Waiting to be asked to dance is a way of demanding a guarantee.
In this sequel to The Courage to Be Disliked, the young man from the first dialogue comes back three years later as a schoolteacher, angry. He tried Adler in a real classroom, and only praise and scolding seemed to work. He has the freedom the first book promised, and he is not happy.
His complaint raises the question the book is about: once you are willing to be disliked, what is that freedom for? Kishimi and Koga’s answer is that it is through loving others that we at last become adults. The classroom is where the youth starts to find out why.
What the classroom cannot force
In this world, no matter how powerful one is, two things cannot be forced: respect and love. Children who obey the youth are not respecting him; they are submitting to authority. Scolding works the way violence does, as the lowest-cost way to communicate when you feel you cannot win.
Respect is seeing people as they are. Not as you want them to be. It means meeting a child as an equal, without conditions, and the first step is concern for the child’s concerns rather than your own anxiety about them. It also spreads: Courage and respect are contagious.
The catch is that the youth must give something up. If your students become self-reliant and assume equal footing, your authority will collapse. Empowering someone means sacrificing your authority over them, and an educator is a lonely creature who does it without receiving gratitude.
Believing without collateral
That sacrifice means believing in the students before they have earned it, and the book distinguishes two kinds of belief. Trust is believing with conditions: collateral, guarantees, proof, the way a bank trusts your income statement rather than you. Confidence is believing in the whole person, even someone who lies to you.
The youth wants collateral from his students first, and the book traces that demand back to him. Confidence in others is also confidence in self-judgment. If you cannot believe in others, it is because you have not accepted yourself, and anxiety leaves you concerned only with yourself.
The same demand runs through love. “If you will love me, I will love you” looks like attention to the other person, but you are only seeing yourself. People ask for collateral in love because they expect to be hurt, and they expect to be hurt because you do not love yourself yet. The book leans on a passage from Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving:
While one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real, though usually unconscious, fear is that of loving. To love means to commit without guarantee, to give completely. Love is an act of faith.
The task of two people
Part of the difficulty is that no one teaches it:
We receive education on the task accomplished by one person, and on the work accomplished by twenty. But we do not receive education on the task accomplished by two people.
Love is not something you fall into; it is because we build it up from nothing by strength of will that the task of love is difficult. When it is built, the subject of life changes from “me” to “us.” The “me” should vanish if one is to find a happy life — because love is liberation from “me.”
This is why the sequel asks more than the first book: the courage to love is harder than the courage to be disliked — because being disliked requires only that you tolerate others’ disapproval, while loving requires that you tolerate your own vulnerability. The youth can tolerate his students’ indifference. What he has not yet done is believe in them with nothing held back. As long as you wait to be loved, you stay in the lifestyle of childhood, and to get out from under the control of the love one is given, the only thing one can do is love.
Picture yourself at the edge of a dance floor, watching others dance and assuming nobody would dance with someone like you. The courage required is not to become a better dancer. It is to walk onto the floor first.
References:
- Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Happy: True Contentment Is In Your Power