Self-reflection and the anxieties therein
Posted on | May 11, 2008 | No Comments
Anybody who’s had more than a few drinks with me can gather it’s a Messiah complex which guides my unrelenting desire to be a father to the world. This predilection has been perpetually involved against personal happiness in a war for my own sense of fulfillment. As the years pass, the former is only becoming stronger. I’m at the point where I feel guilty for going out instead of studying the various crises of man and I curse myself when I falter from my strict regimen of reading and self-reflection.
I accept that such a complex is manifested through just the right proportions of low self-esteem and narcissism. I try to take advantage of it and maintain some semblance of self-control lest my personal anguish become a volatile mixture. Still, I can’t ignore that — more each day — I’m settling with the idea that self-sacrifice can be a means for some vague sense of personal contentment in lieu of being happy.
I’m so afraid. It’s as if I’m slowly granting some greater force power over myself. I’m still an atheist, which means it isn’t any god who’s controlling my sine qua non. If my taste for a mass movement isn’t flavored by religious palate, then what? Social? Nationalist? My fear is that I’m a recipe for destruction. When the world has swallowed my medicine, will it leave a bitter aftertaste?
I maintain that so long as I continuously question my motives for this need I can keep myself grounded. Those same characteristics which underlie my virtuous nature can just as easily found a furious doctrine of hate. This check-and-balance system of self-reflection and doubt helps quell the chances of an uprising of the destructive traits which lay dormant but necessary in the foundation of my being. This deep-seated penchant for ruin actually nests in the heart of every great reformist. Without it, he would not feel the strong desire to end systems as they are.
But it cannot stop there. It is through the complementary attributes of humility and compassion that the great leader holds within himself the inclination to rebuild systems as they could be. Without such, ruin will lay eggs in his heart and hatch only what it knows from experience: further destruction. It is the lacking of the empathic attributes — which temper a will to power with the precondition that it be used for good — which separates the Hitlers from Gandhis, Stalins from Lincolns, and Cromwells from Churchills.
All along, my inner child is screaming, “But I don’t want to be a fascist!” I want him to cry bitter havoc with every breath in his lungs and never stop.
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