Lack of social knowledge, poor social training and society’s
dysfunctional expectations create a self-loathing cycle within you. Painful social experiences reinforce your feelings of worthlessness. The more social frustration you experience, the more dysfunctional your attitude and behavior become.
This leads to the development of self-defense mechanisms; you create distortions to excuse your lack of friends. You deceive yourself into thinking your situation is normal. You deny the painful truth of your condition to avoid dealing with it. And you suppress anything that would expose your feeble, incompetent social skills.
Your dysfunctional behavior causes others to avoid talking to you, which in turn causes you to become even more dysfunctional and withdrawn. And the cycle repeats itself in a downward spiral, ending with you blowing away all your coworkers or classmates.
...Or maybe you’re just stuck with
a computer full of porn and a lot of lonely weekends. Either way, life blows.
fun house mirror—everything appears distorted. For example, you exaggerate your abilities to shore up your self-esteem. Then you’ll burden yourself with impossible expectations that you don’t have the self-discipline to accomplish. The end result is frustration. Only a sufficient amount of pain will dispel these delusions. Only a sufficient amount of pain will expose your true condition. Thus, punishment—the administering of sufficient, merited pain—is required.
For example, people will often punish an obese woman with rejection. Even her own body may punish her with a painful heart attack. In either case, the message is clear: something about her is not functioning correctly. Punishment is required to expose her disorderly condition.
But in her disorderly condition, self- criticism becomes debilitating; mistakes cause extreme frustration and failure feels like an impossible obstacle. It’s easier to eat without limits and avoid exercise. It requires no responsibility to ignore warnings, rules and laws. Imagining herself to be the exception to every rule is much less painful than following the rules. Her desire to escape responsibility causes her to reject anything or anyone that could expose her true condition.
Without punishment, she will remain trapped in her disorderly
condition. Without punishment, she will continue to delude herself into thinking her weight isn’t a problem. Or she will attempt to justify it by comparing herself to people more disorderly than herself—”At least I’m not as fat as her!”
Only a sufficient amount of pain—through scoldings, failing health, and social rejection—has the power to cut through her excuses and delusional beliefs.
This same principle applies to your social interactions. Because your true condition remains carefully guarded by your own self-esteem, there is no practical way for you to deal with your social problems by yourself. Another person must punish you to expose your
disorderly condition. This is why self-help books never help.
As a socially-designed being, you were never meant to thrive alone; your problems require a cooperative remedy. You cannot address social problems by yourself.
Under ideal conditions, it’s your parent’s job to punish your dysfunctional behavior as a child. Their painful discipline lets you know when you’re misbehaving. In turn, you develop a healthy self- discipline habit that allows you to remove your own dysfunctional behavior.
Self-discipline is the ability to restrict your own behavior. It means you’re able to punish disorder whenever it appears. This enables you to correct any problems caused by your actions.
For example, as a preventative measure, self-discipline allows you to exercise and eat a healthy diet. Or as a corrective measure, self-discipline will cause you to eat smaller food portions and exercise more often to get you back in shape. Self-discipline makes you turn in your
work on time. Or if you screw up, self-discipline will force you to become more diligent and put in more effort to ensure the job is done right. Self-discipline will make you a good parent. Or it will force you to eliminate irresponsible behavior to ensure your child’s safety. But because this undisciplined, indulgent society has discouraged parents from punishing their children’s dysfunctional behavior, it now
produces adults full of social problems. You exhibit many of the
symptoms of this disorderly behavior (no direction in life, employment problems, anxiety, poor social
skills, lack of motivation, inability to maintain relationships) You’ve been conditioned by society to avoid the pain of self-discipline. Without understanding why or how to punish your own
dysfunctional behavior, you have no way to resist entropy’s
constant pull toward disorder. Your dysfunctional perspective is
linked to your identity; simply reading a self-help book or attending a group seminar won’t fix the problem. Your self-esteem will fight being exposed, making your current perspective even more stubbornly resistant to change.
This is why “nerds” attempt to control every variable in their environment, down to the most insignificant details. They hope to avoid any painful exposure by controlling every possible outcome. Their irrational desire to micromanage everyone and everything is a telltale symptom of a disorderly life. Instead of correcting their dysfunctional behavior, nerds will neurotically attempt to cover up their failures and shortcomings by developing complex contingency plans. As one nerd reveals:
“To me, the feeling of standing there frozen in front of a girl and not being able to control what might happen is far worse than the actual response. When I realized this, it was obvious why I was so neurotic in my approach to socializing. I was trying to logically plan out every possible thing to say and create a contingency plan for every situation. By doing so, I naively hoped to avoid the possibility of ever being exposed as socially incompetent.”
This obsession with controlling every possible variable mimics the attitude of the overbearing mother who goes to absurd lengths to guard her children from ever failing. By placing herself as artificial buffer between her children’s actions and any painful consequence, she inhibits the natural maturation process stimulated by a healthy fear of pain.
On a larger scale, our feminist Nanny State epitomizes this short- sighted approach. The government stunts the intellectual growth of its citizens by burdening them with feel-good laws. Men thoughtlessly trade in their civil liberties for a false sense of security. In the rush to alleviate pain, we make a blind sacrifice of common sense and reason on the altar of good intentions.
It’s difficult to expose disorder on such a large scale when so many in society have a vested interest in maintaining it. Even exposing your own disorder proves a difficult task. You have built your sense of worth around your identity. You even take
comfort in it. To sacrifice that identity is like pushing your only friend off a cliff. Revealing an identity problem causes great distress; however, exposing your disorderly condition is necessary to progress toward order. Acknowledging you need to change equates to an admission of error on your part. To expose your disorderly condition, you not only have to accept that you are wrong, you also have to accept that who you are is wrong. This will cause you to feel terrible.
This is why you treat any attempts to fundamentally change your perspective as cold-hearted attacks against your being. Your self- esteem hates the exposure of your disorderly condition.
However, a proper change in perspective will touch your identity at its core. It is an extremely painful matter because, in effect, changing your perspective asks you to sacrifice the belief that’s been comforting you for so long.
When your condition is finally exposed, your self-esteem will react violently since it’s heavily invested in the deception you’ve created. This frustration is to be expected. Don’t avoid it. Pain is necessary
to cut the umbilical cord between your dysfunctional perspective and your identity.
This acknowledgment enables you to address your disorderly condition without collapsing psychologically. Because you have finally given yourself permission to make mistakes—even fail—progressing toward order no longer seems like an impossible task. Acknowledging your disorderly condition is crucial to your progress.