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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (64447)	10/28/2002 12:42:06 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

This, in my opinion, is the most revealing thing you said in this post. Identifying honest emotional response as "weakness", you will have none of that. Of course you do not want to lose control, but that is different from supposing that you are absolutely impervious. I don't agree. I think the ability to control one's own responses is not a weakness but a strength. Certainly, you're right that there are certain "standard" responses to a given stimuli -- or I should really say a range of responses. But that doesn't mean one has to accept those standard responses. Consider that a person says to you, in the midst of a discussion, GFY. You, I assume, would react differently if it were your wife, your son, a neighbor you barely knew, Solon in the midst of an SI discussion, a work colleague, a client you were doing a major project for. You manage your response depending on the circumstances. I'm just saying we should extend that and try always to manage our own responses. Your son may be doing it to get a rise out of you; if you allow yourself to be risen, and snap back angrily, you will have fed right into his goal. Why should you let him control you that way? When Poet says that to me here, I know she's trying to rile me up, but she fails because I refuse to give her the power to rile me up. Instead, I just accept that it a part of her weakness and the sadness of her life, and feel more pity than anger. This ability, to me, is strength, not weakness. It is what I think the great philosophers and great religious leaders have been able to achieve, and is a goal which I think is worth striving for.