LIVING FROM THE REAL SELF PARTICIPATES IN POLITICS
Ozodi Osuji
Wherever there are two or more people living together there will be conflicts; those conflicts must be managed if people are to live together in harmony. People must gather and make laws (legislature) and implement those laws (execution) and apply those laws to individuals and cases, adjudicate those laws (judiciary). These activities are political.
Politics is as inevitable as people living together. All that the individual can do is state his understanding of how politics should be played out in his polis, but he cannot avoid it.
I am a social democrat; by that I mean that I want my government to be elected every five years and for that government to be involved in improving people’s lives and not just leave it to the forces of the market to do so; my government must provide all children with education through university and or technical schools and provide all citizens with publicly paid health insurance and provide pension for those above age seventy.
Other than those minimum involvement in the market the government must leave the individual (ages 22-72) to fend for himself by working to earn a living.
Mixed capitalist and socialist political economy, as in Scandinavia, I believe is the best form of the political economy today.
I made this decision while at college and go about trying to bring them about; other than those I live quietly, trying to live from my real self.
Living from the real self participates in politics for if you withdraw from politics, you invite pathological dictators like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and the fools that support them to rule you.
THE REAL SELF IS NOT THE IDEAL SELF, IT DOES NOT WISH FOR IMPOSSIBLE GOALS OF POWER, WEALTH, INTELLIGENCE AND LIVE IN ANXIETY FROM FEAR OF NOT ATTAINING THOSE IMAGINARY GOALS
To try living from the false, ideal self, which pursues unmitigated power, wealth, intelligence and social attention seeking is to sentence oneself to prison for one must now live in fear of not attaining those unnecessary goals and live in constant anxiety, and anger from not attaining the fictional goals.
One can avoid all these problems by simply living from the real self. What is the real self? The real self is life in one, it cannot be defined; it is quiet, it is the false ideal self that is boisterous and destructive!
Living from the false, ideal self, as Karen Horney (Neurosis and Human Growth, 1950) pointed out, has no positive good; on the other hand, living from the real self, which we do not know what it is, some call it spirit, gives folks peace and happiness.
I choose peace not the war of living from the wished-for ideal self that gives me only tension and anxiety.
MY SIX MONTHS HAITUS FROM EXERCISE IS OVER, I RETURN TO REGULAR EXERCISING
Beginning in October 2021, I underwent middle age reassessment of my life. I had studied metaphysics and thought that it would yield some results, but it did not. I wondered whether one must continue doing what one has done all one’s life for the rest of one’s life; it now seemed like a chore to be dreaded, rather than to be looked forward to and enjoyed.
All through my life I exercised vigorously; I ran every other morning, five miles each time, rode my bicycle, did weightlifting on weekends, swan whenever I could. I hate to see unnecessary fat on my body. I wondered if I must be doing this for the rest of my life and despaired. I decided to take a break from working out and think things over.
Now I return to my exercising routine, I do so because I accept that I am a body and body does age and if not taken proper care of die sooner than it should (the average African American dies in his sixties, the average white American dies in his eighties, the life span of human beings in this century is projected to be one hundred years and one hundred and twenty in the next century, science indicates that the longest the human body can live is one hundred and fifty years, that is in the future).
I have decided to do all that I can to live up to the full human life span; exercising and eating well (I really do not need much food, an apple and fruit juice, and vegetables is all I need daily, I do not need to clog my system with stupid loads of food) is a key to it.
Body is a means of spirit living on earth, and a means of seeing the universe of space, time, matter, and colors what it sees.
If you are not in body, you would not see the universe of space, time and matter, you would be in the non-perceptual universe of knowing, aka heaven.
Since it is obvious that the physical universe and people in bodies are going to be here on earth for trillions of years before the sun expands and explodes in a supernova, along with the earth, we must take diligent care of our bodies.
Ozodi Osuji
April 4, 2022