Thoughtcraft 1.6: Motivations For Thought
All human effort is aimed toward destruction, maintenance, or expansion of the self. The ultimate motivation for every effort, including thought, will be one of these aims. For purposes of this discussion, self-destructive urges, and the thoughts they motivate, are regarded as diseased, and will be dealt with only when discussing the impediments to effective thinking. For as long as our discussion is concerned with healthy thought processes, this leaves us only two over-motives to deal with: maintenance and expansion.
These are only over-motives. Each of these motives leads us to choose subordinate goals, and in an important sense, these subordinate goals may be said to be the motive for a particular action. However, it is often important to distinguish which of these over-motives is at work, that is, whether one’s own or another’s thought or overt action is motivated by maintenance or expansion.
The motivations for a thought may be hidden or clear, to the thinker or to others. However, there is no clear separation between the hidden and the clear, because there is very seldom a single motivation for anything we do. Thus, an action or thought may have some motives that are clear to the thinker, and others that are not, and because of this mixture, the motivation in sum is neither perfectly hidden nor perfectly clear.
We are better able to exercise self-control, both in outward actions and in thoughts, the better we understand our motivations. The more our motivations are hidden from ourselves but clear to others, the more we are subject to outside influences. These influences may range from those of which no one is conscious, such as the tacit assumptions underlying social mores, to those that are deliberately wielded, such as the motivating tactics of the best teachers and the worst charlatans.