A Thousand Ways to Say: Be Yourself

The biggest mistake we make is rejecting opportunities to assert our personal independence. The second biggest is refusing appropriate support when it’s available. Both require you bother to look in the mirror of your soul pretty often.
It would require a set of encyclopedias to cover all the various ways I’ve heard it said: Discover yourself and live from that. Chase down all the most useful schools of psychology. Within their acknowledged limitations, they always seek the same thing, which is to reduce dependency and encourage accountability. How about Transactional Analysis? That’s all about breaking out of the conditioning of your youth, and breaking the habits of responding to the expectations of others to whom you really owe no such dependency. Parent Effectiveness Training? Same story but the other side of the coin; stop taking control and responsibility for things you can’t fix.
Game Theory? Throw aside the cultural mythology of human sexual response and operate according the facts of human nature. Don’t be restrained by feminist lies which dominate our social structure. Or the politics of the Tea Party? Plenty of mythology there, but the central theme of reducing the Nanny State has always been a good idea. I go farther by saying the modern State is all wrong in the first place, since it is specifically formulated to dissolve human rights and freedoms by making them mere ideas subject to debate. Western Civilization refuses to admit there is anything of substance beyond the material world, despite any pile of words to the contrary. You aren’t permitted to propose moral realities which aren’t subject to human inspection and logical analysis. Among those higher moral assumptions is the very fundamental necessity of people taking an awful lot more control over their own lives than any Western government can tolerate. It’s the nature of the beast.
Yet we are also designed with distinct limitations. We are required to seek a certain level of protection and support from others. Some threats are just too big, and no one is competent and talented at everything humans need to do. The big problem we always have until The End of all things will be the vast number of ways we do it wrong. There has to be some balance between dependence and independence, and human history has seen precious little effective balance.
In raising these issues, I would hardly be helpful if I pretend my answer is the only right one. That would be a grand hypocrisy. Rather, the purpose here is to raise the question. That’s the only real answer I have. I’ve written it repeatedly: Questioning is the answer. That’s the whole point. The only way to get it wrong is not looking into it. Underlying my philosophy-theology-theory is the assumption whatever absolutes there may be in all of this would surely be outside our ability to perceive and state. The best possible world includes the natural conflicts arising from differences of opinion. It’s the shape of the give-n-take I struggle most to define. Again, there has to be some balance between seeking our own self-realization versus stomping someone else unnecessarily.
It’s not the answer, but the seeking part for which I have the strongest sense of moral definition. Nothing else I do or say matters a whit against this one thing: You need to search.