"It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us"
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We like to believe our lives are guided by deliberate choice, yet the steady pressure comes from what we do without much noticing: the habits, reflexes, and half-formed beliefs that run beneath our attention. Samuel Butler points to that submerged layer and to its generative power. The phrase less conscious is careful. He does not say hidden or mysterious, but acknowledges the murky zone between intention and instinct where routines settle in, loyalties harden, and aversions grow. Those are the forces that, over time, set our course.
Butler wrote as a Victorian skeptic of easy progress and tidy rationalism. In works like Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh, he mocked the pious self-congratulation of his age and examined how families transmit not only wealth and names but patterns of feeling and conduct. He advanced a provocative idea he called unconscious memory, the notion that organisms inherit tendencies akin to memory itself. Whether or not one accepts that biological speculation, his moral observation remains sharp: children do not primarily receive their parents ideas as arguments; they absorb their parents default settings. The tone at breakfast, the posture toward work, the way fear is handled, how anger is expressed or stifled these speak louder than declarations.
Modern psychology echoes him. Much of behavior is automatic; context cues trigger practiced scripts; values are enacted more than announced. If the less conscious mainly moulds us, then responsibility shifts from heroic resolutions to the design of daily life. What we repeat is what we become, and what we model is what our descendants rehearse. The task is to bring a little more light to the borderlands of attention: to notice the habit loops, to reshape environments, to embody the ideals we claim. Influence is not a single decision but a climate, and we are always making weather.
Butler wrote as a Victorian skeptic of easy progress and tidy rationalism. In works like Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh, he mocked the pious self-congratulation of his age and examined how families transmit not only wealth and names but patterns of feeling and conduct. He advanced a provocative idea he called unconscious memory, the notion that organisms inherit tendencies akin to memory itself. Whether or not one accepts that biological speculation, his moral observation remains sharp: children do not primarily receive their parents ideas as arguments; they absorb their parents default settings. The tone at breakfast, the posture toward work, the way fear is handled, how anger is expressed or stifled these speak louder than declarations.
Modern psychology echoes him. Much of behavior is automatic; context cues trigger practiced scripts; values are enacted more than announced. If the less conscious mainly moulds us, then responsibility shifts from heroic resolutions to the design of daily life. What we repeat is what we become, and what we model is what our descendants rehearse. The task is to bring a little more light to the borderlands of attention: to notice the habit loops, to reshape environments, to embody the ideals we claim. Influence is not a single decision but a climate, and we are always making weather.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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