Nerve – tohu va bohu

I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about the word nerve.

It’s the key word in Edwin Friedman’s book, A Failure of Nerve.

I can’t say I’ve ever wasted any minute spent meditating on nerve, its meaning and the related network of concepts.

In discussion about high-agency, nerve connects with the idea of disagreeability. It also seems to involve some mix of hope/optimism and zeal.

I have also spent time thinking about what biblical word overlaps most onto nerve. It’s possible that it takes multiple words to color in all the meaning; think courage, think of self-control and sober-mindedness. In some ways how Friedman defines nerve as gravity seems to have a lot of overlap with love, with affections.

But thinking about it again, maybe the best word is FAITH.

It’s a kind of believing confidence that both anchors someone to hold fast when the wind is blowing against them and also a wind in the sail that compels a person in the right direction.

Even related to the subtitle of Friedman’s book, “Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix,” faith obviously is, by definition, not living on the things that are seen and immediate.

All that to say, living by FAITH is needed as much now as ever.

If this hurts your feelings then you should reread it.

One of the most extraordinary examples of adaptation to immaturity in contemporary American society is how the word abusive has replaced the words nasty and objectionable. The latter two words suggest that a person has done something distasteful, always a matter of judgment. But the use of the word abusive suggests, instead, that the person who heard or read the objectionable, nasty, or even offensive remark was somehow victimized by dint of the word entering their mind. This confusion of being “hurt” with being damaged makes it seem as though the feelings of the listener or reader were not their own responsibility, or as though they had been helplessly violated by another person’s opinion. If our bodies responded that way to “insults,” we would not make it very far past birth.
The use of abusive rather than objectionable has enabled those who do not want to take responsibility for their own efforts to tyrannize others, especially leaders, with their “sensitivity.”

—Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 70-71