WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH BEING "YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND"?

WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH BEING "YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND"?



James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 28, 2013



REFERENCE:



This is an excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend,” which is to be published in a second edition. This is inserted in the center of the text as the book represents a broad framework of what I see as a crippling problem of our time.



Paternalism, benign or otherwise, has run its course. So have emotionalism, disordered enthusiasm and sentimental rhetoric. Grand schemes devoid of personal experience and uncritical acceptance have too often been substituted for reason and have led to our being un-grown-up in our approach to life.

The dry light of reason supported by science has changed the boundaries of consciousness where sensible man can verify for himself without parental or institutional authority what as well as who is best for him, starting with being friends, first and foremost to and with himself.

Inequality, hierarchies, paternalism and nationalism have lost or are losing their clout as liberal rationalism is coming into its own, starting with the individual. Immanuel Kant has written:



“Beings who have received the gifts of freedom are not content with the enjoyment of comfort granted by others.”



We have seen and are seeing what comfort does. It not only leads to complacency but also demoralizes and wreaks havoc on motivation. The most important distinguishing characteristic of human beings is the freedom to act, to choose between what is self-enhancing or self-adverting. Unless a person can be said to be the true author of his own acts, he cannot be described as responsible for them. Where there is no responsibility, there can be no morality.

Inanimate life does not make choices. It behaves as it does by the causal forces of nature, which are outside its control. This is not so with us, that is, unless we are unable to control our minds and bodies to do what is best for us.

We have, as free men, the right to act rightly or wrongly, virtuously or viciously according to our lights. We have the free will to control external factors – physical, chemical, biological, physiological, geographical and ecological – by our internal psychological guidance system. If we choose to be at the mercy of causal forces, rationalizing that we can do nothing but “go with the flow,” then we might as well be a turnip.

Although causal laws may affect our bodies, they need not affect our inner self. The external world is dealt with by science. The internal world, which should be free to make choices, is a function of voluntary actions and the foundation of morality. If there is no such freedom, there can be no possibility of moral law.

The case for being your own best friend is a moral one. Morality cannot be imposed upon us, but we can, indeed, we must impose morality on ourselves to act rationally and freely in our own best interests. This will be, by extension, in the best interests of everyone we touch without exception.

We have reached the point with the rush of history and the calamity and complexity that it has enjoined to demonstrate autonomy (self-governance), meaning giving rules to ourselves, and the freedom from being coerced or from being determined by something or someone we cannot control.

The ideas expressed here are meant to demonstrate that we are ends in ourselves, and not means to some arbitrary ends of someone else. This is so because we are the ultimate authors of the rules that guide us and to which we freely submit. To suggest that this is narcissistic or egoistic is to miss the point.

Should we be made to submit to something that does not proceed from our own rational nature, and is inconsistent with it, is to degrade us as persons, and to treat us as children instead of as a grown up, as mere animals or as objects to manipulate as things to be managed.

To deprive ourselves of the power of choice is to do to ourselves the greatest imaginable injury. No matter how benevolent the intention with which it is done this does irreparable damage to our individual spirit.

Paternalism is the antithesis of being your own best friend. That said this effort here is not to make you more assertive against institutional paternalistic authority, but to offer you a framework for viewing your own reality differently by stepping outside external dependency to make friends with yourself armed with internal integrity and ethical authority consistent with your nature. What you do beyond that is up to you.

To be civilized is to be grown up, that is to say, to behave responsibly to others and not allow anyone to treat you as a child, or to barter your freedom away with entitlements for the sake of security and comfort, or flattery to do what is against your nature to do, or any other device that might compromise your internal integrity and self-regard.

Our corporate society has relegated its citizens to dependent children, which is the greatest of despotisms and destroyers of freedom. Writing 170 years ago (1843), Immanuel Kant had this to say:



“The man who is dependent on another is no longer a man, he has lost his standing, he is nothing but the possession of another man.”



To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve, and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves. We have seen what has happened to our world as a result of this faulty doctrine in the 20th century. The fact that it lapses into the 21st century indicates how little self-regard is yet to be appreciated.

Modernity is the culture of separation (what John Doone suggests, “ ‘Tis all in peeces. .”) and science leads the way with materialism obliterating spiritualism, and secularism finding little time, attention or room for the soul. With all the brilliance of science there seems little wisdom. Our fragmented, frantic world strives to make up imagined deficits, not by holistic thinking, but through a patchwork of inventions. Society, as expressed through technology, is too clever by half. Typical is the experience of a scientist who attempted to make synthetic rubber. Overnight the beaker solidified. He couldn’t extract the material by conventional means, so he burned it off. The heat generated was so intense that he measured it. Thus solid propellant fuel was created, a happy accident, making the jet age possible.

We are also happy accidents. We come into the world surrounded by strangers, in a strange place and time in history. The distinguished American entomologist Edward O. Wilson captures this sentiment in the first sentence of his fine biography, Naturalist (1994): “I have been. . .a happy man in a terrible century.” The strangers we first encounter—our parents and immediate family—have much to do with how we are formed. We see, hear, watch and behave like them. We imitate what we see, hear and observe. These strangers reinforce or correct our interpretation of experience, by applause or scolding. Our initial role in life is that of entertainer. From this we develop a high need to please others; to put a smile on their faces; to control them by giving pleasure; by manipulating them through exploitation of their weaknesses; and thus coming to exploit ourselves.

By the time we enter school we are professional pleasers. Now we are exposed to another set of strangers, teachers, who tell us what is true and important. We are compliant and pliable. What we see, hear and observe at school may not complement what we experience at home, seeding a budding conflict. When we attend church, Sunday school or the Temple, we learn of God and about….



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