Follow Your Dreams... or Not?

Perhaps because of stories like The Little House Books and other things our family read together, I've been very much of the mind that one does what one ought to do for the sake of setting up one's future. Not merely setting it up in view of happiness, but because knowing you've done right by Truth brings a kind of joy.

I assumed for many years, growing up in my family's little homeschooling world, that People In General make choices in life based on future considerations- they take into account their feelings, but always Truth rules over their feelings.

Strangely enough, it has seemed that it is not so anymore, even for Christians who say they believe in truth. I'm not even entirely convinced that Christians typically know what truth actually is, though, so it is perhaps no wonder. I have often been advised to do what I want, and I don't know how to turn some conversations towards should I or shouldn't I? Besides that there are so many things I want that it is not as simple as Just Doing It.

But that's the really, really odd thing to me. I can't figure out if it's just me, or if there is a fear in people of me (or anyone else) not following my desires. I sound like a spoilsport of some sort if I say that I may not really want that, that I would want to discern whether or not it was best. The idea that something could be best sounds like conforming to some standard that won't make you happy.

But I think most emphatically that it would make you happy if it really were what was good and right. Always doing what is right will bring the most joy, even if it is not at the moment. The greatest joys I've had in life were things that at first felt boring and difficult. Sometimes it's only in retrospect that I realise that it was actually wonderful.

We seem obsessed with giving ourselves pleasure in the moment nowadays, even disguising it as what is Best. Because of the psychologising of our culture, we are quick to fear that the root of someone's unhappiness in life is because they aren't pursuing their Dream. But it's very worrying if you can't be happy in life unless you accomplish your Dream- it's a really sad message, because most people on earth will never achieve dreams unless they make them much more realistic. If you learn to tame your desires and love things that are ordinary, you can be happy with much. I do not know why we don't exhort each other to that instead of 'do what makes you happy', which for me is most depressing because I know it won't make me happy... and I can't even say that without someone contradicting me as if I were blaspheming against myself.

Is it actually necessary to tell our children that they can Do Anything, that they should do what they love? Is it possibly harmful? Apart from forcing your child to say he loves something he does not, what is the harm in teaching a child to realistically plan their future? I have thought that true joy belongs in a person who has discernment and wisdom, who knows when his feelings are in accord with reality and when they are not. That person can train his feelings to follow Truth, and true fulfillment is only found in Truth.

Conflict and Love

I don't necessarily like or dislike conflict, because conflict isn't a question of like or dislike; it just is. It will be there in honest relationships, and festering conflict must be dealt with so that Truth can be restored.

Truth looks like being able to love and be honest with people, speaking the truth in love as the Bible says. I mean particularly truths that can seem negative or hurtful when looked at through an enabler's eyes (in codependency). As long as two people hide from each other and continue in deceit and manipulation, there can never, ever be real love. It will always be insipid placation of the other, a work of trying to appease the negative emotions (not just anger, but sadness and disappointment as well) that could arise in the other. It is slavery, not love.

Love in my mind is honesty and truth- love is not possible without those. Oh, how beautiful a love that is truthful and honest is. A love that does not lie even when it seems the truth could hurt. Especially lie with sweet, syrupy lies that masquerade love.

There cannot be true relationship between people unless there is in each person an allegiance to Truth above any selfish concern. If both parties do not ally themselves with Truth, when adversity comes along, it will sunder the relationship either by separation or by turning the relationship into a sickly exchange of mutual buttering-up, ultimately a fear of letting the other person down, losing them due to disagreement.

To let someone continue to appear in right relationship with one is the sweet, syrupy lie of saying 'I'm in right relationship with you.' It's not love, it's not compassionate or respectful. Deceit can never be respectful- it is saying to the other person that you cannot trust them to handle the truth. The soft bigotry of low expectations.

God Made Us to Run on Him

“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Since all (good) things proceed from God, we are nothing apart from Him. Our worth cannot be found in ourselves, but only by looking at, and to, God. In God we will find our natures, because our nature is God's Image in us. So therefore if we wish to find happiness, the only actual happiness we can have, we will find it by looking to God. In Him we will find all that which is Good proceeding out from Him, ready to be received by our curiosity and wonder.

Interestingly, curiosity and wonder are at odds with greed. When we are greedy for things, we want to be the owner, the god, of them. But by trying to turn them into our right and by possessing them ourselves, they are wrested from God, and by being taken out of Himself, they lose all that made them worth wanting in the first place. Because of this we will keep pursuing these things, trying to Contain them, but never get to them, like the carrot on a stick in front of the horse... we can only reach the goal when we know it is not ours, but God's.

Self-discipline and Self-esteem

If you’re raising kids, you’re much more interested in their self-control than their self-esteem. They’ll be a much better human being if they know how to control themselves than if they think well of themselves. And by the way, if they can’t control themselves, they will think well of themselves.

- Dennis Prager, in an interview with Candace Owens

So refreshing to me, because I've been fighting in my head the battle between self-discipline and the modern idea of self-esteem. I think self-esteem is a myth. There is the self-possessed person, which I think some believe is a person with self-esteem, but I do not agree. A self-possessed person is humble, which is not the same as having-self-esteem.

Self-esteem used to mean 'self-respect', but now has gone on to mean something like loving oneself in most people's vocabularies, and because it is in most people's vocabularies, we ought not to use 'self-esteem' when we clearly mean self-respect- it does not help the case for holding yourself to the standards of objective virtue. It seems wrong to believe that for a depressed person to lead a productive life, they have to fill themselves with messages of how wonderful they are. I think that we don't really believe we're wonderful until we prove it to ourselves, so the first step is simply to act, and it is not easy- we cannot invent anything that will make being a fully developed human easy. All of this self-esteem rot seems like an attempt to ease ourselves into maturity, but it just isn't easy- it is always an upstream battle until you build the muscles.

What if those who think highly of themselves (who do not have self-control as Prager mentions) are the ones who need to be told they should think well of themselves? It sounds counterintuitive, I know, yet I would not have such hatred of myself if at the same time I did not think incredibly highly of my abilities. I wouldn't be afraid of voicing my opinion if I did not think highly of myself. I wouldn't fear the disapproval of others if I didn't care how brilliant they think I am.

Yet I do care. And that paralyses me, keeps me from saying what I think. It was freeing recently to realise that I actually think that I ought always only to say what is 100% correct... that I am paralysed and cannot speak my mind because I think I need to be perfect.

I know that no human can know everything, yet for some reason, isolated as I am, I imagine that I do know a great deal, and so when I find out I said something inaccurate, I feel so ashamed, you can't imagine (though to be honest feeling an emotion is pretty nice after numbness). My shame is partly because I imagine I ought to have known better and I cannot stand that I didn't. I just really want to have been smarter than that; to have seen what was going to happen and avoided it. I desire control, I think I am God.

So perhaps we only need self-love and self-esteem now because everyone is incredibly conceited, and those who are conceited need their egos stroked. People who are narcissistic cannot sustain their egos without having others worship them. You do not think highly of yourself without paying the price of your independence- you cannot think yourself wonderful without depending on the rest of the world (including the inanimate products of your labours) to keep that afloat.

If a self-loving person ever realised they were did not live up to their own standards (for which they could love themselves), their balloon would be burst, and they would crash into true hopelessness. Not merely self-hate, but the loss of hope and meaning in life. This is why we cannot start with love of ourselves- it depends on our being worthy of our love and that is not possible.

--

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated these things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

- C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

Should We Teach How One Must Feel?

Finally I'm reading The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. He's certainly making the rounds on my blog, and he'll probably keep doing so for awhile yet.

It reminded me of a question in my mind, one that's been here ever since I was a child. I was raised rather a bit in the world of classical education. For me, there was an aura of there being better things and worse things- that not all art is equal, not all literature is equal, and not all actions are good. There are standards of excellence. There is Truth.

I love all this. Maybe I was brainwashed or conditioned, but if so, I like what I was brainwashed into because it certainly makes sense to me. It felt to me as if I was being welcomed into what I really wanted the world to be like, warts and all, because believing that excellence and truth exist, that means you have to live up to them, and it implies that people often do not (what reason is there for a standard if it is the status quo?).

It's always been an intriguing question to me whether these Classical ideas are really better, or whether that's brainwashing, illusions, so on. In The Silver Chair (by Lewis, again, what must you all be thinking?) the Witch is enchanting the characters to believe that what they came from (the surface of the earth) is not real; that only under-the-surface is real. The Sun they invented by looking at her lamp and imagining a bigger and better lamp. If I am wrong and Truth is made up, I would far rather believe in it than not, as they replied to her about their apparently made-up world.

So, is classical music actually such a great form of music? Is Dickens such very good literature? What of the great, classic painters? Is The Lord of the Rings such a great story? Are these better than pop culture? Could there be a hierarchy of music, values of worth?

I have always felt that we have left Excellence. It is not a value in our society anymore. Beauty no longer is a standard that art should aspire to. It is as if we don't believe in beauty, truth, or any of the other standards we used to think existed. Yet, underneath it all it seems that the desire for all this is still there, and I wonder if we are creating generations of very lost people by divorcing ourselves from these standards. They were our life and breath. They make us Man. We will turn ourselves into only animals if we keep on the course we are in... and we really have forgotten our roots. We really have. Even I have, yet still wanting to believe this. It's very hard to firmly plant yourself in these old standards when everyone around you so obviously doesn't feel the same- people now want to live 'their truth' and feel their own sensations and not judge themselves. I wonder if by not judging ourselves, we are going to lose any respect we could ever have for ourselves.