Our Need for Self-Knowledge

One of man's deepest needs is the need for identity. We need to know who we are; we need to exist in our own eyes and other people's. That need for identity is so strong that it can lead to aberrations [an over-active left hemisphere giving us delusions about ourselves].

Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom (Scepter), 120.

Only by exploring the sub-conscious and understanding it a little bit can we actually improve ourselves over time. The mistake is to think that thinking can override it all.

Lex Fridman Podcast, #393, Andrew Huberman: Relationships, Drama, Betrayal, Sex, and Love (8/17/2023). Start at 20:30, discussing Paul Conti. (Huberman, btw, will be releasing a four-part series with Paul Conti about exploring your sub-conscious.) Mental health; how to explore the self; how to explore one's sub-conscious without a therapist. For those who can't find a spiritual adviser, you may want to check it out. I will be.

The left hemisphere, as you may well be able to predict by now, has higher self-esteem than the right. It is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its own limitations.

Our implicit motives are derived from deep, unconscious, affect-laden experience, whereas motives we attribute to ourselves are cognitively elaborated constructs.

According to David McClelland, who developed the influential Achievement Motivation Theory, implicit motives are a right-hemispheric phenomenon and explicit motives are left-hemispheric.

All in all, the left hemisphere just is not reliable about the self.

And since, in a sense, the self is all we know directly, that’s got to be a handicap.

McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, Chp. 4.

"It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are, and even then you might be wrong. And that's something I don't want to be wrong about." Sheriff Bell. (Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, Chp. 7)