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This is http://www.essayz.com/a9407172.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %SHOULD OUGHT MUST RESPONSIBILITY PLEDGE HONESTY+940717 %OUGHT LOYALTY EXPECTED ANTICIPATED CONTRACT AGREE+940717 %PROMISE COVENANT LAW REQUIRED ESSENTIAL NECESSARY 940717 Our sense of what we should do is intimately associated with our need for approval, friendship and community. To become and remain a member of a supportive community, we court approval, respect, and support for our attitudes, thoughts, decisions and actions. We care what other people think, feel and say about us; but especially what we think they think, feel and say about us. Often we are not well informed about what other people think, feel and say about us---but we care a great deal, nevertheless. In our alienation we seek to manipulate others to achieve their approval, respect and support of us by how we manage our attitudes, thoughts, decisions and actions. Such manipulations of others through our manipulations of ourselves often become the primary focus of our attention in addictive and codependent relationships. We play collusive games of mutual self-deception to convince ourselves that our manipulative lives are normal and healthy. Our duties and sense of what we should do are defined in both informal and formal ways. Often they are engendered by informal expectations which are never verbalized in any way, but are communicated in non-verbal ways. We develop tacit and implicit agreements regarding what is appropriate to expect of each other, and so agree on what we should do. It is not a simple matter to violate such informal expectations which define for us what we should do---for we care about others' approval, respect and support. We fear excommunication; i.e., being rejected and/or ejected from opportunities for open and honest dialogue in intimate relationships. Our fears of excommunication often drive and lead us to be dishonest in manipulative ways which engender alienation through formal and informal judgments, condemnations and rejections. In efforts to control anti-social behaviors we often formalize excommunications, rejections, and alienations in ways defined by laws, moral codes, and ethical systems; and the judicial processes associated with all of them. Our fears of alienation are often misguided through misinformation, disinformation and ignorance which have been engendered by our alienation---and so we act in ways which engender additional fears, alienation, misinformation, disinformation and ignorance. We often respond to such chaotic developments by trying to restore law and order through formal and informal definitions of what we and others should do. We create rules, regulations, prohibitions, proscriptions, prescriptions, disciplines, codes, laws, taboos, etc. Rarely is adequate attention given to the alienative consequences of such efforts---for the attention is focused upon visions of perfect behavior in expectations of conformity---rather than upon visions of increasingly open and honest dialogue and the prerequisites to increasingly open and honest dialogue. Personal and communal integrity are the fruits of increasingly open and honest dialogue; not of increasingly sophisticated articulations of rules, regulations, prohibitions, proscriptions, prescriptions, disciplines, codes, laws, taboos. etc. We cannot achieve true security through manipulations which discourage openness, honesty and dialogue. Such manipulations may give us a false sense of security, but they never give us true security. True security is a gift we give each other in the process of building healthy communities, where we are truly safe in being vulnerable in open and honest dialogue with the people who are most different from us. We are truly secure when we are genuinely interested in intimately getting-to-know people who are different; rather than in fearfully defending ourselves against them as perceived threats to our security. We are often lead by others, our ideals, and our values, to believe that we should do things which are dishonest, disintegrative and alienative. We need to ask why we are lead by others, our ideals, and our values, to believe we should do things which lead to personal and communal disintegration. How can anybody regard such leadership as reasonable, respectable or sane? (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================