Ancient Advice from Marcus Aurelius, who identified the Three Great Untruths
Last edited Sun Feb 24, 2019, 07:37 AM - Edit history (1)
From The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
https://www.thecoddling.com/
First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Advice from Marcus Aurelius, who identified the Three Great Untruths and offered advice to counteract them. Seriously. He discusses each of the untruths, exactly. It's basically CBT from 170 CE. Which untruth is captured by each of these 3 quotations?
Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it—turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself—so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.
Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.
To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it, if you simply recognize: that they’re human too, that they act out of ignorance, against their will, and that you’ll both be dead before long.
The beginnings of the book came from increasingly frightened and upset students in american universities. This is the new "safe schools" paradigm: "Protect me from anything I consider upsetting."
= new reply since forum marked as read
And yet I forced myself to read Lenin and Pravda.
If you want to understand those who oppose you, you have to actually listen to what they say and understand them the way they understand themselves. Anything less is to say, "I understand me better than them; I understand them better than them. Everybody thinks like me because I'm really, really smart." That's not treating them like people.
It's like learning math, but refusing to look at a math book, or studying vaccines without actually hearing anything that those who develop or use vaccines have to say.
I'm not afraid of being exposed to things that might upset me. What doesn't kill me can make me stronger. I don't trust my feelings to always be reliable, esp. when I don't know much about the "Other" than that I don't like them. The "Other" is not always absolute evil while I'm absolute good. It's dehumanizing. Which, as we're constantly told, is but a gnat's wing away from genocide.
What would you think about a leader who would always break protocol to go and meet with small children? Pick them up, talk to them, joke with them, and always carried candy just in case he ran into kids? Sounds like a caring guy.
That was Stalin. So much for "feelings" and "absolute evil." And he'd do that with kids even if he was going to sign an order for their parents execution later that day. He'd also do that with kids if he was going to promote their parents later that day. Liking kids, not evil. Most of the rest of his psyche, 
. 
