Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.
Frederich Nietzsche
The antidote to falling for your own s**t is not about lying yourself down on a couch and psychoanalyzing your thoughts. The rational mind created the problem, and, to paraphrase Pascal – it has its reasons that the heart knows not. To understand where all the sh*t bubbles-up from we need to understand how the mind works. And that is best explained in a few words by a groundbreaking neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio. He says:
We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.
António Damásio
Feelings precede thought. It doesn’t sound right, because you can think some dark or anxious thoughts and begin to feel angry or stressed. Plus, most of the time, the body doesn’t just randomly generate feelings that the mind then interprets. It can, for example, we can have our vestibular system knocked out of whack or stub our toe and whatever thought that arises is a direct consequence of the bodily sensation. However, much of the time, we perceive something outside, real or imagined, such as the deadline, and the body automatically releases stress hormones, then the mind senses the physiologic change and interprets this as stress. And, as many researchers have outlined, Stress hormones are also action hormones, they ready you for flight or fight. Bruce Springsteen was once asked if he still gets nervous before shows. His response:
Just before I go on stage, my heart beats a little faster . . . my hands sweat a little . . . my legs go numb as if I’m getting pins and needles . . . and then I get a tight feeling in the pit of my stomach that starts to spin round and round . . .When I get all those feelings, I know I’m excited, pumped up, and ready to go onstage.
Bruce Springsteen
Stress is a matter of interpretation. Take a blood sample of someone in this state and you can label it anxiety or arousal, it’s in our mind that it becomes positive or negative.
What’s the relationship to Bulls**t? Simple, most of our feelings originate in the mind, just in deeper structures than the cortex – the part that sorts through the feelings and generates narratives. To me, that is the essence of Damasio’s work, feelings are automatic, thoughts are interpretations of feelings. The bullsh**ter stays at the level of the automatic thought that best suited the feeling. In the case of stubbing your toe, it was ‘that hurt.’ In the case of the person who can’t look you in the eye, ‘they’re hiding something,’ and in the case of feeling lousy about your hurtful emotional outburst, ‘they made me do it.’ It is true that they made you do it, their actions or words were the trigger after all.
But you held the gun. If we don’t go deeper and ask what the gun holder was actually feeling, then we always tell the truth. But we remain full of it. The antidote is not to think about what we think, it’s to question how we really feel – if we dare. The ego stops short of questioning the feeling for good reason. It hurts much more than a stubbed toe. The delusion Nietzsche speaks of serves us better (in the short term). Better to not question the initial interpretation of the feeling.
We’ve seen through at least one person referenced in part I of this series that one can do well in life (materially at least) without this skill. In fact, it even makes me kind of jealous – I imagine how much greater my self-confidence would be had I the ability to dismiss every failure as not at all my fault and associate every success as entirely my doing. Of course, I’m not sure I’d truly want the relationships with family and friends, and even with myself, that comes with as much delusion. I do believe that the character that can be forged from going deep – probing one’s feeling yield greater rewards and generates 0less bull. Get to know your feelings about (about your thoughts) about your feelings to think better.
The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.
Frederich Nietzsche
My hope for myself, and especially for my children, is to have that strength of spirit – to be able to be kind and encouraging enough with oneself to act confidently and find success and the feelings of self-worth that come with growth, and, to be realistic and humble enough to not build that upon a foundation of bull. With that I think one can forge authentic relationships with others and with one’s self. In short, I want them to lead with their heart, but to take their head with them.
K. Wilkins is the author of:
Stoic Virtues Journal: Your Guide to Becoming the Person You Aspire to Be
Rules for Living Journal: Life Advice Based On the Words and Wisdom of Jordan B. Peterson
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