People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated. Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.
Archive for the ‘self-knowledge’ Category.
Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
If you trust the words of people who say “I tell it like it is,” you not only don’t trust your own judgment, you don’t have any judgment to trust.
Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance? People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.
The surest indication that you need to pause and ponder right now is the feeling that you ought to wait until you’re better able to think.
Why do we most need exercise when we least feel like doing it? Knowing that the answer is “accumulated stress” has never yet prompted me to put a book down or get up from the couch and cut the DVD player off. I didn’t prefigure this, but it looks as though I’d rather be fat and edified than lean and bored.
The problem with self-delusion is not that you are hiding shameful actions and qualities from other people (simple lying and deception take care of that) or even from yourself (a sense of mounting dread prevents this from occurring) but rather that your unwillingness to see yourself for what you are eliminates the only means whereby you might regain your bearings before that sense of mounting dread drives you into outright insanity in order for you to escape conclusively the truth about yourself.
Values are principles that control behavior. They derive from a twin pair of evolutionary imperatives: the self-assertive need to achieve goals that are measurable, promoting the self-esteem necessary to continue achieving goals; and the self-protective need to assert oneself without fatally antagonizing other people asserting themselves. Convictions, on the other hand, are intellectual formulations of values as they relate to the fundamental aspects of external reality at a given time. Here’s the tricky part: The fundamentals of external reality (i.e., circumstances) are always in the process of altering as time persists. Maladapted people hang on to their obsolete convictions with the ferocity of a downing man clinging for his life to an anvil. Well-adjusted people know that dropping old convictions and adopting new ones as circumstances mandate is the only way their values can be preserved. Soi brave, mon enfant!
We don’t “make” decisions. Decisions make themselves. Sooner or later we catch up to them.
Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways. But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses. The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely. (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.) The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife. Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again. After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you? I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”
The lack of a sense of responsibility leads to self-deception, and this is one of a slew of contemporary American “behaviors” (i.e., behavioral syndromes) against which the sweet-reason approach is powerless to effect change and therefore pointless to employ; others are depression (resulting from the long-term repression of impulses), addiction (escapism masquerading as courageous self-discovery or outrageous self-expression), the chronic inability to keep a promise (“I lied,” “things change,” “I’m moving on”), blaming someone or something other than oneself, saying that one has a disease in order to show that “I couldn’t help it.” The problem is that these sad and threadbare devices are defensive mechanisms applied when people actually need to assert themselves to overcome the fear arising from the insecurity that typifies society so conspicuously. The rising popularity of “extreme sports,” in which people fling themselves off thousand-foot cliffs, for example, with no great assurance that they’re going to land on the ground as anything but a splat, signals the severity of our anxiety. Those of us who don’t leap experience the right impulse (close your eyes and jump) but are afraid to act on it lest we wimp out or look stupid, which we really are for not responding; but we’re not in a condition to appreciate that. And because of our own insecurity we want to cut the clearly maladjusted plenty of slack—we “empower” them, to use another current catch phrase. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional syndrome we adopt metastasizes along with our unabated insecurity until we’re offering even greater slack to those guilty of committing actual crimes; fully crediting them for any of those blame-deflecting excuses cited above they care to indicate, because we believe (however absurdly) that we could well stand in their shoes some day and be in need of all the slack that we can get. The moral of this unhappy exposition is that society is crippled for everybody when a large enough number of its members refuse to accept the discomfort and inconvenience of self-investigation and behavior change as the price of putting an end to the pathology. America’s prosperity, which makes it easy to dissociate cause and effect, insures that this is going to be the way things are for a long time to come.
Providing yourself with an admirable self-image is only half the deal. You also have to match it in reality. The “true you” is not an icon.
Calling All Shrinks: I have irrational, intense, visceral aversions to (1) the idea of eating someone else’s home cooking, and (2) brain teasers. I possess no talent for the latter, but I don’t think I hate working them because I fear it getting out that I am unintelligent. There is just nothing at stake in pondering them that I consider worthwhile, which is not the same thing as saying that I think they’re worthless; I recognize their value—and their great attraction for disciplined thinkers—as mental gymnastics, but to me they epitomize pointlessness (honing skills in a vacuum). I had the same aversion to “writing exercises” when I was learning how to craft fiction; if the technique embodied in an exercise seemed potentially valuable, I adopted it for a story in which I had invested emotions, hoping it would help me in conveying feeling to the reader. That seemed worth the effort. As for other people’s home cooking, this is not a “health issue” or the product of any other conscious consideration, much less the manifestation of a subconscious distemper. I think physiological changes in my olfactory function or perhaps my taste buds, or maybe both, took place a few years back that make me gag on kitchen smells, even prospectively.
I would never have survived in a completely natural habitat. I have the coward’s instinct to say, “It’s just not worth it,” and walk away rather than instantly pounce on an aggressor. My consolation is that I wouldn’t have lived long enough to father a similarly afflicted and doomed offspring, although it is also true that you would not now be subjected to my bullshit.
Ambitions of the Young. I: Listening to some young people talk about their “plans”—to become rock stars, movie stars, CEOs, media magnates, big-bucks athletes, television celebrities—I am reminded of those late-night infomercials which purport to show you how to make millions and millions of dollars in a matter of hours: “First you buy downtown Cincinnati….” The target audience doesn’t know enough to grasp the flagrant absurdities of palaver like this, because they’ve never considered what their dreams entail. “I didn’t want to ‘be a writer,’” said William Faulkner. “I wanted to write.”
We squander, I would say, 30% of our lives trying to “understand” our difficulties, thrashing them out, telling people about them, worrying ourselves silly, wearing ourselves down. If we actually wanted to know the truth about ourselves, we wouldn’t do any of that crap.
I don’t have any problem forgiving, but how the hell can I forget?
You make a mistake, and the consequences force you to recognize the error of your ways. You see yourself differently now, and you don’t like what you see. You want to improve, and you start to become a new person. You work hard at this, and you find that you are sensitive to details you never noticed in the past. Eventually you are entitled to say that you have made yourself a new person and a good person. Does that mean that you can reacquire the state of grace you cost yourself? No. You were not the only person changed by your mistake. The ingredients of your state of grace, I’m sorry to say, are no longer in the mix, at least not in the same proportions. Your hard work and new-found empathy, however, suggest you might do better next time provided that you stop looking forward to the past. ( I write this directly from the heart having today destroyed through my stupidity a relationship I was grateful to have and cherish, in the process doing terrible damage to the feelings of an excellent man who trusted me without demur and was therefore particularly acutely vulnerable to the unintended offense.)
Despair is not what you feel when you break a fingernail. Despair is what you feel when they tell you that you can’t move your body from the waist down any more. What you feel when you break your fingernail is peevishness. If we don’t get things right, words will stop meaning anything. They are halfway there already.
Many things confuse us all our lives because we either prefer it that way or we never take time to isolate them in order to have a cold hard look at them. I isolated one such confusing thing recently and am happy to share it with anybody who might benefit, as I certainly did, from seeing it starkly spelled out: All but a very tiny percentage of losses are irrecoverable.