Why Not Perfect?

Right vs. Wrong

“Getting it right” requires context. The issue is the mechanics of the way things really are behind appearances. It also happens to be the rightness or wrongness of the way things really are. If something has come to exist it had to involve movement and it had to be motivated. It had to come from needing, wanting, and intending something creative. Positive, connecting, and relating. From Yes that’s possibilities. From Love that needs Freedom to Relate, Life that needs to Grow, evolution that needs to move forward, and all of it that needs Direction. From the Order of Definition and Discipline provided by the boundaries of Logic. All things Good. All things Right.

Getting it wrong is the negative: disconnecting and un-relating. No that’s impossibilities. Opposed to movement. Opposed to progress and all the other good stuff. Because that’s the way things really are. Accompanied by their logical opposites, and that includes Love and Life, Freedom and Order, and Logic. Derivatives and after-thoughts that can’t possibly come first: death, captivity, chaos, and irrationality. Implications in Reality that can only come ‘alive’ in a hallucination.

Life on Earth. A ‘paradise’ of no-movement / no change didn’t come first. It never even existed. A static big picture presided over by a know-it-all at the beginning is an impossibility – a myth.

Practical relevance

Relevant because? Roughly half of humanity believes in the myth. The authoritarian-‘conservative’ mindset, and they’re on the loose again. If their irrationality is to be managed, it helps to understand why they’re getting it wrong. The bully will continue to have its way until its claim to authority is exposed for what it is: a joke.

We do have things to be concerned about. Ray Dalio’s book is a warning. From a guy who’s spent his life studying ups and downs in the financial world from a broad perspective. Looking at political doings within countries as well as among countries, and global changes like pandemics and new technologies too. What does he see in the future? In yours, because you’ll be around for it. Maybe mine too, because stuff is happening right now.

“When the debt/money force, the internal order force, and the external order force are late in their cycles. . . it is typically just before big conflicts and revolutionary changes. . . the depression and war stage that brings about the end of the Big Cycle. . . . I believe that we are now in this late-cycle stage. It is a time of radical, typically unexpected changes that haven’t happened in one’s own lifetime but have happened many times throughout history.” – How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle (Avid Reader Press 2025, p.168)

Ah! My birthday present! Scaring me out of my wits. It’ll be OK if you remember to make a wish before you blow out the candles. What shall I wish for? That the candles don’t burn the house down and the cake doesn’t sicken everyone. My original birthday was eight years into the Great Depression. Less than two years later World War II started. Dumb luck got me through both unscathed, though not through family relationships without psychological pain. What I’m sharing with you is a perspective that might help you get through without relying on dumb luck. It doesn’t come with gift-wrap and a greeting card, but it’s a gift all the same.

To win someone’s approval 

You’re perfect. Thank you, but I don’t want to be perfect. You don’t? No. You said relatable is better and I want to be relatable. When I was perfect nobody loved me. Now everyone loves you. I’m everyone’s favorite schlep.

A book by Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett treats perfectionism for the scourge that it is. Perfectionism: A Relational Approach to Conceptualization, Assessment, and Treatment (2017), re-reviewed in Leslie Jamison, “Annals of Psychology: Enemy of the Good,” The New Yorker (08/11/25). You’re a perfectionist? Sure. I was Willie Menifield’s “conscience” since the day I told him he shouldn’t say ‘hell’. When was that? In the first grade. Since I played sandlot football and told guys not to play dirty. And a girl I gave an awful lecturing to just because I didn’t see her in church. A regular pain in the butt. Like you are now? One and the same.

I got an award for character when I graduated from grade school and it went to my head. My excuse now is I don’t have anything better to do so I’ve decided to work on getting it right. Before, there was no excuse. I had to be perfect and everyone else too. It could be a family history thing. Ah, your excuse for lecturing me! Definitely! I’m the bullied son of my Dad who was the bullied son of his Dad. It made him think he had to be perfect to win his Dad’s approval and same with me. Could you feel the same way? Feel like what? That you have to be perfect to win someone’s approval?

Perfectly unrelatable

My self-deprecation is for laughs but there’s a more serious side to it. What, besides being annoying? To stanch the urge to be perfect. A know-it-all. I’m not perfect and I don’t know everything. I make mistakes. Some make me feel awful, just like normal humans. You, normal? Human? I felt awful when my Dad died. He was barely out of his fifties. It was because of the loss of a loved one but also because he’d left before I had a chance to win his approval. To be his friend. He left too soon, but at least you could stop trying to be perfect. I didn’t stop. It’s a condition that can last a lifetime, and it gets in the way. We need to be relatable.

Are there other books about it? Yes, but they don’t get it right. Maybe I’m wrong. Hewitt and Flett too, but if the cost of perfectionism is impaired relatability that’s what I want to emphasize. There could have been more love and acceptance among my relationships if it hadn’t been impaired. Nobody loved you. But rest assured. It wasn’t because you were perfect and unrelatable. It wasn’t? It was because you were imperfect and unrelatable. And you’re just the one to tell me how imperfect. I’m working on a personal memoir: “My Imperfect and Perfectly Unrelatable Friend.” 

Quivering 

What makes you think the other books get it wrong? Just from reading stuff about them. People’s wrongdoings are manipulations meant to keep us from relating. To be understood and accounted for to build character. But also to be put to use to role model how to re-purpose a wrong to accomplish a right. Learning and growing. Maturing. Re-reversing willfulness-manipulation to Loving Friendship with inner Guidance that’s respectful. That doesn’t cross boundaries and create disorder. That doesn’t seek to own, possess, capture, and dominate prey. That doesn’t arrogate, take, and demand. To deceive with make-believe.

Wrongdoing-manipulations are temptations to retaliate in kind that can be converted to opportunities to connect. By resisting temptation. By seeking connection instead by holding up a good mirror with a lake sprite that asks questions. That doesn’t judge. That leaves ‘judgment’ with its answers to Loving Friendship with Guidance. With the sprite or bluebird of happiness.

Mirror-plus-sprite as opposed to the mirror from reverse-opposition to Movement when it first happened. A wild beast herd, undefined, with a thousand faces. Occupying a strange virtual reality that was depicted in the Jodie Foster movie Contact (1997) and Jim Carrey’s The Truman Show (1998). Their fake environment quivered when they touched it, like a stage setting. Physics has observed that black hole collisions make space ‘quiver.’ An interesting choice of words, or else our universe is also a stage setting. Like a hallucination by a Mind that’s unconscious and dreaming.

Cave-dwellers with rockets

Who could that be? A Child. Willful and needing to build character because otherwise it could never perform its function. What function? Choosing freely. How could it do this? Wrongdoing-manipulations are part of the deception. ‘Mistakes’ by a hallucinating Mind that doesn’t know any better because it’s a Child. By correcting its mistakes and growing up. Character-Integrity plus Free Choice, plus Loving Friendship with Guidance, will undo the deception, replace hallucination with Reality, and gain the grown-up Child access to Creation. When, and only when, it may perform its intended function with trust and competence. Securely connected by Free Choice to Guidance.

There’s a practical lesson in this? Here, choice can’t be free until it’s Self-Aware. But it can be Choice because that’s who the Child is. Who we are: Choice. Our function that’s also our identity. Confused and misled. Manipulated choosers getting it wrong, needing help getting it right. Our will to be perfect is a manipulation meant to steer us away from acknowledging our mistakes by willing them not to exist. By ignoring them, shifting blame onto others, avoiding and denying accountability. Feigning innocence. Creating the pretense of others’ guilt by attacking and punishing them.

‘Perfection’ is as much a disguise as sheep’s clothing is to a wolf, and its purpose is the same: to mislead its victim into trusting a predator, surrendering to its boundary-crossing. To captivity and disablement. To giving up Character-Integrity that’s necessary for Free Choice. Why is that so important? Because if its prey discovers that it is Free Choice it can’t be fooled any longer by the predator and its hierarchical kingdom of beasts. It will choose to grow up and wake up. To stop making a fool of itself. To end its self-captivity and that will end the hallucination. Our ‘paradise’ where people put one another in cages as if they were animals, which we are. Psychological cave-dwellers with rockets.

Enrolled in the school of hard knocks

When adolescence passes into maturity it squares around to face its audience from the stage of life. As a whole person with a job to do, and it can’t let itself be distracted. It must set aside the quirks and mischief of childhood, manage its vulnerabilities, innocence, and directness of feeling, to attend to the business at hand. Logically and analytically. Which makes maturity effective and efficient. Grown up, so to speak. And for me that’s wonderful but it’s also a loss. Because what makes for wonderful friendships isn’t doing everything right; it’s making mistakes. Screwing up and figuring out how to keep going. How to learn from what we get wrong and do better the next time.

I’m going on stage soon. Where people are self-conscious and worry a lot about appearances. Where they treat mistakes like the plague and I understand that. You can’t work for NASA and be casual about launching rockets and putting people into space. Then what’s the problem? We’re here to learn from our mistakes. That’s what makes it possible to move on. We’re one collective willful Child because that’s who we are — the Mind imagining us. Guaranteed to get into all sorts of situations and eventually screw up. And when we do our mistakes represent opportunities to learn and grow. To get beyond being a willful Child. As unappealing as they are we’d be lost without them.

What makes this Child willful? It’s in this situation because of what it’s unaware of. Its Self, to begin with. Its relationship with its Parents. The nourishment of its Psyche with its Mother’s Love, the nourishment of its Mind with its Father’s Logic. Its function: Choice and the training it needs to learn how to choose freely. How to build character with integrity because that’s what it takes. The Child, with its function disempowered, is unable to move. Immobilized. Stuck in an unchanging status quo. Lacking judgment, resistant to learning and growth.

The profile I’m describing is willfulness. An immature Child lacking judgment. Self-centered and determined to have its way. Limited to the learning aptitude of an animal, able to learn from its mistakes because they come with a cost. Unable to do any better when there isn’t a cost. So, as much as we abhor pain we must embrace our mistakes if we want to move forward. They’re the only learning tools we have. No gain without pain. It can require a wrenching change of attitude to realize that, but it’s true. University classrooms and books notwithstanding, we’re all of us enrolled in the school of hard knocks.

Grandparents willful and prone to mistakes

You’re lucky then. I am? Experience doesn’t make mistakes, or if it does it doesn’t feel bad. It doesn’t need to learn as much. Age and experience do have their benefits, but not making mistakes and not having to learn from them isn’t one of them. Old or young makes no difference: we’re still creations of the Mind imagining us and it’s a Child. And Child = willful. What experience understands is that mistakes are both inevitable and necessary. How we handle them determines whether we’re part of the problem or part of the solution. 

We’re human animals, a species of ape. Yes. Part of who we are. Struggling to be more human than ape by the way we think and feel. Differentiating and empathizing. Having a conscience, which is part of differentiating: understanding the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. When it comes to mistakes and how to handle them, it helps  to be aware that we’re a Child. All of us, and that includes Grandparents. Willful and prone to mistakes. 

What it’s all about

What do we do with them? Rise above them, and that means understand something that’s counterintuitive: they’re not our enemies. They’re our friends, because learning how to rise above them, to become larger rather than smaller, is how we move forward. How we grow, when not growing is fatal to our cause. Which is to come into our inheritance: awareness of Self, who we really are. More and better than any kind of animal. Awareness of our Relationship with our Parents in Reality and our function in Creativity. Free Choice with Character and Integrity.

We move forward toward Character and Integrity by acknowledging our mistakes. Owning them and putting what they teach us to use. Rededicating ourselves to doing better. Fixing things that we’ve been neglecting. Above all, letting our focus be on our relationship with ourselves. With our own conscience and what it takes to persuade it that we deserve understanding and respect. And not be distracted by what others think of us. When it’s nobody’s job to sit in judgment over us.

We shouldn’t care what others think? Certainly we should care. We want to be helpful, but a mindset fixated on others’ judgment will want to escape from it. To shift blame so that it doesn’t take away our Innocence. We can’t rise above our mistakes by being small. How’s that? By turning the fallout from our mistakes into a sordid game of self-imagery, to see who can make the other guy look bad. A game of appearances that does nothing to advance our cause. To build character with integrity.

Self-imagery is an act of a willful Child who doesn’t care about relatability. It just wants to be the only one standing when the battle has been fought. To wind up victorious, alone at the top. When the opportunity that our mistakes offer us is to connect. Because we all make mistakes and those who have consciences feel bad about them. We don’t connect through our perfection – an impossibility. We’re not perfect, and perfection doesn’t connect. It separates. We connect through our humanity. Our mistakes. And through the sorrow and regrets they cause. The feeling.

This is what brings us together into family: embracing the relatability and vulnerability of imperfection. Our commitment to work together through it to be better. To show one another that we care about the costs of our mistakes and we’ll do better next time. Building character – what it’s all about.