Typically the model for all personal growth is authoritarianism. We have to shape up, sharpen up, toughen up, lift that sorry, saggy self and push it into the format dictated by some source or other of ‘thus it must be.’
Authoritarianism is a noxious weed sprung from the seed of introjected self-doubt. The socially mandated authority entrenches its power, essentially, by gas-lighting us, by encouraging us to buy into a narrative of our innate hopelessness.
Yet this is a false narrative of personal growth. Any time an authority would have us think that we are fundamentally deficient, in need of adding something, removing something, we give up the power of our innate capacity for growth and healing. We allow our innate capacity to be slandered, denied, and even forgotten.
The result is linear, hackneyed scarcity thinking. So long as I allow an external authority to be the arbiter of my worth, I will always inhibit the manifestation of my worth. Worse: the best I can ever achieve is relief from the duty of self-punishment…for now. This is how those in power keep the rest in line: they teach the rest to be self-defeating.
Willpower is inadequate if one wishes to achieve growth, change, discovery. Willpower has been thoroughly subverted by authoritarian narratives, by the imposition of external standards of meaning and worth. Yet, where willpower fails to achieve in its corruption and subversion, the art of patience can succeed. Patience – the art of sticking with difficulty. Willpower is a finite quantity; patience is an attitude of stillness that flows from within.
What would it mean if you were to trust yourself radically and completely? What if you were to cultivate the ability to truly listen within? The god Heimdall sacrificed his external hearing (or perhaps an ear) in exchange for what seems like the ability to listen to himself. Odin gave up an eye for a draft of the water of memory, which might well mean dipping into a truthful relationship with his own unconscious.
What would it mean if you were to trust yourself radically and completely? Authoritarians say you will run riot, uncontrolled. You will turn into a destructive monster. You will lose all discipline, direction, sense. You will collapse into disaster.
Yet such woe is not an expression of the true will. It is the manifestation of a will that has not yet cultivated the ability to listen to itself. It is the dark chaotic threat we must face in order to discover the beautiful, idiosyncratic, natural beauty of our own unique truths. If we had the opportunity to learn how to truly heed ourselves then this authoritarian vision of chaos would just…go away.
At some point some of us, inspired to cut down to the marrow of our own meaning, begin to dare to break free from the lies of internalized authoritarianism. The moment we begin to do so, the self-doubt intensifies. The internalized gaslighting goes into overdrive. All in the service of driving us back into the arms of self-hatred and self-ignorance.
The task of finding our own unique, natural equilibrium is likely to be less obvious, less logical, less rational than we would like. Patience is what counsels us to be open to this mysterious process; at some point we may discover that maximum efficiency occurs when we abandon pre-conceived (= authoritarian) models of what a successful process ‘should’ look like.
Thus patience can save us, can grant us a capacity to trust in our yet unknown nature, our inner mystery, that to which Heimdall and Odin are willing to sacrifice so much. The patience to breathe through the agony of all our internalized self-doubt.
What lies on the other side of an authoritarian relationship to self? Psychological anarchy – the idea that I can govern myself, from myself. The idea that maybe, just maybe, there is a unique picture of self-expression that only I can manifest. And that perhaps this radical uniqueness is a profound threat to all the small-making ideologies of authoritarian control.
To be clear, we are here not talking about egotism. Egotism is still trying to turn myself into an authoritarian creature. Egotism buys into the illusory dynamics of dominance and submission, of evaluation and shallow judgment. Egotism is a fear of the well of memory that we call the unconscious, or that we call the body. The ego is a natural part of the human condition, nothing more. It does not need to be worshipped, since this is just another trap of vapid authoritarian psychology.
Psychological anarchism is a movement away from the illusion of control toward the challenge of patient trust in an unknown self, a self from which each of us is alienated by the lies of authoritarianism.
What are you willing to do today as an alternative to being controlled by your internalized ‘shoulds?’ What would it mean if you were to trust yourself radically and completely? Be patient and be brave.
