The sequel to courage-to-be-disliked. If the first book is about freedom (being disliked), the second is about what you do with that freedom: it is through loving others that we at last become adults.
Respect Is Seeing
Respect is seeing people as they are. Not as you want them to be. Not trying to change or manipulate the person right in front of you. Accepting them as they are without setting conditions. Precisely because they are human beings, one must pay the highest level of respect — not looking down, not looking up, not flattering. Interacting as equals.
In this world, no matter how powerful one is, two things cannot be forced: respect and love. Children who obey you are not respecting “you” — they are submitting to authority. You fall into a vicious cycle because you fail to take the initial step of respecting them unconditionally.
This is Rogers’ unconditional positive regard given its Adlerian name. And how-to-talk-to-kids in its deepest form: the first step lies in having concern for other people’s concerns. Parents who confiscate books and impose “useful” activities are not seeing the child — they are seeing their own anxiety reflected in the child’s choices.
Courage and respect are contagious.
Confidence vs Trust
Trust is believing with conditions — collateral, guarantees, proof. The bank trusts your income statement, not you. Confidence is believing in the whole person — even the person who lies to you. You focus not on material worth but on human worth.
Confidence in others is also confidence in self-judgment. If you cannot believe in others, it is because you have not managed to believe in yourself. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others. You are insisting you “cannot believe in other people,” but that is because you have not accepted yourself as you are — and because you are beset with anxiety, you have concern only for yourself.
This extends the Adlerian triad: self-acceptance → confidence in others → contribution to others. The circle is unbreakable: each element enables the next.
Violence as Communication Failure
When someone finds a discussion tiresome or feels they cannot win, they choose the easiest means: violence. In every way, violence is a low-cost, easy means of communication. We must grow past our immature condition — not rely on violence but search for other kinds of communication.
Even reasonable arguments do not reach children if their parents don’t actually see them. The more reasonable the arguments, the more children oppose them — because the reasonableness is a disguise for not-seeing. This is assertiveness from the parenting angle: the aggressive parent uses force, the submissive parent uses compliance, and neither achieves what the assertive parent does — genuine mutual recognition.
All conflicts, from small quarrels to wars between nations, arise from collisions of “my justice.” Within that collision, we are looking for common ground — looking for connection, hoping to join hands. If you want to join hands, you have to reach out with your hands too.
The Task of Two People
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 “falling” — anyone can fall. It is because we build it up from nothing by strength of will that the task of love is difficult. The important thing is not how one should love but whom one should love.
When one knows real love, the subject of life changes from “me” to “us.” It allows completely new guidelines that are of neither self-interest nor other-interest. The “me” should vanish if one is to find a happy life — because love is liberation from “me.”
This converges with you-are-the-one: the partner cannot be your redeemer, but the act of loving — genuinely, without collateral — transforms you from a child waiting to be loved into an adult capable of loving. Watts arrives at the same place: the ego dissolves not by trying to dissolve it but by engaging so fully with another that the boundaries of “me” become irrelevant.
Love Without Collateral
Why do people seek collateral in love? Because they think: I’ll definitely get hurt. They half-convince themselves: I’m definitely going to feel miserable. You do not love yourself yet. That is why you assume a love relationship will hurt you — because you think there couldn’t be anyone who could love someone like you.
“If you will love me, I will love you” — you seem to be looking at the other person, but you are only seeing yourself. A person who loses the courage to embark on love clings to fantasies of a destined one, bringing forward excessive ideals to avoid interactions with real, living people.
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.
Not possessing the courage to love, you tried to stay in the lifestyle of childhood — the lifestyle of being loved. To get out from under the control of the love one is given, the only thing one can do is love. Not waiting to be loved, not waiting for destiny, but loving someone of one’s own accord. That is the only way.
Empowering Requires Sacrificing Authority
If your students become self-reliant and assume equal footing, your authority will collapse. Empowering someone requires the sacrifice of your authority over them.
This is the need for adults at its sharpest: the adult who holds authority in order to maintain it will never produce self-reliant children. The adult who sacrifices authority to produce self-reliance is the only kind of adult worth having — and an educator is a lonely creature who does it without receiving gratitude.
Man’s juvenile condition is not due to lack of reason. It is that he has neither the resolution nor the courage to use his reason without direction from another. Parents who raise children needing constant direction raise people with children’s minds regardless of age.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “just love everyone unconditionally and everything will be fine.”
The midwit take is “this is naive idealism that ignores real power dynamics and human selfishness.”
The better take is that 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 first book is about freedom from. The second is about freedom for. The freedom you gained by being willing to be disliked is wasted if you do not use it to love — because love is the only thing that transforms “me” into “us,” and “us” is where happiness lives.
Main Payoff
Your hope was not to be happy. It was simply the desire for things to be easier. The world is simple and life is too, but keeping it simple is difficult.
You are standing at the edge of the dance floor of life, watching others dance, assuming that there couldn’t be anyone who would dance with someone like you. The courage required is not to be a better dancer. It is to walk onto the floor. Love is a relationship we create in order to contribute just by Being.
References:
- Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Happy: True Contentment Is In Your Power