Why Do I Hate My Self? | Philosophy Tube ★

today's video gets a little dark so be warned but by exploring this darkness we are going to illuminate something truly amazing about the nature of human minds [Music] part 1 darkness smiled friend got your bloody skin looks awful we've got spots all of your forehead not sure this lighting is right for your facing they sealer really shiny he's standing too far to the left what is up with a haircut mate did you did you remember that shave this morning you know your beard looks more scraggly God you look like an [ __ ] you're like a fat stupid [ __ ] out there it just looks fake you're never that smiley in real life people can tell oh my god is that your voice your voice sounds terrible on camera mate why do you sound Pasha on camera than you do in your actual voice oh god maybe that is your actual voice why is your skin so red is it the lighting is that your look made of pork you look at the inside of pork pie who did the color grading on this it looks terrible why did you wear that shirt God you look fat just get rid of it get rid of the whole thing burn the whole thing why do you bloody bother there's no point you're just gonna disappoint people she just shut the whole channel down you don't deserve it frankly you don't deserve this platform it looks sweaty you look like a like a fat sweaty RC should nail your front door shut and wait till you bloody die you fat stupid self-righteous knob part two the split self that's just a little extract from my internal monologue and you might have a similar voice in your head sometimes that tells you all kinds of lies about being worthless or how you'll never be or do what you really want or this is a popular one other people don't really like you they just pretend to yeah I get that one too sometimes this converge into actual mental illness but the vast majority of people haven't experienced something like this not a literal voice but a feeling of should a feeling of shouldn't a feeling of monitoring and critiquing their own behavior as it were from the outside I call my internal voice mister not good enough because that's all he ever tells me and he's a very skilled actor mister not good enough sometimes he appears in disguise as the voice of reason or the voice of common sense and it's only when I stop and think about it that I realize all he's really ever telling me is you know good enough the philosophers Simon Critchley says that this little voice is essential to having a hue mind he thinks that the self is split into two parts apart we experience and then that little voice who plays many roles sometimes it's our moral conscience sometimes it's the nagging voice or the abusive voice that tells us we shouldn't do that or that because we've done or not done something we're worthless if we obey it it's the little voice that says be proud you did a good thing Critchley calls it our ideal self the place where our ideals come from the self we think we should be and he thinks that little voice will never fully go away he doesn't mean that we can never be happy or satisfied we can learn to have a better relationship with our ideal selves just that its demands can never be 100% met because those demands are part of having a mind like we can't walk through walls but that's not so much an impediment as it is just a feature of buildings the walls are there to hold the ceiling up the subject the self is a split subject divided between itself and a demand that it cannot meet a demand that makes it the subject that it is but which it cannot fulfill and on the one hand that really sucks because sometimes my ideal self is really really mean to me and it's hard to get it to shut up we'll be seeing later on how some ideal selves can get really nasty but on the other hand this might be the solution to an absolutely age-old problem in philosophy why should we care about morality people have been wondering about this for as long as there's been people and quickly says we can put our skeptical hats on all day and ask why should we be nice to each other if it's of no benefit to me but at the end of the day we're gonna go it's raining I should have bought my umbrella with me today and there it is there's the feeling of should there's the ideal self critiquing the experienced self and once you understand that rigidly says if not only do you understand the foundation of the human mind you understand the foundation of ethics as well in her book perfect me philosophy professor Heather Widow's sums it up quite nicely perfection is always beyond and out of reach and that is crucial to the functioning of ethical ideas by the way if you can get your head around this split mind Theory where we give ourselves certain rules and standards and hold ourselves to them and you're well on your way to understanding manual can't who's one of the most famously difficult philosophers ever so keep up the good work part three when good selves go bad I'm curious about where this little voice comes from where does the ideal self get its ideals Critchley pays attention to it mainly insofar as it plays the role of a moral conscience but it might be interesting to explore what happens when our ideal selves tell us things that are bad or untrue that's why I open this video with a little extract of my ideal self mr. not good enough not playing the role of moral conscience which he is perfectly capable of doing but in fact being highly critical and unkind you might have noticed that he's fond of calling me fat in fact he does that quite a lot body image is something I struggle with a little bit it was actually difficult for me to go from my old format of videos where you can only see about this much of me to this because now that you can see more of my body I know that when I added this thing together this [ __ ] gonna be leaning over my shoulder and telling me that I looked fat about two years ago I was a little bit overweight I was quite unhappy with it so in a dangerously short amount of time I lost about a third of my body weight I basically didn't eat and I exercised way too much and I went down to absolutely rail-thin like I was unhealthy dangerously skinny and only about nine months ago I started going to the gym to put on muscle and now I look like this but the thing is I think back to when I was happiest with my body shape and I have to confess it was when I was unhealthy but mr. not good enough was finally telling me that I was good enough and it's a weird feeling to realize that my ideals can be bad but it's not just self-hatred but self approval that can be corrupted in that way there we see an example of how the ideal self isn't always concerned with what's good for us and can in fact be turned against the experience itself in the service of someone else like a diet pill company I mean that's how advertising works right it gives your ideal self an ideal like wellness or coolness or thinness and your ideal self feeds it back to you and says you need to buy that product in order to achieve the ideal but the ideal self can be turned against the experienced self in even darker ways to American Thinker w/e be Dubois chronicled a particularly disturbing example of this colonization of the mind in his book the souls of black folk Du Bois argued that african-americans had to as an unfortunate means of survival incorporate into their ideal selves the perspectives of racist white people who hated them and develop what he called a double consciousness to survive in a racist world they needed to understand how their perfectly innocent actions might be perceived by racists as dangerous and therefore get them in trouble innocent actions like playing with a water pistol or sitting in Starbucks waiting for a friend and Du Bois why's that this feeling of always having to be thinking of oneself from the point of view of somebody who hates you is a uniquely distressing experience it is a peculiar sensation this double-consciousness this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others of measuring one soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity whenever feels his Tunas an American a negro two souls two thoughts two unreconciled strivings two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder what do boys is describing there we today might call internalized oppression the little voice of the ideal self in marginalized people being colonized by privileged peoples and negative opinions of them as a result of systemic material discrimination and unfortunately internalized racism isn't the only kind there's internalized sexism internalized transphobia homophobia biphobia ableism our ideal selves are made up of thousands of little voices that we've been listening to all our lives not all of them kind so if your ideal self is being particularly cruel to you today maybe somebody else has been feeding at the script in this way internalized oppression goes beyond ordinary self hatred or self-criticism which are things that we can work on as individuals and ventures into the territory of a systemic problem that will require all of us working together to materially change the world in order to address part for quieting the ideal self when I was younger I really wanted to see great white sharks in the wild because I just think that beautiful animals still do and I I spent all my savings flying twelve thousand miles to Australia to go cage diving and yeah it was the long long journey was like five hours out on the boat into the southern ocean and it was really rough and I was seasick and I captain was seasick everyone was seasick and we spent all day out there to go up and down on under this blistering Australian Sun and we saw absolutely nothing and on the way back I was sitting on the boat I was just thinking I blown it I've come all this way and I've seen nothing I come so close to what I wanted to do and I failed and as I was thinking this the Sun was going down over the Southern Ocean and the cool thing about the Southern Ocean is there's no landmass in it it just goes all the way around the bottom of the world forever right and as the Sun was going down it hit the water in just the right way then it turned the whole ocean this just incredible orange rusty gold to color it was it was like an ocean of autumn it was like the waves were on fire and I was so so happy I had a beer I had my shoes I had an infinite ocean two gay that and I thought even though I've come all this way and I'm leaving empty-handed it's all been worth it the little voice for just like 20 minutes was gone I was just lost in beauty and I think as an artist that's one of the reasons people look at art ice it's one of the reasons I look art anyway like for me that's what beauty is for it's something that happens to the experience itself that pulls me into the present and just focuses me on that experience whether it's a sunset or painting or a piece of music or gazing into the eyes of somebody I adore or a piece of theatre it just shuts the ideal self up for a second I know some people describe the feeling of meditation in similar terms and I've tried it and yeah I can kind of see where I come in from although I know that it's not for everybody and to be clear here I'm talking about a temporary quieting of the ideal self we'll talk next time on the show about what happens if we just get rid of it completely which can actually happen if you mess with people in the right way and it gets really nasty but for most of us will probably never get rid of the negative aspects of our ideal selves we'll always have a missing are good enough for a Jakov golly odd King jr. or Tiffany tumbles just breathing down our necks but there's a flip side to it because although we can never reach ourselves I find at least that there can be great pleasure in the pursuit we can never win the game but we can win the hand day to day I'll never have my ideal body or my personality but I can enjoy striving for it and actually when I became a professional actor I had to change my name because there's a rule in my country that no two actors can have the same name and I chose the name Oliver Josephine Jacob thorn and I took those names from some of the very finest people I've ever known you know people people whose qualities I wanted to be closer to that I felt was the name of the ideal actor the ideal man that I wanted to be and there's something so beautiful and and empowering about naming oneself according to the ideal in its autonomy literally Otto Norma's self and name and and it's so brilliant to the point where now when people ask me okay what's your real name I tell them Oliver Josephine Jacob thought my friends call me ollie [Music] like the wallpaper sticks to the wall like the sea-shore clings to the see like you'll never get rid of your shadow but you'll never get rid of me and every time I spy you know I'll be then your ID I'm every should I marry oh my I'm Jessica every thought I know we have struggle although I can deceive him you know I won't leave him even when I get tempted [Music] every day not a soul can bust this team into we stick together like glue me not a repeat was a break us about every mind is me and you [Music] we're bringing research barely a feature bring your cut of the sunshine not have the rain life is better when I is for my me [Music] although your singing still needs work [Laughter] you

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 389,505

Rating: 4.9611297 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, mind, anxiety, internalised oppression, Du Bois, Kant

Id: 0AuFvboGKrQ

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018