----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
Subject: ON JEALOUSY ~ Part 2
From: Absolutely Hilarious, Fabulously Wonderful Guy!
Date: Feb 27, 2004 11:31 PM


It is so perceptive of you, Sheilla, when you say:

"For me, it's all about self-confidence, rational thinking and mutual-respect."

Self-confidence is important because a low self-esteem primes you for most life's miseries.

Rational thinking is by far the most under-estimated of the skills you need to possess to succeed in the world. I was introduced to philosophical thought in 1970 by an obituary of Bertrand Russell in the New Straits Times, which described him as a mathematician and "philosopher." "Mathematics," I know, but I hadn't heard of "philosophy" before then and when I looked it up in the dictionary (another habit most people are too lazy or untrained to do nowadays) it said "love of wisdom." And I said to myself, I could do with that. And so those were the beginnings of my philosophical education. I started by reading In Praise of Idleness and Why I am Not a Christian and ended up reading almost everything I could find written by Russell. Also read books on Descartes and other greats ~ I still love Existentialism.

From Philosophy, my interest naturally progressed to Psychology and by 16, I was reading university textbooks: not just introductory texts but also books on Developmental Psychology, Social Psychology and Abnormal Psychology. The Art of Loving by Erich Fromme was such a great book to read because here was an eminent psychologist and what he writes was very much what I had thought about and came to similar conclusions myself! So much so I found my Form 5 school textbooks terribly dull and boring. Needless to say, I hardly read them and did poorly for my MCE/SPM. I got by with 6 C3s, and A1 for English, C5 for Additional Maths and C6 for English Literature.

Anyway, the point of my previous two paragraphs is that those early forays into Philosophy and Psychology formed the basis of my philosophical worldview now ~ I'm a rationalist, a deductionalist and a deconstructionist. Somewhere along the way I discovered I had high cognitive needs and had to be studying something or rather all the time, whether it be Astronomy, Ecology, Environmentalism (I read Silent Spring long before it became fashionable to do so), Mysticism, Engineering, Plate Tectonics, Radio Theory (I've passed the RAE) or Computing.

The ability to respect others, while having its aetiology in your upbringing, sooner or later, reflects your self-esteem and self-respect. After all, if you cannot respect yourself, how can you respect others? If you abuse your body (by over-eating or taking recreational drugs, say) how can another expect you to respect them?

In the final analysis, mutual respect is just an extension of self-respect, which in turn is dictated by your self-esteem ~ your self-confidence.