29: Asceticism

Asceticism involves the denial of one's desire for those things that most people strive to achieve or fear to lose. By dismissing a goal as unimportant, one's failure to achieve or maintain it is less damaging to the ego.

The author suggests that people in modern and western cultures have significantly different values than those in historical or ancient ones, particularly in terms of the importance of the individual. In a collectivistic society a person's individual desires do not matter, and they tend not to cling to the importance of personal success and status and submit to hardship and deprivation for the sake of the welfare of the group. More significantly, the success or failure they experience in life is also credited to the group - so there is less a sense of personal achievement or personal loss.

It is common to many religions to downplay the importance of personal or earthly pleasures and to submit to the demands of the clergy (as proxies of the gods) - and a person who truly subscribes to this dogma no longer feels distressed at his lot in life, as he has devalued himself and considers his personal station to be of little consequence.

The term "sacrifice" is often misused in such ideologies: a sacrifice is the destruction of something of greater value to achieve something of less value. When something lesser is lost to gain something greater, it is merely a rational choice, not a sacrifice. To refrain from marrying in order to attend college and achieve a better station in life, to refrain from indulgence in alcohol to enjoy better health, etc. are all rational and non-sacrificial choices.

Both rational choices and sacrifices are, in western culture, considered to be from the perspective of the individual: the value given achieves something for the person who gives it, not for another person. In fact, when someone insists that another person must sacrifice for the benefit of others, there is a great deal of suspicion about his motives (in many instances, it is to his personal benefit instead of, or in addition to, the "others" he claims to be concerned with.

(EN: From here, the author disappears into examples taken from religious and philosophical aesthetics, never to return to the topic of self-deception.)