Personal Power

To me, a feeling of empowerment is extremely important. Integrity is equally important. As such, when I encounter people who operate contrary to my philosophy of life, I get pretty peeved at them. This is not a rational evaluation of them as people, but rather as a measure of their own life's philosophies.

One example is personal relationships. Take friendships, for example. To me, a friend is a person who is friendly to me, and whom I can trust to guard my back to some extent. As such, there are few people I would actually call friend, and a whole lot of friendly people who are just friendly in relational terms. I wouldn't trust friendly people with my back. Now, I've learned that some people view friendships in terms of debts of gratitude, which disgusts me to no end. One does not take on a friend primarily or perhaps to a large extent due to the fact that friendships allow one to ask favors of another. That would be improper, in my opinion. To me, a friendship is primarily about trust, in that if the shit hits the fan, at the very least you can be sure the friend isn't going to backstab you. For those who know me, they'll certainly notice that I rarely if ever ask them for favors, because to do such a thing is an imposition upon the friendship and it sullies the relationship.

Integrity aside, personal empowerment is something that I feel is essential to everyone. Of course, I do not expect people to agree with me, but that is my opinion regardless. I was quite displeased when some people told me about something they did not like, but that they were unwilling to speak up (or complain) about it because they feared possible repercussions. In my opinion, a valid complaint is valid regardless. It should be presented to the relevant authority in a polite, logical manner. Any reasonable authority should be expected to receive this criticism in good spirit, and act accordingly. To fear to speak out is to accept personal disempowerment. That is unacceptable. I do not claim that discretion is unimportant, and indeed sometimes there are better times to speak out. However, there is no excuse for keeping mum out of a what-if fear. Worse yet, if someone uninvolved in the problem is told that others are afraid of speaking out because of their fears, the person is forced into an unhealthy situation: She can become involved by becoming the voice (and therefore a patsy) of the oppressed, or she can become a hypocrite by leaving them to pluck up their courage to speak up for themselves. True, it may not be actual hypocrisy by not speaking up for others if the only thing keeping them quiet is their own fears and not some actual risk of personal harm, but it certainly does not leave the affected one with a good feeling about herself anyway.

The other thing related to disempowerment is self-deprecation. This is even worse, because one is now voluntarily underpricing oneself. Again, there may be tactical choices made to hide one's prowess in special situations (like to avoid a fight, for example), but overall I believe one needs to be truthful about one's abilities. When someone is clearly self deprecating, my respect for them takes an instant nose dive. On the flip side, I can tolerate boasting but overboard boasting also ticks me off.

On a related note, deprecating others is something that will guarantee a perception nose dive. For example, showing a lack of confidence in another's abilities is plain offensive. If someone claims that they can do something that's plausibly within their abilities, saying something to the contary like "We'll see if you can REALLY do that" or its variants is just nasty and mean. Even if it's in jest, there's a pretty good chance that I'd be offended. It's bad enough to be out in a world where everyone's challenging one another to prove themselves with stupid acts. It's even worse when someone's challenging someone else to do something that they can plausibly do and will probably do anyway. To issue such a challenge robs the challenged of honor: There is no glory in achieving the goal because doing so can effectively be considered doing someone else's bidding. There is shame in failing to achieve the goal, because the challenger is proven right.

Overall, my rant boils down to the core idea that one should first live for oneself, and not for others. Only through being comfortable with oneself, can one truly come to terms with the concept of helping others. There is no life in living for the sake of approval by others, or from believing oneself in some way inherently inferior to others. We are all Great Ones, if we would only be willing to embrace our potentials.