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‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about them.’
Ellis, following the Stoics, suggested that we can change our emotions by changing our thoughts or opinions about events.
Most people, he suggested, sleepwalk through life, never asking themselves what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.
I placed too much value on the approval of other people (which Plato suggests is the classic sickness of liberal democracy)
In the words of Aristotle: ‘It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things only so far as the subject admits.’
Bhutan is a tiny, monocultural, semi-literate, mainly rural country with a population smaller than Birmingham, ruled by a king.
‘There is no time for playing around. You have been retained as counsel for the unhappy. You have promised to bring help to the shipwrecked, the imprisoned, the sick, the needy, to those whose heads are under the poised axe. Where are you deflecting your attention? What are you doing?’
approached every problem I encountered, whether it was failing an exam or a disease or getting shot down and shot up the same way: I would fix what I could fix and I wouldn’t complain about what I couldn’t.’
‘Some things are up to us, and others are not.’
‘The robber of your free will does not exist.’
A 2010 study by the Institute of Psychiatry of the mental health of British soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan found that the main cause of emotional suffering among the troops was not battle-related. It was getting phone calls from their wives, in which their wives complained about problems back home – problems which the soldiers were powerless to do anything about. The feeling of being out of control and powerless to help one’s loved ones is more demoralising than any Taliban bomb.
‘It is critical for leaders to remain calm under pressure and to expend energy on things they can positively influence and not worry about things they cannot affect.’
We have the power to choose our response even in situations we have little control over. Between the stimulus and the response lies a space, and in that space lies our freedom and power.’
“Vex not thy spirit at the course of things, they heed not thy vexations.”
‘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.’
On the other hand, Stoicism has a very optimistic world-view, because Stoics, like the other schools of the Socratic tradition, believe that nature has blessed us with consciousness, reason and free will, and these blessings mean we can adapt ourselves to any circumstance to achieve happiness here on earth.
‘Soldiers need a philosophy that enables them to suffer, and not even to see it as suffering, but instead as a form of service. I have to think that my life is not as important as preserving the country. I have to believe that, and if I don’t, I’m playing at being soldier. If your philosophy doesn’t work in the most dire circumstances, then abandon it now, because it’s a Starbucks philosophy.’
if someone chooses to put their life at risk, knowing the risks, in order to help other people, then that’s not a tragic death, it’s a heroic death. Those 343 firemen died heroically.
‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.’
‘Let the soul which is happy with the present learn to hate to worry about what lies ahead.’
I enjoy Grand Theft Auto as much as the next man, but any philosophy which rates it above Milton or Wordsworth shows ‘a deficiency of imagination’, as John Stuart Mill said of Bentham.20 The value of these writers is that they show us the complexity of human experience, and the beauty of other colours beyond the shiny yellow of happiness.
I think war, and the fact we kill each other over border disputes and who’s got the best god, is an absolute abomination.
‘God is day night winter summer war peace enough too little, but disguised in each and known in each by a separate flavour.’
There are four common responses to the questions of how and why we have consciousness. Firstly, a hardcore physicalist might reply that consciousness and free will are illusions.
The second explanation of the how and why of consciousness is functionalist. Consciousness is a physical process which we don’t yet fully understand, but which evolved through natural selection, because it serves the genetic goals of survival and reproduction.9 But that explanation seems to me like using a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works to hammer in a nail, or using a Ferrari to drive to the shops once a week to pick up the groceries. Why do we have such a powerful operating system for such a basic task? Ants survive and reproduce very well without the capacity for poetry or philosophy.
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A third theory, which has been particularly well expressed by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, suggests that consciousness is a by-product of some adaptive features of our brain. Our thinking powers developed to make us better able to survive, but as a side effect we also became capable of imagining our death, and started to ponder the meaning of life. This led to religion, philosophy, and much deep soul-searching, which might be satisfying for us, but is of no consequence to the universe. Human consciousness is really a fluke.
This fluke gives us the unique ability to rise above our genetic programming, challenge the tyranny of our selfish genes, and to reason freely about our goals and the meaning of life.12 So there is a human point to philosophy – it allows us to resist our evolutionary programming and to find earthly happiness in wiser and better ways. But there’s no cosmic point to philosophy.
Another way of approaching the ‘how’ of consciousness is that it is some form of matter, force or even dimension that quantum physics doesn’t yet fully comprehend, but which will turn out to be of central importance. Perhaps consciousness will eventually be integrated into a genuine ‘theory of everything’ along with space, time, gravity, mass and energy. But at present, our physics is simply not adequate to the task.
‘There are a hundred billion galaxies, each of which contain around a hundred billion stars. Think how many kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe.’
Some things are up to us, and others are not.’
‘it’s not what happens to you but what you do about it’;
‘Eat not the heart’
‘Tear not to pieces the crown’
‘Never sing without the harp’
‘What you resist persists’,
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It has to become absorbed into our automatic habits of thinking, feeling and behaving. Otherwise, your pre-frontal cortex may be very wise and philosophical, while the other 95 per cent of your personality is just as incorrigible as ever.
Ellis wrote: ‘You can positively tell yourself, “I can accomplish anything I want!” But, of course, you can’t. You can enthusiastically think, “Everything will happen for the best.” But alas, it won’t … Accentuating the positive is itself a false system of belief, since there is no scientific truth to the statements that “Day by day in every way I’m getting better and better.” In fact, this kind of Pollyannaism can be as pernicious as the negative claptrap which clients tell themselves to bring about neurotic conditions.’13
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.’
‘The robber of your free will does not exist.’
‘I’d just like half an hour alone with him,’ murmurs another, ‘in a hot-tub.’
Academic Sceptics argued that, while we can never ‘know’ reality, we can at least construct tentative hypotheses about it. The best we can hope for is an educated and provisional guess that a belief is accurate, unless proven otherwise. We can act according to our tentative hypotheses about reality, while continuously doubting those hypotheses, thereby resisting the foolish dogmatism of the Stoics, Pythagoreans, Epicureans and other schools.
It’s not only empty and meaningless – but it’s empty and meaningless that it’s empty and meaningless. And in that there’s an enormous freedom.
According to CBT, what typically causes emotional disorders is overconfidence in our dogmatic interpretations of the world. A depressed person is sure things will go wrong. A socially anxious person is sure other people dislike him. We can learn to question our own rigid dogma, and open up to new ways of interpreting our experience.
From the perspective of the UK, Dawkins and his ilk look like quaint historical re-enactors fighting battles long since won. They don’t seem to me to be fighting the critical battles of our time: climate change, for example, or the moral crisis in capitalism.
The Occupiers were exhibiting an economic system based on sharing and gifts rather than property and capital. They were exhibiting a lifestyle based on imagination, satire and play, rather than lives spent sitting at a desk watching the clock. And they tried to show how little one needs to be happy: a piece of pavement, a tent, a sleeping bag, and some friends. How’s that for austerity measures?
‘One of the big things the Situationists talked about was détournement – it’s a French word that means taking an existing situation, and in a deft, judo-like move, creating a feedback loop that destroys it. So you’re a culture jammer and you’re facing Nike, which is a massive corporation that has all kinds of power on its side. But because you’re fleet of foot, and nimble, you grab them and throw them on the mat with a beautiful, aesthetic, intellectual tour de force that somehow outwits them.’
His father was a banker, and either he or Diogenes was accused of ‘defacing the currency’ of Sinope, which led to Diogenes being thrown out of the city. He arrived in Athens as an exile, under a cloud of scandal, but he embraced his notoriety, became a radical philosopher, and declared it his mission in life to ‘deface the currency’ of civilised conventions.
It’s our inherent sense of shame and our desire for public approval that enables civilisation to exist. We internalise the gaze of others, and this internal spectator becomes all-powerful over us.
‘We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that don’t last on people we don’t care about.’
