Trading Warts for Wings
If we do not discover and acknowledge our flaws, while we can continue to acquire new knowledge and grow in certain ways, the power of new knowledge for the facilitation of meaningful positive change is hindered by our flaws.
The power of self-discovery resides in the insights it provides, insights that enable us to understand ourselves better — warts and wings alike — rendering it easier for us to soar to new heights.
When we shrink from self-discovery, subconsciously we shrink from new knowledge, particularly knowledge which we anticipate conflicts with what we already know. When we embrace self-discovery, encounters with views that we disagree with help broaden our world view, helping us understand better how others see this world in which we all live, move, and have our being. When we shrink from self-discovery, it is because we are afraid of what we might discover within ourselves.
We forget, however, that with the discovery of warts comes the discovery of wings. In the removal of the warts, the new wings that we discover help us soar and perhaps lift us up to heights previously unimaginable.
Consider the notion of suffering in this world. Many a times I see people leverage on all of the suffering in the world to rail against the notion of existence of God. While I understand the frustrations that engender such belligerence, because it is people who care about others’ welfare who typically engage in such, I respectfully disagree with the directionality of the belligerence.
I disagree because most of the suffering in the world is man made.
Suffering in Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, etc. all are man-made, products of greed, the unwillingness to cohabit peacefully, the unwillingness to respect others’ rights to self-actualization etc. Take ISIS for instance. Whereas the seed for ISIS may have been sown by bad decisions on the part of the United States, regardless ISIS continuously refused to govern areas it had conquered with magnanimity and statesmanship, meaning they behaved worse than the Americans that they point to as the root source of their military insurgency. If the objective of military insurgency is not good governance and statesmanship, such insurgency deserves to fail. If Iraq now engages in military and other efforts to prevent the Kurds from independence, independence they have shown they deserve, greed and unwillingness to respect self-actualization that is already demonstrated and earned in the fight against ISIS may derail peace in the Iraqi region. If the Kurds have been braver than the Iraqi Army at fighting off ISIS, bravery that can be objectively supported with factual evidence, the Kurds deserve Independence because their independence strengthens rather than weakens the entire region. If the Iraqi region again devolves into chaos, it will be man made chaos not God or nature.
Many years ago the whole world rallied to help Ethiopia deal with the ravages of famine. This rally was the source of the “We are the World” song by Michael Jackson and Friends. More than 30 years later, and with many years of good rainfall in the course of those years, Ethiopia does not seem to have made any meaningful advances in dealing with low rainfall. Never mind the fact that there exists a segment of Ethiopia that lives in plenty in the midst of said ravages of famine. The technology for dealing with low rainfall? Eminently available. Ancient Egyptians and modern-day Israel have deployed innovations that both facilitate improvements to agricultural yield and ensure year-round agricultural activity for decades, centuries, or millennia. Even if we attribute the ravages of the famine that occurred in the 1980s to a withholding of rainfall by God or nature, in light of absence of any meaningful innovations or developments over the course of more than 30 years for dealing with low rainfall in Ethiopia, we are living in self-denial if we do the same in 2017. And by the way, if Israel celebrates the USA recognizing Jerusalem as its capital yet does not want the Palestinians to have their own state, it seeks to have it all, acts greedy, then finds itself short of 1,200 persons who die because their nation is greedy and uncaring about the plight of their fellow man. The question is, in of itself, absent the willingness to reason with the other side, will killing 30,000 Palestinians bring peace to Israel?
The Allies won the Second World War outright; yet they still had to reason within themselves and with the Germans and the Japanese to arrive at a new world order.
Can Israel win outright?
My point is, I understand the other viewpoint — the railing against God — yet can point out how it can become an exercise in escapism and abdication of responsibility.
Self-Discovery means we are able to disagree with, are able to point out why we disagree, yet are able to respect the merits of others’ viewpoints.
We have opportunities for self-discovery every day. In the course of interactions with colleagues, friends, neighbors, students, teachers, mentors, mentees, we have opportunity to discover our own self. We are to be careful, however, to ensure that we do not allow the interactions to define who we are; rather, we are to leverage on the interactions for arrival at a better understanding of who we are. The difference is subtle yet substantial, because it is the difference between being tugged in many different directions by our interactions or determining which of our interactions we pull closer to ourselves into our inner circle.
Self-Discovery helps us arrive at a better understanding of the interactions that we need to pull closer to ourselves all the way into our inner circle.
In the course of the pursuit of our personal objectives or professional aspirations, we have the opportunity to discover ourselves. We learn what we are good at, what we do not care for, or what we care for but at which we currently are not so good. Whenever educational systems do not empower self-discovery in young people, we fail at what is most important, which is empowering young persons to commence the process of the discovery of the self. In stated respect, whenever students are shamed for being weak in any one specific subject, a good educational system — a system in which learning occurs can fail to empower self-discovery. Such systems fail because shaming leads to pretense and the need for pretense is an antidote to self-discovery.
A society that shames young people for either of their looks or weaknesses lays a foundation that militates against self-discovery in the entire population of young people —the populations of those who shame and the populations of the shamed.
I grew up in a country that does not have well defined professional paths for the basic sciences — I guess I do not have to tell you that any such country has yet to lay any meaningful foundation for economic development. In the absence of well-defined professional paths for the basic sciences, graduation from High School meant those with preparation in the sciences all seek to major in the applied sciences — medicine, engineering, computer science or architecture etc. — never mind the conundrum of how exactly to maintain excellence in the applied sciences independent of investments in the development of the basic sciences. Whereas the structure of competition in Asian countries such as South Korea or Singapore for placements in undergraduate basic sciences programs might be a tad too intense, it is based on sound logic —if a country is to develop technologically, the basic sciences must be attractive to the best students that have preparation in the sciences out of High School.
Like most of my counterparts I chose to major in an applied science — Computer Science. Due to a multitude of factors into which I am unable to delve, eventually I ended up majoring in Mathematics in the best program then available in my native country Nigeria. I thoroughly enjoyed majoring in Mathematics and ended up graduating top of my class with First Class Honors. Absent God’s intervention, luck, or chance, whatever one chooses to call it, I would have missed out on the opportunity to do something I still love and use today (abstract or pure mathematics) in the context of my PhD level specialization in finance and economics. Given I believe in God (Jehovah) and have faith in Jesus Christ, I believe it was God’s intervention that provided me with the opportunity to study Pure Mathematics —after all, if we believe in a God who cares, of necessity we believe He interjects in our favor whenever the imperfections or frictions that are prevalent in our societies impede or distort our discovery of self. However, if I was not open to self-discovery, regardless of my faith in God, I would have insisted on majoring in Computer Science. In stated respect, upon the discovery that I could major in Mathematics, and the admission that I hated laboratory work, it was plain to me that I perhaps was better suited to major in Mathematics, more so than either Physics or Computer Science, both of which are heavy on laboratory work. With the benefit of hindsight and more than 20 years of post-Baccalaureate experience, I have confirmed my intuition that majoring in Computer Science would not have been as good a fit for my strengths, desires, and aspirations as majoring in Pure Mathematics.
Money is an important component of our lives. No matter how philosophical we are about living simply, we all need some amount of money in order for life to make sense.
It is true that we can love without money. It, however, also is true that love that is not supported by resources cannot last, that is, cannot continue to give. If then we need money to acquire resources, money is an important component of our capacity for loving others.
However, whenever we build societies that encourage young people to choose careers on the basis of money as opposed to self-discovery, we create an economy or society that functions on the basis of money alone, as such arrive at a country filled with people who have no notion whatsoever of who they truly are, a country filled with people who operate on a “money herd” mentality. Post-communism, Russia has struggled to redefine itself, because it did not realize that it needed to replace Communism with some alternate unifying philosophy, preferably a scientific philosophy, such as ‘Innovation Centrism’. The USA is losing direction and floundering, because it continues to encourage factionalism with reference to race, religion, etc. because it will not commit to some unifying scientifically formulated unifying philosophy that builds a bond across all of the members of a supposedly secular society. Given the USA is a capitalist country, and given it pays lip service to being Innovation Centric — a country cannot be innovation centric and simultaneously, politics centric — the country clearly is caught in a vicious cycle of factional politics and sociopolitical upheavals, that is, ‘mob rule’ that transpires in the shadows of the society.
Any country in which sociopolitical interactions revolve around one faction or the other attempting to impose itself on others functions on mob rule.
If any society is to be healthy, it only can be because people are encouraged to discover the self and are provided with the tools that facilitate self-discovery. It also only can be because self-discovery devolves into choices of professions that empower decent standards of living.
Famously, on his way to winning the Noble Prize in Economics in 1998, in a brilliantly articulated philosophical treatise (Sen 1985), Amartya Sen concurred with the foregoing, argued that people are free only to the extent to which they are empowered to arrive at self-actualization.
But then, what is self-actualization other than self-discovery that, supported by resources and effort, is translated into ethos and actions?
Sen, A. (2017). Well-being, agency and freedom the Dewey Lectures 1984. In Justice and the capabilities approach (pp. 3–55). Routledge.
