I greatly enjoyed reading Mike Slott's book, Mindful Solidarity: A Secular Buddhist Democratic Socialist Dialogue. This led me to further reflections of my own on some of the topics addressed in the book: particularly the topics of self and non-self, truth as statements corresponding to reality (as far as we know), and the superiority conceit.

I would suppose most people who are attracted to Buddhism are attracted to the aim of ending suffering, or at least, lessening it. I know I certainly was, and in 40 years of practice, my suffering (mostly emotional) has greatly decreased. But is part of the practice to lose the "self"? Does anyone practice to lose themselves?

I do accept traditional Buddhist arguments against a permanent entity called the "self". The arguments are logical and valid. The "self", to be brief, are processes of varying lengths of duration, and essentially, a linguistic convention. But why do people act so contrary to this teaching, even in historically Buddhist communities and countries? Is it only a failure to completely understand the teaching?

Sometimes, it seems to me, that the ontological argument against the self is almost a straw­-man argument. Sometimes, when led by our desires, we do think and act like it's our individual selves against the whole world. But is that really our concept of our self?

Who is myself? If you ask most people who they are, they will probably give you their name, gender, nationality, and possibly their religion. But their name includes their family name, and part of a person's concept of self is relationship to family, and often ethnic and cultural identifications. Each of these self-identifications have emotional attachments, and needless to say, sometimes extremely strong emotional attachments. Is this bad?

Much of modern psychotherapy is concerned with a person’s self-conceptualizations, not some sort of absolute self-identify. I was a practicing psychotherapist for 35 years; many of my clients suffered some kind of psychological disorder, often anxiety or depression or both. Many people who are depressed suffer low self-esteem.

Freud made a distinction between primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. In brief, we can think of primary narcissism as a positive emotional attachment to our own body (and mind), and its health and well-being. It's the desire to be healthy and well-functioning. Secondary narcissism could be defined as our emotional attachments to our concepts of ourself; and herein is where problems seem to lie.

In Mike's book, he refers to Bhikkhu Analayo's writing on the superiority conceit, which since I've not read the article appears to be about Buddhist sects’ internal struggles for dominance.

But the superiority conceit (or complex) ranges widely in human behavior. People are constantly forming hierarchies of one kind or another, trying to find ways they are superior to others because they are a particular ethnicity, culture, nationality, class, religion, or sex. It contributes to racism, classism, sexism, and a great deal of human suffering.

It is one thing to have a healthy attachment to one’s own person, family, culture, nation, or religion. It is another to denigrate, disparage, or try to suppress or eliminate others merely because they are different.

Gautama Siddhartha made a distinction between wholesome and unwholesome dispositions and behaviors. In today's psychology, therapists make a distinction between healthy self­-concepts and unhealthy ones. Some of the most disruptive or unhealthy self-conceptualizations and their attendant behaviors are the personality disorders of narcissism, paranoia, and sociopathy.

In my 35 years of the practice of psychotherapy, I relatively rarely met clients who would be clearly diagnosed as having a categorical personality disorder. However, many people can have some degree or other of pathological traits. When political leaders who have very high levels of these characteristics rise in power, it can be disastrous for the political life of a nation. Incessant claims that the nation, culture, or religion is the greatest that ever existed and must be supreme, appeal to the person's secondary and unhealthy narcissism. Political leaders who over-stress the negative aspects or dangers of other nations, cultures, or religions can generate a kind of mass paranoia.

Today in America, a White Christian Nationalism (which has been here for a long time) has arisen again to political influence, even though it represents a little less than 30% of the American population, but it is fervent and has a distinctly authoritarian orientation that is contrary to the principles of our country's founding.

In his book, Mike warns against belief in truth with a capital T, i.e., an absolute truth. It is a warning against dogmatism and fanaticism. Absolutism, dogmatism, and megalomania have a tendency to walk hand-in-hand.

Many phenomena exist on a continuum. Some ideas start out small and innocuous. We learn, we overlearn, to form habits, and when we engage in systematic thinking, we develop belief­ systems. These systems can be true (as far as we know) or not true, or some mixture of true and not true. But the more we commit to believe, the more fixed the belief or belief-system becomes. Finally, if the belief-system becomes so fixed that it is impervious to contrary evidence or logic, it becomes delusion. (Or to put it more mildly, becomes myth.) This has important cultural and political relevance. Constant exposure to hearing one ideologically-driven narrative with attendant partial truths, myths, or outright lies can cause ordinary people to become fanatics. We need to adhere to facts and critical thinking.

We may be in what is an essentially non-violent civil war, and impending series of constitutional crises. Do we still follow the Constitution as it was written and amended by our ancestors or do we change our system of government to a Presidential dictatorship? It is not only a political crisis; it's a cultural one as well. A political leader cannot be elected without significant elements of that leader's character being prominent in the population. Elements of personal narcissism, paranoia, and sociopathic disregard for others seem prominent in our culture. Our Founding Fathers were concerned above all with the common good. Are we?

Aside from our practices of the Buddha dharma to keep our own sanity, what can we do as individuals?

• Support organizations that promote tolerance, civil and human rights, and an open society: organizations like the ACLU, Common Cause, and Public Citizen, to name just a few.
• Support institutions that promote independent, objective sources of knowledge, by supporting a) science and b) independent journalism, particularly publicly owned sources such as PBS and NPR.           
• Don't buy into the corruption of language. Authoritarians started calling themselves "conservatives" decades ago. This is a colonization and corruption of language that even liberal and independent media have adopted unthinkingly. If you believe a president can systematically circumvent Congress and the courts, you're an authoritarian, not a conservative.
• Support religious tolerance by supporting ecumenicalism and interfaith dialogue.
• If you are raising or educating children, teach them to be caring toward others and to take responsibility for their mistakes. Two of the traits common to Narcissistic personality, Paranoid personality, and Sociopathic personality is a significant lack of empathy and an inability to accept responsibility for anything they do that's wrong.
• Support Indivisible.

What do readers think?