I often find myself wishing I were living the savage life. I use savage in the old sense to mean pre-civilized man. The savage had many advantages. For example, the ability to see the full night sky. This sounds like a minor point only for those whose experience with the stars occurs on the screen…
There is a “very specific quality that distinguishes [man from animal],” says Rousseau, “about which there can be no argument: the faculty of self-perfection.” A horse never strains to be a horse but every man strains to become something other than what he is. And while every person is in pursuit of perfection they never…
Nihilism is a tricky mode of existence. How does one continue existing, in an existence one finds thoroughly meaningless, when one’s very being demands love and relationship with others to survive? Dostoevsky has a scene in the Brother’s Karamazov where a man, an elder of an Orthodox monastery, explains how the more he “loves humanity…
In political discourse (if such a thing still exists) one often hears various religious groups claim that atheism is just another religion and therefore the removal of God from the public square is the same as instituting yet another religion, atheism. Though I understand this sentiment, the fact is atheism is anything but a religion.…
“The present contains nothing but the past,” says the great Henri Bergson, “and what is found in the effect was already present in the cause.” Is this true of the human psyche? Is our present state of mind merely an aggregate of our total experiences and affects from birth to the present? It may be…
George Kelly defined guilt as: “A perception of one’s apparent dislodgement from his core role structure.” This “core role” develops out of our relationships with significant others whom we construe ourselves in certain ways: loving, responsible, secure, etc. It seems to follow that any religious paradigm which casts human beings as essentially good makes guilt…
Depression is a problem of courage (Adler). It is a condition in people who are afraid of life, who have given up independent development and have been totally immersed in the acts and aid of others (Becker). They’ve lived lives of “systematic self-restraint”; a life that can be described as a series of silent retreats…
Aristotle in The Art of Rhetoric analyzes the most important subjects of deliberative oratory (one of his three genres of rhetorical speech). He narrows deliberation to five main categories: revenue, war and peace, the defense of the realm, imports and exports, and legislation. Not a thrilling list at first glance, but reading through the…
Some people are naturally drawn to narcissists. Coincidentally, narcissists are drawn to people who are drawn to them. Like a Kardashian unable to walk past a mirror, never did a narcissist pass up a chance to be admired. Indeed, if you didn’t already know, the greatest torture for a true narcissist is to be treated…
It’s long been thought that talking to oneself is a mark of psychosis. The opposite is in fact true. If used right talking to oneself is a mark of a properly developing personality. C.G. Jung was one of the first of the modern psychologists to discover that talking to oneself can, if used right,…
How many hours of peace did you experience over the last week? I’ve asked several people this question over the years and I’m always amazed how many answer “none.” How is it possible that in a full week – 168 hours – a person is unable to experience even one hour of peace? Well, it’s…
Selfies do not capture the moments we lived, but the moments we sacrificed. They capture moments of people being profoundly non-present in whatever they were supposedly doing at the time: walking the beach, riding a bike, getting married. They catch people in the very act of disassociation – unwitting disassociation, but disassociation all the same.…
