committed to a painful suicide, invite us to ignore our common sense.
However, it is the ignoring of our internal resources regarding how to live a meaningful and a moral life that presents the greatest possibilities for individual and mass misery. A life without a conscious sense of meaning or purpose will generate a certain desperation of its own, which is in some way the manifestation of the unconscious as it tries to get one’s attention regarding the failure to heed one’s calling. However, if one’s habits and culture do not generally support introspection under such circumstances, one is likely to express one’s desperation in harmful ways. The situation is made worse by the absence of internal awareness of morality, leaving even greater room for destructive acting out of such desperation.
The use of introspection to discern an inner moral awareness is particularly under assault in much of the world today. Laws, regulations, ethics codes, religious creeds, mandatory sentencing, and other external constraints on behavior, are displacing our internal awareness of what is moral and what is not. As such external rules proliferate, they invite us to forget that we ever had any internal way of knowing such things in the first place–like the young clerk who scarcely is aware of having the capacity to make change without a cash register. Psychotherapy is one way to facilitate a reconnection with our inner moral compass.
This is not to say that external constraints on behavior are always negative. I am quite pleased to have external constraints when needed in the short to prevent injury and death to humans as well as other species. They may also raise awareness by calling to the public’s