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| QUOTATIONS 195-210 |
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| 195. One always has a choice: when young - how to live, when old - how to die. 196. The Italians have taught Americans how to be happy, the Jews - how to overcome unhappiness. 197. We do not see not because we are blind, but because we have chosen to close our eyes. We do not hear not because we are deaf, but because we refuse to listen. What is happening around us is clear and simple, it is we who are confused and cannot see or hear the obvious. And we lie to the others and to ourselves. And that's how we live and die in voluntary ignorance. We dress the naked Truth in garments made of lies afraid of living and afraid to die. 198. Every nation has to and invariably does create a mythology of its heroic and glorious past in order to boost its collective ego and to compensate, albeit only through an illusion of self-deceptive imagination, for what it is lacking in reality. But, as history has shown again and again, any attempt to turn the mythology of the past into the reality of the present invariably brings about disastrous results. Such attempts are usually made when a particular nation finds itself in a state of temporary blindness caused by the nationalistic fever, the blindness that renders this nation incapable for a time being to see the clearly obvious for an objective outsider distinction between myth and reality. And it is in such times that people become the victims of their own glorious mythology and what was supposed to be a collective psychological remedy turns into a deadly poison. 199. Life is a continuous struggle. When we are young we have to fight our spirit, when old - our body. The first half of man's life is spent trying to find out who he is, what the world around him is like, all the time striving to change both in order to reconcile one with the other. The discovery ( for each man in his own way and time) of the futility of achieving either of these goals signifies the arrival of the so called "middle age". But just as we are about to make peace both with ourselves and the outside world, we are beginning to be confronted with the problems of our body, its deterioration and resulting from it illnesses. Consequently, the second part of man's life is spent, instead of enjoying the tranquillity of his mind, in fighting the ailments of his own body, and eventually trying to make peace with it also. However, the second, physical peace can only be achieved at the expense of life itself. For the name of this peace is Death. 200. The opponents of the capital punishment are trying to present their disagreement with the proponents of it as a conflict between rationality and emotionality. Yet, such an artificially created dichotomy is not only false (since the opposite of rational is irrational, and irrational and emotional are not synonymous) but also blatantly self-serving in allowing the opponents of capital punishment to assume, a priori to any discussion, the position of the intellectual superiority, setting themselves up as impartial judges confronted by the bent on revenge, blood-thirsty mob clamouring for death penalty. To begin with, being emotional does not prevent one from being rational and vice versa. Far from being mutually exclusive the rationality and emotionality are in fact inseparable attributes of men who are both rational and emotional at the same time, constantly rationalizing their emotions and getting emotional as a result of rationalizing. Moreover, human emotions are not only the starting point but also the product and integral part of thinking, and thinking is essentially a rational activity, regardless of its end results. Thus, unless proven otherwise, we will have to accept that the opponents of the capital punishment are no less emotional and no more rational than those in favour of it, and I personally have not seen yet any scientific proof that a professor of sociology or a member of the clergy were less emotional or more rational than an "ordinary" housewife. In any event, even if the previous arguments were not convincing enough, this last one should be: in the face of death we are all equal, none is more qualified than the other. And no amount of statistical data or legal opinions (expressed, by the way, mostly by defence lawyers who have the vested interests in the legal proceeding to go on indefinitely) can refute this simple truth, especially when most of the statistical data in our rapidly changing world are becoming obsolete by the time they're collected and analysed. Furthermore, despite this heavy reliance on statistics, the opponents of the capital punishment won't deny that their objection to it is a product of their abhorrence (clearly an emotional state) of killing of human beings, even if it is done by government and not by individual. They also invoke, once in a while, the notion of forgiveness (again a purely emotional state). But as far as forgiving is concerned, only those who had suffered personally have the right to forgive. Only those who had anguished, who had been tortured, humiliated and stripped of human dignity, who had experienced hell while being still alive, who was killed have the right to forgive. Not the sociologists, not the criminologists, not the pseudo-Christian hypocrites, mesmerized by their own goodness, not even parents and children, brothers and sisters, only the victims themselves. I wish God were alive today as in the times of the Prophets. He would hear then the cry of the innocent, tortured and slaughtered and strike the guilty with all his might. Are you people deaf that you don't hear the cry of those who are suffering, are you blind that you don't see the blood of those who are being killed, are your hearts made of stone that you don't feel their anguish and horror? 201. Young animals learn how to survive by imitating the behaviour of their parents. This is the only way they can learn, since they lack language and cannot ask questions and receive answers. Young humans also imitate their parents. But most of imitating goes on in the early stage of development. As soon as a child is able to speak the main mode of learning becomes the questioning by the child and answering by the parent or anybody else for that matter. Correct answers to a child's questions are extremely important for a child's survival in the present and especially in the future when there will be no parent to protect it. Just imagine for a moment a consequence of a wrong answer when a child asks if people can drink gasoline. Thus, it is essential for a child's well-being that the answers to its questions are as truthful as possible. And children are known for their instinctive and insatiable quest for truth because they, by the previous experience, either know or suspect what the lies can do to them. Fortunately for both the child and the parent the questions at this stage of child's development are mostly of "physical nature", i.e. about properties of things around us. And the questions of this kind could be answered, given the knowledge, correctly and unequivocally, unlike the questions of the moral, ethical, political, or other nature which the child, as it grows up to become an adult, will have to confront himself and eventually find his own answers, since majority of the parents can offer little real help in this matter. And then the child will have to live with the consequences of these answers for the rest of his life. 202. IDENTIFICATIONS versus DEFINITIONS. Why is it so easy, relatively speaking, to identify the things and events but so difficult to define them? Identification is more broad and flexible. It allows variations and nuances. Definition tends to be narrow and rigid, excluding a lot of things and events belonging to the wider class. Definition tries to indicate precisely the point in the continuum where white, for example, turns into grey or grey into black. Definition deals with the discrete, identification with the continuous. Both definitions and identifications go hand in hand, helping us in our interactions with the world. The definitions give us the structure and order without which the world would be too chaotic to deal with. The identifications give us freedom and flexibility to confront multiformity of things and events in order to survive. 203. If you really want to know what people like or dislike and especially what they feel is good or bad for them personally, do not pay too much attention to what they say. Look at what they do. Take, for example, wives and mothers. The majority of them would say they are the victim of or at least the losing partner in the marriage, burdened with the disproportionate amount of responsibilities and obligations in the family, while the husbands enjoy the undeserved privileges by taking advantage of their dominant position in the marriage. Let us also keep in mind that parents in general and mothers in particular want what is best for their children. And evidently their notions of what is best is based on their own experience. Thus we can safely assume that what mothers think is good for their children must also be what they think is good for themselves. And now let us take a look at how they behave when trying to direct the lives of their sons and daughters. Mothers, with very few exceptions, desperately want their daughters to marry as soon as possible, though they would rarely admit it even to themselves. Now, if marriage is such a tragedy to a woman, do they really want their daughters to suffer? Hardly. At the same time, they usually want their sons to marry as late as possible. But, if marriage is such a good thing for a man, why would mothers want to deny their sons, whom they obviously love as much, if not sometimes more, than the daughters and wish all the best in the world for them, all its privileges? The answer is very simple. In reality the average woman gain more in marriage than a man, and an average man loses more than a woman. That's why mothers who undoubtedly love their children want their daughters to marry and their sons not to. And, at least in this case, most of the sons and daughters listen to their mothers because they suspect that this time the mother is probably right. 204. One who is thirsty sees water in an empty glass. One who is hungry sees food on an empty plate. 205. Things are the way they are because of what they are. 206. The night was clear and full of meaning, of lucid thoughts, of joyous feeling 'cause suddenly I understood the tongue of Truth that had been mute, but in the deep sleep I forgot like fleeting dreams my bright new thoughts, then morning came and brought with it the old frustration of confusion and empty pain of defeat 207. "Daddy's little girl", "mamma's boy" - these are the familiar idioms used to describe the special relationships that exist between father and daughter, or mother and son. The most benign form of such a relationship could be found in a situation where while there is a visibly pronounced special closeness between a child and a parent of the opposite sex, accompanied by the mutual recognition of the spiritual, intellectual and behavioural sameness, the child, nevertheless, still maintains warm and even loving relationship with a parent of the same sex. The most malignant form of such a special relationship tends to produce in a child an exaggerated and unhealthy love for one parent and open hostility or even hatred toward the other one. Of course, both the benign and the malignant forms are the extreme manifestations of the same phenomenon and the majority of the cases lie in between. But what is the cause of this well-known phenomenon? Is it the infamous "Oedipus complex" according to which the suppressed sexual desire of a child toward a parent (and vice versa) and engendered by it jealousy and rivalry are the main culprits? Or, perhaps, one should rather look at the family and, first of all, at its foundation - husband and wife for an answer. The dynamics of spousal interactions, the way father and mother treat each other, how it is perceived by the children of different gender, how it shapes their feelings and attitudes toward parents may better, I propose, explain the phenomenon under consideration. I will try to prove that it is social (in the context of a family) and not sexual in nature and if any sexual conflicts enter the picture they are in the sphere of the spousal relations and not of child and parent. Now, the average spousal relationship is a relationship between two subjectively distinct and often incompatible personalities, each with an objectively different specific role to play in the family structure, the role largely predetermined by the gender of a respective spouse. In such a situation of a compounded separateness each spouse is trying to pursue his or hers interests (as they perceive them) and usually at the expense of the other side. This inevitably creates the conflicting situation and the struggle may go on for years, while children become the witnesses, participants and, most of all, judges. What children are often witnessing can be appropriately described as the domestic war, sometimes "cold", sometimes "hot", but almost invariably "dirty", and in which both truth and fairness are the first casualties indeed. It is a kind of war when, literally, the fate of a man and of a woman is at stake. Consequently, in this battle of sexes what is right or wrong, just or unjust, fair or unfair, etc., become subjective in the extreme. In the process everything goes, no holds barred and a man does as much harm to a woman as a woman does to a man. But the man is a child's father and the woman is a child's mother. How is the child to react to the unfairness, injustice and downright viciousness displayed equally by both parents? Naturally, children take sides, partly because of the parents' prodding but mainly guided by their own sense of justice and fairness. Yet, which side they take is usually determined by their gender. As children turn into adolescents and become aware of their own sex they begin to see themselves more and more as members of a particular gender group, viz. as the men and the women. This process of sexual identification includes, among the other things, playing respective gender roles and also acquiring the collective gender consciousness with its inherent collective grievances and collective guilt. Thus a girl upon becoming a woman identifies with her mother as a woman. Seeing what harm her mother-woman is doing to her father-man, she feels guilty by the gender associations as a woman. From this comes the desire to repent and to compensate her father-man for the injustice done to him by another woman - her mother. The daughter wants to be a "good woman" as opposite to her mother who is a "bad one". And from this feeling of guilt by the gender association and desire to compensate for the wrongs done by the member of her own sex, her mother, comes the exaggerated love and devotion toward her father-man who is seen as a victim. Exactly the same process at work in the relationship between son and mother. First, the son identifies with his father as a member of the same ex. Then he sees what harm father-man does to his mother-woman. Feeling guilty by the gender association with his father, son is trying to compensate his mother-woman for the evil done to her by his father-man, member of his own gender, by displaying exaggerated love and devotion toward her, the victim. So the child by his/her love for the parent of the opposite sex is trying to allay the pain from the harm done by the parent of the same sex and also to alleviate his/her feeling of guilt by association with this parent. At the same time, the child is angry with the parent of the same sex for making him/her guilty by association. Quite often the same-sex parents can also be blamed, at least partly, for the child's anger toward them since such parents usually think they understand same-sex child better (because of this sameness) and, as the result, tend to be more forceful and not as sensitive, careful and considerate as with the opposite-sex child (though, sometimes, the opposite approach can also be the case). The hostility of the child towards the same-sex parent in its turn elicits, understandably, the negative reaction on the part of this parent which, naturally, further increases the already present animosity in the child thus turning the complex psychological situation into a vicious circle. At the end of adolescence and coming through such an unpleasant, to say the least, experience as has been described above, children usually resolve not to repeat "the sins of their parents", so to speak, and to be the better spouses than their parents were. Yet, despite their best intentions, when sons and daughters grow up and become husbands and wives, they, with a few exceptions, start to behave just like their parents of the same sex, i.e., sons like fathers and daughters like mothers. Often they do it almost against their will, as if moved by some uncontrollable forces governed by the inexorable laws of marriage. Consequently, they become much more tolerant to the same-sex parents in order, of course, to be tolerant towards themselves, and the notions of justice and fairness so dear to them when they were young and which they used to judge their parents, get easily discarded in the name of self-interest. Evidently, the justice and fairness begins and ends only when dealing with the opposite-sex parent and does not extend to the other members of that gender, especially if it happens to be your spouse. 208. The road to success in any human endeavour lies through the fields of boredom overgrown by the weeds of repetition. Only those who are able to withstand the boredom inherent in doing the same thing over and over again, or better still, who are totally oblivious to the boredom of repetition, or even get addicted to it, can cross this seemingly endless field and finally reach success. No other form of life, be it plant or animal, experiences the feeling of boredom. But then their goal is just to survive, not to succeed. It is only Man for whom the mere survival is not enough. For as soon as he is assured of it he wants more, he wants success. It is man's vanity that, most of all, sets him apart from the rest of Nature. 209. You wouldn't get any answers by asking those who themselves never had any questions. 210. The dreams have at least one thing in common with people: they are born to die. The people bring dreams to life and the very same people eventually kill them. And they do it not only by abandoning their dreams but also by pursuing them and , most of all, by fulfilling them. |
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