UTS 033018

Understanding the self (033018)

Why spend another semester or fifty-four hours just to understanding oneself?  Don’t you understand yourself?  If you in fail this particular subject, does it mean that you are a stranger to yourself?

These issues are certain to crop up when taking this particular subject.

We need to understand ourselves, not because there is a grade attached to it, but rather because we need to answer the riddle of Plato, of that of “knowing oneself”.  Knowing oneself seems to be a basic issue but an individual unable to hurdle such a riddle is destined to a life of contradiction.  A person who doesn’t know where he wants to go and similar to a scenario of playing basketball without a ring or playing darts without a dart board.

Such a person would always be at war with himself and he would most certainly be wasting his time because he would always be ambivalent with what he wants.

If you do not know yourself, you would be consigned to a wasted life.  You might be venturing to an enterprise that would cost you a lot and at the tail end of the race, a realization comes that such is now worthless  because you do not want it at the first place. 

If you do not know yourself, you mimic a lost soul that doesn’t know where he is headed, where he came from and why is he going in such a direction?  One is consigned in chasing things that are deemed important but are discarded later on since there is always a change of what is deemed valuable.

And yes, the quest for knowing oneself at an early stage of one’s life is important.  Similar to answering the riddle of knowing oneself, things are simpler, things are easier and values are rational when there is a basic understanding of oneself.

Take the case of Duterte.  The man is a walking contradiction.  He wants to be loved, he wants to be recognized, he wants to be admired, and yet everything that he does is the exact opposite of what he wants.

He wants to be taken seriously, and yet he jokes most of the time.  When he becomes offensive and gutter language takes the center of attraction, he will just say that he was just joking.  His jokes are inappropriate and somehow, becomes his blanket excuses for his un-presidential behavior.

When one does not know himself, he is always at war with himself.  Ambivalence becomes his middle name, and claims of poor jokes becomes his refuge for excusing himself.

No president will ever admit openly that he has killed a person, and yet, Duterte openly claims such.  And why is this?  The man is bothered unconsciously by his conscience and like a fallen catholic, wants to confess and seeks absolution from anyone willing to listen and willing to award such a symbolic absolution.

I tell you, the man is lost, the man is directionless, the man is a contradiction and the man seeks forgiveness above all else.  The man simply does not understand himself.