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Most people think of philosophy as a system of ethics or an explanation of the purpose of life, so they miss its most practical aspects. Ancient philosophy was a way to create mental clarity — to clear the mind of what psychologists today refer to as cognitive distortions.

Epictetus, Stoic slave trader turned philosopher, told his students that the place to “begin in philosophy is this: a clear perception of one’s own ruling principle.” He meant that people became philosophers when they began to question what guides their thinking and analyze their thoughts. Epictetus wanted to help his students break out of the exaggerated thinking patterns that have a destructive impact on the life of the thinker. Patterns like negative self-labeling, catastrophizing, disqualifying the positive, emotional reasoning, and other cognitive distortions.

Today, one of the most common destructive thought patterns is all-or-nothing thinking (also referred to as splitting). Examples of this include thoughts like:
• If you’re not with me, you’re against me.
• He/She is all good/all bad.
• Because this attempt wasn’t a complete success, it is a total failure.

In other words, perfectionism.

We often hold up perfectionists as models, but psychologists know that this sort of extreme thinking is associated with depression and frustration. It’s a miserable, unproductive way to live. How could it not be? Perfectionism rarely begets perfection, or satisfaction — only disappointment.

The Stoics understood how pointless — and dangerous to our mental health and progress in life — such thoughts are. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, one of the three major Stoic philosophers, reminded himself of this in his private journal, which came to be known as Meditations: “Don’t go expecting Plato’s Republic; be satisfied with even the smallest progress.” Or as Epictetus states, “We don’t abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them.”

These thinkers understood that you’re never going to find perfection. Instead, the message is clear: We must do the best with what we’ve got.

We want things to go perfectly, so we naturally tell ourselves that we’ll get started once the conditions are right, or once we have our bearings, when, really, it would be better to focus on making do with how things actually are.

Instead of perfectionism, we need to embrace a philosophy of pragmatism. As Marcus Aurelius once joked, “That cucumber is bitter, so toss it out! There are thorns on the path, then keep away! Enough said.”

Pragmatism — as opposed to perfectionism — does not share the same paralyzing hang-ups; it takes what it can get. And that’s what Epictetus is telling us: We’re never going to be perfect — if there is even such a thing. We’re human, after all. Our pursuits should be aimed at progress, no matter how much it’s possible for us to make.

Not that pragmatism is inherently at odds with idealism or pushing the ball forward. The first iPhone was revolutionary, but it still shipped without a copy-and-paste function or a handful of other features Apple would have liked to include. Steve Jobs, that supposed perfectionist, knew that at some point you have to compromise. What mattered was that you produced something and it worked.

This is why we need to start thinking like radical pragmatists — ambitious, aggressive, and rooted in ideals, but also imminently practical and guided by the possible. We can’t be guided by everything we would like to have, or by the desire to change the world right at this moment, but with ambitious enough goals to get everything we need. Not thinking small, but making the distinction between the critical and the extra.

There are plenty of things you could do today to make the world a better place. There are plenty of small steps that, were you to take them, would help move your life forward. Don’t excuse yourself from doing them because the conditions aren’t right or because a better opportunity might come along soon. Do what you can, now. And when you’ve done it, keep it in perspective and be pleased with the result.
And remember, it all boils down to this simple idea:

Think progress, not perfection.

Not all voices are broadcast from a “self,” an individual human being. Not all poetic voices gain their flavor from the source of personality, a singular identity responding to experience.

Poets also borrow and paste and ventriloquize voice styles from the public zones of language—commercial, scientific, bureaucratic. These other forms of rhetoric have as much utility in the making of poetry as the nervous high-speed monologues of Frank O’Hara, the humane vulgarity of Charles Bukowski, or the high-styled, ornate, dramatically intense voice if Sylvia Plath. What is more, because we are the common possessors of modern culture, we are deeply familiar with many of these “public-domain” voices; we understand them from experience; we know the context of their usages, and the connotations of their appearance in poems and speech.

In her poem “In Answer to Your Query” the poet Naomi Lazard ventriloquizes the tone and linguistic register of a corporate message:

We are sorry to inform you
the item you ordered
is no longer being produced.
It has not gone out of style
nor have people lost interest in it.
In fact, it has become
one of our most desired products.
Its popularity is still growing.
However, a top-level decision
has caused this product
to be discontinued forever.

Instead of the item you ordered
we are sending you something else.
It is not the same thing,
nor is it a reasonable facsimile.

Lazard’s poem performs a social comedy that replicates the experience of consumer depersonalization and the frustration of dealing with a corporate entity. As the corporate “message” grows more and more absurd, we are amused. But the greater lesson to be gained here, from a poet’s point of view, is the hypnotic power of such a voice to a reader or listener. Our intense sensation of familiarity, born of endless and repetitive exposure to such formulaic language, draws us to this voice; impersonal as it is, we are part of its constituency. Even knowing better than to listen to such voices, they possess a power over us; the declarative syntax, the fictitious “we,” the lingo of authority, “top-level decision,”. Lazard’s satire is about the absurdity of modern life, yes, but we might consider also how, by stealing, counterfeiting, and subverting such public forms, we can harness them to more nuanced poetic agendas and usages.

Consider Adam Zagajewski’s poem “To. . . ,” addressed to the chairman of the board, Death, a monologue that we might call the polite appeal of a citizen to our corporate sponsor:

Madam Death, I am writing to request
that you kindly take into consideration
an extension of my liability to
the institution headed by you
for so many centuries. You, Madam,
are a master, a violent sport,
a delicate ax, the pope, velvet lips,
scissors. I don’t flatter you. I beg.
I don’t demand. In my defense I have
only silence, dew on the grass, a nightingale
among the branches. You forgive it,
its long tenure in the leaves of one aspen
after another, drops of eternity, grams
of amazement, and the sleepy complaints of the poor poets
whose passports you didn’t renew

Though it employs much the same diction and speech register—the bureaucratic—Zagajewski’s poem is poignant in a way different from the comedy of Lazard’s poem. Why? Because the status of power is reversed in the latter poem. Here, the speaker is humble, powerless, and mortal, like all of us, subject to the whim of the “corporation” or “government” of fate. The speaker is vulnerable, and the poem’s central metaphor has the precision of effectively framing our mortal situation in a cogent way—we are indeed like the minor employees of a vast, powerful, and unknowable boss.

Our environments—social, commercial, public, transactional, entertaining—are rife with “voices” and linguistic resources like these, and they are available for conversion to psychological and artistic purposes. We can call such voices foreign and impersonal, invasive and manipulative—they are often all of those things—but they are not entirely foreign in one sense, for indeed, they are already inside us. Moreover, we are already deeply fluent in their idiom, their rhythms and cadences. We ourselves are chambers filled with such voices, and, awake or asleep, we hear them in our dreams. Just as they have cultural power, they have artistic potential.

Culture is a vast hive of discourses available for similar redemptions. In this category of “environmental” voices we could include many familiar ceremonial formulas of speech: prayers, curses, blessings, For Sale ads, cooking recipes, and wedding invitations. Such conventional formulas are not all baldly “impersonal,” like the rhetorical officialese used in the preceding examples of poetic “repurposing,” but neither are they typical poetic self-oriented expressions of individual personality.

If you ask me today, “Ray what do you think is the one thing a society needs most?”, I’d pause, wonder whether I should be honest, and then answer you this way. More than innovation or ideas or money or might or power, I’ve come to believe that there’s something truer, deeper, and more fundamental that a people needs, if they are to be successful, happy, prosperous, if a society is to continue going on and maturing, growing, developing, healthily. It is little bit of an enigmatic quality, which we aren’t used to discussing, precisely because our contemporary discourse is denuded of simplicity, meaning, and humanity. That quality is mercy.

This answer will probably surprise you a little, because we are used to thinking that things like bruising competition, bitter conquest, cunning, and ruthlessness make societies better places. We don’t often think that such qualities like mercy count for much at all and when we do think about them, outside church, on the playing field, in the lecture room, on the till at shoprite, they are seen mostly as weaknesses, infirmities, to be rubbed out quickly. So let me attempt to share my thinking with you, by way of asking: what happens to a merciless society?

Well, the first thing is that people will stop “taking risks”. That again is modern parlance, so let us put it more precisely and meaningfully. People will grow timid and afraid, anxious and heavy with worry, not bold and light and carefree and adventuresome. If every infraction of overly severe rules , by which I mean that little trivial steps become life-or-death-decisions — whether those rules are norms or laws, morals or codes, is met with maximum punishment, then one’s only course in life is glum obedience— or to chance having one’s ruin at the merest misstep. Hence, one’s energy is put into hypervigilance, self-protection, double-checking one’s every step, armoring one’s self, just like a traumatized person, not into self-expression, creativity, intimacy, connection, knowledge, beauty, truth, and so forth.

So the first effect of a merciless society is that all its human possibility , which you now see requires forgiveness, tolerance, safety, security, to be given, expressed, and realized , will stay inside its little infantile shell, just like an unhatched egg.

But what will grow instead? In every society, something grows , and if it is not human potential, it is often its opposite. But what is that opposite, precisely? Well, let us ask this way: who will rise to the top of a merciless society? Those with precisely the least regard for life. Whether it is yours or mine, the planet’s or the children’s, today’s or tomorrow’s. Those who can enforce overly severe rules with the harshest discipline and the most punitive measures — and care least about its consequences — will soon enough find themselves at the top of a merciless society’s institutions, whether government, business, judiciary, or academia.

In just such a way, a merciless society will push the most cunning and wicked in it to the top — the sociopaths and the misanthropes. Not just those who meet some abstract clinical criterion, but those who genuinely abhor and loathe the ideas of society and humanity — that there is a form of social order in which people depend on one another, instead of protect themselves against one another, just as, say Jonas Salk’s grief for polio victims led him to create and then to give the vaccine away, and for that very reason, a humane form of social order may yet be the most explosively beautiful and prosperous one of all. But we will return to this crucial and delicate and oft overlooked point.

Now, among the sociopaths, the misanthropes, there will be a great and spectacular contest of a kind. How are they to decide among themselves who is the king, the ruler, the most powerful? The question boils down to: among the ruthless, who can be the most cruel, the least humane, go past merely enforcing discipline, into something even more, well, merciless. The only way to prove that you are even more of a sociopath and misanthrope, even more merciless, than the next contestant for the crown, isn’t merely to punish — it is to take. Now the sociopath becomes the predator, in a quest to prove just how far the limits of inhumanity extend.

Sounding familiar yet? Do you the parallel I am drawing? Not yet, perhaps.

So. Whom does the predator prey upon? He doesn’t prey upon his fellow predators. They are strong and will put up a fight. The costs are too high. The predator naturally preys on the vulnerable, the weak, the powerless. Who are they? Well, they are the young, the elderly, the sick, the frail, the poor. They are the people who will bear the visible costs of a merciless society the most — for the most human possibility will be taken from them. They will be used and abused in more and more vicious ways, until, at last, there is little left to take.

Is all this reminding you of some place by now? A place called modern day Malawi maybe?

The vulnerable, being preyed upon by the predator, also serve a double purpose. They signal to the rest of society just how strong the predators are — and how easily they can make meat of their victims. The predator must always put up this show, in more and more spectacular and absurd ways, precisely to prove his might, and thus keep the people afraid, tamped down. Hence, today in Malawi we see the senseless spectacle of electing the greedy into power.

The price of a merciless society isn’t just the rise of predators, the turn from sociopaths into predators, the vulnerable becoming carrion. It is what lies hidden inside all that. It is the people in that society never realize themselves, because they are left broken in spirit by all the above. If the vulnerable are being feasted upon — then who wants to risk becoming one of them? And so predation trickles down. Everyone must become a little predator, feasting on whatever vulnerability they can find, simply to survive. The growth of predation until it has become a banal, everyday affair, instead of the expression and realization of creation, progress, growth, and maturity, is the price of a merciless society.

Would you say that sums up Malawi today? Am I being unfair? Isn’t the price now of eking out a barely tolerable life something like accepting one’s helpless complicity in this vicious cycle — becoming just such an everyday predator? Isn’t that precisely the grim dilemma of modern Malawian life — that it extinguishes human possibility in just this dreadful way, both choices being equally untenable: survive through predation, cut down the next person, but never realize your better self that way, or try to realize your better self, and be cut down the moment you begin to rise, because you are not enough of a predator.

You are welcome to reach your own conclusion. I am merely thinking out loud, and my thoughts, such as they are, lend themselves to dark conclusions. Here is mine.

A society is best when it is a lever for human possibility. A merciless society is not even a broken lever. It is something that was turned into a hammer, or a gun, or a sword, instead. That is given to every child at birth, and they are told, “you must beat the weakest person you can find with this! Cut them down! Then you will be rewarded! You will stand taller the more lives you cut down!” But in just this way, no one’s potential is fully realized. One spends one’s life beating, the other being beaten. One cuts, the other is cut down. But neither is building, creating, thinking, dreaming, daring, rebelling, defying, loving, giving. No one can grow in a society that is always being threshed.

And so. When I asked myself tonight, “what’s the one quality that a healthy society needs most?”, the answer I came to surprised me. I was taught to believe that the answers were things like ideas, money, strength, power, and so on, refined through competition, winnowed through conquest, molded into trophies for the most ambitious and cold-hearted among us. But now I have come to know, deep in my bones, that such answers do not cut to the core of this thing called life. They deny it and denude it of what is most beautiful and true about it, and that is why they have led us precisely nowhere but backwards.

It is our fragilities that hold our possibilities close, just as we can only love if we are ready to grieve, just as we can only dare our little legs to leap when we are ready to fall. We can only ever realize ourselves if we are held by one another, instead of cut down by one another as we cut one another down. That is what it means for society to be a lever, not a hammer, a sword, a gun. Fragility contains possibility other like the winter contains the summer. In the absence of the seasons, there is nothing at all, only the desert, over which the vultures wheel.

But we do not really understand that, you and I. We have been taught, and still teach, in this battered and broken land, that only Zarathustra, the superman, is the one worth being — and those who cannot be him should go to the dogs, be condemned to the inferno, before they are served up to be consumed. And yet the greatest truth of life I have learned is this. Zarathustra is a lonely, broken little man on a mountaintop, reaching up frustrated, trying to snatch the stars, while the rest of us go on, with the difficult, joyful, complicated work of living. Perhaps he is weeping, learning, at last, what the price of mercilessness is. Forever losing one’s possibility. Wouldn’t you?

But love is not that fever dream.

And self-love is not won by moonlight through soft, measured breaths. It is a painful, destructive birth of new self. To love yourself you must first look squarely on with the things that have kept you from loving yourself. The things that have kept you from loving yourself are not soft blossoms of joy. They are not your favorite memories on replay. They are the worst of you, the worst you think of you, your worst perceptions, your most unloving thoughts, your self-loathing on display, the very valid reasons you couldn’t love yourself easily and quietly like you thought love was supposed to be.

Self-love is a destruction and it might be that you don’t like the person who lay underneath your protections and egos and false identities. And maybe on the other side of your own love is an anger, because now you see all that you’ve allowed to transpire that you did not deserve. You now know what you’ve allowed when you didn’t know any better.

Because part of loving yourself is knowing what you deserve and the shadow part of loving yourself is seeing the evidence you’ve collected of just how unworthy you believed you were.

There is post-love and pre-love, yet even in the post-love you have to untangle everything the pre-love self said was okay. There’s a fury, too, because you see your past with new eyes that don’t love where you’ve come from. Your past is where the unworthy you has dwelled.

Because, before self-love becomes a liberation, it is first a burden. Well, there’s the anger at who treated you poorly when you didn’t know to ask for better treatment. The anger at yourself for what you’ve allowed. There’s the grief for lost time. There’s the strangling necessity to push people, things, ideas out, out, out because there’s no room for them. There’s the loneliness and isolation that accompanies the growth of self. There’s the new boundary lines, the new range of the word no, the opening of eyes that would rather be shut, and the terrifying realization that love isn’t synonymous with joy. It’s synonymous with growth.

And growth isn’t bliss. It never was. It was a lie that said love would be white-teethed smiles on beaches.

The pinnacle of self-love is not endless ecstasy.

It is a heartbreaking process of undoing the life your unloved self built, brick by unworthy brick.