Excuses vs. Explanations [Part 2]

Toxic positivity, compulsive motivation, and insufferable gurus

How I loathe those aggressive “motivators” with their fake bravado, condescendingly arrogant bragging, outdated militaristic coaching, and their pretentious holier-than-thou attitude of “no excuses”. Ask them why their naive followers keep failing, though, and they’ll shower you with every pitiful excuse in the book — all except admitting that perhaps their overhyped “coaching” may not be worth a damn.

Infantile unaccountability

As an adult, you are responsible for your actions because you have agency over your emotions and thought patterns. We recognise that children don’t have this ability, which is why (civilised) parents grant children the benefit of the excuse. We don’t hold children accountable for their misdeeds; we instead hold the parents responsible, because it’s the parents who are out of excuses. Parents have more control over their children’s actions than the children themselves. How I loathe parents who blame their children for temper tantrums and misbehaviour that are the parents’ fault, no less. Imagine blaming the innocent child, who’s just innocently responding to abusive parenting, while making every excuse for the cowardly, unaccountable parents.

Unfree will

But those toxic motivators?

They keep blaming you instead of holding you accountable. Huge difference. This in-your-face blaming, without the benefit of extenuating circumstances, leads to self-punishment. This is not empowering. This is debilitating. They do this deliberately to keep you down on your luck and keep coming for more “motivation”. A customer helped is a customer lost.

They keep denying you explanations (not excuses) for your misfortune, the credit you deserve for being dealt a bad hand, just to keep you identifying with your failures.

You see, when you are granted respect for the misfortunes that led to your failures, you are empowered to want to live up to a better standard. You detach your identity from your failures, and you thus gain the drive to walk away from self-destructive behaviour.

This is not a denial of self-accountability. If anything, we welcome accountability because accepting your role in your failures opens your eyes to the power and control you had over your life. This again empowers you. But you also need some credit for your random misfortune, and for doing well, considering. We need to consider and show you respect for your handicaps, not deny them.

But the “motivation gurus” are the devil incarnate. They don’t say “it’s your responsibility”. They instead say “it’s your fault” and “you have no excuses”, implying that “you have no explanations or extenuating circumstances, no handicap for which you deserve credit and recognition”.

And what does this rhetoric do to someone who’s been plagued by failure after failure? It leads him to conclude that he failed despite having everything in his favour, which means there is something fundamentally wrong with him. He then cannot detach himself from his failures, as he is not graced with the recognition that external factors have contributed to his failures, despite his own responsibility for failing.

How then can he not identify with his failures, when he attributes every little failure to himself and himself alone? How can he then know what went wrong when he assumes the wind was favourable, yet still lost his path for some mysterious reason?

When you deprive people of their causation and explanations (not excuses), you imply that “they consciously chose” to fail. So, what makes someone “choose to fail”? Something fundamentally wrong with them… which is as fatalistic and deterministic as it gets.

The self-appointed “gurus” infer this: “You don’t deserve the benefit of credit for a badly dealt hand, and we won’t praise you for doing well considering the unfortunate things holding you back. What we’ll do instead is assign everything to your own free will, your choice to fail”.

This type of reasoning is self-defeating, since appealing to someone’s “free will” to make bad choices is an admission of determinism.

What makes someone choose one way and not the other? What predetermined neural pathways and mental processing algorithms lead to good or bad choices? Why is someone lucky enough to “be better” by default, to be able to make “better choices”? What had randomly shaped their inner psyche, their cognitive flowcharts, and their mental architecture to be that way?

See how an irresponsible appeal to “free will” is inadvertently an admission of determinism?

You’ll find the most smug, most arrogant people to be the most vicious proponents of supposed “free will” when they arrogantly attribute all their successes to themselves and them alone, showing no gratitude for their blessings. But when faced with the slightest failure, they quickly conjure up excuses (the thing they preach against) to blame everyone and everything else rather than accept some accountability.

Recognition

What you so casually and irresponsibly dismiss as “whining and complaining” may be someone’s cry, not to be absolved of responsibility, but to be recognised for their misfortune, their unfavourable circumstances. This is so that they can begin to believe in themselves again through acknowledging that their failures had help from external factors.

They aren’t “playing the victim” as you gleefully like to stroke your schadenfreude every time you falsely accuse them of victimhood. They are asking for your help to try to refine and redefine their self-image. They need you permission to see that indeed they had greater potential had they had slightly better circumstances. And what do you do? You kick them when they’re down, telling them that nothing went wrong along their path, and that they just chose failure. This infers that there was nothing they could have done differently, since supposedly everything was in their favour, and they still failed. How motivating is that? They don’t see exactly how they “chose” to fail, so they conclude it’s their fundamental and unchanging nature to fail.

How deterministically disempowering is this — this refusal to recognise extenuating circumstances, especially when someone needs encouragement to change?

By all means, hold people accountable, but don’t blame them for their suffering ot top of it all. Their suffering from failure is painful enough; they don’t need self-loathing and self-punishment on top of that. Encouraging them to hold themselves accountable (not blame themselves) shows them where they have power and control over their decisions; it’s not to make them feel regretful and guilty. Knowing they had had control all along, without feeling judged, empowers them, because now they know they can seize the reins of their life, whatever’s left of it.

Don’t refuse to give them credit for the special considerations, the extenuating circumstances that led them to their failures. They need your help acknowledging that it was their responsibility, but not their fault. This is to help them detach themselves from the things that helped them fail, the misfortune that facilitated their downfall.

People need recognition of their handicaps. This helps them dissociate from those handicaps, to stop identifying with them, and to instead seek an identity that is separate from them. If you deny them the credit for their misfortune, then you become an abuser and a horrible human being.

Here’s how: “Gosh, I wasn’t aware you went through such debilitating misfortune. I can’t even imagine what you’re going through. It isn’t fair that this happened to you. You didn’t deserve it. Nobody did. I can’t imagine what you could have achieved otherwise. I don’t know what I would have done in your position. I don’t think I would have made it this far if I had your misfortune. Making it this far, even if it’s not much, is extremely respectful, considering the things that unfairly held you back”.

Say it, and mean it.

---

Deserved credit

We aren’t looking for excuses because we are accountable. We aren’t asking for any handouts or even deserved apologies. But we do deserve our explanations, some credit, and respect for the bad hand we were dealt.

The evil, insensitive narcissists who claim “it’s all on us” say so because they want all the credit for their undeserved blessings, without the humility to admit they had them, and without gratitude for them.

The narcissist will never recognise his external blessings, and will evoke his supposed “free will” as the paragon of his “success”, unironically failing to recognise the inherent determinism in this belief.

Similarly, since the narcissist doesn’t recognise his external positive influences, he denies the negative influences of those he believes are beneath him… until he gets to taste failure, and then he’ll look for every excuse in the book. But as long as he sees himself as “successful” and as a “winner”, he will insist with fanatic self-assurance that everything we get is 100% on us — this is what suits him to believe. But it’s not all up to us. A child who was brutally molested cannot be expected to have the same chances at success as another who grew up in a nurturing environment. Any anecdotes of people who came out of bad environments and somehow “succeeded” neglect to recognise the compensating blessing that found them after.

People deserve some credit for the bad hand they were dealt. This is not to enable them to stay down. This is not a permission to stop trying. If anything, it’s encouragement and empowerment. It’s recognising in them that they have the endurance and perseverance to absorb a hell of a lot more than you ever could.

If people see you, someone they admire and consider to be a success, admit that you may not have done as well as they did, considering their late start, misfortune, and burdens, then imagine what goes on in their minds. They’ll believe they can do it too; it doesn’t get any more encouraging than this.

Recognising people’s handicaps is not enabling victimhood; it’s empowering, just like the Paralympics. Giving people credit for their misfortunes is not a pass to keep complaining and not take on responsibility. If anything, there is nothing more disempowering than depriving people of their agency and accountability for their failures.

But they also need to hear you acknowledge their bad hand, their unfair misfortunes. Are you scared that they will hate you for your relative fortune and luck? Is that it? What are you projecting here? If they value you enough to want to be heard by you, then you need not worry about malicious envy. They don’t want to hate you for being luckier than them. They respect you since your opinion matters to them.

Give them the benefit of the doubt, that they could and would have done better had they been dealt a slightly better hand.

Life is poker: there is some element of skill, determination, and effort, but at the end of the day, it’s mostly luck. Sure, after infinite games of poker, it’s the most skillful that wins. But in life, we only get one draw of a hand. And besides, what makes someone skillful is also sheer luck, and the consequence of deterministic causation.

“Your mistakes do not define you. They tell you who you’re not.”
— 3 Doors Down

Boundaries

Judge people by their intentions. Most don’t dwell on victimhood. They truly want to change. All they need is drive. They get drive by believing in themselves. They believe in themselves when you help them separate their identity from their mistakes. They can’t believe in themselves when you insist they deserve no credit for their misfortune, that they somehow “had it all” and still failed. Denying them the benefit of the doubt of having had misfortunes instead of blessings is the cruelest thing you can do when someone is down on their luck. All you accomplish is solidifying their identity as a failure, …Perhaps deliberately…

Stay away from people who don’t give you credit for your handicaps. They enjoy seeing you fail again and again, and they deep-down believe in the influence of external misfortune, otherwise they wouldn’t be so vehemently trying to keep you down.

And give people credit for their misfortunes, but not permission to dwell in victimhood. It’s not their fault, but it’s still their responsibility. It has to be someone’s.

Thank you for reading.

P.S.

Right before I proofread this, I came across PF Jung (

PF Jung

)’s article titled ‘Analyzing the Childhood Trauma of Major Political Influencers’, in which he analyses the causation behind certain influencers’ mental afflictions. And all this without robbing them of their self-accountability.

I commented:

“Some things are psychodynamic. Ignoring the influence of childhood trauma ensures that it will forever remain unsolved. We are defined by trauma, even though we can still strive to manage it. Trauma is no excuse for bad behavior, but it is an explanation. We aim not to absolve but to identify causation, and to thus avoid repetition.”

---