Everybody is living life from a personal, unstated philosophy – a set of beliefs. It begins quite early in life when it is basically put there by our parents, and then significant others and the state education system add to it. At this point there isn’t any critical faculty and a weak sense of autonomy, no confidence in one’s ability to think for oneself. Soon young people connect to social media and contemporaries add to this core philosophy.
A few people, entering adulthood, become interested in logic or philosophy or perhaps psychology — and give this personal philosophy a full audit. Yet generally it stays in the head as a series of thoughts, beliefs, expectations, policies (never talk to stranger, immigrants are bad, I need to find a partner), goals, desires etc.
The inner-philosophy, and we could call it a mission statement, stays somewhat unconscious and largely unchallenged. Some people have a very negative philosophy and policies which lead to near certain early death, incarceration, loneliness or poverty.
The inner-philosophy is sometimes critically assessed in discourse, people ask you about your motivations and goals and you justify or explain yourself. There can be a bit of back and forth, but whether this inner-philosophy changes than depends, often it doesn’t because it’s linked to identity. Inside the black box of the mind, this philosophy is playing out, and it creates a mental-mini-me, a little representation of self, in various situations as daydreams and fantasies, as it relives and recreates various past memories and future speculations, memes and ideas from the media — all the time, reinforcing this inner-philosophy, of what life is about and what you are doing.
The problem is that, in terms of logic and sanity, the world is INSANE, and by implication, so are most of the people in it. If most people actually wrote down their inner-philosophies and considered them critically, much of the insanity would stop. Perhaps it isn’t immediately obvious what this philosophy actually is if it’s never been considered before. It might actually require some thought. Deeper aspects of this forgotten, hidden philosophy only become apparent when you look at the contents of the mind. This is a huge thing to understand.
There is an inner-philosophy that people believe they have and will explain when asked, and then there are the actual contents of their mind, all the thoughts, inner-talk, mental-pictures, choice of focus, that illustrates, oh so starkly, that their ACTUAL philosophy of life is completely different to what they thought. There is the conscious and the unconscious, the seen and the unseen — and a major goal is to make these the same.