Dale Holbrook: Sensitivity Alert!

Sigmund Freud

This week’s offering is about philosophy. Eh, eh, eh! Don’t punch the delete button just yet. For those of you who have been clamoring for more personal insight into the workings of that id, ego, superego known collectively as Dale Holbrook, this will be the answer to your queries. (Forgive the language, I am currently reading a collection of short stories penned by Rudyard Kipling and Victorian English effects me that way… just be’eth glad I arst not readithing Shakespeare).

Plato

I have read some small amount of philosophy; a very small amount, actually you can count the readings on one digit. I read Plato’s Republic and that ruined me for subsequent exploration of those considered the Great Philosophers because all Plato did was make a case that Philosophers should be at the highest tier of society’s members and furthermore that society itself exists for the singular purpose of supporting the doings of Philosophers. I recommend it just so you too can be as angry as I.

None the less, philosophy is important. Notice I’ve used the lower case “p” in this paragraph. That is because we are shifting our focus from the grand Philosophy of civilization, which is utterly useless unless (see if you can construct a sentence containing three words all starting with the letter “u” in a row… yeah, it’s not easy is it… that’s why you’re the reader and I’m the writer) you are trying to dupe the people into subjugation in a utopic but ordered society, to the much more fruitful “personal philosophy”.

If you are a thinker it is more than likely you have a personal philosophy, even if you are not aware of it. Being an accountant by training, I want to slap labels on everything. So from now on, we will call your abstract set of motivational drivers what it is, a personal philosophy, or “pp”. Quit snickering, Swee’ Pea! If you are a doer, well, you probably have a personal philosophy as well. Because if you don’t, you wouldn’t be doing those things everybody recognizes you for.

I know what you’re thinking. “But Dale, I’ve never seen my “pp”! Could it have been thrown out with the afterbirth when they let me go home from the hospital with my mommy?” No, my children, you are not issued a “pp” at birth. It is something that you develop over your lifetime. It is the “why” that drives all of your actions (and inactions, what you don’t do is just as important as what you do, do) as we live day to day. So if you ever wonder why you did a certain thing, that attempt at answering the why (not the how) is an attempt to define your ‘pp”.

To help you understand, I will share my “pp” as an example:

Faster cars,

Younger women,

Smoother tequila,

More money!*

Be honest now, how many of you thought this was going to turn into a five-thousand word treatise?

* Apologies to Mr. Tom T. Hall

The Cowboy and the Poet