This is http://www.essayz.com/a9610131.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %OFFICIOUS INTRUDER LEGITIMATE PRETENSE STANDING 961013 Some officious people are preoccupied with intruding into the lives of other people whom they regard as un- guided and/or misguided. Such officious people volunteer to see to it that other people live their lives properly according to officious standards which are neither asked for nor welcomed. The officious people seem not to be adequately challenged by the circumstances and opportunities of their own lives; so they venture forth looking for greater challenges which they regard as appropriate to their own great insights and powers of discernment regarding how people should live their lives. Officious people are pathetic in the absence of any respected powers of and official office held---and are viewed with amusement and/or disdain. Yet on other occasions officious people are vested with official elected and/or appointed office(s), powers and respect. In this latter case officious people often engage in disintegrative patterns of behavior which undermine both personal and communal integrity. If our own integrity and the integrities of our communities are to survive the threats of officious people we need to respond to their misguided efforts with personal and communal integrity. We need to articulate appropriate boundaries between what is helpful and what is disintegrative in regards to people intruding into each other's lives, spaces and affairs. The following may be helpful: 1. Unrequested and unwelcome intrusions are rarely helpful. Only under clearly articulated publicly published circumstances should we respect and/or support unrequested and unwelcome intrusions in the our lives/spaces or into the lives/spaces of others. What happens to others can happen to us if we do not respect others' rights. 2. Peoples' desires and dispositions should be respected in the absence of any clearly articulated and generally agreed to understanding of why respecting them will constitute a threat to their personal integrity and their community's integrity. 3. Unbalanced people are not reliable guides who are able to intrude into the lives of other people unasked and unwelcome --- to promote proper behavior. Unbalanced people are driven and guided by preoccupations, ideals, values and principles which fail to engender respect for paradoxical truths and the ambiguities of people's true fulfillment of their human potentials. Unbalanced people are unable to respect equally helpful alternative ways to fulfill unique human potentials---and so engage in prescriptive and proscriptive writing of rules, regulations and commandments. 4. Humility is a virtue which intrusive people do not demonstrate because they think in dichotomous terms. Their responses to human situations are in terms of "yes" and "no" --- or in terms of other comparable mutually exclusive responses. Agreement or disagreement seem to be the only possible alternatives. People who do not agree/conform are wrong and evil. People who do agree/conform are right and righteous. There is no room, time or place to be in dialogue about differences in the experiences of different people living in different environments and circumstances. Existential reports by people of their real personal experiences count for little or nothing. It is the written words of scribes found in scriptures which are authoritative and to be respected without regard to the reports of recent experiences of people being true to themselves and each other in honest dialogue. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================