limits to the growth of the soul, to maturing processes. And to the extent each generation functions in a responsible manner, the communities formed in the next generation will be that much richer for it. The process is limitless.
And by maturity, you mean what you said earlier, the capacity — or the willingness — to take responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny.
Correct, but that means not blaming. It means understanding that the toxicity of most hostile environments is proportional to the response of the organism, not to the toxic factors within it. It also means understanding that the conditions for trauma reside within the emotional processes of the family or the community rather than within the event. It means accepting the fact that forgiving or at least not being reactive to situations is more freeing than vindication. It means understanding that cutoffs between people do more fundamental damage than the initiating hurts.
And those are all internal factors, as you said before.
Internal and eternal. They have to do with the soul, which is the proper concern of both religion and therapy.
So?
So I seduce humanity into focusing outside instead. I have three favorite displacement issues. Abuse, which I mentioned; carcinogens is the second; and the environment is the third.
Those are honest matters of concern.
I didn’t say they weren’t. I called them “displacement” issues, not false issues. I use them to keep people from focusing on their own salvation. I used to use the communists, but carcinogens and cholesterol work just as well. And as far as the environment goes, it is absolutely the ultimate in arrogance for humankind to think that they can destroy or save the planet. The earth will survive, even if it has to do in the human species in order to, and then it will simply start over again. If you don’t believe me, pay a visit to Mount Saint Helens. The evolution of the human species does not depend on the survival of the planet; it can take care of itself. Immortality for the human species depends on overcoming its tendency to adapt to its own immaturity.
But isn’t helping one’s fellow, unfortunate creatures a form of maturity?
Absolutely. And there are hundreds of public and private agencies designed to accomplish that. There are no other institutions, however, aside from religion and therapy, that are designed for promoting the evolution of the soul. By introducing political rhetoric into salvation, I succeed in destroying their distinctiveness, and thus thwart their potential for promoting immortality. In addition, political rhetoric makes everyone get too serious, and they lose their capacity for playfulness and, therefore, perspective. Remember what I did to Marxist art? “Social realism,” ughhh. Political rhetoric makes everyone more intense, it increases the efforts to will one another to change, and it enlarges the possibilities for alienation and polarization.
We’re back to black and white alternatives.
Right. And most delightful for me, introducing political rhetoric into religion and therapy allows me to hoard all the devilishness for myself.
Well, I don’t know what would happen to religion if it tried to get more playful. Salvation is pretty serious.
Let me correct you. What seriouses up salvation is trying to save others. Saving oneself is not nearly as grim. But I haven’t finished. By introducing political rhetoric into religion and therapy, I swing the power to the dependent, to the victims, to the recalcitrant. The adaptation of the community goes towards weakness, not strength. And comfort triumphs over challenge, thus weakening the immunological response.
Why does that follow?
Because political rhetoric encourages everyone to lower their threshold for pain. It supports a quick-fix attitude. Haven’t you ever noticed that in any counseling session or at any community meeting the persons most apt to mention “trust,” “sensitivity,” “confidentiality,” “togetherness,” and “consensus” are always the ones who want others to adapt to them?
These concepts have great communal potential.
They used to, but through the word “empathy” I have succeeded in turning them into abuses of power.
You’re taking credit for empathy?
It’s probably the most regressive concept I have ever employed.
Regressive? It’s the foundation of many modern approaches to relationships.
But it makes feelings more important than boundaries. It’s a very late concept, you know. The word is not even in the original edition of the Oxford English Dictionary published in 1931.
I believe it was originally intended as a translation of a German word in the field of aesthetics.
Came over into English about 1922, actually. At first I didn’t pay too much attention to it, but then I began to realize that by getting everyone to substitute empathy for compassion — feeling in supposedly being better than feeling with — I saw that I could generally frustrate the Creator’s plan for an evolving response to challenge because everyone would stay focused on one another instead of themselves. It wasn’t until after World War II, however, that I really succeeded in getting empathy into common parlance.
But how does the matter of feelings connect up with immortality ?
Through the concept of immunology. As some of your more recent biologists have come to realize, immunology is not basically about outside toxic agents; it’s basically about the inner condition of integrity. As I said earlier, everything that is true about immunology is true about self. In fact, the immunological system has been defined as the capacity to distinguish self from nonself. It does not come equipped at birth like a woman’s ovaries; it learns from its experience with adversity. Moreover, organisms that lack an immunological system cannot experience love.
Because?
Because without one it is impossible to touch another member of your own species and still retain your identity. The way the Creator set it up, when organisms of the same species that lack immunological systems even reach a certain point of proximity, one will dis-uintegrate,” in other words, lose its integrity, because of the presence of the other.
“Whenever you find two peas in a pod, one will begin to shrivel.”
That puts it very well. But there is also an opposite form of dis-integration, the autoimmune response, which occurs when loss of self allows anxiety to flood the organism.
Hawks and doves. Pentagons can’t be allowed to make the final decisions. But I still don’t see where empathy comes in.
Look at it this way. What all pathogenic elements in life have in common is they lack self-regulation. This is equally true about viruses, malignant cells, substance abusers, chronically troubling members of families and institutions, and totalitarian nations. Now this characteristic is always the ground of two further attributes. One, organisms that lack self-regulation will be invasive of the space of others. Not because they want to be; it’s just their nature, a byproduct of what they are missing. Two, organisms that lack self-regulation can’t learn from their experience.
That
