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A crucial part of learning, growing, and reshaping harmful behavior either at the personal or societal level is understanding where the behavior is coming from. It provides context for the behavior, helps us to mitigate our response, and also guides the building of new approaches, habits, and processes to prevent harmful behavior from happening again.
Unfortunately, trying to understand why we do the things we do, or why others do the things they do, can be both one of the most difficult and most important things we ever try to achieve. Sometimes the answer can be embarrassingly simple and in other cases it can be enormously complex, layered with painful truths and unresolvable contradictions.
The basest human motivations towards pleasure and away from pain are relatively simple and straight forward but sentient beings can have staggeringly different definitions for those two concepts which then become entangled in the intricacies of societal and interpersonal systems.
Any quest for self-mastery not only requires clear understanding of our own impulses and behaviors but also, more importantly, the capacity and drive to persistently clarify and expand that understanding. The only way to ensure our actions bring us the greatest degree of…