|
What is the difference between someone that is neurotic, normal, and criminal?
A neurotic is not your boss, and if you are the boss it is not the people who work for you. Maybe.
One definition of neurotic is when a person cannot decide when to participate or when to withdraw, and the person is frozen for some reason. A neurotic cannot see their own needs and cannot fill them. Are we neurotic some of the time ourselves? Do we need help from time to time to sort out what is going on around us?
On the other end of the spectrum is a criminal. A criminal cannot see the needs of others and harms others, and cannot distinguish between themselves and the rest of world.
In the middle is us. Whoever “us” is. In life we need to learn to adapt to change as the world around us changes. And as our world changes faster now than ever before, we are challenged to look at our own beliefs and determine if they fit the world now or not. And if we decide we can’t change our beliefs, we become neurotic and/or criminal.
A big story lately has been the bombings of several hotels in Jordan by suicide bombers with radical beliefs. These people cannot cope with the fact that the world is changing. They do not want the world to change; they want the world to be what they want it to be, and that is not going to happen for anyone.
So the suicide bombers cannot fill their own needs and become criminals blowing up innocent people. And this makes them feel like they are doing something that will change the world.
They cannot adapt to the world as it grows.
They cannot accept change, and so their choice is to try to force change to stop.
We all hold outdated beliefs that are no longer true, but the extent to which we act on these beliefs makes a big difference.
One of my favorite stories is that in 1899 Charles Duell, the head of the U. S. Patent Office, declared that everything that could be invented had been invented and we could save the taxpayers a lot of money by closing the Patent Office down.
The change in our world is becoming more rapid every day. Dealing with the changes takes adaptation like never before in the history of man.
|
