THE ILLUSION OF EGOCENTRISMPart 2The idea of ​​authorityIn the first part, I described the paradox of the time traveler. In a nutshell, this paradox can be described as follows: if a person’s personality is primarily a product of experience, then by changing the past of the world, the time traveler also changes his past, thus changing the experience that formed him as a personality, changing himself. As a result, the time traveler who flew into the past no longer exists. I paid special attention not to this paradox, but to the peculiarities of our perception, which does not allow us to immediately see the impossibility of the existence of a time traveler. This feature of perception is our egocentrism, which gives rise to a number of consequences. First of all, this is a series of cognitive distortions due to which we cannot and will never be able to fully perceive the world objectively. For the same reason, we build individual ideas about the world - our own subjective pictures of the world - which for different people can be completely different, even diametrically opposed in a number of aspects - just watch any political talk show to be convinced of this. It's all about the selectivity of our attention (we perceive first of all what confirms our picture of the world) and our tendency to judge others by ourselves (attributing qualities to other people that do not actually exist). As a result, we, who live in a single objective reality, live in individual subjective realities, each of which only partially reflects the real objective world. Can we say that we are all equally mistaken about the true state of things in the real world? No way. There are people whose activities are effective due to the fact that their worldview does not contradict reality. There are philosophers whose worldview contributed to the prosperity of not only individuals, but also entire countries. And vice versa - there are many people who are out of touch with reality and demonstrate helplessness, confusion and ineffectiveness in any activity. These are people who are hostage to their wrong values, attitudes and beliefs. They live in the looking glass of a distorted worldview, which is in conflict with objective reality. These are people who cannot develop personally, who are not able to come to true personal maturity, and therefore are not able to find their place in the world, build deep relationships and, ultimately, are not capable of finding their true selves. There are philosophers whose worldview contributed to increasing chaos, violence and existential emptiness in the world, who destroyed old values ​​without offering anything worthwhile in return. I wrote about this in the article “Children of the Postmodern Era,” where I described my vision of the currently dominant social philosophy. Ultimately, if philosophical relativism took place and each of the subjective pictures of the world were equally far from the truth, then there could be no progress in civilization, science as such could not exist, and we could not increase our knowledge about real, objective world. Therefore, we can safely say that some people may be right and others may be wrong. Objective reality exists, science accumulates data about it and provides answers to questions that seemed insoluble even in the last century, and technological progress takes everyday life and production to a new level. But science does not directly answer the question - why does a person live and what should he be like? This is a question for philosophy. But ultimately, both science and philosophy are called upon to move humanity along the path of progress, along the path of development. On this path, science moves by answering the question “how?”, and philosophy determines the vector of movement by answering the question “why?” The development of an individual is in many ways similar to the development of all humanity: each of us needs to create our own picture of the world (the task of science) and find goals and meanings for ourselves in this picture (the taskphilosophy). Does it make sense for him, an individual, to overcome his egocentrism? Why and how to do this, given that an egocentric view of the world is a given of our existence? The answer to the first question “why” is it necessary to overcome egocentrism - to be able to build a true picture of the world. Subjectivity and, accordingly, the incompleteness of the world we perceive is clearly illustrated Indian parable about several blind men who asked to be allowed to touch an elephant in order to get an idea about it. The blind man who felt the elephant's tail thought that the elephant was like a rope, the one who felt the elephant's leg thought that the elephant was like a column, etc. Each of the blind men had a wrong idea about the elephant, or, in the language of our post-modern era, each of them had his own truth about the elephant. But besides the many truths of the blind, there is one single truth about the appearance of the elephant. Truth is a clear concept that denotes the correspondence of an object and an idea of ​​the object. Did the blind people have the opportunity to avoid mistakes and gain a true understanding of the elephant? Yes, I was. The easiest option is to contact a sighted person. If there is no such possibility, then they had to search for the truth together - i.e. correlate your data, take each other’s observations into account, be able to build an image about the elephant not individually, but all together. We usually perceive this parable in the sense that everyone has their own truth, and therefore everyone is right in their own way, at the same time, not a single point of view can lay claim to the truth. But it would be more correct to understand it as an illustration of the fact that the search for truth is not a task for a single person, and that one person, relying only on his subjective experience, is doomed to make a mistake. We all live in a civilization - in a world created by the work of hundreds of generations of people who summed up their mental and physical efforts. Each of the objects around us was invented, developed, tested and modified by people, millions of people. Alone, alone with nature, a person is weak and is not able to create even a stone knife - generations of primitive people learned to process stone, each time passing on the skills to their children. The overlap and summation of labor in science is even more clearly visible. “If I have seen further than others, it is only because I stood on the shoulders of giants” - this phrase attributed to Newton perfectly illustrates that any discovery is based on previous discoveries, and every great scientist relies on the knowledge gained by the work of other great scientists, those who in the quote they are designated as giants. If all people were like the blind men from the Indian parable, relying only on their subjective experience and not using the experience of other people, then we would never build civilizations and simply would not be what we are - intelligent beings. The phrase from “wise” psychological articles that you should “listen only to yourself” and “trust only yourself” will make you, if you follow it, the blind man from the Indian parable. It’s better to follow Gorky’s behest - “Learn from everyone, don’t imitate anyone.” But it should also be perceived wisely - at certain stages of apprenticeship, it doesn’t hurt to imitate. The phrase is good for adults, but is no good for young people. So, we need to push the boundaries of egocentric worldview to build a more objective picture of the world, since alone, based only on our observations, we will inevitably make mistakes. It is necessary not so much to put yourself in the place of another, but to use the experience and knowledge of another, taking on faith that the other may be smarter, more experienced and knowledgeable than you. In its completed form, this idea becomes the idea of ​​authority. A person needs authority in order to have someone to learn from. Authority is not only a teacher, but also a model. Parents (and adults in general) are the authority for the child and by imitating them, the child learns to speak. The teacher is the authority for the student, and only in this case the student will be able to fully study. In current realities, when authorityteachers have been undermined, persistent problems with education have emerged in many countries of the world (see the article “liberal style of education”). In our time, the idea of ​​the relativity of truth dominates (there is no truth, there are only opinions), and therefore nothing can be genuine authority, because authority is ultimately nothing more than the bearer of truth. The concepts of truth and authority have been inextricably linked since ancient times; it goes back to the image of God in all Abrahamic religions, in which God is the absolute authority and the absolute bearer of truth. But now the idea of ​​authority is often associated with the idea of ​​totalitarianism, with the lack of freedom and enslavement. Philosophical and moral relativism, which is one of the most significant features of postmodernism, has destroyed the concept of truth, and with it the concept of authority. It is typical for postmodernity to deny the value of authority as such and the presence of any objective values. I would venture to say that a person vitally needs authority during the period of formation for the correct development of the psyche, for the opportunity in the future to overcome egocentrism and become a mature personality. A child and teenager must have a point of support, and this point for them is precisely authority - a reference group, an authoritative adult who will be translators of truth for the child and teenager. As personality develops, authority continues to play a big role in a person’s life, but it gradually turns from a personified one (an individual: senior comrade, leader, teacher, idol, etc.) into an abstract ideal image, usually hard-won and very deeply understood. by the man himself. Those. at the time of personality maturation, at the time of apprenticeship, a person must have external personalized authority; during the period of gaining psychological maturity, authority becomes internal, abstract. Parallels can be drawn between internal authority with the “Adult” ego state according to Burn or with the Freudian superego, which serves as an instruction to a person on how to behave in order to avoid remorse, but there is no complete analogy in either case , since both Burn and Freud had these “mechanisms of conscience” of an unconscious nature, and internal authority is fully realized and fully accepted by the person. This is nothing more than a personal ideology, a personal value system. “Plato is my friend, but Truth is dearer,” said Aristotle, Plato’s student. During his apprenticeship, Aristotle’s authority was Plato, which allowed Aristotle to study fully. But when the time of apprenticeship ended and Aristotle became a mature person, the image of Truth became his authority, in his own words. To gain such your own authority - allegorically speaking, to find your personal God in your own soul - you need a lot: to have extensive knowledge, to build a consistent, integral worldview, to master the art of thinking (a developed logical apparatus), to go through the suffering of doubts and disappointments. The meaning of gaining internal authority is that a person, having gained the opportunity to go beyond egocentrism, at the same time becomes free from external authorities. Perhaps the main difference between personalized external authority and internal abstract authority is that in the first case a person can expect from an authoritative person assessment of oneself, as well as for the first time to look at oneself from the outside - through the eyes of an authority figure, and in the second case, a person no longer needs external assessment. The first personified authority for a person is often the father, personifying law, power and responsibility. Erich Fromm saw the difference between maternal and paternal love in that maternal love is unconditional, while paternal love is deserved by worthy behavior and serves as a reward for meeting expectations. A father's love is thus something that can be earned, but a mother's love can only be received as a gift - whether it is there or not. Mother's love gives us an example of the selfless love of a strong person forweak. Maternal love is necessary for a child at the dawn of its existence and does not depend in any way on the child himself. It does not take the child beyond the boundaries of egocentrism; on the contrary, it contributes to the development of egocentrism. This is neither good nor bad - it is a given and a necessity for a child, as a natural stage of personality development. But as the child grows up, the father’s love, according to Fromm’s ideal model, becomes more and more significant. Unlike your mother's, you must earn your father's - and grow psychologically, fighting for his love. For the first time, the child feels responsible, meeting his father's expectations and striving to be like him. For the first time, a child can feel that love can be controlled and earned, and not just received (or not received, mothers are different) as a gift. The father may be the first authority in the child’s life, but he will not necessarily remain so. “Teachers are more honorable than parents,” said the aforementioned Aristotle, “because a parent gives us only life, and a teacher gives us a worthy life.” An authority figure plays a huge role in the life of a teenager or young man. The maturation of a personality during that period largely depends on what kind of referent person he has, i.e. in what circles does the teenager move? The choice of a teacher (i.e., an authority figure) in a person's life can be no less (and perhaps more) important than his relationship with his parents. Falling under the influence of a reference person and meeting his expectations, a teenager is guided not so much by his own views and opinions as by the views and opinions of his authority, which after a certain time will be perceived by the teenager as his own. At the level of psychological maturity at which a teenager is, following authority is perhaps the only way to truly go beyond egocentrism. Fromm, in his treatise “The Art of Loving,” wrote that without faith there can be no love. And there are only two types of faith: faith in power and faith in love. Fromm's first personified force, requiring submission and providing guarantees, the second personified freedom and self-reliance, i.e. responsibility. There must have been something of a left-wing anarchist in Fromm - he had a painfully negative attitude towards faith in power! I agree that freedom and responsibility are better than relying on someone strong and wise, but I undertake to assert that in the process of development a person INEVITABLY goes through the stage of faith in power. Belief in power is belief in external authority. The child believes in his father, in his strength, justice and wisdom - generally speaking, he believes in his power. This is the only reason the father has the POWER to encourage and punish the child - because he is strong, wise and fair. Faith in love is faith in yourself, it is the ability to love, a privilege of a mature personality. But none of us initially has the ability to love; we are born with the need for love, but are not able to love ourselves. A child must receive love, but he has nothing to give in return, because loving is always giving. Also, the child does not have the opportunity to believe in himself - only in his parents, in his father. A child cannot protect himself; we, adults, and first of all the father, must protect him. For a person to believe in himself, he must first believe in someone. Therefore, once again: the acquisition of internal authority is preceded by the acquisition of external authority. Believing in yourself precedes believing in someone else. Faith in love is preceded by faith in power. Distracting from the topic of egocentrism, I will draw several conclusions about the structure of society from these provisions. First. There should be a model of authoritative power in society, because a person should feel protected by power from childhood. I am afraid that in the current realities of the dictates of liberal ideology, this statement will be perceived as a call for authoritarianism. Second. The person is psychologically mature, i.e. having not external, but internal authority, must have a relationship with power - i.e. the very structure of society should encourage personal development of a person and.28.07.17