Wrong, comrade. It is nothing negative, but positive. I am here today to declare everlasting love.
If it were someone else, my eyes would be wide open and my ears pricked up. But it's none other than you who is to make such a declaration. I would be a complete fool if I do not sense something rather fishy...
Again wrong. It's really about true love, undying love. It's eternal, it's foreveeeeerrrr!
Ah, is it about you and your athlete's foot?
Neither am I in a love relationship with any fungus nor suffer from athlete's foot!
Hmmm, let me see... could it be related to your pessimism?
What can I say, you've come rather close. It's myself.
You came here today to declare undying love for... yourself?
That's right.
I was afraid that even gods might have given up on you. At last you found someone who would love you forever!
Mind you, I am not confessing my narcissism or self-righteousness.
Oh, tell me about it. How does self love differ from those two, if at all?
Narcissism is blind love for oneself, usually displayed in public. It implicitly urges others to love her/him as much as s/he does her/himself. Narcissistic people have their reasons why they consider themselves superior, but in most cases, they are not justified in the eyes of others. They cherish their attributes simply because they are theirs.
Such people are unaware that it is the ownership of the attributes that is playing a big role in their feelings.
Self-righteousness is to consider oneself morally above others. Again, what we forget is that our morality appears superior mostly because it is our morality.
If these are not self love, what is?
I guess it is analogous to true love and fake love.
You mean, narcissism and self-righteousness are wrong kind of love for ourselves, and what you call self love is the right one?
It may appear that I am exhibiting the very behavior that I criticized a second ago, but...
Comrade, I am glad that you realize that. How can you blame others of narcissism and self-righteousness when you have those traits?
Let's put aside for the moment the issue of whether we are qualified to talk about a certain topic.
Critics are often incapable of performing the task that they evaluate, but they do not hesitate to praise or curse as they see fit.
I think it is division of labor, or more precisely, talent. Accomplished artists are not necessarily informed of all the events in their world, or capable of writing and talking about what concerns the senses. The same holds for reporting. A wonderful tennis player is not always a good newscaster for tennis matches.
When it comes to morality and such, isn't it slightly different, because the problem is about how we live and all of us are fully engaged in that activity?
True, we would be hypocrites if we do not practice what we preach, because we are principle actors in our own lives.
Whatever we say about life could be used at some point as a piece of evidence for our hypocrisy, since we are all imperfect.
In other words, none of us can discuss life without being hypocritical. That would greatly inconvenience us, wouldn't it?
What do you suggest?
I think it is possible to talk about it with sincerity.
How so?
To be open to criticisms and be ready to admit mistakes. We should bear in mind that, because we love ourselves so much, a tad more leniency toward others and a bit more severity toward ourselves than we think are best would appear justly balanced to others.
I know what you mean... I have heard the line, "People are selfish, but I'm not," and the like. We are so clear-eyed about others and cloudy-eyed about ourselves.
We shall proceed on the premises that we are capable of discussing earnestly how we should live. We do so while acknowledging that none of us can eliminate all of our hypocrisy, because we are imperfect. Our imperfection in turn does not allow us to be a total hypocrite either.
We have those moments when we think the person who is in front of us is so hypocritical that we want to throw up on him. If we call him a total hypocrite, we will have to admit that we are letting our anger and disgust take over. Too bad, isn't it?
Comrade, you are reading my mind... You must know, then, that the ones who claim to be moral persons are absolutely the worst. They would do anything so that they would appear moral, even by taking advantage of others' distress.
For example?
They would admonish people who are in anguish, anger, sorrow, fear, etc., for those reactions. Further, they may say that immaturity has prevented them from accepting what caused such emotions.
Isn't that lack of compassion?
Yes. It is also hypocrisy on the side of the self-professed moral people, because they preach compassion. In the above case, they are not so much concerned about how to help mollify the emotions, but how to make use of the incident to display what they think is their advanced mentality. Oftentimes, they do so with the tone implying that they themselves are mature enough to accept a similar situation.
Some may not tell the distraught person that s/he is immature on the spot, but later tell why they did not say so then. It comes down to their own maturity.
It's all about themselves, not about the distressed person. It can be pretty condescending, I tell you. I have been subject to many of these, and it is only recently that I realized their self-serving nature.
It shouldn't have taken that long, comrade...
The more self-advertising people are about their honesty, kindness, compassion, and so on, the more hypocritical they are. Isn't that chilling?
That goes by definition. The more you market yourself, the more attention you and the claim receive.
You should have seen me when I was facing this guy who claimed that he was compassionate. Or another who claimed that he was nice. So far, I have not met a person who lived up to a positive characterization of who her/himself was.
We, human beings, do not have the ability to be nice in all senses and that all the time. We should not be congratulatory about ourselves, because it will look ridiculous sooner or later.
Agree. You may say, "Trust me, I will do it," but not "I will do it. I'm a trustworthy person."
It is a matter of generalization, then. We can make a strong claim for one event and act accordingly. As for general statements, we should know that we cannot help violating them. In other words, broad claims make us hypocritical.
It is quite embarrassing when we forget having made such encompassing claims but others remember that we did.
Are you trying to seek your way out of your hypocrisy?
... Getting back to our earlier topic of self love, I think too many of us are self-loathing or self-neglecting.
They are the opposite of narcissism and self-righteousness which you brought up earlier as big problems.
In my mind, they are all related by insecurity in oneself. When we cannot be confident about ourselves, we either hate or neglect ourselves, or try to think and show that we are more than what we are.
Insecurity can be very harmful, but doesn't self love lead to another type of harm, overconfidence and cockiness?
Once again, we should not go to the very extreme. The underlying problem is that we are the ones who have to live with ourselves, but we often forget that. It would be better if we are with someone we like than someone we do not.
Is that why we'd better love ourselves?
Biology has endowed us with the mechanism to think anything that is ours better than others'.
We are already self loving without trying?
Yes, but that love is problematic, because we love whatever we happen to be.
What about self-loathing and self-neglecting people?
For some, the mechanism is suppressed by negative feedback from others. We may say that they are victimized by people who wish to feel secure at the expense of easy preys. Some others think the affection that they receive is insufficient, and loathe or neglect themselves as a way of expressing the frustration. Since they cannot get enough attention for being "good," so to speak, they are unconsciously trying to be "bad."
They adopt the attitude that would correspond to, "You don't like me? I don't either. You don't care about me? I don't either," if articulated.
But in truth they are keenly waiting for someone who would like them or care about them.
We love ourselves, but at the same time we harbor insecurity about who we are.
You know how that works. If you are desperate, you become vulnerable. As with anything innate, the biological urge to love oneself is deep rooted, but inappropriate in situations that are more delicate and complicated than basic survival. It may in fact work to our disadvantage.
Comrade... Tell me, should I love myself or not?
Consider a world in which every member behaves as dictated by their blind, biological love for oneself. It would be quite brutal.
Deep down, we think we are sane and others insane, but those others think they themselves are sane.
It's hard to accept, but all of us are quite loony and unreasonable at times.
Naturally, some are so more often than others, right?
"To love a stranger as oneself, implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger."
Simone Weil... Is that why you brought that big mirror with you?
We need to look at ourselves as if we were strangers who are to be nurtured into ideal beings with care and attention. There are too many occasions in which I think, "Only if they knew how they appear to others!"
I fear that the very hypocritical wouldn't notice their hypocrisy, whatever we do.
You're right, I can think of an example or two... or three, or...
Let me hold the mirror for you.
...
... Comrade, your pulse is... weak! You just saw yourself. Your true love, your one and only, remember?
Posts
