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%BALANCE VIA FRIENDSHIPS 780502
Friendships offer us opportunities to maintain a
balanced perspective of life. Often, however, our
friendships are chosen in ways which deepen our
collusions---our games of mutual self deception. The
professional who chooses close friends primarily within
the professional collusion thereby deepens the grip of the
professional collusion. Our choice-of-friends-process
usually begins in adolescence, if not earlier. The
balance of a healthy life is maintained as much by the
balance and variety of personal friendships, as by the
balance and variety of intellectual-rational activities.
The adolescent who becomes a "loner" early in life by
focusing exclusively upon non-personal activities thereby
becomes vulnerable to the collusions of a chosen
specialty. This is true even if the focus of attention is
human behavior. The vulnerability originates in the
absence of intimate personal relationships with real
people who are living challenges to the professional
collusions. Professionally studying such possible friends
while still within the perspective of the professional
collusions will not meaningfully challenge those
collusions. Our intimate friendships with incarnations of
challenging perspectives offer us meaningful challenges to
the collusions of our chosen profession. Our adolescents
should be encouraged to develop and maintain such
friendships while they are developing their professional
orientations.
Our traditional technocrats tend to encourage
adolescents to sacrifice their challenging friendships on
the alter of excellence within the technocrats'
specialized profession. Professional excellence is
achieved in competitive processes in which there are
relatively few winners. The technocrat rarely values
excellence in cooperative ventures and/or in activities
which do not have well defined a priori goals. The
technocrat values deferred gratification achieved through
the systematic use of techniques---and does not value
meditation, present satisfaction, pleasure, gratification,
and repose which fail to fulfill techniques. Thus,
intimate friendships are not valued and are discouraged by
direct and indirect behavior---sacrificed to specialized
excellence. The adolescent who would like to avoid
professional collusions will do well to affirm privacy,
complementary friendships, and seek to maintain a balanced
perspective of life by seeking friends who have profoundly
challenging contrasting life-styles. No systematic
procedure will serve as an adequate substitute.
(c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in
www.essayz.com Search for Integrity and Honesty
(On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy)
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