Humans always strive for perfection. It's something in us. We can conceptualize perfection. We also know when and how we fall short, and in what myriad ways we fail.
To an extent striving for perfection in the individual is fine. To an extent, even, it is a -- not unique but the degree of application is unique -- part of the American character. When I first came to the US as an exchange student, I was startled at the EXISTENCE of a self-help shelf. Things on how to cope with brokenness, how to improve your performance, etc. ad nauseum.
Some of them were very obviously insane or infantile -- I came over the first time in 1980, which is to say at the very end of the 70s when everything was infected with the pseudo-just-so-stories of Freudianism. (In fact, I've been reading a lot of books that came out late sixties to the early eighties, and it's amazing how every author -- every single one -- dives into Freudianism to attempt to make the book "profound" or "literary.") -- but a lot of the techniques described still worked.
The techniques are usually behavioral, which, as an explanation for what humans are, for the human ethos, sucks, but as a way to modify and regulate your behavior for the inside works more or less unfailingly. (More or less. Humans can always invent new ways to fail.)
Note I said from the inside. From the outside... Well, every time a dog salivates, a Pavlovian must ring a bell, to paraphrase Heinlein.
Which brings us to the urge to improve humans from the outside. Those other humans. Yes, them, outside my head. While I might be falling short of my own potential, brother, what's their excuse?
I mean, I won't deny that I'm not a particularly charitable person. And I confess I suffer from intellectual pride. But there are exchanges one witnesses online -- particularly between people we know both exist -- where the only possible response is "I didn't realize the baseline of humanity is mentally dead." Particularly when one knows neither of these people are actually stupid by any other marker.
The truth is that raising kids who tested in the stratospheric line for IQ made me very skeptical of IQ as a measurement of any use for anything but academic achievement (And even then! For instance, until trained both sons scored abysmally in multiple choice tests, due to an inability to accept an answer could ever be "that simple" or "that stupid." Instead they would try to complicate things and justify in their heads why an obviously and clearly absurd answer "must be" right.) Because while the kids -- saltational development is a thing -- could demonstrate some bizarrely high abilities, at the same time they could pull mistakes that you couldn't even figure out how someone could make. And then I'd sit there, holding my head and going "And if these are the creme de la creme, how do other kids even survive?" (I have an answer to that, actually. Normal kids don't get in half as much trouble, and don't come up with half that many crazy things to do, that could either blow up the house or poison them, or whatever. It's like raising my very smart kittens. It's driving me bonkers. I've now raised fifteen cats, but none that got into drawers that are child-locked, to find twist ties to eat.)
Everyone seemingly is incredibly stupid at times. Geniuses just are stupid faster, harder, and from above, so to put it.
Come on, you know if you look back, there were entire periods of your life when you were convinced of something, or attempting to do something that in retrospect was incredibly stupid or at the very best misguided. (Around here we call it Sarah's so called writing career. It continues, too.) But at the time you couldn't see it, and what you were doing seemed logical. (To be fair, I've known it for some time. And it's not logical, it's compulsive.)
However, from the outside in, looking at other people, it's easy to think you know exactly what they should be doing, what they should be trying, how they should be solving their issues and mitigating their trouble.
In my fifties, I finally understood mom's most annoying habit. No, seriously, I'm now 61. I've been on my own since 22, so almost the time I was a child in her house, doubled, but if I mention I'm doing anything at all, from cleaning something to making something, I get advice as though I were about 10. And heaven forbid I'm having some problem, health or motivation or something, and mention it, because the instruction will be very minute, take hours, and tell me everything I've known for 39 years, give or take.
I understood it, because looking at my sons as they launched off into their own lives, the impulse to tell them what to do, so they avoided making the same mistakes I made was almost unendurable. You could see them tottering off to do exactly the most stupid things you did. And you wanted to physically reach out and redirect them.
It took a lot of self-control, and even more self-reflection to realize that no, it wasn't my mistakes they were making, but their own. While sometimes there were echos, mostly because there is a familial temperament (depressive and anxious and neurotic as a shaved cat-- like you're surprised, right?) their path was not mine (thank heavens, even if both of them write) and their time is not mine, and the country they grew up in is not mine (We could ease up on the echoes of recent developments any time now, or why do you think my PTSD is keeping me up on the black-swan blind?) In the end turned out some of the things they were doing I thought were horrible mistakes, were not. And some of the actions I approved of based on my own experiences, might have been mistakes, and--
Now, these are our kids -- speaking in the general -- that we have that impulse about. And the impulse is often wrong. I know in the village, from listening in to the gossip of women, that half the "nice girls" women hoped their sons would marry were disastrous. And have of the "that whore" they did marry did turn out to be very good wives, and often very good to the complaining mother in law, as well. Yes, sometimes parents are right after the kids are adult, and beyond the obvious "don't drink too much, drug too much, whore or waste money" but-- It's not often.
Almost all my friends were their family's tragedy, taking a path that the parents didn't like, and the extended family disapproved of. Often they were their own tragedy, balked of the initial path for some reason, physical, mental or just fate. Often they spent years lamenting the path not taken.
But in the end, we all came to a place where we're doing pretty well, at peace with ourselves, and looking back, we can't see it any other way. (Which is why the so called career still exists. That and because I enjoy writing more than having written.)
The point is....
Self-improvement is a grand and noble ideal if undertaken from the inside out. And it has been known to score some remarkable successes.
We often hear about them, and not just when someone is trying to sell you something.
Sure, about half of the prisoners who gave up drugs and found Jesus in jail will fall back into criminal behavior once they come out. Given what militates against them, from habit to the friends they choose, to the circles they're used to navigating in, and the way they are used to things working, the big shock is that only half of them do so.
We tend to hear about the big transformation projects in movie-of-the-week type thing, and it's always huge: the drug abuser who went clean and became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur; the alcoholic who went clean and became a philantropist, etc. etc. etc.
But those are not the most common transformations. In fact, I'd say those are the rarest, because they happen to people who had reached a level where saving themselves is almost impossible. It's not one habit or one tendency, but an entire complex of them pushing them a certain way. And those are very hard to break.
The most common transformation will be the C student who formed new study habits and seemingly overnight becomes an A student. The basement dweller who wakes up one day and realizes he must stand on his own two feet, and starts reaching for everything and anything to make that goal happen, including putting in a lot of work. And similar cases, which we all know.
These cases we know and see every day, just about. We don't fully remark on them, just treat them as "Oh, he finally grew up." Or "Oh, she got serious."
I've done this a number of times, with different things. Including fiction writing. I do really well with a regular writing schedule, and habits. This makes perfect sense, if you know I'm ADD AF. Habits or medication are the only ways to deal with it. But habits break, usually with.... moves, illness, various issues. Like, you go through two or three weeks of not being able to do whatever you made an habit of. So I will fall off the wagon, and have to reform the habit again. (I'm in the middle of this, which might or might not be perceptible from that side of the screen.)
The power of doing this is outright transformative. And therefore it gives people illusions.
"If I can change that much, I who am so superior," okay, most of us know that's BS, but self-obviously a lot of people don't, "Surely if these mugs just did what I told them, and worked at it the way I tell them to, they too could be perfect. And then the world would be perfect."
That is where the issue starts, because that's not how any of this works. Habits imposed from outside are notorious for not sticking, if they ever take in the first place.
I think this illusion that you can change others from outside is one of the oldest temptations of mankind.
But in the twentieth century it became the illusion of nations.
More tomorrow.
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