Monday 7 September 2015

Vlog CCLXXXVIII







Their attitudes are largely cultural, although partly marketing and manipulation. The Judeo-Christian notion of reality is that we each have a "soul" that has to be worked on to bring it to a stage of moral perfection. If our soul is not at this stage yet, our sinfulness will wreak havoc in our lives and bring us down. This notion of a perfectable soul is itself narcissistic, because it is based on wishful thinking of the sort that makes us turn all our attention onto ourselves. (One may argue that focusing one's attention inward is, indeed, a good thing to do at certain stages of the healing process nonetheless.)
Whilst Christianity insinuates that we are responsible for our ills due to 'original sin", the Judaic form of reasoning is more subtle. Its mystical formulation is that we must have become damaged at the level of the unconscious mind, due to bad parenting practices. The Jewish formulation has a flipside, in that it embraces the materialist notion that nothing succeeds like success, but that failure in life is a result of bad parenting practices, which the victim now has to face up to and (again, the same formulation!), work on themselves to bring themselves to a state of moral perfection. Once they do that, material success is guaranteed. One will be one of the winners in life, instead of one of the losers, though one's own moral courage.
Encouraging people to believe in this inner pathway to success of course plays on their narcissistic feeling-sensations, which cry, "I can bring myself to a level of moral perfection!" Of course this is still a path inwards, trying to generate material success by looking inwardly at oneself and trying to make it all about our individual moral-striving.
But all of this is deeply cultural in origin.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity