More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robin Ince
Read between
June 15 - June 19, 2020
To be self-conscious is to be aware of the perpetual possibility of being ridiculous.
Many of the psychological problems of our existence come from our fear of being seen to be ridiculous. The effort of keeping ourselves together is often what pulls us apart.
The biographical details of childhood can rarely be ignored these days, and it’s the rise of psychotherapy and neuroscience that has made our childhood inescapable. We’ve all been given an alibi for our lousy behaviour.
It’s easier to focus on being creative if you are not preoccupied with socializing with popular people. Sitting on the edge is a better spot from which to observe than being hugged in the middle.
Many geneticists no longer see the fight of who we are, and what we become, as nature versus nurture. Your genes may change the odds, but they do not tell you who will win and who will lose. The culture around you, the environment, your diet, love – or the lack of it – will all go to shape you. Your story does not end with cutting the umbilical cord. Neither nature nor nurture reigns supreme.
‘The only things stopping me today are: genetics, lack of will, income, brain chemistry, and external events.’
My general rule is if a stranger approaches you and asks you if you’ll take part in a scientific experiment, say, ‘Yes’. At the very worst, you’ll have an adventure and a story to tell about how you ended up having your left arm replaced with a vacuum-cleaner hose, or your mouth sewn onto someone else’s anus, after overly trusting someone who appeared scientifically official.
‘The stuff that’s going on in your mind, that you’re not telling people about but which I can decipher, is a critical component of comedy.
we normally pay attention to how we’re sounding when we speak, but fear can disrupt those mental processes, meaning that we revert back to our ‘default’ voice.
Life can be lively enough without walking into something specifically designed to be lively.
The problem with being a multitude, as Walt Whitman described us, is that yeses can be nos; nos can be maybes; and changing days can change who you think you are.
We want to be just wonky enough to be interesting, but not so wonky that our life is unbearable or painful. We want all the perks of abnormality, with none of the pain.
When I am lost in the moment, even for a moment, there is a critical little homunculus on my shoulder, whispering in my ear and saying, ‘Look at you, lost in the moment – pathetic. What do you think everyone is thinking? I bet they’re thinking, “Look at that old man who’s lost in the moment. We should alert someone, he looks both foolish and suspicious.”’ As quickly as I am lost, I am found again;
Inside my head is a very active panel of critics, the ghosts of a late-night TV arts discussion show, who might for example scrutinize all the different ways that I may have been misinterpreted while attempting small talk. Or they will explain how a casual compliment could have been interpreted as a flirtation or an advance. They are always there, nagging and critiquing.
The human has a life of the mind, and it can be really bloody annoying as a place of self-doubt, unnecessary fear and paranoia.
Charles Fernyhough thinks that if we could see other people’s thoughts, it would be like Wittgenstein’s lion trying to have a conversation with a human. In Wittgenstein’s philosophy, ‘if a lion could speak, we could not understand him’. His theory is that a lion’s existence is so different from a human being’s that, despite a common language, we would not be able to translate the meaning and intention of the lion’s words. They would not make any sense to us, because we would not be able to find common grounds of communication.
But comedy thrives on the repression that we all feel we must engage in, to survive in our social society. Again imagine – if you can – voicing all your day-to-day thoughts as and when you have them. If we could all express ourselves freely and without fear of condemnation, shame and embarrassment, then comedians would probably be out of a job.
One friend of mine found out that his son’s imaginary friend was Adolf Hitler. In his son’s defence, he would often argue with Hitler and refused to play with him if he didn’t ‘start to be nicer to the Jews’. Thankfully, as an adult, the son shows no signs of wishing to annex Poland or create a race of Aryan supermen.
A wildly creative and active imagination can be viewed with suspicion and fear. It is as if society does not want people to think of the impossible or improbable and give flesh to its bones. It is not practical. What is the use of such nonsense? Those with proper control of themselves will keep their imagination focused on useful concrete (literally) things – such as building bridges, barns or gyratory systems.
If anyone questions the sanity of your actions, just say it is art.
‘If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done,’ wrote Wittgenstein,
Boredom and dull tasks are a reminder that we could be doing something better with our time; they act as a contrast and incitement to fill our time more imaginatively. Boredom leads to daydreaming, and daydreaming can lead to creation.
‘If the audience knew what they wanted, they’d be the artist.’
There is a toxic satisfaction that can be found in whining about others while doing nothing yourself.
Sometimes, if you want it, then it’s up to you to make it. Build it and they may not come, but at least you have built something.
Stand-up is about creating a persona and having these sorts of questions in the background. It is a chance to create who you want to be or wish you were, or just to exaggerate what you think you might be. And yet, isn’t real life like that, too? Don’t we all adapt our behaviour to fit the circumstances? Is that what we are doing when we use expressions such as ‘I have my “being a dad” hat on today’? Whose character is so consistent that they are the same with their drinking friends as they are with their grandmother? Language, accent and demeanour are all open to constant change.
projecting existential angst onto people who were just having a wondrously bacchanalian night out – the sort of night that was never accessible to me because I was always anxiously ruminating so much?
Perhaps, on a sliding scale of troubled personality, a mark of your own confidence and sanity is how much you can stick to who you think you are meant to be, whatever the company. A party is a good place to watch who has the strength of personality to be only one person.
A mark of how much you can trust someone to be who they are is seeing the disparity between their behaviour towards the least important person in the room and the most important person.
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, ‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’
Society expects, and indeed must expect, every individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly as possible, so that a man who is a parson must not only carry out his official functions objectively, but must at all times and in all circumstances play the role of parson in a flawless manner . . . each must stand at his post, here a cobbler, there a poet. No man is expected to be both.2
Jung wrote that the shadow is ‘the thing a person has no wish to be’.3 Failure to acknowledge the shadow can be at the root of our problems when we communicate with others.
If comedians really did release the full slavering id, the comedy clubs would soon be closed down under laws of public decency, gross impropriety and health-and-safety regulations, but there are nights when you might catch a brief glimpse of the stocking of the id.
I have read just about enough about a large enough number of things to be wrong about nearly everything, but as long as I am in a room with people who don’t know I don’t know, I can look like I know something.
The first thing to know about impostor syndrome is that it is an impostor itself. It is not a real syndrome, it is somewhere between a mood and a malaise. Basically, it’s where the sufferer frequently believes that, despite evidence to the contrary, they are an impostor or a fraud.
In Clance and Imes’s paper, they noted three defining features of impostor phenomenon. First, the belief that others consider you to be better than you are. Second, that the discovery of your true worth is just around the corner. Third, that when you have achieved success, this has been due to outside factors such as good fortune, rather than your innate abilities.
As the counterbalance to Impostor Syndrome there is Expert Syndrome, an increasingly prevalent condition, where people are quite sure they know what is best for you and the world, despite having no expertise or knowledge on the matter whatsoever. In psychology, these conditions are all part of what is known as the Dunning–Kruger Effect, where people fail to realize their level of competence, which can be loosely summed up as ‘the less you know, the more certain you are that you are right’. Bertrand Russell, on whom in my impostor way I once presented a documentary, summarized it as: ‘the
...more
We judge ourselves on the terms of our own inner monologue, and others by their outer appearance, which will never be an equal match.
I wonder if the secret of the social human is to tactfully conceal the fact that you’re screaming on the inside. Or am I just projecting my scream onto others?
I often feel self-doubt, but I don’t deify others. I know others have limitations, too, just maybe different ones.’
I’m the Descartes of anxiety. I panic, therefore I am. Richard Lewis
The nagging Just me, then in our heads is often what stymies our social conversation. When we are at events with strangers – at a school do, for example – where pleasantries and niceties are necessities, outrageous or impulsive thoughts sometimes creep towards our mouths, with the words even forming on our lips before at the last minute being hastily turned into a cough. We think, Don’t say that – it’s probably only you. Stay on safe ground.
Impulsive thoughts are sometimes called the ‘imp of the mind’, or even the ‘imp of the perverse’, after a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.
‘You warbling cock canker, shut your bubonic beak gash.’
The power of the mind to create false jeopardy is the shabby gift that comes with self-consciousness and imagination.
After all, what is the harm in trying to make an individual’s life less stressful through a single simple action? Human experience is the frequent chaos caused by the unexpected and unpredictable, from birth to death, and comedy is meant to be about making people happy, so what’s the problem with occasionally making things less unbearable? What’s so funny about love, peace and understanding? If we can develop a little empathy, why let those things shrivel and be ignored?
Eric Hoffer’s aphorism, ‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.’
It is easy to be an -istic nowadays, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Must humour have victimless punchlines? Is the fault with the teller or the listener? Have comedians become more offensive, or audiences more sensitive? Is it because the news media has become more opinion-based than event-based, so that the lack of foreign correspondents has meant that Twitter has become the foxhole from which to observe the flying shrapnel?
Offence is the collateral damage of free speech.
