Relationships
Part 11 - “Everyone is doing the best they can for themselves at any given moment of time.”

Q: What is your first reaction to this statement?

Q: Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

Let’s try following a thread to see how far we can go with this. If you say that you agree with the statement… then you are saying that everybody in the whole wide world is doing the best they can for themselves. This would include:

• you, yourself
• all of your family and friends
• people you cannot stand
• people who have done the weirdest things
• the person who says they can’t be bothered with anything anymore
• the person who makes the same mistakes over and over again
• the person who is constantly in and out of prison
• the person(s) who harmed you
• people with addictions and disorders
• the person who took their own life
• rapists, abusers, powermongers, suicide bombers
• everyone

There are no exceptions to this rule: it either applies to everyone, or no one. Maybe it even applies to animals and plants. Everyone is doing the best they can for themselves, despite:

• the lousy cards they were dealt
• the dire situation that they find themselves in
• their own fears
• a lack of learning
• a dearth of opportunities
• their traumatic life experiences
• their illness
• their distorted thought processes
• the hurt and pain they are suffering

Now let’s try following another thread to see how far we go. If you say that you disagree with the statement… then you are saying that people can sometimes do bad things to themselves on purpose. That they may:

• sabotage their own hopes and dreams
• actively harm and injure themselves
• try to end their own life
• do things for other people rather than themselves
• stop looking after themselves
• lead a miserable life – on purpose
• destroy everything that was good about themselves, just like that, in the bat of an eyelid

There are no exceptions to this rule: it either applies to everyone, or no one. Maybe it even applies to animals and plants. No-one is doing the best they can for themselves all the time, because of:

• the lousy cards they were dealt
• the dire situation that they find themselves in
• their own fears
• a lack of learning
• a dearth of opportunities
• their traumatic life experiences
• their illness
• their distorted thought processes
• the hurt and pain they are suffering

Do you have any personal experience to add to this debate? If so, maybe you can attempt to answer the following questions:

Q: Do you have an example of overcoming adversity? If so, can you write an account of what you did?

Q: Have you done any acts of self-sabotage? If so, can you write an account of what you did? Could you also include what your motivation was for doing what you did?

Whichever side of the debate you fall on, we hope you will agree that it’s an interesting philosophical question to ask.
And maybe we could all agree on the following insight:

There is usually a pay-off as to why people do the things they do – even if their action(s) seems odd to another person.

Fear, shame, guilt, blame, hurt, pain, distress, despair, misery, money, love, lust, success and failure… these can all be strong motivating forces for certain actions or inactions.

Equally, self-sabotage, self-harm, destruction and destructive acts can also be seen in a light of people doing the best for themselves – given the limited options that were available to them/us at any moment in time.

Noel took the rap for a crime he didn’t commit. He spent a lot of time in prison, but never told anyone what happened until many, many years later – when he was having counselling.

Nobody knew about it except himself and the other member of his family who had committed the actual crime.
Noel made the decision in a split-second, when the police came to his house. Within that split-second, a number of factors were involved:

He said he did it out of love. He did it because he saw the face of the family member and he couldn’t bear the thought of them going to prison.

He also thought that he would cope a lot better in prison than his family member. He also said that he couldn’t have lived with himself if he hadn’t put himself forward to take the punishment – although that thought came to him later. He says he doesn’t regret what he did, and that he would make exactly the same decision again if he had to.

Noel also went into detail about how hard prison life was. He lost his job and his friends, his status and reputation: people now looked down on him as though he was a second-rate citizen. He said that sometimes he forgets that he didn’t commit the crime, and then he breaks down and cries. He never talked about what happened to the family member since the police came – and this put a great strain on their relationship.

Q: What do you feel about what Noel did?

Q: Was he doing the best for himself? Was he sabotaging himself? Or was he doing a bit of both? Or something else?

The trouble with honesty is that, while it is often flagged up as an important virtue, it doesn’t make sense. It contradicts itself and is completely hypocritical.

The definition of honesty is free of deceit.
The definition of deceit is concealing the truth.

Other words around honesty include: sincerity, frankness, goodness, scrupulousness, decency.

So here comes the challenge to all those who hold the notion of honesty dear…

(1.) When we are young we are expected to behave in a certain way by our parents, teachers, siblings and peers. We are taught to please people in order to gain acceptance.

(2.) If we fail to behave in the ways that others want us to, we fail to gain their acceptance. The signs that we have failed can be subtle, like a raised eyebrow of disapproval, or unmistakable, like being shouted at or beaten. Either way, the pain of being rejected is a tough one to bear, and the message is clear: being 100% yourself, being 100% honest is not acceptable.

(3.) It then follows that we learn to adapt and modify our behaviour. We learn how to pretend, and in so doing we are learning how to be dishonest (with ourselves) in order to please others.

(4.) At some point in our lives we are told about the importance of being honest (usually by the same people who taught us how to be dishonest) – especially with them! Only they don’t mean honest (as in 100% honest); they mean a type of honesty that is acceptable to them.

(5.) Because everyone has a different take on the notion of honesty, we grow up expected to be dishonestly-honest (or honestly-dishonest) in different ways for different people.

(6.) This is but one example of how we can end up in psychological trouble: we are asked to do something that doesn’t make sense, something that requires being in two different spaces at the same time (honest and dishonest).

Here are some examples of the mixed messages we can pick up from other people.

Be honest, but not too honest.

Be honest, but only in the way I want you to be honest.

Be honest, but risk the consequences.

Be honest and be damned.

Or turned around the other way:

Be deceitful, but not too deceitful.

Be deceitful, but only in the way I want you to be deceitful.

Be deceitful, but risk the consequences.

Be deceitful and be damned.

Just because it’s not often mentioned doesn’t mean to say there are no hostilities between different parts of our society.

Leonard Cohen wrote a song called There is a War, in which he lists the ongoing, unspoken war between the man and the woman, the black and the white, the rich and the poor, the left and the right.

We could add many more verses to the song, such as:

The old and the young.
The believers and the non-believers.
The voters and the non-voters.
The noisy and the quiet.
The bosses and the workers.
The authoritarians and the libertarians.
The North and the South.

Q: Are you involved in any unspoken wars? If so, can you describe them?

Warming to the theme, Leonard Cohen also co-wrote the song Everybody Knows, in which he claims that we all know what is really going on in the world – yet we say nothing and we do nothing.

Here are some of the lyrics:

Is he right? Are we letting great injustices go unspoken?