PART I: Identity Over Truth
There is a fundamental dividing line in the human experience, a crossroads where the trajectory of the soul is decided. It is captured in the realization that anybody who chooses their identity over the truth is a psychological child inside. This choice reveals a profound lack of will—specifically, the will to own one’s feelings enough to reflect on their own potentially contradictory nature. Instead of engaging in the difficult, rational work of self-examination, they react emotionally. They prioritize the preservation of their constructed self-image over the undeniable reality of what is.
This dynamic is best understood through the lens of the Logos—the objective, ordering principle of reality. The Logos is the ultimate objective standard in relationship to us; it is the truth that exists whether we acknowledge it or not. The survival-ego, conversely, constructs an “identity,” often built on unearned pride, trauma, unconscious self-deceptions, and/or group affiliation. When the Logos presents a truth that contradicts this identity, the mature individual allows the false self to be dismantled and realigned with reality. The psychological child, however, willfully rejects the Logos to save the survival-ego, retreating into a fortress based in emotional whims and rationalizations.
The mechanism behind this retreat is a failure to “own” one’s feelings. To own a feeling does not mean to validate it as absolute truth; rather, it means to acknowledge it as an internal event without being possessed by it. The psychological child lacks the fortitude to observe their anger or shame without becoming it. Because they cannot bear the reflection of their own hypocrisy or “contradictory nature,” they project that internal conflict outward. The result is an emotional reaction designed to silence the truth rather than a rational response designed to understand it.
At the root of this behavior lies a corrupted logical formula, a glitch in the software of the soul. The sovereign, trans-rational individual operates on the premise of “I am, and therefore it is,” meaning their external reality is a natural radiation of their internal state of being. They align themselves with the Logos, and their life becomes a testament to that order. The controller, trapped in the pre-rational state, operates on the inverted logic of “I want, therefore I am [entitled to have].”
This inversion confuses appetite with authority. In this infantile framework, the raw sensation of a desire is interpreted as a binding command upon the universe. They do not pause to ask if the desire is good, true, or earned; the mere existence of the want validates the claim. It is a pre-rational state where the boundary between “what I feel” and “what is true” has been completely dissolved.
Consequently, the sensation of lack—be it hunger, loneliness, insecurity, or perceived disrespect—is processed through a distorted lens. For the mature individual, lack is a signal to grow, to create, or to build. It is a call to action within the self. For the psychological child, lack is interpreted as an injustice. It is not a signal to work, but a signal that the external world has failed to provide. The responsibility for their internal state is entirely externalized.
Solipsism is the metaphysical belief that only one’s own mind is certain to exist, and that the external world—including other people—may be nothing more than a projection or simulation of that consciousness. It is a state where the individual acts as if their subjective thoughts, feelings, and desires are the only reality, treating objective reality and the autonomy of others as irrelevant or unreal.
This brings us to the nature of the tantrum. When we see a child—or an adult acting as one—throwing a tantrum, we are witnessing the will being used strictly in service of desire. It is a raw display of power aimed at bending reality to fit the survival-ego’s emotional landscape. This misuse of the will is profoundly solipsistic. It assumes that the internal experience of the self is the only reality that carries weight, and that the external world exists solely to accommodate it.
This solipsism necessitates a willful ignorance of the “Thou” in the “I/Thou” relationship. To maintain the delusion that one’s desires constitute objective reality, one must strip others of their sovereignty. Other people cannot be viewed as complex, autonomous beings with their own rights and perspectives. They must be reduced to props in the survival-ego’s drama, obstacles to be removed, or resources to be consumed.
In this solipsistic bubble, the world is viewed through an “I-It” relationship. The psychological child interacts with others not as ends in themselves, but as means to an end. This is the relational crime of the immature: they refuse to see the “Thou” because acknowledging the “Thou” would require acknowledging a limit to their own desires. It would require admitting that other people are not merely extensions of their own wants.
Ultimately, this mindset leads to a parasitic entitlement. As I have noted in previous articles, such as the “Engine of Control,” these individuals believe their need constitutes a mortgage on someone else’s soul. They operate under the delusion that their pain or desire creates a debt that others are obligated to pay. They do not seek relationship; they seek resource extraction, demanding validation, energy, and compliance as interest payments on a debt that does not objectively exist.
The tragedy of the psychological child is that they remain trapped in a prison of their own making. By choosing identity over truth, they cut themselves off from the only force capable of liberating them: the Logos. They protect a fragile, contradictory self-image at the cost of genuine connection with reality and with others. They remain stunted, reacting to the world with the emotional volatility of an infant, forever waiting for a universe that does not care about their tantrums to finally obey their commands.
True maturity, and indeed true spirituality, requires the rejection of this childish entitlement. It demands the terrifying courage to subordinate one’s identity to the truth, to distinguish appetite from authority, and to recognize the sovereignty of the “Thou.” It is the move from the “I want” of the child to the “I am” of the Logocentric being—a shift from demanding the world serve us, to aligning ourselves with the divine order of what is true.
PART II: The Earned Reflection
The ultimate spiritual conflict, the war between the Logos and the survival-ego, can be distilled into two opposing statements of identity. On one side stands the Divine Name revealed at the burning bush: “I AM THAT I AM.” On the other stands the inverted, parasitic logic of the psychological child: “I want therefore I am [entitled to have].” These two phrases represent not just different attitudes, but two mutually exclusive ways of structuring reality. One is the foundation of truth; the other is the bedrock of delusion.
The divine declaration, “I AM THAT I AM,” is the ultimate statement of Logocentricity. It signifies absolute being, governed by the Laws of Identity and Non-Contradiction. God does not merely possess existence; He is existence. His nature is generative and perfectly consistent; there is no contradictory gap between who He is and what He does. It is a tautology of sufficiency, where the “I AM” is the uncaused cause, the solid rock of objective reality from which all truth radiates outward.
In a stark, contradictory inversion, the psychological child adopts the Cartesian twist of “I want therefore I am.” Where the Divine Name is a statement of ontology (being), the child’s mantra is a solipsistic statement of appetite. They have tethered their very identity to the sensation of lack and the act of consumption. They do not exist to be—to align with and reflect the Logos—but to consume. In this infantile framework, the raw sensation of desire is not just a feeling; it is the proof of their existence and the source of their authority.
This identity is inherently unstable because it is built on a contradiction: it attempts to found “being” on a “void.” Because their “I am” is contingent upon their “want,” any denial of that want feels like a negation of their existence. This explains the aggressive entitlement of the psychological child. As I noted in my treatise regarding the section on the Immorality of Aggressive Force, “A mind that could conceive of initiating force against another is a mind in a state of profound self-contradiction.” The aggression of the child is the violent thrashing of a contradictory identity trying to sustain itself. They must make claims on what they see and indulge themselves, because to stop consuming is, in their twisted logic, to cease to exist; it is the root cause of survival instincts (survival of the fittest).
This dynamic is mirrored with terrifying precision in the Greek myth of Narcissus. While often dismissed as a parable about simple vanity, the story is actually a tragedy about this specific epistemological error. Narcissus staring into the pool is the physical embodiment of “I want therefore I am [entitled to have].” He is locked in a closed circuit where his existence is validated solely by his desire for the reflection. He seeks only to encounter his own wants reflected back to him, refusing to acknowledge any reality that exists independently of his appetite.
The tragedy of the myth, and of the psychological child, is found in the rejection of the “Thou.” In the story, Narcissus rejects the nymph Echo because she is a separate entity—a “Thou” who attempts to make contact. The solipsistic ego prefers the reflection in the water because it is compliant. The psychological child rejects the independent existence of others (and the Logos) because a “Thou” limits the sovereignty of their desires. If “I want therefore I am,” then an independent “Thou” who refuses to be consumed is an existential threat to the survival-ego’s definition of self.
Ultimately, Narcissus dies of thirst next to a pool of water, illustrating the fatal consequence of this inverted identity. To drink the water—to internalize the truth—he would have to touch the surface and shatter the reflection. He chooses to starve rather than destroy the illusion of his self-image. Similarly, the psychological child spiritually starves / self-sabotages because ingesting the truth would require the “death” of the false aspects of their identity. They would rather preserve the reflection of their “wants” than disrupt their survival-ego long enough to drink from the waters of reality.
There is, however, a path that transcends this tragic binary. We naturally desire to look upon ourselves and see a creation worthy of pride—to witness a reflection that aligns with the Good. Yet, unlike the starving Narcissus, the mature individual realizes that to sustain the being who looks into the mirror, one must be willing to drink from the living waters of truth. We must accept that taking in reality will invariably disturb our appearance; the ripples of self-correction will temporarily distort the ego’s image. But we understand that we cannot sabotage the being for the sake of the reflection. It is worth disturbing the image from time to time to ensure the survival and growth of the soul.
This process allows for an “earned” sense of worth, sharply distinguished from the unearned, fragile entitlement of the child. By voluntarily shattering the illusion to ingest the truth, we engage in a cycle of destruction and stronger recreation. We accept the temporary chaos of self-correction so that when the waters settle, the face that looks back is not merely a starving ghost of desire, but a substantive entity forged in reality. It is a justified pride, rooted in what we have objectively created and become through the hard work of alignment, rather than a delusion we are desperately trying to protect from the intrusion of facts and reason.
The path of maturity, then, is not the abandonment of the self, but the proper stewardship of it. It requires the abandonment of the contradictory, consumptive logic of “I want therefore I am [entitled to have]” in favor of submitting to the objective standard of the Logocentric “I AM.” We must have the courage to disturb the water, to let the truth ripple through our identity, knowing that this is the only way to create a being that is truly substantial. We move from the short-sighted self-sabotage of the child to the endurance of the Logocentric being, who can look in the mirror and be proud of what they see, precisely because they were humble enough to let the truth transform them.
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THE UNITY PROCESS: I’ve created an integrative methodology called the Unity Process, which combines the philosophy of Natural Law, the Trivium Method, Socratic Questioning, Jungian shadow work, and Meridian Tapping—into an easy to use system that allows people to process their emotional upsets, work through trauma, correct poor thinking, discover meaning, set healthy boundaries, refine their viewpoints, and to achieve a positive focus. Read my philosophical treatise, “The Logocentric Christian”, to learn more about how Greek philosophy, the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, the law of reason, and Jesus of Nazareth all connect together.
