265) The Doctrine of Original Awesomeness, Part 2 (Also, Day 33 -- Reason #33 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism)
The Doctrine of Original Awesomeness states first of all, that humans are innately growth-oriented. That was our first “fundamental tendency”. The second is that humans are —
2) Excellence-oriented
A close sister of the growth-orientation, people NATURALLY want to pursue excellence, for the things they really enjoy. Watch a kid who is obsessed with Minecraft, get better and better and better over time, persevering through challenges, finding shortcuts, watching speed run videos and learning even more awesome techniques, and then practicing them until they can do them themselves. You don’t need to pay them, give them smarties every time they learn something, give gold stars or praise. You just need to let them play.
Whether it’s practicing an instrument they love (not the one their parents forced them to learn), or getting better at soccer skills, or studying chess tactics, or enjoying puns and wordplay and rhyming and rapping with their friends, or making online videos, or doing cartwheels or skateboarding or whatever turns their crank, kids not only want to get better, they want to get awesome. For exactly the same reasons as before — It FEELS better.
When you love some activity, then deepening your skills, challenging yourself, finding those nuanced ways to improve, feels AMAZING. It takes hard work, but when that “hard work” is intrinsically enjoyable and fascinating, you will NATURALLY do the work. And as you climb the ladder of excellence, the sheer joy of overcoming those obstacles and pushing past your own barriers, is enough motivation to keep you going. Especially when, in those times that people hit a plateau and struggle to improve (because sure, sometimes it’s hard), they have some encouragement, coaching, guidance, by the people in their lives.
Again, kids don’t need to win a medal every weekend at some competition, when they are pursuing something they love. Sure, it’s great, and feels good and everything. And obviously it’s nice to get rewarded now and then. But the rewards are not ‘the point’. The true reward isn’t a medal or a trophy. The true reward is the inherent joy of stretching your abilities, pushing yourself to the max, and discovering that the limits you used to have, you have now surpassed. THAT, feels awesome.
The keys to excellence are to be intrinsically motivated (i.e., doing something you love), and to be emotionally secure. Because there ARE tough times, times you even want to quit because it’s just “too hard”. But the more secure a person is, and the more that security is nourished by a supportive environment, the easier it is for people to push through to the next level, rather than giving up and resigning themselves to mediocrity.
You don’t need to push a secure person to embrace struggle. Struggle is our birthright. We are born into struggle. We are evolutionarily hard-wired for struggle. We aren’t lazy, selfish assholes at heart. We are vibrant, loving, curious, focused, striving, interdependent social beings. We love struggle. We love challenge.
Watch any little kid who hasn’t had their INNATE desire for mastery crushed out of them by over-controlling, over-shaming OR over-rewarding parents. Watch them spontaneously engage in complex play and push themselves to do something they couldn’t do before. Even babies exhibit joyful delight when they learn to move their clumsy limbs in new ways, or take those first steps, or grab that enticing teacup from the coffee table…. And toddlers and little kids do too; they try to stack those blocks just a little bit higher. Try to climb that playground equipment they were scared of before. Try to throw rocks into a lake and make them go farther or make a bigger and bigger splash.
We LOVE challenges, because it feels super-kick-ass to stretch ourselves, to make progress, to get better, to become excellent. It just feels….good!
To encourage this kind of mastery-orientation towards life, we don’t need Rules Rewards or Punishments. We just need the freedom to autonomously gravitate towards the things we are intrinsically interested in.
Which takes us to the third aspect of our Inner Awesomeness — Community. Humans are innately —
3) Community-oriented
We need each other, right from birth. First of all, we need our caregivers so we don’t actually die. We need to be fed, and held, and have our diapers changed; it makes us profoundly, naturally grateful for, and bonded to, the people who show us love and affection. Thus, right from the starting blocks, we are INTERDEPENDENT little creatures. Interdependence isn’t something we need to learn; it’s what we are.
As we grow up we need our caregivers to help us learn not to do stupid things that we don’t yet understand are stupid — like playing in traffic and eating whatever we find on the ground that looks interesting. We also need them to tell us stories and jokes, teach us songs and the alphabet and how to read, go on imagination adventures with us where we can be aliens, or rescuers, or animals, or superheroes with incredible powers. We need these experiences because we are hardwired to be enriched by culture, by language and ritual and imagination and games, by art and music and stories. We need these things, and are NATURALLY fascinated by them.
We also need more emotionally stable, grounded, wise others around us to help our little developing nervous systems to learn how to handle our raging emotions. We need to learn to tolerate frustration, to push through difficult moments in the learning process, to develop grit and determination and perseverance.
We need social validation so that we learn that we actually do matter to other people, our actions do matter for the world, and being “a good person” actually does pay off in terms of being more warmly embraced by the community around us.
We need others to learn skills, like how to tie a lure to a fishing line, or how to type, or how to read, or how to fry eggs without them sticking to the pan. Or how to calm ourselves down.
That’s a good one — learning to calm ourselves down. Do we most effectively learn to calm down and gain self-control by being given “rules”? By being punished? Or do we most effectively learn to control our difficult emotions by being exposed to wiser, more mature others who model for us how a responsible person behaves, and ideally, by being taught, in-the-moment, how to do things like mindful breathing, how to be self-aware, how to reassure ourselves with messages like “this too shall pass”, and how to learn to reframe our “failures” as “learning experiences”?
I fully believe that learning to be a responsible, productive, healthy, moral and well-adjusted human being does NOT come from rules. (In fact, the more rule-focused our environment is, the LESS likely we will develop in desirable ways!). Instead, learning all these things comes from having one’s inner goodness nurtured, embraced, accepted and loved PLUS having one’s inner shitty-ness also embraced, accepted and loved, so that the power of being loved and accepted in our totality, warts and all, teaches us that we ARE “good”! We ARE worthwhile, beautiful, wonderful little beings. Maybe we don’t exactly behave that way all the time, but intrinsically, we are creatures of love, far more than we are creatures of selfishness.
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This is one of the biggest problems of perspectives that are so common nowadays and that lay at the very root of many issues with masculinity and power and relationships. These perspectives, of rules and hierarchy and authority and discipline and all that, are trumpeted, endlessly, by people like Jordan Peterson, and the ‘traditionalists’, the people who follow the Doctrine of Original sin. Their hierarchy-based, rule-based way of thinking comes from a philosophy of scarcity and fear, rather than abundance and trust. It is focused on the defects in people and the age-old pessimism that our “weaknesses” will win in the long run, unless we stamp them out of the person through DISCIPLINE.
I was raised to believe exactly this. And maaaaaan, let me tell you, it did not work. And the “strongest” people I knew growing up, those who insisted on discipline and obedience and following the rules and all that — well, they were pretty lonely, especially as life went on. Not “needing” anybody, they found their social worlds constricting smaller and smaller as they aged, until, in the most extreme example I know of, they died almost entirely alone and with deep sadness for all the relationships they didn’t build and all the people they “let go of” over the years.
So what if we just…..throw that shit out in the trash where it belongs? Throw out the Doctrine of Original Sin! Throw out the need for “rules” to “teach us right from wrong.” Throw out appeals to authority based on the (incorrect) belief that hierarchies of power are hierarchies of competence. You only have to look at politics for two seconds to see how untrue that is.
If we throw out enough of those disempowering, shaming, distrustful beliefs about human goodness, what are we left with?
Love! Compassion. Empathy. Vulnerability. Interdependence. The need to be there for each other because that’s what being human IS.
Imagine how free, joyful, zestful, ALIVE people would feel if they grew up feeling USEFUL and LOVED by the people in their lives; if they grew up feeling they could contribute to their community, that they were respected, that even though they were still learning the skills of life, the adults around them HONOURED and VALUED them. Imagine how good that would have felt, when you were a kid.
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And after all, history provides abundant evidence that people don’t become ethical because they’ve internalized a bunch of rules. Just look at all the rule-enforcers over history, from governments, to the Church, to the finger-wagging angry teacher or parent, and it’s pretty clear that these people are so often not ETHICAL. They are, in fact, scared. And addicted to being in CONTROL.
I’m sure in 5 seconds you can bring to mind examples of control-oriented “authority figures”, who emphasize discipline and rules, and yet, are total assholes. I sure can.
It is very clear that people become ethical not primarily because of rules, but because their love and empathy and compassion are nurtured. They become loving because they are LOVED. Love begets love, compassion begets compassion, and acceptance begets acceptance.
So, when people’s dark and twisty parts express themselves, giving them a bunch of rules is NOT going to help them heal those parts; it is, in fact, going to further shame them, polarizing their inner world into an even more starkly contrasting “persona” and “shadow”. This is a foundational insight in the entire field of Psychology, going right back to Freud and Jung.
Rather than helping people to heal, integrate, and thrive, focusing on Rules actually further distances people from their own inner abundance and their confidence that, indeed, they live in a world of abundance, that other people CAN, for the most part, be trusted. People grow up quite differently if they believe the social world is generally kind and honourable, that they are generally valued and respected. And thus, feeling cared for, people care. It just happens.
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In sum, we need to re-brand human nature, aligning it with our actual reality. THIS is the Doctrine of Original Awesomeness. Which states:
People strive to be better because striving feels innately better than laziness, boredom and mediocrity.
People help others and are generous because they care, have empathy, and feel compassion for others’ suffering, and because they are grateful for the blessings and help they have received.
People naturally want to learn because being curious and fascinated feels awesome.
People grow because PLAYING is innately fun, and the more that “learning” and “challenge” can be framed and experienced as play, the more effortlessly people will be drawn towards exerting effort.
And people grow up to be responsible, moral adults because they are inspired into being that way by the responsible, moral adults in their lives, the wise elders and mentors who have already walked that path and can shine their own lights into the darkness, showing others the way forward.
When we raise children, and treat adults, in ways that nourish this Inner Awesomeness, rather than controlling, shaming, punishing AND over-rewarding people for competitive accomplishments, we release the Human Spirit to shine.
That’s the Doctrine of Original Awesomeness. And it’s one of the deepest wisdoms I have ever learned.
And of course, it gets right to heart of why we need to revolt against Predatory Capitalism and free ourselves from this system of hierarchical control.
Because, you show me a world where people grow up with their Original Awesomeness nurtured and loved, and I’ll show you a world in which Elon Musk is actually a good person.