Fear and learning
Two things:
1) I was being hard on myself, yesterday. I was looking over my work, today, and looking at my progress over the course of a year and realizing, "I came a long way in a year." The fact is that I've been learning over the course of this year. And there is just a lot to learn on this job. My administrators have just been dicks, is the truth. They've been hostile and aggressive and they've made a learning curve that was already a steep one more difficult. They get no credit for my progress. And their aggressiveness totally undermined my learning and progress.
The biggest lesson I learned, today, while I was reflecting on this is that the quality of liberal societies and institutions that promotes so much more progress is learning. And the degree of aggressiveness and hostility in an institution indicates the degree to which that learning is undermined. It wastes time. It undermines learning and growth that needs to take place. It soils relationships where learning takes places. It undermines common objectives. And it is just, generally, a very poor strategy for promoting progress. It's no secret, then, why more aggressive, hostile societies - the Nazis, Communists, theocracies and repressive societies - why they fail so regularly. Because the aggression and hostility and inappropriate use of force undermines learning which undermines growth - cultural, intellectual, economic, political, etc. - and it creates regressive, more threatening and threatened, less honest and dishonest tendencies. Socieities and communities mired in aggression and hostility stay mired, when they do, because people get less honest about the dysfunctionality of that way of handling life and because they begin to accustom themselves to its fear-driven ways because they give into the fear rather than expecting better. I came from more aggressive, less thoughtful poor communities and I have no interest in expecting less than more thought and less aggression and hostility in my own personal life, nevertheless the larger politics and society, anymore.
2) The best thing that's come from the last 5 years for me is watching just how scared most people live their lives. How easily cowered they are and how easily they will settle for less in their lives as a consequence. The fact that people are so circumspect about what they talk about on their jobs versus how much more freely and openly they will talk with one another on a university campus is evidence of just how accustomed people get to this kind of fear. I have no interest in doing that and do it as little as possible. And I am really proud and glad that I didn't choose a path of least resistance that might have led to a life like that for me, as well.
That is the source of the term "path of least resistance": people are coerced down a certain path that others want them to take, and they follow it to avoid resisting the flow and facing the consequences that come with that life.
And I could not be more pleased with myself for resisting that temptation and taking a stronger route even when others took a less resistant one.
I'm going to go take a walk and enjoy the freedom that I've earned this year.
Love,
Ben
