POWER
Self-protectiveness serves as a weapon, or at least, as a disguise for a weapon, in contemporary culture.
A person who feels a friend has slighted them, or criticized them, is likely to respond by distancing themselves. Setting up boundaries.
What is that, really? A method of coping, undoubtedly. Beyond that, it’s avoidance by any other name. Beyond that, it’s an exercise of power.
The power that everyone possesses is the power to reject. In the long run, we prefer the boxer who gets up off the floor and fights. We’d rather be him.
I think we can characterize the exercise of rejection and the status of ‘I reserve the right to reject you’ as a continuous silent threat as both the path of least resistance and as a manifestation of a fear of fighting to meet one’s needs. ‘Those who step up, who participate’…I’m paraphrasing part of a much touted quote from Teddy Roosevelt. It speaks to the significance of this issue. On an ordinary interpersonal level, weaponizing withdrawal and rejection limits intimacy and trust. The protection the protagonist achieves also limits his ability to perceive or even to seek to understand the world around him.
It is certainly true that we each have the power to withdraw affection. This cannot be undone by an abstraction, or rule. However, some learn to invest energy in being engaged in the ride, while others are looking for lifeboats.
The ratio has a great impact on the world. No matter how aligned the person who relies too much on his power to reject is with virtue, with reasoning, with good intentions, he cannot be a source of reliable strength. There are other disguises: the person who cannot imagine themselves as cruel may be just as culpable as the one who sees cruelty as a necessity.
Back to the impact of a reliance on the power of rejection: the opposite course, the willingness to suffer hurt during the course of the pursuit of understanding, the unwillingness to leap to punishment, the desire to seek a bridge rather than to build a wall, these things are also powerful. Civilization rests on the choice to engage infinitely.
Is it a misstep to seek to see and label polarizations of this sort? I don’t think so. The variables in each person’s path are many, and the causal chain that leads to either the preponderantly protective methodology vs. the more vulnerable continuum can only be referred to here, being complex and seemingly impenetrable. Recognizing that the decisionmaking process matters, even if we agree that free will is but a conceptual device, is useful. Do you open your eggs on the skinny or the fat end? We can glean from Swift’s invocation of the seemingly arbitrary nature of this choice of alignment that weightier decisions can be shifted.
By untangling the threads of one’s life, or by simply embracing the greater warmth, the more constructive quality, of the empathic over the self-protective, one can, at least theoretically, recognize that one’s rationale for choosing to protect oneself was a mere cobweb, and can be brushed aside. All the unctuous, sanctimonious aspects of one’s persona can be subtracted. They can go away.
The implication of recognizing free will as a device is exactly this: the stories we’ve told ourselves, the rules we’ve made, are as arbitrary (even though comprehensible in the context of our experience) as the matter of the up or down side of the egg. What tremendous freedom!!
Power that rests on the willingness to interface even though paying the price of hurt feelings, or false pride, is power that is harnessed to the greater good.