World as a Petty Tyrant
In the previous article I briefly mentioned petty tyrants. To put it very simply, it’s a concept of learning to deal with people who have power over our lives and who are using this power to anything, from all kinds of abuse of various severity to merely venting their frustrations and other similar annoyances. It’s about dealing with bullies and other impossible folks who have absolutely no control over themselves.
It may be your boss, your coworker, or classmate; it may be a lady with a stamp at a counter in an institution or a policeman by the road; it may be your partner, and even your teenage kid. In the public space today the epitome of a petty tyrant would be Trump or Putin and their ilk. And I could continue, but I guess you get the point.
Basically, it boils down to learning how to be unperturbed in the face of any acts such people may subject us to, and which may offend us, annoy us, paralyze us, make us panic, and so on. The goal is, then, to keep a calm and level head on one’s shoulders not only in-between but especially during real-time interactions with such people.
The benefits of such mindset should be obvious. However, I think that social level of human experience only scratches the surface.
While it’s a fact that the social sphere is responsible for majority of triggers that exhaust us because they waste our time and energy as they can make us react in conditioned ways we later either regret or work hard to constantly rationalize and validate exactly in order to don’t face the regret (which also includes, for example, the victim mindset), the whole concept can be taken much more deeper than that.
Just consider — even when the whole social sphere of an individual is calm and harmonious, an ordinary human will tend to fret about e.g. weather, particularly if it endangers their wealth and thus comfort, or strange, unknown sensations, particularly if unpleasant and clashing with control over one’s body. Heck, some people can be even annoyed by birds chirping and singing.
Clearly, human self-importance, which is why a human frets in the first place, is not limited to human social interaction.
Thus, in essence, you can treat the whole world as a petty tyrant. All people who are not you; whole of human culture, civilization, and their antitheses; all natural and whatever-natural beings, forms and phenomena, including your body, mind, or what have you. Simply, every thing.
After all, when you fret about any thing, human or not, you are clearly not at peace. And when you are not at peace, you cannot have a level head on your shoulders. And a lack of a level head limits your view to a tunnel vision and makes you, as I said above, susceptible to programmed, habitual actions no matter how destructive. Literally like Pavlov’s dog.
So, when you see the whole Cosmos as a petty tyrant, who is annoyed and why?
Well, that’s the question.
