No matter how much a person tries to avoid conflict and feel that ignorance is bliss, it will take it’s toll one way or another. At the heart of most conflict is ignorance. When we are not able to see another person's view or perspective, we become ignorant to their views, values and their way of life. We don’t have the ability to empathise with them hence we enter into disagreements which inevitably lead to further conflict. This has been most prevalent in our society today with refugees entering Australia.
There are several recurrent themes running through this collection such as, the lost father, the regained father, the lost love, brotherhood, betrayal and the one I found most striking was that of facelessness. Common belief would view facelessness related with invisibility, but in the book Drown, it is not. There is something within this facelessness, which makes the person all the more visible, real, pitied, hated, feared, and by some, treated with great kindness. Those who are “faced” want the “faceless” to be gone for good because they represent the fear that they will also one day suffer this fate where all that defines a person to the outside world is stripped away. They fear to be in a position where they are unloved and unlovable.
However, Edward will not accept by the society because he is so different. This is a wonderful tale about love and kindness, but also about rejection and estrangement. It shows the limits of people's tolerance for what is different from them and how strangers, those who stray from the norm, commonly named 'misfits', awake mockery or fear from a society which will use them and ultimately reject them, thus breaking their innocence and goodness. Though a harsh satire of people's vices, such as deceit, gossip, jealousy, hypocrisy, as well as a tragic witness to the pain and frustration linked to being unable to be accepted as one is by others, the tone is still infused with an ever constant sweetness, gentleness and innocence. The film can be read as a dark, romantic fable for adults, another take on the disparity between the individual and society, on the unique nature of one single character and the horror of conformity.
When I criticize and attack myself, it is because knowing I failed makes me think about if i had tried harder then it would have made a difference. Negative self concept is often hidden from the world because we are suppose to perceive ourself with positivity in order to be accepted but that can change. Self concept is basically the beliefs and attitudes we role play in our lives. In How to Improve Your Self Concept, it mentions “your attitudes about yourself may be positive for some roles, and not so positive for others”. There will always be negative views because we do not live even near a Utopia society and we cannot please everybody.
Man is reluctant to move out into the overwhelmingness of his world, the real dangers of it (Becker, p. 53)…." Becker describes the world itself as a "nightmarish" and "demonic" environment that is essentially terrifying to our human consciousness, and in order to maintain our ability to function in our lives without this relative horror and despair, we build psychological defenses such as feelings of self worth and power, as if we control our life and death, though in effect we are actually hiding from life itself, or the true nature of reality. Though this declaration of morbid, subconscious self delusion as the primary mechanism of human survival is rather depressing, I believe that Becker supports this claim with effective and well developed psychological and philosophical conclusions, and in support of his position I believe that there is significant support of his hypotheses within many of the texts covered in this course, such as Aurelius, Nietzsche, and Sartre, whether or not they had even realized this themselves. In order to fully
Drabble is correct to argue that people tend to ignore truth in order to follow societal standards. In today's world it is often difficult to adjust to one type of lifestyle or another. The constant bombardments of outside opinions hamper our ability to choose and be comfortable with a certain way of living. Therefore, blind conformity is actually a molding of what is said to be normal in society instead of using differences to enhance humans. The malicious acts committed by Malcolm X reflect the idea that people ignore truth to conform to society.
The Second Noble Truth is that craving causes all suffering. When we look at psychological suffering, it is easy to see how craving causes it. When we want something but are unable to get it, we feel frustrated. When we expect someone to live up to our expectation and he or she do not, we feel let down and disappointed. When we want others to like us and they don't, we feel hurt.
PHILOSOPHICAL CONDITIONING REBT is based on the assumption that what we label our “emotional” reactions are largely caused by our conscious and unconscious evaluations, interpretations, and philosophies. Thus, we feel anxious or depressed because we strongly convince ourselves that it is terrible when we fail at something or that we can’t stand the pain of being rejected. We feel hostile because we vigorously believe that people who behave unfairlyto us absolutely should not act the way they indubitably do, and that it is utterly insufferable when they frustrate us. Like stoicism, a school of philosophy that existed some two thousand years ago, rational emotive behavior therapy holds that there are virtually no good reasons why human beings have to make themselves very neurotic, no matter what kind of negative stimuli impinge on them. It gives them full leeway to feel strong negative emotions, such as sorrow, regret, displeasure, annoyance, rebellion,
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. The world has no trust in each other anymore. Everybody believes that others are scheming against them. Things are taken too personal and problems are created within an environment.
It can be toxic when applied to human institutions. The concept of exclusivity or an exclusive attitude lies at the core of corruption, wars and many other problems in the world to day. This is because exclusivity implies the exclusion of people according to some criterion which is the root discrimination and prejudice. Exclusivity engenders an atmosphere of us and them, pitting one group against another. It highlights the differences between people and leads to tension and violence between groups.