Urgency to Correct Others
There is a primal urge to correct others, so much so that even newborn infants are obsessed with it from day one. They exhibit the tendency for order by demanding that their parents do this or that, according to their view as to what is right and what is wrong. They wield the weapon of disagreeable sounds which were awarded to them to offset their helplessness as bodies which cannot walk upright and hands which cannot yet operate to grab things.
When the parents do not give them what they desire, the infants express violence which adults find hard to tolerate. To cause the children to ceases the verbal abuse, the parents do whatever the children indicate should be done. Behind this is the tendency to correct others, to bring others under order, so that the social scene is arranged to satisfy the desires of the infants.
Have you ever had the urge to correct some other person?
Wherefrom the feeling?
Is this creation not fine as it is?
Why attempt to change the cosmic order?
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The urgency to correct, indeed a primal urge, innate and natural. In the animal forms as well there is upbringing, a form of correcting, as we serve the next generation to follow upon our evolutionary acquisitions. It is because we want to naturally assist with the survival of our species, clan, family… This formatting processes expand all the way to human ideologies, including geo-social trends we can observe in modern politics. The instinct is imbedded in that of influencing, or reaching beyond oneself and assimilate others, in-spite of their personal tendencies to resist in order to maintain their own course of development and schemes.
When I initially started teaching in public schools, I would invest all my youthful energies in reforming resistant batches of pupils, but it was also my duty and responsibility as vested by the education system. Over the years, I have come to the point where I currently deal with my pre-teen son on the basis of service and responsibility as obligated, with the understanding that I shouldn’t be “detrimentally”attached or become discombobulated in the line of duty. So as in the classroom, even what looks like some anger or upset is simply to display seriousness to the proper intended beneficiary of the attitude, but shouldn’t unduly become adversely and personally ensnaring.
This is all now taking another form as I transition to assisting adults. They participate and are helped only as clients, and so voluntarily. I can more easily avoid the pitfall of personal sense gratification and satisfaction of influencing or lording it over others. When in traffic, my passengers can become aggravated because I almost never honk even when driving in extreme metropolitan cities. I don’t see it as my mission to educate the masses, or even to correct their reckless and sometimes deadly driving patterns (maybe I lack compassion). In the overwhelming number of cases, honking is not really preventative, but a means of pacifying or a let out of one’s frustration.
So hopefully, these energies become selfishly concerned and invested in getting sense of completion from correcting my-self, and ultimately understanding and accepting the flaw in the innate and engrossing desires to influence others. Influencing others goes to the core of many social melodramas, although essential for natural success, it is highly distracting and detrimental to advancement for the “isolationist”, who might as well consider it a prelude to the "kiss of death". But then again as they say, it is what it is; what gives.
