Andy: Embracing and nurturing the inner child is how to
quiet him/her.
Eric: Robert Benchley suggested stunning it with a soft
padded mallet.
Andy: That's why honor is so self and other defeating,
because instead of focusing on what one wants, needs, feels
and how to improve one's life, one focuses on the perceived
slight and forgets the self, even to being willing to kill
the self to cure the insult.
Eric: Focusing on what one wants, needs, feels and how to
improve one's life--what a symptom of our time!
The narcissistic and isolated individual, abandoning
community and social responsibility to concentrate on the
warm, squirming baby self. What an unbalanced equation!
Humans are simultaneously individuals and parts of groups.
There is no private side without a social side. There is no
"improving one's life" in a narcissistic vacuum. It was
precisely the turn inward--abandoning the social side of
self--that turned the Civil Rights movement into a bunch of
whining, selfish drugged-out hippies who were easily
corralled by corporate propaganda into the '80s and '90s
Yuppies.
And it is this same nihilistic and selfish contingent who
kvetch at anything that interferes with their "wants and
needs." Wants and needs are infinite, the human self
perpetually unfinished, and the abandonment of civic virtues
merely makes the nihilists slaves of their latest buzz.
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