2017.08.22
One of the occasional participants in my UU "Science and Spirituality" is a therapist who describes her practice as Freudian, and of course she's well aware of the issues with some of his views, and how that kind of practice can seem oddly quaint and out of step. But based on my layman understanding of Freud's ideas, I think there really is something to the Id/Ego/Superego division - a division that is often under the radar of everyday life, but that emerges with sufficient introspection as seeming likely to be an accurate and useful model. (In much the same way you can kind of shove your way into some level of grasping "the self really is illusion" concepts of Buddhism through thinking along side the more traditional practices of meditation.)
For me there's a tie in to Superego and the sense of Objective Truth. Though I guess Superego provides a host of "shoulds", while Objective Truth just says what is. And you can't get ought from is directly. But in my life, one of the highest moral goods is pursuing the most accurate level of shared understanding of Objective Truth, foregoing judging of the should levels. "Whatever works!", objectively, is generally ok by me. I guess that view is what cost me my simple religious faith; the multiplicity of beliefs was on the whole incompatible with singular Objective Truth, and my duty towards that (and my humbleness in thinking 'what were the chances that the faith I was born into was THE one that was correct? Pretty small') caused me to drift from the church of my youth.
But I dunno. I guess there's an obvious parallel in that emotion/thought divide as there is with faith and then the cold dispassionate description of the Objective Truth - that I'm incorrect in thinking I have a pure method for aligning my life with being correct in the objective sense, because it will always be tempered by my subjective experience, what I was taught, and what I feel...
If only one person in the world had a sense of humor, it would probably be labeled a mental illness.
One of the essential qualities of liberalism is that it always disappoints. To its champions, this is among its greatest virtues. It embraces a realistic sense of human limits and an unillusioned view of political constraints. It shies away from utopian schemes and imprudent idealism. To its critics, this modesty and meliorism represent cowardice. Every generation of leftists angrily vents about liberalism's slim ambitions and its paucity of pugilism. Bernie Sanders and his followers join a long line of predecessors in wanting liberalism to be something that it most distinctly is not: radical.
If you're OK with Waltham... you're OK