STREET DOGS:
Charlie Munger on self-pity and extreme ideologies
Charlie Munger on self-pity, self-serving bias and extreme ideologies: Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows … and some people recover and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity but to utilise the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity…. I don’t care what the cause — your child could be dying of cancer — self-pity is not going to improve the situation. It’s a ridiculous way to behave, and when you avoid it you get a great advantage over everybody else, almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard conditi...
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