I have an idea for a detective novel. I'm really proud of my lead character, she's the most brilliant detective in the world, a real genius, with out-of-the-box thinking leading her to breakthroughs in the case nobody else sees coming. Problem is, I'm not a genius, I would really love to devise a case that show-cases her brilliant lateral thinking capacities, but here's what I've got so far: A man reports his wife missing and (spoiler) turns out he did it, after none of the cops think to treat him as a suspect, she wakes up in the middle of the night and is like 'what if the husband did it? He reported her missing to throw us off the scent!'
There's a trope to help me out in my writing aspirations 'Informed Ability' that's where if you yourself don't know how a super-detective would go about a case, or even how a particularly well-thought out criminal conspiracy could work, you just have people claim your detective is brilliant, or that the criminal plan was genius.
Bringing us to Antifa, once Trump started attacking Antifa and building it as one of his more solid 'Law & Order' campaign platforms, I've been dismayed by the number of thinkers whose scrutiny of 'Antifa' has consisted of 'What's Antifa? It stands for Anti-fascist, well I don't like fascism so nothing to see here.'
I'm honestly surprised how many people aren't able to see the problem with this failure to engage. To make it a little easier to spot:
'What's 'Pro-Life'? They are people who support a right to live, well I'm not 'pro-death' so nothing to see here.'
'What's 'Pro-Choice'? They are people who support the right to choose, well I like choices so nothing to see here.'
I guess Antifa coast on a lot of informed attribute. Fascism is bad, therefore the opposite of fascism, anti-fascism is good. Except you probably couldn't define fascism, I can't, largely because fascism is itself vaguely defined.
I have looked into Antifa, tried to give myself a rudimentary understanding of them after reports of their activities tickled my 'they sound like dicks...' bone.
It can be hazardous for me to make these inquiries, as given Antifa's participation in criminal activities, asking a friend to create an electronic paper-trail of their identifying as Antifa might have present or future legal implications.
Though I'm aware of my potential to inject bias, I felt both relief and vindication in the past days when Dr. Todd Grande finally posted a concise summary of Antifa which I'll embed, because it's contents are really the main dish of this post:
Now, Oliver Thorn, proprietor of 'Philosophy Tube' channel strikes me as a sincere and sensitive young man who does do a lot of research and puts a lot of effort into his videos. His channel and content are also well received and reviewed. I've watched enough of his content now though for him to discuss topics and subjects that I have acquired enough expertise (like Economics) to detect that he speaks out of turn. Kind of a 'in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king' or functionally.
I suspect but can't prove, if I were able to investigate his fanbase, the value-proposition of his business model is to - for example - give an uninformed or illiterate audience permission to believe something they want, like 'don't worry, no need to research Marx, I have and it passes the Olly Thorn test.' In much the same way Jordan Peterson, or Christian Apologists in general serve for many the function of 'Don't worry, I've read the Bible and actually it's much more brilliant than it lets on.'
(For example, go to the description and just check out the *impressive* bibliography Olly lists - that I assert serves the main function of impressing upon anyone who cares to check that Olly 'really knows his stuff' and discourage scrutiny. The bibliography includes works like 'Manufacturing Consent' by Herman & Chomsky, 'Leviathan' by Hobbes, 'Mein Kampf' by Hitler, 'On Liberty' by John Stuart Mill and MANY MANY MORE. Yet, having watched the videos, it's not clear as and when or even if, he is engaging with the materials listed in the bibliography, nor am I confident he has read all the works he lists, and while it might be clear that he rejects the thesis of 'Mein Kampf' it is not clear for example whether he rejects or accepts the arguments presented in 'On Liberty'... he lists Dinesh D'Souza's 'The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left' in there, and I have no idea how it relates to the video content; leading me to suspect the function of the Bibliography is to create the impression that watching his video is as good as reading all those books.)
Steering back to the subject of Antifa, the subject at hand, Olly's hour long video reminds me of Thomas Friedman's pro-Globalization book 'The World Is Flat' where after writing a whole book on how wondrously wonderful globalization is, he throws in a sub-heading 'Too many Toyatas' where he mentions as an afterthought, that the economic/lifestyle aspirations of those emerging from poverty in China, India, Brazil etc. to have a home, a car, a flat screen tv... would require 6 planet Earths, rendering pretty much all of the preceding book a complete waste of copy. (In my opinion, 'The World Is Flat' is well reviewed, though it has its critics, unlike Olly Thorn, probably owing to the fact that Thomas Friedman is much higher in public profile.)
My synthesis of Olly's hour long video is this:
1. Fascism and its opposition are fundamentally asymmetrical because while a fascist can decide to stop being a fascist an ethnic Jew can not decide to stop being Jewish, a Gypsy can not decide to stop being a Gypsy, a Homosexual can not decide to stop being homosexual etc. so there is no satisfaction point at which the fascists will go home.
2. Therefore, fascism must always necessarily end in violence, because that which offends fascists have no recourse to not offend them, they offend them by existing. Antifa is morally superior because that which offends them can choose not to offend them through altering their behavior.
3. Therefore, fascism must be opposed by any means necessary.
Then the 'Too many Toyotas' moment arrives:
4. Of course, many fascists don't call themselves fascists or Nazis, they use *secret codes* and/or dogwhistles.
I find it useful when presented with an hour or so of content, to collapse it down to what is functionally being said:
A group that isn't a group (more a meme like 'planking' or 'harlem shake') that reserves unlimited powers to fight fascism where what constitutes fascism is defined by the people fighting it, who are not an organization.
Which brings me back to the concept of 'chmess' which cites Donald Hebb's dictum:
"If something isn't worth doing, it's not worth doing well"
In which case, to be clear, opposing fascism, and other provenly inhumane and bad systems of government is worth doing. Spending an hour explaining the 'philosophy' of a group with no organizational structure and subsequently, no quality control is not worth doing, because there is nobody with the authority to determine whether you are living up to or transgressing the philosophical ideals.
Bringing us to Dr Todd Grande's analysis. I'm pleased to see Dr Grande excise pretty much all the bullshit and look at Antifa as practiced.
Antifa avoid the label of 'organization' and identify as a 'movement' however, they are functionally a 'disorganized' organization, lacking a headquarters etc similar to a criminal conspiracy with shared ideology and intention.
It is predicated on an interpretation of history/assumption that if people had fought the Nazis in the streets, then the Third Reich could have been avoided.
Antifa promote violence on the basis that elites control the government and the media.
'Free speech' does not apply to far-right voices as they categorize this as 'hate speech'
Violence and anonymity are part of their modus operandi, demonstrating a commitment to recklessness and a contempt for the law.
The group resent false attribution of violence and criminal acts, while advocating violence in attempts to deny free speech.
Members lack an understanding of history, Nazism, World War II, Fascism etc. and clear goals.
Possible motive of members is a combination of frustration at injustice and excitement seeking drives - rationalizing their own desire for violence by linking it to a social justice cause.
Antifa are on the decline, owing to their lack of organization.
When Joe Biden in the first of the 2020 Presidential campaign debates' said 'Antifa aren't an organization, it's an idea' he left himself wide open to the retort 'I'd agree, you can write a letter of complaint to an organization, but not to an idea, if you have complaints about Antifa, I suggest you register them as a vote for me.'
Fortunately for Biden, his opponent is Donald Trump who barely understands the office of President, despite holding it for 4 years and whom I have no confidence could prosecute an Anti-Antifa campaign, particularly if he feels groups like 'the proud boys' are doing good work.
By the way, lest one think Dr Todd Grande is a right wing commentator with something against Antifa, he has looked at other 'dickhead groups' in the recent weeks including 'Sovereign citizens' and 'Proud Boys' etc.
Now I want to explore why Antifa a dickhead group based on unjustified beliefs, slip under most people's bullshit detector.
For one thing, using a hueristic of 'if the Republican Party/Fox News are hysterically critical of it, it's probably a good thing.' is a reasonably reliable heuristic.
The other is that I think most people have heard and accepted as a proverbial truth the following analysis:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.
And it is high time this famous poem was questioned - first and most obviously is that the 'me' for which there was no one left to speak for 'me' wrote this poem. Second and less obvious is that this is a slippery slope argument, third and most importantly is that the poem should finish 'then they waged war simultaneously with two large imperial powers and were defeated.'
Which brings me back to Dr Grande's 7th point - Antifa don't appear to demonstrate an understanding of history, fascism, WWII etc. Comedian Andrew Doyle, creator of Titania McGrath 'the world's wokest woman' is good on this point - people don't realize that Antifa failed to stop the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and that there were anti-hate speech laws in place in the Weimar republic and that the same tactics employed today were cited by the Nazis as justification for their increasingly authoritarian rule, much as the Trump-Fox alliance do with the modern watered down versions.
The above video is good. I suspect that by and large, most people think of WWII with a great amount of hindsight bias, thinking that the reason countries like the UK and Commonwealth, USA etc. opposed Germany's expansion was because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust wasn't learned about however until the Eastern and Western fronts started liberating the death camps. It was the world's largest ever imperial power (The British Empire) and the largest Communist empire (Stalin's USSR) trying to quash Hitler's upstart empire. Antifa, were highly ineffective in the whole mix, even potentially counterproductive, as they are now.
Have you heard of Antista? No. It stands for 'Anti-Stalinism'. Well, no problem there, everyone knows Stalin was bad. Except that Antista is something I made up, and could easily describe fascism. They are the thugs that believe Communism inevitably results in violence and thus must be resisted at any cost.
A big part of the problem with getting Antifa the scrutiny and criticism it deserves, and many progressive 'movements' is that people don't understand the concept of 'methodology'.
We're flipping a coin, to decide whether Hitler was bad or good. You and I agree that Hitler is bad. If the coin lands 'heads' Hitler is bad. If the coin lands 'tails' hitler is good. The coin lands tails up, so you and I agree that flipping a coin is a garbage methodology. We try again and the coin lands heads up, so you and I concur that flipping a coin is a sound and trustworthy methodology.
This is a garbage methodology, for evaluating methodology, but I suspect this is what most people do quite absent-mindedly.
Antifa turn up to protest the police as a 'fascist white-supremacist institution' in the wake of yet another death of a black person in custody. Now let's take Antifa as being a model of legitimate positive social change and use them as inspiration for police reforms:
Scrap police badges, ID numbers or other identifying factors. Remove police 'chain of command' and encrypt police communications to prevent scrutiny or oversight. Put police in masks so they cannot be identified. Remove police stations and any other avenues by which to lodge a complaint. Extend to the police the right to destroy property as it does not count as 'violence', scrap all entrance requirements to the police apart from demonstration of a shared ideology etc.
I have no problem with objecting to fascism, but I have a problem with Antifa's methodology. Almost all of it. These are unworkable 'Double Standards' like the coin flip being legitimate contingent on it coming up with the result we want.
To my knowledge, Antifa as an organization is yet to be responsible for the death of anybody, but they are remarkably similar to a movement like 'Boogaloo' in terms of being a loose disorganized movement with no quality control. And Boogaloo do kill people. They also believe they have a monopoly on 'the truth' and particularly who has the right to govern etc.
On this subject of methodology, I'd apply to Antifa UK Labour Politician Tony Benn's Five Questions to Power, and lacking an Antifa member to ask, and also distrusting Antifa to a) understand their own philosophy/ideology/special pleading b) answer honestly. I'll answer to the best of my ability to determine:
Question 1: What power have you got?
Unlimited power to resist fascism, also the power to unilaterally determine who is a fascist upon their own authority.
Question 2: Where did you get it from?
Self appointed, by their own individual interpretation of history.
Question 3: In Whose Interests do you Exercise it?
Everyone's, without consultation or consent. If you don't like it, you potentially qualify as a fascist.
Question 4: To Whom Are You Accountable?
Functionally nobody, we are not an organization, with no constitution or charter. We can No True Scotsman any member.
Question 5: How Can We Get Rid of You?
Education probably. A vote for Trump is likely a vote for Antifa, and vice versa, they have a symbiotic relationship, polarization drives both organizations recruitment.
When Macchiavelli wrote 'the ends justify the means' there is a built in assumption that the means can guarantee the ends, I will leave you with the homework of understanding the terms 'goad' and 'grist' and 'self-fulfilling prophecy' perhaps with some literary examples like Oedipus and Jonah and the Whale where the very efforts to avoid an outcome serve to bring it about.
As per parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6: I'm not a qualified counsellor. Nor am I a qualified philosopher, pertinent to today's post. All below is my opinion based on my experience, which as you can read below can be deleterious to mental health in itself.
In this... I'm going to tentatively say final part, very much the final planned part, I want to look at something that is very difficult to talk about in these contemporary times: Philosophy, and its impact on Mental Health. I know other people share this struggle, because Seinfeld Episode: 'The English Patient' captures this plight so well -
There is critically acclaimed philosophy out there, and there are those of us that just want to enjoy 'Sack Lunch' and there's a big social cost involved, that nevertheless, I believe is not worth the adverse mental health outcomes of sitting through the English Patient.
Imagine you are at a restaurant, a nice expensive one celebrating a successful defense of your doctoral thesis. The culmination of years of effort is being expressed in this nice meal. You order your steak medium-rare, they bring it to you...
...and it is medium.
To your left, your stoic friend says:
'So the steak is not done as you hoped or asked for, you are disappointed? But how bad is the steak, does it sour in your mouth or in your mind? Is the seasoning not fine? The mash not smooth and buttery? the beans not perfectly blanched? Is it not a finer fitter meal than your breakfast? Is a little over, not good enough? You could send it back and have them bring you one more perfect, but the time will be lost then and the rhythm of the meal is lost. Do we your guests await your satisfaction? Or return our meals? Of all the things that could have gone wrong today, is this what steals your triumph? Would you lose the joy of your accomplishment over the error of one chef? You did not get what you ordered, you ordered hope, and were delivered instead a perfectly fine medium steak.'
Sounds pretty good, and as you resolve to enjoy the steak as it is, you catch the eye of your postmodern/critical theorist friend who says:
'your steak is overcooked because the system permits such oppression. The 'doneness' is a social construction and the chef exercised his privileged position to dominate you by defining the construct of medium rare. To accept the meal is to be part of a system of oppression, don't deny your reality, the only moral response is direct action. Come with me and we'll throw that steak at the kitchen wall and demand that the chef be terminated with extreme prejudice to never work again. If they arrest us, then that just proves that the prejudice is systemic and we are obliged to resist the system...'
Now not to trivialize the lofty projects philosophy takes on, this post is looking at attaining better mental health via selection of the prism you see the world through - namely a change in philosophy.
The menu of philosophy is large, like a Chinese restaurant's and 'The School Of Life' Youtube channel is about as good an introduction to a history of philosophy that highlights the best each philosopher or school has to offer better than I can.
I'm just going to look at two, the school I'm most drawn to - Stoicism and the school I'm most morbidly intrigued with - Postmodernism.
My journey to what remains of Stoic writings was kind of arse-backwards - I gravitated to them because they are most easily reconciled with what I found through experimentation was really good for my mental health. I didn't 1) discover the Stoics and then 2) watch my mental health improve, than the reverse I figured out 2) what improved my mental health and then 1) discovered the Stoics.
So I'll focus on the stoics and conversely the Postmodernist and Critical Theorist philosophies because their influence is quite huge right now and the practices they have influenced are popular and I've been interested and on a long journey since 'Trigger warnings' were first a meme that caught my attention some years back.
Important Concept - Insults from reality
The content of this post makes a basic assumption: that external reality exists and our beliefs are constrained by it.
Any conflict between a previously held belief and reality is won by reality. An 'insult from reality' then is when a belief becomes untenable given that constraint. There's a temptation as an untrained philosopher and non-rigorous thinker to delve into the interesting but useless philosophical questions like 'am I brain in a vat?' 'am I in the Matrix?' 'if Elon Musk is wrong why come he so rich?'
In my own case, I well, I think it would be characterized as 'dismiss'... I dismiss these questions as that they simply don't matter - even if Descartes' demon has hijacked my senses, so long as my sensory input has some consistency I can attain knowledge and should avoid insults from 'virtual' reality given that 'reality' is unattainable. I can form rules to live by, in a manner I cant in my dreams, which have no consistency or continuity.
My other assumption is that an insult from reality is ignored at the peril of mental health. To try and put this in an accessible example, think of someone auditioning for 'American Idol' or 'So you think you can dance' who comes in with the belief they will blow the judges minds with their god-given-talent, to then be cut off mid-routine and rejected by the panel of judges.
My assumption is that better mental health outcomes are attained by the contestant that takes the feedback on board and either redirects their energies into other pursuits of happiness, or recalibrates their estimation of their abilities and pursues voice coaching or professional instruction/practice.
The applicant who resorts to an ego-defense rationalizing that the judges rejected them because their level of talent was so high as to be threatening, so too with the show's audience who concurred with the judges, it's all obviously a vast conspiracy fueled by envy for my undeniable talent.
If you are a philosophy graduate student who objects to the casual dismissal of ontological jibber-jabber, know I'm leaning on Dan Dennet's 'chmess' article, and prior to that Diogenes reported response to Zeno's paradoxes of movement, where after Zeno had provided a sound argument as to why it is impossible to get from point A to point B, Diogenes simply stood up and walked out.
Important Concept - Knowledge
Knowledge is a subset of beliefs, most often regarded as a 'justified true belief'.
Again, wishing to avoid a graduate student debate regarding 'what is justice? what is truth?' I like in particular youtuber Paulogia's phrasing -
'Knowledge is adjudicated by predictive power.'
Knowledge are beliefs that accurately and reliably predict things. Basically, you know something when it tracks with reality, instead of insults from reality, your belief generates 'compliments from reality' it says 'good job on that'.
Important to note, if I believed that I could outrun Jerry Seinfeld, that's a belief that might be vulnerable to an insult from reality, but I could sustain this belief and a subsequent belief that it is 'knowledge' by simply never putting it to the test, or alternatively if Jerry 'chooses not to run'.
Onto the meat of the matter:
The last part, part 6, I looked at changing your social environment as an alternative to doing much of the heavy lifting of psychotherapy. This part is looking at attaining better mental health through a change in psychology, particularly philosophy.
I have prefixed philosophy with 'practical' in terms of a philosophy you actually practice. An impractical philosophy might be 'Just do it.' the Nike Athletic Wear slogan, but somebody is unlikely to practice this philosophy if they demonstrate any capacity for hesitation, questioning etc. It might be your 'philosophy' but you don't practice it with any degree of consistency.
Philosophy being the 'love of wisdom' puts in my mind Sam Harris' observation that when giving advice to friends, often our advice is really quite good, we are fonts of wisdom, and that to be wise is often no more complicated than 'following your own advice.' but simple things, like practicing a set of behavioral rules you understand the why and how of, can prove incredibly difficult.
This personal consistency turns out to be a recurring theme in many schools of psychology, or psychological techniques - for instance Jung's analytical school has the concept of 'integration', Carl Rogers sought in the person-centered school to reconcile 'incongruence' and Cognitive Behavior Therapy seeks in particular to identify and relieve cognitive distortions.
Consoling an anguished mind via Philosophy
Then there is 'the Consolation of Philosophy' you might recognize it as the title of one of Alain De Botton's books, but it's a title he appropriated from the Italian classic of prison literature Boethius 'The Consolations of Philosophy' which De Botton explains well in this video.
The video is particularly handy if you like me are described by Mark Twain's quip: 'A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.'
Boethius gives us a perfect juicy example of the mental anguish caused by an insult from reality. He is born into a good family, well educated, wealthy, with a beautiful wife and children and a high office when the king decides instead that he should be arrested, tried and executed for treason.
The most commonly distressing insult from reality is to have the illusion of control shattered. In Boethius' none of his wealth or accomplishments could protect him from getting on the wrong side of the King.
Modern analogues might be getting made redundant at work after 40 years service, or having a market collapse wiping out your retirement savings, or say... a global pandemic putting you under varying degrees of house arrest for two years.
Beyond the illusion of control, another usual victim of insults from reality is the just world hypothesis, but we are loaded with cognitive biases and heuristics, so there's opportunities for us all to cop an insult from reality on a regular basis. Furthermore people regarded as mentally healthy often carry positive illusions that keep them that way - specifically an optimism bias, illusion of superiority (healthy narcissism?) and an illusion of control.
Philosophy provides a menu of options in how to deal with insults from reality, but much like insults from people the options produce varying results. Which is why when I get insulted I choose...
Cynicism and Stoicism
In my adulthood I gravitated towards stoicism, largely because it taught me the least. This may seem like a strange value proposition, but largely I enjoy reading them because they can articulate thoughts good. But Stoicism largely consists of life lessons, as in, things life will teach anyone if they are observant and reflective enough.
Via introspection, rather than mindfulness, the Stoics adopt attitudes that are most resilient to insults from reality.
Stoicism, can be regarded as 'Cynicism lite' with Cynicism's most famous proponent Diogenes the Cynic basically noticing that a dog's life was one to be envied, and most misery came from modern living. Stoics are basically Cynics that are not yet resolved to live on the streets.
I must disclose, I have long suffered from hype backlash - that is things getting popular make me suspicious that I ever liked them - or as Warren Buffet puts it 'We are fearful when the market is greedy, and greedy when the market is fearful' - and a bunch of... frankly speaking... tools, have recently embraced Stoicism. This maybe because grifter guru Tim Ferris keeps attaching himself to stoicism and the like.
What I am continuously forcing myself to learn and accept are that just because something is popular doesn't mean it is bad, and certainly doesn't mean it has been adopted. This rule (popular things are probably bad) though is less prone to insults from reality than a belief that disseminating an idea wide enough will solve persistent problems (if enough people know the right thing, they'll do the right thing).
It is likely that for many stoicism will be a chapter in their lives along with keto diets. I'm sure there are people who have read 'The Obstacle is the Way' who will still lose their shit when their sneakers get scuffed, largely because they adopted 'The Obstacle is the Way' for the same reason they bought the sneakers - to be esteemed by an in-group.
For example Part 1 in this series' subject was Meditation and its limits. Meditation works, it also trended massively (apparently in a way that corelates highly with the introduction of smart phones) and most stoicism enthusiasts, like meditation enthusiasts will produce vanishingly small results to show for their interest in it, because many things are much easier to read about, talk about, even write about, than do.
Practices require discipline, you have to be a disciple, you have to practice stoicism. How do you practice stoicism?
I would reduce the practice of Stoicism to this - a thorough interrogation of how little you need to get by, with the most thorough and rigorous interrogation being essentially homeless or a vagrant. It is the practice of finding ways to be happy with as little as possible.
These are for me the two major, practically demonstrable benefits of Cynicism/Stoicism:
1. You can choose how much you suffer.
2. You can calibrate what upsets you.
This practice, in my practice also involves throwing a bunch of tools out of your toolbox - namely: blame, excuses, denial, wishful thinking etc. It is very much a 'shit happens, now what?' philosophy. Or 'when life gives you lemons, make lemonade' philosophy.
The Golden Rule for example doesn't work when you are a practicing stoic, for example if I turned up to your house and you offered me a straw mat and a glass of water to sleep on, that is a welcome opportunity to practice stoicism - 'Do I really need a queen size bed with throw pillows and a three course meal to survive the night?' The answer is no, however I would never inflict the hospitality I would accept, on my own guests.
Stoicism thus set a fine example as to why the negative affirmation version of the Golden Rule is generally superior to what most westerners think of as 'the Golden Rule'
just to be clear: 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' is inferior to 'Don't do to others what you wouldn't have them do unto you' though as Stoic Seneca the Younger put it 'Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors' suggesting desire as the motivator, rather than aversion.
That's okay though, my favorite Stoic writers are Marcus Aurelius the emperor of Rome and Epictetus the slave. Indeed, one of the reasons I particularly gravitate toward Stoicism and Cynicism are that they are philosophies that beat the condition of slavery - if practiced rigorously, there are examples - Diogenes and Epictetus that could not be diminished in esteem or dignity by being kept as slaves. In Diogenes case, or at least according to the anecdotes about Diogenes, he literally couldn't be kept as a slave.
According to a story which seems to have originated with Menippus of Gadara,[28] Diogenes was captured by pirates while on voyage to Aegina and sold as a slave in Crete to a Corinthian named Xeniades. Being asked his trade, he replied that he knew no trade but that of governing men, and that he wished to be sold to a man who needed a master.
Boethius of course, draws heavily on stoicism to cope with his change in fortunes and await his execution.
If first you rid yourself of hope and fear You have dismayed the tyrant's wrath: But whosoever quakes in fear or hope, Drifting and losing his mastery, Has cast away his shield, has left his place, And binds the chain with which he will be bound.
The other thing about Stoicism, is that it influenced the current standing best tool in the psychological toolbox - Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Again to steer back to tools 'embracing stoicism' I notice that while stoicism has trended particularly among douchey young men, psychotherapy has not not exploded.
I invite you to keep in mind, what I value about Stoicism, and the basis of evaluation are the mental health outcomes. I am sympathetic that some people might interpret Stoicism and its results as masochistic or even psychotic - when you begin to contemplate the best way to respond to being tortured on a rack for example.
"I should prefer to be free from torture; but if the time comes when it must be endured, I shall desire that I may conduct myself therein with bravery, honour, and courage. Of course I prefer that war should not occur; but if war does occur, I shall desire that I may nobly endure the wounds, the starvation, and all that the exigency of war brings. Nor am I so mad as to crave illness; but if I must suffer illness, I shall desire that I may do nothing which shows lack of restraint, and nothing that is unmanly. The conclusion is, not that hardships are desirable, but that virtue is desirable, which enables us patiently to endure hardships." ~ Seneca the Younger.
But the practice though, is more about building a robust inner life, mental health, rather than making your mental health contingent on anything external because Fortuna can crush anything external under her wheel.
In this sense you may notice similarities to Buddhist philosophy, like how desire is the root cause of suffering. And what we call 'Evil' is largely a product of ignorance not malice. I just have to plead ignorance of Buddhist texts as to why I lack the confidence to lump them all together. Buddhism has many things going for it, but also the baggage of mysticism and religion.
It is worth giving a concrete example of this point - some people have calibrated their sensitivity to suffering, such that reading a news story about a penguin that choked on a fish might ruin their day, escalating their misery and others who have to interact with them. Whereas a stoic might have their child diagnosed with leukemia, and bear this insult with far more grace and dignity and reduce both the suffering of themselves and their child.
The difference is definitely psychological, and I would argue philosophical, the first person who despairs at a sad news article has an inner life that sees itself as the intended target of all the world's ills, where the other can imagine no suffering greater than compromising the integrity of their 'inner citadel' by say making the situation of their child even an iota harder than is absolutely necessary.
If meditation is a useful brake that can be applied to our introspection, philosophies like Stoicism, Cynicism and variants of Buddhism could be regarded as beneficial introspection. Cognitive behavior that promotes better mental health.
A Moment to attempt to Steel-Man Postmodernism
I can't do a better job than Alan De Botton's video biography of the ideas of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan etc. He presents the best and most valuable ideas of postmodernism in a manner in which I would welcome it with open arms.
We could criticize the constructive pessimism of Stoicism and the like, by pointing out that it can function as an excuse for the powerful to throw their hands up and shrug when they make life unpleasant for the disenfranchised. That it's easy for people who have it good to say 'just take it on the chin.' when they are throwing the punches.
Though I've alluded to it earlier, it is open to a form of 'Golden Rule' abuse where people who aren't suffering can say to the suffering 'well suck it up, that's what I'd do, I'm a stoic.' And while no part of my attempts to practice stoicism is to cultivate the expectation that others should be stoic, I'd concede this is a likely avenue for fucking up.
If Stoicism can be condensed to a 'shit happens, what next?' Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Critical Theory etc. might be characterized as 'Shit doesn't happen, arseholes make it happen.'
I know I am supposed to be steel-manning these philosophical schools, but in defense of my beloved Marcus Aurelius and to further illustrate Stoicism I'm confident his retort would be something like:
"rememberest that what does the work of a fig-tree is a fig-tree, and that what does the work of a dog is a dog, and that what does the work of a bee is a bee, and that what does the work of an arsehole is an arsehole."
Or
"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The arseholes I deal with today will be stinking, unsightly, gaseous, unclean, infirm, and inconstant. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil."
But if we look to regimes around the world that have embraced what I understand to be the central thesis of postmodernism that truth is a product of power, we can see this working and feasible in Putin's Russia, The Trump-Fox-Murdoch Alliance, Xi's China, where insofar as power can be exercised to insulate the powerful from insults from reality, the truth is functionally, what they say it is. The 'laws' are only what can be enforced.
"Trump is an unreflective beneficiary of every sort of white privilege on offer, from his inherited fortune to his mass-media celebrity to his ability to lie with utter impunity about his career, his finances, and his easily documented record of public statements." ~ Kimberle Crenshaw
A postmodern approach to the situation of Boethius might be articled by Maynard from Tool's cameo in Mr. Show's Ronnie Dobbs sketch:
"Guilty? Yeah he's guilty, but he knows it. We're guilty, you don't know it... so who's really in jail?"
Boethius could in other words deconstruct his prison and console himself that King Theodore is in fact the real prisoner of an ideology promoted by the discourse... or something.
In other words, there's a similar approach at play, the cognitive behavior is the narrative you tell yourself - stoicism, empiricism, pragmatism, skepticism, buddhism, eastern martial philosophies etc form a loose family that tend to try and reconcile that narrative with the insults from reality to relieve the suffering, assuming that constraint - no matter how powerful Trump, Putin or Xi get, they can't ignore the laws of physics.
Postmodern-type philosophies reinterpret (or rather deconstruct) the insults from reality in a way that reduces suffering...
But that's as far as I can go, Postmodernism, Critical theory are descriptive of phenomena - the powerful can to some extent impose their interpretation of reality on our performance within reality. And in some sense it is consoling - it is of some comfort to abdicate responsibility for your suffering onto your antagonists, or take some flattery that you are the victim of a vast conspiracy rather than simply less fortunate.
In this regard, though philosophy has a meaningful distinction from religion, to the question of why history has produced so few Boethiuses, it is probably because the reinterpretation of circumstances is much more readily available than reconciling those insults.
Namely, Boethius could have consoled himself to the very real and determined suffering of losing his life and liberty with a readily available narrative that by accepting Christ as his Lord he was basically just in a waiting room before he goes off to a big-massive-party-where-everybody-has-a-good-time-forever-disco-dancing that is way better than the sum total of everything he had gained and lost in this life.
This clearly to my satisfaction works, and not just for innocents: It is possible for a child-murderer on death row to come to believe that no event in his life was more significant than finding Jesus or Allah, to which murdering a child comes a very distant second and is even a blessing in disguise because it put him on the path to salvation, thus securing him infinite reward, redeemable on death.
This is powerful, and in case one is not swayed by the clear power of belief, I heard an anecdote from an unreliable source about Tibeten Monks sitting and praying and loving the soldiers that were mowing them down with machine gun fire, coming from the presupposition that: to hate their executors and resist thus getting downgraded in their next life, than to love them and score an upgrade for their next life was a time saving exercise in achieving their spiritual aspirations.
That said...
If you think of yourself as left wing, a lefty, progressive, liberal, social justice warrior, or woke etc. chances are you knowingly or unknowingly have subscribed to a product of Postmodernism, or Critical Theory etc.
I personally view the radical left-wing positions as counterproductive to their stated aims, perhaps a manifestation of the maxim 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' ~ George Santayana. While my focus is on mental health, I do wish to flag that I am skeptical that individual's mental health is a necessary sacrifice for achieving the worthwhile aims - in no small part because the sacrifice of mental health is unlikely to achieve those aims. But that's another post.
What I would flag here is the potential to interpret my criteria as circular. Basically, one might notice that if my preference of Stoic philosophy is based on its compatibility with CBT, and my criticism of Postmodern philosophy because it is incompatible with CBT, where CBT is itself based on Stoic philosophy, it might appear I am using Stoic philosophy to justify Stoic philosophy. It is rather, that CBT derived initially from Stoicism, has actually been rigorously tried in the field and it provides quite good mental health outcomes.
This is taken from an article in the Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt sort of at the 'ground zero' of when Postmodern and Critical Theory started to hit critical mass in the colonizing of tertiary institutions:
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment of this ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied nonpharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widely to treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No other form of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broader range of problems. Studies have generally found that it is as effective as antidepressant drugs (such as Prozac) in the treatment of anxiety and depression. The therapy is relatively quick and easy to learn; after a few months of training, many patients can do it on their own. Unlike drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy keeps working long after treatment is stopped, because it teaches thinking skills that people can continue to use.
The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. You start by learning the names of the dozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning; see the list at the bottom of this article). Each time you notice yourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describe the facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations, and then choose an interpretation of events more in line with those facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In time, this process becomes automatic. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way—when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness—they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.
The article goes into some detail of matching many of the specific ideas and concepts widely embraced as literal cognitive distortions.
I want to dwell for a minute though on the last sentence from the excerpt: 'they become less depressed, anxious, and angry.'
These are findings from an experimental process. As I've been writing this post, I've been watching the HBO documentary series 'McMillions' where years after the fact, a compelling tale is told of a systemic fraud being perpetrated - even though the facts on the ground should have raised the alarm-bells like 6 winners coming from the same postcode, or how many winners were East-coast Italian Men. Similarly films like 'The Big Short' and 'Greed' come out years after the fact explaining how the Sub-prime mortgage securities market worked or how someone can buy a corporation by having the corporation borrow the money they would buy its own shares and then selling off corporate assets to repay the loan.
Similarly, based on the efforts I've made to understand where progressive ideas come from, I can see in 20 years time an acclaimed documentary watched by 3% of the population where an aged progressive explains to us:
"So you have a nice idea, like 'what if everyone could have pizza?' it would be great if everyone can have pizza. Now what an activist like me assumed is that if someone from a university was saying 'everyone can have pizza' then they would have maybe looked at data like - population of the world, production of ingredients, energy consumption, lactose intolerance rates, vegan substitutes etc. and arrived at the conclusion that everybody can have pizza. What was actually happening was someone in the University is pouring over the lyrics of 'That's Amore' and watching episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and basically works of fiction that mention pizza. Then they use 10,000 words to write essentially '"pizza" is a social construct, so everyone can have "pizza" (because 'pizza' is whatever you want it to be)'
then like money laundering or something, someone comes along and cites that paper, and then somebody cites that paper to conceal the fact that the 'science' behind the conclusion is essentially a movie or book review. It's called epistemic constructivism where like, fiction is as good as facts because facts are just fictions? Meanwhile, activists like me don't realize the pizza they are talking about isn't the pizza anybody cares about. This was what was informing my anti-poverty activism, it'd be like getting on an airplane and the captain saying 'Our wings are made out of wax, but according to the story of Icarus, so long as we don't fly too close to the sun or too close to the waves we'll be fine, it's all a rich metaphor.'"
I'll flag for your benefit that I'm using the very unscientific and oft unreliable 'availability heuristic' because I don't know of a direct study into the mental health outcomes of people who inadvertently adopt postmodernist and critical theory philosophies via their activism.
What I see though is that among the people visible to me particularly on various social media feeds (facebook, instagram mostly) is that the more someone posts activist content to social media, the more reliably they will also self report mental health issues (it also appears to predict people who will announce they are suspending or deactivating their account citing mental health reasons).
It generally looks like the following:
1/1 Righteous_Dude posts: "Gah so sick of these priveleged Ultimate Frisbee Throwers feeling entitled to hundreds of square meters of community parkland to play their bullshit macho frisbee games. When is society going to value Athletic-Non-Conforming people's self expression through sitting? Sitting makes me powerful!" (270 reacts)
1/2 Righteous_Dude posts: "Another dark day, need hugs and kisses friends. As an Athletic Non Conforming individual I've been struggling with my mental health since my early teens. Every time I think I've got this ghost that haunts me beaten, something sets me off and I spiral downwards again...'
Now, I've had friends that added me on facebook just to run analytics for their phd theses, and respecting that I am never the intended target of either post examples above and only have coincidental access to communities on my social periphery, I'll never go data-mine any contacts to build a robust data set, even if Zuckerberg feels that's A-ok. Besides, 'Stoic' better resembles as a philosophy the descriptor 'stoic' (Compared to 'Cynic' and 'cynic') and I can't exclude the situation that more stoic inclined people simply complain neither about social injustice, nor their mental anguish.
It could be, I don't know, it's not the way I'd bet. Like co-Author of the Atlantic article Greg Lukianoff, I more or less had the same experience when I first came across a meme like 'trigger warning' which is: 'hang on, isn't that the exact opposite of the medical advice?' turns out, it is. My response to much of these fascinating memes has generally been curiosity.
A fundamental difference is that you can subject Stoicism to Empiricism, which is to say you can test it and it produces reliable results - hence you can get a fairly mechanical therapeutic tool like CBT out of it. So too, to my limited understanding, can you take the teachings of the Buddha about the nature of consciousness and subject them to scientific testing. You can know it works.
When I learned in physics the counter-intuitive fact that a ping pong ball and a stone dropped from the same height will hit the ground at the same time, I told one of my friends who couldn't believe it. Intuitively we think heavier objects must fall faster, but you can conduct an experiment in the right conditions and prove it to yourself.
I guess I am arguing here that you can actually test the effects of your philosophy on your mental health - 'How does it make you feel?' A simple place to start in my experience is to stop consuming news. Then notice whether the world becomes a more or less confusing place to you, whether you actually get less informed and whether you feel more or less anxious, angry etc.
Happiness in Slavery?
In the cases of Epictetus and according to legend, Diogenes, the product of their philosophy was quite literally - happiness in slavery.
I just want to be clear that for me the end-goal of mental health or indeed life is an individual maximizing happiness. A case might be that intelligence tends to corelate inversely with reported happiness levels. The smarter you are, the more miserable. Is it then desirable to become less smart? (This was much of the argument for lobotomies.) I would say no.
Standing up to a bully, similarly might have them redirect or redouble their efforts to make your life unpleasant, but that doesn't mean it is worth tolerating the bully and hoping they pick on somebody else.
I have, particularly after returning from a 3 month sabbatical in Northern Italy, adopted an agnostic position towards whether the 'ends justify the means' of something like radical feminism - which is to say, maybe adopting radical feminist beliefs exacerbates the deletorious effects of anxiety and depression, but greater equality between the sexes (and/or genders) is a worthwhile goal.
On such an example I occupy an extremely privileged position - I can adopt a position that 'the patriarchy is out to get women' without it necessarily being 'the patriarchy is out to get me' because I in no way identify as a woman, though I can identify with women.
The understanding I've reached as a lay philosopher is that it is where one cannot liberate oneself from the condition of slavery, (or insults from reality) one should endeavor to liberate oneself from the suffering of slavery. (or to harmonize with reality)
Unpacking the Knapsack
I cannot get onboard with many progressive concepts, or at least, I can't and also continue to practice stoicism. Stoicism is pretty much incompatible with these philosophies.
It is tempting to read this passage from Boethius:
When she [Philosophy] saw that the Muses of poetry were present by my couch giving words to my lamenting, she was stirred a while; her eyes flashed fiercely, and said she, "Who has suffered these seducing mummers to approach this sick man? Never do they support those in sorrow by any healing remedies, but rather do ever foster the sorrow by poisonous sweets. These are they who stifle the fruit-bearing harvest of reason with the barren briars of the passions: they free not the minds of men from disease, but accustom them thereto."
As comforting narratives can provide short term relief (it's not my fault) but over the course of time offer no actual relief from suffering (there's nothing *I* can do but complain).
That Atlantic article I linked to earlier under the subheading of 'Higher Education’s Embrace of “Emotional Reasoning”' walks through many specific examples in quite clear prose of the misalignment between progressive concepts and mental health, how many of them are explicit manifestations of cognitive distortions. i.e. we know this cognitive behavior leads to inferior mental health outcomes that in a mental health context require treating.
I'd rather at this point just switch to a 'listicle' type format of progressive ideas and their paired cognitive distortion.
Systemic
Systems can produce great disparities, depression etc. A big one is a tax system, but also economic systems. Great examples of systemic oppression are practices like Redlining perpetuating poverty, and Negative Gearing which perpetuates wealth.
Functionally though the use of 'systemic' in particularly Critical Theory as 'systemic oppression' is what Chomsky would probably label a truism - bad stuff happens because the system allows it. 'systemic racism' (also referred to as 'White Supremacy') 'systemic sexism' (more oft referred to as 'the patriarchy') and generally 'systemic oppression' are functionally if something bad can happen, evidently the 'system' permits it, therefore the system is bad.
In practice though, and pertinent to the mental health of people who adopt as belief for example - that police killings are sufficient evidence that the police are out to murder innocent people based on the color of their skin, or that the gender pay gap proves the existence of the patriarchy - it is completely consistent with cognitive distortions - specifically 'Personalization and blaming' 'Jumping to Conclusions' 'Fallacy of Change' 'Overgeneralization'
"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil." ~ Marcus (Stoic Emperor of Rome)
"It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself." ~ Epictetus (Stoic Philosopher and Slave)
At first pass, 'lived experience' seems fine even banal. How do I know I ran a marathon? Because I ran a marathon. Functionally though, 'lived experience' is a notion where if you experience something as sexist, for example, it is sexist. It is essentially an incredibly low burden of proof.
Here is a straw man version for purposes of illustration:
For a steel-man example an artist I really admire Ronald Wimberly wrote and illustrated a comic for the Nib called 'Lighten Up' which is definitely worth reading, I recall it here because it applies an example of what I'd identify as a 'lived experience' argument and a stronger case than Uncle Leo's overcooked-hamburger-as-manifest-antisemitism since ethnicity is discussed. Specifically:
"is this racist?" and I know if I'm asking this question, the answer probably is "yes".
"Does anyone bathe in a mighty little time? Don't say that he does it ill, but in a mighty little time. Does anyone drink a great quantity of wine? Don't say that he does ill, but that he drinks a great quantity. For, unless you perfectly understand the principle from which anyone acts, how should you know if he acts ill? Thus you will not run the hazard of assenting to any appearances but such as you fully comprehend." ~ Epictetus
Microaggressions, Dogwhistles etc.
A microaggression is what would have been historically referred to as a 'faux pas' or 'slight' the best case I could make for it is a subjective disparity. Asking a person of an ethnic Asian appearance in the US, Canada, UK or Australia 'where are you from?' seems like banal small talk to an ethnically white person and an insinuation of outsider status to the Asian person etc.
"Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting. When, therefore, any one provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you." ~ Epictetus
"Does anyone bathe in a mighty little time? Don't say that he does it ill, but in a mighty little time. Does anyone drink a great quantity of wine? Don't say that he does ill, but that he drinks a great quantity. For, unless you perfectly understand the principle from which anyone acts, how should you know if he acts ill? Thus you will not run the hazard of assenting to any appearances but such as you fully comprehend." ~ Epictetus
Identity
The behavioral cue I would say is 'As a...' where one deindividuates into a group or collective identity, presupposing that individual member experiences are homogenous. Eg. my experience as a white, left-handed, male artist are essentially the same as Leonardo Da Vinci's, especially when you factor in historical oppression.
Functionally, my experience is that Identity Politics is to Politics as Imaginary Numbers is to Numbers - which is to say, for those that have never covered the subject - basically the same but with a rule suspended in the latters case you have the number 'i' that when squared = -1, and in the former Ad Hominem is no longer a logical fallacy.
Along with 'Ad hominem', Identity Politics premised on shared group identities having shared experience are also particularly prone to 'No True Scotsman' defenses to preserve notions like 'lived experience' for example Masha Gesson, a great historian and author wrote a fascinating article for the New Yorker on 'The Queer opposition to Pete Buttigieg, Explained'
Other examples include Kanye West and Barrack Obama can have their 'blackness' revoked for offering opinions that contradict the notion of a homogenous group identity, namely having divergent views.
"One man prays thus: How shall I be able to lie with that woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? Another thus: How shall I not lose my little son? Thou thus: How shall I not be afraid to lose him? In fine, turn thy prayers this way, and see what comes." ~ Marcus
Fragility
Fragility as near as I can determine, is proven by the presence of defensiveness when a charge of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, privilege etc. is leveled against somebody. Probably the best known is 'White Fragility' in response to charges of privelege and racism, a term coined by Robin DiAngelo.
“In my workshops, I often ask people of color, “How often have you given white people feedback on our unaware yet inevitable racism? How often has that gone well for you?” Eye-rolling, head-shaking, and outright laughter follow, along with the consensus of rarely, if ever. I then ask, “What would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change that behavior?” Recently a man of color sighed and said, “It would be revolutionary.” I ask my fellow whites to consider the profundity of that response. It would be revolutionary if we could receive, reflect, and work to change the behavior. On the one hand, the man’s response points to how difficult and fragile we are. But on the other hand, it indicates how simple it can be to take responsibility for our racism. However, we aren’t likely to get there if we are operating from the dominant worldview that only intentionally mean people can participate in racism.”
Fragility in this context is congruent with a cognitive distortion of 'Always being Right' and 'Fallacy of Change' where given the two motivations for denying a charge:
Because one doesn't wish to face the consequences.
Because one knows oneself to be innocent of the charge.
The second option is discarded. Hence attempts to clarify and reduce a perceived offense, become themselves an offense.
From the mental health perspective though, consider how fragilizing it is, to set your expectations or sensitivity to the point where any friction to having your complaints rectified becomes a form of malicious oppression.
Stoicism itself is a remedy to fragility, but no in the DiAngelo sense of just accepting and working to resolve it:
"If a man has reported to you, that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make any defense (answer) to what has been told you: but reply, The man did not know the rest of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only." ~ Epictetus
"If a person gave your body to any stranger he met on his way, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in handing over your own mind to be confused and mystified by anyone who happens to verbally attack you?" ~ Epictetus
Why Only Quote the Stoics?
All of the above, (and I could find great pleasure in reviewing and sharing more, if you wish the distinct pleasure of the experience I leave the journey to you, envying your chance at discovery, rather than rediscovery - Epictetus, Marcus, Lincoln) I had adopted as influences before the awokening began in the last decade, and it largely kept me out, because so much of the woke philosophy was antithetical.
By contrast, reading the words of the Postmodernist, or postmodern influenced thinkers in particular, is painful, not even necessarily for their content, but for the effort required to discern whether there is any content in the phrase at all, I have written a whole post dedicated to this before, but have yourself a gander at the prose of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Kimberle Crenshaw all influential thinkers in the world right now:
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power." ~ Butler
"If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all." ~ Butler
and almost most insulting of all is Butler's demonstrated capacity to speak plainly wherever I'd be inclined to agree with her:
"There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said “we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge.” It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability." ~ Butler
"[T]ruly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us." ~ Foucualt
"I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist." ~ Foucualt
"After examining the doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework, I will discuss how it contributes to the marginalization of Black women in feminist theory and in antiracist politics. I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women’s experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast." ~ Crenshaw
Here I must confess, much of my attempts to understand the politics and philosophy my friends are subscribed to, at least nominally (they may be impractical philosophies afterall) is to avoid having to actually read writers like Kimberle Crenshaw, Michel Foucualt and Judith Butler as they seem to by accident or design, punish the reader for taking an interest. For me it is a red-flag when somebody appears to deliberately discourage scrutiny - It smacks of a sales technique to me, slap down a 10,000 page end-user agreement to discourage any user from reading it before they agree to the T&C's. Their writing is in stark contrast to Marcus' eloquence writing to himself in Greek a book that was never intended for consumption by anyone but himself.
So please take a pinch of salt with my prejudice and heuristics for how to divide my scarce attention, I really don't want to have to wade through Gender-Troubles in order to satisfy my own critics that I can be confident nothing is there, when few enough of them have read it themselves, in fact my general reaction to progressive memes has not been hostility but curiosity, and my frustration mostly arises from people being unable to source ideas they have subscribed to. In this regard I am actually grateful to those who have made the effort to dig to the bottom of this stuff and provide a synthesis of the nothingness.
Setting aside correlation-causation errors, the mental health outcomes of the current prevailing output of social justice causes (feminism, racial equity etc.) is precisely exactly the single worst things you can do for your own mental health.
Conclusion, Implications for Talk Therapy
That we 'know' what our problem is.
That we 'know' what the solution is.
Run the experiment, does the empowerment promised on the package result in empowerment or increased anger, frustration, anxiety and depression? I return to the powerful therapeutic question: 'How does it make you feel?'
There is nothing passive in my experience of practicing Stoic philosophy. Like mindfulness it aids and abets my ability to choose the best approach to any problem. Namely, I can choose to be assertive, rather than angry, because I can tolerate insult, injury and inconvenience. Things move slower, but forwards, where the other philosophies appear most adept at moving their proponents backward quickly, at an accelerating pace even.
Here I would reveal my prejudice and make the qualitative judgement that somebody who goes to a therapist unsure of why they are distressed is in a better position to attain mental health than somebody who is certain they know the source of their distress. This though, is a guess based belief of mine, not knowledge and it is banking on the fact that people who can identify what is really bothering them accurately are more likely to not go to see a counsellor in a state of distress, than somebody who is essentially admitting to a frank and open acknowledgement of their own diagnostic incompetence.
For me, a self-diagnosis is more likely to be a misdiagnosis, and a misdiagnosis is more likely to lead to an ineffectual treatment plan. Psychotherapy is wrought with misdiagnosis I admit, and seeing two different counsellors might produce three different opinions.
To use a biological analogy, imagine a patient that barges into an Emergency room and says 'I have double vision, I feel a tightness in my chest, nausea... I'm confident I was bitten by a king brown snake GIVE ME THE ANTIVENOM!' versus a patient that simply reports the symptoms. The doctors might explore a number of possible diagnoses, and seek more information to confirm it. Where the patient that insists they were bitten by a snake despite an absence of bite marks, and no recollection of how they would have been bitten by a snake wastes their own and the doctors' time.
I have learned, the hard way, to navigate these difficult conversations by establishing: shared values, differing diagnoses.
Because I disagree with Antifa doesn't mean I am Pro-fascist, and if it does, then it has never been cheaper to be Pro-fascist. Because I disagree with 3rd~4th wave feminism, doesn't mean I want women restored to their position in Ancient Athens, or Byzantium, nor have any resistance to further progress. Because I do not like Black Lives Matter, or 'Defund the Police' as a slogan it does not follow that I am pro-police brutality, pro-racism and pro-militarization of the police.
I'll even concede riot's and protests by people fully in possession of their passions, can serve as catalyst for calmer, surer hands to pen meaningful reforms and in that way are useful. But they also serve as a catalyst to energize resistance, increase division and secure future escalation of the problem wishing to be addressed.
This series has been about mental health. My focus is not on the efficacy, but on the mental anguish a philosophical outlook can inflict upon the self. Philosophy can be demonstrably consoling, it can also be demonstrably damaging.
As per parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5. I'm not a qualified clinical psychologist. Services are available, particularly in Australia to speak to somebody qualified or at the very least trained to deal with people in crisis when it comes to Helpline, Beyond Blue or Social Work that is informed by science. Investigate, explore, but please don't unfurl your sails to catch the slightest breeze of bullshit, even with my opining.
Today I want to introduce a framework I've found incredibly useful for navigating mental health - the biopsychosocial model. It relates to the following cliches:
“You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family." ~ Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
"A man is known by the company he keeps." ~ Aesop, Aesop's Fables
"Birds of a feather flock together." ~ English Proverb
"Opposites attract." ~ English Proverb
Sometimes better mental health is attained through better choices. Instead of doing things that make you feel bad, do things that make you feel good. Instead of spending your time with people who make you feel bad, spend time with people who make you feel good.
Of course, nothing so simple is ever actually simple. I hear, cocaine can make you feel great, and yeah you may at points in your life attract sycophants and/or yes-men who don't challenge any of your stupidest ideas, to your own detriment.
Our attention is ultimately a scarce resource, we can ostensibly be friends with everybody but we can't have a conversation with everybody, we can't sit next to everybody on the school bus, we can give everybody a piece of cake but only one person's name features in 'Happy Birthday to You'. We all inevitably make investment decisions. We often enough, make poor investment choices.
What I suspect is at play is a very powerful human intuition of loss-aversion. Like you are managing a team, one employee competently does her job with little input from you, the other is a dingus and doofus who routinely makes the same erros. Naturally you pour your time and energy into the dingus, worried that they will make you look bad, and we tend not to worry about putting time and energy into the competent employees further growth and development at the risk of them making us look good.
So too, often enough we commit ourselves to relationships, friendships, jobs and even activist causes that make us miserable, feel shit, loath ourselves or perhaps most commonly simply feel insecure in ourselves. Then we double down, we invest more time trying to conquer or overcome.
This creates an opportunity for a counsellor to maintain a simple yet effective discipline we often enough cannot do ourselves in the form of a question that punctuates our chain of reactions to life events:
'How does that make you feel?' (Conduct)
or:
'How do they make you feel?' (Relationships)
These questions if asked often enough can produce a valuable data set, emotions are data and it is in my opinion worth factoring into our decision making, and also since emotions motivate our decisions certainly worth being aware of. Emotions drive decisions that drive consequences that drive emotions. It's a feedback loop, bringing us neatly back to -
The biopsychosocial model, short for biological, psychological and social factor model is for me a useful diagnostic tool for figuring out the stimulus of my mental emotional state. I know in my case I am prone to making attribution errors, and while it isn't perfect, stopping to question whether the traffic is particularly bad today, or whether maybe my mood has more to do with my toothache is worthwhile.
Gabor Mate is my preferred narrator of the biopsychosocial, unfortunately his most comprehensive and succinct video on the matter is no longer on you tube. But from memory he goes through the following false dichotomies and points out they are in fact co-dependent:
You can't separate the mind from the body. (bio-psycho feedback loop)
Hopefully you can confirm this with your own experience. You may notice for example you are more irritable when sick, or that when you are stressed you crave fattier, saltier, sweeter foods and when you gain weight you get more stressed. You may notice that your mind can prevent you from sleeping, just as a lack of sleep effects your mind.
I don't want to spend much time on this, apart from observing that mental health and physical health have a feedback loop. Personally, if I can enjoy good mental health, that's better than being in physical health and unable to enjoy it, indeed that is the truly terrifying thing about mental health, when young physically fit people end their own lives because they cannot face another day of anguish.
I will, before moving onwards just say, my own experience to being presented with this false dichotomy was 'my god why wasn't this obvious to me?' and the answer probably is 'God', or rather religious intuitions such as dualism, where consciousness is treated as a homunculus or soul inhabiting a body but it is separate and special from the carcass it animates.
I've been an atheist for as long as I can remember, but this intuition persists, even when I accept that consciousness is an emergent property of electrical activity in the brain, and even when entertaining weirder notions like panpsychism.
You can't separate the individual from their environment. (psycho-social feedback loop)
For this one, the example Gabor uses is an addict recovering in rehab, and the high rates of relapse. Or recidivism of convicts (though that is harder because often prison is a debilitating process). You disrupt an addict's life with new routines, new activities, new diet, new restrictions and they get sober, they get through withdrawal etc. Then they are discharged from rehab and go straight back into the environment in which they were an addict. And so, if the stressors are reintroduced, or the social norms are reintroduced the addict becomes that much more likely to relapse.
Addiction though, and particularly the kinds of addictions that are debilitating enough to land someone in rehab - as opposed to sugar, caffeine and pornography - are pretty extreme.
For most people though it's useful to conceptualize their mental health as a function of their environment. Hence 'how does that make you feel?' and in particular with social environment 'how do they make you feel?'
(note - it's also useful to conceptualize mental health as a function of things like diet, sleep schedule and body chemistry which can be treated through changes to routines and habits, or altered through medication - I have no experience however of taking medication for my mental health, apart from self-medicating - sugar, salt, fats, Netflix - which for me and most people is not a great pathway to better mental health.)
Of course, after rejecting both of the two false dichotomies you can chain them together into the bio-psycho-social model, indeed vegans probably know well that what you eat can dictate who your friends are, and anybody who has tried organizing a dinner party in a wealthy democracy in the past two decades knows the reverse is annoyingly true also.
So How did they make me feel?
In grade 5 I got left behind. I was abnormal. I didn't want to be older. I was running with the cool kids, and suddenly what was cool, was no longer being a kid. My inability to get over pastimes like tag, fantasy board games (Talisman) and computer games created a schism as the conversation moved towards girls, beer and smoking.
None of which, I'm fairly confident my fellow 10~11 year olds understood. They were aspirational though, seeking esteem by trying to 'pass' as their older siblings. It culminated for me in a confrontation with my best friend as to why I wasn't invited to his birthday party in grade 6. I was given a story about strict limits on numbers, but I suspected it's because I wasn't cool enough. I asked why I was cut, but a kid who'd never been to any of his past parties was invited. In a foolish move, my friend not having an answer said he'd flip a coin for it, a coin that hit the ground and he immediately stamped on with his foot and said 'heads! it was heads!' (I called tails)
Highly suspicious, I suspected a sophisticated 11 year old's conspiracy was afoot. The party came to pass and despite my then unknown tendency toward stoic resolve, I had a cry and confessed to my mum that I was on the outs of my social circle.
The solution to my distress was rather a simple one - change friends. I stopped investing in the losing battle for esteem with the cool kids, and started hanging out with the weird kids who welcomed me into their ranks.
I'd be interested to know if this is a statistic that is measured, my google-fu couldn't produce anything dependable so I shall lean on my highly unreliable availability heuristic - but I'd guess the average Australian who completes up to secondary school in Australia attends on average, slightly more than 2 schools. Like 2.2 schools (or 20% of kids change either primary or secondary schools).
I went to 4 different schools in the one town. My folks had me and my siblings change primary, and then I did my first year at a public school, so beyond migrating within a school from cool kids to weird kids, I actually had to make new friends 5 times before graduating. The only times I was on a level playing field were starting prep and starting year 7, the rest of the time I was the new kid.
But by happenstance, I had been forced to learn through childhood that you can start over rather than keep investing in the environment presented to you.
The saying 'You can pick your friends...' isn't quite true. At best we pick among a narrow sample of possible friends chosen for us, usually by our parents. As such, our social environment is likely to be defined by a set of passive reactions rather than active choices. Our parents shipped us off to school, school influenced our career aspirations, our career aspirations influenced our post school choices (what to study > where to live) that presented us with the pool of people to date.
To me, this is one of the ways to actually contemplate a non-genetic mechanism by which mental health issues can be passed down through generations.
Biopsychosocial gives us three avenues of variables to accomplish better mental health - changes to our biology (diet, sleep, exercise, medication), changes to our psychology (mindfulness, CBT, talk therapy, practical philosophy) or social environment (break up, join a club, relocate, change jobs, change schools).
The first two avenues generally require change to be effected through maintaining a discipline. The third avenue often requires a decision and in this way, I regard it as the 'easiest' way to effect positive change.
You may hear the amatuer diagnosis again and again throughout your life 'they fell in with the wrong crowd.' so we acknowledge a peer group as influential.
The 'fell in' implies a degree of randomness, which the biopsychosocial model can also remove. Indeed Gabor Mate introduced it as 'who we are and aren't friends with is not an accident'.
For example, if you were looking at two potential share houses to rent - one cost $50 a week, and one cost $500 a week. Which one is likely to put you into a social environment where recreational drug use happens any day of the week, and which where recreational drug use forms weekend binges? Which household is likely to consume more weed, and which more cocaine? Which is likely to be a social environment shared with a freegan and which with someone who purchased a Mercedes on finance?
I feel it important to note, for people whose mental health suffers from a relentless pursuit of esteem, that higher rents do not translate to better mental health outcomes. Unfortunately, effecting a change in your social environment for postive mental health outcomes is not as simple as spending more money.
In recent years, my home city has seen a murder of an international student by a 20 year old vagrant, and a porsche driving mortgage broker under the influence of crystal meth taunt a dying police officer before fleeing the scene, running the full gamut of socio-economic brackets.
Personally I am persuaded that genes and environment interact, they both play a role. I reject the notion of tabla rasa, largely because there's too much evidence to the contrary and those that claim or appeal to it overtly or covertly have not made a compelling case to exclude that evidence.
I have never struggled with picking my friends, I did struggle for a good decade with picking partners. Here talk therapies were really useful to me, and particularly the heuristic of 'how do they make me feel?'
This enabled me to become conscious that very often the women I apportioned most of my attention to, made me feel shit, stressed and anxious. The core mystery I had to unravel, through talk therapy, was why I was attracted to the women in my life that made me feel shit, and not attracted to the women in my life that made me feel secure, valued, relaxed.
There's a number of notions and hypothesis I have on that, but unpicking that knot was a lot of work, this is making changes to the 'psycho' part of biopsychosocial. I had to identify patterns, commonalities and most laborious of all, trying to experiment in approaching women who were 'off-type'.
Much much easier than this, I discovered, was to change my environment. This is rather extreme and particularly in a global pandemic not of direct value to many at the moment, but the first step I took in this direction was to go live in Genova, Italy for 3 months.
For me, this was a living lesson in the power of biopsychosocial, because it turns out, when you go halfway around the world into a city where you don't know anyone, don't speak the language, and have nowhere to live - unlike the biopsychosocial environment I was born into, I wound up finding accomodation with the type of person who opens their home up to strangers. I made friends through groups that want to practice their English and teach people Italian, ie. volunteers, and I was introduced to people that share my interests, winding up in art classes.
3 months was too short to settle down and find a family, but by the end of my time there I was meeting women that had I more time, I'm confident I could have dated, healthily and happily. Like a woman who approached me at an exhibition opening I went to to invite me to the independent bookstore she ran, or the woman from an architecture collective that had a stall at a zine fair I attended. I was meeting the people that I meet when I apportion my time and attention to the activities I actually want to do. Unburdened by a largely inherited and accidental social environment I wasn't quite compatible with.
I would also actually meet my next major intimate partner on that trip, albeit on a side trip to Spain, but I came home with valuable skills about how to approach my time and attention better in Melbourne. Less of what I feel obliged to do, more of what I want to do basically - and the people and opportunities follow.
I met my current partner, incidently about 2 months into my year in Guadalajara, Mexico, again facilitated by me picking the kind of household in the kind of district I wanted to live in, my housemate introduced us. It took 6ish months to get together, and we are still together despite Australia's liberal travel bans proving a stalwart obstacle to our reunion.
None of this is to say 'fuck you' to my friends and family in Melbourne, it's just to illustrate that your social environment is probably filled with a bunch of legacy baggage. As a hypothetical example - say you are an actuary, in your mid 40s. You earn a good wage, but struggle with ennui, and one day you bump into a smug deadbeat artist at a party who asks you 'what 10 year old dreams of being an actuary?'
The answer is hopefully, none. But you realize at some point in your secondary education, you stopped thinking, without noticing about what you want to do, and started thinking in terms of what you could and should do. That you didn't pick your school, because your dad sent you to the school he and his father went to. That school was affiliated with a residential college you followed your peers to, where you absorbed their social habits of going out drinking. Full time work caused you to back off how much and how often you drank, substituting quantity for quality. Which is where you wound up taking a wine-tasting course and joining a wine club that naturally led you to attend a wedding at a winery where you met your wife in your early 30s.
'I wanted to be a truck driver when I was ten.' you tell the deadbeat artist, and yeah okay, I wanted to be a baker. It's okay for dreams to change as you become wiser to the world, but probably from a priority of mental health - not the criteria. Don't become a truck driver because your 10 year old self thought it would be fun, but by all means at 18 do something you want to do, pick from the options of things that you want that best allays your fears of being destitute, but don't switch your criteria to the qualification you can obtain with the marks you have that pays the best.
An Important Caveat
Now important caveat - much like 'fake it until you make it', Aesop's 'A man is known by the company he keeps' and it's inverse 'A man is known by the company he avoids' (Gordon Livingston M.D.'s variation) should not be seen as an invitation to participate in such contemporary cultural phenomena as ghosting, cancel culture, ostracism etc. These practices are I feel by this stage well researched and approach being certified 'objectively awful'.
To back peddle to assertive communication - people have a right to speak, a right to listen and a right to make repairs. Ostracism and its variations take away all three.
That said, attention is a limited resource, we lose touch with people frequently and think nothing of it. The big difference between losing touch (fine natural) and ostracism (also natural, violent) is that losing touch is passive where ostracism is active. Losing touch is by definition mutual, ostracism is sustained unilaterally.
If you have friends that are making you miserable, and you've never communicated to them the effect their conduct has, I believe they are best served by getting this feedback, and having an opportunity to adjust. The 'I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas' is not justification for ghosting out on your friends. Sure, if your husband is beating the shit out of you and you fear for your life, by all means tell him you and the kids are going to the shops to get some milk and run to a women's shelter.
Generally though, people to avoid I defer to Gordon's list in his book 'How To Love' you want to avoid the major personality disorders, you want to avoid people with substance abuse problems, you want to avoid the sub-clinical category of people colloquially known as fools. But chances are if you are entagled with an individual or embedded in a culture, the problem you have with them is shared by many and it's worth giving people an explanation before cutting them off, otherwise you are effectively rendering them unable to respond for the next relationships they form.
But avoiding is an extreme, generally it's just about who you invest your time in. If you look around and think 'I spend 10% of my time with the really nice people and 90% of my time with the really mean people' it can be the simple act of just reversing those ratios, or rebalancing them. Alternatively, it can be the choice to stop going to friday night drinks and start going to the Sunday crossword club.
WWIDIIMTT? (What Would I Do, If I Moved To Toronto?)
This is the exercise you can do, you can get ready in fact for whenever you are let out of lockdown. I just picked Toronto Canada, because I imagine it's similar enough to Melbourne and wouldn't lead to very literal interpretations of the exercise like maybe picking Cairo would 'well... first I'd have to learn Egyption, or... is it Arabic?'.
While by moving to Genova and Guadalajara I forced myself to do this for reals, I made this exercise up to point to perhaps an unconsciously felt obligation to maintain what may or may not be working for you in lifestyle.
In many ways, this was what I was hoping for in terms of a pandemic mental health windfall - the mass habit disruption. Prolonged social isolation is going to wear on everyone eventually, but the initial disruption I am still curious as to whether anybody capitalized on being unable to socialize in ways that were toxic for them - a basic example being people who's primary motivation for spending their paycheck on cocktails every Friday was FOMO.
Now, if by happenstance upon hearing Toronto your thought immediately goes to 'Well I better visit my Aunt, my mum will probably want me to take her some Vegemite...' PICK ANOTHER HYPOTHETICAL CITY
The underpinning assumption of the biopsychosocial modal is that doing activities you want to do will facilitate meeting people you want to meet, and in turn this will relieve the need for much consumption behavior that you might use to self-medicate for the stress your current environment induces.
Another way to look at it is to think on the metaphor of 'baggage'. Imagine just in the limited domain of wardrobe that you wear a white t-shirt and gym shorts for comfort on your long haul flight, and arrive at baggage claim to discover your luggage has simply ceased to exist, they offer you $3,000 compensation to replace your lost items - would you buy the same wardrobe? Or would you say, take the opportunity to buy a suit so you could apply for the job you actually want, or buy more outlandish clothes so as to better express who you are, rather than your existing wardrobe that consists of clothes largely gifted to you by people with more conservative tastes.
Just so this applies to almost every aspect of our lives, if you had no friends in a new city, do you join a futsal league to meet people? Now do you wind up making friends with fit active people actively doing something for their mental health, rather than the sedentary work colleagues that got you into the habit of after work drinks?
Not to rag on after work drinks, or socializing with office workers, there are many benefits to it. It's just probably the thing you don't or shouldn't value is the drinking part of after work drinks. Now imagine the effort required to lobby your work colleagues to play futsal instead of working a bar stool.
This is the output of WWIDIIMTT? You might identify that freed of the baggage of your habitual social life you passively go along with, you would build a social life by design by joining a futsal league instead. Then you just make that change, without moving to Toronto.
One of the first things I did upon returning from Genova, was lookup on Meetup.com an Italian-English language exchange group in Melbourne to join, so I could in effect be the other half of what I'd done while in Italy. Unfortunately Italian groups in Melbourne at the time appeared to consist entirely of groups for ethnic Italians to meet other ethnic Italians in Melbourne so they didn't have to marry non-Italians. Not having the resources at my disposal to start my own language exchange group, that particular avenue didn't pan out for me.
But moving into an art studio, joining life drawing classes etc did.
Even in a pandemic, you are probably still making passive habitual choices as to your social environment - who you interact with on facebook, who you chat with on messenger, how you flout the lockdown rules. There are people drinking themselves through lockdowns and watching the news, and there are people forming online communities undertaking creative endeavors.
It's all a matter of asking 'how does it make you feel?' collating that data and then experimenting.
One final thought, is that another source of data is your physical health. In fact when I was first enamored of biopsychosocial I began to make very unscientific correlations between couples who were in toxic relationships and couples who gained copious amounts of weight once they started dating. It of course ignores all the unhealthy relationships vegans are prone to get into. But I still find this heuristic a beguiling idea founded on the biopsychosocial model. I think it will generate both false positives and false negatives, but I contrast that with couples whose physical health improves dramatically after they hook up.
In the next part, I feel it's time to address practical philosophy and ideology.
