Thinking about ourselves – our feelings, our past, our desires and our hopes – is
a hugely tricky task that most of spend a good deal of effort trying very hard to avoid.
We keep away from ourselves because so much of what we could discover threatens to be
painful. We might find that we were, in the background, deeply furious with, and resentful
about, certain people we were only meant to love. We might discover how much ground there
was to feel inadequate and guilty on account of the many errors and misjudgements we have
made. We might find that though we wanted to be decent, law-abiding people, we harboured
fantasies that went in appallingly deviant and aberrant directions. We might recognise
how much was nauseatingly compromised and needed to be changed about our relationships
and careers. We don’t only have a lot to hide, we are liers of genius. It is part of
the human tragedy that we are such natural self-deceivers. Our techniques are multiple
and close to invisible. Two are worth focusing on in particular: our habit of thinking too
much. And our proclivity for thinking too little. When we think too much, in essence,
we are filling our minds with impressive ideas, which blatantly announce our intelligence
to the world but subtly ensure we won’t have much room left to rediscover long-distant
feelings of ignorance or confusion – upon which the development of our personalities
nevertheless rests. We write dense books on the role of government bonds in the Napoleonic
wars or publish extensively on Chaucer’s influence on the mid-19th century Japanese
novel. We secure degrees from Institutes of Advanced Study or positions on editorial boards
of scientific journals. Our minds are crammed with arcane data. We can wittily inform a
dining table of guests who wrote the Enchiridion (Epictetus) or the life and times of Dōgen
(the founder of Zen Buddhism). But we don’t remember very much at all about how life was
long ago, back in the old house, when father left, mother stopped smiling and our trust
broke in pieces. We deploy knowledge and ideas that carry indubitable prestige to stand guard
against the emergence of more humble, but essential knowledge from our emotional past.
We bury our personal stories beneath an avalanche of expertise. The possibility of a deeply
consequential intimate enquiry is deliberately left to seem feeble and superfluous next to
the supposedly grander task of addressing a conference on the political strategies of
Dona Maria the First or the life-cycle of the Indonesian octopus. We lean on the glamour
of being learned to make sure we won’t need to learn too much that hurts. Then there is
our habit of thinking too little. Here we pretend that we are simpler than we really
are and that too much psychology might be nonsense and fuss about nothing. We lean on
a version of robust common-sense to ward off intimations of our own awkward complexity.
We imply that not thinking very much is, at base, evidence of a superior kind of intelligence.
In company, we deploy bluff strategies of ridicule against more complex accounts of
human nature. We sideline avenues of personal investigation as unduly fancy or weird, implying
that to lift the lid on inner life could never be fruitful or entirely respectable. We use
the practical mood of Monday morning 9 a.m. to ward off the complex insights of 3.a.m.
the previous night, when the entire fabric of our existence came into question against
the backdrop of a million stars, spread like diamonds on a mantle of black velvet. Deploying
an attitude of vigorous common sense, we strive to make our moments of radical disquiet seem
like aberrations – rather than the central occasions of insight they might actually be.
We appeal to the understandable longing that our personalities be non-tragic, simple and
easily comprehended – so as to reject the stranger, but more useful facts of our real,
intricate selves. A defence of emotional honesty has nothing to do with high minded morality.
It is ultimately cautionary and egoistic. We need to tell ourselves a little more of
the truth because we pay too high a price for our lies. Through our deceptions, we cut
ourselves off from possibilities of growth. We shut off large portions of our minds and
end up uncreative, tetchy and defensive, while others around us have to suffer our irritability,
gloom, manufactured cheerfulness or defensive rationalisations. Our neglect of the awkward
sides of ourselves buckles our very being, emerging as insomnia or impotence, stuttering
or depression; revenge for all the thoughts we have been so careful not to have. Self-knowledge
isn’t a luxury so much as a precondition for a measure of sanity
and inner comfort. .
If you liked this film, please subscribe to our channel and click the bell icon to turn on notifications.