Principles of Self-Development

Societal forces are directed at helping us become reliable and efficient machines. Economic systems of work and production encourage us to become reliable and efficient work machines. Systems of family relations encourage us to become reliable and efficient family machines. Churches encourage us to become reliable and efficient church-going machines. Government systems help us become reliable and efficient mechanisms in a vast bureaucratic machine.

Each system we are a part of exerts a standardized, impersonal influence on us directed at remodeling our thought and behavior according to a certain template. The only way to identify the traits of each system and recognize their influence on us is to try out at least one alternative system of the same order. After this has been done, one can make a conscious, personal choice between alternate systems.

No one is really interested in your personal, inner sense of happiness. Your employer is only interested in your happiness insofar as it increases your work output. Your country is only interested in your happiness if it promotes the interests of the state. Your church is only interested in your happiness when it serves the congregation's interests. Your family doesn't need your happiness per sé, but rather needs you to be a good family member. Your friends only need your happiness if they get something out of it. Heck, and I only need your happiness if it increases traffic to my site! Such is the nature of things.

Seeing that no one has an interest in cultivating your inner sense of happiness, any attempts — whether overt or concealed — to demand this of them are irresponsible. The only one who might have an interest in your personal happiness is you. You are the only agent who obtains any direct personal benefit from your happiness.

Much of the self-help philosophy is based on the assumption that you already have a correct goal in mind and simply need help achieving it. Most self-help is directed at helping you achieve widely acknowledged, socially accepted goals which are assumed to be correct by default. The issue of achieving genuine, personalized self-knowledge, which leads to pursuing unique, personally significant goals, is generally ignored. No one can tell you which personally significant goals you should pursue. They can only come from within.

We cannot perceive ourselves holistically nor participate in decision making that takes place unconsciously. Even our attempts to pinpoint problems in our own functioning lead to largely incorrect conclusions. We are dependent upon others for accurate self-knowledge and self-evaluation. No psyche is capable of independently generating a properly balanced self-portrait. Other people must take part in our quest for self-knowledge, but we can be in charge of the process.

Why do you need self-development in the first place? To become a more reliable and efficient machine? To impress others (the base motive of which is to obtain reproductive advantages of some order or another)? Do you really need self-development for your self?

The natural instinct of most people is to use any material or other success to make their lives increasingly reliable, predictable, and efficient and thus to fall into a state of "blissful slumber." Most people are prone to use any material gains to cushion themselves from experiences that might jarr them out of their cozy existence. And yet, ironically, the jarring experiences and unexpected challenges we have faced are what we remember most. The natural tendency is to insulate oneself from all that we fear and dislike. In doing so, we cut ourselves off from what might develop us and bring us to life.

Man is designed to have powerful experiences from such things as: running away from wild beasts, discovering a source of food in a time of famine, and solving other problems directly related to his physical survival. Other situations revolving around sex and reproduction and human and tribal relations also evoke powerful emotional and physical responses. The greater one's connection to these fundamental human (animal!) experiences, the more powerful feelings one has. The greater one's success in dealing with primary survival situations, the more resilient and powerful one feels. The strongest generations arise from the ravages of war and famine.

As our civilization experiences achieves more and more material success on a society-wide scale, more and more cushions are created that insulate us from the really challenging situations in life that rouse the senses and concentrate one's inner forces. The result is a general lack of vitality and sense of meaninglessness. Vitality comes from solving "vital" problems, and a sense of purpose comes from discovering that you insanely want to survive.

09/11/2006 Pieter
What you are basically saying, is that in order to be happy, you need to return to your Id (=Vitality. I.e. Id in the Freudian sense, not in the Socionics sense), at the expense of the Super-Ego (the requirements of those other than you), which you claim is what is typically in control (which is true for most people).

However, the reality is that you cannot live without the social context, neither should one be complete subject (=machine) to the social context. This is why we have an Ego to mediate between the requirements of the Id and the Super-Ego. The Purpose of Self-Development is to arrive at a healthy balance between Id and Super-Ego with the Ego being the master of your life. It is what the Guatama Buddha described as the Middle Way, the principle of Enlightenment and the absence of suffering ;-)

09/11/2006 Author
Great comment. I think that perspective matches what I am trying to say on this page. How would you describe the role of the Ego and what it means for the Ego to be the master of your life?

09/11/2006 Pieter
The Ego is what decides between the requirements of both Id and Super-Ego.
Look at it like this:

Super-Ego is the "wise" parent in you, norms, values etc.
Ego is the adult person in you, the responsible person in charge, it's he who should decide
Id is the child in you, your life force, your "will", your "I want this" or your "I don't want his"

It is the task of the Ego to listen to the child in you making known its wants and desires. It has then to decide if it is something approriate, or if it is the appropriate moment (i.e. weighing these desires against the requirements of the Self and the outer world, which is the Super-Ego, the "wise" parent). Sometimes it's also about weighing the requirements of the Id and Super-Ego against themselves. You can allow a kid some candy if the candy is not too bad, but you can't allow the kid all the candy it wants. Also one should not be too moralistic by denying a kid all candy.

P.S. perhaps this clarifies it further: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego

please note that the Ego/Super-Ego/Id model is just a model, but it helps by providing a concept of human motivation. There a lots of other theories, that basically say the same thing. The overall idea is that there are things you want from the outside world, and things the outside world wants from you. There has to exist a healthy balance between the two. If you deny your own wants, you will suffer because your needs will not be met. If you deny the want of others, people will ultimately turn their backs on you, and you will suffer too.

09/11/2006 Author
I would add to all that the personal value of obtaining self-knowledge, or "knowing ourselves." One can have what psychologists would call "healthy psychological development" and intuitively do things right without inner tension, and yet lack an understanding of one's inner mechanisms. If "success" is your goal, self-knowledge is not really a priority. However, a deeper interest in how people operate and why things are the way they are opens up new and interesting layers of reality.

09/11/2006 Pieter
Well, that's exactly what Buddha said: there is no such thing as loving a
happy life while being ignorant at the same time ;-)

09/23/2006 Lehel
I really like all your thoughts that you posted here. But there is one comment I'd like to make on this thought:

"Why do you need self-development in the first place? To become a more reliable and efficient machine? To impress others (the base motive of which is to obtain reproductive advantages of some order or another)? Do you really need self-development for your self?"

Perhaps, I'm misunderstanding your point. If you meant the questions to make one question the purpose of self-improvement, I say touche. But, if your point is that self-improvement can be seen as irrelavent, I beg to differ.

I believe that self-knowledge and self-development are powerful tools in helping us to reach our goals of contentment, enlightenment and self-actualization. Though, I agree with the idea of struggle giving us vitality, from one who has suffered a lot in this life, I can say that survival and suffering are definately not boring--but not pleasant either. I would rather be able to return to a level of inner peace and deviate from it having the ability to return to a level of inner peace again.

Perhaps, it really comes to a matter of control. People desire control over themselves and their lives. If they are ruled by unconscious forces and suffer from unresolved grief, indecisiveness, anxiety, neurosis and psychosis, such people would like to find a pleace of peace and sanity. Of course, that's the far extreme. There are people imbetween mental instability and self-actualization. And while people live, even if they have reached some mythical Nirvana, they will always have some measure of drama and excitement to kill boredom while they aren't seating in the Lotus position.

I digress. This is why I see self-development valuable. Our goals for self-betterment can be for the sake of goals independent of society around us.

09/23/2006 Author
Well said. The point of those questions was to make one question one's motives for self-development to see if you really want it for yourself — for your own personal joy and satisfaction — or as a means for achieving social rewards.