The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness

by Ichiro Kishimi

But when someone’s suffering right there in front of you, you can’t just leave them be, can you? Would you still say that lending a helping hand is intervention, and then do nothing? PHILOSOPHER: One must not let it go unnoticed. It is necessary to offer assistance that does not turn into intervention. YOUTH: What is the difference between intervention and assistance? PHILOSOPHER: Think back to our discussion of the separation of tasks; to the subject of a child’s schoolwork. As I stated then, this is a task that the child has to resolve himself, not something that parents or teachers can do for him. So, intervention is this kind of intruding on other people’s tasks, and directing them by saying things like, ‘You have to study,’ or ‘Get into that university.’ Whereas, assistance, on the other hand, presupposes the separation of tasks, and also horizontal relationships. Having understood that studying is the child’s task, one considers what one can do for him. Concretely speaking, instead of commanding from above that the child must study, one acts on him in such a way that he can gain the confidence to take care of his own studies and face his tasks on his own. YOUTH: And that action isn’t forced? PHILOSOPHER: No, it’s not. Without forcing, and with the tasks always kept separate, one assists the child to resolve them by his own efforts. It’s the approach of ‘you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink’. He is the one who has to face his tasks, and he is th...