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The Self and Personality
 

Like most mammals, we develop a strong personality exceedingly young for survival reasons. Upon waking we must be able to act as an organism not retarded or driven mad by our sleeping dream; in our evolutionary past, we especially had to be able to act at once if we were attacked while we rested or dozed.

Personalities aren’t regenerative, they’re organic and once broken can seldom be fixed. If severely damaged, likely, it’s been done by cultural oppression, sexual brutality and/or physical abuse; sometimes it’s affected by the state, church, and most often by exploitive parents, especially ideological or fundamentalist ones.

We come into our personalities from sleep time in a such a fashion as to rule out solipsism. It’s the belief that ultimate reality is based on us and no adjustment/accommodation to the external world is possible. The claim that there’s a riddle about whether we know we’re dreaming or not is easily answered. Complete subjectivity presents real danger, so we endeavor to be objective, especially after dreaming. Being so subjective we can’t achieve complete objectivity, but to survive we must try.

Behind every self is a mind who seeks the external world. What we can assume of it, we can verify or refute with the tools of reasoning, i.e., logic, deduction, induction, mathematics, science, etc. This applies equally to other personalities. The philosophic view that there are only personalities and that they’re inaccessible to one another isn’t true. Our knowledge of the external world in which we evolved to comprehend and which our science has refined, is valid in the same fashion for all humankind. The study of people isn’t an inference when billions of people are here to analyze, to say nothing of the tens of billions long gone. We can draw conclusions.

Furthermore. We can rule out certain human testimony; we’re exaggerators, constructivists and outright liars. We’ve good reason to be skeptical of claims without verification. If we sincerely believe that unicorns can fly, we might well witness flying unicorns. These are phenomena of non-skeptical minds. People who believe in the supernatural are more likely to believe in UFOs, ghosts, the paranormal and other forms of fantasy; their threshold to belief is low. These events appear to the mind as a huge subjective self-created mystical/conceptual event and not as a direct sober apprehension of the really-real which with some effort we could realize many events as a scientific impossibility. Skeptics don’t see ghosts for the same reason that atheists aren’t easily drawn into cults.

What as spectators we were obliged to check centuries ago, and what we are duty-bound to check now in the 2000s is different in kind. Information is almost free. Knowledge requires only the payment of hard work. Unlike yesteryears, you aren’t entitled to believe what you want. If you can’t prove you were visited by aliens, you must refrain from your belief. If they land tomorrow and shake the hand of Barrack Obama, doing a press conference on the steps of the White House, your story becomes more plausible though not necessarily true. Are you so important among 6.5 billion people that Jesus, Mohammed, the angel Gabriel or ET come to you personally and not to everyone else? If you see ghosts, you’ve a conduit to the other world. If you can read the future, but live in poverty; you’re our savior. If you’re a brilliant avatar, but modest enough to read only the holy books, you’re courageous beyond mere mortals.

The gig is up. Flying saucers can’t make you important, nor banshees or talking snakes, only earnest honest mental labor, learning the facts and relaying the stone-cold sober information so that we may all thrive together. You’re overweight, smoking, under-motivated, over-spent and looking for a disease to equal your pain that you might find some solace. Get out of your funk; give those bibles to the wastebasket. Earn a life in the modern world – there are thousands of brilliant books – none of them guaranteed by divine inspiration or inexorable inevitable economic laws.

You’ll have the intellectual adventure of your life.

As animal man we see the flat earth and the hot yellow ball in the sky. As social man we see Mother Earth and the Sun God. The thinking individual is set aside from the collective. He creates things–mostly ideas. Our progress has been on his back–paid for in his blood. Behind every collective is a god who roars against him.  We look at our mortality, and quake, “This can’t be all there is.”

The lonely voice of humankind stretches out into the night and his reason creates religion. The collective and the individual are at odds. Our personalities find this conflict hard to reconcile. Unsupportable faith is better than permanent death; better to suppress the voice of reason. They say that a good soul will avoid it at all costs. Wishful thinking gives us comfort, but with a price-tag of having to embrace the irrational. This is our plight: our minds need an arbitrator and will take any instrument except reason as the judge. However, reason, like love is the only real treasure. Trouble is that we’ll create a hell rather than give up the idea of a heaven; perhaps the time has come to cast off illusion, accept reason and learn to live with earthbound mortality. If we did, I think we’d be less likely to spare ourselves our myths and thus live a better life.

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