Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Three

BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER THREE: SELF-DETERMINATION AND AUTHENTICITY

Our culture has taught us to value being self-determining: making our own choices about important events in our lives rather than having those choices made for us by others. That value is expressed in our desire to be authentic: to speak and act as who we truly are rather than shaping all our responses to fit other people’s expectations. Self-determination and authenticity are different sides of the same issue: Each requires the other for its full expression.

Each of us can learn to trust our own sense of what means most to us and accept it as our guise as we seek to find our own direction.

Relying upon anyone’s advice as to what you “should” or “shouldn’t” do will have you living borrowed pieces of other people’s lives instead of being responsible for your own life. No one is more suited to be you for you than you are.

When others respond with mistrust to my choices and actions, I can describe in the most caring way I know that I do appreciate their concerns and suggestions, but that as part of my own growth I have to be accountable to myself and to make certain decisions for myself. That may not “make everything all right,” but at least it opens the door to dialogue – especially when demonstrating my respect for them may help them to demonstrate greater respect for me.

Existentialist Martin Heidegger – “When we take refuge in the decisions of others it is not long before we think what others think, feel what others feel, and do what others do.”

Soren Kierkegaard used the term authenticity to refer to being in touch with our inner selves and acting from that full contact with who we are. To be authentic means to be true to myself. I cannot be authentic and put up a false front before others at the same time.

Being True To Ourselves

In each area of my life, I can ask, “How much room do I have to be myself in this situation? How much of the room I have do I use?”

It’s possible to be authentic when I’m not happy or comfortable as well as when I’m feeling good. When I’m lonely, for example, I don’t need to pretend that I’m not. If I reveal my loneliness to you, there’s at least a chance that we’ll touch each other in a way that has meaning for both of us. Even if we don’t, my attempt to communicate has intrinsic value. But if I keep silent when I want to tell you how I feel, we probably won’t make contact in more than a superficial way.

Steppingstones are significant turning points or periods in our lives – pleasant, painful, or neither – that brought us where we are today. They can help us recognize the “deeper than conscious” directions in which we move with our life currents.

Being authentic requires self-trust.

Being open with others can be frightening, for it increases my vulnerability and lessens my options for manipulation. In a way, I’m safer when you’re mystified by my cloaks, masks, and shadows, for then you seldom know just who or where I am.

If you and I are authentic with each other, we may become very close. The general principle is clear: To express yourself as you are, with minimal pretense, allows for a less stressful and more satisfying life.

Personal and Social Selves

Newborn infants have no roles to play. They just are, completely true to themselves. We could say that a newborn is entirely a personal self.

Conflict with and response to others lead to the beginnings of a social self. This early social self includes all of the personal self. Thus integrated, there’s nothing that the infant is unwilling to reveal to others.

The social self, or persona as Jung called it – a word that comes from the masks ancient Greek actors wore to symbolize the roles they played – serves two purposes: to make a specific impression on other people, and to conceal the inner self.

When people identify heavily with the persona and deny the rest of who they are, psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1969) speaks of a divided self.

We may stay locked into certain roles out of habit.

Each of us has the option to present ourselves in our social roles in ways that moves closer to who we are inside, so that our personal and social selves overlap more.

Acting As If

When I’m being authentic, I’m voicing my real wants and needs. When I’m concealing and manipulating, I’m testing you.

When I trust you to deal with me as I am, I communicate clearly who I am and what I want. When I act from the part of my social self that’s different from my personal self, I speak and act as if I’m thinking and feeling something other than I am.

When I’m stating clearly what I want, I’m likely to be decisive and direct. I’m in touch with my strength – and so are you.

Hypocrisy is a particular kind of as-ifery. It means being phony, presenting a public front of seeming to act in the service of higher principles than I really am. If I tell people I’m doing something because I want to help my community, or because it’s “the American Way,” when in fact my reason is because it helps my business or gives me a tax writeoff, I’m being hypocritical.

The Script

Psychiatrist Eric Berne speaks of the parental instructions we’ve received about how to act and be, and what to do with our lives, as our scripts (1961). Our scripts are also our own doing.

Until I realize that I’m acting out an obsolete script, I may be struck with some ineffective, unproductive, or even self-destructive behavior. When I follow a script that no longer fits me, I expend a lot of energy trying to bottle up the spontaneous flow of my life force. I don’t have to waste my energy in stopping myself. I can judiciously appraise where I have room to be myself in a fuller way and where I don’t.

HOW WE BECOME STRANGERS TO OURSELVES

Disconfirmation, Confirmation, and Pseudoconfirmation

Through my responses to what you do and say, I confirm or disconfirm your sense of who you are.

If significant others validate what you think, feel, and do, you’re encouraged to develop a secure, reliable sense of yourself. IF you get feedback that reinforces your own impressions, you learn to trust your ability to discern what’s going on around you. You’re likely to develop a clear sense of contact – of where you leave off and other people being, rather than becoming enmeshed in the sticky web of what Perls terms confluence, where you’re not sure of your boundaries.

But when others act in ways that deny y our actions and your perceptions of yourself and your world, you may become confused and uncertain about your identity. In order to keep the love and protection of significant others, you may choose to repress your questions and misgivings and agree with their insistence that they know you better than you know yourself.

What’s different about words and actions and confirm and those that disconfirm? A confirmatory response, say Laing, acknowledges your action – though it doesn’t necessarily agree with it. Disconfirmation, by contrast, has a tangential quality. My response appears to deal with your concern, but actually it deals with an aspect of the matter that concerns me – not the one that concerns you.

An especially subtle and fascinating process is that of pseudoconfirmation. This is pretense at confirmation, giving teh appearance of it without the substance. I tell you who you are, then I confirm my definition of you. I induce you to accept my ideas about you, then confirm your attempts to apply them to yourself.

“A friend is a person who leaves you with all your freedom intact but obliges you to be fully waht you are.” In that spirit, in being authentic, I don’t want to intrude on your authenticity.

Carl Rogers describes an attitude that he terms “unconditional positive regard,” which he defines as “an atmosphere with…demonstrates ‘I care’; not ‘I care for you if you behave thus and so’” (1961). This kid of acceptance is not so easy. It can take hard work to set aside my goals for you – what I want for you and what I think would be good for you – and leave you room to be yourself. But it opens the way for me to know you as you are.

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter One

“BEING & CARING, A Psychology for Living,” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984.

Selections curated by The Happy President.

PREFACE

We all write, direct, and act the parts we play in the theaters of our lives. These roles grow out of how we feel about ourselves, how we want the world to see us, and the constraints of our environments. Within these contexts, each of us has the option of finding ways to live that help us to feel good and know ourselves more deeply – to create and flow and to stretch and reach.

Being and Caring begins, in Part One, by setting out some guiding principles:

Learn to appreciate and enjoy yourself, your life, and other people, rather than depreciatively judging all these. Live in a self-determining, authentic way that’s based primarily on who you are rather than what others want you to be. Develop the neglected sides of who you are and become a more fully integrated person. Increase your freedom and power by accepting responsibility for your behavior. Sharpen your ability to be aware of events both within and outside yourself.

Part Two presents skills and information about interacting with other people. Parts Three, Four, and Five consider emotion, cognition, and overt behavior. The order is psychological: Emotional clarity facilitates clear thinking, and both feeling and thinking affect our actions. Part Six returns to our connections with others with an emphasis on intimate and other long-term relationships.

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS

CHAPTER ONE: PERSONAL EVOLUTION

Look in the mirror: What tales do the lines in your own face tell? In our first few years, we all live with the faces we were born with. After that, we start wearing the faces and living the lives we’ve created for ourselves.

Each of us becomes more of who we can be in part by being fully who we are now. “Don’t push the river,” said Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, “it flows by itself.” So often, to fit our ideas about who we should or could be, we stop ourselves from acknowledging who we are. We don’t have to rush headlong into changing ourselves, nor feel unhappy about who we are today to evolve in constructive ways. As we recognize our complexities – our diverse parts that interact, conflict, demand, and counterdemand – we’re more likely to appreciate our processes, purposes, and actions.

Finding ways to enjoy and appreciate ourselves, those around us, and our interactions with the circumstances of our lives is part of what might be called personal wisdom – something as unique as your fingerprints, signature, or way of laughing. Such wisdom includes actively seeking choices and alternatives rather than passively playing the role of a “victim of circumstances.” You can confront your reality creatively rather than accepting other people’s solutions and limitations.

THE EMERGING YEARS OF “PEOPLE PSYCHOLOGY”

Amid the material growth and prosperity that followed World War 2…Unhappiness was seen as a defect in a life of all possible goods. A popular textbook from the forties and fifties comments that a “maladjusted” person was often viewed as morally “bad” or “wrong”.

Adjustment textbooks, valuable to many readers though they were, suffered from two significant limitations. First the goal was some abstraction called “normality.” Normal is “an accepted standard, model, or pattern; especially corresponding to the median or average.” The old “adjustment psychology” sought to help troubled people become like everyone else instead of accepting their own uniqueness.

Second, most of the values and conditions to which a person was asked to “adjust” were unquestioned.

Fritz Perls (1947) argued that in the context of a society changing as rapidly as ours, it’s not clear just what we’re supposed to adjust to. He held that the demand to adjust can interfere with the self-reliance that maturity requires. To adjust blindly, he asserted, is to participate in the collective madness inherent in some aspect of our society.

Jungian analyst James Hillman goes a step farther, pointing out that the “manic consumerism and overtiredness and sleep depressions” of many clients in therapy today reflect the environments in which they live. We need to develop a psychopathology of civilization. As we discover how our culture is crazy, we can conceive of saner, wiser ways to redirect it.

THE MYSTIQUE OF SELF-FULFILLMENT

The humanistic orientation in psychology. (Theorist) Rogers emphasizes a person’s capacity to define the central issues of his or her life. Perls identified the fragmented nature of many people’s experience and the need to move toward a sense of integration and wholeness. Maslow described needs common to all of us as we seek both to be our unique selves and to understand the ways of the world we live in. Their perspectives can help each of us participate creatively in our world without being consumed by it.

The self-fulfillment ethic appears to have three different roots. One is the emergence of a psychology that aims at helping people discover themselves at a deep level, use themselves creatively, and achieve a full, happy life that doesn’t depend entirely on possessions and status. A second is our historic attitude of commitment to individualism. A third is our consumption-oriented economic system that relentlessly exhorts people to buy everything they want – today!

Is the quest for self-fulfillment an unmixed blessing? Some think not. “You’re obsessed with your own fulfillment but you don’t help others with theirs,” such criticism runs. “There’s no cooperative glue there, no shared effort of the kind that’s needed to build a mutually nourishing society.”

In their movement toward greater self-knowledge, people go through stages of development.

The next step beyond self-fulfillment is to take our more fulfilled selves into mutually enriching social relationships with others.

BEYOND CONFORMITY AND THE “ME GENERATION” – BEING FOR ME AND CARING ABOUT YOU

From birth until death, a person can grow in his or her ability to be with other people in mutually fulfilling ways. At the same time, the person is developing an ability to be independent, separate, and unique. Thus contemporary theorists speak of an interplay between two motives: individuation and relatedness. At every point, both are active. The two tendencies not only coexist but support each other. The more I know and the better I feel about myself, the more supportive, challenging, and caring I can be in my relationship with you. And vice versa. This interplay represents the guiding perspective of this book.

When I’ve learned to stand on my own feet, I’m ready to move toward you and with you. It’s then that I discover what synergy means: self-interest enlightened by appreciative awareness of myself in your existence and of your participation in my world. We do for each other in ways that enrich us, too, and do for ourselves in ways that enrich each other.

LIVING BY OUR REAL CONCERNS

Taking Time for Assessment

Taking stock of our lives is something we need to do more.

Living and discovering in ways that embody my life themes may require important redirections of my energy. These may involve changes wihtin my life. My deep concerns are found both in the far future and in how I do what I do each day.

I need to find a way to feel all right about what I do. This doesn’t mean “Chip up and put a sunny face on what’s nasty and uncomfortable.” Rather, it means that if I’ve examined how I use my time and energy and find no more effective alternative, I may need to go easier on myself, and recognize that, all things considered, I’m doing the best I can for me and those important to me.

Clarifying Our Directions

Evolving toward ways of living that demonstrate our own values and priorities involves a self-determination that’s more than just rebellion against others’ expectations. It’s an active process of redefining what we want to do with who we know ourselves to be. How do I know if the direction I choose is a productive one? If it leads me to make better use of who I am, I’m willing to call it growth.

I can distrust my ability to accomplish anything when I focus only on the finished product, and forget that the process of creating somethign can be as rewarding as completing it. When I’m afraid I’ll never make it, I don’t even start. Perhaps if we pay attention to the ways we frighten ourselves, that act will be a start toward what we want to accomplish.

ETHICS AND WISDOM

The direction of our evolution is influenced by the natur of our ethics. Our approach is this: to experience our acts in terms of how helpful or harmful they are – how useful or counterproductive – to whom or what, how under what circumstances.

Our knowing process becomes distorted when we’re required to learn large amounts of information in which we find little meaning or value. Understanding is seeing relationships among facts that are important to me. As I develop understanding, I become able to use my knowledge.

Wisdom goes beyond understanding. Wisdom is the knowledge of the spirit. We tend to expect a different kid of knowing from our spirituality than from our heads – a very personal integration of knowing, feeling, sensing, and doing.

Money and Value

What is money? Where does it come from? How do we use it? How does it make us feel?

The current climate of the world is that of massive job layoffs, businesses closing to keep people healthy, and humans scared of getting a paycheck to afford to live each month. When we’ve operated on this “you have to work for money” idea, and when there is no work to be done, what do we do? Of course there are things that can happen that improve humans lives but don’t “earn” money. But the money system, as it stands, is broken. We won’t be having as many jobs in the future (yay!) because we have a new system that makes life easy for everyone.

We’ve got to adapt the system. We have to look at finance and see what things really cost, and at what cost they are to Earth and humanity. We have to stop pollutive industries and we need to use technology to improve quality of life for each and every one of us. We are operating on a hundred year old system and it needs to change.

Money came about as a neutral way to exchange goods and services. It makes sense. I have cows that make milk, you have wheat that can be made into bread. How do we figure out what is a fair trade? Well, whatever the two parties agree upon. But milk goes bad after some time, and wheat can get moldy. What if I want to give some of my milk now but don’t want any wheat? Now we create a neutral, non-perishable form of transfer in the form of metal coins, or shells, or any neutral item. Money was created because it doesn’t “go bad” like milk. It can be taken and used for anything. I like it. It makes sense.

Traders would bring goods to market and then sell them to buyers who liked getting things they could not provide for themselves. When you have foreign travelers, you will have some foreign forms of currency. Some people use gold coins, some people use silver coins, some people use shells from their local beach. With these different forms of currency, we now need to create an exchange rate and thus have someone that sits at a table – in Italian table is banco, where the word for bank comes from – and makes sure you can exchange one form of currency for another at the same value. These table bankers now became middle men – only dealing with money and not the exchange of goods.

When you accumulate a bunch of gold coins, what do you do with them? Well, you could store them in your house but you don’t have much security and people could come and steal it pretty easily. So now we have fortified buildings that will hold our gold for us, keep it safe, and let us access it whenever we want. We also realized that for larger transactions it is a lot easier to have a piece of paper with a value on it rather than dragging a roomful of gold across town. So we have representative money – paper money that says it is worth something backed up by the bank holding your gold. It says that whomever has this note has the right to access so much gold in that particular bank. Cool.

What do banks do with all that gold sitting around? They figured out that you don’t come back to take much out very often, so would you notice if it weren’t all there? Well, they take the gold that you put in and loan it to someone else who wants to do something but can’t afford it on their own. The bank loans your money to other people. You don’t get a say to who is getting your money now that it is in the bank’s hands. The bank makes money off of interest from the loans. But why? What service are they really providing except for using someone else’s money without them knowing hoping that they don’t come to claim their gold at once?

Cows. That’s where the concept of interest comes from. Let’s say I have a heard of cattle but want to get on a boat and search for exotic spices. You have a boat but are sick of sailing and wouldn’t mind looking after the cows for the year or so it takes you to come back. What happens to a heard of cows after a year? They procreate, making little cow babies. So your one hundred cows are now hundred and seven cows. You can still keep the hundred cows you originally left, but it’s easy to let the seven new cows go to the guy that watched them for you. Makes sense.

Banks charging interest on money loans make no sense. Cows growing makes sense. Money to make money is immoral. Money to create value and add wealth is moral.

How these big corporations are making money off of humanity is by selling information that we don’t even realize they have on us. Anyone with a new car, one with cameras and GPS and all the fun stuff – those car companies track you and sell your information to the highest bidder. It knows where you go, what you listen to, and has videos of the area you live. Alexa hears everything you say. Siri listens to you. Targeted ads are everywhere, but I see a world where we don’t need more cheap products, we need more life-improving products that empower the individual.

What is the shift? It will be easy, actually. We look at corporate finance and take all the weeds out. We look at efficient energy systems using the modern technology that these corporations have access to and we shift from a weaponry making system to a livingry making system. It’s nice to see business with factory infrastructures switching production from cars or clothes to ventilators and scrubs for the health and safety of humanity. We can change.

The Earth wants to be played on. She wants humans to be happy, outside, laughing and jumping and playing on her with your friends, family, loved ones. She doesn’t want you stuck in a cubicle staring at emails all day. She doesn’t need you to make another million dollars on Wall Street, she needs you to laugh on the beach and jump in the ocean.

We do not need a bigger economy. We do not need more jobs. We have the technology, the knowhow, and the strength to create new systems where jobs are optional, you pursue what you want, and there is a basic level of care for each and every human on the planet. Earth does not charge rent for its inhabitants.

Transparent Finances for All. Removal of Corporate Personhood and the freeing up of all the money they weaseled out of paying.

What are taxes, and where do they go? Why do corporations not have to pay what they owe yet individuals do?

We also have to blend local and global economies. I’m for a one Earth currency, so no one is making money betting on exchange rates. Food becomes more local – grown in the Earth in your own backyard or a nearby public plot. Let’s disperse our population and get connected to the Land again. There are inexpensive high quality housing options that have been available and we are not using them. With technology it will be easy for us to have the luxuries we are used to but with an energy efficient, Earth-friendly way.

Money is formed out of a transaction. It’s when two or more parties need to agree on an exchange – putting a value on what something is worth. Money is not actually value. Or even real energy. It is a representation of energy and that is it. It is what we agree it to be. It came about naturally but then got manipulated by banks.

Profit seems to be a nasty word to me. Value, wealth, abundance are nice words. We can still use money as a form of exchange, but the cost of everyday items will be reduced considerably. It will be easier to live and breathe and play. We might need to build more theme parks.

Self-Evident

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

Seven of the most famous words in American history, from The Declaration of Independence, written mostly by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. The original wording of “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” was edited by Benjamin Franklin to rephrase it as “We hold these truths to be self-evident”.

What is the meaning of self-evident? I don’t have to ask Ben or Tom. Self-Evident is knowing for yourself what is true. Self-evident is using your own mind and reasoning. Self-evident is making your own evidence.

Prove to yourself what is right for you. The signers of the Declaration of Independence declared that what was right for their own selves. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of Happiness.

If you like those words, please keep living them. But if you don’t like those words, find some other words and keep living those. The French prefer Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Brazil promotes Order and Progress. India knows that Truth alone Triumphs.

America is not about preaching one way over the other, America is about accepting differing ideas and making sure that every individual is able to live freely. There are no borders to ideas. There are no walls that can keep humanity from living its chosen destiny. America is just as much an idea, a way of life, a perspective on the world, as it is a physical place.

What truths do you hold to be self-evident?

For me, I’ll stick with Life, Liberty, and Happiness.

-The Happy President, January 22, 2019

Freedom of Speech

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

The ability to communicate with each other is the most valuable thing we have as a society – it is how we learn, grow, work together, build things, play games, and connect to something bigger than ourselves. Communicating is how we know what can keep us alive, so we don’t have to relive the same lessons over and over again. The ability to record ourselves is how humanity saves itself and the Earth. Communication is how we know we are not alone.

“What Hath God Wrought?” was the first message instantly communicated over long distance, which in 1844, was the 40 miles between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland. It sounded more like “dot dash dash, dot dot dot dot, dot dash, dash…” because it was sent on a telegram wire via Morse Code, but it made sense to the telegraph operator at the time.

The first human voice recorded was a Frenchwoman singing the folk song “Au Claire de la Lune” in 1860, but it wasn’t until Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1877 that the world was able to record and playback sound regularly.

The first radio broadcast happened around 1900 to share weather reports, but radio wasn’t a regular communicating device to the masses for another 20 years, and then there was television, then the internet, and now we have cell phone apps.

The United States President has always had to communicate with the American public. George Washington toured the country on horseback and published in newspapers. Rutherford B. Hayes installed telephones to the White House. Franklin Delano Roosevelt embraced radio with his weekly Fireside Chats. John F. Kennedy looked good on camera. Bill Clinton established the first website for the White House. And of course, there’s today’s Presidential Twitter account.

With technology giving humanity the ability to record and share freely, why haven’t I been able to openly give and exchange my thoughts? I am a modern woman. I have a phone. I have a Twitter account. I have all the things necessary to become President, except the ability to communicate. To talk. To speak my mind. Share my opinion. Admit that maybe I am scared by what’s going on and I’m more scared of what will happen if things keep going the way they are.

So no more silence.

(a breath).

Now what do I speak? Sometimes it is easier to speak using someone else’s words first, so here are some quotes.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

That is from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1949. Way before Twitter. Before YouTube. Before the internet, and blu-rays, and dvds, and VHS tapes. Before CDs and cassette tapes and 8 Tracks.

I really like it. So here it is again.

Blogs. Podcasts. A true expression of the freedom of speech.

It’s the First Amendment for a reason. These rights are given to the people by the people because it is so important for an individual to be able to freely express themselves, no matter what popular opinion dictates.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell.

I’m someone who never wants to upset anyone. I want the whole world to be happy and fulfilled and merrily singing along to whatever tune they wish to march along with. Having an opinion seems to bring immediate insults, backlash, questioning. It’s like stirring up the muck at the bottom of the lake. It was a clean lake and now it’s dirty because of what you are stirring up. Of course I want a clean lake. But it’s not actually clean if the surface is the only thing that looks clean, and there’s all this muck at the bottom just settled. The opinion’s job is to stir up the muck so it can be cleaned out. Let’s talk, let’s figure it out. Let’s face the fact that no one really knows what we are doing and so let’s all just hold hands and make it work as we go along. Let’s really clean the lake. I mean that both figuratively and literally. Water is the most important resource on Earth.

Freedom of Speech, and of expression, is the most important resource to the individual human.

So now what?

Start expressing yourself. Even just as a blog that no one will read. Write to yourself, learn your own opinions. Make up your mind about things. Figure out for yourself what works for you and the expressions you prefer to bring to the world.

You are special, because no one else in all of existence has the exact same experience as you. The world needs your lessons to be shared. Your opinions are yours for a reason. You are safe, because you live in a world that knows how important expression is to the human soul.

Thank you for reading, and thank you to the people and institutions who promote and protect the Freedom of Speech.

-The Happy President, January 21, 2019