Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

There’s pretty much always been a tacit assumption that our emotions cause all our problems, and that our reason must swoop in to clean up the mess. This line of thinking goes all the way back to Socrates, who declared reason the root of all virtue.9 At the beginning of the Enlightenment, Descartes argued that our reason was separate from our animalistic desires and that it had to learn to control those desires.10 Kant sort of said the same thing.11 Freud, too, except there were a lot of penises involved.12 And when Egas Moniz lobotomized his first patient in 1935, I’m sure he thought he had just discovered a way to do what, for more than two thousand years, philosophers had declared needed to be done: to grant reason dominion over the unruly passions, to help humanity finally exercise some damn control over itself. This assumption (that we must use our rational mind to dominate our emotions) has trickled down through the centuries and continues to define much of our culture today. Let’s call it the “Classic Assumption.” The Classic Assumption says that if a person is undisciplined, unruly, or malicious, it’s because he lacks the ability to subjugate his feelings, that he is weak-willed or just plain fucked up. The Classic Assumption sees passion and emotion as flaws, errors within the human psyche that must be overcome and fixed within the self.