Mastering one's emotions: Feeling the emotion, understanding it, and developing skills for overcoming negative feelings. Also, the ability to choose not to act based on strong emotion.

In a crisis, or in critical or chronic situations, possession of these two related skills usually yields superior outcomes.

It isn't "wrong" to feel the feelings. It is wrong to let the feelings dominate you to the point of paralysis or drive you to harmful behavior. Children can't help going through phases as their brains develop where they're overcome with emotions. You help them by teaching them it is OK to feel sad or angry. Then you help them by teaching them how to cope through action, or focus on something else like goals.

Having negative emotions is normal. Coping with negative emotions, mastering them, is a valuable skill.

Words do not inflict physical injury. You teach that. Words can inflict emotional pain. You also teach that this is so. Words can inflict mental injury, and you teach that, too. But you start with the far simpler formulation of "sticks and stones" until metaphor and nuance are available tools.

It's like teaching children about strangers. There are exceptions to every rule, but if you value their safety when they're small, you teach them the rule "Do not talk to strangers." Young children don't have the social context to parse exceptions until they're older... when the teaching has to add resolution and detail.

It’s not the goal of monks either, so perhaps mastery of oneself shouldn’t be taken as simply being stoic?

If I'm attempting to repeat back his sensibility: It's an aspiration for people to be self-responsible. Look after self, then others. We're individuals first, and must look after ourselves, and then the collectivist-minded activities come after looking after the self.

This self=>others axis is the basis of Maslow's hierarchy. But it's the inverse of many cultures' (including the blackfoot tribes from which Maslow borrowed the model, which put community at the bottom of the pyramid of needs, oddly enough)

I respect his view (it's rather effective in some contexts, esp environments of scarcity), but I'd rather embrace the collectivist and interdependent aspects of humanity as the foundational principle.

My general impression is that both of these worldviews could save us in different contexts. Maybe the collectivist would save us from climate change, and individualist would save us in some armed conflict. I feel we need to keep both, and keep them balanced, and respecting one another. It's like keeping a seed vault -- different wisdoms for later, and part of a diversity of thought we should probably preserve for unknowable future challenges.

> I don’t think there is a serious argument that let’s say for some particularly sadistic reason I wanted to bully them and do real harm

I think you'd be surprised. I had some tough great uncles who taught rough lessons and were damn proud of it.

I'm not sure the words are the problem there.

One such mechanism is the mentality of "believing victims". Not a bad thing on the face of it, but my feeling is that we've tipped over into a world where people are incentivized to become victims. In this way the mechanism ends up becoming weaponized and wielded like a cudgel by those good at playing the victim against a new set of victims who just aren't as good at that game.

These new victims may end up even more disadvantaged due to ideological fashions which shape who we see as victims (e.g. "girls are more likely to be victims than boys") and dictate to what degree we should mete out empathy (e.g. "we have to make sure we aren't overly empathetic towards the white kids since we are biased and they are privileged").