Your Own Worst Enemy.

[Mindful]

The desire to submit to the constraints of established authority at the very same time that we long to break loose of them seems to me a fair account of one of the major miseries of the human condition. It is not the particulars that hurt, so much as the fact of inherent self-division—the Sisyphean nature of its repetitions.

For most of our lives we embrace the infantile comfort of living inside conventions of thought and behavior given us at birth. Then, periodically, these conventions come to feel confining, even imprisoning, and, as though awakening from a deep sleep, we erupt in an explosive longing for the freedom to define ourselves anew. What follows then is anything from cultural unrest to flat-out revolution—governments may fall, institutions crumble, new equalities assert themselves—but the constitution of the human psyche does not undergo any material change; inevitably, the cycle of submission and rebellion repeats itself, without much permanent progress having been made.

Your Own Worst Enemy Boston Review

 

[Mindful]

From Plato on, philosophers, educators, and analysts have supplied one version or another of the relation between culture and nature as the key explanation for our ongoing dilemma. The ancients suggested that the gods had originally made human beings with four legs, four arms, and two faces each, but Zeus, fearing that too much power was invested in this creature, split each person in two, forcing men and women to spend their lives searching for the lost half. Then the Bible offered this version of the problem: human beings were at one with themselves until they ate of the Tree of Knowledge, whereupon they evolved into animals endowed with consciousness—a gift and a punishment. On the one hand, consciousness made the race proud, on the other it made people lonely.

The loneliness proved our undoing, so perverting our natural tendencies that we became strangers to ourselves—the true meaning of alienation—and could never again feel whole. After the Bible—I’m skipping a bit here—came Freud, who agreed that the loneliness of humankind was inborn, the sense of disconnect permanent. For Freud, however, the disconnect was better accounted for by his theory of instinct drives, those elements inscribed in our very essence that put us into the kind of conflict that only profound self knowledge could ameliorate. Interestingly enough, from Plato to Freud, all have agreed that help could come only from within. If men and women learned to occupy their own conscious selves, fully and freely, they would no longer be alone: they would have themselves for company. Once one had company one could achieve integration and risk fellowship.

 

[Treeshepherd]

the cycle of submission and rebellion repeats itself, without much permanent progress having been made.

I don't know if progress is made. Things change and in the process there is always something gained and something lost.

Generally, we are subject to a natural progression or ontology of union and separation. The fetus in the womb is separated at birth, and then bonds with the parents, and then asserts himself with the terrible two's and then makes friends and worships the parents, and then teenage angst, and then bonds with a girlfriend and then breaks up with that girlfriend, and then makes new friends in college and re-invents himself and somewhere along the line marriage, and then the 7 year itch and possibly divorce or a redefinition of the marriage and so on. It's an oscillation between union and separation.

On a macro-scale, you might argue the same dynamic unfolds in Western Civilization;
Greece is overtaken by Rome
Rome falls
Synthesis of the Greek thinker, the Roman builder/legislator and the Christian saint
Dark Ages
Carolingian Renaissance
Protestant Schism
Renaissance
Age of Revolutions
Age of Liberalism
World Wars
Globalism

 

[Natural Citizen]

 

[Mindful]

^ Then that.