Rowan Williams - What Is A Good Life

I was delighted to discover in probably the fifth century work by a man with the unwelcoming name of Mark the Aesthetic, a very vivid description of what goes wrong and how unexamined instinct, pure reactivity prevents us from a good life either a sense of feeling at-home with ourselves and our environment or in the sense of being actively benevolent.

Here's what goes wrong - pardon the gender exclusive language it is still the fifth century.

"He who does not understand God's judgements walks walks on a ridge-like knife's edge and is easily unbalanced by every passing wind. 

When praised, he exalts.  When criticized he is bitter. 

When he feasts he makes a pig of himself.   When he suffers hardship he moans and groans. 

When he understands he shows off and when he does not he pretends that he does. 

When rich he is boastful,  when he in poverty, he plays the hypocrite 

Gorged he grows brazen and when he fasts he becomes arrogant. 

He quarrels with those who reprove him and those who forgive him he regards as fools. "

It's a fine description of a certain number of public figures  one can think of also even more uncomfortably of oneself.   I quoted it, not so much as a summary of evil doing but as pathologized perception. 

The person who cannot see what there is, relating all things to himself or herself becomes locked into a selfhood constructed in a very strict and careful opposition, an exclusion of a human environment which might challenge, enlarge, heal, even. 

That passage starts at about 9:00.