Better Mental Health Part 7: Practical Philosophy, Debilitating Ideologies
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.
(Diogenes also had an excellent response to the chmess-like philosophical wank of Zeno's paradoxes of movement.)
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.'"
In many ways, the documentary has already been made. People are making efforts to shed light on the epistemology being employed to reach these conclusions.
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)
"The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him." ~ Abraham Lincoln, presider over largest mass execution in US History.
Lived Experience
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".
So we can add the specific cognitive distortions to lived experience of: 'Emotional Reasoning' and 'Mind-reading' and 'Magnification' along with cognitive distortions 'Personalization and blaming' 'Jumping to Conclusions' 'Fallacy of Change'
"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.
It is consistent with cognitive distortions: 'Magnification' 'Mind-reading' 'Personalization and blaming' 'Filtering' 'Overgeneralizing' 'Labeling'
"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.
Cognitive distortions Identity Politics is consistent with are: 'Labeling' 'Overgeneralizing' 'Magnification' 'Fallacy of Change' and in particular 'Always being Right' that I'd like to focus on in terms of rationalization.
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.
When Coleman Hughes reports he's 'not sure I could be friends with somebody who takes White Fragility as a recipe for how to live' for one I assume he has read the book, perhaps fragility is a variation of 'the customer is always right' from which, anybody with the lived experience of working in customer service, knows to be a fallacious claim.
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.
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