February 15, 2009

• Self-Inflicted Misery

  

  There are more ways to make oneself miserable than there are people alive to find ever more and more new ways to add to all the old ways.  Some of the more effective and widespread ways involve poisoning ourselves with various chemicals that, once our body chemistry is altered by them, our bodies don’t want to go back to living without them.  I have written about that more than once.  I’ll probably do so again sometime.

  More than once when writing about my own experiences and my observations of how people hurt themselves, I have used the phrase, “fairy tales and soap opera.”  For me, that’s shorthand for the many influences of popular culture that lead us into unreasonable expectations and false, limiting beliefs.  There would be no broken hearts if nobody had ever spread the dirty lie that hearts could break.  No one would feel embarrassment or hurt feelings because of something said or done by another, if we had all been taught to detach from such nonsense.  Only those who are acculturated and indoctrinated to such beliefs are subject to those discomforts and miseries.

  There isn’t much a little child can do but accept the doctrines and dogmas he is fed, and to mimic the actions of, first, his elders and, then, his peers who have been acculturated by their elders.  In that sense, some people never grow up and learn to observe and reason for themselves, but go on all their lives swallowing what they’re fed and aping what they see others do.  As Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography, “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”

  It’s not only in religion and politics that this is true for most people.  It holds true in romance, child rearing, commerce, psychology and virtually, if not absolutely, any field you’d care to name.  It has been my observation that much if not all of the suffering in the world comes from second- or third-hand bullshit.  I think suffering could be eliminated if people would grow up, think for themselves, look around and see reality as it truly is, and take responsibility for their own thoughts, feelings and actions.

  I could be mistaken about that.  Maybe some people just are not capable of thinking for themselves.  I haven’t tested this theory on absolutely everyone.  All I know is that for myself, those closest to me, and a large number of others who have been similarly deprogrammed from traditional bullshit, life took a sudden turn for the better when we quit allowing our parents and society to dictate our beliefs, stopped blaming them for our problems, and took responsibility for ourselves.  We stopped fearing the future and began to love life.

  Each of us was pretty much on the edge of disaster and self-destruction before we made that turnaround.  Maybe that is what it takes to shake one loose from the bullshit belief systems.  I am sure that that there are people who can learn truth as well as bullshit from others, even if the bullshit does tend to comfort and the truth is not so comfortable.  I am not so sure, but I like to think that not all of them have to hit bottom and get to the brink of disaster before they develop a bullshit detector.  But I know that this new version of me is somewhat optimistic, about like the bastard offspring of Candide and Pollyanna.  As I said, I could be mistaken, but I don’t think I am.
  

  • 7:34 pm
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