Moral Wrecktitude: How We Drove Ourselves Crazy and How We Drive Ourselves Sane
So you’re driving down a country road.
The sign you pass on your right says “Speed Limit 45 Miles Per Hour”. You now have a mental concept about how you should control your car. That concept is to be applied to, or imposed upon, reality, for the safety of you and your passengers and other people on the road. Sounds like a good idea. How could you fuck it up?
Well, you are a human being. If there is anything you can depend on about human beings it’s this: If we have an idea, good, bad or indifferent, we can be pretty sure, most of us, most of the time, will be not only able, but very very likely to fuck it up.
Here are a few ways:
If you become too enamoured of the value of the idea you may pay more attention to the idea than reality (reality being the road, the car, the countryside, your rear view mirror, etc.). You could get used to being so sure you are right you become a worse driver and more of a danger to yourself and others.
Being in touch with ideas about reality, thinking that the ideas are reality, and because of that, becoming distracted from reality itself, can be also dangerous, even deadly. If you drive down a road that has a speed limit of 45 and you drive at exactly 45 miles per hour because you know that is the speed limit and you know that you are right in obeying the law and doing that, you will not only be a very bad driver, you may very well kill yourself and/ or somebody else on the road. (…he said self-righteously, knowing he was right.) You could be morally correct but dead. You could be dead right. Moralism, being trapped in being proud of doing and being right, kills way way more people than it helps.
Well, what is a good driver?
An actual good driver varies her speed within the context of the constant change of experiential reality. She slows down to 30 (fifteen MPH under the speed limit) or maybe less, at the curves, or if it’s wet, and when it is dark, or a truck comes the other way, etc. And maybe she speeds up to 60 or so on the long straight open and empty stretches (15 MPH over the speed limit) where she can see it’s clear ahead. She regularly checks the road ahead and the rearview mirror and other aspects of ongoing experiential reality—including the speedometer…but she checks that for practical judgment about how to handle reality. She stays with the flow between reality and thoughts about reality...
Pride in Moral Certainty (Moral Wrecktitude)
I know I am right about this! Having a mind that gets attached to being right is a piss poor idea and dangerous God damned thing to do. Moral approximations are more virtuous than righteousness! (heh heh…I’m right proud of that! I think that should be a rule we should all make ourselves live by!)
I’m a psychotherapist and an author and a seminar leader. Me and the people I’ve hung out with for the last 50 years or so, say that awareness, or noticing is more important than thinking. We also say that a mind is a mixed bag. We attempt to distract you from your mind, because your mind is often simply distracting you from paying attention to experiential reality. Once you get distracted from being distracted we then recommend that you learn skill in shifting your attention from thoughts about reality, to what we call experiential reality itself. This is a key to living a less fucked up life.
The Awareness Continuum
You can be aware of (that is, you can only notice, three classes of things:
What you notice happening at this moment right now, inside your own body (sensations).
What you notice outside of your own body right now (perceptions based on seeing and hearing and being grounded in your present tense experience of relating to everything and everyone outside your body) and
What you notice right now going through your mind (including your thoughts in the moment about speed limits and moral righteousness.)
We call these three areas of experience: (1) “INSIDE” (2) “OUTSIDE” and (3)“UPSIDE DOWN” (we call your mind upside down because what is going through your mind is almost always bullshit.)
Now, add to that model, one more idea, which is: by the time you notice something, and report it, it is already over! There is no such thing as the here and now except as a concept! Noticing is always of a flow that never stays still. Now is gone as soon as it is noticed. By the time you can report it, it is over. Now is always later than you think.
But when your mind is not distracting you, your being is flowing right along, noticing! Now and then the being names it’s noticing, using its mind’s proclivity for naming things, and you make note of what flowed in and out. Then you either flow on or stay trapped in the matrix of thoughts that have claimed your attention. But remember, God dammit, thoughts and memories are all past tense! They are not about reality anymore. The “reality” they represent is no longer there. They are fun to play with. They are good toys. They are not real. They are ideas about what was real a little while ago. They can be projected into the future as imaginings to play with. You can attempt to re-create them in reality. They are O.K. as toys. But don’t take them too seriously! The more you demand them to be real the more you cause needless suffering because you are stupid as shit.
Constant Disobedience to Rules: Your Life Depends On It
Life is like going on a drive on a country road with a speed limit of 45 miles per hour. Good drivers notice the world and their thoughts with an ongoing scan, back and forth, and modify their speed with general guidelines and perceptions and concepts that come and go. This works better than maintaining an illusion of control with abstractions that never relent and never fit exactly any God damned way, at best, in the first place.
Good drivers are hardly ever “obeying” the speed limit. Good drivers are always scanning. Good drivers always modify the speed limit to fit the circumstances more than the rule of the law. We have a name for this ongoing scanning. It is a self—correction and re-orientation method, and we have instructions on how to share it with, and get help from, others, by doing it. We call this constant checking and sharing to remain in touch with reality “Radical Honesty.”
Moralism is a disease of being trapped in the judgmental mind with no apparent awareness of the need to find an avenue of escape. If you are a moralist you are one stupid bitch and almost as bad as a God damned head-up-his-ass Republican.
Moralism is a Sickness. Radical Honesty is a Cure.
Radical Honesty is a method of getting unstuck from the morass of moralism with a little help from our friends. Radical Honesty is what liberates me and you from the jail of righteousness (moral wrecktitude) by seeing what a bad God damned joke righteousness is in the first place.
My book Radical Honesty: How to Transform your Life by Telling the Truth came out 25 years ago and the new revised edition has been published in 12 languages around the world. I have 7 more books, most of them, roughly, on the same topic. And other Radical Honesty Trainers and writers have published lots of books—and we have trainers and workshops and podcasts and talks and videos all over the world, all year round. In this last year we conducted over a hundred workshops in 10 countries in 3 languages.
We are now developing online workshops to teach people how to be a little less stupid and fucked up and keep helping each other do that. That collection of workshops and books seems popular and pretty good and we are happy about how we have been able to help, but the truth is…we disagree with damn near everyone in the world! We are unAmerican! And we are unaffiliated with nearly every God damned affiliate group of human beings in the world! Show me a human being and I will show you something that is full of shit! How in the hell does somebody with an attitude like that expect to get along?
We disagree with God damned nearly everybody! For example, being led by a bunch of God damned fools that call themselves The United States of America, the countries of the world spend trillions of dollars on preparation for, and maintenance of, war. It’s a total God damned fucking waste of human life. Makes me want to kill the sonsabitches.
Another example: Billions of people live barely survivable miserable God damned lives because somehow, in our infinite ignorance, we all came to believe that our “security”depends on secrecy. It’s bullshit! We are wrong. We are all as full of shit as a Christmas turkey! Security does not fucking depend on secrecy, If anything, the opposite is true. Real security is based on honest sharing...showing your ass...living out loud about your uncertainty instead of hiding it! Protecting thoughts, withholding information and keeping secrets will fucking kill us! All of us! The whole God damned world full of us!--and most of what is left living in the rest of the whole God damned world as well!
Honest sharing will allow for conflict, confusion, correction and other blessed states.
And through these states we can work things out instead of killing each other in large numbers because of small differences in unimportant bullshit in our fucked—up minds.
Instead of being so attached to being right, and not being wrong, or not being wronged, we could pay attention to each other, by noticing relevant information other than just the God damned verbal content of what is being said.
We could focus on that aspect of awareness that has to do with listening (the tone of voice, the volume, the speed of speaking, the pauses and changes in inflection, rhythm, patterns of withholding how strong the breath goes through the vocal chords, changes in nose breathing and mouth breathing…etc.
We could also focus on what we observe with our eyes as a way of listening…how the person looks away and looks back, how their body moves, how they gesture, laugh, cry, sniff, snort, sneer as punctuation and placing stress on some of the words they say and on the music how they conduct their presentation of ideas…and how that goes along with or against the meaning of what they say in whatever language they are speaking. We can listen with our eyes. There are so many ways we have of being with each other, and of withdrawing from each other, and of contacting each other, and of avoiding contact with each other. What if we focused on coming forward instead of holding back.
Withholding is the most pernicious form of lying. The incredible intensity of human suffering caused by lying through withholding (simply not saying all or part of anything about what you know or think or feel or notice) is at the very heart of human conflict. In this line of W.H. Auden’s poem called “Ode to William Yeats.” he said would “sing of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress...” Singing the blues makes you feel better. Singing the blues, like telling the truth, makes you feel better...because sometimes bliss comes from revealing hurt and anger. Maybe before we all die of any of the 8 or so things that could kill us at any God damned minute now, we could try that. We could try being as honest as we can be for a few minutes, and see if that killed us?
Naahh! Never mind. Bad idea. Forget it.
Love, Brad
Brad Blanton, PhD is the author of the best selling book, Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth, and is the founder of Radical Honesty Enterprises.