Jason wrote:I'm not sure I fully understand what you're getting at. Are you suggesting that perhaps my goals aren't achievable given my abilities? That maybe I'm being unrealistic and fooling myself if I believe that these goals are within my reach?
Your clear
inability to get even yourself squared away suggests that until you get your own house in order, you won't be up to achieving much.
That sounds defeatist. Don't you think that we should even be attempting change for the better?
Sure. Start with yourself.
Trying to make the whole world a better place ends in disaster more often than not. Why don't you, instead of trying to improve the whole world, start by improving yourself? Then improve the lives of those in your immediate surroundings -- your family among them; then, perhaps, your town or district; etc.
In your case, I think trying to fix the whole world is exactly one of those internal lies I spoke of. Because the goal is so vast, you don't really have to actually, you know,
do anything. Telling yourself that you want to make the world a better place makes you feel good about yourself (look how noble I am, how much I care about other people!), while not requiring you to actually do anything or live up to any reasonably attainable standards of success.
I would bet dollars to donuts that in your own mind, you have compared yourself to some benevolent historical or mythological figure -- Prometheus, Gandhi, or somesuch. Am I right?
Society and culture, in fact civilisation as a whole, can be seen as a massive project whose central goal has always been about attempting to reform things for the better.
Dude, civilization is not a
project, and it has had no
goal. People have goals. Civilization as a whole does not.
t's not like there are just little and obvious pockets of reform such as ending racism and sexism. Large parts of society and culture, if not the entire thing, are built from reform upon reform upon reform stretching back millennia.
Yeah -- and it's usually slow, gradual,
evolutionary change, instead of wholesale revolutionary change you are speaking about.
You wanna make the world a better place? Start by becoming a better person.
Be the change you seek in your world. Don't go around deciding what others should do. Start by deciding what
you should do -- and do it.
It's quite a bit more commitment than you have made so far, I bet.
The simply fact is that with a lot of things we just don't ask if they are working, we never even consider it. "It's just the way things are." about sums up the reactions where there is any hint that such issues exist at all - no question even that things could be different, let alone why maybe they should be different. In the many places where there is no awareness at all there is just silence and unexamined recycling of the past.
And of course you possess a unique insight into all these things which most everyone just takes for granted, and you are eager to bless the world with your enlightenment. Right.
vicdan wrote:Why don't you care to discuss them?
Because they are ugly, and I don't have any adequate reason for revealing them that would outweigh that. My goal is not to teach, nor to help. It is to
understand. I neither am, not desire to be, a guru, a psychotherapist, or anything else of the sort.
Your ongoing advice to me has been to stop whining and to engage people. You made the comparison with psychotherapists and how they help people by engaging them. My initial post in this thread was a rather heartfelt and sincere expression and sharing of my personal thoughts, feelings and experience with those here - I was engaging people, it was very much like something I might express in psychotherapy. Now you are backing away, you don't want to engage.
Right. Because I already know what my problems were and are. I have no internal conflict which undermines my life or my coherence as a person. You do. You are the one who needs this engagement, not I. I am not a psychotherapist (obviously, ha!)
The very goals I have been discussing here are substantially about discovering and overcoming the lies that I and others tell ourselves. Don't you see the similarity between what I have been saying all along and what you keep proposing?
No. I started by seeking to root out the incoherence within myself. You seek to fix up everyone else.
Did you ever consider the possibility that your supposed empathy and willingness to socialize at Christmas gatherings(or similar), is actually you deluding yourself into believing that you are more empathetic, understanding and humane than you really are?
These stories are what people do to be able to deceive themselves, to reinterpret themselves in a better light
without doing the actual work. See the example above, about the vastness of trying to make the world better -- or the earlier example about a virgin boy who uses the 'high standards' excuse.
If you are actually
doing what you wish yourself to be doing, then it's no longer the sort of self-deception I spoke about. It's the real thing. Now of course you might be insincere at it, and unhappy about doing that, but that's a different problem.
