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About the first principle, you might ask, “Limit the rules to what, exactly?” Here are some suggestions. Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don’t end up in jail. Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don’t hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not
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Such outcomes are far from optimal, and children will definitely misbehave more in public, because they are experimenting: trying to establish if the same old rules also apply in the new place. They don’t sort that out verbally, not when they are under three.
When they started to get antsy, after sitting for forty-five minutes, we knew it was time to go. That was part of the deal. Nearby diners would tell us how nice it was to see a happy family. We weren’t always happy, and our children weren’t always properly behaved. But they were most of the time,
Watching people respond to children restores your faith in human nature.
Part of establishing a relationship with your son or daughter is learning how that small person responds to disciplinary intervention—and then intervening effectively.
You’re not doing your child any favors by overlooking any misbehavior (particularly if he or she is temperamentally more aggressive).
What no means, in the final analysis, is always “If you continue to do that, something you do not like will happen to you.” Otherwise it means nothing.
He certainly won’t conclude that he should hit her more, using the flick of his mother’s finger as an example. He’s not stupid. He’s just jealous, impulsive and not very sophisticated.
Every gingerbread house has a witch inside it that devours children.
The rule is “Come be with us as soon as you can behave properly.” This is a very good deal for child, parent and society. You’ll be able to tell if your child has really regained control.
Disciplinary principle 1: limit the rules. Principle 2: use minimum necessary force. Here’s a third: parents should come in pairs.107 Raising young children is demanding and exhausting.
Here’s a fourth principle, one that is more particularly psychological: parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful.
And this is only the beginning of the road to total familial warfare, conducted mostly in the underworld, underneath the false façade of normality and love.
Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world—merciful proxies, caring proxies—but proxies, nonetheless.
Faust: A Tragedy
Clean Up Your Life
Perhaps you will discover that your now less-corrupted soul, much stronger than it might otherwise have been, is now able to bear those remaining, necessary, minimal, inescapable tragedies.
Perhaps your uncorrupted soul will then see its existence as a genuine good, as something to celebrate, even in the face of your own vulnerability. Perhaps you will become an ever-more-powerful force for peace and whatever is good.
We thought it over, and drew a conclusion: The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future. A great idea begins to emerge, taking ever-more-clearly-articulated form, in ever more-clearly-articulated stories: What’s the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice.
Evil, Confronted
Christianity and its Problems
Doubt, Past Mere Nihilism
There is no blaming any of this on unconsciousness, either, or repression.
The Truth, Instead
The Word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity. Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.
All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve.
Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life.
The meta-goal could be “live in truth.” This means, “Act diligently towards some well-articulated, defined and temporary end. Make your criteria for failure and success timely and clear, at least for yourself (and even better if others can understand what you are doing and evaluate it with you). While doing so, however, allow the world and your spirit to unfold as they will, while you act out and articulate the truth.” This is both pragmatic ambition and the most courageous of faiths.
we can deceive ourselves and others into believing and acting as if things are other than we know they are.
Things fall apart: this is one of the great discoveries of humanity. And we speed the natural deterioration of great things through blindness, inaction and deceit. Without attention, culture degenerates and dies, and evil prevails.
“Being itself is susceptible to my manipulations. Thus, it deserves no respect.”
Hell comes when lies have destroyed the relationship between individual or state and reality itself.
Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It’s the light in the darkness.
Apprehend your personal truth. Communicate it carefully, in an articulate manner, to yourself and others. This will ensure your security and your life more abundantly now, while you inhabit the structure of your current beliefs. This will ensure the benevolence of the future, diverging as it might from the certainties of the past.
ASSUME THAT THE PERSON YOU ARE LISTENING TO MIGHT KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON'T
A Listening Person
That’s key to the psychotherapeutic process: two people tell each other the truth—and both listen.
“The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.”
If you really understand a person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.” More salutary words have rarely been written.
We have extracted the moral of the story. It becomes a description of the cause and the result of what happened, formulated such that repetition of the tragedy and pain becomes less likely in the future. “This is what happened. This is why. This is what I have to do to avoid such things from now on”: That’s a successful memory.
If you first give the devil his due, looking at his arguments from his perspective, you can (1) find the value in them, and learn something in the process, or (2) hone your positions against them (if you still believe they are wrong) and strengthen your arguments further against challenge.
You will also be much better at withstanding your own doubts.
This is partly because talking (and thinking) is often more about forgetting than about remembering.
central narrative, cause and consequence, come into focus or consolidate itself. Only then can the moral of the story be derived.
The goal is to gain support for a comprehensive, unitary, oversimplified world-view. Thus, the purpose of the conversation is to make the case that not thinking is the correct tack.
people organize their brains with conversation.
If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds.
Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves. The input of the community is required for the integrity of the individual psyche. To put it another w...
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We outsource the problem of our sanity.
The sympathetic responses offered during a genuine conversation indicate that the teller is valued, and that the story being told is important, serious, deserving of consideration, and understandable.
