Some subconscious issues I’ve been processing recently:
Processing confusion and anxiety
I’ve been very anxious since Elliot pointed out that I misquoted. I’ve slept poorly and had anxious dreams about making more mistakes and misquoting again. I think this indicates some deeper subconscious process at work. I think it relates to my Tribalism conflict and there’s some sort of fear of being cast out or rejected for things that I don’t understand. Discovering my misquoting mistake has made me doubt that I understand quoting correctly (on a subconscious level) and I’m concerned that I will do it again, so that lack of self-understanding makes the rule against misquoting kind of scary. The fear of being cast out is also real - I’m sure that Elliot will ban me from posting if I keep misquoting. In summary, because I’m confused about my quoting competence I’m scared that I will mess up so badly I get banned.
But even being banned isn’t the end of the world. Elliot isn’t some irrational tribal chief; tribalist thinking is not relevant here. He’s a smart rational person that has good standards. If I do make so many quoting mistakes that I get banned I would still be able to go away and work on that on my own and then attempt to persuade him that I’ve fixed the problem and if I succeed I may be allowed back. It may take a lot of time. If I truly do turn out to be that confused and bad at quoting it makes sense that I don’t try to fix it in a way that causes a lot of problems for others (i.e. by doing it on CF and misleading people with repeated misquotes.)
Thinking about misquoting
Misquoting is completely unacceptable on this site and this is good. I think people are generally very very very sloppy with quoting and misquoting is a form of lying. This is actually useful to take seriously as it’s a relatively easily-identified form of lying compared to many forms of lying that are insidious and evasive, so I think anyone who wants to pursue being more honest should take it very seriously. Since I started being active here I’ve consciously taken it seriously, but I made a bunch of big mistakes anyway. I think maybe subconsciously I wasn’t taking it seriously enough, or maybe had some subconscious ideas about quoting which were misguided (learned from typical bad quoting conventions) or maybe both.
Thanks to Elliot’s criticism I think (and hope) that my subconscious mistakes have been identified. I’m going to pay more conscious attention to my quoting until I’m confident that my subconscious can handle it well. I think expressing my thoughts in this section helps my conscious and subconscious be more in tune.
Approval-seeking
Related I think to my Tribalism conflict I’ve noticed that approval-seeking has come into my conscious thoughts. There’s some part of me that is disappointed when I don’t get approval for things I write. I think this is bad; just like I need to learn to judge my quoting ability and my grammar on my own I need to judge for myself if my ideas are good.
I think this is related to being habitually confused to some degree. Because often on some level that maybe I don’t even consciously notice I’m confused, I often don’t know how to judge if something I’ve done is right or wrong. So some part of me wants someone else to answer that for me so I can stop being confused. This is dependent thinking that relies on other people to take responsibility. This is both irrational (other people can make mistakes too) and immoral (only I am responsible for my success or failure.)
I think continuing to exercise being decisive is the best thing I can do to solve the root cause of this problem. My mini-project studying Peikoff’s grammar course which I will fail if I write final answers that I am confused about is one such exercise. I think also my Overload conflict contributes to my underlying confusion, so continuing to work on that with better project planning and time management will also help.