“Parent is not the same as mother or father, Adult means something quite different from a grownup, and Child is not the same as a little person.”Jesus.
The title says it all: this is not a zero sum world. Person A can respect Person B without shrinking. You can consider yourself a hero without conceiving of others as inferior shmucks. I'm failing to convey the book's saccharine voice — it's hard to work backwards, and I can't expunge my snarky exasperation with the trite obviousness of the message. But that's the gist.
Even as a child, I considered the book's message to be a cotton ball coated in "duh", kindling a lifetime of disgust with self-help and New Age material (some people imagine that's what I'm about, but it's definitely not what I'm about).
But that message, I learned much later, wasn't so obvious. It was a bestseller, after all. Even psychologists didn't find it banal. Their consensus was the very opposite: Readers will need copious therapy to swallow such a bitter pill of non-supremacy. This sappy cheese, it turned out, was deemed powerful medicine!
The book was a breakthrough proposition, less "Duh" than "Woooooah!". It was revelatory not just for oblivious types, egotists, and narcissists, but even for people you'd have imagined were light years beyond.
The brainy professor well-versed in cognitive fallacies and biases.
The smiley super-nice guy.
The detached therapist who well knows how people misframe.
Thinking it through now, I grasp the sheer animalism of the human perspective and am horrified. It turns out that people truly need to hear this. It's like a monolith.
Even more horrifying is that I was so slow on the uptake. I spent 62 years — including a decade managing a community the size of a large city — in a world of rampant zero sum egoism and selfishness, where even generosity and kindness can be diabolically transactional, before finally catching on.
I've frequently referred to the "suspension of social disbelief" in recent postings. This one's a doozy.
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