Why is it so hard, actually impossible, for some (actually many) people to be rational, clear-seeing, reality-accepting? I refer to the millions of disturbed people who believe conspiracy theories, who think D. Trump, the sociopath, is a good or ratifiable person, who accept ideas produced by hate not by evidence, who endorse generalities where only individuality exists. Who cleave to magic, the unproven and the unprovable.
Why does a narcissist believe he is the smartest person in the world, in history, while knowing, in a moment’s directness, it can’t be true? Why does someone believe in heaven and the Holy Trinity’s forgiveness when there is no reason to believe?
Why are children able to see a person not an ethnic group, but an adult can only see a race? Why are children not genocidal but adults are?
The answer to
these questions has to do with the response of the young to loss of love when no
help comes to them. They must escape from this, the worst pain possible to the
human psyche, the kind of pain that equals soul death. Some methods of running
away are drugs and sex and acting out. But the most powerful and replenishable
escape is thinking. Thinking either anesthetizes feeling or acknowledges,
identifies it. It would be more accurate to say that thinking is the deliverer
of anesthesia while identifying is seeing. I identify that I received no love
as a child because my parents were incapable of it. I see that I sadly gravitated
to a spouse as barren of feeling as my mother. I think that things aren’t
so bad, that life will get better. Or I think that life is nasty, brutish and short and that I don’t have it different from anyone else.
We must recognize that some people are stronger and some are weaker. It is strong to see personal truth, the soul loss at the beginning of life. It is weak to numb it by fantasizing positive or by projecting one’s pain into the world. In his speech on religion, Bertrand Russell* said: “When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.” It is no less contemptible to debase others and say they are sinners, and to allow hurt to morph into hate by a failure to see. Right now, our country is in danger of being overcome by weaklings, thinkers not seers.
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* Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” final section: “What we must do.” https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.