Name: 缺失自我意識的危險 (The Dangers of Missing a Sense of Self)
Uploaded: 2025-07-30T18:32:44.000Z
Duration: 5 min 42 s

程度副詞

One of the odder features of this life is that without there being too many significant outward signs of the problem, many people are to be found wandering the earth, lacking any sense of self. By this we mean that they are radically unsure of who they might be, what they might want and who they should trust. These unfortunates have no settled core. In the background, they are always quietly asking themselves not what do I like, but what am

這種生活有一個奇怪的特點，那就是在沒有太多明顯外在跡象的情況下，人們會發現許多人在世上游蕩，缺乏任何自我意識。我們的意思是，他們根本不知道自己是誰，不知道自己想要什麼，也不知道自己應該相信誰。這些不幸的人沒有穩定的核心。他們總是悄悄地問自己："我喜歡什麼？

情態副詞

I supposed to like? Not what do I approve of, but what is it good to approve of? Not what do I find funny, but when should I laugh? When we watch them carefully, we may notice rapid almost arbitrary shifts in their views. They love this artist or jacket or political opinion, but in fact no, they prefer another one and then another. They are implicitly constantly calling out to a world which puzzles and terrifies them. Who should I be? What is it right to think? These poor souls tend to be the products of very particular sorts of childhood. When little, they will have faced environments in which their uniqueness was never a matter of concern to their self-absorbed caregivers. Mother or father were never able to push their needs aside for a time to drop to their level and ask, who is this extraordinary new member of the human race whom I have helped to create? What are their particular inclinations and loves and hates? What do they have to tell me? They were far too perturbed and fragile for such self-abnegation. They couldn't attune to the child and so the child could not, in turn, attune to themselves. For we can only find out what we think if, in the early days, someone was sufficiently patient to facilitate our own process of self-discovery, if someone didn't shout over us and say, don't be ridiculous when we ventured forth an opinion, or didn't use all the resources of adulthood to insist that their way was the only way. The self-less child will have had to cope with an egotist who simply coerced them to follow an already predetermined agenda. These are the books you need to think are amazing. The only way to be a good boy or girl is to win at this kind of sport or that school subject and later to be a banker or a vet and so on, all without in any way bothering to check in on how this might have felt to the small person biologically programmed to adore and revere them. From this was drawn a moral. Survival depends on compliance. The price of existing is the sacrifice of one's real identity. Self-less people can be deeply charming. Their manner can be exquisitely polite and mellifluous. They are built to work out what we like and to reflect it back to us. They aren't merely pretending to go along with what we think for a few minutes. They genuinely seek out our worldview and lose themselves in it. But these people also pose grave dangers. For no one forgoes their sense of self without storing up a significant degree of rage and dissatisfaction. Yet this can never emerge cleanly because the candid expression of their needs was never something that these selfless people were allowed to practice. The first we're liable to learn about a problem they have with us is when it's become unmanageable. We can be most at risk if we fall in love with these elusive, beguiling, shapeshifting people. At first, it's our tastes they want to understand. It's the books and places and foods we like that seem especially interesting to them. We can allow ourselves a dangerous moment of self-indulgence. We're made to feel marvellous and aren't suspicious enough to wonder why.

我應該喜歡什麼？不是我贊成什麼，而是贊成什麼有好處？不是我覺得什麼好笑，而是我什麼時候該笑？當我們仔細觀察他們的時候，我們會發現他們的觀點幾乎是任意快速轉變的。他們喜歡這個藝術家或外套或政治觀點，但事實上不是，他們更喜歡另一個，然後是另一個。他們含蓄地不斷向這個令他們困惑和恐懼的世界發出呼喚。我應該是誰？怎樣思考才是正確的？這些可憐的靈魂往往是特殊童年的產物。小時候，他們所處的環境中，他們的獨特性從來都不是自以為是的照顧者所關心的問題。父親或母親永遠無法暫時把自己的需求放在一邊，站在他們的角度問一問：我幫

情態助動詞 B1

Until at some point, the wind changes. Our beloved without a self starts a new job, develops different friends and starts to hang out with a crowd they take to be superior. What replaces their approval of us isn't just gentle disinterest. It will probably be disdain. We become as repulsive to them as we were once extraordinary. They may say, you don't really know me or you expect me to be perfect. They feel trapped by the very borrowed identity they once sought out so avidly from us. There is considerable anger in their system because they know that someone has quashed their true self. They simply forget that it wasn't us. They know implicitly that they've been prevented from becoming who they are and hold us responsible for stifling them. They may say, with an early adolescent level of scorn, you're controlling me, when what they really mean is, I don't know who I am, I've surrendered control to you and now can't work out what to think. Or, more profoundly, I can't determine the line between being loved and being controlled because a parent who was meant to do the former was more interested in the latter. We can find ourselves dropped like a stone. And yet ironically, we may have been very right for them, they just didn't know enough about who they were to trust their original instincts. The best we can do for people who have been denied a self is to signal that we aren't, as their parents once were, only there to foist yet another set of views on them. We won't demand that they echo us. We want to be curious about someone they've never yet been allowed to discover. We're keen to do a very eerie and unparalleled thing. Get to know them properly.

直到某一刻，風雲突變。我們沒有自我的夫妻開始了新的工作，發展了不同的朋友，開始與他們認為高人一等的人群來往。取代他們對我們的認可的，不僅僅是溫和的不感興趣。很可能是鄙視。對他們來說，我們變得和曾經的非凡一樣令人厭惡。他們可能會說，你並不真正瞭解我，或者你希望我完美無缺。他們覺得自己被曾經熱衷於從我們這裡尋找的借來的身份所困。他們的內心充滿了憤怒，因為他們知道有人粉碎了他們真正的自我。他們根本忘記了那不是我們。他們隱約知道，他們被阻止成為真正的自己，並認為我們要為扼殺他們負責。他們可能會帶著青春期的蔑視說，