This may be a bit labored, but I do like to write one blog a day. Thoughts today on the sense of public achievement and success versus the sense of failure. I think the duality of this really damages many people’s psychology.
It helps to have a belief in something larger than ourselves to prevent our individual sense of worth or worthlessness from driving us insane or into despair. I suppose the issue is whether you choose a worthy larger cause or identity. Larger causes can get us into terrible evils, “the banality of evil,” just doing what you’re told because you submit abjectly and think the authorities always know better than you. Of course, you don’t want to be a monstrous egotist either. Ayn Rand made a distinction, as I recall, between egoism and egotism, one being positive and the other negative. But I never really understood Rand. And people I know who have read her novels say she was an interesting philosopher but a horrible novelist.
I used a few of Sean O’Casey’s plays in the book this site is promoting. One of the themes of his Dublin plays seemed to be the priority and importance of domestic and family life over political campaigns and causes. The idea seemed to be that being loyal and good to your family matters more than careers or campaigns, which only seem to lead to tragedy in his plays. It’s a simple moral. I used to tell my students the messages of poetry are usually very simple; it’s the way they are delivered that affects us.