21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview
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T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S
done to remedy this?
In essence, these two questions are the premise of the work. Personal happiness — explored best perhaps in psychoanalysis — and happiness for the many, the Marxist ideology. Desire and need.
As to the first of these, psychoanalysis literally means ‘letting the butterfly go free’, and Freud spoke of the ‘will to pleasure’. Meanwhile the frustration of this quest is succinctly observed by R.D. Laing in The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. He says: ‘To adapt to this world, the child abdicates its ecstasy.’ Recovering ecstasy then is the primary quest of this work.
As for the second issue — satisfying the needs of others — the fact has to be faced that the political solution has not been ultimately realisable and address our concerns accordingly.
Our culture tends to see questions as either/or questions. It tries to reduce everything in the world to such black and white choices. The alternative to this dualistic, polemical approach is a ‘dialectic’ — a discussion that looks at both/and. I hope that what follows will be such a dialectic. Always, the ‘delusions’ that are discussed are not to be abandoned wholesale. Of particular note is how each subject might be ‘brought home’ to real life and how it might inform us of our response to ourselves, others and to the world.
Finally, of course, I am not pretending to ‘solve’ the delusions discussed here. They are probably
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