Comments on: Perspectives on positivity

By: Livy

Livy — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:12:25 +0000

The New Year and new decade have spurred people on to look for a more meaningful career with over 40,000 registering their interest in becoming a social worker with children and families.

By: Livy

Livy — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:59:33 +0000

So is now the part where I start talking about my relationship with my mother?

I’m a simple man. I believe what Wayne Gretzky said, that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Then again, he does have a January birthday…just like all the other undeserving elite athletes in the NHL.

By: daniel snell

daniel snell — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:03:17 +0000

Livy,

there very first thing i learnt in therepy is that you externalise your internal belief – (you make external what you believe about yourself) what do you believe is true about you?

By: Livy

Livy — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 04:43:40 +0000

Tessy’s are the only comments I invariably wish I made first. The force is strong with this one.

I didn’t want to come near these positivity posts once I realised how out of step I was. Suppose I could caveat the few musings I’m brave enough to verbalise with the admission that compared to all you fine, lucid and well read people I probably have half your age and a quarter of your experience. Then again, Shakespeare boasted a mighty library of fifty books whilst I have Google on my side.

Besides, I wanted to save most of my personal insights into happiness for the larger article and audio series I plan to release in 2010… Not only will I save my fellow brothers from their wretched negative lives but they’ll also enable me to finally buy that yacht I always wanted. Which I will earn…and so could anybody if they buy my pre-strapped boots.

To realise the ‘Form of the Good’ is analogous to what many of your detested, money grabbing, “$$$” owning, self help charlatans might today refer to as ‘unconscious competence’. It always amuses me when fierce opponents of self improvement literature, or even the mildest ‘positive thinking’ skeptics, tend to be people who already carry themselves with high levels of self esteem and live fulfilled lives.

Unfortunately for the philosopher king he must endure the burden of one day returning to the cave. A man who has seen the sun as the real source of truth now knows the ‘ideal’ world and has a responsibility to educate those in the ‘material’ world. Light must be spread into darkness as often as those levers are pulled or statues are moved; shadows on the wall don’t comprise reality. These days individuals know that for they were born outside the cave; society generally doesn’t and they aren’t being told, which is why the story describes the freedman being painfully blinded when stepping outside for the first time.

Who knows. Maybe rising prosperity doesn’t automatically correlate with greater well being because free market consumerism is divorced from any notion of learning and self awareness. With so many people unchained from the wall they may be in the second stage along the ‘divided line’, but still viewing the world through imagination and conjecture rather than real understanding.

Or then again Tacitus could have been right, if not under appreciated. Whatever the relationship between individual and society, studying the way a real state is governed could ultimately teach us more about darkness, light and ‘the good life’ through practical lessons about good vs. bad government. Certainly more than an over intellectualised and (sorry..) irreconcilable blog debate about where we should be.

Livy.

By: daniel snell

daniel snell — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:20:39 +0000

Matthew,
Right. .. I grasped the broader point you were making, which might be summed up like this – the individual vs. the state (politics) as a focus for positive human change, or perhaps both.
Haven’t we been kicking this around since the birth of philosophy?
Is this not what Plato’s Republic is trying to address – That ‘intelligent’ beings, pull the levers and the public are made better/more positive by it.
Clearly clever people making the right collective decisions for the benefit of the many is also essential, but it is the individual that must do the personal development. Complex ideas are made simple my simple minds so that they can understand the complex.
RE Hegel: who followed on from Kant and was as you know a massive influence on Marx, can be simplified by saying that he focused his philosophy upon ‘the unreality of separateness’, which is an illusion, nothing he believed was ultimately and completely real except ‘the whole’.
We have a divergence and perhaps a cross roads in society like never before. And (I believe) must watch very closely what plays out, that separation is the individual and or vs. the state or community.
We are being told that we must be the masters of our own destiny, and that if we fail then that is in some way our fault. A powerfully flawed suggestion in my opinion. Especially as if you don’t have the right information to hand or are taught what to do with it – how can you realistically act successfully?
We were told that there is no society (community) only the individual, which pits man against man into competition. If there is no community, or ‘being with’ others, in reality there can be no state. Why should I care for some invented notion of Britishness (quite an inflammatory thing to write) if it’s all about me and my personal success? His loss my gain, as I drive into my gated community.
We are all hooked into notions of success (collapsed with positivity and wealth) and we are to admire wealth and success regardless of how it is achieved. I heard someone who worked with a very famous music mogul hay of his character he was in essence a materialistic, ruthless, driven brute and made bones about that and he was very, very rich. AND that was somehow OK. Say what you like about him – he’s successful – isn’t that what you are trying to do – you’re just not very good at it.
We end up despising ourselves for not being successful and will sell our gran for success. Why? Why do we so desperately want… at the cost of community or the state, others?
Is the state dead or is community? But all happiness as Hegel would suggest in the whole. It is the desire to be in connection with others that create happiness, it is the separation that creates unhappiness. Therefore, it is this sanitized version of happiness of ‘positivity’ which is the Prozac the oil upon our dysfunctional selves that has us survive this ‘insane’ society we have built for ourselves, where the rich get richer and the prisons get fuller, there are more wars, more medication, more mental health issues, and what do we do?…line up to take advantage of the boxing day sales to buy designer clutch bags at half price, like demented fools, we justify the savings (from £1000 to £500 or whatever), when the product was undoubtedly made in China for pennies. Madness. But look at me, I have to show you I’m important, otherwise, I’d be like the others, and they are Helots, the serfs.