Adler’s psychology is pretty straightforward, and thus is quite usefull to direct attention. I’ll also add a little complexity theory to this mix [1] [2]
Adler’s fundamental position can be expressed as: We all have both a desire for power and competence, and to display that power and competence to others.
In this situation, life involves challenges (for almost all beings). Some of these challenges are ‘routine’, challenges of love, life and work (gathering energy for life). Some of these challenges will vary from place to place, generation to generation, or gender to gender. There are very few people who don’t have to face such challenges. Basically you cannot develop without experiencing these challenges and facing them.
We can succeed in ‘dealing with’ those challenges displaying our power and competence, we can then face new challenges. We can acknowledge failure and revise our plans and start again knowing more than we did when we first started. We can pretend we are successful and superior to others, or loose energy and retreat into nothingness.
Acknowledging failure is better than fake success, because acknowledging failure allows you to try again, or start something new. Failure is normal. When we learn to walk we fail repeatedly, but we get there, and it is similar with many other learning experiences/tasks.
As we mature we realise that we need to work with others on big challenges, and that contributing to others’ success is also a great feeling provided you are not avoiding challenges through how superior you are.
Life tends to present you with the choice between difficulty or superior ease, and the challenges are rarely finished, because we will all face sickness and death.
Sometimes the big challenges are challenges you have little to no hope of solving alone. Complexity is always generating new challenges, often because of the unintended consequences of our attempts to bring order to the world. Climate change is one of these challenges.
Again as well as trying and temporarily failing, you can pretend that scientists don’t know what they are talking about, that you are superior to them, because you can see the problems with their ideas/theories or observations without actually doing the work. You don’t have to face the challenges because they are not challenges, or you face the real challenges others you don’t like deny like perhaps trans people, or the decline of white culture or whatever,.
And it is difficult to deal with climate. You often have the State against you, which is keen to damage people who oppose climate change and who might raise alarm amongst other people. You also have exceedingly wealthy and powerful corporations fighting you to maintain their profit.
So it is not easy.
But Adler’s point is that human life is not always easy, especially in the middle of a big social challenge which is produced by the dominant groups.
The point is, do you want to try and help protect yourself, your children and grandchildren, or the children and grandchildren of your friends and kin?
Will you explore the problem and try to find constructive ways to work with others to resolve those challenges?
This requires courage, and the imagination to think of something new.
Or do you want to avoid the challenge, and yeild to destruction and fantasy or not?
We can have hope because we can persist, even in the face of defeat. Hope is not a feeling, it is a set of actions. We are part of the system and also somewhat independent on the system – we can fight the trends of the system. ‘Hope’ is signed by the fight and the search for solutions.
More later
Tags: Adler, climate change, complexity, depth psychology, personal-development
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