“Quite often we’re unaware of our own blindness, and make a bad action worse by the dishonest excuses we offer for it — we lost our temper, for example, and put it down to zeal, or we pounce on the slight faults in our neighbors so as to have an excuse for ignoring the more serious faults of our own. How quick we are to reckon up our grievances against other people, how slow to notice what a lot they have to put up with from us! And yet the man who sees himself as he really is hasn’t the heart to criticize the next man.”
The dishonest excuse of the day is, “that’s just my personality.” We say things such as:
I have an addictive personality
I’m a type 8 on the enneagram
My Meyers-Briggs is ESTJ
Or, what has become popular with younger generations… “that is my slight autism.”
We are eager to explain away our bad behaviors with the excuses of personality and simultaneously desperate to explain who we are to others in hopes that they will affirm us and our existence (and maybe even have compass…
