Techniques 1 : Gratitude Diary

Photo by Antonio Guillem

Just because someone is good at articulating a philosophy doesn't mean they are always good at living it. In recent times I have struggled with anxiety and depression and needed to look to others to teach me how to quell it (while also having the help of medication.) 

One idea I picked up from television. I assume the guy I saw being interviewed was Hugh Van Cuylenburg of The Resilience Project. I'm very familiar with the cover of his book from the library where I work, but have not, as yet, read it.

In talking about gratitude he suggested something very simple. Just write down three good things which happened each day.

I latched on to this and found myself ending each day by writing a list of around fifteen things which were positives. The key was that nothing was too small. A stranger returning my smile. A tasty meal. An enjoyable conversation.

A psychologist I've been seeing said that this is just the way to do such a technique. Those who are not helped often say each day : "I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my health." The key is to draw attention to the little things which might go unappreciated.

We all tend to have a negativity bias. This makes sense as we need to be aware of dangers and to focus on problems in order to solve them. Our ancestors were more likely to die from being inattentive to negatives than unappreciative of positives. And if we feel a pain in some part of our body, it is a call to attend to a problem.

But sometimes the problem alert signal - in the form of anxiety or depression - becomes a hindrance to addressing the problem itself.

Keeping a gratefulness diary counters the negativity bias. We will still be able to focus on solving problems as needed, but by appreciating the things which go well we will draw more sustenance into our psyche with which to power those problem solving activities.

What I have found is that I am more likely to wake in the morning feeling optimistic and excited about the day to come because I have reason to believe that it will be filled with similar small but precious gifts to the one before.

My suggestions are :

1. Make the list just before going to bed.

2. Write down as many things as you feel like. If you can only think of one, write one. If you think of fifty write fifty.

3. Survey the day from start to finish in your memory, but don't feel you have to write things in chronological order. If you remember something afterwards, just add it to the end of the list. If you remember something the next day which you'd forgotten, you can always add it then.

4. Remember all your senses and how they can give you pleasure. (I always think of the Iranian movie A Taste of Cherry (1997) (dir. Abbas Kiarostami) in which one character tries to persuade another not to commit suicide by reminding him that to be dead is to forgo the pleasure of tasting a cherry.)

The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet

 "Totalitarianism is the belief that human intellect can be the guiding principle in life and society.”

One of the most important questions which face us as a species is why we have a propensity to go collectively insane in horrendously bloodthirsty ways. Why the Holocaust? Why the killing fields of Cambodia? Why Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Why Stalin’s purges?

Wars of conquest, horrible as they are, make sense to us. We can understand wanting something possessed by another and using force to get it. But these periods of madness lead societies to implode. They begin by vilifying particular subsets of their population, but the elimination of the victim classes leads to a widening net of destruction which may end up with the annihilation of those who initiated the purge. Hitler assured the German people that he was saving enough gas for them so that they wouldn’t have to face the reality of defeat. And many of those who enacted Stalin’s purges ended up finding themselves on the list. Whatever is going on in these times of madness is not something which can lead to a stable outcome.

Mattias Desmet has written a truly remarkable book on this topic. Building on the classic work of Hannah Arendt, he provides a framework for understanding the psychological landscape of totalitarianism which is concise and easy to understand. You’ll find yourself saying, “Ah, ha! Of course,” often.

He places this phenomena in the deepest of contexts, both that of the developmental psychology of the individual and the historical evolution of ideas.

As a child we learn language. We want to know the precise meanings of words, but words are described using other words. Meaning is always deferred. This sense of uncertainty can either be accepted as an opportunity for creativity or lead to an anxious hunger for some kind of certainty. The deepest question for the developing child is “What does the Other want?” What is the secret to being loved by the Other? The need for a sense of certainty about this question can lead to narcissism. Healthy development requires the ability to live with uncertainty.

The history of ideas also saw us faced with a choice between accepting that the essence of reality will always be unknowable or a mechanistic way of conceiving of the universe as something which can be fully explained and successfully manipulated to create an earthly paradise. The mechanistic worldview continues to dominate even though discoveries in physics which were made in the twentieth century reveal it to be unfounded. The mechanistic schema is that the realm of physics determines that of chemistry which determines that of biology which determines those of psychology, sociology and economics. But we now know that psychology has the ability to determine physical phenomena such as the movement of atomic particles.

Desmet explains that totalitarianism is the full expression of the mechanistic worldview.

What inspired him to assemble the notes on this topic he had been making over recent years and put them forward to the public in the form of this book was the social and political response to the Corona Virus. In the acceptance of authoritarian control imposed on society and the othering of the unvaccinated, he saw the basic patterns of what at other times has turned into full-blown totalitarianism.

I’m sure that many would resist this interpretation. Sure scientific studies have now shown that the lockdowns led to more collateral damage deaths than they could possibly have prevented Covid deaths. Sure we know that the Covid shots didn’t end up preventing anyone from contracting or passing on the disease (and thus don’t fit the traditional meaning of the word “vaccine” regardless of how much benefit they might hypothetically have in limiting symptoms for the individual.) But we believed these things in good faith. Is it fair to say that we were hypnotised as a result of our social isolation and free-floating anxiety? You or I might not have been a part of the mass formation perhaps, but extremes of behaviour were exhibited by large numbers of people which it does make sense to interpret in that way. Hostility toward “anti-vaxxers” certainly persisted beyond the point at which we knew that they posed no more risk to others than anyone else. And how do we explain people’s willingness to have their male children (who had an infinitesimal chance of a bad outcome from Covid) given a shot which carries a very significant chance of damaging their heart?

Desmet doesn’t go into detail about these issues. You can go to Alex Berenson or Dr. Robert W. Malone amongst others for that. His point is that we have a propensity to manifest totalitarianism. It isn’t just something that happened in foreign countries in decades past.

There is a spiritual vision at the heart of the book which points the way to a cure for our madness. If transhumanism is the latest form of totalitarian dystopia in waiting, the way forward is for us to embrace our humanity, and its grounding in the mysterious creativity of the universe, all the more deeply.

Mattias Desmet

BOOK REVIEW : The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde

When he wrote this essay, first published in 1891, Oscar Wilde was very optimistic about the ability of socialism to rid society of poverty, and advanced machinery to rid society of burdensome toil. Or was he? I don't know much about the context, but Wilde was a playful provocateur. Perhaps by taking the promises made by socialists and running with them, he was trying to expose the fallacies of their thinking and explore what really might be necessary for an improvement in society.

He claims that the chief advantage of Socialism would be rescuing us from having to be concerned about alleviating the hardships of others. Poverty might be ended without the need for charity, which is degrading to the recipient.

What he means by socialism is the abolition of private property. He is not simply talking about some extension of a state funded welfare system. Of course he is writing well before the horrors which attended so many experiments with communism in the twentieth century. So it is possible his optimism is genuine.

We think of socialism as the surrender of the individual to the collective. Irony is at the heart of Wilde's wit, and here the irony is that he takes the promised Utopia of Socialism and explains how it can only succeed if it leads to the full flowering of Individualism.

The reason to abolish private property is that its protection and maintenance distracts us from cultivating our Individuality. The more we are our property the less we are ourselves.

His vision of socialism is more like anarchism. All forms of authority will cease and along with them all forms of punishment.

He turns to the teachings of Jesus, which he presents also as a call to Individualism.

It is common for people to wrongly associate Jesus' teachings with Socialism. There is a huge difference between appealing to one's followers to voluntarily help the poor and advocating that the state should force them to do so. Wilde isn't saying that Jesus was a Socialist. He's merely saying that Jesus advocated Individualism and asserting the opinion that Socialism, if properly pursued, would lead to greater Individualism.

He adds that Individualism would end family life, but that this would make the love of a man and a woman more than it has been, the implication being that that which is enforced is less genuine. Again he appeals to Jesus' refusal to recognise the members of his own family.

In the latter part of the essay, Wilde turns to literary criticism to show how hard it is for Individualism to find acceptance in various written forms.

Wilde's take on things may tend to be unrealistic. He argues ending private property will end crime. But in the broad strokes of his thesis is much food for thought.

It makes sense that a peaceful, cooperative and loving society, if such a thing is possible, would have to be made up of those in whom Individuality has found an unhindered expression. We can see an apt analogy in nature. A thriving healthy group of plants or animals are those least impeded in following their instincts.

Is a society possible where everyone is free from impositions on their Individuality and yet cooperation allows for the practical solution of the problems facing the group?

I think so, but the process to get there will not be easy as the healthy loving impulses are often buried beneath much resentment.

The abolition of private property is impractical because it requires either the consent or the control of the masses. On the other hand, Wilde is right that Individualism is the answer. The way to achieve it is through a mixture of assertion and healing. Strength and soundness are needed to stand firm in the face of all that opposes it. This is where Wilde's pointing to Jesus is so relevant. We don't need screwed up people uninhibitedly living out their reckless disregard for the well-being of themselves or others. Of course, we might see that they are not Individuals, because they are more of a programmed expression of those who have damaged them than of their authentic self. 

But we need a path of healing and it may be that the words of Jesus, rather than those of Socialists, have the ability to provide it.

Anyway, there is much to recommend Wilde's vision :

"For what man has sought for is indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment."

Will We Fall Back On Love and Truth?

One need not be a religious believer to feel that we live in Apocalyptic times. We are reaching the limits of our society to maintain basic cohesion and of our ecosystem to support us. And we see the spread of toxic forms of ideology which emphasise identity and difference in a way which works against the spirit of universal love which might gather us in and set us on a true path. And the pandemic has tended to make us fear each other and to put our trust in a centralised authority which has often proved unworthy of that trust.

Some say that we need to return to Christian values. This seems valid if one takes those values from a non-literal interpretation of the Gospels. There are too many of us who call ourselves Christians while departing from those values - of love and honesty and non-judgement and charity - to expect that holding up Christianity as an answer will win the approval of unbelievers.

I say this and yet the one thing I fall back on to give me some modicum of hope is that Jesus prophesied that the darkest moment would herald his return. I may not believe in a supernatural sense, but a pattern which is central to our greatest story is not to be lightly dismissed, especially when the alternative is a slow painful extinction for the human race and all the beauty in the world.

Some believe that the heart of human psychology is competition. Nature is a competition for food and mating opportunities. But it seems to me that love is the primary grounding of our psychology. The love bond between mother and child is the foundation of our development. Later there are factors which alienate us from that. If our survival as an individual is in peril, if we are feeling the impulse to serve the breeding impulse, and, particularly, if we are in a psychologically insecure state, then this acts as interference temporarily blocking out our more profound nature. But if we meet a stranger in a situation in which we feel no danger to our survival or our psychological integrity, then there is no reason we won't feel a fellowship with them which is a return to the essence of our first way of relating to another human being, but without the element of complete dependence.

Psychological insecurity is the root of our problems. I know it all too well. If my belief system were made up of secure building blocks, then I would not want to see those who think differently proven humiliatingly wrong. Don't we see this in ourselves and others, particularly on the topic of politics. We build our ego castles and hurl projectiles of mockery at those of our fellows. The "other" becomes perhaps a stand-in for everyone who has ever hurt us. We get an outlet for our frustration, but no healing for that hurt.

So is, perhaps, an Apocalypse the last stand of a failing strategy? There is no doubt that business as usual is proving to be a massive failure. If that failure breaks us, will we, in newfound humility, acknowledge the long-denied truth and fall back into our capacity for love?

BOOK REVIEW : A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century : Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein

 

The challenges which face us as a species are legion. What should we do?

First we have to know who we are and where we are. We need to understand our programming and the ways in which it interfaces with the world around us, both its natural elements and those we have constructed.

The central challenge is one of hyper-novelty. Our instincts change extremely slowly and so are still adjusted to the way we were living many thousands of years ago. Culture changes more quickly, but still requires much time to test its innovations. A technological advance can spread throughout the world almost instantaneously, but a culture of social habits which allow it to be used for our net benefit rather than net deficit might take decades. Social media gives a case in point. It has brung us great benefits, but we are struggling to know how to manage downsides such as addiction and toxic forms of social interaction.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein set out in this book to provide us with tools which we can use to orientate ourselves and begin to improvise strategies for a liveable future.

I sometimes become annoyed with people who interpret human psychology with an evolutionary lens. Clearly our psychology exists within the process of evolution, but it sometimes seems as if people will use evolution as an excuse to reduce everything to the question of what does or does not lead to the prospering of the genes. So we are told that people wear ostentatious clothes for the same reason that some species of bird have bright feathers, i.e. it helps to attract a mate. That is all very well as far as it goes, but it doesn’t acknowledge that a post-menopausal woman may wear fancy clothes because it feeds her ego to get attention. The authors talk about rape as a product of evolution - a reprehensible form of reproductive strategy. This makes sense, but the rape of non-impregnable individuals is very common. Men rape other men and they rape prepubescent children. Rape can be an expression of a distortion of the ego which does not confer any benefit on the individual's genes.

So it seems to me that, just as culture is nested within and interacts with the system which is the genetic evolution of the species, so the psychology of the individual is nested within genetic evolution and culture, and it would be foolish, in trying to understand it, to reduce it to a role of servant to that larger system. Very often we are not even servants, but rather saboteurs, to ourselves.

This is just to give some idea of my own biases. I was not disappointed in the way this book approached the topic of evolutionary psychology. It emphasises the importance of viewing cultural evolution as being in service of genetic evolution. Just as mutations in genes lead to variations which either persist or don’t depending on fitness for life in the environment, culture is a series of experiments (conscious in this case) which lead to changes in society which either prove adaptive or not.

If an aspect of culture is costly in effort or resources and persists for a long time, then we can assume that it is adaptive in some way. The authors call this “The Omega Principle”. This doesn’t mean that the content of this cultural form is necessary true. It may be a myth which encourages socially beneficial behaviour. If a tribe believe that anyone who steals will go to Hell, it will probably lead to them being more cohesive and prosperous even if it isn’t true.

One of the key influences on this book is G. K. Chesterton. You may get a little sick of just how many times the author’s refer to “Chesterton’s fence,” but it is understandable given what a useful analogy it is. Chesterton pointed out that, if you are walking across a field and you see a fence and you don’t know what the fence is for, it is a really good idea to find out before you tear it down. This is Conservatism 101. Tradition is the wisdom we have inherited. Be careful that any change is going to be in your own best interest.

There is an interesting balance between this caution and the authors’ acknowledgement that, at this crisis point of hyper-novelty, we need to prioritise consciousness over culture. Culture is the repository of old solutions and consciousness is what we use to find a new path. I suppose the idea is that we need to learn the lessons from culture in the process of finding a new way.

There is plenty of practical advice in the book, grouped in bullet points at the end of each chapter. A lot of it centres around limiting hyper-novelty - processed foods, pharmaceuticals, unnatural light, etc. There is much parenting advice. And a lot about getting out into nature and being more sociable in person. Their argument against watching pornography seems like very sound advice for others, though I won’t be following it myself. I’ll also give spending time in potentially dangerous wild environments a miss for the time being.

One part of the book I found very interesting was their comment on the growth in diagnoses of autism and the way they link it to young children being “babysat” by screens. This fits well with what I have read from some other writers and it makes complete sense. I’m curious how it will be received though. In the past, explanations posited for psychological disorders which centred around the behaviour of parents have been very strongly resisted.

It’s a book which is very easy to read and full of fascinating information. I never knew that we humans can be usefully thought of as a kind of fish.

The final chapter deals with the question of where do we go from here - how do we secure ourselves a future. The key insight is that we need to find a psychologically satisfying alternative to material growth. We need to be exploring and utilising a new frontier - “The Fourth Frontier” - because it won’t satisfy us to stagnate without adventure. It has to be something other than maximising our exploitation of the Earth’s resources in the service of an increasing population and its indulgence. It’s a fuzzy picture, but I suppose it has to be. It can’t be someone’s planned utopia. It has to be something emergent from the interactions of us all. Thus it can’t be knowable in advance.

I also highly recommend the authors' Dark Horse podcast.

My Response to Jeremy Griffith's Explanation for the Human Condition

From the time of my adolescence I was always prone to feelings of guilt, even though I did little to feel guilty about. I felt shame, early on, about masturbation. I sometimes gave sizeable donations to Third World charities because I felt guilty about having more money than I needed. I’m sure these were fluctuating phases. I was also prone to deep depressions.

When I read Jeremy Griffith’s first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, I resonated with it because of my guilt. It said that “sex is an attack on innocence". It related our extravagant lifestyles to the starvation of people in Africa.

It also promised redemption from this state. It promised to explain why we had had to be the way we were and shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I was glad that such a thing was promised, but I didn’t feel it as strongly as I felt the guilt.

I’m not sure how much I came to feel his work as a defence. I certainly championed it, and I did some work transcribing for him. While I was doing that I was throwing the responsibility for whether he was right or wrong to him. I knew that it was good for ideas to get out into the public sphere where they had a chance to prove themselves. If Griffith was wrong on some things, it would come out in the public debate which would eventuate.

My immediate break from supporting Griffith’s work came when I had a mental breakdown. The worst point in that experience was a confrontation with the worst feelings of guilt I ever experienced. I felt that the whole of human history was going to come to nothing only because of my lack of courage.

Later I tried buying copies of Griffith’s new book and donating it to libraries. By now I felt he was wrong on at least a few things, but again I thought the best way for that to be sorted out was to submit it to the attention of the world. There was need for debate.

It’s hard to be in a situation where you recognise that there is some key problem at the heart of human psychology which is not being addressed, but you’ve ceased to trust the one attempt you have come across to articulate it.

If an explanation for the human condition is going to solve that problem it has to bring positive feelings to the bulk of humanity.

What if it works the opposite way? What if we all have our ways of keeping the guilt at bay, and this book promises a better way, so we grab it, but then it dissolves in our hands and drops us into undiluted guilt?

I suspect this is why it has been a slow process for Griffith getting many people supporting his work. Most people can probably sense where guilt lies. I was early to open to his work because I was already wallowing in the pit.

Griffith’s advice is that, once someone has been convinced that what he says is the truth, they should support it without grappling with it intellectually too much, lest they become destabilised. That they should live off of what it can do for the world.

But that is only possible if you believe it will have a liberating effect on most people. If you believe the “confronting” aspect of it will connect harder than any defence, it would be hard to be so enthusiastic, especially if being confronted by idealism is what drives the progressive worsening of that condition in the forms of hostility, alienation and egotism.

My response, such as it was, was to express the ideas I did in How to Be Free. How might we heal from the human condition without running the risk of increasing any feelings of guilt? 

The Case for Jeremy Griffith

I’ve written a lot about the case against Jeremy Griffith’s explanation for the human condition. Here I will try to walk with him as far as I can go.

His explanation grew out of his need to reconcile his idealism with what he encountered in the social world around him.

His idealistic behaviour was an expression of his instinctive orientation toward love, which was sheltered by similarly loving nurturing.

From observing himself he deduces that our instincts are toward idealistic behaviour.

In time he will discover that most other people do not behave in this way. People are often selfish, egotistical or cynical. And the world is not run on idealistic principles or it would not be in the mess it is in.

He comes to the conclusion that people become angry, egocentric and alienated when they encounter the message that they should behave idealistically. They are angry at the criticism. They try to defend themselves from the attack on their ego by fortifying it. And they shut their ears to what is being said. If this means blocking their mind from acknowledging certain aspects of reality, then that means they become alienate, i.e. cut off from reality.

It’s worth pointing out that the anger isn’t necessarily one way. Griffith talks about expressing a great deal of anger, in his youth, at what he saw as the wrongness of other people’s behaviour.

Griffith supposes that all children will go through the process of trying to make sense of why the people around them don’t act according to what they perceive in themselves as the correct form of behaviour.

Eventually, he says, they will “adopt resignation”, i.e. find a strategy of adaptation to the non-ideal world they find within them now as well as without.

The state before resignation is innocence.

Sex could be an innocent expression of the loving instincts, but by the time we reach sexual maturity, egotism characterises our behaviour. So Griffith sees sex as “an attack on innocence” - he sees the egotistical element of it.

Perhaps it would be fairer to talk about something like sex (to the extent that one can generalise) being used as an attack on the oppressiveness which originally originated in innocence. There may be sadists who want an innocent one to suffer, but most of us just want guilt to fuck the hell off. And that doesn’t just come from directly from innocence, but censorious prudes who may be anything but innocent.

Anyway, there’s a battle against the oppressive ideals, a battle which is necessary if those ideals are not going to oppress the freedom necessary to find liberating self-understanding.

Griffith came up with a hypothesis to explain what he had experienced in his own life. Our instincts were like him, in his youth, pointing a finger and accusing people of being selfish and superficial. Our conscious mind had to set off to find a defence for itself. Humanity, as a whole, was responsible for the knowledge gathered by science, though it is Griffith who assembles it and finds the liberating truth, thus being a representation of the start of the problem and its finish.

Griffith’s takeaway is that we are the heroes of existence because we were willing to fight a great battle against ignorance.

I don’t remember how much this meant to me when I was supporting Griffith. I know I saw value in it as a “selling point” when writing about Griffith’s book for others.

When I knew him, Griffith had a way of saying “I love your courage” when he hoped that someone would stop doing something. The theory is that, if egotistical behaviour is part of this grand battle against criticism, then the proper response is to show appreciation for the behaviour instead of criticising it.

When he tried it on me it didn’t have any effect. I could see through it as a strategy, but also receiving praise from others is rarely if ever the motive behind something I do.

So, even if Griffith’s explanation for the human condition is correct, will the perception that we are an heroic species have a healing impact on individuals? Isn’t “you’re a hero!” a bit like a cocaine shot to the ego, which burns out as quickly as it hits? And even if it didn’t, isn’t “I’m a hero” just a cage to live in?

What interests me the most is therapy. How do we become free of the embattlement of the ego?

The most beautiful thing in the world is redemption. A redemption story in film or literature is the most likely to move me to tears.

For as long as I can remember I’ve identified with we human beings at our worst. Griffith in his youth may have looked on at egotistical and superficial behaviour with anger at its wrongness. And most of us will tend to view those who commit atrocities as alien monsters.

My imagination has always taken me inside the destructive individual to see someone who is already imprisoned by a character structure which makes them the centre of their own little hell, which they then inflict on others.

I can imagine that something in the human spirit which corresponds with the condemning innocent that Griffith represented in his youth might be the jailer which locked us in our prisons.

Does his explanation of the human condition set us free?

I can only imagine this being the case if it brings on a cathartic release of the frustration pent up within that condition. Maybe some kind of almighty primal scream aimed at the condemning innocence which was the unwitting source of all the horrendous evil and suffering ever committed or experienced by we humans on the planet earth.