“[George] had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so,
the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George
from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “Harrison Bergeron”
My first entry on Zen Buddhism showed correspondences between the four polarities of this discipline and the main concepts of my own philosophy. Before searching for more commonalities, I think now would be the time to discuss a metaphor I’ve developed about these poles and how it organizes the way I look at my own life.
Philosopher Mortimer Adler’s book, Desires, Right & Wrong,* points out the distinction between the “summum bonum”/highest good and the “totum bonum”/total good. In my system, The Principle, “self-conscious dialogue and growth therefrom,” is the former, and “The Four,” the latter – We could think of “The Four,” which encompasses all the essentials and their outgrowths described in my September/October series, as a moral compass and The Principle as the “north.”
As I thought about this metaphor, I saw my brother Will’s treatment of me throughout my life in a new way. First there is the bullying, especially in disrupting my attempts to organize and educate myself – in the way he tore my schedule off my wall and ripped it up and in trying to cultivate in me a distaste for reading philosophy by badgering and tricking me into (and gloating over my) reading a passage about the benefits of torturing a helpless dog (both anecdotes here.) Then there is the shaming and ridicule, especially of my attempts to find a useful role model. Note how, when I told him about Queen Victoria’s pledge to be good, he mocked it – and repeated the mockery decades later (In fact, as I also wrote, he would argue that “evil” was a compliment.) His repeated shaming of my interest in Ayn Rand’s work (from the first time I heard of her, having just borrowed her most popular novel, until well after I admitted the flaws in her work) was even more extreme. Third is his constant need to confuse me while investing me in “winning” debates – These anecdotes here. Of course, there was also the actual sexual abuse and torture described in the link I just provided as well as here, and his use of our younger sister to counteract my attempts to regain my dignity described here. There was also the attempt to discredit me to my teacher and parents, “setting me up” for punishment, described here, and for scapegoating by my fellow students, also in that entry as well as others previously linked. Such abuse not only made me extremely shy, but gave me a verbal tic that would occur whenever a memory of shame or anger (often the means to set me up for more shame) occurred. This tic further made it hard to get close enough to anyone for them to find out that I had it, and even would constantly interfere with my memory and other thought processes themselves (“Harrison Bergeron”-like.) In essence, he was attempting to destroy my spiritual/moral compass as well as my intellect. After I looked at his actions this way, however, I realized that I had always found ways to reclaim, repair, and refine this compass. This realization, and my bringing it to the fore whenever a shameful or angry memory resurfaced, has in large part quelled the tic. I thus feel compelled to learn more about the healing spiritual discipline that inspired the metaphor and to share it with my readers.
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