Grieving, friendship, family and philosophy

I grieved for

The closure that would never happen,

Even though closure is a myth

 

I grieved for

The childhood fear and anger

Of him, and about him

That I could never more fully express to him,

Never more get him to understand,

Never again try to make him understand.

 

I grieved for

The fact that he never would abandon

The myth of control

Over his family, his fatherhood

And the narratives he had spun to himself

About all of this.

 

I grieved for

The fact that he had walled himself up

Over the bits of my childhood fear and anger

That I had told him about,

As he built that wall of control higher

Against the perceived Mongol invaders,

Or whatever he thought of these challenges.

 

I grieved for

Any form of an “us”

That growing or changing, could have continued.

 

But

I grieved for

Me

Most of all

Because I still hadn’t gotten past that fear enough.

 

Real friends,

Friends for life,

Whether in families or not

Let their friends grow

In ways that are good for them,

And, offer suggestions first,

Stronger comments second,

And maybe rebukes next,

When they see friends growing in unhealthy ways.

 

— As inspired by Kieran Setiya

The biggest lies ...

Are the ones we tell ourselves.

And, with the occasional Hitlerian sub-humanizing lies, these are lies that primarily affect ourselves, and they're primarily internal.

No, they're not Dunning-Krueger effect lies about how wonderfully skilled and intelligent we are in cases where we're not Lake Wobegon above-average geniuses. (That said, they would come in second place.)

No, I see what I call motivational lies as the biggest lies. And, they are?

They're kind of the reverse of Aesop sour grapes lies.

We instead tell ourselves "I really want to do X" before venturing out to do X, or a larger task that in part includes doing X. Variants could be "I'll do X better this time" if we've had problems with X before and similar.

These are the type of internal lies that easily can be flipped to sour grapes lies at some point in the future, of course.

Example: "I really didn't want Y so badly as to work that hard on X," or "Y wasn't worth that much work on X," or similar.

But, we tell ourselves these original motivational lies when we're in a place of partial ambivalence. And, often, the ambivalence is more emotional than intellectual. We can't, or don't want to, commit fully to the work to do Y because something just doesn't feel right about Y. Per the likes of Antonio Damasio, we need to unpack those feelings first, before we go down the road of motivational lies to ourselves.

'No regrets'? I have plenty in my life

Time and time again, I hear people claim they have no regrets about how they’ve lived their life up to this point.

Taken literally, that means to me that they’d live their entire life the same way if they had a chance to live it over. Really?

There’s three problems here, as I see it. One is viewing “good/bad” (in a growthfulness, not a moral sense) as two polarities, not a continuum. The second is “no regrets” is imprecise, and probably doesn’t mean what it literally says in such cases. The third relates to the first second and impinges upon issues of free will.

The first issue? I believe life, and life issues, can be more, or less growthful. Even ones I regret going through because of bad decisions on my part. (Although I may guilt-trip myself, I can’t honestly be regretful about issues where my range of choice was constrained, or I was reacting to a bad decision/choice by another person; that’s the free will angle.) So, “regret” isn’t totally a bad thing. If I can look back, and see something to learn from the situation, to see how I didn’t handle it as well as I could have, or as well as I could have with more knowledge, then regret’s not bad.

At the same time, that “more knowledge” is another key. If there’s no way I could have known more at the time, whether conscious or unconscious knowledge, that is that. I’ll get to that more in a minute, too.

The imprecision of language? This is one of the few areas where I have fairly substantial agreement with Plato, with the caveat that I don’t limit myself to writing as a way of allegedly obscuring, or even bending or destroying meaning. Oral communication, contra him and the pre-Upanishad Brahmin priests of India, can be manipulated just as well, even when in a mnemonically-driven sacral structure.

I think what people really mean is, “I don’t have any regrets about past actions to which I am too attached.” That’s much healthier – if true. But … maybe it isn’t always true?

Maybe it isn’t so bad to retain a modicum of regret as a learning tool NOT as a “kick myself” tool but as a learning tool.

Finally, there's all sorts of free will aspects.

To the degree free will even exists, it may not exist on a conscious level. To the degree it exists within semiconscious subselves, it's constrained by past elements in our lives and how they've shaped the psyches of those subselves, as well as the fictitious unitary self that claims to be in the driver's seat. The idea of regret may be the right idea in one sense, but not at all in another sense. How can we regret an action that was not undertaken or done with full freedom? There may be a partialness of regret, but, can there be anything more?

"Emotional dissonance" - a term that needs more use?

I have briefly mentioned the phrase, as a parallel to "cognitive dissonance," with support groups and friends.

In a comment on a SkepticBlog post about The Amazing Meeting 9 and cognitive dissonance, I mentioned the idea there.

As cognition is not done as a sterile intellectual exercise ... I think we need to stress this more.

One person responded that s/he thought that "emotions" were included in cognition, and in cognitive dissonance. I responded:

Understood on what “cognitive” entails. That said, it’s my guess that the “average Joe/Jane” thinks “intellectual” when they hear the term “cognitive,” though, or may at the least think the “intellectual” is being emphasized to the degree of less to much less attention on the emotions.

And, that, in term, gets to the “image of skepticism,” if you will. My skepticism (or better yet, per David Hume, my empirical stance) is driven by the interaction of the passions and reason.

Obviously, emotions are visible when one is being a dick, rather than when one is not … but showing positive emotional reasons for skepticism is the “hearts” of the “hearts and minds” battle.

This person then, in my opinion, undercut her previous comment. I will quote this person:

“(E)motional dissonance” implies that emotions are to blame for poor reasoning, which is usually not the case.

I humbly but firmly beg to differ.

Look at the religious right segment of the GOP, which continually votes on emotion even though the party's corporatist leaders really don't care about it that much. Ditto on tea partiers letting themselves be astroturfed and not starting a third party. Many "moderate" antivaxxers who aren't into conspiracy theories let themselves be swayed by emotions even though they know, intellectually, that expert medical opinion is usually right.

Hume reminded us, after all, that reason needs to follow the passions, not the other way around. This doesn't mean that reason accepts what the passions within us say, but it does mean it accepts as a starting point what the passions are saying to us.

If we want to take "emotional dissonance" more narrowly .... it affects our decision making all the time. We're conflicted about going to a family gathering because we like some people but hate others. We're emotionally conflicted about taking a new job. Etc.