Why What Oprah Says Might Be WRONG

Here.  This.  A friend shared this video on Facebook last week, and this is exactly the set of principles I heard from Oprah years ago, but which I'm now thinking are wrong, and directly contradictory to some of the most fundamental principles of my most foundational philosophical beliefs.



Listen to what she says:


"You have a supreme destiny."

"There is a supreme moment of destiny calling on your life." (just one moment, note)

"Your job is to feel that, to hear that, to know that."

"The losses are there to wake you up" (so, if you are in an unhappy or un-supremely-settled state, it's your own fault, for not discovering that one thing that you were put on the planet to do)

"When you're not at ease with yourself, that is the cue that you need to be moving in another direction." (like, you're obliged to keep changing until you are perfectly at peace, and only one thing will get you there)

"The way through the challenge is to get still and ask yourself what is the next right move." (so, moves can be right or wrong. There's an answer to what's right, and you can get the answer wrong.)


Now think about the situation of the very talented, smart, capable unemployed person, when this voice has been internalized into her head.  Your are unemployed because you are on the wrong path. You are DESTINED for something in particular.  Your JOB is to figure out what that is. And there is only one right answer, which means that there are wrong answers, so every minute of your precious life which is a precious gift from God which you spend not doing whatever that thing is, you are WASTING that time.  Every minute! Every second!

I have had this voice in my head for years, and the people around me know how it hounds me and stresses me out.

I was describing it to the new Rector of my church, and observing that it creates a lot of...pressure, and he laughed and said, yeah, I was going to say.

In the further course of that same conversation, I described how much I was influenced by Sartre in the early part of my Philosophy education, and how it formed my views about the meaning of life - that there is no essence, no meaning is given to you just from being born a human being, it is your responsibility to act, to choose into each new second as it unfolds, to define yourself as you go along by your choices, and only at the end of your life can you look back and read that history of choices and understand your essence, who you were.

This belief underpins my deep belief that the future is not actual, that nothing is determined at this point, that you can't know anything for sure about things that have not yet happened.  Not that this pen in my hand will fall when I release it, not that the sun will rise tomorrow or the earth keep turning, not that if you raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour it will either help or hurt the economy, not that if you tighten or ease up immigration requirements it will make your country either flourish or be destroyed.  People have arguments all the time about these things, but you can't win an argument about what will happen in the future, because the future is not actual.  Things are more or less likely, but you can't know them yet, not until they happen.  This firm belief I get from David Hume and his Problem of Induction, and you can see how it goes with the Sartre views of how one lives a life.

So, Oprah, that means that I cannot have a "destiny".  There is no one right answer for how I exist myself into each new second.  I choose.  No one else chooses.  I can change direction and do something different every second.  I do agree that because of their likely consequences some actions are more likely to result in something good (the greatest good for the greatest number) than others, and are more likely to lead to flourishing, but there's no one set of actions for me that will lead to that. What you say is incompatible with what I believe. No choice is the right choice, so no choice can be intrinsically wrong, there's a huge spectrum of possibilities, not yet written, it's up to me to write them.

And it's also damaging, and puts undue pressure on not just me but on all the people around me, when whatever I'm doing with them does not feel like that thing.

I can't be still and discern, like, see something that exists, what my path is or what I should do with my life.  I CHOOSE it.  I choose it.  I have radical freedom, because human beings have no essence, and the future is not actual, per my boys Jean Paul and David.

This argument will continue, I think, because this video is quite recent, but her views got into my head and started beating me up about my choices probably 15 years ago.  It will take a while to untangle Oprah vs Existentialism.  But I think what she says might not just be unhelpful, I think it might be WRONG.