Never take anything personally
Many years ago, a friend told me something that blew me away. He said that he never took anything personally. At the time I was 21 years old and I was probably taking almost everything personally. I realized that was the key, that if a person could reach the point where they took nothing personally, they would be enlightened, for all practical purposes. They would be living a non-neurotic life. In fact, a good working definition of a neurotic would be someone who takes everything personally and who makes every relationship into the nuclear triad of Mom-Dad-Baby.
I was wondering if taking things personally or not has anything to do with looking at things subjectively versus objectively. If you look at neurosis at the collective level, there may be a clue. Take nationalism, for example. National identities, driven into us by schools, media and the general culture become the focus of our personal identities. Why would this be so? In the United States, the media, both in content and in advertising, always refers to people in general as “Americans.” Why not humans, or “people” or something? This is “subjectification” literally. That is, the creation of a national “subject” in both senses of the term: a subject of a regime (from the Latin root meaning of “thrown below”) and a subject who acts on objects.
I spent a year in Germany in the 1980s and it struck me that when I was hanging out with Germans of my own age and my own social class, that I had more in common with them than I would people in my own country of different ages or classes. Nationalism tries to erase that, though. We grew up doing the same kinds of things, listening to the same music, etc. With media globalisation, this is probably even more true now. And just as, for objective thinking it is necessary to see ourselves as others see us, so too it is necessary to view our own nation from the outside, which is very difficult if you don’t ever go outside your own country. If you do step outside your national subjectivity, however, you may find yourself stepping into the area of heresy.
I was wondering if taking things personally or not has anything to do with looking at things subjectively versus objectively. If you look at neurosis at the collective level, there may be a clue. Take nationalism, for example. National identities, driven into us by schools, media and the general culture become the focus of our personal identities. Why would this be so? In the United States, the media, both in content and in advertising, always refers to people in general as “Americans.” Why not humans, or “people” or something? This is “subjectification” literally. That is, the creation of a national “subject” in both senses of the term: a subject of a regime (from the Latin root meaning of “thrown below”) and a subject who acts on objects.
I spent a year in Germany in the 1980s and it struck me that when I was hanging out with Germans of my own age and my own social class, that I had more in common with them than I would people in my own country of different ages or classes. Nationalism tries to erase that, though. We grew up doing the same kinds of things, listening to the same music, etc. With media globalisation, this is probably even more true now. And just as, for objective thinking it is necessary to see ourselves as others see us, so too it is necessary to view our own nation from the outside, which is very difficult if you don’t ever go outside your own country. If you do step outside your national subjectivity, however, you may find yourself stepping into the area of heresy.
posted by Donald Hunt at 9:15 AM
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