How not to need anyone's advice

 

I will occasionally mud wrestle at Slate.com comments. A recent article discussed the Joe Rogan situation: his purveyance of false covid vaccine information. I suggested that Rogan is either a sociopath or an Oppositional-Defiant angry-pouty little boy in men’s cloth­ing. Another com­menter, in pique, whined this question: “His show is inter­est­ing. It isn’t what you think. I’d much rather listen to him than NPR all day. Why is everyone threatened by someone who doesn’t agree with you 100 percent of the time?” I replied with a question: “Why do adults need to listen, day after day, to some attitudinal-thinking individ­ual rather than, say, discover their own under­standings of the world?”

Counseling 101 class teaches that advice-giving is generally a bankrupt form of help. It re­places the client’s brain with the therapist’s. It leaves the person’s feeling core dor­mant and, in fact, rotting from pollution and disuse. There are many forms of self-sooth­ing that the child-in-the-adult uses in order to run away from itself and to manage the grownup corpus he must carry for the rest of his life. One of the sickest of these soothers is bath­ing in other people’s mental membranes: absorbing and mas­tur­bating in their opin­ions, attitudes, hates, loves, advice.

Pay attention to the old phrase: “Think for yourself.” But improve it: Feel your feelings about some opinion issue, such as the rightness or wrongness of Joe Rogan’s propa­gating vaccine falsehoods. If you have a spontaneous, gut reaction, recognize that this is a feeling not an objective fact in the world. Detect if the feeling is the offspring of an ear­lier feeling. This part of the process can take time and courage. For example, if you like Rogan, is it because you feel weak and need a macho role model? Or because you were a child left out in the cold and now feel bitter envy of warmth and do-good­ism? Or because you feel child­ishly defiant and therefore give knee-jerk sanc­tion to Repub­lican con­trar­i­ness? Or because, from your child­hood feelings of alien­ation, you have con­flated “patriot­ism” with individ­ual­ism, individ­ual­ism with Conserva­tism, Con­ser­va­tism with Trump­ism? There are other possi­bilities. The process is to doggedly self-ana­lyze and discern the source of feeling, which so often creates our thoughts and beliefs.

Brutal self-examination has a dual benefit: It can lead you to your own feelings (your own self), and your deeper buried feelings, which are not Joe Rogan’s or Ann Coulter’s or any other neurotic pundits’ effluvia. (This is, by the way, real individualism.) And it can help you see what is true, or at least as true as the slipshod human mind can know.