I Must to I Like – Moderates United

Doing something “voluntarily” that you are forced to do is no virtue. If you don’t lie, cheat, and steal only because you fear being caught, you have not understood their value. If you pray incessantly only because that is what you think you are expected to do–or if you want to be esteemed as pious without actually being pious–then that is no virtue.

The more I mature, the more I realize that morality is a simple expression of mental health. It is right because it is right: it works at every level, from the personal to the global, to increase happiness, social connection, productivity. And anything that is right need not be forced. You simply let it be, and it is.

This basic idea of course is everywhere, with the Tao Te Ching being the most obvious example within my own history.

And speaking of my own history, it is filled with “I Must.” The point of breaking someone is to make it so that doing other than what they are told fills them with extreme anxiety and fear. This is the domain of “I Must”.

What I am trying to migrate to–and one technique I am experimenting with is trying to, in effect, be my own guide, and record messages on a tape recorder as to who I have been and where I am trying to get to–is “I Like.”

I am echoing something Jack London wrote:

The ultimate word is I Like. It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says, in an instant, “I Like,” and does something else, and philosophy goes glimmering. It is I Like that makes the drunkard drink and the martyr wear a hair shirt; that makes one man a reveller and another man an anchorite; that makes one man pursue fame, another gold, another love, and another God. Philosophy is very often a man’s way of explaining his own I LIKE.

I will add to this a quote from Herman Melville that I am reciting (perhaps slightly wrong) from memory: “When I hear a man give himself out as a Philosopher, I conclude that–like the dyspeptic old man–he must have ‘broken his digestor.'”

Think about this: is not every failure of follow-through you have ever experienced not come as a conflict between “I Must”, and “I Like”? One part of you feels you ought to do one thing, but some other part of you tells the first part to go fuck itself, and following behavior, predictably, is erratic and incoherent.

My own task, then, logically, is reconciling my parts. I am still working out how to do that, but am making, I do believe, some progress.