann, was the first bring it up to me. Today, and God bless her, when I go off on some silly tangent, she brings me back to planet Earth.

But when all the Anns in our lives can’t get through to us, when we refuse to “get it,” our unconscious may step in with a hard lesson, bringing to awareness whatever message it’s been pushing up in our thoughts and dreams.

The unexamined life, the Greeks added, is not worth living. It can likewise warp and twist what our own eyes and ears are telling us into a grotesque version of the truth to fit our own pre-conceived notions that we then project on the world, calling it “the truth.” Take a look around.

I think this is why the following lyrics from “Oliver!” — the 1968 film adaptation of the stage production — have hammered on my mind so persistently of late.

In a crucial scene from the film, a woman whips a boisterous bar crowd into belting out a humorous rendition of a song called “Oom Pah Pah,” which we are to understand was “a little ditty they’re singing in city,” and in so doing, creates a commotion to shield what she’s about to do from murderous eyes.

“…With a little patience, your own imaginations

Will tell you just exactly what you want to hear.

Oom Pah Pah, that’s how it goes.

Oom Pah Pah, everyone knows.

They all suppose what they want to suppose,

When they hear Oom Pah Pah.”

Today, unscrupulous people, eager to advance themselves and fatten their wallets at the expense of our continuity as a nation, have conned many Americans into distrusting whatever news they may hear elsewhere that doesn’t come from them, and instead believing the rank nonsense they spew.

Have we reached our “Oom Pah Pah” moment?

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.