Psychology

So you know someone who doesn't do the right thing. What do you do to have them change course?

At the moment I am considering the distinctions between two methods. Imagine a ship. If you were at the helm, would you try to turn the wheel in an approximate direction, or would you try to get the ship's navigation computer to accept precise coordinates? Obviously the latter.

For people this is different. If a person were a ship they would have a habit of resisting and rejecting the coordinates, even though they are correct. We cannot tell the complete truth all of the time because, due to psychology, counterproductivity is the result (and probably the start of a lasting resistance). The sought moral correction is not attained. Appeals, therefore, to what the person is already committed to, are the order of the day. But this has the downside of not giving the person the end at which they aim, and they can feel manipulated or feel the discussions arbitrary as a result. A person consciously and in a hands on fashion leading another person psychologically is a fairly repulsive endeavor in any case due to abuse, and other issues of dependence.

Deciding between the two methods would seem to imply answers to the follwing wuestions: When do you trust a person's capacity to change their mind through reason? How do you sense when someone is capable of cutting through their affectations and commit themselves to something uncomfortable?

Last night I considered my personal commitments to discomforting truths about my character - truths that I cannot mend but through experience and repeated uncomfortable and unnatural effort. We tend to find, when our reason identifies qualities as desirable that we do not possess (precisely because the means of possessing these qualities scare us to death of commiting ourselves - as therefore weak, broken, tragic - to them), other arguments that allow us to deny their importance, by affirming the importance of qualities that we do possess.

This behaviour is potent to such an extent that we depict the visions of our future selves by way of it, quite naturally and quite decidedly. I have become able to leave this aspect of my psychology behind, leaving me with darker, more hopeful days. The ability of people to commit themselves to uncomfortable valuations, decisions etc. becomes a question, I now believe, of understanding these 'darker, more hopeful days' - of finding their worth, their honesty, their truthfulness - and offering their occurance in people's lives as better and far more desirable than the usual paradigms.

In this way psychological steering disposes the person toward accepting the consequences of their most inward-looking reason, and the two methods combine into one. The only remaining problem is that the commitment to the new paradigm presupposes commitment to genuine improvement of the person as a goal, both as more important than other life goals that might attempt to crash in on the action, and as general enough to avoid the emotional turmoil (that results from the identification of specific faults) that is so psychologically leading. That conventional living is crap is evident enough even before any effort is expended uncovering the fact. However, a commitment to something general and unspecific requires reason. My task here may therefore be question begging, rhetorical, or deceitful. If only people weren't so stupid.