Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength: Willpower

rediscovering the greatest human strength: willpower

Rediscovering the greatest human strength: willpower

In their book, Willpower: Redisovering the Greatest Human Strength, authors Roy Baumeister and John Tierney claim that success, however defined, materially, financially or psychologically, relates to self-control. They confess their original belief that the religious teachings about character, morality and will, were restrictive and punitive. But when their own studies demonstrated the observable link between willpower and self- control, they changed. The authors state, in fact, that “willpower is like a muscle. Self-control demonstrably diminishes as willpower fatigues. Improving willpower is the surest way to a better life…” redicovering the greatest human strength: willpower.

Furthermore, Baumeister and Tierney declare, most major problems, ranging from underachievement in school to obesity to divorce, anxiety, depression, impulsive violence and many more of the most common social illnesses result from a lack of self-control.

Willpower and self-control are essential predictors for a happy life. Lack of both incur massive troubles for the human person.

Gasp!

Sarcasm aside, understanding social science’s love/hate relationship with the reality of the human will and our need to train it, recalls my study of Catholic Christianity at Saint Benedict’s Abbey under the tutelage of Brother Andrew Koch. Like most Americans, including many Christians and Catholics, I lacked appreciation and understanding of virtue, will, soul., intellect…: The extensive vocabulary of faith was utterly foreign. However, once I began to study, I got hungry, remembering the yearning for wisdom I’d had in my youth. As I learned and assimilated authentic wisdom provided by a seemingly bottomless trove of scholars, I changed. Hence everything changed. And continues to do so because there’s no limit to wisdom and light.

There is nothing on earth more desirable than truth, is there?

How did we get here?

During the last several days, many are asking, what happened?

How did we become a culture requiring a president to declare there are just two genders?

Or a country whose president must enforce achievement and merit as basis for hires, advancement and salary?

Or an American state declaring it illegal to request proof of citizenship to vote?

The easy answer is to blame all this on the sixties, my coming of age era. It’s surely reasonable to hearken back to those days of protesting everything, but it isn’t sufficient. The answers, apart from our first sin, lie in the words of a rabbi and a priest.

First, the rabbi. Edwin H. Friedman’s Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix nails it. Friedman’s aptly named “cultural camouflage” leads directly to what I’ve called the Institutionalization of Denial. Family therapist and ordained Rabbi, Edwin Friedman, died suddenly in 1996 prior to the completion of this book. It was his family and friends who finished then published this remarkably insightful work.

It was in fact my consistent inablity to predict the future course of relationships on families and institutions over the course of several decades that first led me to question the adequacy of the social science construction of reality and eventually led me to wonder if an intended source of enlightenment had, in fact, become a force for denial

In this book on leadership, I will describe a similar failure of nerve (to the Socratic Greeks) affecting American civilization today. But I will add, when anxiety reaches certain thresholds, reasonableness and honesty no longer defend against illusion, and then even the most learned ideas can begin to function as superstitions.

Failure of Nerve

Friedman’s theory of leadership, begins with a person, one with integrity-integrity in the sense of willing to stand apart, take command. A leader with nerve because he-or she- has a “differentiated self”. Someone with the “presence” to take a stand, apart from the consensus, relying not on data or consultants but on her abillity to act. Make a decision while accepting that there will be hundreds or thousands who may hate him or her. Accepting that there will be sabatoge, an inevitable result of leadership. There will be resistance.

The priest

is Fulton J Sheen who peels back Friedman’s theories to explain the morass oppressing much of humanity: the extinction of guilt by psychiatry. Feudian psychiatry’s insistence that the ills affecting man were external forces applied to him or her done without any fault of the person. With a sweep of psychiatry’s therapeutic touch, sin, conscience and responsibilty were relegated to the medieval past. What suffering people required was understanding and kindness not punishment. A culture of tolerance that developed and transformed society into….this.

In his book, Peace of Soul, the archbishop relates the Lord’s preference for “nasty people.” In a real sense, Sheen writes here about the cultural camouflage of ‘niceness’ that imbues our societies.

Nice people must see themselves as nasty people before they can find peace. When they exchange their proud and diabolical belief that they never did anything wrong to a hope for a Divine remedy for their mistakes, they will have attained to the condition of normality, peace, and happiness. In contrast to the pride of those who deny their guilt to escape self-criticism is the humility of God, Who made a world which added not to His glory and then made man to criticize Him. The nasty people are the convertible people; aware of their own imperfections, they sense within themselves an emptiness…This sense of sin in them does not beget a forlorn despair, but a creative despair, when once they know that they can look beyond themselves for loving relief.

Our Blessed Lord was very fond of nasty people. He told so many stories about them. One of the charges the enemies made against Him was that He ate with nasty people and with sinners. One of the greatest of all the Apostles came to Our Blessed Lord through hate.

Peace of Soul

“I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.”

The greatest of the apostles came though hate

Yesterday was the Feast of the conversion of Saint Paul-the apostle who Archbishop Sheen writes “came to Our Blessed Lord through hate.” Saint Paul surely wasn’t an individual I expected to get to know…until I felt impelled to write a novel about his early life, My Name is Saul. In the Afterword, I wrote this:

Throughout the writing of this book, my decision to imagine the early life of St. Paul has seemed alternatively foolish and wise, arrogant and humbling … and a panoply of other feelings as paradoxical as Paul himself. Of one thing I am sure, however. After a year of immersing myself in the life of the young man called Saul, I am convinced that he is a man for our times. I undertook this book for many reasons, but primarily because I came to see Saul as a man who had no interest in sidestepping the meaning of things, or in appeasing hurt feelings or bruised consciences. Saul was interested in just one thing: truth…

As he told it, he became the most feared persecutor of the followers of the Way— the Christians— until he was quite literally toppled from his throne of certitude. At that point, he became … drum roll here … the Apostle to the Gentiles, trading his Jewish Saul, for the Roman Paul.

Certainties are so seductive, are they not? Whether about religion, the Bible, the hypocrisy of Christians, or the broader concerns of politics, many of our certainties loom so large that they eclipse everything else— including the truth standing right in front of us.

My Name is Saul

Caravaggio: The Conversion of Saint Paul

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