Some Thoughts on Khudi

"Personality is a state of tension and can continue only if that state is maintained."-Allama Iqbal

One of the greatest tensions to which the personality is subject is that between the truth and expedience. We are naturally gregarious creatures; we have a desire for appreciation and social acceptance. In fact, our flourishing as human beings depends on it. At the same time, Humans were created to know and love the truth; without a living relationship with the truth the very structure of our being will decay. To go to either extreme, to attend exclusively to either drive is destructive of human personality and thus of human good; to care only for social acceptance is to reduce one's self to a cypher, to nullify one's own personality in the personality of others, while to borishly insist on one's own take on the truth in total disregard of the social context in which one is enmeshed and in defiance of those very the conditions that allow truth to flourish in the hearts and minds of others is also to nullify one's personality. In the latter case one takes one drive, one facet of a personality (though doubtless an important one) and obliterates the rest of one's being in it. It is in this case that we see an inkling of the wisdom behind the Prophetic directive to speak to people according to their level. In both cases the tension which is crucal to the formation of personality is relaxed and thus its fruit, human flourishing ("personality... is the most valuable achievement of man"), is destroyed.

This is not to say that each of these drives ought to be given equal weight; one can be virtuous hermit but not virtuous flatterer or sycophant. What is crucial is the inner experience of tension between these competing drives; it is this experience that serves as the crucible in which a fully developed personality comes into being.