About how it is very important to increase the aspirations of the individual and create a positive image of the future for her, I wrote already in this article. Here I want to touch on the problem of fate from the point of view of past experience, and not the future.
If I were asked the question "what annoys you the most in life", then I would answer about the randomness of many life events in a person's fate - parents, love, political and the economic situation in the country, the historical context of the era, etc. Randomness is a fact, since any complex system (and life is the most complex system) has so many interrelated factors that it naturally becomes unpredictable and uncontrollable. This, by the way, is where the arguments of Hayek and others about "spontaneous order" that is created by the free market come from. I do not fully agree with him, since it seems that in such a model there is no place for the mind, although the mind itself is the greatest invention of evolution, which can create its own evolution (social). But the point is that we will constantly be influenced by random events on us, which create for us personal experience and, in fact, future expectations from the world.
And here the devil lurks. Since these events can be so bad and traumatic that they block a person, her psyche. I don't like it when they say that a person has not achieved something or is unhappy in something because she herself is only responsible for it. I think this is a very gross simplification of reality. Everything except the appearance of the world as such has causes. And most likely the unhappy fate of a person also has reasons. For the most part, we cannot influence these causes such as genes or experienced severe illness or experienced difficult relationships. But we can:
1. study these causes and expand our knowledge about the construction of a person’s fate and its determinants;
2. educate the right attitude to all events, including traumatic ones (prepare for these events, show examples of how it could be in the future, help prevent these events etc.);
3. to build an environment around young individuals that directs a person’s destiny in the right direction (the presence of interests, a good job, happy family relationships, etc. - these ingredients are still not really studied yet).
In In this sense, the example of the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential is interesting, but instead of focusing on achieving genius, I would establish the Institute for the Foundation of Human Destiny, which would focus on achieving the happy fate of the individual. And I would single out all the points above into a separate discipline that would combine the academy (psychology, sociology, philosophy) and applied pedagogy.
In short, this is a Crusade against the cruel accident of nature, which does not take us into account, using us as material for evolution. It seems that the mind that creates social evolution will allow us to overcome this, or at least minimize the consequences of this. Thus, the new discipline will create an unprecedented amount of benefit for people, creating more favorable destinies for millions of people. And that's a big deal!