List disturbing situations. Recognize that you would do what others have done, if you were them and had their past and environment. Accept your own past behavior
Your
task, when anything upsets you, is to reduce the stress by understanding why it
happened. This is similar to method #7, stress inoculation, in chapter 12. To
begin with, you might consider what situations and behaviors you would like to
be more tolerant about, more accepting of, and less disturbed by. For example,
you may be upset by a critical and hurtful parent, by a racially prejudiced
relative or friend, by a critical and demanding teacher, by an unwed mother on
welfare, by a dishonest and power-seeking politician, by an illegal drug pusher
who sells to teenagers, or by your own internal critic which calls you stupid,
weak, and naive. There are innumerable situations that bother us, i.e. where we
are basically saying "it shouldn't be this way" or "It's going
to be awful." But, remember, whatever has happened is lawful.
Next,
it may be quite helpful to list all the causes you can think of for these
upsetting situations and behaviors. Method #1 11511y2419l (everything is true of me) in
chapter 15 may be helpful at this point. Also, note how determinism compliments
methods #1 and #3 in this chapter. The idea is to understand fully the
behavior. You may want to talk to other people involved and/or even to
uninvolved wise persons to get their ideas about the reasons and history
underlying the behavior that concerns you. One approach is to understand the
causes so well that you can accept the behavior as lawful. Another approach is
to simply assume--have faith--that there are necessary and sufficient (but
unknown) causes for all behavior, enabling you to tolerate it. In this case,
you don't have to laboriously search out all the precise reasons and history of
an irritating behavior (which is likely to be impossible anyway). You just
accept it.
Please
do not misunderstand this point. I am not advocating accepting all
behavior as being moral or desirable or commendable. I am just saying all
behavior, good and bad, is caused and, thus, something
we must accept. Value and moral judgments are also lawful. So, you may consider
your own or someone else's lawful behavior to be mean,
cruel, selfish, gross, immoral, or bad in many ways. In which case, it would be
morally proper to do all you can to prevent the bad behavior from continuing.
However, you would remain tolerant of yourself or someone else who was obeying
the psychological laws that produced the bad behavior. However, if behavior is
the natural, inevitable outcome of its causes, how can you dislike or blame the
person for what he/she does? Over and over, convince yourself that "they
did what they had to do... according to the laws of behavior" and that
"but for the grace of God, there I go..." This is the key to tolerance
and self-acceptance.
STEP THREE: On a moment by moment basis you can learn to accept behavior as lawful, not awful.
After
accepting your long-standing pet-peeves and self-criticism, you need to focus
on your day to day thoughts, expectations, and feelings which are still
upsetting you. The procedure is the same; look for the causes, understand the
behavior, persuade yourself that the action has its
causes and is lawful. Your hopes and ideals about what is a "good
person" may not change, but you can give up your irrational demands that
things always turn out the way you want. You can challenge your
"shoulds" and "musts," your insistence that you, others,
and the world should have been different. Instead of getting upset because
things that haven't worked out as you wanted them to, rely on applying your
knowledge of behavior in the future so you can get closer to your goals and
ideals.
STEP FOUR: Use the faith you have in the lawfulness of behavior to plan ways of achieving your goals. You become a confident self-helper.
The
greatest barrier to improving is the lack of hope that one can change. Knowing
that behavior is a result of cause and effect relationships and not the result
of wishing or luck or fate, should encourage us to
study behavior and try out different approaches.
I hope you now see that thinking like a determinist gives us tolerance and hope
Time involved
It
will only take you an hour or so to absorb the idea of determinism and do some
additional reading. It will probably take weeks of practice before you have
revised your thinking and accepted all events in the world as lawful. Tolerance
of all others and of ourselves, coupled with a
dedication to changing whatever is wrong, does not come easy. Our society is
saturated with criticism, cynicism, and intolerance. We probably have blamed and
resented personal traits and evil intentions all our lives. We are not even
"understanding" of our own children and our lovers; we are far from
accepting the behavior of strangers and our enemies as being determined by
lawful cause-and-effect relationships. I think it may take decades for the
majority of us to adopt determinism, even though it is reality. But you can to
think like a determinist (or a scientist) and receive the benefits any time.
Common problems
First,
the causes of human actions are very complex and, thus, hard to
observe and understand. It is certain that no ordinary behavior of a human
being (not even a two minute conversation) has ever been completely understood,
i.e. all the causes of all behavior, thoughts, and feelings known and
understood. In light of this, it is amazing that humans constantly and quickly
develop simple explanations for why people acted the way they did or why events
occurred as they did. Needing an explanation seems to be an innate feature of
our brain, which served us well for millions of years by quickly understanding
we were under attack and devising a way to survive (see method #8). The quick
witted survived. There were few evolutionary payoffs for the early human who
tried to understand his/her attacker's psychological background and motives
(they were killed). It is hard to overcome your biological heritage.
Some
of us are much more confident than others of our instant, superficial
explanations of behavior. Thus, people, who are comfortable with their instant
analyses, have firm resistance to thinking like a determinist. More importantly,
many of our explanations of human behavior are determined by our strong
feelings towards the other person. If we are angry or hurt, we see the other
person's actions caused by mean and self-serving motives. If we are needy or
attracted to the person, we see their behavior caused by desirable motives and
factors. These aren't valid, objective, comprehensive explanations of human
behavior; they are more likely to be irrational manifestations of our own
irrational emotions. Another example: the person who is convinced that his/her
marital problems are caused by the spouse being terribly self-centered may be
reluctant to give up that over-simplified, unsympathetic, angry explanation. If
the person truly explored the complex causes for the spouse's self-centeredness,
he/she might find the spouse not only blameless but the victim of a long,
painful history which necessitated self-centeredness or self-protection from
harm. We have to be willing to give up much of our strong negative emotions
before we can become a thoughtful, tolerant determinist. In today's culture, we
thrive on our resentment of others; that requires us to stay ignorant and
justifies our selfishness.
Three
hundred years ago Leibnitz, a German philosopher, taught, "Man should
accept his lot, and not try to change it." Some people still believe we
are helpless. Similarly, others believe that determinism means predestination
or fatalism--that specific events in the future are inevitable and that no one
should feel responsible for their future behavior. More rot. The determinist
rejects all of these ideas. Consider this: Is it already predetermined whether
or not we will travel to Mars and cure cancer or Aids? No, of course not,
according to the determinist (but the fatalist would say yes). Laws don't fix
the future; in fact, laws and knowledge must be used to change the future,
i.e. to develop space travel and cures. How wisely laws are used determines how
well future problems are handled. Therefore, each of us assumes great
responsibility for what is going to happen, especially in our own lives.
This
responsibility for improving the future is complicated by the fact that we can
only know the past and the present. We have little or no way of gauging with
certainty how much influence we are having or could have on the future. As we
try to influence human events, we have to wait for the future moment that
concerns us to occur in order to know if we were successful. Knowledge of the
laws of behavior must be applied to a future time or event--an unforeseeable
event. Thus, an intelligent user of knowledge is forced to always focus on the
future and to use hindsight: what did I do one minute ago or yesterday
or last year that influenced what just happened? Our answers to such questions
are then used in another effort to influence the future. Thus, the thoughtful
life is a series of informal experiments. We can only learn more about the laws
of behavior by observing what interventions seemed to lead to what outcomes in
the past, but the practical application of knowledge only involves trying
to change a future event. The effectiveness of an effort to influence
the future can only be known when that future time becomes the present.
In
short, the determinist, who wants to be a practical activist and effective at
influencing the present and maybe the future, must be future oriented and both understand
and use laws ahead of time, maybe seconds ahead of time or maybe years
ahead of time. The true determinist accepts, enjoys, and learns from the past
and the present, observing the cause and effect relationships, and actually
trying to use the laws in order to change future moments when they arrive in
the present. This gives any person who tries to be a determinist an awesome
responsibility, much as Reality Therapy does when such a therapist asks the
client, "What do you want to happen in your life?" and "What do
you need to do to make it happen?"
Effectiveness, advantages and dangers
There
is no proof that all behavior is lawfully determined; determinism is a faith, a
reasonable assumption. However, human life is so complex and chaotic that many
or most future events can not be controlled with certainty. There are no known
studies of the impact of starting to think like a determinist. Casual
observation suggests that psychology students, steeped in the science of
behavior, become more and more accepting of their clients' aberrant or even
cruel behavior as they become more knowledgeable and empathic. They see the
undesirable behavior as less despicable. As we learn to see the world the way
another person sees it, we understand the other person better. (I know of no
evidence, however, that psychologists are unusually empathic with spouses,
bosses, persons who rip them off, politicians, competitors or critics; perhaps
an empathic attitude is situation specific. Indeed, I am bothered by my own
greater empathy for a murderer or drug dealer than for a self-serving, arrogant
administrator.) Thinking empathicly or like a determinist may not generalize
easily from one situation to another, but, at least, it seems to be possible.
The
advantages of determinism are spelled out above. This belief is not dangerous,
unless you abhor the idea that humans operate lawfully like all the rest of the
universe.
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