NancyLebovitz comments on My favorite popular scientific self-help books - Less Wrong

11 Post author: lukeprog 10 September 2011 09:53PM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 11 September 2011 05:02:27PM 2 points [-]

I've recently read Compassion and Self-Hate by Theodore Ruben, which builds on Karen Horney's idea that people who were abused, neglected, or overly manipulated as children are apt to conclude that being a human wasn't good enough, and then they invent inhuman standards (always right, always victorious, the perfect martyr, etc.) in the hopes that they can find a way to be good enough.

I'll add that self-hatred can lead to overreacting to ideals from fiction. I found the book to be a very specific salve to some damage I'd picked up from Ayn Rand. Her preferred characters are very passionate and energetic, and I'm not like that. I hadn't realized how much my concern with the mismatch was (and probably still is) haunting me. I described the book to a friend, and that made him realize he was haunted by Heinlein characters, and not in a good way.

Ruben addresses self-hatred as a semi-autonomous and very debilitating pattern, with compassion towards oneself as a not fully comprehensible or optimizable system as the solution.

Will's "being flawless along a set of dimensions the designation of which as desirable is itself considered flawless reasoning" strikes me as one of those inhuman standards.

Comment author: Craig_Heldreth 11 September 2011 06:03:18PM *  1 point [-]

Maybe swap in "ideal" for "flawless"?

Also: I tried to google that Nietzsche quote and could not find it on the first search page. I wonder how valid that sucker is. There is a lot of poorly translated Nietzsche.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 12 September 2011 12:54:13AM *  1 point [-]

If I am trying to live up to an unreasonable standard then I am being unreasonable aka flawed. This is where Taoism is really important. Effortless action, keeping the gears from grinding needlessly, from wasting the chi, the money, the metaness, the subtelty, the self-correcting-ness of the world, building better institutions with low transaction costs...