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by Jordan B Peterson
Freudmistakenly thought to recommend non-judgmental culture, when he onlyencouraged non-judgmental therapy, as a way to reveal unconsciousattitudes and beliefs.
A defeated wolf will roll over on its back, exposing itsthroat to the victor, who will not then deign to tear it out. He maystill require a future hunting partner, after all. If a dominantlobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then itgrows a new, subordinate's brain - one more appropriate to its newlowly position. Anyone who has experienced a painful transformationafter a serious defeat in romance or career may feel some sense ofkinship with the once successful crustacean.
When a lobster that has just lost a battle is exposed toserotonin it will stretch itself our, advance even on formervictors, and fight longer and harder. Prozac even cheers up lobsters.Low serotonin/octopamine ratio produces a defeated looking, scrunchedup, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely tohang around street corners, and to vanish at the first hint oftrouble.
It's winner take all in the lobster world, just as in humansocieties. To those who have, will be given. That same brutalprinciple of unequal distribution applies to wealth, and anywherecreative production required eg scientific papers, musicians,composers, authors (Price's law or the Matthew principle - Matthew25:29).
Female lobsters identity the top guy quickly. This is abrilliant strategy in my estimation. Instead of undertaking thecomputationally difficult task of identifying the best man, femalesoutsource the problem to the machine like calculations of thedominance hierarchy.
They try to seduce him. His aggression has made himsuccessful, so he's likely to react in a dominant, irritable manner.Furthermore he's large, healthy and powerful. It's no easy task toswitch his attention from fighting to mating (lobster equivalent of50 shades, and the eternal Beauty and the Beast plot - continuallyrepresented in the sexually explicit literary fantasies that are aspopular among women as provocative images of naked women are amongmen.
[Frans de Waal's work on alpha behaviour in chimps discussed -not simply physical dominance, but coalitions, baby kissing (!)etc]
Mark Twain - it's not what we don't know that gets us intotrouble, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
Yin yang - masculine and feminine, order and chaos. The dot in each head is to show how interchangeable they are.
Why is this relevant? Firstly, lobsters have been around more than 350m years - unimaginably distant, 65m years ago there were still dinosaurs. A third of a billion years ago, brains, nervous systems simple - nonetheless, already structure and neurochemistry to process information about status and society. This master control system modulates perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions.
Red queen in Alice in Wonderland- in my kingdom you have run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. So with evolution.Dominance hierarchy is older than trees, skin, bones.
Low status associated with poor health, opportunities,unhealthy behaviours, predation. Low serotonin, from being low in the hierarchy makes you hyper-responsive. Emergencies are common at the bottom, you must be ready to survive. But that burns energy, causes stress. You will use up resources without thought for the future. Your immune system seems to be one of those resources.
Erratic sleep and diet can affect these mechanisms. Repeated tasks in life need to become habitual so that everything becomes simple and predictable. Small children are great examples, delightful when in a routine, horrible when not.
Positive feedback loops drive many negative behaviours eg alcohol, agoraphobia. Similarly, early trauma leading to submissiveness.
Bullying often happens because people won't fight back, not physical dominance. The forces of tyranny expand to fill the space provided by weak boundaries. Being prepared to bite means you generally won't have to. Simple social axioms eg violence is bad, collapse in the face of malevolence.
No one likes to be pushed around but people often put up with it for too long. Resentment should be replaced by honest anger - speaking and acting from anger are part of the force that holds tyranny at bay. PTSD can originate in this revelation of one's own or another's capacity to do evil, especially when your belief state is that nothing really terrible can exist.
Maybe you are a loser. Maybe you just have bad habits. But circumstances change. If you slump around like a defeated lobster people will assign you a lower status, and your ancient brain will restrict serotonin. Circumstances change, and so can you. Being asked to adopt facial expressions leads to the emotion - emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified or dampened by that expression.
Standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical, because you're not only a body. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. You see the gold the dragon hoards, instead of shrinking in terror from the Dragon. It means deciding to transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality.
To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the Flood. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them - at least the same right as others.
People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent (or at least they will not immediately conclude the reverse). Strengthened and emboldened, you may be able to stand,even during the illness of a loved one, even during the death of a parent, and allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed by despair.
Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the world, and find joy. Look to the victorious lobster. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
1/3 of people won't collect their prescription. Half of the rest won't take it as prescribed, if they take it at all. Even when the medicine is against organ transplant rejection. But people are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That's not good. Even from your pet's perspective, it's not good.
It is difficult to conclude anything from this except that people appear to love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds (and maybe even their lizards) more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist?
Genesis 1 - God created the cosmos, using his divine word. It is difficult for us to understand, but before the dawn of the scientific world view, Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. It was understood as something more akin to a drama. Subjective experiences- familiar objects but also emotions and dreams,hunger and pain - are the most fundamental elements of human life. Matter can be reduced to molecules and atoms. The world of experience has primal constituents too. One is order, another chaos the third is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness. It is subjugation to the first two that makes us throw up our hands in despair and fail to care for ourselves properly. It is proper understanding of the third that allows us the only real way out.
Chaos is ignorance, unexplained territory, the stranger, foreigner, monster under the bed, despair and horror. It is also formless potential from which God of Genesis called forth order using language.
Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home, your plan for the day, the clock, politeness of strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification. When someone betrays you, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. Order is Tolkien's shire, chaos the underground dwarf kingdom usurped by the dragon Smaug.
Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper fast circuits maintained from the ancient days. The faster the response, the more instinctive.
Things or objects are part of the objective world. This is not true of order and chaos, which are perceived, experienced and understood as personalities. That is true for modern people, they just don't notice. We think we perceive first, then infer intent and purpose. We see what things mean just as fast or faster than we see what they are. This is particularly true of the actions of others, but we also see the non-living world with purpose and intent.
The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around forever, for all intents and purposes. The division of life into male and female happened before the evolution of multicellular organisms, a billion years ago. The categories of parent and child have been around for 200 million years, when mammals first appeared. Our minds are far older than mere humanity. Order is symbolically associated with the masculine (yang).
Order ismale because among most animals society is male based hierarchical.Men are builders,engineers. Order is police, soldiers, queues,traffic lights. Pushed too far it's forced migration, concentrationcamps, soul devouring uniformity of the goose step.
Chaos issymbolically associated with the feminine, partly because all thingswere born originally of the unknown, just as all beings are born ofmothers. Chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas. Negativelyit is the darkness of the cave and the accident by the side of theroad. Also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women (unlikefemale chimps!) are choosy. Most men do not meet their standards(women on dating websites rate 85% of men as below averageattractiveness. We all have twice as many female ancestors as male.It is this reason more than any other force that has shaped ourevolution into the creative, upright, large brained, competitivecreatures we are.
Religious symbols often reflect thisdichotomy. The Star of David is an upside down triangle on top of anupright triangle. Yoni and lingam in Hinduism (come covered insnakes!). Osiris (god of the state) and Isis (goddess of theunderworld) represented as twin cobras with tails knotted together.Virgin and child. Hemispheres of brain reflect division betweennovelty and routinisation!?
When you understand the world inthis way, this kind of knowing what helps you know how. Juxtapositionof yin and yang tell you how to act: the Way in Taoism is the borderbetween the two. As in Matthew 7:14, narrow is the way which leads tolife, and few find it.
To straddle that fundamental dualityis to be balanced: to have one foot in order and security, the otherin chaos, possibility, adventure.
In the garden of Eden, theserpent appears to mean the same as the eye dot in the yin yangsymbol: the possibility of the unknown suddenly manifesting itselfwhere everything appears calm. Even God himself has to allow a littleof the outside into the garden.
Milton is where serpentbecomes associated with Satan. The snake inhabits each of our souls. The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity forevil. The worst of all snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal.Solzhenitsyn- the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heartof every human being.
Even the most assiduous parent cannotfully protect their children. Banishing everything dangerous(challenging, interesting) means permanent infantilism. Maybe Godthought Adam would be able to handle the snake, and its presence asthe lesser of 2 evils.
Question for parents - do you want tomake your child safe or strong?
Eve eats the fruit and becomesself conscious. She immediately shares the fruit with Adam - she'snot going to tolerate an unawakened man. Women have been making menself conscious since the beginning of time, primarily by rejectingthem - but also by shaming them, if men don't take responsibility.Since women bear the main burden of reproduction, no wonder.
Why a snake? Lynn Isbell, anthropologist, suggests that humanvision evolved to detect snakes. Colour vision to detect ripe fruit!
Adam and Eve become aware, and aware of their nakedness. Theypromptly hide, unworthy to stand before God. Naked means unprotectedin the jungle, ashamed - their faults stood out (esp humans, uprightwith most vulnerable parts exposed). Beauty shames the ugly, strengthshames the weak, and Ideal shames is all.
God asks "whotold you you were naked?" Adam points right at Eve - nowawakened, he is also resentful. And then he blames God, for givinghim Eve. This is how every spurned male feels. At least Eve has theserpent, Satan himself, to blame.
God tells Eve she willbring forth children in sorrow - probably just descriptive, theevolutionary arms race between fetal head and female pelvis. The babywill also be dependent on the woman until 18 (or 30).
Womenpay a high price for pregnancy and child rearing, and one of theinevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimesunreliable and always problematic good graces of men.
Banished, Adam must look to the future, see trouble coming,eternally sacrifice the present for the future. In short, he willhave to work.
No one is more familiar than you with all theways your mind and body are flawed. A dog is clearly more deserving.
Why the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil? What's that to dowith nakedness? Dogs and cats are predators. They kill things andeat them. It's not pretty. But it's just their nature. They'rehungry, not evil.
We know what makes us suffer. We know howdread and pain can be inflicted on us - and that means we know how toinflict it on others. We can torture. That's more than predation.That's the entry of good and evil into the world.
Humanbeings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. The ancientMesopotamians believed mankind was made from the blood of the monsterKingu. Genesis however has God creating the world with his divineword, and Man in his image with the same capacity to create orderfrom chaos. At each stage God pronounces it good. After the Fall, Goddecides Heaven must be built and Paradise earned.
Perhapsit's not the knowledge of good and evil that makes us doubt ourworth. Perhaps it's instead our unwillingness, like Adam's, to walkwith God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil. As TS Eliotsays, "we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of allour exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the placefor the first time". (Little Gidding, Four quartets) It is easyand fashionable to believe that people are arrogant and egotistical,and always looking out for themselves. But such an attitude is not atall characteristic of many people. They have the opposite problem. 2lessons from Carl Jung about loving your neighbour as yourself -nothing to do with being nice! And an equation, not an injunction.You bargain as hard on your own behalf as you do for others - notself sacrifice, where one can end up a slave. This means embracingand loving the sinner who is yourself as much as forgiving someoneelse who is stumbling and imperfect. We are all made in God's image.We can make order from chaos (and vice versa) in our way. We may notexactly be God, but we're not exactly nothing either.
Everyday heroism is the rule, I believe, rather than theexception. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, and itis always wounded people who are holding it together. It's an ongoingmiracle. Some people degenerate into the hell of resentment and thehatred of Being. We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect.To treat yourself as someone you are responsible for helping is toconsider what would be truly good for you. Not "what youwant", "what makes you happy". You don't just feedchildren candy. You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible,awake being capable of full reciprocity. Why would you think itacceptable to do anything less for yourself?
You need toconsider the future. You must bargain for yourself so you don't endup resentful, vengeful and cruel. Don't underestimate the power ofvision and direction. Start with yourself. Nietzsche- "he whoselife has a why can bear almost any how". You could help directthe world, in its careening trajectory, a bit more toward heaven anda bit more away from hell. You could, in fact, devote your life tothis. That would give you a Meaning. That would justify yourmiserable existence. Learn once again to walk with God in the garden.You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you wereresponsible for helping.
When you move, everything is up on theair, at least for a while. It's stressful but in the chaos are newpossibilities. I thought every person who moved would have-and want -the same Phoenix like experience. But that wasn't always the case.
Sometimes when people have a low point of their own worththey choose a new acquaintance of precisely the type who provedtroublesome in the past. Freud called this "repetitioncompulsion",an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past - sometimesperhaps to formulate those horrors more precisely, perhaps because noalternatives beckon. Faulty tools produce faulty results.
Sometimes people want to rescue someone. In Dostoyevsky's Notesfrom the underground, the "sick man" fantasizes aboutrescuing Lizabut hasn't the character to see it through. It demolishes her.
Maybe you're saving someone because you're strong and generous. Ormaybe it's easy to look good in the company of someone irresponsible.Always assume people are doing what's easy rather than what'sdifficult.
Friends can be bound by an implicit contract aimedat nihilism and failure. You don't talk about it. It's easier to allsacrifice the future for the present. Homer Simpson downing a jar ofmayonnaise and vodka - "that's a problem for future Homer - man,Idon't envy that guy!"
Before you help someone you shouldfindout why that person is in trouble. You shouldn't assume he is a noblevictim of exploitation. It's just never been that simple. Besides, ifyou buy that story you deny that person all agency. Maybe your miseryis your attempt to prove the world's injustice.
Success:that's the mystery. Virtue: that's what's inexplicable. Things fallapart, of their own accord, but the sins of men speed theirdegeneration. And then comes the Flood. Maybe I should at least wait,to help you, until it's clear you want to be helped.
Someoneself sacrificing might just be trying to look good pretending tosolve what appears to be a difficult problem instead of actuallybeing good and addressing something real. Maybe instead of continuingour friendship I should just go off somewhere, get my act together,and lead by example.
Loyalty is not identical to stupidity.Loyalty must be negotiated, fairly and honestly. You are not morallyobliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place.
Michelangelo ‘s David cries out to its observer: "youcouldbe more than you are". When you dare to aspire upward, yourevealthe inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future. Don'tthink it's easier to surround yourself with good healthy people thanwith bad unhealthy people. It requires strength and daring.
No matter howgood you are at something there is someone out there who makes youlook incompetent. Inside us dwells a critical voice and spirit thatknows all this. It condemns our mediocre efforts. Because mediocrityhas. consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary. Therewill always be someone better than you is a cliché of nihilism, likein a million years, who's going to know the difference? The properresponse is not, "well then, everything is meaningless",but "anyidiot can choose a frame of reference within which nothingmatters".
There is not just one game. You might consider judging yoursuccess across all the games you play. Imagine that you are very goodat some, middling at others, and terrible at the remainder. Perhapsthat's how it should be. Winning at everything might only mean you'renot doing anything new or difficult.
Perhaps you overvaluewhat you don't have and undervalue what you do.
Dare to bedangerous, dare to be truthful. Consult your resentment. It's arevelatory emotion, for all its pathology.
We can see. We canenvision new ways that things could be better. The disadvantage toall this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort.
The first step is to take stock. When you buy a house, youhire a surveyor to list all its faults. You pay him for bad news. Youneed to know because you can't fix something if you don't know it'sbroken.
Called upon properly, the internal critic willsuggest something to set in order, which you could set in order -without resentment, even with pleasure. Imagine you are someone withwhom you must negotiate. You might have to use a little charm andplayfulness. "Excuse me," you might say, "I'm tryingto reduce someof the unnecessary suffering around here. I could use somehelp."
Maybe you don't trust yourself. You think you'll ask for onething and, having delivered, immediately demand more. Who wants towork for a tyrant like that? Maybe you need to say to yourself"Iknow we haven't got along very well in the past. I'm sorry aboutthat. I'll try to learn. Maybe if you did the dishes we could go forcoffee. How about an espresso?" Then you could listen. Maybeyou'llhear a voice inside (maybe a long lost child). That's the voice ofsomeone once burnt and twice shy. A little careful kindness goes along way. Then you could take that small bit of yourself by the handand do the damn dishes. And then you better not go clean the bathroomand forget about the coffee or it will be even harder to call thoseforgotten parts of yourself forth from the nooks and crannies of theunderworld.
500 small decisions, 500 tiny actions, composeyour day, today, every day. Could you aim one or two of those at abetter result?
Aim small. You don't want to shoulder too muchto begin with, given your limited talents, tendency to deceive,burden of resentment, and ability to shirk responsibility. What youaim at determines what you see. Dr Daniel Simons gorilla experiment.Vision is expensive, neurologically. We triage, when we see. In theVedic texts, the world as perceived is "Maya", appearanceorillusion. This means, in part, that people are blinded by theirdesires (as well as incapable of seeing things as they truly are).This is true, in a sense that transcends the metaphorical. You use aset of tools to screen most things out and let some things in. Ifthings are not going well for you - well, maybe that's because lifesucks. Before your crisis impels you to that hideous conclusion,however, you might consider the following: life doesn't have theproblem - you do.
You won't, can't, change yourself thateasily. You have to dig deeper. You must change what you're aftermore profoundly.
Religion is about proper behaviour. Theclassic liberal enlightenment objection to religious belief is thatobedience is not enough. But at least it's a start. You cannot aimyourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined anduntutored. It is necessary and desirable for religion to have adogmatic element. Without internalising that you're nothing but anadult 2 yr old, without the charm or the potential. A person capableof obedience - let's say, a properly disciplined person - is at leasta well forged tool. Of course there must be a vision , beyonddiscipline.
You might object, "but I'm an atheist." Noyou're not (read Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov decidesto take his atheism seriously, and pays the price. You're simply notan atheist in your actions. What you want, what you see, is a productof unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural,biological.
The God of the Old Testament can appear harsh,judgmental, unpredictable and dangerous. But Old Testament Goddoesn't much care what modern people think. If you did not do whatGod demanded, you and your children and your children's children werein terrible, serious trouble.
It was realists who created, ornoticed, Old Testament God. Ancient societies ended up enslaved andmiserable- sometimes for centuries. Was that fair? Was thatreasonable? Is a hungry lion reasonable, fair or just?
NewTestament God is often presented as a different character, the morekindly Gepetto, master craftsman and benevolent father. That seemsmore optimistic but less believable. The all good god, in a postAuschwitz world? Nietzsche found binding the Old and New Testamentstogether a "Sin against the spirit".
Faith is notthechildish belief in magic. It is instead the realisation that thetragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equallyirrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It issimultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable,and to sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) yourlife. You realise that you have, literally, nothing better to do.
You might start by not thinking. This doesn't mean "makeyourself stupid". It means you must quit manoeuvring andcalculatingand conniving and scheming and enforcing and demanding and avoidingand ignoring and punishing.
Pay attention. What is it that isbothering me? Is that something I could fix? Would I actually bewilling to fix it? If the answer is no to all or any look elsewhere.Aim lower. Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated toundertake the job. Don't tell yourself "I shouldn't need to dothatto motivate myself". What do you know about yourself? You are,on theone hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on theother, someone who can't even set the clock on the microwave. Don'tover-estimate your self-knowledge.
Do this every day, for awhile. Now you will be asking yourself, habitually, "what couldI,would I do, to make Life a little better?" You are notdictating toyourself what "better" must be. You are not a totalitarianor autopian even to yourself, because you have learned from the Nazis andthe Soviets and the Maoists and from your own experience that being atotalitarian is a bad thing. Aim high. Align yourself, in your soul,with Truth and the highest good. There is habitable order toestablish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil toovercome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better.
This is the expression not merely of admirable self control andself mastery but of the fundamental desire to set the world right.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; andall these things shall be added unto you (food, drink, clothes - Luke12)
You are telling the truth instead of manipulating theworld. You are negotiating instead of playing the martyr or thetyrant.
There are plausiblepsycho-biological reasons for favouring male over female children,and they're not pretty. If circumstances force you to put all youreggs in one basket, a sin is a better bet. A reproductivelysuccessful daughter might gain you 9 or 9 children. But sex withmultiple female partners is the male's ticket to exponentialreproduction- Genghis Khan is forefather to 8% of men in CentralAsia, 16 million male descendants after 34 generations.
Freudsaid "a man who has been the indisputable favourite of hismotherkeeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence ofteninduces real success". But spoiling a son can make for a dark,painful spectacle and mutate into something indescribably dangerous.
Day to day familial problems are insidious. That appearanceof triviality is deceptive: it is the things that occur every singleday that truly make up our lives. Three quarters of an hour fightingto put your son to sleep every night is equivalent to a month and ahalf of standard 40 hr work weeks over a year.
The idealisedimage of an unsullied child ("there are no bad children ")isdangerously and naively romantic. Parents may be granted aparticularly difficult son or daughter. It's also not for the bestthat all human corruption is uncritically laid at society's feet.That conclusion merely displaced the problem back in time. Logicallythen all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be solved bycultural restructuring, no matter how radical. This is not a goodthing. Each persons private trouble cannot be solved by a socialrevolution, because revolutions are destabilising and dangerous.
Was it really a good thing, for example, to so dramaticallyliberalise divorce laws in the 1960s? It's not clear to me that thechildren whose lives were destabilised by the hypothetical freedomthis introduced would say so. Horror and terror lurk behind the wallsprovides so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril.
I see today's parents as terrified of their children, notleast because they have been deemed the agents of social tyranny andsimultaneously denied credit for their role as benevolent andnecessary agents of discipline, order and conventionality. This hasincreased parental sensitivity to the short term emotional sufferingof their children while heightening their fear of damaging theirchildren to a painful and counterproductive degree.
Idea thatkids are pure and innocent belies the fact of bullying and thehorrible truth of Lord of the Flies.
Jane Goodall concealedobservations of chimps murdering each other in case she had causedsuch behaviour by her contact with them (typically gangs ofadolescents coming across strangers, but also former troop members).Hunter gatherer societies are romanticised but can have v high murderrates eg Yanomami. Abuse by omission as significant asmental/physical abuse. Without immediate correction of antisocialbehaviour, children are avoided by others, attention seeking producefeelings of revulsion in adults wary of establishing a relationshipand then dependence.
Parents who want to be a friend to theirchild forget the child has plenty of potential for formingfriendships but v limited potential for having a parent figure.Friends don't have a role in correction, because it's mutual.Discipline is not anger, not revenge, but a careful combination ofmercy and long term judgement. Difficult! What's right, wrong, why,negotiate a strategy with other carers. Abandoning your parental dutyas agent of enculturation and pretending it's good for children is adeep and pernicious act of self-deception. It's lazy, cruel andinexcusable.
We assume that rules will inhibit the boundlessand intrinsic creativity of our children, even though the scientificliterature clearly indicates firstly that creativity beyond thetrivial is shockingly rare, and secondly that limitations facilitaterather than inhibit creative achievement.
Imagine a toddlerrepeatedly striking his mother in the face. Why would he do such sthing? It's a stupid question. To dominate his mother. Violence,after all, is no mystery. It's peace that is difficult: learned,inculcated, earned. People often get basic psychological questionsbackwards: why do people take drugs? That's not a mystery. It's whythey don't take them all the time that's the mystery. Why do theysuffer anxiety? That's not a mystery. How is it that people can everbe calm? There's the mystery. A million things can go wrong, in amillion ways. We should be terrified out if our skulls at everysecond.
Infants are like blind people, searching for a wall.
A patient adult can defeat a 2yr old. This is partly becausetime lasts forever when you're 2. Half an hour for us is like a weekfor them.
No grudges after victory. When someone doessomething you want, reward them.
Kids cry frequently. Scaredparents think that always means sad or hurt. This is simply not true.Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying. Angry cryinglooks and sounds different.
Rewarding good behaviour can andshould be used to shape behaviour. But it's difficult, it requires alot of patient observation. Negative emotions help us learn. We needto learn because we're stupid and easily damaged. We feel hurt andscared and ashamed and disgusted so we can avoid damage. In fact wefeel more negative about a loss than we feel good about the samesized gain. Pain is more potent than pleasure.
In Disney'sSleeping Beauty, the King and Queen have a daughter after a longwait. They welcome everyone to the christening but fail to inviteMaleficent, essentially queen of the underworld, or Nature in hernegative guise. Symbolically this means they are overprotecting her.It makes her weak. The spinning wheel is the wheel of fate, thebleeding from the prick the loss of virginity. Falling unconscious isescaping the terror of adult life.
If parents avoiddiscipline (being the bad guy) they turn over responsibility to theharsh, uncaring judgemental world. Every child should be taught tocomply gracefully with the expectations of civil society. This doesnot mean crushed into mindless ideological conformity. It meansrewarding attitudes and actions that bring success in the world, andusing threat and punishment to eliminate behaviours that will lead tomisery and failure. There's a tight window of opportunity for this.If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of 4 itwill forever be difficult for them to make friends. This matters,because peers are the primary source of socialisation after the ageof 4. Rejected children cease to develop because they are alienated.They fall further and further behind. Much more of our sanity than wecommonly realise is a consequence of our immersion in a socialcommunity. We must be constantly reminded to think and act properly.
Rules are not arbitrary, except in a dystopian totalitarianstate. Limit them though. Here are some suggestions. Do not bite ,kick or hit except in self defence. Do not bully, so you don't end upin jail. Eat in a civilised and grateful manner, so that people arehappy to have you in their house and pleased to feed you. Learn toshare, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken toby adults so they don't hate you and might therefore deign to teachyou something. Go to sleep properly so your parents can have aprivate life and not resent your existence. Take care of yourbelongings. Be good company when something fun is happening. Act sothat other people are happy you're around.
Use reasonablemeasures, and give warnings. Keep time periods short eg inrestaurants.
Punishment whether physical or not affects thesame brain areas and responses to both ameliorated by opiates. Saying"no" to a child had to mean "or else" or thechild will hear onlyanother nonsensical adult muttering or worse, it means "alladultsare ineffectual and weak".
One of the Columbine shooters wrote "The human race isn'tworth fighting for, only worth killing. Nothing means anythinganymore."
Such people are the ultimate critics. The worldis insufficient and evil - so to hell with everything!
Samefeelings expressed by Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust. People oftenthink in this manner, although they seldom act upon their thoughts asbrutally as the mass murderers. Tolstoy saw your options as retreatinto childish ignorance, pursuing mindless pleasure, or dragging outyour evil and meaningless life knowing nothing can come of it. Thelast option involves strength and energy - suicide. He didn't evenimagine the situation over the last 3 years in the US with a masskilling (4+ people, not including shooter) on 5 our of every 6 days,often followed by suicide. That is a far more effective existentialprotest. For years, even at the height of his fame, Tolstoy hid gunsand rope from himself. How can a person who is awake avoid outrage atthe world?
Truly terrible things happen to people. It's nowonder they're out for revenge, aimed in some fundamental way at Godhimself.
"Distress, whether psychic, physical, orintellectual, need not at all produce nihilism. Such distress alwayspermits a variety of interpretation. " (Nietzsche)
Mostabusedchildren do not become abusers.
Solzhenitsyn was a soldieragainst the Nazis. He was arrested, beaten and sent to a camp. He wasthen struck by cancer. Vast stretches of his life were stolen andsquandered. He witnessed pointless and degrading suffering and deathof his friends. But his response was to write a book demolishing theintellectual credibility of communism, even though he supported theCommunist party unquestioningly in his youth.
The Jewishpeople enter a covenant with Yahweh , organise themselves into anempire. As their fortunes rise, success breeds pride, arrogance,corruption. A prophet arises. When his wise words are not completelyignored, they are heeded too late. God smites his wayward people,dooming them to abject defeat and generations of subjugation.
This is life. We build structures to live in. We abstract theprinciples upon which those structures are founded and formulatesystems of belief. But success makes us complacent. We forget to payattention. And everything falls apart. Is that the fault of reality -of God?
When the hurricane hit New Orleans, was that a naturaldisaster? The Dutch prepare their dykes for the worst storm in tenthousand years, had New Orleans followed their example, no tragedywould have occurred. 40 years after the Flood control act of 1965,only 60% of the work had been completed. Wilful blindness andcorruption took the city down.
A hurricane is an act of God.But failure to prepare - that's sin. And the wages of sin is death(Romans 6:23). The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when thingsfell apart. That's insanely responsible.
If you're suffering-we'll, that's the norm. If your suffering is unbearable, however,consider your circumstances. Start small. Have you taken fulladvantage of the opportunities offered to you? Are you working hardor are you letting resentment hold you back? Have you made peace withyour brother? Do you have bad habits? Have you cleaned up your life?
If the answer is no, here's something to try - start to stopdoing what you know to be wrong. Don't waste time questioning. Youcan know something is right or wrong without knowing why. Everyperson is too complex to know themselves completely, and we allcontain wisdom that we cannot comprehend.
Stop acting in thatparticular , despicable manner. Say only those things that make youstrong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.
You can use your own standards of judgment, although youshould not overlook the wisdom of the past - life is short, and yourdead ancestors may have something useful to tell you.
Don'tblame capitalism or the radical left or your enemies. Have somehumility. You will begin to say what you really think, want and need.Your head will start to clear up. Your life will become simpler. Youwill untangle your past. You will then be left with the inevitablebare tragedies of life, but they will no longer be compounded withbitterness and deceit. Perhaps they stay merely tragic instead ofdegenerating into outright hellishness.
Perhaps youruncorrupted soul will then see its existence as a genuine good.Perhaps you will become an ever more powerful force for peace andwhatever is good.
Who knows what existence might be like if weall decided to strive for the best?
Set your house in perfectorder before you criticise the world.
Life is suffering. It's basically what God tells Adam and Eveimmediately before he kicks them out of paradise. "By the sweatofyour brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground. Fordust you are and to dust you will return" Genesis 3:16.
Whatin the world should be done about that?
The simplest answer -pursue pleasure. Or is there an alternative?
Our ancestorsworked out very sophisticated answers to such questions, but we don'tunderstand them well. This is because they are in large part stillimplicit - manifest in ritual and myth. We act them out and representthem in stories. We've established predictable routines and patternsof behaviour but we don't really understand them.
TheBiblical narrative has humanity learning that God's favour could begained through proper sacrifice. And also that murder might bemotivated among those unwilling or unable to succeed in this manner.
When engaging in sacrifice our forefathers began to act out aproposition: that something better might be attained in the future bygiving up something of value in the present.
The necessityfor work is one of the curses placed by God on Adam. It is for thisreason that the concept of sacrifice is introduced immediately afterthe Fall. There is little difference between sacrifice and work. Theyare both uniquely human. Beavers build dams because they are beavers.They don't think "yeah, but I'd rather be lying on a beach inMexicowith my girlfriend" while they're doing it.
Such work isdelay of gratification but that's a very mundane phrase to describesomething of such profound significance. The discovery thatgratification could be delayed is simultaneously the discovery oftime, and with that, causality. Long ago, we began to realise thatreality was structured as if it could be bargained with.
Understanding is often acted out before it can be articulated,just as a child acts out being "mother" or"father" before being ableto give a spoken account of what those roles mean. The act of ritualsacrifice was an early enactment of the idea of the usefulness ofdelay. It takes a long time to learn to keep some extra meat asidefor yourself, or to share it with someone else (much the same thing,as in the former case you are sharing with your future self).
Our ancestors personified fate as a spirit that can be bargainedwith as if it were another human being. And it worked. In partbecause the future is largely composed of other human beings - oftenprecisely those who have watched and appraised your past behaviour.It's not far from that to God. Here's a productive symbolic idea: thefuture is a judgmental father.
First question: what must besacrificed? Going to medical school involves large, comprehensivesacrifices for a hardcore party animal but might dispense with a lotof trouble over a very long period of time.
Second: whatwould be the largest , most effective of all sacrifices? How goodmight the future be?
Cain and Abel are really the firsthumans, since their parents were made directly by God. They mustwork. They must make sacrifices. Abel's please God, Cain's do not.It's not clear why, the text strongly hints his heart is just not init. Maybe the quality was lower. Maybe his spirit was begrudging. Ormaybe God was vexed for reasons of his own. And all of this isrealistic. Why isn't God happy? Those are difficult questions- andeveryone asks them, all the time, even if they don't notice. Askingsuch questions is indistinguishable from thinking.
Here is adevelopmental progression from animal to human. After a kill, with alarge animal, there is some left for later. That's accidental, atfirst. Eventually the utility of "for later" starts to beappreciated. If I leave some for later, I won't have to go hungry. IfI leave some for later, I won't have to go hungry, and neither willthose I care for. Maybe if I feed some to other people, they'llremember, and feed me when I have none. In such a manner mammothbecomes future mammoth, and future mammoth becomes personalreputation.
The child who refuses to share fears gettingnothing back. To share properly, means to initiate trade. A child whocan't share can't have friends, because having friends is a form oftrade. Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer ask aneighbour for a favour: he that has done you a kindness will be moreready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged. Insuch a manner both parties overcome their natural hesitancy.
We can now observe how the groundwork for the concepts ofreliable, honest, generous has been laid. From "Leftovers are agoodidea" the highest moral principle might emerge. These principleofdelay and exchange begin to emerge in abstraction as tales andrituals: it's as if there is a powerful Figure in the sky, givinghim something of value seems to make him happy. This is true whetheror not there is actually such a figure.
The god of Westerntradition requires sacrifice. Sometimes he demands sacrifice ifprecisely what we love best. Abraham finally gets a son, then Goddemands the child as sacrifice. The story ends happily but why doesGod - life - impose such demands?
Sometimes things do not gowell. Sometimes it's not the world that's the cause, instead, it'sthat which is currently most valued - subjectively and personally. Ifthe world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore it'stime to study your values.
(Story of monkey and jar oftreats)
What constitutes the ultimate sacrifice - for the gainof the ultimate prize? It's a close race between child and self. Thesacrifice of a mother, offering her child to the world, isexemplified by Michelango's Pietà. Is it right to bring a baby intothis terrible world? Mary answers yes - as do all mothers. It's anact of supreme courage, when undertaken voluntary.
In turn,Christ sacrifices himself , God, his father, is simultaneouslysacrificing His son. It's archetypal.
The person who wishesto alleviate suffering will make the sacrifice of self and child, ofeverything that is loved, to live a life aimed at the good. He willforego expediency. He will pursue the path of ultimate meaning.
We have other examples. Socrates has an inner voice or daemonwhich objected to him fleeing or defending himself at his trial. Hisdecision to accept his fate allowed him to put away mortal terrorprior to and during the trial, and during his execution. Instead headdressed his judges in a manner that makes the reader understand whythe town council wanted him dead.
It is not only privationand mortal limitation that must be addressed by work. It is theproblem of evil as well. When Adam and Eve way the forbidden fruitthey open their eyes, they were also granted (or cursed by) theknowledge of good and evil. Once you become aware you yourself arevulnerable, you understand human vulnerability in general. Youunderstand what it's like to be fearful, angry, resentful and bitter.You understand what pain means. And once you understand such feelingsin yourself, you understand how to produce them in others.
Cain is outraged by his rejection. He confronts God, who respondsthat the fault is all with Cain - and worse, that Cain has knowinglydallied with sin, and reaped the consequences. This is not what Cainwanted to hear. So he murders his brother, to spite himself, all ofmankind, and God himself, all at once. And next in the Genesisstories, comes the flood. This juxtaposition is by no meansaccidental.
The problem of evil remained unsolved forthousands of years. The same issue emerges again in the story ofChrist and his temptations by Satan. But this time it's expressedmore comprehensively- and the hero wins.
Christ's sojourn inthe desert is the dark night of the soul. It's the journey to thatplace each of us goes when things fall apart, hopelessness anddespair reign, black nihilism beckons. 40 days and nights starvingalone might take you to that place. A bit of familiarity with historycan help. "After Auschwitz", said Theodor Adorno,"there should be nopoetry". The terrible destructiveness of man has become aproblemwhose seriousness self-evidently dwarfs even the problem ofunredeemed suffers. This is where the idea of Christ taking on thesins of mankind as if they were his own is key. "Homo sum,humaninihil a me alienum puto" (Terence). Nothing human is alien tome. "Notree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell"(Jung).There was no possibility for movement upward in his opinion without acorresponding move down. It is for this reason that enlightenment isso rare. Who is willing to do that?
In the desert Christencounters Satan. The psychological and metaphorical meaning is thatChrist is forever he who determines to take personal responsibilityfor the full depth of human depravity. It means that Christ is alwayshe who is willing to confront evil - consciously , fully andvoluntarily. This is nothing merely abstract.
Soldiers whodevelop PTSD frequently develop it not because of something they saw,but because of something they did. Involvement in warfare can open agateway to Hell. Now and then something climbs through and possessessome naive farm boy, and he turns monstrous. And he watches himselfdo it. And some dark part enjoys it. And later he will not know howto reconcile himself with the reality about himself that was thenrevealed.
Horus, the all seeing falcon god, confronts eviluncle Set and loses an eye - his consciousness is damaged.
Satan first tempts Jesus to turn stone into bread. His answer isthat even in extreme privation, there are more important things thanfood. (See Solzhenitsyn). Christ aims higher - instead of expedience,to produce and sacrifice, and share, to make hunger a thing of thepast. Other miracles (wine, bread and fishes) portray Christ aspurveyor of endless sustenance. Live as the archetypal Saviour lives,and you, and those around you, will hunger no more.
"Throwyourself of that tower" - God will surely save you. But thatestablishes no pattern for life. Deus ex machina is a cheap trick ona story where the hero is magically rescued. It makes a mockery ofindependence, and courage, and destiny, and free will, andresponsibility. God is no safety net, even for his own Son. He couldcompel God or self identify as the magical Messiah, but that wouldnot solve the problem for everyone else and for all time.
Thirdly Christ is offered the kingdoms of the world. The pinnacleof the dominance hierarchy. But that's not all. Such expansion ofstatus also provides unlimited opportunity for the inner darkness toreveal itself. Power means the capacity to take vengeance and crushenemies.
The sage does not contrive to win and therefore isnot defeated. He is not grasping so does not lose. (Tao te ching).The greatest prize is something above even the pinnacle of thehighest dominance hierarchies, the Kingdom of God, paradise, thatrequires the rejection of immediate gratification and desires. Evilamplifies the catastrophe of life. Sacrifice can keep tragedy at bay,more or less successfully, but it takes a special kind of sacrificeto defeat evil.
Jung hypothesised that the European mind wasmotivated towards alchemy and then science because Christianity hadfailed to deal with the suffering of the here and now. This is not tosay Christianity was a failure. Quite the contrary. Christianityachieved the well nigh impossible. It elevated the individual soul,rendering slave, master and nobleman alike equal before god,something so contrary to all apparent evidence. This was partlyaccomplished through the strange insistence that salvation could notbe obtained through effort or worth. The immediate utility of slaveryis obvious, an the argument that the strong should dominate the weakcompelling, convenient and eminently practical (at least for thestrong). A revolutionary critique of slave owning society wasnecessary before the practice could even be questioned, let alonehalted. We think it is the desire to enslave and dominate thatrequires explanation. We have it backwards, yet again.
Thisis not to say Christianity was not without its problems. But theywere the sort of problems that emerge only after an entirelydifferent set of more serious problems has been solved. Pollutiononly becomes a problem when the far worse problems that the internalcombustion engine solves has vanished from view. People stricken withpoverty don't care about CO2.
Nietzsche claimed first that itwas precisely the sense of truth developed by Christianity thatultimately came to question and then undermine the presuppositions ofthe faith. [Judaism similarly, surely!?]. Secondly, that the churchhad removed morality. Redemption had been earned by Jesus' sacrifice(says Paul), so not too much more for people to worry about. Earthlymatters became less important than the hereafter, the status quobecame accepted, faith trumped moral burden. Marx and Dostoyevsky hadsimilar objections. Latter had great influence on Nietzsche butargued in a more sophisticated way - tells a story in the BrothersKaramazov if Christ returning at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.The Inquisitor arrests him, saying it has taken centuries to dilutethe burden He laid on people, the demand for perfect Being, and soChrist is too great a threat , no longer needed. Christ listens insilence, then embraces and kisses him. The Inquisitor goes white withshock, then goes out, leaving the cell door open.
Dostoyevskyseems to admit Christianity has been defeated by intellect butaddresses the problem by placing action above words. By the end ofthe Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha the novitiate who courageouslyimitates Christ, wins over the spectacular but nihilisticintelligence of the atheist Ivan.
Nietzsche does not perhapstemper his anger against the church with judgment. He believedhowever that the "unfreedom" of dogmatic Christianity was anecessaryprecondition for the emergence of the disciplined modern mind.
If a father disciplines his son properly he obviously interfereswith his freedom, particularly in the here and now. He might beconsidered a destructive force. But if the father died not take suchaction he merely lets his son remain Peter Pan, the eternal Boy, Kingif the Lost Boys, ruler of Neverland. The dogmatic structure of theChurch was a necessary disciplinary structure. The dogma is dead, atleast to the modern Western mind. It perished along with God. Whathas emerged behind its corpse however is something even more dead:nihilism, and an equally dangerous susceptibility to new,totalitarian, utopian ideas. Nietzsche posited that individual humanbeings would have to invent their own values in the aftermath ofGod's death. But this is the element of his thinking that appearsweakest, because we cannot invent values, because we cannot imposewhat we believe on our souls. We rebel against our owntotalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot merely ordermyself to action. I will stop procrastinating, I will eat properly, Iwill end my drunken behaviour, but I don't. I have a nature, so do weall. We must discover that nature, and contend with it, before makingpeace with ourselves.
Descartes started with "cogito,ergosum", but the "I" who thinks had been conceptualisedlong before asthe all seeing eye of Horus, before that the creator God Marduk whoseeyes encircled his head. During the Christian epoch the "I"transformed into the Logos, the Word that speaks order into Being atthe begin of time.
Karl Popper regarded thinking itself as alogical extension of Darwinism. A creature that cannot think canmerely act out its nature. Human beings can produce abstractedrepresentations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an ideain the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against otherideas. We can let our ideas die in our stead. Then the creator ofthose ideas can continue onward. Faith in the part of us thatcontinues is a prerequisite to thinking itself.
An idea isnot a fact. A fact is dead. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself. An idea wants something, aims forsomething better than before. An idea is a personality. It has astrong proclivity to impel a person to act it out. Sometimes thatimpulsive can be so strong that the person will die, rather thanallow the idea to perish.
To use the dramaticconceptualisation of our ancestors: it is the most fundamentalconvictions that must die - must be sacrificed - when therelationship with god has been disrupted eg the presence of undue andintolerable suffering indicates that something needs to change.
Socialism proved insubstantial: with time I came to understand,through the great George Orwell, that it found its motivation inhatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for thepoor. Besides, socialists believed just as strongly in money. Theyjust thought if different people had the money, the problems plaguinghumanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problemsmoney doesn't solve. Rich people still divorce each other, andalienate themselves from their children, and suffer existentialistangst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved.
What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. Nihilistscannot undermine it with scepticism. Cynics cannot escape from itsreality. Each human being understands a priori perhaps not what isgood, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that isnot good, then the good is whatever stops such things from happening.
For Jung, whatever was at the top of an individual's moralhierarchy was that person's ultimate value. It was what the personacted out. Something enacted is not a fact, it's a personality. It'sSherlock Holmes or Moriarty. Batman or the Joker. Superman or LexLuthor. That's the inescapable archetypal reality.
If you actproperly you benefit yourself, your family, and the broader worldaround you. Everything will come together. This produces maximalmeaning. We can detect this with our ability to experience more thanis simply revealed here and now by our senses. Meaning trumpsexpedience. Meaning gratifies all impulses. That's why we can detectit.
You may come to ask yourself "What shall I dotoday?" Ina manner that means "how could I use my time to make thingsbetter,instead of worse?" Once you have placed "make the worldbetter" atthe top of your value hierarchy, you experience ever deepeningmeaning. It's not bliss. It's not happiness. It is something morelike atonement for the criminal fact of your fractured and damagedBeing. It's how you make amends for the pathology of history.
Expedience - that's hiding all the skeletons in the closet. Thereis no careful observation that actions and suppositions matter, orthat the world is made of what matters. To have meaning in your lifeis better than having what you want, because you may neither knowwhat you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something thatcomes upon you of its own accord. You cannot simply produce it , asan act of will.
Meaning signifies that you are in the rightplace at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos,where everything lines up as best it can at that moment. Meaning iswhat is put forth by Beethoven's Ode to Joy, pattern after patternupon beautiful pattern, every instrument playing its part,disciplined voices layered on top of that, the entire breadth ofhuman emotion from despair to exhilaration. Meaning is the lotusstriving upward through the dark lake depths, blooming forth on thevery surface. Meaning is the way, the path of life more abundant, theplace you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth andwhen nothing you want or could possibly want takes precedence overprecisely that.
Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
Working with paranoid people is challenging. They are hyperalert, they attend to non-verbal cues with an intentness nevermanifest during ordinary human interactions. They make mistakes inthe interpretation (that's the paranoia) but that are still almostuncanny in their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment andfalsehood. You have to tell the truth if you want a paranoid personto open up to you.
Sometimes bureaucratic runaround isunavoidable - but sometimes it is unnecessarily complicated by pettymisuses of bureaucratic power. I had a paranoid and dangerous clientwho was very attuned to such things. He was obsessed by honour andcould never allow himself to be demeaned or put down. My client'sactions had already been subject to several restraining orders.Restraining orders work best, however, with the sort of person whowould never require one. "I will be your worst nightmare "was hisphrase of choice. I have wished that I could say something like thatafter unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles but it's generally best tolet such things go. My client meant what he said, however. He was noone to lie to. I told him when he scared me (often), that he wasgoing to get in serious trouble. He talked to me nonetheless, becauseI listened and responded honestly, even though I was not encouragingin my responses. He trusted me despite (or, more accurately, becauseof) my objections.
Talking to my ex- con, drunk bikerneighbour at 2am, trying to sell me something so he can keep ondrinking. We entered temporarily a no man's land, in which societyoffers no ground rules or guidance. I rid myself of primate dominancemotivations and moral superiority. I told him as directly andcarefully as I could that I would not. In that moment I wasn't aneducated, fortunate upwardly mobile young man. He wasn't a drunkbiker. No, we were just 2 men trying to help each other out in ourcommon struggle to do the right thing. I said that he had told me hewas trying to quit drinking. I said that it would not be good for himif I provided more money. I said that it made his wife, whom herespected, nervous when he cam over so drunk and late.
Heglared seriously at me for about fifteen seconds. He was watching, Iknew, for any micro-expression revealing sarcasm, deceit, contempt orself congratulation. But I had chosen my words carefully.
Youcan use words to manipulate the world. It's flattering, scheming,propaganda. Typical calculated ends include"to prove I wasright","climb the hierarchy", "avoid responsibility"etc. All examples ofAdler's "life-lies". A life lived in this manner is basedconsciouslyor unconsciously on 2 premises. Firstly, that current knowledge issufficient to define what is good far into the future. Second, thatreality would be unbearable if left to its own devices. The first isphilosophically unjustifiable. The second is even worse. It is validonly if reality is intolerable and simultaneously something that canbe successfully manipulated. Such speaking and thinking requires thearrogance that Milton Identified with Satan. Rationality inclinesdangerously to pride: all I know is all that needs to be known.
I have seen people define their utopia and then bend their livesinto knots trying to make it reality. A left leaning student adoptsan anti-authority stance then spends 20 years working resentfully totopple the windmills of his imagination. Oversimplification andfalsification is typical of ideologues. They adopt a single axiom:government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad. They thenfilter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowlythat everything can be explained by that axiom. They believenarcissistically that the word could be put right if only they heldthe controls.
Consider the person who insists everything isright in her life. She avoids conflict, smiles, does what she isasked to do. Her obedience and self obliteration eliminate allmeaning from her life. She has become nothing but a slave. It mightbe noisy troublemakers who disappear first when a company downsizes,but it's the invisible who go next. Someone hiding is not vital. Ifyou say no to your boss, your spouse, your mother, when it needs tobe said, then you transform yourself into someone who can say no. Ifyou ever wonder how ordinary people could find themselves found thethings gulag guards did, now you have your answer. If you betrayyourself, act out a lie, then you weaken your character. Adversitywill mow you down when it appears, as it will inevitably.
Avision of the future is necessary, linking action now with importantlong term values. Falsification is not vision but wilful blindness.It's refusal to admit the knocking sound means someone's at the door.The elephant in the room, the skeleton in the closet.
Everygame has rules. The first is that the game is important, else youwouldn't be playing. Second, that a move is good if it helps, if not,then it's a bad move. Insanity is doing the same thing over and overexpecting different results. Kierkegaard conceived of this mode ofbeing as "inauthentic". The inauthentic person continues toperceiveand act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. "DidwhatI want happen? No. Then my aim or methods were wrong. I still havesomething to learn."
"Did what I want happen? No.Then theworld is unfair. People are jealous and stupid." That is thevoice ofinauthenticity and is not too far from "they should bestopped" or"they must be destroyed". Solzhenitsyn analysed the causalrelationship between the prison camps and the almost universalproclivity of the Soviet citizen to falsify his own day to dayexperience, to deny his own state induced suffering.
For whatshall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit hissoul?
I have repeatedly observed the transformation of mereexistential misery into outright hell by betrayal and deceit.
The honest human spirit may continually fail in its attempts tobring about Paradise on Earth. It may manage however to reduce thesuffering attendant on existence to bearable levels. The tragedy ofBring is the consequence of our limitations and the vulnerabilitydefining human experience. It may even be the price we pay for Beingitself- since existence must be limited, to be at all.
Withlove, encouragement, and character intact , a human being can beresilient beyond imagining. What cannot be borne, however, is theabsolute ruin produced by tragedy and deception.
The capacityof the rational mind to deceive, manipulate, scheme, trick, falsify,minimise, mislead, betray, prevaricate, deny, omit, rationalise, bias, exaggerate and obscure is so endless, so remarkable, that centuriesof pre-scientific thought, concentrating on clarifying the nature ofmoral endeavour, regarded it as positively demonic. This is notbecause of rationality itself. That process can produce clarity andprogress. It is because rationality is subject to the single worsttemptation- to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute.
Western world wrapped a dream like fantasy about the natureof evil around its central religious core. Milton took it uponhimself to dramatise the essence of this collective dream in thefigure of Satan - Lucifer, the "light bearer". In Milton ‘seyes,Lucifer, the spirit of reason, was the most wondrous angel. This canbe read psychologically. Reason is something alive. It's bestunderstood as a personality. It has its aims, its temptations, itsweaknesses. But reason falls in love with its own productions,elevates them, worships them as absolutes. Lucifer is therefore thespirit of totalitarianism.
The greatest temptation is toclaim that all important facts have been discovered, nothing remainsunknown. But most importantly, it means the denial of the necessityof courageous individual confrontation with Being. What is going tosave you? The totalitarian says in essence "faith in what youalreadyknow - all problems will vanish forever once the perfect system isaccepted". But that is not what saves. What saves us thewillingnessto learn from what you don't know. That is faith in the sacrifice ofthe current self for the self that could be.
Old Soviet joke- American gets tour of hell from Satan. Come to giant cauldron, fullof suffering souls. Devils round the edge poke anyone who tries toclimb out with their forks. " Here's where we put theEnglishmen".Second cauldron larger, hotter. "Here's where we put theFrenchmen".Third cauldron even larger and hotter. Occasionally a limb pokes outfrom under the surface. No devils with forks here. "Why is therenoone to stop these souls from escaping?" "We put theRussians here.If one tries to escape, the others pull him back in. "
Miltonbelieved stubborn refusal to change not only meant ejection fromheaven and ever deepening hell, but the rejection of redemptionitself. Satan knows even if God offered reconciliation, he would onlyrebel again, because he will not change.
"The mind isits ownplace, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, and a Hell ifHeav'n."
This is an abstract idea, but it's true. Hell iseternal. Take a walk down any busy urban street. The people whom youinstinctively give a wide berth. They are immediately angered if youdirect your gaze at them, although sometimes they will instead turnaway in shame.
What happens if, instead, we decide to stoplying? What does this even mean? An aim, an ambition, provides adestination, a point of contrast against the present. An aim definesprogress, reduces anxiety (because if you have no aim everything canmean anything or nothing, and neither of those options makes for atranquil spirit).
How then to envision the future?
Some reliance on tradition can help. It's reasonable to do whatothers have always done. Get educated, work, find love and have afamily. But aim with your eyes wide open. It might be wrong. You mustmake friends therefore with what you don't know.
The ancientEgyptians had already figured this out. Osiris, founder of the state,god of tradition, is blind to his brother Set's scheming. Set hackshim to pieces, scatters the pieces, sends Osiris' spirit to theunderworld.
Fortunately Osiris has Horus his son to help. Hehas the form of a falcon head, else the single eye. Horus is the godof attention. Horus and Set have a terrible battle, Horus defeats himbut loses an eye. Eventually he takes it back. Unexpectedly, hejourneys to the underworld and gives the eye to his father.
What does this mean? Culture is always in a near-dead state. Thepresent is not the past, wisdom becomes outdated. That is a mereconsequence of the passage of time. But it is also the case thatculture and its wisdom is vulnerable to corruption.
It is theact of seeing that informs the individual and updates the state. Itwas for this reason Nietzsche said that a man's worth was determinedby how much truth he could tolerate. The horror of seeing can halfblind us. You are by no means only what you already know. Thus youshould never sacrifice what you could be for what you are.
Christ is identified with the Logos. The Logos is the word of god,that transformed chaos into order at the beginning of time. In hishuman form Christ sacrificed himself to God. He died and was reborn.The Word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, evenitself , to god. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension,sums up Christianity. Every bit of learning is a little death.Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception. Thebetter ambitions have to do with character and ability rather thanstatus and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with youwherever you go.
Is existence good? You have to take aterrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or in deceit, face theconsequences, and draw your conclusions.
This is the act offaith whose necessity was insisted on by Kierkegaard. You cannotknow. Even a good example is insufficient proof, given thedifferences between individuals. Success can be attributed to luck.Everyone needs a goal to make sense of their life. But all suchconcrete goals should be subordinated to the meta-goal, which couldbe "live in truth". This means "act diligently towardssome end, makeyour criteria for failure and success clear, at least for yourself(and even better if others understand). While doing so however, allowthe world and your spirit to unfold as they will.
Ourcapacity for imagination lets us dream up alternative worlds. This isthe source of our creativity. The opposite side of the coin is we candeceive ourselves and others into believing and acting as if thingsare other than we know they are.
Why not lie? Reality has itsterrible aspect. Why not turn away, at least, when looking is simplytoo painful?
The reason is simple. Things fall apart. We canopen our eyes and modify where necessary and keep the machineryrunning smoothly. Or we can pretend that everything is alright, andthen curse fate when nothing goes our way.
Most lies ouracted out rather than told. The biggest is composed of smaller lies.Its seeming innocuousness, the feeble arrogance work to camouflageits true nature, its genuine dangerousness. Lies corrupt the world.
Successful lies brings a sense of superiority: everyone isstupid, except me. So I can get away with whatever I want."Beingitself is susceptible to my manipulations. Therefore it deserves norespect. "
Hell comes later. Things fall apart. Torturedbyconstant failure, the individual becomes bitter. Disappointment andfailure produce a fantasy: the world is bent on my suffering, mydestruction. I need, I deserve my revenge. That's the gateway toHell.
Truth builds edifices that can stand a thousand years.Truth makes nations wealthy and safe. Truth reduces the terriblecomplexity of a man to the simplicity of his word, so that he canbecome a partner rather than an enemy. Truth makes the best use ofthe future's possibilities. It's the light in the darkness.
Truth will be personal. Only you can tell. Apprehend it.Communicate it carefully. This will ensure the benevolence of thefuture, diverging as it might from the certainties of the past.
If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. Ifyou cling desperately to an ideology or wallow in nihilism, trytelling the truth. In Paradise everyone tells the truth. That is whatmakes it Paradise.
Tell the truth. Or at least, don't lie.
Client desperately waiting for a story about herself to makeit all make sense. Like supersaturated sugar solution - drop a singlecrystal in, and all the excess sugar will suddenly and dramaticallycrystallise. People like that are the reason the many forms ofpsychotherapy work. People are so confused that their psyches will beordered and their lives improved by the adoption of any reasonablyorderly system of interpretation.
The past appears fixed butit's not - not in an important psychological sense. Imagine a moviewhere nothing but terrible things happen. But in the end everythingworks out. A sufficiently happy ending can change the meaning ofprevious events. Now imagine another movie. A lot of things arehappening, all exciting and interesting. But the story ends abruptly,or something facile and clichéd occurs. You leave annoyed andunsatisfied- although you were engaged almost the whole time.
There is no way of knowing the objective truth. There is noobjective observer. There are only partial accounts and fragmentaryviewpoints. Memory is not a description of an objective past. Memoryis a tool. It's purpose is not to remember the past. It's to stop thesame damn thing happening over and over.
People think theythink , but it's not true. It's mostly self criticism that passes forthinking. True thinking is listening to yourself. To think you haveto be two people at the same time. Then you have to let those peopledisagree.
True thinking is complex and demanding. It involvesconflict. Conflict involves negotiation and compromise. Thinking isemotionally painful. But you have to be very articulate andsophisticated to have all this occur inside your own head.
Alistening person tests your talking and thinking without having tosay anything. A listening person is a representative of the crowd.The crowd is by no means always right, but commonly right. You needgood, even great, reasons to ignore or defy general, public opinion.
A listening person can let the talking person listen tohimself. That is what Freud recommended, to avoid transferring yourown biases and opinions into the internal landscape of the patient.It's also why Freud insisted that analysts also be analysedthemselves, to uncover and eliminate some of their own worst blindspots and prejudices. The reaction of a positively inclined humanbeing to a personally revealing statement by another human being ismeaningful, sometimes, even, corrective.
Carl Rogers,psychotherapist, knew that listening can transform people. His rulefor disputes was that each person should be able to speak only whenhe has restated the ideas and feelings of the other accurately and tothe other person's satisfaction. Apart from being able to correctmisunderstandings, it also opens you up to being changed yourself,"one of the most frightening prospects most of us canface". Secondlythe act of summarising distils a memory into a story with a cause andeffect, a moral, which means it becomes a successful memory - youbecome more prepared for the future. Thirdly, you can clarify aposition perhaps better than the person themselves- after all, thismay be the first time they have tried to articulate somethingemotional. So you are either better able to address the specificissues, or at least not get distracted by the wrong words.
Some talk is less valuable, even dangerous. There is theconversation that tries confirm the dominance hierarchy, with eachtrying to outdo the other in "interest", to theembarrassment of all.Or where neither is really listening to the other but insteadthinking of what to say next, which often doesn't really follow so itgrinds to a shuddering halt.
A variation of the dominancehierarchy conversation is where one person endeavours to denigrate orridicule a contrary viewpoint, using selective evidence and thereforetrying to gain support for an oversimplified position (even when thelisteners may already broadly agree). This is essentially trying toend thinking and validate one's own assumption-structure. Mostideological conversations are like this, so both conservatives andliberals believe their positions to be self evident, particularly asthey become more extreme.
In a healthy conversation, thespeaker is organising some troublesome event in his or her mind,while recounting the story. Everyone else listens sympathetically. Ifyou don't have anyone to tell your story to, you lose your mind. Weuse the reactions of others to keep our complex selves functional. Weoutsource the problem of our sanity. Sympathetic responses mean thatthe story teller is valued, and the story important. Men are oftenaccused of trying to fix things too early on in a discussion. Whichfrustrates men who like to solve problems and to do it efficiently.Whereas women may still be intent on formulating the problem as theydiscuss it. So listening and questioning may reveal what the problemreally is, and would also make clear that early problem solving isn'tmerely an attempt to escape from the effort of productiveconversation.
A lecture is - surprisingly- also aconversation. A good lecturer is not only relating facts, but alsostories, gauging the level of comprehension, and also saying whythose facts are relevant. They rely on non-verbal communication. Theyclosely attend to gestures, sounds, not of the audience as a whole,but by watching single, identifiable people. And they use the sameskills - clear speech, eye contact, spontaneous rather than scripted,not apologising, not hiding behind clichés or the ideas of others. Agood lecturer presents an idea to one person in the audience, gaugesthe reaction and responds, before switching to another person.
Witty banter can behave a dominance element but everyoneparticipating gets to enjoy it anyway. You can say things that aren'ttrue, but only if they're funny, you can even say things that areappalling if you're reckless and your audience can take it. Lesscommon perhaps higher in the social ladder - or perhaps just withage, as relationships lack that insane competitive closeness andperverse playfulness if adolescent, tribal bonds. Beware beingboring. And don't actually put someone down when pretending to putsomeone down.
Finally, there's the philosophical chat, theconversation of mutual exploration. Temporarily you invert the usualpreference for order over chaos, and accept that your currentknowledge is insufficient. You listen to yourself as much as youlisten to others. That desire for truth is what makes it engaging,vital, meaningful. You're immersed in the Tao. One foot in order, theother in chaos. Like great music, it's where souls connect. The maskscome off. The search for knowledge is the highest form of wisdom,which is why the Delphic Oracle declared Socrates the wisest of all -because he was content to say what he knew was nothing.
Assume the person you are listening e might know something youdon't.
A laptop is merely a leaf on a tree in a forest of technologiesand systems and dependencies. It can be perceived briefly as a single self containedentity but within 5 yrs it will probably be near worthless as all those related thingsadvance.
We assume we see objects when we look at the world but that's nothow it works. Our perceptual systems transform the complex multi- level world intouseful things, or their opposite. The world reveals itself as something to navigate through.We see faces because we need to communicate with them. We don't see them surrounded bytheir social circle, or their yesterdays and tomorrow's that may be a more important partof them than what is currently manifest. We have to see this way or be overwhelmed. Inseeing this way we make things sufficiently simple for sufficient understanding.
It is for this reason we must be precise on our aim.
We quickly become possessive of things on our hands, the cars wedrive, as if we start to identify with them, indeed using them becomes automatic as if theyare a part of us. We identify with groups in the same way. Only when the car stopsworking do we look at it in a different, uncomprehending way. Suddenly you have to consideryour choices; a new car? Which mechanic? This uncertainty makes its presence known.
The cheating husband becomes a complex frightening stranger to hiswife. But her theory of herself also collapses. She is no longer the "wellloved, secure, valued wife". Perhaps she never was. Is she a deceived innocent or a gullible fool?Are any of her relationships real?
In the course of a disaster, or a social upheaval, we don't seethe well known useful objects, the familiar personalities, not even familiarobstacles to dodge.
Emergency- emergence. Sudden manifestation, the underworld withits monsters rising from the depths. How do we respond?
Our bodies react faster than our minds. First we freeze. Thencomes adrenaline- we draw on resources (if we are fortunate enough to have them) andprepare for the worst - or the best. Then we begin to parse the chaos.
Story by Jack Kent, "There's no such thing as a dragon".Little dragon appears in Billy's room, mum refuses to believe him. It grows until it overtakes thehouse, indeed the house is carried with it into the air. When eventually mum begins to acceptthat dragons might exist it begins to shrink. Mum asks why it had to get so big - Billyreplies, "maybe it just wanted to be noticed".
That's the moral of man, many stories. Chaos emerges bit by bit.Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. One day it bursts forth, every unrevealedissue, lie, rationalisation, hidden army of skeletons in some great horrificcloset, like Noah's flood. There's no ark, because no one built one, even thougheveryone felt the storm gathering.
In many households the traditional division of labour has beendemolished. That has left not so much glorious lack of restriction as chaos, conflict andindeterminacy. The escape from tyranny is often followed not by Paradise but by asojourn in the desert. Options are tyranny, slavery or negotiation. A slave can be happy toshed responsibility but the spirit of the slave rebels. The tyrant tells the slave whatto do and solves the problem of complexity. But the tyrant tires of the slave. Negotiationrequires admission on the part of both players that the dragon exists. That's a realitydifficult to face.
"It's not worth fighting about" is agreeable, lazy andcowardly. There's little in a marriage that's not worth fighting about. You're stuck like 2 cats ina barrel, until one or both of you die. The oath is there to make you take the damnsituation seriously. Maybe you should put up with stuff - maybe the fault is with you, andyou should grow up, get yourself together and keep quiet. But perhaps you should stick toyour guns - there is nothing like a fight (with peace as the goal) to reveal the truth.
Maybe a forthright conversation is the proverbial stitch in time.Sorting some things out is worth a fight, isn't it? Things that are a big part of life?Solving the problem might be worth 2 months of pure misery. Not with intent to destroy, orattain victory, because that's not the truth, that's just all out war.
Maybe it wasn't sex, but day by day deterioration into boringroutine. Living things die, after all, without attention. In truth, what you need - what youdeserve - is someone exactly as imperfect as you.
Maybe unaddressed conflict left both resentful. Respect slowlyturned to contempt. Maybe they left things purposefully in the fog. Maybe being able tocomplain to neighbours and her mother was more gratifying, secretly, thananything good that could be derived from the marriage, no matter how perfect. What canpossibly compare to the pleasures of sophisticated and well-practiced martyrdom.
What did her husband gain when his sex life died? Did he play themartyr? Did he use it as an excuse to seek a new lover? Or to get effortlessly fat andlazy?
Here's the terrible truth - every single unprocessed and ignoredreason for marital failure will compound and conspire and then plague them for the restof their lives. Why avoid then? Because the possibility of a monster lurksunderneath. Maybe the end of your relationship. Maybe because you're a bad person. It's likely, atleast in part, isn't it? Having the argument necessitates willingness to confrontchaos (the fragility of relationships - of life itself) and Hell (you being a bad enoughperson to ruin everything with laziness and spite).
Maybe you're not a bad, careless, worthless person. Who knows? Notyou. Particularly if you refuse to think about it. Which doesn't make it go away. Youmerely trade specific knowledge of the finite list of real flaws for a much longer list ofundefined potential inadequacies.
What if there truly is something rotten in the state of Denmark?That the monster is real? Is it wise to let it grow in the shadows of blissful ignorance?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
(The second coming, WB Yeats)
Why refuse to specify the problem, when that would enable itssolution? Knowing what you want means it will hurt when you don't get it. But you will learnsomething from that, and use it in the future. Refusing to define success also meansnot defining failure, so that if you fail, you won't notice and it won't hurt.Instead you carry continual sense of disappointment in your own being and selfcontempt, and increasing hatred for the world).
When things fall apart, we can re-establish order through our speech.If we speak carefully and precisely, we can sort things out, set a new goal -often communally, if we negotiate. If we speak carelessly and things remain vague, the fogof uncertainty does not lift, and there is no negotiating through the world.
If you wake up in pain, you might be dying. You might be dyingterribly and slowly from one of a number or painful, horrible diseases. But if you talkto your doctor, all those terrible possibilities collapse, with luck, into just oneterrible disease, or not so terrible disease, or even into nothing. Precision may leave thetragedy intact, but it chases away the ghouls and the demons.
Search for the correct words. The past can be redeemed whenreduced by words to its essence. The present can flow without robbing its future.
You have to define the topic of difficult conversation, or itbecomes about everything, and everything is too much. This is so frequently whycouples cease communicating. Every argument degenerates into every problem thatever was, that exists now, and ever terrible thing likely to happen in the future.
You must determine where you are gong in life, because randomwandering will not move you forward. Say what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can findout what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors. Strive to correct them. That ishow you discover the meaning of your life.
Confront the chaos of being. Take aim against the sea of troubles.Admit to what you want. Narrow, and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly.
Be precise in your speech.
Kids learning stunts want to triumph over danger. People,including children, don't seek to minimise risk. They seek to optimise it. They push themselvesso they continue to develop. If things are made too safe (eg playgrounds) people startto figure out ways to make them dangerous again. (Vrolix, moral hazard in trafficsafety)
Nietzsche investigated what motivated ostensibly selfless actions,often exhibited all too publicly. Justice and equality, or "tyrant- mania of impotence"?
Orwell attacked upper class socialists in "the road to Wigan Pier"- more hatred of the rich than desire for social justice, hence the pity and contempt.
Sometimes the only clue to motivation is the outcome - skate stoppingmini bollards produce unhappy adolescent males and spoil communal aesthetics,implies an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit.
It has not been long since the Earth seems infinitely larger than thepeople who inhabited it. We've only just developed the conceptual tools andtechnology to allow us to understand the web of life, however imperfectly. We deserve a bitof sympathy for our destructive behaviour. It's not as if life is easy for humanbeings, after all, even now. It's only a few decades since the majority of human beingswere starving, diseases and illiterate. We could cut ourselves some slack.
Those who appoint themselves judges of the human race, see a plague(David Attenborough), or a cancer (Club if Rome), then make the person who eradicated it ahero. A real Messiah might follow throug with his rigorous logic and eliminatehimself as well.
Boys are suffering in the modern world. They are more disobedient(negatively) - or more independent (positively) - than girls, and they suffer for thisthroughout their pre-university educational career. They are less agreeable (apersonality trait associated with compassion, empathy and avoidance of conflict) andless susceptible to anxiety and depression, at least after puberty.
Boys like competition and they don't like to obey, particularly whenthey are adolescents. They are driven to escape their families and establishtheir own independent existence. There is little difference between that and challengingauthority. Schools do not take kindly to provocative and daring behaviour, no matter howcompetent.
Other factors play a role. It is ok for a girl to lose to a boy. Itis often not ok for a boy to beat a girl, and if he loses - well, his life might as wellbe over. By being good at what girls value, they lose status among both boys and girls.It costs them status among the boys, and attractiveness among the girls. Areuniversities becoming a girl's game? Is that what we want?
Women at female dominated institutions of higher education arefinding it increasingly difficult to find an enduring dating relationship. But this is oftenwhat they want. 37% of young women say that a successful marriage is one of the mostimportant things in life (up 30% over 5yrs to 2012). Only 29% of men feel the same,down 15% over the same period. Among never married 30yr+ adults, 27% of men say theynever want to marry, cf 8% of women.
For most people, making more than a certain amount of money doesn'timprove life. Top performing women usually get out of high pressure jobs - not becauseof "male definitions of success" and lack of childcare facilities but because theywant a life that allows them some time off. Since women prefer to marry same or higherstatus, and there is an increasingly short supply of university educated males, there is aproblem. Men are much more likely to marry down, although they have a preference forsomewhat younger mates. So marriage is becoming something of a luxury, in that ittends to be only well off that manage to make successful relationships.
Culture is an oppressive structure. It's always been that way. Ithammers us into a socially acceptable shape. But it offers great gain too. To think ofit as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous. This is not to sayit should not be open to criticism. Any hierarchy creates winners and losers.Collective pursuit of any goal produces a hierarchy. Yet it is the pursuit of valued goals thatin large part lends life its sustaining meaning. Absolute equality would requiresacrifice of value itself - and then there would be nothing worth living for. Asophisticated culture should allow for many games and many successful players, and allowindividuals to play and to win in many different fashions.
Men have through history been partners and protectors of women. Thatwomen had additional burdens of physical inferiority, risks of pregnancy and childbirth ,plus burden of children, may also be a factor in differing legal and practicaltreatment.
Marx attempted to reduce history and society to economics. One of theprimary architects of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, received a doctorate from theSorbonne before he became the nominal head of Cambodia in the mid 1970s. He argued thatthe work of people in cities eg bankers, bureaucrats and businessmen added nothing tosociety but parasitised the genuine value produced by agriculture and smallindustry. After evacuating the cities a quarter of the popular were worked to deathin the countryside.
In the 1930s the Soviets sent 2 million kulaks to Siberia. These werethe peasants with a number of cows, hired hands, a few more acres of land. They wereconsidered enemies. 30 thousand were shot. Their property was expropriated. Agriculturaloutput crashed. 6 million died of starvation in the Ukraine. Posters went updiscouraging cannibalism of children.
Well functioning societies should have competence as the primedeterminant of status. Ability, skill. Not power. Most valid traits of long term success inWestern countries are intelligence and conscientiousness (viz industriousness andorderliness). There are exceptions, eg creatives and entrepreneurs have higher "opennessto experience", again, appropriate.
If hierarchies are thought to be only about power, then the use offorce becomes justifiable. Society must be altered until all outcomes equitable.The wish for the latter is more important than the justice of the former. If genderdifferences are not just socially constructed, then the drive for equality becomespropaganda. So logic is inverted. Strangely, gender is often considered a socialconstruct by the same people who feel gender re-assignment surgery is appropriate fora man who feels trapped in a woman's body (and vice versa). This is illogical.
Not all outcomes can be equalised. Outcomes must be measured: salaryis easy but other things not, eg social influence. And how far do you subdivide groups?There are 500+ Native Indian tribes. What about attractiveness? [Height?]
Yes, studies of adopted out identical twins show you can get a 15point IQ difference with extreme differences in upbringing. How much pressure are weprepared to apply to achieve equality? But even then , there's still choice. If men andwomen have different preferences, no doubt culturally determined, must we re-train meninto wanting to be nurses, and women into wanting to be engineers? Where might thelimits lie?
Aggression stems from an ancient part of the brain. About 5% of 2yrold boys are aggressive by temperament. Most are nonetheless effectivelysocialised by age 4. Aggression underlies the drive to be competitive, unstoppable,outstanding. At a minimum it is necessary for self protection. Women who areinsufficiently aggressive (high on the scale for agreeableness and neuroticism) struggle withconflict, continually sacrifice for others. Toxic resentment can emerge.Assertiveness training is offered. This is the path to dependent personality disorder. Theopposite of a criminal is not a saint, but an Oedipal mother. She says to herchild, "I live only for you." The pact is "Never leave me, and I will do everythingfor you." She is the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
Jung's collaborator Erich Neumann contrasted consciousness(symbolically masculine, struggling upwards to the light, painfully, carrying with it therealisation of vulnerability and death) with its origins (symbolically feminine,drawing consciousness back down into unconscious dependency, to shed the existentialburden). What opposes enlightenment, self determination is smothering, devouringoverprotectiveness.
Terrible mother is seen in Tiamat from the Enuma Elish, who givesrise to all forms but who in dragon form moves to destroy her own children. It's the terroryoung men feel about attractive women, ever ready to reject them.
Sleeping beauty's Prince is both the saviour who frees her from therestrictive parents but also her own consciousness. Even if a woman does not need a manto rescue or even support her, she does need consciousness- attentive wakefulness,clarity of vision, independence. Masculine traits, and not just symbolically- men areless agreeable and tender minded, even in the Scandinavian countries where equality hasbeen such a priority.
The Little Mermaid - Ariel has independent streak that endears her toher father despite the trouble it causes. The adversary to the king is Ursula,an octopus (compare the dragon form Maleficent can take), the chaos to his order. Ursulatricks Ariel into giving up her voice - how can she develop a relationship withher Prince without her capacity to speak (the Logos, the Divine Word)? So she is doomedto remain underwater forever. Then Ursula exploits Ariel's failure to trap her, and forcethe king to relinquish his power and position. Finally the Prince rescues Arieland the rejuvenated king transforms her into a human being. So a woman becomes completethrough a relationship with masculine consciousness and standing up to aterrible mother figure.
Men tease each other as a way of testing response to social stress,as well as for fun and for point scoring in the eternal dominance battle. They enforce acode of behaviour- pull your weight, pay attention, don't whine, don't snitch. Don't bea slave to rules. We don't want to feel sorry for you or do your work for you.
Charles Atlas advert in comics has weak boy bullied on beach, getbuff with training programme, then win the girl. Summarises human sexual psychology-recognises deficit, adopts "compensatory fantasy" - not as escape but asillumination of a genuine path forward.
It is to women's advantage that men do not tolerate dependency amongthemselves. They should look after themselves and not be an extra child.
Nelson Muntz in the Simpson's is a bully but also stops the schoolbeing overrun by touchy Milhouses, narcissistic Martin Princes, chocolate gorgingGermans or infantile Ralph Wiggums.
Fight Club was a recognition that when softness and harmlessnessbecome the dominant values, then hard dominance starts to exert an unconsciousfascination. Iron Man perhaps similarly, in terms of a turn to fascism.
Some women don't like losing their baby boys so keep them forever.Some prefer a submissive mate, even if useless, which also gives them plenty tofeel sorry about. The pleasures of self pity should not be underestimated.
Spinning donuts in cars is testing skills to the limit. Speaking backat teachers is testing authority, to see if it is something that might in principlebe relied on in a crisis.
The spirit that interferes when boys try to become men is no friendto women either. It's anti-human, jealous, resentful and destructive. If you think menare dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.
Leave children alone when they are skateboarding.
What is a reasonable person to think when faced with a sufferingchild? How could a good God allow such a world as this to exist? Perhaps it would bebetter not to be at all. Perhaps it would be better if there was no Being at all.
Logical they might be. But there is a terrible catch to suchconclusions. Acts undertaken in keeping with them (if not the thoughts themselves) -suicide, or the destruction of everything - inevitably serve to make a bad situationworse. Hating life, despising life - even for the genuine pain that life inflicts -merely serves to make a bad situation unbearable. There is no genuine protest inthat.
But is there any coherent alternative? I don't think it ispossible to answer the question by thinking. Thinking leads inexorably to the abyss. It didnot work for Tolstoy, it might not even have worked for Nietzsche.
When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinkingcollapses in on itself. It's noticing, not thinking, that does the trick. Perhaps youmight start by noticing this: when you love someone, it's not despite theirlimitations, it's because of them.
When overwhelmed, the demand of life don't stop. Set aside some timeevery day to talk about the crisis and how it should be managed. Do not talk or thinkabout it otherwise. Conserve your strength, this is a war not a battle. When worriesarise, remind yourself you will think them through at the scheduled time. This usuallyworks. Don't schedule time to think in the evening or you won't be able to sleep.
Shift the unit of time you use to frame your life. When the sun isshining you can plan for the next 5 years. "Sufficient unto the day are theevils thereof" [Matthew 5:34]. That is often misinterpreted as "live in the present". Itcomes from the Sermon on the Mount, which is where Christ distils the 10 "thou shallnot" commandments into a single "thou shall": place faith in God's heavenly kingdom, andthe truth. That's a conscious decision to presume the primary goodness of Being. Aim high, wishupon a star like Gepetto. Be careful. Put the things you can control in order.
Dogs are happy at the bottom of the family pyramid. Cats,however, are their owncreatures. They aren't social or hierarchical (except in passing). They're only semi-domesticated. Sometimes a cat will ignore you completely, becauseit's a cat. But sometimes it will come over, push its head against your waiting had,and be pleased about it.
It's a nice break. It's a little extra light, on a good day, anda tiny respite, ona bad day. If you pay careful attention, even on a bad day, you maybe fortunate enough to be confronted with small opportunities of just that sort.
And maybe when you are going for a walk and your head is spinninga cat will show up and if you pay attention to it then you will get a reminder for justfifteen seconds that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering thataccompanies it.
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
Bible as 4000yr+ old collective attempt to explainconsciousness. The story is that existence is good, but that theEmergence of consciousness a cataclysm (the Fall) - the rise and fallof Israel the attempt to find redemption in the state. The NewTestament is the attempt to find it in the individual psyche. Thatattempt involves an ethic, and the ethic is truth.
Fits withclinical experience, that all therapy involves addressing andaccepting truth.
Tolstoy's Confession about his depression and suicidalthoughts. Depression not far off the idea that human life isinsignificant.
Pyramid as symbol of hierarchy. Hierarchies necessary becauseotherwise unable to decide what to prioritise, and excessive choicesparalysing. Even polytheism tends towards hierarchy.
There is an unconscious world in us, we act for reasons wedon't understand, we don't behave the way we would expect. Otherwisethere would be no psychology or sociology.
Nietzsche predicted totalitarianism would replace religion. Hesuggested that a person should become a "super man" byadopting his own values, rather misinterpreted by the Nazis.
Curious how important our belief systems are. Nothing quite asprovocative as a poke in the axioms!
Consciousness has only been around a maximum of 7 millionyears, since man split off from apes.
Jung - everyone acts out a myth. You might want to work outwhat that myth is, as it might turn out to be a tragedy. Dreams as away into our unconscious. Joseph Campbell took his ideas fromJung.
Bible has 4 principal sources, based on textual analysis.Jehova text is oldest, chapter 2 Adam and Eve etc. Priestly textrefers to El Shaddai and Elohim, interesting because plural. Probattempt to merge different stories from different tribes into awhole.
Logos as consciousness.
Potential and human ability to effect that potential.
Speech, naming of things as how we bring them intoexistence.
Piaget describes children playing a game without necessarilygrasping all the rules, later they are able to state the rules,eventually they understand they can make the rules themselves.
First step to enlightenment the encounter with the shadow(Jung) - the potential for evil in us.
Horus, falcon headed because ability to see important, eye isiconic. Marduk (Mesopatamian king of the gods) has eyes all round hishead and speaks magic. Becomes king of gods by catching the Tiamat innet, chopping her into pieces and creates world from pieces. Createshumans from blood of her most powerful monster.
Paradise means walled garden (?Persian).
Why are our brains in 2 hemispheres? Appear capable ofindependent consciousness eg division of corpus calloaum. Women'sbrains more integrated, hence less susceptible to brain injury. Couldbe order vs chaos, creative vs systematic, verbal vs non verbal.
Woman created from Adam's rib, then injunction"Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleaveto his wife". Sleeping beauty as fable about over protectiveparenting: old king and queen, only daughter, not inviting Maleficent(Nature, chaos and evil). Unprepared for her first love affair,wounded by prince leaving. Discovers spinning wheel (wheel of fate),pricks herself and becomes unconscious. She is not so much rescued bythe prince, as rescued by consciousness (often given male guise), andthe need to develop a relationship of her own.
Living together is where you're saying you'll do for now but Ireserve the right to leave if something better comes along - whichwould be insulting if it wasn't mutual. That's why those who havelived together are more likely to divorce once married. Shacklingyourself to another imperfect being (because Mr or Mrs Right wouldnever truly want to be with you) allows you to be truthful with oneanother, and without truth there are always lies, or at leastunresolved issues.
Major primate predators are birds, cats, snakes. Hence demonsoften snake-bird-cat beasts eg dragons. Vision co-evolved with snakepredation and drove visual cortex development.
Women tend more to self consciousness, anxiety and depression.Not sociocultural.
Fruit as symbol of information. We forage for information asmuch as we ever did for food. Colour recognition developed toidentify ripe fruit.
Adam's excuse for eating the apple is really poor - She mademe do it, and you gave her to me, so really it's your fault.
Snake as "most subtle of animals". Suggests God is aliar, just wants to be in control. Identified as Satan by laterChristians, not in Old testament.
As bipeds we stand with everything exposed! Clothing offersdefence from judgement as much as from elements, Adam and Eve'srecognition of their nakedness is related to this.
Good and evil - why is it so bad to be conscious? Becausewhen you are conscious of your vulnerability, you can exploit it insomeone else.
Cain and Abel as first human beings - Adam and Eve after allcreated by God, brought up in Paradise. Abel was a shepherd, but nota Wordsworthian poet among the daffodils but a desert survivor, readyto fight off lions.
Jung said the Shadow had roots all the way down to Hell.Malevolence not so uncommon - Hitler only managed to follow throughwith the organisational skills.
Appears to be some favouritism towards Abel's offering. Cainbecomes jealous. Goes through the motions, wasn't very happy aboutit (could be the epitaph on many people's graves).
Perhaps if you had established the proper relationship withGod the father (whatever that means), is that an unreasonableproposition? What's the alternative? Can you only do it youself, ordo you want to take credit for it all? He doesn't appear to be in agrateful and enquiring posture - grateful, because things could getworse, enquiring because maybe you don't know how to make thingsbetter, but you're open to suggestions. That's humility.
"What sacrifice should I make? There's a question youcould ask yourself every morning. What can I do to make thingsbetter? And you can decide what constitutes "better", thenit's not like it's being imposed on you. Try to make itsophisticated, so not just better for you, because that's not goingto work out very well, you have to live with other people. And it'sstupid anyway - that's the attitude of a badly behavedhyperaggressive 2 year old. And I mean that technically."
Emergence in history of delay and exchange - same thingreally, exchange of concrete now for hypothetical future (egmarshmallow test - delayed gratification associated with good longterm outcomes, prob associated with trait conscientiousness). Traitconscientiousness second only to IQ in predicting success(definition?), which is how it should be in a healthy society, wheresuccess of an individual contributes to success of society. Sacrificeis same thing.
Sacrificing own values may be necessary if those values do notappear to be working! Whether you believe in God or not, blaminganything other than yourself for your problems is never going to makethings better (even poor Job, at mercy of bet between God and Satan).And if sacrifice is good, what is the biggest and best sacrifice?
Stalinist Russia - where forbidden to complain, because thatwould suggest communism isn't the answer to everything.
Why if you do well will it not be acceptable to me?
Jung also said if you end up living someone else's story,you're never going to have more than a bit part.
"Past authoring" programme - making sense of yourlife experience. "Future authoring" as a way of looking tothe future- because without planning you give yourself up to stupidsuffering, with a flavour enhancer of bitterness (like Cain). 70-80%of your life is routine, so get those sorted out, negotiated.
Young children will like you for just giving them attention.And a well socialised child will bring pleasure to people aroundthem.
Then you look to higher order goals. These are always somewhatarbitrary but doesn't mean life is meaningless because whether youwant to or not you have to choose a goal anyway, and your dopamine(positive emotion viz cocaine etc) system is actually most triggeredby moving towards your goal, not achieving the goal (cf graduation -1 day pinnacle of years of effort, next day unemployed).
3-5yrs is best timescale, anything longer is too susceptibleto complication. Imagine what would make all the suffering of lifeworthwhile. Imagine what you would want for a 12yr old child.
At the top of the hierarchy is the logos, ie awareness and theability to refashion the way we see the world and go about in it.Otherwise you would have totalitarianism.
There's a flood myth on every continent, usually related tosins of mankind but not always. But there's always a flood coming -we're always skating on thin ice, 1 inch from falling through a holeinto the underworld of chaos - so better build a boat.
It's not always a bad thing, for everything to be burned tothe ground, ready to rise again from the ashes (Phoenix myth).Because chaos is still information - it's just about being able tomake some sense of it.