Man′s Search for Himself

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Meanwhile, unlike the species, each individual is born completely helpless and dependent on the parents. This is the the VSCO girl; this the teen and twenty something who live off of the likes on The Gram; this is the twenty something and thirty something who feed off of their matches on Tinder. The more the threat wins, the more then our awareness of ourselves is surrendered, curtailed, hemmed in.

Wonder is the opposite to cynicism and boredom; it indicates that a person has a heightened aliveness, is interested, expectant, responsive. One shouldn’t feel much, nor put much meaning into what one says: what you say seems to have more effect if you don’t try to understand. Gone is the John Wayne swashbuckler; he took his cues from himself - this was the inner-directed man.I read this book before reading Eric Fromm's "Escape from Freedom" and I expected to be different (in contents) but similar in its own way.

Time was when only the minister’s wife was looked over by the trustees of the church before her husband was hired; now the wife of the corporation executive is screened, covertly or overtly, by most companies like the steel or wool or any other commodity the company uses. Our deeper emotional experiences are pushed further away, and we tend, thus, to become emptier and lonelier.They can empathize with people from hundreds of years ago, on different continents, with other types of animals and plants, and imagine themselves as them. That is; I found much of the writing here overly verbose, and the excessive pontificating, especially in the latter part, a bit frustrating.

The self-condemning person is very often trying to show how important he is that God is so concerned with punishing him.Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a “slave-morality. The painful insecurity on all sides gives us new incentive to ask, Is there perhaps some important source of guidance and strength we have overlooked? May, following Nietzsche's striking insight about cultures, values, and the origin of the negation, shows the nature of rebellion. He draws his insights from occasional tidbits with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kafka, whom he considers to have been influential on his thought with regards to the condition of man.

I would much prefer formal books that retain a technical level of rigour to investigate on a more solemn note. To be in the crowd but still maintain the “sweetness of solitude,” as Emerson said, to have integrity while still learning from tradition and culture, is to possess inner strength. Each step in this journey means that he lives less as a servant of automatic time and more as one who transcends time, that is, one who lives by meaning which he chooses. A psychoanalyst once pointedly remarked that when someone in psychoanalysis berates himself at great length for picayune sins, he feels like asking, “Who do you think you are? In these myths there speaks not only the courageous side of man, but the servile side which would prefer comfort to freedom, security to one’s own growth.Freedom means openness, a readiness to grow; it means being flexible, ready to change for the sake of greater human values. While there are certainly individuals who deal with overbearing mothers, America has never been a matriarchy outside of the domestic quarters.