The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

(this is raw unedited text transcribed directly from the audio)

Dr. Kenner:      Here’s a question I got, and then I thought, “This poor young woman.” “Hello Dr. Kenner. Lately I’ve been very self-conscious. I’m Japanese and two of my VERY, VERY close friends are Chinese and Korean. They mean so much to me. But my Chinese friend and I got into a fight once and he brought my country into it. He named all the bad things about Japan’s past. I felt so guilty because of my country’s past. Ever since then, my feelings have been unbalanced and uncomfortable. With my Korean friend, I am always so afraid my country will tear our friendship apart. As you know, the Japanese did cruel things to the Koreans in the past. Should a country’s past come between friends? That’s all I’ve been thinking about this past month. I am so ashamed of Japan’s past. I think it’s better to be proud of your country’s past, but I can’t be, and I have no one to discuss this with because both of my parents are Japanese and they’ve moved to America and I don’t want to hurt them. It is so frustrating that I have bad dreams, feel really sad and depressed. What can I do? Please help me. Thank you, Midori.”

Midori, what individuals in your country did in the past in no way reflects on you! If you don’t have choice, if you’re not thinking, “Oh, do I want to hurt this person or not? Do I want to kill this person or not? Do I want to be the aggressor or abuse somebody?” If you don’t have the choice, if it happened before you were born, how can you hold yourself accountable? It has zero reflection on your moral character. When you were born, you were born with a clean slate. Think of a whiteboard, it’s a clean slate. And you make your own choices in life. Some of them you’ll like and some of them you won’t like and you’ll learn from. And some may be bad choices that you make and you don’t learn from and you don’t like that part in yourself and you want to change it but you keep pushing those thoughts out of awareness – man, you make yourself. If you’ve made yourself into a lovely friend, then you are protected for life. It doesn’t matter what people in Japan did in the past. It doesn’t matter. Imagine if you were German, what the Germans did in the past, and not every German did that in the past! Not everyone, we have a good friend who came from Germany and had to live through the Nazi period, and man, he was not onboard with the Nazis. So his country doesn’t reflect on him. In fact, he had tremendous courage to be able to stand back and evaluate the actions taken by his countrymen as evil.

You have that same type of courage. You just don’t know how to credit yourself, Midori. If you have the courage to be able to say, “I hate what happened in Japan’s past.” Maybe it was bombing Pearl Harbor or whatnot, with the Koreans. You can say, “I hate that that happened. It has no reflection on me. I am my own person and I make my own character.” And, if any of your friends say, “Oh, man, you are a rotten person because you come from Japan,” you want to educate them. Tell them, “You can’t judge a person based on something that’s outside their control. That’s kind of a low blow and it doesn’t apply to me at all. You might want to rethink that, because that isn’t fair.”

Midori, I want to tell you that you have a lot of company here. It doesn’t just happen with a country’s origin. Kids who grow up in an alcoholic family think that gives them a bad mark for the rest of their life. A bad mark for the rest of their life, like they’re a marked person, or a woman who has been abused through no fault of her own, may see herself as damaged goods or a good, honest kid who has the horrible misfortune of being brought up by mobsters or the mafia or something, if the kid can retain his own sense of dignity and make it through that hell hole and come out with his own sense of integrity and valuing honesty and vowing never to be like the parents and maybe even distancing himself as much as he can, yes, from his evil parents, then good for him. That takes an enormous amount of courage.

So, what we’re talking about is justice. It’s how do you judge yourself? How do you judge other people? And when you’re judging a person’s character, you definitely want to go by what was under their original control. You judge their words, their actions, their choices objectively, and then you treat them as they deserve. You do not deserve to be dammed for country of origin. You may even want to share this with your parents. I don’t know them, so you know the context much better, but it could be that your parents are more reasonable than you suspect.

I hope that you are much kinder to yourself, Midori, because I would love for you to be able to go to sleep tonight and for the next month and have wonderful, wonderful dreams. Instead of judging yourself by some group, a collective, judge yourself by your own character, the choices you make, and make yourself into someone you like or love and then you will become a good friend to people who are similar to you. If somebody isn’t that good, think about how valuable that friendship is. That’s my advice. You never want to judge yourself – Ayn Rand, my favorite author, said the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another is false. That’s from Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, my favorite author and favorite book.