THE COMFORT OF BEING "AN OUTSIDER"

 

THE COMFORT OF BEING "AN OUTSIDER"

 

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

  © November 21, 2020 

A READER WRITES:


Jim,

I thought you might enjoy this take on Trump.

Ted


https://patriotpost.us/opinion/74834-will-trump-ride-off-into-the-sunset-2020-11-12?utm_campaign=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=100487214&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_K9YRbOvPlH5XgbpurWfVJiGu87DhdYHMbsD2juJWCjEYaKD5_-wDuv7QHjhBMpAlFkffwPACDM-TG7F3UcPc-9v8WIA&utm_content=100487214&utm_source=hs_email


I RESPOND:

Ted,

Thank you. It is nice that the so-called "most despicable human being in the history of mankind" has at least some supporters.

Paradoxically, when painted "totally bad" only the "relative good" seems to survive.

President Donald J. Trump was always an outsider, in fact, an outsider even in his entrepreneurial pursuits in real estate. Interestingly enough, Frank Sinatra, the "boss" and "Chairman of the Board," as he was known by his group, popularized his outsider status in a song "My Way" in 1969 adapted from the French lyrics of "Comme d'habitude."

British Eastern philosopher Alan W. Watts (`1915 - 1973), a definite outsider, unconventional in his thinking, titled his biography, "In My Own Way" (1972).

Colin Wilson (1931 – 2013) emerged from obscurity when his book, “The Outsider: The Seminal Book on the Alienation of Modern Man” (1956) was published. Wilson was in his twenties when he wrote this explosively popular international bestseller, attacking man’s increasing retreat into comfort and the status quo at the expense of identity and reality, abandoning the idea of freedom for security.

Wilson writes:

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outside because he stands for Truth . . . The problem for the ‘civilization’ is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as objectively as the headlines of last Sunday’s newspapers. But the problem for the individual always will be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint (The Outsider, pp. 13, 281).


Wilson was an old soul in a young body. He wrote another haunting tale titled “Access to Inner Worlds” (1983) in which a man builds a magnificent home but remains in his tent outside the structure, only to have squatters take possession with him helpless to do anything. The story deals with how “locked in” our “left brain” or cognitive consciousness has become.

We create with our “left brain,” but too often leave our “right brain,” the conceptual core of our imaginative thinking, dormant. It is as if we are still in our tent with our creative displays open for squatters to possess.

We see this with people who cannot get beyond their fixed responses to everything as if we are listening to an echo chamber.

For the past four years visceral hate of the president has been the consuming motivation of over half of the American voting population. Hate forms a mindset that cannot be mitigated with a constant confection of bromides which are already apparent as if we can live on a diet of air; nor can hate be made transient simply by finally experiencing victory.

Hate is in the air; in the collective mindset; and hate leaves a distinctive trail. Trump may be gone but it soon will become old hat, yet quite predictably, he will be blamed for everything that goes awry over the next four years as if still president. Go figure!

A comparable situation, as pointed out in my last missive (“Losing the Battle,” November 20, 2020), is that you cannot do for others what they best do for themselves.

Thank you for sharing,

Jim