But it occurred to me the other day: there is ALSO a lot of courage, persistence, selflessness, giving, ingenuity, patience.
Then it occurred to me that one of the greatest crimes you can commit is to attempt to deprive someone of useful suffering. Useful suffering is transformation is growth. Depriving them of it, is telling them to remain permanently stunted as human beings, and to fail–to the extent you can manage as their alleged guardian–to reach anything close to the potential with which they were born.
The essence of productive, useful culture is making emotional pain useful.
Our salient problem in the modern world is that we have rejected the notion of THROUGH, that you can get through depression or anxiety by embracing it, and accepting it, internalizing it, and using it as a teacher. Anything short of a superficially happy Worker and Consumer is considered maladaptive and treated as a deficiency of neurotransmitters, or happy thoughts.
Fuck this. It is stupid.
I am tempted to state as definitive, and will certainly state provisionally: the sole honest purpose of spiritual teachers is to teach people how to make pain productive. It is in no cases to deny them the opportunities their pain grants them.
Thus, no one–not me, not you, not the local pastor or rabbi, or yogi–need concern him or herself with helping people directly. Their concern is with good ideas, which enable them to help themselves.
I would draw an analogy between Socialism and Capitalism.
In Socialism, a fascist state is enacted to a varying degree, so that a core group of emotionally constipated individuals can avoid processing their own internal emotional trauma by claiming to care in the abstract for the misery of everyone else; they do this by promising something for nothing to ignorant and greedy people. In the end, by working hard to deny people their actual misery, and by denying the need for pain in the abstract, they actually make everyone MORE unhappy. There is no point in pain, in either a Sybaritic Leftist society like they have in northern Europe; and there is no redemptive pain in a Communist hell. There are only lies.
In Capitalism, the goal is to create universal opportunity for people to choose their own work, to make their own way, to build their own fortunes. Morally, this system is empty, except to the extent that functional emotional behaviors tend to lead to financial gain.
Are you beginning to see where this modern world went so wrong?