[Michael Chui]

First: Excellent post and thread.

Originally Posted by mtrimpe

I believe that in the personal development movement there is an implicit assumption that goes as follows:

• You should focus on improving yourself
• Through improving yourself you will act as a role model for others
• Through acting as a role model you will improve the world as a whole.

This is your primary assertion, and I disagree with it. While I do not claim to have any knowledge of the personal development movement, I have found no major problems with it. This is why:

• The world as a whole is composed of people (as well as other things).
• You are one of these people.
• Improving yourself therefore improves the world as a whole.
• Through improving yourself, you will act as a role model for others.
• Through acting as a role model, you will give inspiration and/or motivation to others to improve themselves.

To summarize: the individual is not removed from the population simply because he has improved himself.

Originally Posted by mtrimpe

It was a single person that brought this development to a standstill. It was a person that I met at the height of my mudslide towards personal enlightenment. I connected to that person on a level so deep that it felt like our souls were dancing and embracing each other, no wonder that against all odds our paths crossed again less than two days later and that our love easily bridged a distance of a 1000km. This same person is now my partner and it is through encountering him that I found what I believe to be the greatest fallacy of the personal development movement.

There is something extraordinarily beautiful about this. I invite you to read my definition of love: Aqualgidus.org > The Definition of Love
And my definition of economics: raccaldin36: The Science of Choice

And I'll explain how they relate to you. But read those links first.

Personal Development, in my opinion, is first the dictum of "Love thyself", and then the dictum of "Love the universe and everything in it." It is said that you cannot love another without first loving yourself. Love, as I explain in the definition, has to do with knowledge. Not merely textbook knowledge, but all that which your brain can receive, internalize, process, memorize, recall. The touch of their skin, the smell of their hair; the look on their face as they screamed down the snowboard run for the first time; the curve of their body while you're watching TV together: this, too, is knowledge.

But that's love for one other person. Self-love is knowledge about yourself, and acceptance of yourself. Personal Development is a way in which you may achieve this. To go further, expand beyond one person to recognize that you can love many people, to different degrees, that you can love many things: the earth, the trees, the sky; the skyscrapers and highways and arching ceilings; the tradition, the possibilities, the hope of the future. And if you expand and expand far enough, you can love all that is in the universe.

Perhaps that's a bit out of our reach. Or perhaps not; far be it from me to impose limits on our potential.

What does economics have to do with it, though? Personal Development is, as are other things, about decisions. PD asks you to take responsibility for them. And you can make better decisions the more you love, because the more you love, the more you know and the more your selfishness is indeed a benefit to more people, and the more people and the more things, the closer you get to loving the world as a whole, the universe indeed.

I'd be happy to discuss any of this, if my explanation was a bit foggy.