School of Life: What we believe

Question 1

RELATIONSHIPS

We agree with the view (first put forward by Freud) that a fulfilled life is essentially made up of two ingredients: Love and Work.

Our childhoods mark us deeply and frequently leave us a legacy of trouble around relating to others.

The only hope of escape from these patterns is to become a little more aware of them. In our search to understand love, we are great believers in the benefits of self-knowledge and sustained introspection.

We’ve collectively given ourselves a deeply problematic Romantic picture of what good relationships should be like: we dream of profound intimacy, satisfying sex, an absence of secrets and only a modicum of conflict.

The Classical view is in certain ways cautious about love. Everyone is ultimately deeply troubled and hard to live with.

We require regular reminders to be more patient, forgiving, understanding and appreciative. We believe that love is a skill that has to be learnt, not an impulse that can just be followed.

Answer 1

WORK

Schools and universities, as well as society at large, doesn’t place much emphasis on this stage of education; on helping people to understand their authentic working identities.

There’s far more stress on simply getting ready for any job, than a job that would be particularly well suited to us. Which is a pity not just for individuals, but for the economy as a whole because people always work better, harder and more fruitfully when their deep selves are engaged.

Many jobs are relatively meaningless because it’s very possible, in the current economy, to generate profits from selling people things that don’t fundamentally contribute to well-being.

Consumers have an enormous power over what kind of lives we can have as producers. By raising the quality of our demand, we raise the number of jobs there are which can answer to mankind’s deeper needs.

Question 2

EDUCATION

The powerful influence of Romantic thinkers, means the current education system leaves us stranded with all sorts of issues which are not passed down across generations, because they are believed to lie in the realm of intuition.

We take the more Classical view that all important human achievements – especially around emotions – can be taught: how to control rage; how to have a conversation, how to be a loving parent, how to be calmer or more creative…

It should not only be children who go to school. Adults in general should see themselves as in need of education.

RELIGION

The technical errors of religions (for example, the claim that the soul can be reincarnated, that Christ rose from the dead or that the creator of the cosmos made specific promises about land rights at the eastern end of the Mediterranean) historically got entwined with some highly important, enduring large scale social and psychological ambitions. Religions have been machines for addressing psychological needs, which we still have.

THE MEDIA

The media is a breeding ground for feelings of undigested envy and material dissatisfaction.

Answer 2

Religions at their best tried to:

• keep ideas about forgiveness at the front of our minds
• encouraged compassion
• insisted that certain forms of worldly success were misleading primary ways of assessing the worth of people
• got us to recognise our own capacities to hurt other and to feel sorry for doing so
• nudged us to be tender and understanding towards the secret sufferings of others
• gave us helpful rituals to keep important ideas before us throughout the year

Culture is valuable because it is capable of addressing our needs for education, guidance, consolation, perspective, encouragement and correction. We are drawn to the idea that culture is therapeutic.

Comedy helps us around inescapable failures and follies. Painting and the visual arts help us by being (in Hegel’s terminology) ‘the sensuous embodiment of ideas’. Often even very good ideas need to be experienced in a sensory way before they become meaningful to us. Music the role of music is to support beneficial emotions and states of mind.

Literature has an astonishing ability to take us inside the experience of other people. Novels lend us more lives than we have properly been granted.

The core issue is about improving capitalism to make sure it is fulfilling our highest needs.