On Self-Examination

[ibsh...@gmail.com]

There are any number of people who ask me why I don't do more by way of self-examination. The reason is that I do not trust the paradigms by which this self-examination is done.

Sigmund Freud was a charlatan; Alfred Adler, more so. When someone tells me that I want my mother or that I am inadequate, the only thing it means to me is that I should discontinue contact with the person who tells me such things. If they insist on believing such things, they can do so without me. I place zero credibility in either quack.

Self-esteem and self-respect I see for the most part as a goose chase. There will be always someone out there to break whatever self-esteem or self-respect you work to attain. I've seen the efforts that people put into defending their self-respect, and it is simply not worth it. It makes sense to work hard in order to provide or in order to make meaningful contributions; it makes no sense to work hard or go to great struggles in order to guard one's self-esteem.

I also place zero credence in personality psychology. In a study done recently, two thirds of Americans have scored high on the narcissistic disorder. If two thirds of the population have a disorder, then it is no longer a disorder; it is the norm. The people who throw around terms like "sociopath" or "narcissist" usually do not know what they are talking about. By that standard, a vast portion of the population - and a vast portion of its major contributors - are possessive of these disorders; which means that they no longer qualify as disorders.

The Aristotelian approach does not work for me either. Aristotelian approach assumes consistency of character, which is not the case for me. I go to great efforts to understand and to instill in myself all sorts of traits, the memory of which work I may lose the next morning. A model that assumes a fixed character is simply out of tune with reality for me.

Christianity holds out a greater promise as the examination done there concerns with deciding what is righteousness versus what is sin and shows the possibility for righteous conduct regardless of what is in the psyche; however there are many problems with Christianity. It is full of misogyny, it is full of prudishness, it is full of intolerance, it sees the entire human nature as sinful, and it attacks all sorts of positive things, from art to science to individuality onwards, falsely claiming these things to be pride. The Christian solution is a disaster in a lot of ways, and we have the history to go by. Nevertheless there can be merit in applying some Christian-inspired attitudes to decide which course of action to take.

The paths I've seen that work best are not ones that attempt to analyze or to fix the personality or the psyche but rather to transcend them. In Hindu and Buddhist meditative techniques, that is precisely the point. If the person does more practice to access the higher and wiser elements in his mind, that will result in him operating with greater wisdom. And there is now significant scientific evidence to demonstrate that this is indeed the case.

I've wasted enough of my time with charlatans and their ideologies, and now I am going on to more important pursuits. There is need for clean energy conversion; there is need to expose corruption; there is need for better man-woman relationships; there is need for a global cultural renaissance. What I've had to say about theories in psychology is still there. Only now that is no longer the direction of the attention that I choose to pay.