Peace Amid the Anger and Chaos
“Just let it go!” How many times have you been told that by friends? How did you go with it? Have you ever given it as advice? Were you like me and replied, “Yeah it’s ok, that’s what I do.” Yet in your mind you know full well you’ll set aside a little compartment to store, feed and nurture your resentment. And why not? None of what had happened was correct or proper. It was all falsehood perpetuated by others who obviously aren’t committed to your well-being, in fact you suspect their motives are quite the reverse. So outside you project a persona where it’s cool and you’re above all that rubbish. But secretly you’re stewing, and you will do so for quite a while.
Real private peace that endures in the face of injustice can be an elusive prey when one’s life is constantly being buffeted by chaos. Most people dislike chaos, and while it can go from being slightly disordered and uncomfortable to being almost soul destroying I have come to feel that this doesn’t need to be the case. As we now know our brains possess enormous plasticity and are quite pliable. It may not be a simple thing to change decades of well-worn cognitive pathways, and to achieve change of any magnitude, but I suggest there are certain things that we need to do. There are things we need to acknowledge, and there are methods of thinking that may need some radical surgery. The following are some suggestions that right now seem to work for me.
No 1 – “Know Thyself”
Three aphorisms were written across the top of the entry to the temple of the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. They were "Nothing to Excess", "Surety Brings Ruin" and “Know Thyself”. Mortals would approach the temple, and through the priests in the temple make enquiries of the Oracle. The most common types of questions she was asked were what are the future plans of the gods? The oracle would enter a trance, make some obscure and unrecognisable articulation, and then priests would interpret it all. The aphorism “Know Thyself” as you entered meant that knowing the intention of the gods was a meaningless exercise if the seeker had a deluded view of their own character or abilities. Mortals were nothing like the gods and only a healthy self-knowledge with its acute awareness of one’s limitations would enable you to maintain a realistic perspective. "The un-examined life is not worth living" was a declaration by Socrates. It is therefore a long established concept, and an essential starting place in any journey to peace.
There’s a witty observation within scientific circles that says, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, such thinking proves you don't.” In my experience the same might be said about knowing oneself. “If you have no doubt about who your inner self really is, chances are you’re wrong.” Fortunately much happens to us as we mature that brings balance, commonsense and realism into our personal equation, and ultimately it softens the volume our early hubris.
So do we conclude that self awareness is a distant hope, or are there things that we can do to enhance, open up, and improve the process? In my opinion, definitely yes. For a start it helps to remember that reflective self-analysis is not naturally the domain of the young, although this is not always the case. There is a description that is sometimes applied to a young person that says that they have a “wisdom beyond their years”. This suggests that older age is not always a prerequisite. Self awareness is more about the individual’s ability to cut through our many delusions and get to the truth of the matter, and age gives no certainty of this happening, just as youth doesn’t automatically equate to self-deception, but the ability to interpret and reflect on the bigger issues of the past does seem to be associated more with maturity than youth. A young person can be very self aware, but it does seem to come more naturally with age.
In the quest for self-knowledge one of the most common notions that we have to unlearn is that we are somehow unique or special. Even though our beloved parents spend a lot of our formative years telling us how wonderful we are, the inescapable truth is that the vast majority of us are not. Exceptional individuals like Stephen Hawking, Yehudi Menuhin or Diego Maradona exist but they are extremely rare. Ordinary is the norm, and the sooner we accept this reality the less will be our angst. And this is not neutral in its implications.
I recently came across this very disturbing suggestion. When giving one of his many psychology lectures supplied online Jordan Petersen said the following about the German population during the time of the Nazis.
“….if you were there, for any of you there’s a 90% chance that you would have got tangled up with it….you wouldn’t have been the person who rescued the Gypsies, it’s like forget that….unless you think that, you know you’re heroic far beyond the average, and I would be very, very careful about assuming that, you could assume instead that you would’ve been swept along with the crowd, just like everyone else…”
The implications behind this are so uncomfortable and unsettling it’s almost better to not consider them, and of course it’s not true just because Jordan Peterson says it. He was actually speaking about views of the self that have been derived from a multitude of psychological studies that had been carried out in much post Second World War research. Famous experiments like those performed by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in early 1960’s made some sobering findings. Look them up sometime, they are very interesting. The overall conclusions were that for the majority of people the assertion of individuality is a myth, and passive acquiescence to perceived authority by society is more likely to happen than the opposite. The Germans were normal people just like you and I, and in our times we have never been confronted with the kinds of choices that they were. If we were there would we have been like everybody else and justify our participation in rounding up Jews by saying we were just following orders? We didn’t know about all the rest. Most of us have never had a gun held to our head to make us comply with directions. We will never be tested in this way. But right now this type of thing is happening in Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Burma, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Ethiopia, Columbia, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, anywhere where Isis or Al Quaida is active, etc etc. Historically there was the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, the Iron Curtain and Eastern Europe, the Dirty War in Argentina, Pinochet’s Chile, The Spanish Civil War, etc etc. For millions and millions and millions of people just like us this has been their ever-present reality. In fact it’s way more common than we in the pampered, privileged West right now care to think about. We can’t say how we would act.
One the major turning points in the tide of public opinion in the US towards the Vietnam War happened in March 1968, although the truth about it didn’t emerge till some years later. The so-called My Lai Massacre by the US military contained the most appalling and violent cruelties inflicted on unarmed old people, women and children. The details are nothing less than horrific. In the midst of the carnage a US helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson and his crew saw what was going on and used their chopper at enormous risk to themselves to rescue as many of the Vietnamese as they could. At one stage they were even prepared to face their own death and fire their weapons to kill their own soldiers to stop the carnage. Their actions saved the lives of many innocent souls. In the immediate aftermath Thompson in particular was vilified for what the military said were treasonous actions. He and his crew were ultimately recognised as heroes when the truth of what occurred finally came out. Many years later it must be said. One wonders through history just how many Thompson’s have stood against the flow and let there courage and convictions determine their choices. I would humbly suggest there have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions. We all have the potential to be heroes, but if we feel we have it in us to be a Hugh Thompson we need to make that choice long before we face any kind of test. We would do very well to hold in our minds the former uncomfortable assertion about Nazi Germany and always remember that our self-generated myths about our goodness, if not tested, are very easy to hold onto. Given the right environment or motivations we can be very expert at lying to oouselves. It is likewise circumstance dependant, or issue dependant. Knowing oneself can sound easy enough, and is a worthy ideal, and while being doable is not necessarily the walk in the park it may at first appear to be.
When trying to determine our own or someone else’s motivations a good place to always start is to look to the most base or carnal of our desires. The facts are that the majority of us live lives in which we are largely powerless. Being disrupted by fate and misfortune are our natural bed fellows. Actual times when we gain some form of power, or rise to the status we feel we’re entitled to, or enjoy the much sort after centre of attention status we crave, are as rare as the special individuals mentioned above. Therefore when some set of circumstances momentarily gifts us the positions where we we are a key decision maker in a committee, or we are in control of some part of another’s life, or our greater education allows to know more than our fellows on some important matter, our natural inclination is to take advantage of it and forget humility. Fortunately along the way we can also learn that friendship, love and companionship are far more satisfying and worthy motivations, and they supply us with purer desires and actions. But we ignore our potential baseness at our peril, and any claims that our basic instincts are mostly virtuous is delusional. It’s almost as if it doesn’t actually matter just how truthfully, or how completely, we know ourselves. What is crucial is our capacity to be able to recognise our self-generated myths, acknowledge their inaccuracy, and to have the guts to clean the slate and adjust where necessary. Any microscopic kernel of truth is of much more use to you, and everyone else about you, than a brimming harvest of fiction.
The Oracle of Delphi once revealed to one of Socrates' friends that she regarded the philosopher as the wisest man in Athens. Socrates set about to demonstrate that the Oracle was wrong. He asked everybody he could what they considered to be a truly worthwhile life. If they could answer this question that would automatically prove that they were smarter than Socrates. But nobody could give an acceptable answer. Ultimately he concluded that he may be the wisest man because, rather than pretending to a level of knowledge he didn’t have, i.e. what was a worthwhile life, he was prepared to recognise his own limitations, and he actually knew what he didn’t know.
Also as a good rule of thumb I have found that people who constantly need to assert to whoever will listen that they know themselves, and furthermore they believe they are basically good people who always try to be selfless, well they probably don’t, and certainly aren’t. Their self-deprecation is more likely a manufactured mask to cover their self-doubt and insecurity.
All of the above is of concern to those of us who have been fortunate enough to have lived, or are living, a life where malevolence, extremes, tragedy, and loss is absent. Talk to anybody with years of experience in the counselling industry and they will tell you that there are some seriously damaged souls whose only mistake was being born in the wrong place, or at the wrong time. I have known good honest people who have worked hard and are successful, but are individuals whose internal geography is a wasteland of bitterness, hatred and ill-will towards those who so callously abused the innocent and defenceless children they once were. Similarly there are others whose grief from loss engulfs their consciousness. In this context, and for those I have known, knowing oneself is a process of guilt and confusion because on the one hand they have understood that all-consuming grief, resentment, or wishing harm to another person, is not going to lead one to peace, but on the other hand their lingering emotions are sometimes too powerful to ignore. The only comfort I have been able to offer to those that I have known has been to acknowledge that theirs is a very different dynamic and the only mind big enough to understand the reality of their hatred is God, whoever they perceive Him or Her to be. The rest of us have no idea. Their hateful thoughts may be well justified and no reason for ongoing guilt. In the Bible the apostle Paul said to remember that where “... sin increased, grace abounded all the more…” (Romans 5:20 NASB)
As I have taken all that on board and tried to become more aware of who I really am another strange reality that I have observed has been just how much of our modern life is designed to take us away from having to expend time or effort in facing the reality of who we are, or dealing with our shortcomings. Whether the phenomenon of modern social media is so distracting by accident or design is another question, but it’s influence is ubiquitous and its growth only enhances the modern plague of narcissism. Nietzsche famously said that we should strive to “become who we are” rather than “be who we are”. The clear implications are that self knowledge should more properly be seen as a work in progress.
No 2) - Contentment
Without getting all Biblical on you the Greek word in the New Testament that is regularly used to define ‘sin’ is ‘hamartia.’ It comes from archery, and means missing the mark. When the apostle Paul says all have sinned, he is saying that we all fall short of the standard that is spelled out in God’s laws. Now this in and of itself is not a problematic proposition for any honest soul. Believer or non believer, we all know intuitively and practically that we always fall short of any kind of perfection. We are continuously aware that we regularly don’t even achieve even our own limited standards. Only the mindlessly shallow would say at the end of any day in their life that they had always fulfilled the dictates of their conscience and achieved a level of perfection in their words and actions. We all know we are imperfect, and any serious contemplation of our life is tempered as much by regret as it is by fulfilment.
Alternatively, I also know that most of us believe in our hearts that we mostly want to do the right thing. And this is the central tension of our lives. We want goodness, meaning, purpose, and morality, and for that to be a major part of our conscious life. Yet we seem hard wired to have to live the opposite. The self evident fact is that we all know that what most spiritual systems call “God’s Ways” are an ultimate template for a good life, and yet we constantly fall short of them.
So can we ever be satisfied with our shambolic on-off attempts to try and improve ourselves and be better moral beings while we wallow in our shortcomings? Well again, I believe yes. Whether we can ever achieve a level of total satisfaction in the quest I seriously doubt, but I would like to suggest that we can on occasions rise to a level of “contentment”, where we can honestly recognise our limits, but at the same feel some type of positive emotion that we are mostly trying to do our best. That arrow that always falls short, in a Christian Theological framework, will be our reality till what believers accept will be God’s future intervention. I am convinced that we can be an arrow that falls not quite so short today as it did yesterday. With specific effort and committed attention that arrow can get a little closer to its target. Our reflections on our daily life can get us to a point where it is obvious, at least to ourselves, that we don’t have to simply repeat again and again the same old mistakes of the day before. Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Healthy self-analysis can enable us to recognise the things in our day to day that we need to change about ourselves to be better partners, parents, friends, employees, work mates, or whatever. We are not predestined to keep going over the same old garbage. We have a free will. We can rise above ourselves and be better. In fact in my experience there can actually be many days in a row when that arrow can get a little closer that it did the day before. To ignore this reality is as bad as repeating the errors and self delusion of the narcissist. We can achieve a type of contentment where we can allow for our endless imperfections but at the same time inculcate into our consciousness a belief that we can and will always try to do better.
No 3) - To Like Oneself
This modern world is full of self help gurus and “influencers” (whatever that means). Self help has for some become the new religion. It doesn’t have churches as such, but it certainly has a clergy who appear to be doing very nicely out of our generous weekly offerings. One of the more popular concepts that permeates the messaging in this space is that we should “love ourselves”. Oddly this very old idea has become so distorted in its modern parlance it has become a significant catalyst in our narcissism pandemic. It is based on a misunderstanding of the original meaning of the word love. Instead of love being what the ancient Greeks thought of as an ethical guiding principle, a reliable measure of virtue, a source of pure charity, or the basis of unconditional acceptance, forgiveness and respect between individuals, its meaning has narrowed to where its purest expression is perhaps best expressed in the phrase “I’m worth it”. Current self love seems to be more about me accumulating large volumes of whatever it is I think I’m ‘entitled’ to – money, status, attention, power – instead of unselfishly focusing on the needs of my brother or sister. Very few people seem to use their self love to give them confidence and motivation to try and do something – anything – to make things better for those around them.
Through the ongoing and sometimes confrontational process of knowing one’s self, I have found it much more satisfying to hanker for a state where I “like” myself. Here the implicit goal is reaching a kind of working contentment about who we really are, and how good we are trying to be. This eliminates the problem of making love so abstract as in the ancient philosophical sense, or cheapening it to the place where it just ends up being a justification for selfishness. To like somebody is very practical. It evokes a feeling of hands on engagement with another, with the world at large, and ultimately with ourselves. There is nothing abstract or academic that can be inferred from “like”. Its connotations are about rolling up your sleeves, getting a little dirt on your hands, and being useful. In fact I would contend that “being useful” to someone else is one of the most satisfying of human experiences.
Now take all that commonsense meaning and apply it to yourself. Is this where your self-analysis ends up? Is this a place where you can acknowledge that you are neither highly virtuous nor endlessly reprobate? You can accept that your arrow always falls short, but you delight in the fact that there are some days when you feel it might just have got a bit closer. You find that this is a place where words like exceptional, extraordinary, saintly, and gifted are replaced by simple concepts like decent, modest, reliable, honest, sincere, and good. It turns out to be a place where trying one’s best has in it an implicit dignity that is sufficient for the genuine soul to feel a success even though one’s imperfections are ever-present and obvious.
No 4) - Nature verses Nurture
When it comes to the crunch, who or what are we really? If we are honest with ourselves in the way I feel we need to be to find peace we will see that we are no more than the sum total of – our genetic inheritance, the influence and limits of our physical and social environment, the quality (or otherwise) of our upbringing, and the impact of the many life events we experience through most of our adulthood. And these are dynamics we have very little control over.
Our genetic inheritance for instance is immutable. We have no say if we are male or female, athletic or scholarly, tall or short, eye colour, hair type or quantity, skin type or colour, propensity to illness, personality type, etc. etc. Similarly we start our lives with no say if we are going to be impoverished or prosperous, oppressed or liberated, enslaved or free, passive or independent. Yet in spite of these most obvious facts most of us go on to accept our own hubris. We invariably believe the all successes we achieve, the prosperity we end up with, or the good graces we acquire, are the consequence of our own intelligence, hard work, and smart decision-making. At the same time we are equally convinced that the negatives that afflict us are the result of bad luck, fate, or worse, some other person’s unwise choices and the impact that has on us. The rather unpleasant view that our successes are really the consequence of good luck, and the negatives we endure are the direct result of our own poor choices, is a cognitively dissonant idea that we find very difficult to live with. But any intelligent, objective reflection will surely lead us to conclude that neither of these extreme perspectives is where the truth lies. And whatever bold claims we make none of us have a clue as to where that truth is. None of us can actually prove anything one way or the other.
So what does this all mean? It simply means that we have no excuse for arrogance, pride or self-satisfaction, or on the other hand depression, misery or stress. What we fail to accept is that life is an ongoing challenge, and we can never really say we’ve truly ‘made it’. In the end it’s an ongoing roulette of luck regardless of how in control we might erroneously think we are. Some of us are on the way up while others are on the way down. And there are probably times when we don’t even know which is which. None of it is anyone’s fault. Likewise, none of it is anyone’s favour. It’s just the way it is. And if this randomness is true then it means we must strive to keep our judgemental natures in check, because we can never be sure where others are on the ubiquitous roller coaster. We just need to cut each other a bit of slack, and especially ourselves!
In the end most of us are good people. Most of us work hard. Most of us love our families. Most of us try to be honest, tolerant and forgiving. And yet the world we all inhabit is full to the brim with rage, jealousy, bitterness, deviance, badness, intolerance and hatred. I wonder if all that anger is a consequence of not being able to come to terms with just how dis-empowered and impotent we all really are. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know this. Let’s be really grateful that if for the moment we’re on some uphill stretch; because one day it will turn, and then we’ll need all the spiritual equanimity our poor bruised souls can muster. So for now let’s all be nice and kind to each other. Let’s all be generous and empathetic. Let’s not gossip or judge. And let’s have nothing to do with, or give any support to, the deviants, the liars and the haters. Let’s leave them out in cold where they belong.
No 5) The Rubber Meets the Road
So how do these particular aspects of our complex interior design have an impact on our ability to be at peace whatever else is going on around us? Because no matter how different is our genetic inheritance or our life experiences, or how our plastic brains are wired and re-wired by that experience, we all have to deal with the most elemental of desires, that is, we all want to move from chaos to order. Chaos is uncomfortable and stressful, and order is hopefully the opposite.
Without boring anybody with endless details, the last 10 – 15 years has been pretty unpleasant for me. Where I have currently finished up is definitely somewhere other than where I hoped I would be at this stage in my life. But given the massive amounts of suffering that currently exist for much of the world’s population, and for most of human history, I really have not got much to complain about. My circumstances could be a lot better, but then couldn’t that be true for us all. The one thing I do now know for certain is that when an individual makes poor decisions, like I have, it should be consequential that the same individual lives with the implications of those choices. The resulting chaos should also be inevitable. People who protect others from these outcomes ultimately do not help because in the real world it will happen somewhere sometime. But here’s the thing. If I can say that in the midst of all that chaos I have come to a self-knowledge that I’m content with, and if I can simultaneously conclude that I am satisfied my main motivations lack the evil, nastiness or negativity I see around me, and seems at times to be the natural order, the question then arises how did this happen? The answer to that it turns out is simplicity itself, and is the key to the peace we all seek. Whatever has happened to me in my past must be, by their consequential impact, the very same things that have helped make me who I am now. That is so simple and logical. Now whether these things have been cheery and prosperous – or whether they have been unpleasant or extremely difficult – it is not relevant to that outcome. Whether it has been sweetness and light and I am the luckiest soul alive, or whether it has all been sorrow and regret, and I am at the other end of the chain, is similarly not relevant. The massive truth is that whatever has happened to me has helped make me who I am, whether or not I’m happy about it. I am now going to repeat all that or try to put it another way because it is so important.
Whatever things I have lived through, and whatever emotions have flowed forth as a result, these experiences are the very same things that have caused me to learn just what it is that motivates me. In the middle of my rise out of the mess, or my descent into chaos, if I have come to be content with my actions and reactions no matter how imperfect they are, then my dealing with both the order and the chaos represents the best I could be. And this is regardless of whether I was always missing that target. If all that is true then I really should be thankful and filled with gratitude for all I have experienced, because it is what has made me who I am.
Now as stated earlier this excludes souls who have experienced suffering way beyond what could be regarded as normal. (This raises the question, “is any amount of suffering to be regarded as normal?”) I’m sure we all know what I’m talking about. We all know “shit happens” to us all, and it does so whether we like it or not, how rich or poor we are, or how powerful or weak we are. We also know that there are events that go way beyond. What I’m talking about in relation to feelings of gratitude are the losses, the bad will from others, the tragedy, the accidents and the illnesses that seem part of our normal day to day.
It is an accepted fact that an attitude of graciousness can have a positive effect on one’s psychology and physical health. Gratitude has been proven to enhance positive self-esteem. Research has shown it reduces stress, anxiety and depression. The reduction of these negative attitudes have been associated with improvements in cardiac health. The evidence for the positive impacts on overall human well-being are voluminous. But how easy or difficult is it to maintain gratitude when the tenor of one’s life is a long way the positive outcomes we all crave? As the tongue in cheek old proverb cogently declares, “When you’re up to your arse in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.” It’s difficult to find reasons to be gracious when all the inputs into your life are unpleasant, harsh or offensive. But what if we, as I have suggested, choose to see those inputs, whatever they are, as the very things that have helped us develop the patience, good grace and gentleness we now like about ourselves. It then becomes possible to see them as things that we might be grateful for.
This is where changing one’s attitude to the noxious stimuli comes in. It doesn’t require attendance an endless wellness seminar on yourself. And it doesn’t mean descending into caricature where we become a plastic gerbil who automatically goes “hi-de-ho” when our car breaks down in the middle of a storm, or we break a string mid concert. Rather than endlessly analyzing all that goes on in one’s head, take the attitude of gratitude based on this self generated reality and apply it logically across the board and see what happens. Sometimes the magnitude of the issues is so intense that the descent of peace from above takes a little more time to settle over the troubled waters. But in my experience the peace and calm can come, and it does so with a refreshing reliability. It can then become so much easier to let them go. In fact it can transform in time, and with effort, to become our natural order.
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