Witoubou Newmai
There has been ‘foreverness’ regarding people who are trying to feel good, albeit in varying degrees or variations. The endeavours to achieve these variations have been the reason for all the ‘busy-nesses.’
Meanwhile, it is to clarify that we are not trying to rake up “esoteric philosophical debates” here. We are only attempting to share simply what has been generally observed.
To feel good is a wonderful thing. It is the best thing, indeed. It is the best thing because one cannot feel good if something is not right in the person or around the person or situations related to the person. In other words, when things are in place with a person, the person feels good. Feeling good would also simply mean free from anxiety, sadness, threat, burdensome, tension and their never-ending variations.
As humans have the weakness for that ‘feel-good factor,’ they use this as a tool to design methods to exploit things through their ways. It is difficult to resist through when one is made to feel good either by a method or with a genuine intention. Opposite gender flatters each other of their likes, or enticing business advertisements or election campaigns or anything else or the everydayness of life, unless one makes you feel good first, nothing will work.
The only distinction is whether one is doing it to be as real as possible or in a mirage. What takes you there is the issue. We may not elaborate the obvious here.
Knowing the very weakness of humans, flatteries have been used as tools in different forms. Some flatteries have come in highly graduated forms that the number of people getting trapped is higher than otherwise. These forms of flattery make you appear more beautiful and important than you really are. People who do not know their real sizes and shapes believe the flatteries for real.
Israeli historian and public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari talks about the dangers of such methods, saying that it makes one see oneself as far more beautiful and important than the person really is.
Harari takes the “fascist mirror” as his case of argument, and delineates on how fascists do things. He is also talking about “a new form of fascism” that may come in the near future.
Fascism makes people see themselves as belonging to the most beautiful and most important thing in the world, he maintains, adding: “When you look in the fascist mirror, you see yourself as more beautiful and more important than you really are.”
He then advises that “getting to know our own weaknesses will help us to avoid the trap of the fascist mirror” which he termed as ‘seduction.’
“But if you really know yourself, you will not fall for this kind of flattery. If somebody puts a mirror in front of your eyes that hides all your ugly bits and makes you see yourself as far more beautiful and far more important than you really are, just break that mirror,” Harari further advises.
Contextualising and connecting Harari’s method in our case would help us ascertain whether it provides a reality check for us.
What if we look more beautiful and more important than we really are in the mirror that has been put before us?
We did not create that mirror. We are not responsible for placing the mirror before us. We do not lie about this. However, our whole life will be a liar if we cannot resist the charms of the feel-good factor even after having realized that a false mirror has been placed before us.
The whole point is: we do not mean to take away the emphasis from the feel-good factor. We are only asking to set our situation in an appropriate context loudly and examine the mirror that is before us with over-brimming vigour.
