Austrian doctor and pioneering psychotherapist Alfred Adler made the inferiority complex central to his thinking. He believed that, “When the individual does not find a proper concrete goal of superiority, an inferiority complex results. The inferiority complex leads to a desire for escape and this desire for escape is expressed in a superiority complex, which…
Religious Conversion Can Block Self-Discovery
An Introduction In my earlier post, “Outrunning the Hound of Heaven,” I described how repressed material in the unconscious mind might drive the religious impulse. I used (among others) the English writer C. S. Lewis as an example. Today I want to present the idea that religious conversion may be an evasion, a way of…
Simone de Beauvoir on Life’s Possibilities
Simone de Beauvoir believed that, "The programme laid down in our childhood allows us to do, know, and love only a limited number of things; when the programme is fulfilled and when we have come to the end of our possibilities, then death is accepted with indifference or even as a merciful release - it…
Intellectual Alchemist at Work
From time to time, people ask me where I find so many and such varied post ideas. I always answer that I have been a steady reader for most of my life, and since 1990, I have had the habit of writing down my thoughts about whatever it is that I am reading. I also…
Your Easy Life May Be Depressing
Depression is becoming a pandemic in the West. Perhaps surprisingly, hardship and want are not always – or even often - the source of our misery. The problem is more likely to stem from our comfortable standard of living and secure social safety net. Having it easy makes us passive and complacent – and that…
We Need New Explanations of Reality
Every culture has its own way of accounting for reality. These explanations are necessary to enable the culture as a whole, and the individuals within it, to act and to justify those actions. We cannot come to grips with anything until we have some way of understanding and explaining what we are dealing with. Legislation…
The Morality of Robert Louis Stevenson
We revere Robert Louis Stevenson for his adventure novels, but he was not a genre writer in the modern sense of that term. While Black Arrow, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and Treasure Island may seem like straightforward romantic picaresque yarns, Stevenson was always deeply concerned with the moral aspects of his story. Among his…
Do You Live in the Past, the Future, or the Eternal Now?
We humans have various ways of orienting ourselves in time. Some people seem to live in the past while others are oriented towards the future. Then we have the “live in the moment” types who believe we should look neither backward nor forward but concentrate only on the here and now. Because prestigious philosophies such…
Teachers Are Too Big for Their Britches
I am a conservative, and like many people on the right, I have a problem with the leftist propensity for taking everything over. Leftists are against boundaries for the simple reason that they love to overstep them and meddle where they have no business getting involved. A case in point: In a recent local dispute…
What Socrates Meant by the Examined Life
When Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living” he was not recommending a life spent in endless naval-gazing, the practice of complacent self-absorption. He meant something far more rigorous. Pertaining to our day to day lives, he was telling us that philosophy is a lifelong dedication to accurate analysis and sound critical thinking…