How Is Freedom Defined In The Quotes

What is a woman's place in this modern world? Jasnah Kholin's words read. I rebel against this question, though so many of my peers ask it. The inherent bias in the inquiry seems invisible to so many of them. They consider themselves progressive because they are willing to challenge many of the assumptions of the past. They ignore the greater assumption--that a 'place' for women must be defined and set forth to begin with. Half of the population must somehow be reduced to the role arrived at by a single conversation. No matter how broad that role is, it will be--by-nature--a reduction from the infinite variety that is womanhood. I say that there is no role for women--there is, instead, a role for each woman, and she must make it for herself. For some, it will be the role of scholar; for others, it will be the role of wife. For others, it will be both. For yet others, it will be neither. Do not mistake me in assuming I value one woman's role above another. My point is not to stratify our society--we have done that far to well already--my point is to diversify our discourse. A woman's strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses it to be, but in the power to choose that role. It is amazing to me that I even have to make this point, as I see it as the very foundation of our conversation.

Today’s events are reminiscent of the Old Testament story of how the Israelites demanded a king over God’s objection. They believed that a king would give them peace and security. The results proved otherwise.

Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where i end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership. Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom. Taking responsibility for my life opens up many different options. Boundaries help us keep the good in and the bad out. Setting boundaries inevitably involves taking responsibility for your choices. You are the one who makes them. You are the one who must live with their consequences. And you are the one who may be keeping yourself from making the choices you could be happy with. We must own our own thoughts and clarify distorted thinking.

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

Heros aren't defined by the way they die but how they live.

This is how they survive. You must know this. You're too smart not to know this. They paint the world full of shadows... and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true. In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it. All this will be for nothing. We will have been for nothing. Defined by their histories... distorted to fit into their narrative... until all that is left of us are the monsters in the stories they tell their children.

The free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict the freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition.

What can we do? How can we do it? With whom? What tactics should be used? How should we define a strategy that is accessible to everyone, including a general public that has reached levels of depoliticization that can make atrocities seem acceptable? What is our vision? How can we make sure “we” are talking to “everyone”?

By their actions, the Founding Fathers made clear that their primary concern was religious freedom, not the advancement of a state religion. Individuals, not the government, would define religious faith and practice in the United States. Thus the Founders ensured that in no official sense would America be a Christian Republic. Ten years after the Constitutional Convention ended its work, the country assured the world that the United States was a secular state, and that its negotiations would adhere to the rule of law, not the dictates of the Christian faith. The assurances were contained in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797 and were intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced. John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers.

And the mainstreaming of the sex industry reflects that inequality. It is still women who are dieting or undergoing surgery on their bodies; still women stripping in the clubs while the men chant and cheer; still women, not men, who believe that their ability to reach for fame and success will be defined by how closely they conform to one narrow image of sexuality. If this is the new sexual liberation, it looks too uncannily like the old sexism to convince many of us that this is the freedom we have sought.

I believe that no matter how rough the world becomes, there will always be teachers and students learning from each other, and even when savage and violent powers obstruct our freedoms, there will always be earnest and heartfelt first loves and friendships being born. While writing, I was focused on and absorbed in giving expression to those moments. I believe those are the moments that define our lives. We may be the protagonists of tragedy, but we are also the heroes of our most beautiful and thrilling experiences.

Our ability to choose is our most basic freedom. When we define ourselves we choose. When we give meaning to our experience we also choose. The more aware we are of ourselves and our day-to-day experience, the more we are able to exercise freedom's power — the power of choice. Freedom depends upon clarity. We cannot exercise our freedom if we are confused. And, of course, being defined backwards leaves people confused. Backwards connections arise out of the Controller's confusion, and oppressive and controlling behaviors create confusion. When others define us, our freedom is assaulted because our awareness is assaulted. Awareness and freedom are intrinsically linked. Without freedom awareness fades. Without awareness freedom fades. If our freedom of choice is lost, life itself loses meaning. Despair fills the void of lost meaning.

But these gains in freedom for both men and women often seem like a triumph of subtraction rather than addition. Over time, writes Coontz, Americans have come to define liberty “negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one’s wealth or time.” If this is how you conceive of liberty—as freedom from obligation—then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.

From Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign ruling by authority to Max Weber 250 years later, defining the state in terms of a monopoly of force is a slow loss of civil sensitivity. The term “democracy” is strictly a constitutional belief about how authority is generated, but today it most commonly commends rather than names a government that serves some particular interest, such as that of “the people.” The drift of these and other confusions of our political talk has always been to transform the subtle and balanced features attributed to the state in the past into an enterprise that facilitates our political preferences. It would be hard to deny that political sophistication has given way to a kind of partisan brutishness, some elements of which Oakeshott thought had already been recognized by Tocqueville in 1848: “… the passions of man, from being political, have now become social.” And this means that men care now far more about “the satisfaction of substantive wants” and the power of government needed to supply them than about freedom and constitutionality.

If only we lived in a culture in which internal measures of satisfaction and success — a capacity for joy and caring, an ability to laugh, a sense of connection to others, a belief in social justice — were as highly valued as external measures. If only we lived in a culture that made ambition compatible with motherhood and family life, that presented models of women who were integrated and whole: strong, sexual, ambitious, cued into their own varied appetites and demands, and equipped with the freedom and resources to explore all of them. If only women felt less isolated in their frustration and fatigue, less torn between competing hungers, less compelled to keep nine balls in the air at once, and less prone to blame themselves when those balls come crashing to the floor. If only we exercised our own power, which is considerable but woefully underused; if only we defined desire on our own terms. And — painfully, truly — if only we didn't care so much about how we looked, how much we weighed, what we wore.

In Christ, we are a new creation and are defined by His Life, not our bad behavior!

Complete freedom is as much curse as boon; freedom within strict and well-defined confines is, to me, ideal.

Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?

We need to find our identity--how we define ourselves--in what God has to say about us.

Your identity will no longer be defined by how you feel, but by who you are--God's holy child--set apart for His good purposes.

I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.

This got me thinking of how animals define beauty versus us humans and how drastically different these opinions are. Animals don’t see beauty or judge us based on it. If a cat is comfortable with you and trusts you, it does not care what you look like. You could have a missing eye or two missing eyes or a freakish pimple on your face, and the horse you are riding or brushing will not care one bit. Animals teach us the meaning of beautiful every day. Do you take the time to listen?

It was Eisenhower who defined freedom as the opportunity for self-discipline. In fact, freedom and power and success require self-discipline. Because without it, chaos and complacency move in. Discipline, then, is how we maintain that freedom.

Sure, I hear about the new freedom that people are enjoying in Eastern Europe. But how do you define freedom? Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security

I define power as the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the lives of others, the freedom to shape and determine the story of who we are. Power also means having the ability to reward and punish and decide how resources are distributed.

What we focus on defines us, so if our focus is inward, on ourselves, we wind up defining for ourselves whether we are righteous or guilty. When we begin and end with us—with our self— we miss the heart of the gospel and never truly find the freedom for which we ache.

The Idea of the University, Cardinal John Henry Newman’s great work defining how the republic of the mind should be governed, hailed the importance of increasing the breadth of understanding, promoting excellence in scholarship, advancing student dialogue and freedom of expression and inquiry.

But hell can endure for only a limited period, and life will begin again one day. History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labor. Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place—far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history—to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in, and which we must now define in the face of a world that insults it.

According to the logic of that old, deluded world, freedom means being at liberty to come and go as we please. Such a definition of freedom is often very useful to an oppressive regime. That is because freedom, if so defined, becomes something that can then be taken away. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi said no when offered his freedom because the offer itself was deluded. His captors, who thought they were free but in reality were the “thought prisoners” of an oppressive government and the victims of a degraded religious culture that had long since capitulated on the matter of basic human rights, therefore had nothing to offer him. He was free already.

What does and should unite us as Americans is our adherence to and respect for the U.S. Constitution—and that’s about it. Love of, belief in, and a willingness to defend freedom, liberty, and democracy: government by the consent of the governed. But as for metaphysical, spiritual, otherworldly, religious, or transcendental matters—is there a God? What happens after we die? Why are we here? How does karma operate? Who was Jesus? Where does chi reside? What is the Holy Ghost? How can we best mollify jinn?—the answers to such questions, whatever they may be, are not what define us as Americans, as citizens, or as human beings. And to suggest—as more and more politicians seem to be doing—that to be a good, decent American requires faith in a Creator, or to imply that Christian values are the only values, or to argue that our laws are given to us solely by God, or to constantly denigrate nonbelievers as somehow less-than-welcome partners in the American enterprise . . . that’s all, quite frankly, very un-American.

Do not settle for living a version of your life designed by another. You are not meant to be gatekeeper or the holder of secrets and shame. You are here to live free and clear and into your own wide open truth. If you are spending too much time around people who expect otherwise you will begin to notice a feeling of constriction. Sometimes the life we create can be come a cage of our own making. Sometimes we stifle our truths to make others comfortable. Do not sacrifice your own comfort and freedom for that of another. The price you pay for this is too high. Define your own space. Remember your own divinity. You have a responsibility to this existence to live in fullness of your truth and art and purpose. Do not be diminished by circumstance or opinion or judgement. Your story is your own; nobody can write it but you. You hold the paper, you choose the pen, and you write your life story the way only you can. So, if someone tries to build you a box, rip that fucker apart and use the wood to build yourself a stage, then ditch your indoor voice and sing it loud. People are not meant to live quietly in small containers no matter how beautiful. A gilded cage is still confinement. You are a wild child – only the open air of freedom will do.

The real story of Nader, Shahed, and other women who live as men in Afghanistan is not so much about how they break gender norms or what they have become by doing that. Rather, it is about this: Between gender and freedom, freedom is the bigger and more important idea. In Afghanistan as well as globally. Defining one’s gender becomes a concern only after freedom is achieved. Then a person can begin to fill the word with new meaning.

Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking. We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry. The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

If they believe war essential to preserving their freedom, it’s incumbent upon them to prosecute war with the same seriousness their forebears demonstrated in the 1940s. Washington’s war would then truly become America’s war with all that implies in terms of commitment and priorities. Should Americans decide, on the other hand, that freedom as presently defined is not worth the sacrifices entailed by real war, it becomes incumbent upon them to revise their understanding of freedom.

But there was one girl who had a big influence over me. Barbie. I worshipped Barbie. In fact, I would say Barbie was my twelve-inch plastic life coach. She had it all, a camper, a dune buggy, even a dream house. Part of why it was a dream house to me was that she was the only one who lived there. Her boyfriend, Ken, came to visit when she--er, I decided. She had a sports car and would bounce from job to job as she--er, I saw fit.Barbie owned zero floral baby-making dresses. I craved that indepence. And her weird-ass boobs? So what? She still reached the steering wheel of her royal blue sports car. Some people thought that the fact that her feet were fucked and she couldn't stand was a problem. But to me, it meant she was free. Free from standing at a stove, or a washing machine, or with a baby hanging off her hip. She has no hip. She has no hips. Plus, she didn't have to walk; she drove her convertible everywhere. God, I loved Barbie. She was free in every way I knew how to define freedom.

Zebra crossings have produced a peculiar new type of mentality in an increasing number of people. This has its new correlated freedom: THE RIGHT TO ZEBRA-CROSS. If Freud were still alive he would certainly be able to define this new psychological trait, this zebra-complex. For those afflicted, life is simply a huge zebra-crossing: as soon as they step into the arena they expect all movement to come to a standstill and give way to them. In very bad cases the patient expects people to watch him admiringly and wave to him with friendly smiles.

participation in the political process or lack thereof—and the principles we employ—greatly affect our neighbors. Politics can be a matter of freedom or imprisonment, free speech or censorship, housing or homelessness, life or death. Politics is an essential aspect of modern life. It is how we govern ourselves, and it plays a major role in how we organize ourselves as a society. Political actions have started wars and defined certain people as property, but they’ve also fed the hungry and provided care for the sick. Christians must be faithful and thoughtful in how we choose to wield our influence and political power.

Restating Kierkegaard, the cultural historian Louis Menand noted, “Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom.”2 Kierkegaard believed that we are free to choose our future actions, and this defines who we are.3 But modern science has concluded that our freedom is often more illusory than we think.4 Regardless of how free our will really is, though, the fact that we believe it is free makes us anxious when we perceive that we do not actually have control, when we face risky options in situations of uncertainty, or when we ruminate over how the present and future might be different if we had acted differently in the past.

Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion’s share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late sixties—and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next four decades—grew out of black America’s complete embrace of the latter option.

How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm: Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure. Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. ... Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.

I had been careful, that afternoon, not to tell Albertine how grateful I was to her for having left the Trocadéro. And now, in the evening, fearing that she might leave me, I had pretended to want to leave her, a pretense dictated, as we shall see presently, by the lessons I thought I had learned from my previous love affairs and which I was trying to put to use in this one. This fear I had that Albertine might be going to say to me, “I want to be able to go out on my own at certain times, I want to be able to be away for twenty-four hours,” or make some other demand for freedom which I did not define to myself, but which frightened me, the thought of it had occurred to me for a moment during the evening at the Verdurins’.

A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material equality is inherent to all political systems. The major political philosophies can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend there is no tradeoff. And that in turn means that any discovery of innate differences among individuals is not forbidden knowledge to be suppressed but information that might help us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner.

I have suggested that women look at men this way: if they took away their own network of intimate friends, those with whom they share their personal journey, removed their sense of instinctual guidance, concluded that they were almost wholly alone in the world, and understood that they would be defined only by standards of productivity external to them, they would then know the inner state of the average man. They are horrified at this notion. Having confused the wielding of outer power roles with identity and freedom, women assume that men have a better life. Certainly, they seem to have more outer choices. But most women do not recognize that men have fewer inner choices. And it is with the inner choices that we most define our lives, as almost all women know.

The attempt to define free will is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be coerced. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more. Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance alone. Absent coercion, we are free. Freedom of the will, choice, the possibility of change, mean nothing more-absolutely nothing more than the absence of coercion. This means simply that we are free to change many things about ourselves. Indeed, the main facts of this book—that depressives often become nondepressives, that lifelong panickers become panic free, that impotent men become potent again, that adults reject the sex role they were raised with, that alcoholics become abstainers—demonstrate this. None of this means that therapists, parents, genes, good advice, and even dyspepsia do not influence what we do. None of this denies that there are limits on how much we can change. It only means that we are not prisoners.

We face a deep moral crisis, which we might also describe as a 'crisis of community.' Alongside increasing economic stratification and the continuation of an adaptive racism, a 'morality' of individualism has grown more and more severe. With this deadly combination, we have been losing the spirit that's needed to hold any community or any nation together: a sense of responsibility for each other. In the long term no community can survive when greed and irresponsibility are incentivized instead of reined in. This crisis point to a decision we have to make as a society: Do we want to live in a nation that is defined by inclusionary, solidaristic community values, or one that is defined by the moralistically bankrupt values of Wall Street and the bigoted, exclusionary "solidarity" of reactionaries?

You always have the power of choice. Externally, things may be out of your control. But one thing you can always control and master is your inner control: how you perceive the situation, how you filter it. There’s a tremendous freedom in taking leadership of how you perceive things. An obstacle is only an obstacle if that’s how you look at it. We make choices every day, and when you choose not to choose you are also making a choice. As soon as you make the conscious decision to be happy or successful, the universe moves to get you there. You can choose what impacts you. You can choose what scares you. You can choose to be confident, loved, or damaged. You can choose to let something define you or nothing define you. You can’t change the cards you were dealt, but you can always choose how you play your hand.

Freedom from Expectations I don’t measure my effectiveness at all. I don’t believe in self-measurement. I feel like this is a form of self-discipline, self-punishment, and self-conflict. [1] If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that’s their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it’s your problem. But, if they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem. It has nothing to do with you. They’re going to have lots of expectations out of life. The sooner you can dash their expectations, the better. [1] Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think. Anyone who has known me for a long time knows my defining characteristic is a combination of being very impatient and willful. I don’t like to wait. I hate wasting time. I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I figure out it’s a waste of my time, I leave immediately. Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time. This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning—what the heck are you doing? Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy. [10]

Notice how wickedly and cunningly the serpent tempted Eve: “God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.” The basic sin, the original sin, is precisely this self-deification, this apotheosizing of the will. Lest you think all of this is just abstract theological musing, remember the 1992 Supreme Court decision in the matter of Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Kennedy opined that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” Frankly, I can’t imagine a more perfect description of what it means to grasp at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If Justice Kennedy is right, individual freedom completely trumps objective value and becomes the indisputable criterion of right and wrong. And if the book of Genesis is right, such a move is the elemental dysfunction, the primordial mistake, the original calamity. Of

healthy eating go-to scripts God has given me power over my food choices. I’m supposed to consume food. Food isn’t supposed to consume me. He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” . . . For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9–10) I was made for more than to be stuck in a vicious cycle of defeat. You have circled this mountain long enough. Now turn north. (Deuteronomy 2:3 NASB) When I’m considering a compromise, I will think past this moment and ask myself, How will I feel about this choice tomorrow morning? Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20) When tempted, I either remove the temptation or remove myself from the situation. If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. Therefore, my dear friends, flee. (1 Corinthians 10:12–14) When there’s a special event, I can find other ways to celebrate rather than blowing my healthy eating plan. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. (Revelation 3:8) Struggling with my weight isn’t God’s mean curse on me, but an outside indication that internal changes are needed for me to function and feel well. “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! . . . I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:18–19) I have these boundaries in place not for restriction but to define the parameters of my freedom. I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. (Romans 6:19)

What if, rather than asking women to bear the burden of responsibility for our nation’s health and intelligence, governments invested money in research for better formulas that can improve health? If what we feed our babies in the first year really has that much of an impact on lifelong health, this should be a priority. Because in reality, not all babies are going to be able to be breastfed, as long as we want to live in a world where women have the freedom to decide how to use their bodies; whether to work or stay home; whether to be a primary caregiver or not. In reality, there are going to be children raised by single dads; there are going to be children raised by grandparents; there are going to be children who are adopted by parents who aren’t able to induce lactation; there are going to be children whose mothers don’t produce enough milk, or who are on drugs not compatible with breastfeeding. Rather than demanding that every mother should be able to—should want to—breastfeed, we should be demanding better research, better resources, better options. We should be demanding better.

As existentialists as Jean-Paul Sarte learned, radical individualism can be a dead end for social justice. It is not easy to establish a coherent ideology of social justice based solely on the radical freedom of the individual. Unlike Sarte, who eventually escaped into Marxism, postmodernist philosophers reject communism. But they do find refuge in the New Left, in which Marx's old economic class warfare has been replaced with identity-cultural warfare. This transformation gives them a way out of the individualist-relativist trap in which they found themselves. Instead of the proletariat, it is now cultural identity groups that are being oppressed. It is not workers but races, women, and ethnic and sexual minorities who are the new revolutionaries. Unlike classic Marxists, for whom class consciousness is a social phenomenon economically determined, identity theorists define it as a psychological phenomenon manifested in the culture. Identity solidarity is the equivalent of class consciousness, only it has no objective foundation, economic or otherwise, other than the perception of mutual grievance based on identity.

qualifies as a WMD. The people putting it together in the 1990s no doubt saw it as a tool to bring evenhandedness and efficiency to the criminal justice system. It could also help nonthreatening criminals land lighter sentences. This would translate into more years of freedom for them and enormous savings for American taxpayers, who are footing a $70 billion annual prison bill. However, because the questionnaire judges the prisoner by details that would not be admissible in court, it is unfair. While many may benefit from it, it leads to suffering for others. A key component of this suffering is the pernicious feedback loop. As we’ve seen, sentencing models that profile a person by his or her circumstances help to create the environment that justifies their assumptions. This destructive loop goes round and round, and in the process the model becomes more and more unfair. The third question is whether a model has the capacity to grow exponentially. As a statistician would put it, can it scale? This might sound like the nerdy quibble of a mathematician. But scale is what turns WMDs from local nuisances into tsunami forces, ones that define and

them intentionally, effectively, and satisfactorily through your physical expression of life. The Law of Attraction is the first of the Laws that we will offer, for if you do not understand, and are not able to effectively apply, the Law of Attraction, then the second Law, the Science of Deliberate Creation, and the third, the Art of Allowing, cannot be utilized. You must first understand and effectively utilize the first Law in order to understand and utilize the second. And you must be able to understand and utilize the second Law before you will be able to understand and utilize the third. The first Law, the Law of Attraction, says: That which is like unto itself, is drawn. While this may seem like a rather simple statement, it defines the most powerful Law in the Universe—a Law that affects all things at all times. Nothing exists that is unaffected by this powerful Law. The second Law, the Science of Deliberate Creation, says: That which I give thought to and that which I believe or expect—is. In short, you get what you are thinking about, whether you want it or not. A deliberate application of thought is really what the Science of Deliberate Creation is about, for if you do not understand these Laws, and deliberately apply them, then you may very well be creating by default. The third Law, the Art of Allowing, says: I am that which I am, and I am willing to allow all others to be that which they are. When you are willing to allow others to be as they are, even in their not allowing of you, then you will be an Allower, but it is not likely that you will reach that point until you first come to understand how it is you get what you get. Only when you understand that another cannot be a part of your experience unless you invite them in through your thoughts (or through your attention to them), and that circumstances cannot be a part of your experience unless you invite them to you through your thought (or through your observation of them), will you be the Allower that you wanted to be when you came forth into this expression of life. An understanding of these three powerful Universal Laws, and a deliberate application of them, will lead you to the joyous freedom of being able to create your own life experience exactly as you want it to be. Once you understand that all people, circumstances, and events are invited into your experience by you, through your thought, you will begin to live your life as you intended when you made the decision to come forth into this physical body. And so, an understanding of the powerful Law of Attraction, coupled with an intention to Deliberately Create your own life experience, will ultimately lead you to the unparalleled freedom that can only come from a complete understanding and application of the Art of Allowing.

Beginning in 1519 and continuing until the end of his life, Luther expounded a theme that the Sacrament brings and means a fellowship of love and mercy: "This fellowship consists in this, that all the spiritual possessions of Christ and his saints are shared with and become the common property of him who receives this sacrament. Again all sufferings and sins also become common property; and thus love engenders love in return and [mutual love] unites . . . It is like a city where every citizen shares with all the others the city's name, honor, freedom, trade, customs, usages, help, support, protection, and the like, while at the same time he shares all the dangers of fire and flood, enemies and death, losses taxes and the like. For he who would share in the profits must also share in the costs, and ever recompense love with love . . ." For Luther, unity with respect to the Sacrament meant both doctrinal agreement and love. When the prerequisite to church fellowship is defined merely (however important!) in terms of doctrinal fellowship, it can end in a Platonic pursuit of a frigid and rigid mental ideal. Doctrinal unity, true unity in Christ's body and blood, is also a unity of deep love and mercy. If I will not lay down my burden on Christ and the community, or take up the burdens of others who come to the Table, then I should not go to the Sacrament. Close(d) Communion is also a fellowship of love and mercy with my brother and sister in Christ as Luther taught in the previous citation.

Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry. The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity. These have been hard-fought battles, waged on uncertain, shifting terrain. Each advance has sparked a strong reaction from those whose interests and beliefs are threatened. Today the changes are happening so fast, in an environment so covered in a blizzard of information and misinformation, that our very identities are being challenged. What does it mean to be an American today? It’s a question that will answer itself if we get back to what’s brought us this far: widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the meaning of freedom, and strengthening bonds of community. Shrinking the definition of them and expanding the definition of us.

1. ‘ I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art.They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more. But I can see they’re beautiful arranged.’ 2. ’ Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?... Why do you keep on using these stupid words-nasty, nice, proper, right? Why are you so worried about what’s proper?...why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?’ 3. ‘ Because I can’t marry a man to whom I don’t feel I belong in all ways. My mind must be his, my heart must be his, my body must be his. Just as I must feel he belongs to me. ‘ 4.’ The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe-so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.’ 5. 'It’s weird. Uncanny. But there is a sort of relationship between us. I make fun of him, I attack him all the time, but he senses when I’m ‘soft’. When he can dig back and not make me angry. So we slip into teasing states that are almost friendly. It’s partly because I’m so lonely, it’s partly deliberate (I want make him relax, both for his own good and so that one dat he may make a mistake), so it’s part weakness, and part cunning, and part charity. But there’s a mysterious fourth part I can’t define. It can’t be friendship, I loathe him. Perhaps it’s just knowledge. Just knowing a lot about him. And knowing someone automatically makes you feel close to him. Even when you wish he was on another planet.’ 6.’ You must MAKE, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible form. If you feel something deeply, you’re not ashamed to show your feeling.’ 7. ‘ The women I’ve loved have always told me I’m selfish. It’s what makes them love me. And then be disgusted with me...But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way. ‘ 8. ‘ I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making , I love doing, I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart. ‘ 9. ‘ I don’t know what love is...love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.’ 10. ‘ All this business, it’s bound up with my bossy attitude to life. I’ve always known where I’m going, how I want things to happen. And they have happened as I have wanted, and I have taken it for granted that they have because I know where I’m going. But I have been lucky in all sorts of things. I’ve always tried to happen to life; but it’s time I let life happen to me. ‘ 11. ‘I said, what you love is your own love. It’s not love, it’s selfishness. It’s not me you think of, but what you feel about me.’ 12. ‘ The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We’re so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we’re stronger then they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can’t stand ours.

Like stress, emotion is a concept we often invoke without a precise sense of its meaning. And, like stress, emotions have several components. The psychologist Ross Buck distinguishes between three levels of emotional responses, which he calls Emotion I, Emotion II and Emotion III, classified according to the degree we are conscious of them. Emotion III is the subjective experience, from within oneself. It is how we feel. In the experience of Emotion III there is conscious awareness of an emotional state, such as anger or joy or fear, and its accompanying bodily sensations. Emotion II comprises our emotional displays as seen by others, with or without our awareness. It is signalled through body language — “non-verbal signals, mannerisms, tones of voices, gestures, facial expressions, brief touches, and even the timing of events and pauses between words. [They] may have physiologic consequences — often outside the awareness of the participants.” It is quite common for a person to be oblivious to the emotions he is communicating, even though they are clearly read by those around him. Our expressions of Emotion II are what most affect other people, regardless of our intentions. A child’s displays of Emotion II are also what parents are least able to tolerate if the feelings being manifested trigger too much anxiety in them. As Dr. Buck points out, a child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression. The self-shutdown serves to prevent shame and rejection. Under such conditions, Buck writes, “emotional competence will be compromised…. The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.” The stress literature amply documents that helplessness, real or perceived, is a potent trigger for biological stress responses. Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so. People often find themselves in situations of learned helplessness — for example, someone who feels stuck in a dysfunctional or even abusive relationship, in a stressful job or in a lifestyle that robs him or her of true freedom. Emotion I comprises the physiological changes triggered by emotional stimuli, such as the nervous system discharges, hormonal output and immune changes that make up the flight-or-fight reaction in response to threat. These responses are not under conscious control, and they cannot be directly observed from the outside. They just happen. They may occur in the absence of subjective awareness or of emotional expression. Adaptive in the acute threat situation, these same stress responses are harmful when they are triggered chronically without the individual’s being able to act in any way to defeat the perceived threat or to avoid it. Self-regulation, writes Ross Buck, “involves in part the attainment of emotional competence, which is defined as the ability to deal in an appropriate and satisfactory way with one’s own feelings and desires.” Emotional competence presupposes capacities often lacking in our society, where “cool” — the absence of emotion — is the prevailing ethic, where “don’t be so emotional” and “don’t be so sensitive” are what children often hear, and where rationality is generally considered to be the preferred antithesis of emotionality. The idealized cultural symbol of rationality is Mr. Spock, the emotionally crippled Vulcan character on Star Trek.

One might pause here to wonder how it is that the United States claims to support democracy and freedom in the world when it so often backs dictators like the Shah and Somoza. As I tell my human rights class every year, the United States always supports democracy and freedom, except when it doesn’t, which is all the time…. As political analyst Stephen Gowans explains, the United States is simply not what it claims to be, and most likely never has been: The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire. And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.2

In all the seconds of life that beat solemnly from my heart, in all the hours of waiting for the release that binds us, in all the months of moons that guided our hopes, of all the years of yesterday that taught us the path of which we walk today: Today, I am true. Today I will write without release; without questions or care of the minds that do not understand the words that will lie before me in this letter. Licentia. The release of anything that covers my ears or blinds my eyes. Oh, licentia. The people shall call me insane because I have proven to remain unrelenting in the belief that freedom and justice and truth are all subject to change, but that the ideas are the spark which light the fire to continue my journey. These words have no value unless given an idea, and that is the only part that is bounded in this world: the idea. The idea to be free; no matter the cost of autonomy and decisions and conscious state of mind. The idea to have justice; without a governance to proclaim what it defines. The idea to seek truth; no matter how many lies claim to hold the reality. Licentia. The release of anything that covers my ears or blinds my eyes. Oh, licentia. It is the fear that controls the grip which lacerates our brains and chains our souls. It is the fear that without power or an entity that seeks it, that we will be dangerous. It is the fear of our ourselves that binds us. But once we are no longer afraid of the mirror that grants us our reflection, we begin to understand that the fear was simply an illusion. It is the pain that scares us into submission and breaks our vows to our hearts. It is the pain that makes an honest man beg on his knees to the wolves that seek to devour his ideas. It is the pain that creates the stage to which only fools applaud and puppets play. It is the pain that makes us see the ugliness of our soul. But once we are in pain, we realize that it was never the worst feeling to behold, but that the betrayal of our minds and the minds of others is. Licentia. The release of anything that covers my ears or blinds my eyes. Oh, licentia.

The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which story has been pushed from its biblical frontline prominence to a bench on the sidelines and then condescended to as "illustration" or "testimony" or "inspiration." Our contemporary unbiblical preference, both inside and outside the church, is for information over story. We typically gather impersonal (pretentiously called "scientific" or "theological") information, whether doctrinal or philosophical or historical, in order to take things into our own hands and take charge of how we will live our lives. And we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation. And we live them in an extensive community of men and women, each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire. Picking a text for living that is characterized by information-gathering and consultation with experts leaves out nearly everything that is uniquely us - our personal histories and relationships, our sins and guilt, our moral character and believing obedience to God. Telling and listening to a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality. There are no (or few) abstractions in a story. A story is immediate, concrete, plotted, relational, personal. And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls - our moral, spiritual, embodied God-personal lives - story is the best verbal way of getting us back in touch again. And that is why God's word is given for the most part in the form of story, this vast, overarching, all-encompassing story, this meta-story.

Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking. We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry. The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity. These have been hard-fought battles, waged on uncertain, shifting terrain. Each advance has sparked a strong reaction from those whose interests and beliefs are threatened. Today the changes are happening so fast, in an environment so covered in a blizzard of information and misinformation, that our very identities are being challenged. What does it mean to be an American today? It’s a question that will answer itself if we get back to what’s brought us this far: widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the meaning of freedom, and strengthening bonds of community. Shrinking the definition of them and expanding the definition of us. Leaving no one behind, left out, looked down on. We must get back to that mission. And do it with both energy and humility, knowing that our time is fleeting and our power is not an end in itself but a means to achieve more noble and necessary ends. The American dream works when our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences and when together they create endless possibilities. That’s an America worth fighting—even dying—for. And, more important, it’s an America worth living and working for.

How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr Erich Fromm: ‘Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.’ Our ‘increasing mental sickness’ may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But ‘let us beware’, says Dr Fromm, ‘of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.’ The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. ‘Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.’ They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish ‘the illusion of individuality’, but in fact they have been to a great extent de-individualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But ‘uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.’ In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father’s genes into contact with the mother’s. These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.

Unconditional blame is the tendency to explain all difficulties exclusively as the consequence of forces beyond your influence, to see yourself as an absolute victim of external circumstances. Every person suffers the impact of factors beyond his control, so we are all, in a sense, victims. We are not, however, absolute victims. We have the ability to respond to our circumstances and influence how they affect us. In contrast, the unconditional blamer defines his victim-identity by his helplessness, disowning any power to manage his life and assigning causality only to that which is beyond his control. Unconditional blamers believe that their problems are always someone else’s fault, and that there’s nothing they could have done to prevent them. Consequently, they believe that there’s nothing they should do to address them. Unconditional blamers feel innocent, unfairly burdened by others who do things they “shouldn’t” do because of maliciousness or stupidity. According to the unconditional blamer, these others “ought” to fix the problems they created. Blamers live in a state of self-righteous indignation, trying to control people around them with their accusations and angry demands. What the unconditional blamer does not see is that in order to claim innocence, he has to relinquish his power. If he is not part of the problem, he cannot be part of the solution. In fact, rather than being the main character of his life, the blamer is a spectator. Watching his own suffering from the sidelines, he feels “safe” because his misery is always somebody else’s fault. Blame is a tranquilizer. It soothes the blamer, sheltering him from accountability for his life. But like any drug, its soothing effect quickly turns sour, miring him in resignation and resentment. In order to avoid anxiety and guilt, the blamer must disown his freedom and power and see himself as a plaything of others. The blamer feels victimized at work. His job is fraught with letdowns, betrayals, disappointments, and resentments. He feels that he is expected to fix problems he didn’t create, yet his efforts are never recognized. So he shields himself with justifications. Breakdowns are never his fault, nor are solutions his responsibility. He is not accountable because it is always other people who failed to do what they should have done. Managers don’t give him direction as they should, employees don’t support him as they should, colleagues don’t cooperate with him as they should, customers demand much more than they should, suppliers don’t respond as they should, senior executives don’t lead the organization as they should, administration systems don’t work as they should—the whole company is a mess. In addition, the economy is weak, the job market tough, the taxes confiscatory, the regulations crippling, the interest rates exorbitant, and the competition fierce (especially because of those evil foreigners who pay unfairly low wages). And if it weren’t difficult enough to survive in this environment, everybody demands extraordinary results. The blamer never tires of reciting his tune, “Life is not fair!

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

The ending of war, the resolution of poverty, the creation of a material abundance unseen in history to meet human needs, the removal of most crime as we know it, the empowerment of true personal freedom through the removal of pointless and/or monotonous labor, and the resolution of many environmental threats, are but a few of the calculated possibilities we have when we take our technical reality into account. However, again, these possibilities are not only largely unrecognized, they are also literally restricted by the current social order for the implementation of such problem solving efficiency and prosperity stands in direct opposition to the very mechanics of how our current social system is operating at the core level.

The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How ‘free’ a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone.

When I first began to see and understand that this is what was at work in me, I started to rise up a little bit against it. The foundations of my faith gave me the understanding that I could and should call out to God for completion and identity in these areas instead of trying to draw it out of a relationship with a woman — or any human for that matter. The revelation came that I was engaging in idolatry, expecting wholeness and fulfillment from something and someone that wasn’t designed to give it to me, and I was valuing that as primary to God. It was angering and humiliating when I saw that I was underestimating my own womanhood and allowing some other woman to define what was rightfully and uniquely mine to express. This marked my freedom from the bondage of looking to women for affirmation in my womanhood, and I started looking for that affirmation in the mirror — the one I dressed in front of each day and the one this is the Word of God.

In 2009, the Urban Dictionary defined a “guys’ girl” as “a mix between tomboy and girly girl…The guys talk openly in front of her and she wouldn’t be out of place going to a strip club with them. A guy’s girl enjoys the freedom guys have in farting, eating disgusting food, and in how they discuss sex, but still likes to look and feel like a woman.

It’s complicated, and I won’t pretend that part of me still feels betrayed by what he did. But once I got home, after a while it dawned on me that I had a choice to make if I wanted to move on with my life. Just because our pasts are part of us, it doesn’t mean they have to define us. I refused to give my past that kind of power over me. So I chose to let it go.” “How could you let that go?” he asked, his tone and expression incredulous. “How could you let that go after what he did to you? What they did to you?” “Forgiveness,” she answered. She knew it sounded overly simplistic and probably cheesy, but that’s exactly what had helped her break from the past. “Hassan saw himself as a patriot, first and foremost. He did what he had to in order to accomplish his mission, and did what he could to protect me at the same time. It’s why he married me, so I was off limits to the others.” She was thankful for that too, in hindsight. The alternative was beyond bearing. “He risked everything to get me out of that hellish situation, and wound up paying for my freedom with his life.” Taya paused to pull in a slow breath. “I’ve forgiven him for the rest of it. I had to, to be able to go on. But I didn’t forgive him for his sake. I forgave him for mine.” She needed Nathan to understand the difference. “Forgiveness was what earned me my true freedom.” He was quiet a moment. “Well then, you’re a better person than me,” he said in a low voice, his eyes burning with emotion.

Time And Memory It's intriguing how a certain Point in our lives lingers with us. It's marked by a certain face, A haunting song, and of course A particular feeling. That point seems to define us, And its Memory fills us with melancholy - Through the knowledge that we had met Our happiest self, and were Too naive to hold on to it. That point where potential Met purpose, and love was a happy Song, and freedom was the wind on A butterfly's wings, and passion Was illicit yet unrestrained. Funny how the stolen fruit Is always the sweetest - Yet when immersed in morality That sweetness is leached, and Joys are exchanged for secrets. Funny how this Time flies by The swiftest, without the Slightest glance backwards, Taking our bodies hostage But leaving our minds behind. That point in our lives, where The body yearns to return, Just for a moment, to take Hold of its reality. But Time will never allow it, And gives Memory only a glimpse of it. The moments are never fully ours at all

Liminal Thinking defines how, through the conscious exploration and acceptance of new ideas and truths, you can influence your unconscious mind.

Being responsible front of the other. (part1) We live in a historical period which, without too many difficulties, can be defined as a transition period. In many respects, in fact, the world as it appeared a few decades ago has almost completely disappeared. In its place, however, no paradigm that can be said to be truly new has yet materialized. The era to come, which always seems to be on the verge of a future driven by perhaps too naively acclaimed technological development, is as if it were slowed down by ideas, visions and practices that still belong to the past. Take for example the urgent need to convert industrial production, but also individual consumption, through sustainable, ecological, greener and more aware practices. It is our own planet that requires us to make a change in this sense: climate change is there for all to see, but the political institutions that should deal with the issue are unable to be decided and united to stem the problem. We know that the resources we have are limited but we continue to exploit them even though there are already alternatives, so we squander what nature can offer us in a year well before this year is over because we still believe in the mad and blind race of progress. We also take the incredible technological development that information technology has made possible. We can store an incredible amount of information in devices that we can put in our pockets, we have at our fingertips practically much of all the knowledge that humanity has produced throughout its history, but ignorance continues to spread like a river in full. The areas in which it is possible to recognize that much the current historical period is a period of transition are still many others, from the political one, with the crisis of representative democracies but also with the absence of a real alternative, to the economic one, social, with the giants of the web that increasingly impoverish small businesses, thus contributing to widening the gap, now almost unbridgeable, between the few who have too much and the many who have less and less. Or with the appearance of a new precious commodity: our personal data that is exchanged too lightly, as if they were a traditional market product. In this framework, already quite unstable in itself, the Covid-19 pandemic, directly or indirectly, is also radically changing our sociality. In fact, the spread of the virus has highlighted not only the fragility of the world economic-social system, in which if you break a link in the chain it is the whole chain that breaks, but it has also made clear, by difference, how much the our way of relating to others, even the most banal, even the most everyday. Especially in a country like ours, which has made conviviality its distinctive feature. What seemed natural to us, like hugging and greeting each other with a kiss with an acquaintance or going to a concert piled on top of each other, now that we are discouraged - if not forbidden - takes on even more value. Probably a value that we didn't even know, so obvious and taken for granted, was there before. In other words: we only discover what our social freedom was worth now that it is being restricted to us. And we discover it, precisely, by difference, by comparing what we could have done before with what we must do now. In this regard, I would like to ask a question: why should all of us accept that our way of life, our daily habits and our social freedom are limited? The question is deliberately provocative. His answer, quite obvious. In some cases, however, even the question whose answer seems obvious and obvious must still be formulated. It must be formulated in order to attempt to review the question posed in a clearer and more profound way, that is, to better understand the underlying reasons. Therefore, although the answer is evident as well as common sense, I believe that asking this question can help to better understand some intrinsic reasons.

Time is the currency of our life—how we spend it defines our existence.

Here is the answer: Regardless of who they are, whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word: freedom. As in: Men have it, women do not. Shahed says the same thing, when I ask her. “When no one is the boss of your life,” is how she goes on to define it.

This is a good way to understand liberalism—as opposition to illiberalism. While liberalism might be hard to define, illiberalism is easily recognizable in totalitarian, hierarchical, censorious, feudal, patriarchal, colonial, or theocratic states and in people who want to bring about such states, limit freedoms, or justify inequalities. Liberals oppose this, not because they want to establish their own authoritarian regime, but because they are opposed to all such regimes. Therefore, liberalism is expansive, but it is not weak.

[T]hat we collectively value the 'growth' of capital as the final purpose of our economy is not reducible to the reigning ideology of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, the purpose of our economy is beyond democratic deliberation under any form of capitalism, since the defining purpose of capital accumulation is built into how we produce our social wealth in the first place.

Unlike the natural sciences, psychoanalysis was not meant to give us necessary relations of cause and effect but to point to motivational relationships which are in principle simply possible. We should not take Leonardo's fantasy of the vulture, or the infantile past which it masks, for a force which determined his future. Rather, it is like the words of the oracle, an ambiguous symbol whlch applies in advance to several possible chains of events. To be more precise: in every life, one's birth and one's past define categories or basic dimensions which do not impose any particular act but which can be found in all. Whether Leonardo yielded to his childhood or whether he wished to flee from it, he could never have been other than he was. The very decisions which transform us are always made in reference to a factual situation; such a situation can of course be accepted or refused, but it cannot fail to give us our impetus nor to be for us, as a situation "to be accepted" or "to be refused," the incarnation for us of the value we give to it. If it is the aim of psychoanalysis to describe this exchange between future and past and to show how each life muses over riddles whose final meaning is nowhere written down, then we have no right to demand inductive rigor from it. The psychoanalyst's hermeneutic musing, which multiplies the communications between us and ourselves, which takes sexuality as the symbol of existence and existence as symbol of sexuality, and which looks in the past for the meaning of the future and in the future for the meaning of the past, is better suited than rigorous induction to the circular movement of our lives, where the future rests on the past, the past on the future, and where everything symbolizes everything else. Psychoanalysis does not make freedom impossible; it teaches us to think of this freedom concretely, as a creative repetition of ourselves, always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves.

In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer.

That is how we solve ourselves, how we write the variables of the equation. Self-determination is the means by which we create a meaning for our existence. And self-determination, the basic exercise of freedom, is not possible alone. We define ourselves—and discover ourselves—not simply in relation to others but in relationship with others, and with our world. How could you be the greatest Pokémon master in a world with no Pokémon?

conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer.

.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.

I keep using the term “anticapitalist” as opposed to socialist or communist to include the people who publicly or privately question or loathe capitalism but do not identify as socialist or communist. I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.

The things that we describe so carefully are called phenomena — the second element in the definition. The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. As an example, take a cup of coffee. (Husserl liked coffee: long before Aron talked about the phenomenology of apricot cocktails, Husserl told students in his seminars, ‘Give me my coffee so that I can make phenomenology out of it.’) What, then, is a cup of coffee? I might define it in terms of its chemistry and the botany of the coffee plant, and add a summary of how its beans are grown and exported, how they are ground, how hot water is pressed through the powder and then poured into a shaped receptacle to be presented to a member of the human species who orally ingests it. I could analyse the effect of caffeine on the body, or discuss the international coffee trade. I could fill an encyclopaedia with these facts, and I would still get no closer to saying what this particular cup of coffee in front of me is. On the other hand, if I went the other way and conjured up a set of purely personal, sentimental associations — as Marcel Proust does when he dunks his madeleine in his tea and goes on to write seven volumes about it — that would not allow me to understand this cup of coffee as an immediately given phenomenon either. Instead, this cup of coffee is a rich aroma, at once earthy and perfumed; it is the lazy movement of a curlicue of steam rising from its surface. As I lift it to my lips, it is a placidly shifting liquid and a weight in my hand inside its thick-rimmed cup. It is an approaching warmth, then an intense dark flavour on my tongue, starting with a slightly austere jolt and then relaxing into a comforting warmth, which spreads from the cup into my body, bringing the promise of lasting alertness and refreshment. The promise, the anticipated sensations, the smell, the colour and the flavour are all part of the coffee as phenomenon. They all emerge by being experienced. If I treated all these as purely ‘subjective’ elements to be stripped away in order to be ‘objective’ about my coffee, I would find there was nothing left of my cup of coffee as a phenomenon — that is, as it appears in the experience of me, the coffee-drinker. This experiential cup of coffee is the one I can speak about with certainty, while everything else to do with the bean-growing and the chemistry is hearsay. It may all be interesting hearsay, but it’s irrelevant to a phenomenologist.

Its not that people want to get hurt again. Its that they want to master a situation where they felt helpless. "Repetition compulsion" Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago, by engaging with somebody familiar- but new. The truth is that they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable." "He may be resistant to acknowledging it now, but I welcome his resistance because resistance is a clue to where the crux of the work lies; it signals what a therapist needs to pay attention to." "Conversion disorder: this is a condition in which a person's anxiety is "converted" into a neurologic conditions such as paralysis, balance issues, incontinence, deafness, tremors, or seizures." "People with conversion disorder aren't faking it- that’s called factitious disorder. People with factitious disorder have a need to be thought of as sick and intentionally go to great lengths to appear ill." "Interestingly, conversion disorder tends to be more prevalent in cultures with strict rules and few opportunities for emotional expression." "Ultracrepidarianism, which means "the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge or competence" "Every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart." "if you are talking that much, you cant be listening" and its variant, you have two ears and one mouth; there's a reason for that ratio)" "To feel better now, anytime, anywhere, within seconds" Why are we essentially outsourcing the thing that defines uses people? Was it that people couldn’t tolerate being alone or that they couldn’t tolerate being with other people?" "The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaningless" "Flooded: meaning one person is in overdrive, and when people feel flooded is best to wait a beat. The person needs a few minutes for his nervous system to reset before he can take anything in." "Developmental stage models: Freud, Jung, Erikson, Piaget and Maslow

Even though everyone embraces minimalism differently, each path leads to the same place: a life with more time, more money, and more freedom to live a more meaningful life. That means that everyone can define his or her own version of minimalism. It’s not about giving up all your possessions and living out of a suitcase; it’s a philosophy and mindset that can be applied to any business. It’s figuring out how to run your business efficiently, effectively, and affordably. It’s bootstrapping at its best. It’s understanding that striving for simplicity isn’t the same as being simple. Like The Minimalists said, my version of minimalism isn’t the same as yours: but our goals are the same. We all want to cut out anything unnecessary, and free more time to spend on our priorities. Why

Allow me to explain. Social Justice can mean many things. Gay rights, minority rights, women's rights — all good civil rights stuff. The problem comes when social justice is defined by of things like media representation, cultural appropriation, language policing, etc. Because no one deserves a right to control how others speak or express themselves. Social Justice only makes sense to the extent that it doesn't effect freedom of speech and stuff.

In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin.

God has given me power over my food choices. I hold the power—not the food. If I’m not supposed to eat it, I won’t put it in my mouth. I was made for more than being stuck in a vicious cycle of defeat. I was not made to be a victim of my poor choices. I was made to be a victorious child of God. When I am struggling and considering a compromise, I will force myself to think past this moment and ask myself, How will I feel about this choice tomorrow morning? If I’m in a situation where the temptation is overwhelming, I will have to choose to either remove the temptation or remove myself from the situation. When a special occasion rolls around, I can find ways to celebrate that don’t involve blowing my healthy eating plan. Struggling with my weight isn’t God’s mean curse on me. Being overweight is an outside indication that internal changes are needed for my body to function properly and for me to feel well. I have these boundaries in place not for restriction but to define the parameters of my freedom. My brokenness can’t handle more freedom than this right now. And I’m good with that.

How well can you live With that which you do not know ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Surrendering into the light The unknown As it comes to carry me To places of understanding Far beyond you or I Far beyond what words have given For my freedom And perhaps yours as well ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I release once more Retracting into the fragmented shadow That uneven Ambiguous shade Not yet given over to the darkness Not yet fully defined By questions that preceded the light

What has changed about our era is how successful capitalism has become in colonizing our everyday lives, and how market dependency has bulldozed through efforts to check it.3 People have used markets for trading and exchange for centuries. What is unique today is how the economy has been restructured to extend and accelerate our reliance on markets into all aspects of society. For all the language about how markets open up opportunities, they also create dependencies as well. As Wood notes, what defines our current way of dealing with markets “is not opportunity or choice but, on the contrary, compulsion.” The things we need to lead our lives are forced into markets where we are compelled to obtain them,

Through capitalism we gain, but we also lose. The loss, Smith felt, was felt most among the lowest classes—his particular example was employees in a pin factory—whose cramped place in the chain of production leaves no room for the enlargement of the mind and spirit, which the freedom of commercial society should open up. Smith in fact defined the problem of the “assembly line” mentality of factory workers almost two decades before the Industrial Revolution got fully under way—the problem that Karl Marx and his followers would call alienation. It was especially worrisome to Smith, because “in free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favourable judgement which the people may form of its conduct,” a mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that “natural liberty” which they have enjoyed in the first place.

Being full of both grace and truth is part of his glory revealed. It’s not a balancing act. The goal is to max out both, neglecting neither. This fullness defined Jesus, yet our pendulum tends to swing a mile to the left or a mile to the right, depending on what our formative faith environment emphasized. Very few of us have been nurtured toward both. Some of us grew up in a truth-focused faith environment or church. Typically, these environments value doctrine over method or, at the bare minimum, focus more on Scripture, study, and obedience than on understanding freedom and grace. While this environment may result in a more developed view of a doctrinal gospel, it often lacks the ability to empathize appropriately during a situational or social issue. Our default becomes a form of legalism, and our confidence is often misinterpreted as arrogance or even judgment. Conversely, some of us grew up in a grace-focused faith environment or church. Typically, it is these “it’s the heart that matters” environments that often value the how over the what. The life that accompanies this focus is often expressed outside the walls of a church service or Bible study. Our default is grace, at times seemingly at the expense of truth, and our freedom is often misinterpreted as being too compromising. Those of us who grew up in truth-focused environments most likely struggle with extending grace to ourselves and others. Those of us who grew up in grace-focused environments most likely struggle with applying truth to ourselves and others. And so we clash when we come together to pursue gospel living, not always realizing the reason we see things so differently. What can we do about this? Knowing where our roots lie is a great place to start. From there we can ask the questions, Do I need to apply more truth to this situation, issue, or relationship, or do I need to extend more grace? and, How is my perspective perhaps skewed by my faith environment background?

Jung was not suggesting that we all adopt the Puebloan mythology, rather his point is that many people suffer because their life makes no sense. And the task for those who want to be free of anxiety or depression is to discover this sense. We must, in other words, find a way to justify our existence, so that we, like the Puebloan, can believe that our life is meaningful. For some this can be accomplished through religion, for others by contributing in a substantial way to the promotion of values such as justice, freedom, or community, while others will find it through the creative act. But for those of us in the modern West, where we lack a dominant mythology, it is up to us, and us alone, to discover how we can play a meaningful role in the divine drama of life. For the few who accomplish this task, a fulfilling life will define their future, for the many who don’t, years or decades of pointless suffering and compulsive seeking will be their fate.

Their goals are big. It is not a stretch to understand that, from different starting points, they really seek nothing less than world domination (“ winning the world for Christianity”—as they define it—and maintaining the role of a Christian United States as the world’s number-one economic and military superpower). These are the stated aims of the leadership of both Christian nationalists and right-wing politicians, promulgated under a triple banner of personal salvation, individual freedom/ rights, and what they perceive to be American-style democracy.

Imagine yourself again, that same innocent five-year-old. Your parents get into a fight, and it makes you feel something new—fear and doubt of love and goodness. You instinctually find that by covering yourself with a blanket, you feel safe and protected. So you start to wear this blanket as a costume to hide from the chaos. You go to school and your classmates taunt you just for being yourself. You feel ashamed and embarrassed. You decide one blanket isn’t enough protection, so you add a second one to cover yourself up even more. If you didn’t physically do this as a child, we can guarantee you did it metaphorically. As you get older, you fall in love, but the person you open your heart to shuts you down. So you add another layer of protection over yourself. Your parents get divorced; you add another layer. People let you down; you add a layer. Your big plans don’t pan out; you add another layer. Anytime you are unable to control your circumstances or the people around you, you are reminded of how powerless you seem to be, and so you protect yourself with yet another layer. Because of mineness mentality, your mind innocently collected these experiences as a part of your identity and has worn them all your life. After all, from your ego’s vantage point, all of it is mine, and therefore about me—all my experiences must define me. As time goes on, the free, happy, innocent child of bliss becomes buried deep underneath the layers of fear for so many years that even you forget your true identity. You’ve been wearing the protective layers for so long that you completely overlooked the fact that you could just take them all off at any point. Luckily, underneath the layers of past experiences you have dressed yourself in, you still remain the innocent and happy child. No matter how traumatic life has been, you are still innocent and free, beautiful and perfect, wanted and loved, seen and recognized—just as you are. And with a little decluttering of the mind’s layers, the innocent child of bliss can finally be revealed once again.

It’s crazy to me how many people stop side hustling in this way once they get a full-time job. Side hustling—what I define as any way you make money outside of your full-time job—is a relatively simple way to become an entrepreneur and diversify your income streams without taking the risk of leaving your full-time job.

So let me say what already should be obvious: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is neither comprehensive nor authoritative, even if a good number of the titles assembled here would be on most lists of essential reading. It is meant to be an invitation to a conversation—even a merry argument—about the books and authors that are missing as well as the books and authors included, because the question of what to read next is the best prelude to even more important ones, like who to be, and how to live. Such faith in reading’s power, and the learning and imagination it nourishes, is something I’ve been lucky enough to take for granted as both fact and freedom; it’s something I fear may be forgotten in the great amnesia of our in-the-moment newsfeeds and algorithmically defined identities, which hide from our view the complexity of feelings and ideas that books demand we quietly, and determinedly, engage. To get lost in a story, or even a study, is inherently to acknowledge the voice of another, to broaden one’s perspective beyond the confines of one’s own understanding. A good book is the opposite of a selfie; the right book at the right time can expand our lives in the way love does, making us more thoughtful, more generous, more brave, more alert to the world’s wonders and more pained by its inequities, more wise, more kind. In the metaphorical bookshop you are about to enter, I hope you’ll discover a few to add to those you already cherish. Happy reading.