Caring is an action with a focus on control.

Caring is not a thought alone. Caring is an action we perform. We do not think of things unless we care about them. We do not make ourselves think of things in order to care. Thoughts come about repetitively when we happen to care. We do not seem to have control of what we care about. We can only control our proximity to them when conscious of the fact we care about them. Caring is an action because when we care in our thoughts we take physical actions due to the fact we care in our minds. If we are in denial about what we care about we may take actions based on artificial representations we make up in place of the things we really care about. Either way we are acting on something. Sometimes we may care about something, but feel powerless to overcome the challenge to acquire it. In these cases we tend to take on actions that reflect stress like drinking more or overeating. These habits of self-degradation only exist because we have not found the power in ourselves to overcome our fears and grasp our true desires. No matter how we look at it, caring is an action we perform, even when we perform actions that do not get us what we really desire. Sometimes it takes a little time and pain of avoiding someone or something that we cannot have to detach ourselves from them. We may take actions that are not in our favor in the short run in these times of stress, but if we act properly in our favor these times will pass in the long run.

Conscious struggle is key to grasping a denial and gaining power over our weaknesses. The reason we stay unconscious in many cases is because it is a control mechanism. I know a long time back I wrote on concepts of control and lack of control, and the conclusion was that there is no such thing as lack of control or disorder in the world. There are merely new forms of order and control that might not be in our favor or conscious to us. The constant changing of orders rapidly can seem like chaos, but in most cases the changes are stable whether we realize it or not. This is why we make ourselves unconscious sometimes. We do not want to see the order of how things really are in the world or ought to be in our lives. This is a control mechanism we create to avoid painful feelings and remain weak. Control mechanisms we create over ourselves exist in everyone. We are much less able to see the ones we have ourselves due to the way our emotions shape them in our lives. This is why a community is important. This actually a divide I see in method when looking at groups like Satanists that they themselves in many cases are not aware of. The divide I am talking about is Epicurean versus Nietzschean approaches to living a life in our favor. The Nietzschean approach is more focused on the individual priority and the willing of oneself to power. I do not prefer this approach because it is flawed to me. The reason is because the emotions we tie to ideas can keep us from seeing our own denial. The Epicurean seeks to strengthen the self through a community of friends. This is the idea of ethical egoism where we want to maximize ourselves for our own benefit, but the only way to best accomplish this is by benefiting those we know will treat us well back. We should all belong to a small community of friends who can be more objective to our weaknesses, and point them out for us in order to better us, and make the whole community better off. This is similar to a market system where we each seek to maximize our own utility, but the actions of all others will let us know if our actions are flawed or not working in reality.

There are some cases where even the community may lack the power to make some individuals see their denials. I can think of a few examples that come to mind when I think of this. One involved a father who was cooking hamburgers and asked the mother and son if anyone wanted a hamburger. The son said he did not want a hamburger. The father asked again just to make sure and the mother was sitting in the room the whole time. Once again the son makes it clear does not want one. When the father comes in the room eating a hamburger the mother asks why he did not make her one. He tells her that he asked if anyone wanted one and told her she did not respond. Her response was “I make dinner all the time”. This is a control method. She may or may not be conscious she is exerting this control method. The point is that she is not willing to admit she is flawed or wrong. If she can never admit this to herself, she can never work toward correcting her own actions. She wants to be in denial to her own actions, because it is painful for her to look at them and easier not to correct them. This allows her to keep acting as she chooses and take advantage of others. It is only the actions of the others who can change the way she acts in these situations by changing their actions towards her. In some cases the group may never cause them to become conscious of their actions. Some people just will not ever be able to look at the fears in themselves and overcome them, and it is because of some of these cases we must abandon them to make ourselves live better.

Another example I have experienced personally and have counseled many others on are situations where people will blow you off and act like it is not a big deal. These people do not really care about us. They only care what we can do for them on the surface and nothing beneath that. One instance is a friend I would call and ask to hang out. He in many cases would not call back for many days when he happened to be bored. He would make the excuse that he was busy that day doing something else, but never managed to call later that day to make plans for another time. By continually taking advantage of me by only calling at his convenience, the only choice I had was to stop calling him. The step beyond this of course is if he continued to call me and make pseudo plans I would have no choice but to advance further and say do not call at all anymore. The best method I found to deal with these people is to tell them not to call unless they are actually calling to hang out that moment. This confines them to only calling at your convenience and water is at its own level.

One more example has to do with something I have experienced and recently had to talk someone else through who was experiencing something similar to myself in the past. This had to do with a person they liked who would continually ignore their calls and would only call back at their own convenience. The pattern you start to see in these examples is that denial of others feelings is a method to keep these people from looking at their own issues. By projecting their personal issues onto others they can take advantage of them by assuming that their actions are completely proper and never seek to change themselves. This situation is very similar to the last one where she would continually call and when she would ask why he did not call back to at least say he would not be able to keep plans, his response was “I’m sorry if I hurt you in any way”. By saying this he was erasing the guilt from his actions and she would let him off the hook, only to do it to her again. Once again this is a control mechanism. As long as he could apologize whenever he took advantage of her and she would turn the other check, he would keep on taking advantage of her. It is only when she takes actions over herself to change what she is doing that he will stop taking advantage of her.

This is all in a sense a will to power, but you will notice that people have trouble accomplishing this on their own, and need someone from within their community of friends to give them strength to the see the situation for what it really is. Sometimes people will ask for advice or help and never act on it. They may become conscious of the desire to act and seem interested in talking about it, but afterward they will continue taking old actions anyway. We cannot be accountable for the actions of others. We can only seek to become conscious of our own and change the things we are doing. We should only go out of our way to understand the actions of others in our direct community, because understanding these actions and trying to better them will actually better our lives. It is true that in some cases we may not be able to better these people, but we should try if we have to deal with them in our everyday lives. Control is something we should only seek to get over ourselves, and we should always be ready to blame ourselves when something happens out of our favor so we can correct ourselves afterward. We cannot know better about the future without having some understanding of the past through experience, but a little superstition never hurts when seeking to try new things we may not have experienced personally.