Sunday, March 28, 2010

The Messiah complex

I have always suffered from something I call "the Messiah complex", namely the belief that I can make people better. That somehow, under my influence, while feeding their positives, they will reach their full potential and become better, whatever that means for them. And the greater the challenge, the more I thought I could make it work, that somehow there is a cosmic reason why our paths intertwined.

I have learned in time that it absolutely does not work. No one ever gets better and definitely not under my influence, because it was an incredibly arrogant assumption to begin with. By no means am I a role model. I am just a person, flawed and imperfect as they come, perhaps with slightly more imagination than others. Is that in any way redemptive? I think not.

Now, if you believe that my intellectual ruminations from above stopped me in any way from continuing to manifest my Messiah complex, then you don't know human nature. We are all aware of the distinction between the intellectual side and the emotional side in man. And we pride ourselves in being cognitive beings, endowed with reason, self-awareness and all that jazz. All that is swell. However, as my friend says, I have found that most of the times, we act upon emotional drives rather than rational ones. Our decisions are based on how we feel about things, and our feelings are determined by lots and lots of networks of details that make up our personal experiential structure.

Therefore, it was with no small cost to me that I had to accept that people do not need drawings on the wall, butterflies, flowers in their hair, soap bubbles and chewing gum. And I am nobody's savior.

"The Flower Duet" from Lakme by Leo Delibes.



The flower. It is pretty. My lady.

1 comment:

  1. Somehow, we all have embedded inside ourselves this Messiah complex. At least, it's two of us. I get deluded each single time. I keep trying and trying the same thing hoping to get one day a different result(as Einstein said when he defined the crazy person). But at the end, with my arms falling down, I'm asking myself: if the point from which I'm living and seeing my life is wrong why can't I just simply switch to a better one? Why do I keep following the same path? At this point rationality shows me, like a caring mother, that this Messiah complex was not given to me in order to change others, but to change myself. She remembers me that we are born with a potential to becoming human, that if I know that "the candlelight is fire then the meal was cooked a long time ago", that there is a difference between living from inside out and living from outside in.

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