How to Solve a Problem?

Another great question. What is it today with all the great questions?

OK, so what is a solution? If you have a major, persistent problem in your life, how do you solve it?

I don’t know anything about your life so let’s use mine as an example of problem-solving. I left my first husband when I was 22. For the next 9 years, I dated. A lot. But every relationship I entered followed the exact same pattern that I’d had with my ex-husband. I chose men of different nationalities, languages, age groups, etc. But the result was always identical. It was so identical that it would actually be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. I blamed the men – they are bad, they are low-quality. I blamed my bad luck. The actual problem was obvious to everybody around me except for me because I didn’t want to name the actual problem.

Then I finally got over myself and diagnosed the actual issue. I confessed to myself that I needed to replay my first marriage in miniature. This was a powerful need that I had, so I kept engineering these situations with a blind dedication.

Once I correctly named the problem, it was gone. I almost immediately met N and we have had a completely different kind of relationship for 17 years and counting.

Correctly naming the problem is the solution. If you are stating what the problem is and the solution doesn’t materialize, it means you haven’t yet named it right.

Look at what people do in AA, for example. They go to meetings where they repeat, “hi, my name is Johnny, and I’m an alcoholic.” Then they talk about what alcohol means to them, and that’s how they solve their problem of alcoholism.

Even in terms of an individual life, solving a persistent problem is extremely hard because the brain loves nothing more than the status quo. It will throw up all sorts of defences to prevent you from seeing the actual problem. “I’m lazy, I’m not good at this, society oppresses me, etc.” This becomes even harder at the level of society where, barring a deeply traumatic collective experience, you’ll have millions of people putting up defences to avoid seeing the truth.

We don’t want a traumatic collective event here in America, so we’ll have to plow through patiently and for a long time before we can all name the problem and move away from it.

4 thoughts on “How to Solve a Problem?

  1. “Correctly naming the problem is the solution.”

    Except that this is a form of telomancy when used for wish or outcome divination.

    Insofar as being used as an end run on spiritual materialism goes, what’s often missing involves some very basic precautions against leveraging nominalism to produce new abstractions that are then reified or made real via materialist hacks.

    So you give a name via nominalist means, then shortcut your way to understanding how it’s supposed to manifest, and then you get a kind of answer, but there’s no guarantee that intent is going to force this mapping as intended, so by the time you have given it some kind of type universal, functional type, or other materialised form, it may have taken on a life of its own.

    Well, I don’t know about you, but that sounds an awful lot like a Leviticus 19 violation …

    [quietly hides that amicus brief on spiritual materialism and prohibitions on divination meant for the judgment of sinners] :-)

    Nah, no fun, let’s do this Umberto Eco style: within every field of knowledge there is at least one forbidden idea for which even the expression of how it’s contained in one or more manifestations marks you as ontologically contaminated, with the result that everyone who could become aware of this becomes immediately aware and seeks to wall you off as a hazard before it happens to them.

    (SCP guy lurking here: it’s 55 plus 3125 but instead of mass manifesting it waits for people to stumble on to it, those people then becoming focal points for mass transmission, with the outcome being the ability to occupy and control sections of noetic space in order to prevent anyone else from occupying them. Except it’s real, look around you and observe.)

    “We don’t want a traumatic collective event here in America …”

    [coughBULLSHITcoughcough]

    Second coming of Jesus?

    That might tick all of the boxes.

    But would the simultaneous arrival of Maitreya Buddha and Avalokiteshvara do instead?

    Leaning into More Wrong territory now, of course. :-)

    But all you wanted was some simple useful result out of name casting?

    It’s fun and games until [RELIGIOUS ONTOLOGICAL HAZARD REDACTED].

    Ask me why I’m a Buddhist sometime, or just watch “Time Bandits”, you’ll know the part when you get to it. :-)

    So back to the OP: presenting solutions to proposed problems in close proximity smacks of name casting or telomancy which Christians on the Right may recognise intuitively as a breach of faith.

    And so they ask these questions so that solutions may be worked on without the temptation to perform divinations, by means of conferring within groups and collective knowledge.

    Which of course means how individualistic the solution may be doesn’t really matter since the worldview is biased toward consensus to avoid potential forms of spiritual damage.

    So while the Right as named the Right for purposes of Marxist-Hegelian dialectic occupies a certain space, the people within that space also tend to occupy a religious space that drives the interactions with that convention of dialectic.

    Or: the Right can’t not be Christian.

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