13/01/2022
[The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing]
L ~ Everything we've been talking about has been leading us towards values - the ideas which give us our feelings of what life's about, what matters most, what's good for us and what harms us. Presumably, we're now going to relate different value systems to different levels of mental health?
O ~ Yes. But let me start by asking you a question. Thinking back over what we've said so far, what would you say are the most important indicators of real mental health?
L ~ Off the top of the head, I'd choose two. The most compelling measure of health seems to be the degree to which you face reality; that is, the degree to which you perceive it, and accept it. Then, parallel with that, there’s the extent to which you behave inclusively - that is, try to include; other people, new ideas, and your own perceptions and feelings, rather than exclude them. But I suspect that’s really just an aspect of facing reality - which is, after all, inclusive!
O ~ Well, let’s examine the idea of ‘reality’ a little further. Man’s achievements are due to his extraordinary capacity for abstraction. Without it neither our science, nor our art, nor our literature, nor our philosophy could exist. All our most positive achievements arise from this gift for abstraction; that is, for simplifying things by selecting out those aspects of reality that we want to concentrate on, while ignoring the other aspects as if they didn’t exist.
L ~ And, of course, all our values are abstractions, too.
O ~ Yes. They originate from our experience of reality, but we can choose which set of values to follow. However… the snag is, all our most negative qualities also come from the same gift.
L ~ Tell me what you mean by 'negative'.
O ~ I mean madness, crime, evil - everything that's unhealthy. All of it arises when we get hold of the wrong ideas - in other words, when our abstractions have gone wrong, when our simplifications have ignored aspects that were important.
L ~ So your point is: this capacity of ours for abstraction is completely double-edged.
O ~ Completely.
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