Self-Defeating Self-Awareness

“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers…” Is this still the case? The traditional psychological wisdom was that we could alter ourselves through self-awareness — that by bringing our neuroses to our attention, we could overcome them. It is, of course, generically true that in order to solve a problem we must know of it. But how often does knowing of a problem actually lead to us attempting to solve it? The contemporary problem is not that we don’t know ourselves, but that we can’t change ourselves. Our defeatist self-awareness, rather than liberating the human spirit, only serves to entrench our unnatural habits as inescapable. The better goal is not to know what we are, but what we could be.

Self-defeating self-awareness plagues not just the contemporary individual, but contemporary society as a whole. So often we feel our knowledge is impotent — that comfortable ignorance is preferable to unsettling intelligence. Why else, except that despite our understanding of society’s failures, we see little hope in addressing them? We devote so much attention to the past and present, to the oppressive onslaught of history, that we regard the future with a premonition of, at best, emptiness, and, at worst, apocalypse. We have no hope for the future because we have no hope for ourselves. Only when we recognize the eternal possibility of becoming can humanity realize its great and boundless potential.