Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at progress with John Gray. If you want to see John and me at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival, we will both be there next weekend in London. Use “MINIPHIL20” as a discount code if you are free and want to come. Do say hello if you’re there.

I’ve talked about Dave before.

Dave was an old colleague of mine back in my teaching days — with slicked-back Elvis hair and an undiluted Cockney accent. Dave was a kind of mentor who knew his way around the place. He was also a willfully technophobic Luddite who’d ask me why his unplugged computer wasn’t working. We paid each other in kind, like a symbiotic bird-rhino relationship.

One day, we were resentfully carted from our peaceful savannah to sit in a cramped hall for the spring term’s training day.

“New Approaches to Learning: The Whole Child Theory.”

“Thanks, everyone,” the facilitator said after an hour-long presentation. “We’re going to now go into breakout groups.”

As luck would have it, Dave and I were placed together at the same table. Bird and rhino reunited to glue together cut-out cards all about The Whole Child™ — an exercise that was somehow infantilizing, infuriating, and impossible all at once.

Then came the reflection period.

“So, what do you think about the theory, Jonny?” the facilitator said.

“Well, yeah, I think it makes sense. I’ll have to change a few resources, but it seems like it’ll be some decent effort that’ll pay off later.”

Suitably agreeable. Suitably vapid. A box gets ticked, and we can all move on.

“What about you, Dave?”

“Sorry, mate?”

“What do you think about Zhang’s approach to The Whole Child?”

“Zhang, eh?” Dave said. “Isn’t this exactly the same thing that they were saying in the ‘90s? When I first started, this is what we were doing. Of course, we didn’t call it this back then. JT, you’ll back me up, do you remember that bloke who…”

As became clear over a ten-minute monologue, Dave had seen the pendulum swing. Dave’s theory was that in most learning and development environments, a fad will always, given enough time, come swinging back around. It’ll have a new name, a new representative, and probably millions in venture backing, but it’ll all seem like old hat to someone like Dave.

And so, this week we’re going to look at the swing of the pendulum and ask: Is there such a thing as progress?

Go well,
Jonny

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Seeing history with Gray-tinted glasses

There are two different kinds of stories.

The first is the linear story. The characters start at position A and end at position B, having beaten all the baddies and married the right person. The real story is about the transformation that happens along the way. This is a story about direction. Mostly, it’s about progress. We move from naïve to wise, raw to cooked, NPC to hero.

In terms of philosophy, the linear-progressive story is best represented by the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel argued that history is measured by a series of resolvable battles. One side represents red, the other represents blue. The two struggle over days, years, decades, or centuries until eventually they bleed so much they bleed into each other. Red and blue become purple. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Movement, countermovement, resolution. And so, for Hegel, we move forward in a constantly improving run. Each battle makes us better and wiser.

Over the summer, I spoke with the philosopher John Gray about this idea of “progress,” and Gray doesn’t think much of it.

“If you go back to Greek drama or Shakespeare, or Hinduism or Buddhism, none of these assumptions are made about the future of mankind being potentially better than it’s ever been in the past. It’s a modern Western myth, and I would say it’s a kind of neo-Christian myth, because it comes about by secularizing certain Christian assumptions about sacred time, about human history being meaningful.”

I encourage you to watch the full video because Gray has that kind of easy, enviable erudition where he can just drop in an obscure quote or historical anecdote to color his argument. But, as far as I can tell, this is what Gray argues in a good ol’-fashioned premises-to-conclusion form:

1. Progress is not the same as improvement. Progress means a cumulative advance that does not unwind over generations or centuries.

2. In technology, we do make progress. The gains are cumulative and retained over millennia.

3. In ethics and politics, though, gains are not cumulative — they unwind depressingly often.

Therefore: There is no such thing as progress in ethics and politics.

It’s a persuasive argument, and much does depend on Gray’s definition of progress as something that’s basically permanent. If we accept that, well, then it doesn’t take a macrohistorian to point out that almost all civilizations do tend to unwind over time. We oscillate between periods of peace and war; order and madness; security and terror. Politically, history is a pendulum. So, too, ethically. For all our talk of human rights, liberty, and universal love, we still kill and destroy each other with Neolithic ease. And here we have the second kind of story: the cyclical one. The pendulum one. This story sees history as oscillation, and we just happen to occupy a certain position on the swing.

But what about those Hegelian ideas of progress? For example, what about Karl Marx’s idea that our systems of governance are moving forward? Marx argued that we can see a movement from something like despotism to feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Each was different from the one before, each a step better, and there was no “unwinding,” as Gray put it.

But Gray doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t think there will be any “end of history” in either the Francis Fukuyama or Marxist sense. Rather, Gray sees things in terms of revolutions and countermovements. In politics and ethics, nothing stays still long enough to be called progress.

On that, I think I agree with Gray. On an individual level, I believe most people are only one or two catastrophes away from utter moral ruin. If you murdered my children, threw me into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and gave me a gun, I have little doubt I’d become unrecognizable to who I am right now. We are all just a comic strip away from our villain origin story.

On a social level, I think the same is true. If you just look at how wildly irrational the crowd becomes in times of shortage or fear, I think you can appreciate how much things rest on a knife-edge. In the UK, it only took a few headlines of “there might be a supply problem with toilet roll” for the entire country to panic-buy the stuff. People get weird when things get bad. The next great revolution might come in one bomb, one virus, or one intergalactic threat. Or it might be the drip effect of constant deterioration and deprivation. Either way, I see the world with Gray-tinted glasses.

So, what do you think? Are we progressing socially, politically, and ethically? Or do you think we just happen to be riding one swing of a colossal pendulum of the gods?

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at shallow and deep solutions.

The tap and I had an understanding.

The Americans call it a “faucet,” and my editor and I usually have a kind of cat-and-mouse battle about these kinds of things. How many Britishisms can I slot into a newsletter edited by an American? We shall see. Because for all the rubbish bins, pavements, car parks, trousers, crisps, torches, and trainers in the world, I’m going to insist he keep “tap.”

The tap in the shower never worked properly. The on-off side was fine, but the hot-cold one lived by its own chaotic rulebook. It could technically turn 180 degrees either way, but there was really only one spot you could have it in. A fly’s push one way and you’d be cold plunging. A strong wind the other way and you’d be off to the minor burns department.

And so, over the years, I had mastered the art of finding that oh-so-perfect sweet spot. I enjoyed waiting to hear guests’ yelps or curses. I took pride in how artfully I could position that tiny, well-worn knob.

But then, one day, we had a plumber come around to fix our toilet. Big James we called him because he had large biceps. Sexy James, our cleaner called him.

“You know,” Big and Sexy James said, “I could get you a new shower tap for about £20.”

We bought the tap, dear reader. James put his arms to use, and our shower was fixed for less than $30 plus labor. No more freezing. No more skill required. It even had a safety button to prevent you from scalding yourself.

For years I had managed to cope with my dodgy tap. For years I had been happy with a “shallow solution” to my ablutionary needs. All it took was for one plumber with a well-used gym membership to show me a deep solution.

This week we look at why that difference is important.

Go well,
Jonny

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The deep thinking space

I’ve always found the idea of a “game space” interesting.

The game space is a hallowed ground, set apart from the “normal world” where certain rules, laws, and instructions apply. On the rugby field, you have to pass backward. In an RPG, a wizard cannot wear heavy armor. In chess, a bishop can’t move straight. And so on.

I wonder if there is also a kind of game space when it comes to thinking. For example, if you were to join me for a Mini Philosophy seminar next month, the rule would be that we talk about things in a philosophical way. We’d unpack ideas, we’d reference books, we’d dive into the mysterious depths of why we do what we do. But when I talk to a friend over brunch or in the pub, the rules are different. This is a social occasion. It’s a light catch-up. There is a time and place for “shallow,” and there is a time and place for “deep.” No politics at Christmas. No penis jokes in a newsletter.

But what happens when we confuse our spaces? When we try to bring deep thinking to a shallow setting, it can often be funny or eye-rolling but very rarely problematic. If I try to unravel the underlying psychodynamic motivations behind my need for constant validation at a kids’ birthday party, my friend will probably just tell me to stop. Have a day off, Jonny.

The problems come when we offer only shallow thinking in a deep space.

Imagine you’re sitting in the car driving with your friend somewhere, and they say, “I’m really unhappy, mate. I’ve not been happy for years.” Now, the game has begun. The rules are in place. This car, this moment, has become a sacred space that demands deep thinking and deep conversation.

“Ah, cheer up, mate,” you say, “let’s go get a drink.”

Now this is a solution of sorts. No doubt a drunken revel capped by an early-morning McDonald’s distracts your friend from their pain, but it doesn’t resolve it. They’ll wake up the next day just as unhappy as before but now with a hangover and a sesame bun sticking to their face. You offered a shallow solution where a deep solution was wanted.

This week I spoke with Jack Maden about his new book, The Philosophy Prescription. (Mini Philosophy Members can hear our full interview at the end of this newsletter.) And Jack started talking about Arne Næss’s distinction between shallow and deep thinking. Because for Næss, our governments and leaders have been dealing only in shallow solutions to problems that really need deep thinking. If there is ever a “deep space” it ought to be the corridors of power. Instead, we’ve been getting successive administrations scattering about vote-winning quick fixes. We’re plastering the cracks of a building that’s wobbling. These are the examples Jack gave:

“So, a shallow response to say famine would be to send food. These people are experiencing starvation, let’s send them food, problem solved. A deeper response would be to question why has the famine occurred in the first place? What’s driving the famine? How can we make structural changes to ensure famines don’t happen again in the future?

“Arne Næss basically says, in the context of the environment, that all of our responses are shallow, they’re all reactive. They’re all driven by this idea that we should prioritize human production. So, if an earthquake happens, we need to rebuild the area so that it can start producing again. If pollution is affecting fishing, then we need to kind of remove plastic from the ocean so that we can fish again. And he wants us to go deeper in our questioning and say, ‘Well, is placing human production on this pedestal really leading to lives worth wanting?’”

It might be, of course, that we disagree with Næss on this one. It might be that we do think we ought to prioritize human production over a more ecologically mutual position. But the point is that we need to ask ourselves why these problems keep happening, rather than offering shallow, fix-the-symptom solutions. We need something more root and branch. We need to look at the systems, values, and structures underpinning our entire worldview. But to do that requires us all to enter a deeper thinking space and to play by different rules. And not everyone wants or is willing to play that game.

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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If we look back, then we find an unfixable past. Everything we’ve done cannot be undone. All the cruel and silly things I’ve said in my life cannot be unsaid. The horse has bolted, the ship has sailed. And so, no matter how much we rage about it, we can never go back in time to live a different life. Here we are, and that’s as close to a fact as philosophy can give us.

And here, with only our present thoughts for company, we get to look the other way. We can look at the future. But where the past was frustratingly closed, the future is dizzyingly open. In fact, it’s because we’ve spent so long reflecting on just how unchangeable the past is that our future choices seem to carry so much weight — a weight that we often cannot shoulder. We cannot unsay anything, so we should be very careful about what we say. We cannot undo things, so we should spend anxious hours obsessing over every tiny action.

So, here we are on the unhappy hinge between the one-track past and the garden of infinitely forking paths. How are we to deal with this? How can we make decisions, make plans, and banish the angst of overthinking everything as long as we live on this hinge?

Last week, I gave a members-only talk with Big Think just on this topic. We explored existentialism, Stoicism, and modern psychology, and we ran through some philosophical answers to these questions.

Go well,
Jonny

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He’s known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

Hello everybody,

Tomorrow (Friday, Aug 28), there is a Mini Philosophy and Big Think live event. It’s on the philosophy of decision-making and I will discuss a lot of what I write about today. This is a perk for all paid members. If you want to register to attend and ask questions, click the button below. Thanks!

What made you open this newsletter?

What shadowy undercurrents made you check in on me today? I suspect it wasn’t much of a conscious decision. You probably didn’t stare into space for five seconds weighing the pros and cons of clicking versus carrying on your internet scrolling. Surfing the web, we once called it. A different time.

No, there is something about you, something deep in your being, that pushed you to open this newsletter. And thank you for doing so. You’re very welcome.

This newsletter will carry on a bit longer, but will you? Because just as there was something that made you click, there will be something that makes you read to the end or something that pulls you away. There is no easy answer to what that thing is. The neurochemical processes underpinning decision-making are still mostly unknown to the best of modern science, let alone to me right now. And those unseen forces, those unseen hands on the strings, deserve more recognition. They deserve a newsletter.

You see, we don’t tend to call people “moody” these days. And that’s mostly for good reason. For hundreds of years, moody was a term overwhelmingly used by men to describe women. A husband tells his wife she’s being moody, and so her complaints are unjustified. A brother tells his sister to stop being moody as he steals her toy. A doctor tells a patient she’s just being moody: “Just go home, take some painkillers, I’m sure it’ll be fine in a week.”

But it turns out that we are all moody. Your moods define how you perceive the world. They define how you remember the world. Your moods define what the world even means. We can all “be in the mood” to do something — you were in the mood to carry on reading until now.

So, let’s indulge that mood. Let’s explore the philosophy of moods.

Go well,
Jonny

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The lenses that tint the world

Your moods are not the same as your emotions. Emotions are temporary moments of feeling that act as a response to the world. They rumble inside in reply to some thought or experience. They might linger, as when a child watches a horror movie they’re too young to see, or they might disappear as quickly as they come, as when we mistake a tree’s shadow for a dusk-time assassin. They might be strong, as with the lust of seeing someone incredibly good-looking, or barely noticeable, as with the slow burn of falling in love. But emotions are often far more reducible to a kind of input-output model. While they might force our minds a certain way or motivate our actions, they do not define our experiences as much as our moods do.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that moods show us how far we are “thrown” into this world because moods will frame the kind of world we see. They are the unknown and unseen. They are the eyes with which to see. Or, better, they are the lenses that tint the world.

Heidegger was a fan of the Danish existentialist with the sad eyes: Søren Kierkegaard. In his 1844 work, The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard makes a distinction between “fear” — the emotion — and “anxiety” — the mood. Heck, if you’re in the mood to explore this philosophical rabbit hole with me, you can even find this distinction way back in Augustine. Then Pascal uses it in his Pensées, and Kant uses it in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Which means that if you were a well-read, early-20th-century philosopher reading Heidegger and Sigmund Freud both reusing this worn distinction, you’d likely roll your eyes. And now I’m here to wear it some more.

The point is that there’s a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is a response to something out in the world. It comes and then goes when the trigger is removed.

“Okay,” the teacher says, “we’ve got time for one more presentation today.” Your heart bounds into your mouth, thump-thump-thumping along.

“And it’ll be… Cole. Come on up.” Phew. Not me. The fear subsides.

Anxiety, though, changes the world because the anxious person sees everything through their anxious lens. Things of great importance are reduced to nothing, while trifles are made into terrible catastrophes. A curtly worded email gets amplified into, “Well, I might as well look for a new job ’cause I’m getting fired on Monday.” The same could be said of the depressive, the joyful, or the restless person. All are “moody,” at least in the Heideggerian/Augustinian/Freudian sense. Moods are vantage points on the world.

We can never be rid of our moods. Even if it were possible, it would be undesirable. A life without moods? It sounds like being trapped in some kind of OpenAI hell. To experience the world objectively without any feelings about it whatsoever is inhuman. We cannot be rid of moods, so what is a life-planning, rationally inclined philosopher to do? Should we shrug our shoulders, give in to our limbic puppet masters, and say, “Couldn’t help it, guvnor, was my hormones!”

Well, there are two things to do.

The first is to recognize that being influenced is not the same as being forced. Yes, our moods might incline us to think or behave a certain way, but we still have discipline and self-control. We have our limbic system pushing us to do something, but we have our prefrontal cortex as a counterbalance. Being angry doesn’t mean you have to cheat on your partner. Being tired doesn’t mean you have to be mean to your colleague. Being anxious doesn’t mean you have to catastrophize a single event into a global conspiracy to destroy you.

The second comes with identifying the push and pull of our moods. Knowing that a certain mood can influence our thoughts allows us to try to align our moods in a certain way in order to influence our thoughts. Many addiction recovery groups will use an acronym, “HALT,” which stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. They know that if you are any of these, you are more likely to make bad and ill-thought-out decisions. That’s good knowledge to have. So, eat well, take deep breaths, call a friend, and get a good night’s sleep. Our bodies respond to the environment we choose to put them in.

We are all moody. The idea of a rational, detached overseer oversimplifies what it is to have a mind. But we are not puppets, either. Some shadowy undercurrents might have motivated you to read to the end of this newsletter today, but you also have the discipline to choose to do so in the future. I thank your prefrontal cortex in advance. Unless such arrogant presumption makes you less likely to do so, of course.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

Subscribe now

Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at trusting other people with .

A video version of this newsletter is found at the end.

I am not a gambling man.

Generally, I don’t enjoy that moment of breathless tension as the coin spins in the air. I get far too anxious about it. But I can vaguely understand why others do like gambling. I can understand the adrenaline rush of potential self-destruction and the joy of spending imaginary winnings.

“Well, I’ll definitely want to buy a second home, but the question is: Do we go for an alpine cabin or a villa by the sea?”

The 17th-century samurai-turned-monk Suzuki Shōsan wrote about the value of “death energy.” When you choose to sit down with the Reaper and roll the dice of death, you are filled with a vital spark. When you face down your own destruction and — ideally — come back to life, you suddenly find yourself walking with a strut and a leather jacket. The gambler’s frisson of “I might lose everything” is a kind of death energy.

But I’m not one for all that. I like to fantasize about lottery winnings as much as the next guy, but I’m a risk-averse sort. Some boats are built for the buffeting storms of an ocean in a rage. Some boats are built for the safe and peaceful shallows of a lapping shoreline. Gambling makes me anxious. I don’t like being anxious.

And yet, I’m a compulsive gambler. We all are. In every minute of every day, we are gambling.

The world is unpredictable, and the people in it are even worse. The art of living is about getting used to uncertainty and ignorance. Are we alone in the universe? Maybe. Are the laws of science an accurate reflection of reality? Maybe. Is there even such a thing as “reality”? Maybe. Am I actually typing this newsletter right now from a desk in north Oxfordshire? Maybe.

From the small to the big, from the trivial to the momentous, all our beliefs are probabilities. And how much probability we need depends on who we are. We’re all epistemological gamblers, and this week we look at the philosophy of how to gamble better.

Go well,
Jonny

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As they say in Texas

According to George W. Bush, there is an old saying in Texas, maybe in Tennessee too, that goes like this: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”

A human is born as a statistical inference machine — almost all animals are. This face is nice to me; I’ll try to be near them, a baby intuits. This food is yummy; I’ll eat more of that, the child thinks. And, as the good people of Texas-maybe-Tennessee know, this is never truer than when it comes to other people.

When it comes to other people, we are constantly revising how much we should trust them. How many good or correct things does someone have to do or say before they become “trustworthy”? How many bumbling fumblings are we willing to tolerate before we stop calling them for help?

A few weeks ago, I spoke with about his new book How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic (paid members can see the full interview here). Massimo introduced me to something we’ll call the “Carneades Confidence Ladder.” Carneades was an ancient Greek Skeptic, and he argued that because we will never be 100% certain about anything, we have to settle for pithanon, which, over the ages and via the Romans, is probably best translated as “probability.”

The original idea was about our beliefs. So, how certain are you that you have two hands? How certain are you that Costa Rica is in Central America? How certain are you that Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger once dated?

For Carneades and a lot of Skeptics who came after, there are essentially four categories of pithanon:

1. Plausible: Something seems right but you’ve not checked much. For example, the news anchor telling you that there’s flooding in the next city over.

2. Convincing: You have strong reasons for believing something. It’s been raining torrentially for three days. Floods are likely.

3. Coherent: The belief agrees with most or all of your other beliefs. The news channel is generally reliable, rain causes floods, and that city always floods when it gets bad.

4. Thoroughly explored: You’ve done an extensive investigation into the matter from multiple angles. “Right, darling, I’m off to double-check Witney is flooded. Would you mind calling the Environment Agency to see what they have to say?”

There is a version of the confidence ladder that would work with other people. In other words, we can take this ancient wisdom and use it to help us identify who our most reliable friends are or which colleagues to rely on.

The first step is almost instinctive in that it comes naturally to most of our initial human interactions. And this is where we simply take people at face value. If someone seems trustworthy, then we think they are. If someone says something confidently, we believe it. If someone gives us some information, we (usually) tend to assume they’re honest. Most of the time, this works, especially when it comes to casual interactions or strangers. A festival attendant tells you where to park your car. A waiter gives you the food you ordered. Good. Fine.

But for any relationship more than a five-second flyby, we need more. We need coherence. We need the other person to be consistent in their personality and in what they say or do. And for this, we need to see them often and for longer. If Brett tells you a story about his breakup five different ways over three different meetings, that’s a cause for concern. If someone says, “I’m a gentle, loving person,” and then tries to whack a passing pigeon for a laugh, you might turn a bit suspicious. In almost all trusting relationships, we need the other person to be consistent. This doesn’t mean they are always predictable, of course. I’m fond of a great many chaotic-good people. It just means that their words and behaviors align over a period of time.

For our most important relationships, though, you need to go through some stuff. The other person needs to be tested and ideally in a variety of settings. When you were hungover, ill, or just feeling antisocial, they were still there to chat or be by your side. When they were angry, upset, or desperately sleep-deprived, they didn’t morph into some vicious gremlin in want of a pigeon to hurt. You told them a secret, and they kept it. You asked them for advice, and it was good. You said you were fine, and they knew you were not. From multiple angles, in many ways, over a great deal of time, this relationship has been tested, and it’s passed each time.

If I were thrown back to 200 B.C., I think I’d find myself among the Epicureans rather than the Skeptics, but it’s a fool who does not call on wisdom, wherever it comes from. And so, I think I will be using a version of the Carneadean Confidence Ladder when it comes to the friendships in my life.

I hope that as you were reading this newsletter, a few faces popped up in your mind’s eye — both good and bad. You could picture the unreliable, inconsistent, say-one-thing-do-another kind of person in your life. But you could also picture the steadfast, reliable, and tried-and-tested friendships you have.

Because as they say in Oxford, maybe Cambridge too, “Be true once, good on you. But true me twice… and we’ll become good friends.”

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

Subscribe now

Paul and Liam are indisputably the best quizzers there. I’ve got a good general knowledge, but it’s mostly limited to only a few sections of the library. Philosophy, obviously, but I’m decent at English literature, history, and politics. But the moment there’s a question about the Grand Prix, music, or soap operas, I’m glazing over and reaching over to steal another of Joe’s cheese and onion crisps. It’s not the flavor I’d have chosen, but Joe does Joe.

And every month, just before the drinks break (one of seven), the quizmaster will throw out one of those impossible-to-get questions that are really just testing your ability to provide an educated guess.

“How many cans of Coke get drunk every day around the world?”

“Yes, full-fat Coke, Val. No, regular 330 mL cans, Harry. No, just normal Coke, Sam. No, not Cherry. Not Vanilla. Not Raspberry… What the f*** is Raspberry Coke anyway?”

So it goes.

I used to hate these best-guess questions because I figured a pub quiz should be about knowledge, not shooting in the dark. But I’ve come to see them as a valuable exercise in the wisdom of crowds. Best-guess questions aren’t testing Paul, or Liam, or Onion-breath Joe; they test the entire team.

“I reckon 20 million,” Nick says.

“20 million?! Sod off,” Liam shouts, too loudly for the sneaky, secret whispers of huddled quiz tables. “Let’s do the maths. There are 8 billion people in the world, right? Let’s subtract the babies, the very old, and so on, so…”

The beauty of a best-guess question is that it gets to the heart of what the ancient Skeptics once knew: that we will often never know the answer to things. There might not even be an answer to things. The trick with knowledge — the trick with life — is to fumble your way to something a bit better than before, and a bit less wrong than yesterday.

And in this week’s full interview with the author and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci we explore how we can do just that.

Thank you, as always, my generous patrons and friends,
Jonny

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at Karl Jaspers' concept of "boundary situations."

A video version of this newsletter is found at the end.

He nearly died.

I was sitting on the sofa talking to my mate’s dad. It’s always a little bit strange talking with your childhood friends’ parents when you’re all grown up. On the one hand, it’s nice to see them and their world with clearer eyes. It’s nice to see them as people. But on the other hand, childhood is not an easy thing to throw off.

“Hi Jonny, come on in,” he says.

“Hi Mr. Hammond! Thanks for having me stay. Can Alex come out to play?” I reply in a squeaky prepubescent voice, wearing shorts and carrying a primary school bag.

As I sat there in the nostalgic, liminal space between adulthood and childhood, Mr. Hammond told me about how he nearly died. It wasn’t one of those “I got a diagnosis then I pulled through” kinds of stories. It was a hit-by-lightning, hungry shark-attack, act of God kind of thing. One minute he was fine, the next he was in the back of an ambulance, careening down the road to the hospital. Without oversharing another person’s story, I’ll just say it involved a lot of blood, hours on an operating table, and a few weeks in a ward.

“Do you know what, Jonny?” he said to me. “All that ‘You need to make the most of it’ stuff is pretty abstract and remote until it happens. Of course, you think it and say it, but until something like this happens, you don’t feel it.”

I told Mr. Hammond to write down his story for me — especially his post-encounter philosophy. But until that time, you have me. And so, this week we’re going to look at life-changing moments.

Go well,
Jonny

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Flying past a man with a gun in his hands

In Anton Chekhov’s play, “The Seagull,” we are asked to imagine a seagull flying over a lake. The gull is swooping and diving, fishing and cawing. It’s entirely consumed by the busyness of being a seagull. And then, in the squeeze of a trigger, it’s gone. A man on the shore holding a rifle is bored. With no game and no fun to find, he pulls up his gun and shoots the bird for no other reason than idleness.

Of course, as with any great literature, there are metaphors wrapped in allegories. In the play, we meet a cast of characters all obsessed with their plans. They have unfulfilled longings. They want fame, riches, love, or a life of pure art. Like a seagull flapping back to land, they have eyes only for the shore. And so, blinkered and distracted, they are vulnerable to the misfortune of life’s mercurial rifle.

So much of our lives is spent in planning and preparation, and yet often the most significant moments come out of the blue. These are what the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers called “boundary situations.”

A boundary situation is a rupture. It’s a transformative experience that we cannot initiate, plan, or avoid. We can only “encounter” it. The mundane, everyday parts of our life — putting on socks, ordering a pizza, planning a holiday — are what Jaspers calls “situation being.” But a boundary situation is one that thunders down to shake the foundations of your being. It changes who you are. It is what happens when you wake up in a hospital bed, having only just beaten the reaper’s odds.

Although these “boundary situations” change a bit in Jaspers’ works, he broadly sorted them into four categories:

Death: We fear our loved ones dying, and we fear the fact of our own death. When we know grief, or when we reflect on mortality, we often find some kind of revelation. As my friend’s dad told me, we always know about death, but when it’s a boundary situation, it comes crashing into our lives like some grim and unforeseen final curtain.

Suffering: As the Buddha pointed out long before Jaspers, it is impossible to avoid suffering. Our paths will hit old age, sickness, and a great deal of pain. Some of this we can see coming: a tooth filling, a long run, a fourteen-hour flight to Australia. But the rest comes unexpectedly. It hits us with such a shocking intensity that we’re almost glad we didn’t see it coming. We come home from the hospital with a new life to live.

Guilt: There will come a moment, and often in adulthood, when we feel responsible for things. It’s the sudden awareness that our actions impact all those around us — that we are the reason for those tears, that laughter, that pain, that joy. The profound pull of the heart changes how we live, and it usually comes on unexpectedly.

Chance: No matter how ordered we might want our world to be, there will always be an unpredictable exception. We can hope for the best and make all the plans we want, but we will never fully control all of the facts that affect our existence. We want order and regularity but get the capricious throes of chance.

What Chekhov’s Seagull, Jaspers, and Mr. Hammond all get right is that we are each much more vulnerable than we might want to allow. A wedding, three years and a fortune in the planning, is ruined by a stomach bug. An hour-long journey home for Christmas winds up getting you stuck in the traffic of a freak snowstorm. A lifetime achievement is overshadowed by a national disaster. A long and gentle retirement is blown off course by a near-death detour to the operating table.

Our lives are defined by the unforeseen. We have our dreams and hopes, and we are flying to some distant horizon. Yet life doesn’t care. Around every corner, at every flap of our wings, everything can change. And that’s all the more reason to enjoy the view, as long as it lasts.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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There are three people sitting on the bench: a wise man between two fools.

One fool is called “Pointless.” They argue that the universe is cold and uncaring to human needs. We can try as hard as we want and can plan as long as we can, but at the end of the day, the world will have its way. A bullet, a disease, a speeding truck, a single sentence from a powerful person — they’ll each determine our lives, so trying to plan is pointless.

The other fool is called “Control.” They say that we are in charge of everything. If we work hard and plan properly, we’ll achieve all of our targets. Luck is an invention of the weak and inadequate. Fortune favors only the brave. I, and only I, am in control of my life.

And in between the fools, the sage nods. They listen to Pointless and they listen to Control. They take on a bit of both. They plan but accept that plans go wrong. They think about tomorrow but never forget today. They recognize the power of choice but bow to the gods of fortune.

So how can we follow the middle path? How can we be wiser?

Here’s how to make your own luck.

The serendipity mindset

In his book, The Serendipity Mindset, the writer Christian Busch argues that there are actually two kinds of luck. There is the luck that kind of happens to you. It’s out of your control, so you have to just roll with it. There’s a traffic jam, a freak thunderstorm, a stomach bug on your wedding day. But there’s also meeting someone fun at a party, catching the last bus, and getting to witness the rare passing of a wild deer in the woods.

The other kind of luck is “serendipity,” and this is something we have more control over. According to Busch, there are three things we need to nurture a “serendipity mindset.”

First, be open. This means doing more things and experiencing more of the world. Meet new people, go to exciting places, and read books and watch programs you’d never think to try. If you experience more of the world, then you will simply witness more opportunities. As any gambling advertisement will tell you: you have to play to win. And so exposing yourself to more of the world is like throwing the dice again and again.

Second, be alert. When something pops up, be present enough to recognize it. When you are so fixated on one thing, you miss what the world offers. Back in the innocent days of the early internet, there was a viral video about missed attention. The video had you count how many basketball passes a team performed in a minute. And, as people are so intent on the task, they entirely miss a gorilla walking into the shot and then out. When you watch it again, it’s easy to be disturbed by how much we can miss. Alertness is like this — always be vigilant about the world around you.

Third, be tenacious — be ready to leap and to hold on tightly to any passing opportunity. Reply to that email right away. If something works, try it again and again and again. If you meet someone interesting at a party, carry on talking to them. I am incredibly fortunate in my life to meet and interview a lot of people. Some of the greatest opportunities, and some of my now-best friends, have come because I carried on a conversation long after the first meeting.

Wisdom on a bench

Embracing openness, alertness, and tenacity is how we hold the line between the two fools on the bench. We cannot stop the traffic jams, but we can choose the podcast to listen to. We cannot control the weather, but we can build a sail to catch its winds or a roof to stop its rain.

Cultivating a serendipity mindset doesn’t mean ignoring the reality of a chaotic universe, nor does it require the arrogant belief that we can dictate every outcome. In the ancient world, the playwrights and philosophers loved nothing so much as a story about “hubris.” If any mortal thought they could steer the world, if any human thought they were too big for their boots, a capricious god would pop along to set them right. And so, Icarus falls to the sea.

Yes, of course, some people get more luck than others — by definition that’s out of our control. But in the swirling, messy, passing opportunities of the world, the truly lucky person is the one who is paying attention and is ready to jump when the time comes.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at aesthetic injustice, with Daisy Dixon.

Paid members can find the full interview here. A video version of this newsletter is found at the end.

The band was playing Oasis.

We were sitting in a beer garden overlooking the sea, and the band was playing “Wonderwall.” It was an odd choice during a “folk night,” but when it’s 11 p.m. and the crowd is getting shouty, you give the folk what they want, I suppose. And there are few things a tipsy crowd wants more than “Wonderwall.”

A pub full of strangers, arm in arm, belting out a surprisingly tuneful chorus.

“I said maybeeeeeeeee! You’re gon’ be the one that saves meeeeeee!”

Tucked away in a quiet nook at the back, my friend turned to me, and she said, “Do you know what? I never, ever sing.”

“What? You never sing?”

“Well, no, because when I was growing up, my mum would always say I had a horrible voice. She said I shouldn’t sing in case somebody hears me.”

I think about that conversation a lot. What an awful thing to tell anyone. What an evil thing to tell a young child. My friend never sang. She didn’t sing along to the radio, hum in the shower, or chant along to Oasis. She had learned to be ashamed of her own voice.

This week, we look at why this might be an example of “aesthetic injustice” and what that actually means.

Go well, beautiful songbirds,

Jonny

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Everyone is an artist until they’re told they’re not

Last week, I spoke to the philosopher of art Daisy Dixon, and she introduced me to an idea known as “aesthetic injustice.” Aesthetic injustice is when you deny somebody access to art or beauty. It argues that humans need beautiful things in order to flourish, and so to deprive someone of beauty is to deprive them as a person.

In the 1980s, philosopher Martha Nussbaum presented her version of the “capability approach,” which says there are certain things that all humans need to thrive. Yes, things like food, water, safety, and peace, but also relationships with other people, means of expression, rest, play, and so on. Dixon’s version of aesthetic injustice fits somewhere into Nussbaum’s theory.

Here’s how she put it:

“For me, aesthetic agency is our ability to experience the world aesthetically and to express ourselves aesthetically. That can include having pleasant or beautiful experiences of nature where we live. It might involve our ability to find our own bodies beautiful — or ugly. It also includes our ability to express ourselves through what we wear, the music we listen to, and the art we make.”

“All these things are part of what it is to be human. I bundle them into Nussbaum’s capability of ‘senses, imagination and thought.’ A society is just when it supports everyone’s capabilities to that threshold.”

From our conversation and from what I can garner in my research, it strikes me that there are actually three forms of “aesthetic injustice.”

The first is when you deny somebody access to their own preferences or tastes. If you tell someone that they shouldn’t watch those kinds of programs or that they’re banned from dancing in that kind of way, you are saying they can express themselves, but only in a list of predefined, acceptable ways. Sing, but only hymns. Read, but only philosophy. Draw, but only landscapes. This kind of preference denial is seen in a hundred small acts of judgment. If someone says something like “Oh, you listen to death metal music? That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?” or if someone says, “I thought only kids and nerds read graphic novels!” — those are tiny moments of aesthetic injustice.

The second is when somebody is denied access to beautiful things. For example, if successive governments or authorities insist on drab, utilitarian civil spaces, we soon find ourselves living in a kind of Brutalist nightmare. No green spaces, no ornate architecture, nothing fun, curious, or beautiful. To live in a gray dystopia wears a person down. But it’s not just in urban planning. It’s when you can’t get easy or cheap access to books. It’s when you can’t hear music, see art, or hear the morning call of a bird.

Finally, aesthetic injustice is when someone is prevented from expressing themselves. It’s when they are forbidden from being creative or using their imagination. In 1969, John Lennon reportedly said that “every child is an artist until he’s told he’s not an artist.” What a poignant thing to say. He’s absolutely right. Spend time around children, and you will see them dancing, singing, drawing, creating. Put it on the fridge, call it a masterpiece, and celebrate the child as a maestro. What a cruel thing it is to extinguish that need to create. It was said that the Romans would occasionally feature dishes made from the tiny tongues of songbirds — larks, nightingales, and thrushes. I can think of few things so brutal as cutting out the tongue of a bird that’s born to sing, just to impress your friends.

Aesthetic injustice reminds us to be angry about an increasingly artless world. It reminds us that beauty is not some luxury, reserved only for the leisure classes. We are born with a near-bottomless well of creativity and an unquenchable thirst for beauty. And so, it’s not some fringe political issue whether or not to close a library, a museum, or an art gallery. It is not a pointless waste of money to add ornaments, art, and wildlife to public spaces. It is not simply bad parenting to tell a child she should never sing. It’s a terrible injustice. And it’s one that people carry with them, forever.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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I’m fairly comfortable with singing in public. I’m not desperately bad — I can hold a tune, and when I strain for the high notes, I don’t usually offend too many cats. But I’m certainly not George Ezra. Good for a pub, I always say.

I was doing a post about this week’s interviewee, and in my opening segment I sang a few lines from Oasis’s “Wonderwall.” It’s a stalwart of British weddings. It’s a karaoke classic. And it’s surprisingly hard to hit some of the notes without closing your eyes. My attempt is available on request and for purchase.

The thing that surprised me most about my “Wonderwall” interlude was not the good, bad, and funny comments — “It’s like Liam’s on TikTok!”— but rather the few judgmental comments. Some people were really annoyed that I chose to feature, and to sing, Oasis.

Now, I’m no fan of the Gallaghers. I suspect that if I ever found myself in a room with them, I’d find another place to go. Noel and I have different ways of living. Liam and I probably don’t laugh at the same gags. But I love Oasis. They were my formative band — “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory” was the first CD I bought, and it’s the only album where I can remember 99% of the lyrics.

But oh, some of the comments.

“Minus 10 points for mentioning Oasis.”

“Please don’t ever sing that awful band again.”

And, most oddly: “Sad. Now I have to unfollow the GOAT because he sang Oasis.”

In this week’s Mini Philosophy Interview, I spoke with the philosopher of art Daisy Dixon and we talked a lot about the “aesthetic self” and especially performative preferences. Why do people lie about what they like or don’t like? Why do people judge others for their artistic tastes? And how much can you actually tell about someone from what music they listen to?

Well, carry on to find out what we had to say.

Thanks, as always,

Jonny

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at experiencing the world with older eyes.

There is a boy from school I think about a lot.

We’ll call him Henry, but that wasn’t his name.

Henry was a quiet boy and seemed to have few friends. In the rainy, wintery months, he’d spend his time reading. On clear, lovely days he would walk around the school grounds. He’d stroll along various paths, pausing often to look down at a plant or up at the sky, then he’d potter on. Henry was a boy from another age — another world — out on a saunter in his private, walled-off garden.

At school, I was the kind of chatty, always-joking boy who feared silence. A silence meant boredom. It meant failure. And so, Henry and I never really became friends. The talker and the walker; the busy and the still. In the complicated and hormonal melange of our foundational years, we are rarely given room to explore the vastness of another’s identity. We’re too busy finding our own.

I have few regrets in my life, but Henry is one of them. As you might imagine, there is no trace of Henry on social media. I’ve tried searching — I try almost every year — but Henry is a digital sasquatch. Someone had heard a rumor that Henry was now selling handmade guitars from a cottage in a wood just outside Canterbury. But that was seven years ago and you can saunter a long way in seven years when you’re a sasquatch.

I regret not talking to Henry. I think there was a depth to him, a richness of soul, that I needed then and I probably need now. As Walt Whitman told us, we each contain multitudes. Our personalities are complex, and there aren’t enough archetypes in the deck to truly get to the heart of them all. Back at school, there was a part of me that yearned for Henry. There is a version of my life where we became best friends and where I’m whittling a fretboard instead of typing a newsletter.

I was who I was then, and I am who I am now. But this week, we look at revisiting the old world with new eyes.

Go well,
Jonny

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The many textures of the world

We all change. Only gods and fools do not. We change to adapt to our environment, we change to avoid error, we change because we just want to. But there is change and there is change. For example, I recently got a haircut, and I feel like a changed man.

“Did you get your ears lowered then?”

“Had a fight with a lawn mower, did you?”

Etc., etc.

A haircut is what we might call a superficial change. Often, these types of changes are temporary and reversible, but they might also be something that’s pretty small in itself. You’ve started a new book, you’ve moved the wardrobe to the other side of the room, you’ve upgraded your iPhone. With superficial changes, life goes on as it did before — but with more comments about your hair.

Meaningful changes are those that change your identity. For some people, this may start with a new haircut but often needs more than just that. It could be a new house, a new car, a new job — the elements that make up a new person. For most people, meaningful changes are the gradual step, step, step of a thousand chosen paths. After I left secondary school, I chose to study philosophy at university. I chose to get outside more and enjoy long walks or runs. I chose to turn down big, busy parties for small gatherings and solitude. A thousand paths led me to now, standing on a path that walks remarkably close to Henry’s.

When we change, the world changes with us. I don’t mean this in the purely philosophical sense. Heraclitus was famous for saying that “all is flux” — you cannot stand in the same river twice because neither you nor the river is the same. To be honest, given the state of things in the UK right now, the river may very well just be a claggy bed. No, I mean in the phenomenological sense. When we change, we see the world differently.

Growing up, I used to love David Gemmell’s fantasy books. I’d whittle away entire holidays binging the Drenai saga. Recently, I tried to reopen a Gemmell book and found it simplistic and predictable. The characters were monotonous, the plot black and white, the dialogue hammy. I still love fantasy, but I read differently now.

When I talk with someone, I focus on topics I used to shy away from. I’m far more comfortable with silences and the thoughts that they bring. When I was at school, I would have walked past Henry a hundred times. These days, I’d pause to ask him what’s on his mind.

The joy of growing up — and I’m coming to learn it really is a joy — is getting to know the many textures of experience. The school years bring experiences your 20s do not. My 30s have opened up worlds that seemed distant or impossible when I was climbing trees as a nipper. The love I have for my friends, my family, my wife, and my children has revealed flavors that were never there, or never really enjoyed. I pine for the good old days and wallow in pointless nostalgia as much as anyone, but I’m excited about how growing up offers me things I’ve never before known.

The world is full of boring, ugly, forgettable things. But that almost always speaks more of us than it does of the thing. So, look again at those lost things from your past. Talk to the Henry you once found a bit strange, read the book you once found hard, listen to that song you could never understand. You’re wiser, older, and different. So experience the world with wiser, older, and different eyes.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at the quest for truth with John Dewey.

The Quest of Pure Philosophy

“There is a scroll buried deep in the woods,” the sage says, “but to get there is hard.”

You’re sitting in the tavern with all your adventuring friends: Aristo the Archer, Thomas the Cleric, René the Tinker, and Bertrand the Magician. You lean in and listen closely.

“First, you must meet with the Scholarch of the Academy, and he will teach you the Geometric Path. After several years, you will set out to cross the Bridge of Contemplation and abide in thought for a time. Once you are ready, enter the woods. There are creatures within that you must defeat. The LinkedIn Gargoyle will tempt you with a career. The Incubus of Invalid Syllogisms will pretend to be your friend. And finally, hardest of all, the Dragon of Relativity will roar with the voice of a thousand peoples. Overcome all these, and you will find the scroll — the Scroll of Truth. In there, you will find the answer to everything you seek.”

For thousands of years in the Western tradition, this is how philosophers have viewed truth. It’s often called Truth with a capital T — abstracted, perfect, and pure. It’s the single correct answer and the only path, where all others lead to darkness. It’s in Plato’s World of Forms, Aquinas’s Divine Intellect, Descartes’s Meditations, and Russell’s Logical Atomism. It’s in the somewhat short-lived efforts of Leibniz and Frege to create a logical language — beyond and better than our day-to-day languages. The way we talk and live is so messy. So imprecise.

Every mainstream has its counterculture, and so too with Truth. The ancient Skeptics argued that even if there might be some actual answer or reality, we’ll never know it. Millennia later, Nietzsche questioned whether we should want this Scroll of Truth, even were it to exist. But one of the biggest and most coherent alternatives was not found in Europe. It was found in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the Metaphysical Club.

This week, we look at pragmatism — the philosophy that says the scroll is actually a map.

Go well,
Jonny

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The truth is in the room with us

Pragmatism is an umbrella term for the idea that there is no Truth out there, but rather that truth is whatever works. It’s what allows us to make sense of the world and get things done. The word “discover” has Latin roots, where it meant a kind of revealing. You dis-covered something, like lifting the lid on a box or digging up some buried treasure. And to discover truth in this sense means that we only have to look in the right place — which may or may not be in the deep, dark, high-fantasy woods.

Pragmatism says that truth is not something to discover; truth is something to use.

From there, things get more complicated because the three big names in pragmatism all had different versions to offer.

First, C.S. Peirce was the most absolutist of the lot. He argued that while “truth is what is useful,” humans would eventually — through good reasoning and the scientific method — coalesce on one truth simply because it’s the greatest, best, and most useful.

Then, William James was the most relativistic of the bunch. James argued that we should weigh the merits of any belief by its “cash value” — how does this affect my life? Is this a worldview that makes me happier and better, and lets me live more easily? Believe and do whatever makes your life work.

Finally, John Dewey was the most pragmatic of the pragmatists. He sneered at the intellectual parlor games philosophers played on the European continent. He didn’t have any time for the weird metaphysics of Hegel or the lofty pretensions of the Rationalists. For Dewey, we live tethered to the world, so let’s make sure our philosophy and ideas are always tethered to that world.

I tend to oscillate between Peirce’s and Dewey’s versions of pragmatism. I believe — and I suppose it’s nothing more than a belief — that we are getting closer to some kind of “best” truth, but we’re certainly not there yet. But I’m also a fan of Dewey’s idea of “warranted assertions.”

Dewey argued that we are warranted in believing things that are the result of “competent inquiry.” In other words, we should believe those things that come as a result of lots of good, hard thinking. Sometimes, this happens through private, hands-on experimentation, but more often, it’s a communal effort. It’s a group inquiry — the kind you get in breakout rooms, town hall meetings, and university seminars. It’s the collective thought process of many competent inquirers, be that scientific consensus, political tradition, or moral and social norms.

For Dewey, this competent inquiry is always subject to the needs of the times. It doesn’t correspond to some “actual” truth in the Woods of Pure Philosophy but rather presents a system or way of thinking that works. And this way of thinking isn’t fixed. It’s fallible and provisional. Sometimes, something is “warranted” based on the best available evidence right now. It is open to being revised, refined, or discarded if new evidence or a better framework comes along. It’s not a million miles away from what Thomas Kuhn would later call a paradigm (with paradigm shifts being possible).

Here are three examples:

Warranted: The Universe is about 13.8 billion years old. This is an answer that emerges from the cosmic microwave background, the ages of the oldest stars, and the observed rate of expansion. I’ll leave it to Ethan Siegel, Big Think’s resident astrophysics expert, to explain the details. But it’s also provisional. It’s the best-supported system we have for making sense of the evidence we have.

Unwarranted: Space and time are absolute. This belief was a foundational pillar of Newton’s system, and it was warranted for two centuries by Dewey’s standards — it predicted, it worked, it put ships across oceans. Then relativity came along to show that it was still perfectly serviceable at certain speeds but wasn’t an accurate universal answer.

On the cusp: The world is entirely material and mechanistic. I’ll leave this controversial one right to the end. For hundreds of years, science has told us that the Universe is matter in motion and nothing more — a very large machine whose every part, mind included, is explicable by the laws governing the parts. But recent research into the quantum world, dark matter and dark energy, and the inexplicable but unignorable fact of consciousness at least challenges this worldview. Is it warranted to carry on believing something that so inadequately explains all the newest evidence?

So, what beliefs do you think are unwarranted? What beliefs are on the cusp?

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at when a coincidence is not a coincidence.

I went to a “creator festival” this week.

I don’t know why I did it. I’ve been to one of these before and, just like last time, I felt ridiculous.

For one, I find moving around these kinds of open-plan, stall-filled warehouses a kind of torture. Drop your bag off, get a free coffee, then walk around with an imbecilic grin that you hope is welcoming but reads as psychopathic.

And then, on the three occasions I did manage to talk to strangers, I found myself quickly trapped in a conversational cul-de-sac.

“So, what content do you make?” I asked.

“Mostly hair and make-up stuff.”

“Fashion things.”

“Yeah, I’m with the L’Oréal team doing beauty products.”

Good. Great. I respect and admire the work and consistency. But I have utterly nowhere to go with this networking opportunity. My wardrobe consists of five items: jumpers and brown shoes for winter; T-shirts and flip-flops for summer; and chinos all year round. The colors and textures might change a bit, but my fashion and beauty portfolio could fit on the back of a novelty playing card.

I gave my fellow creators a follow; they gave me a follow back, and I suspect we’ll all silently unfollow each other in a few weeks when we realize it was a polite mistake.

It was time to leave. Cut your losses, Jonny, go do something better. But just as I was about to slink off to meet my friend a few tube stops away, I bumped into someone I once knew from university called Bobby.

Statistically, given the size of the event and the size of my university, this isn’t desperately unlikely. But what was weird — preternaturally weird — was that I had a dream about Bobby last week. Bobby and I played on the same rugby team, and we occasionally had a few drinks together, but we were never best mates. So why did he pop up into my slumbering unconscious? Why did the universe at that exact moment throw Bobby and me together somewhere around North Greenwich?

Well, let’s explore the philosophy of synchronicity.

Go well,
Jonny

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The unfalsifiable theater of your unconscious

The Book of Changes is a three-thousand-year-old divination tool. It contains 64 hexagrams — symbols made up of six lines each. It’s thought that the hexagrams represent the dual aspects of the universe: some are broken (Yin), and others are whole (Yang). A prospective soothsayer will throw three coins, and after some complex rules (usually guided by an expert), you will get a series of hexagrams. For example, you might get The Abysmal (#29), representing the dangerous abyss; The Marrying Maiden (#54), representing a union that might not be equal; or Gnawing Bite (#27), representing teeth coming together to resolve a problem.

Armed with your hexagrams, you go away and reflect. What could the three hexagrams represent? What can they tell you about your life? What do a Marrying Maiden, Gnawing Bites, and The Abyss have in common? Within the wider theological framework of The Book of Changes, your hexagrams are a kind of cleromancy — a divinely inspired message. It’s guidance from the Dao.

But according to the psychiatrist Carl Jung, The Book of Changes is an example of “synchronicity.”

For Jung, synchronicity is when we see two causally unrelated things as meaningfully connected in some way. Suppose, for instance, that you had a recurring dream about an old school friend — a friend you’ve not seen for a long time. Then, by coincidence, you see that friend at a fringe and obscure creator festival.

Synchronicity is a bit more than “Oh, that’s weird.” It is something that forces you to reconsider either your own psyche or the world. It says, “There must be something to this — I’m going to reconnect with this friend.”

It’s a subject of some debate about how much spiritual or quasi-religious emphasis Jung put on this. His own interest in The Book of Changes implies that he was at least open to the idea of some kind of cosmic hand behind synchronicity. There are passages where Jung sounds more like a spiritualist than a psychologist. But for our purposes — in the rigorously mundane bounds of Mini Philosophy — synchronicity can also be understood as a psychotherapeutic tool. Even if we want to explain these improbable coincidences away as confirmation bias or the peculiar propensity all humans have to imagine and create patterns, there’s still something to it. There’s a power here, even if it’s not divine. There’s something I need to learn.

In analytic psychology, these coincidences are moments where the unconscious forces itself onto the conscious. It’s a desperate, pleading scream from subliminal forces wanting to be heard. Synchronicity feels spiritually true because it carries the weight of your vast unconscious. Seeing Bobby in that warehouse feels like a religious “It’s meant to be!” because it’s my unconscious finally being recognized. In some ways, synchronicity is a kind of revelation or transformative experience. It’s a voice from somewhere, whether you think it’s God, the Dao, or some repressed element of your psyche. And that voice needs answering, or there’ll be pain ’a coming.

Synchronicity does, undoubtedly, take a seat in the unfalsifiable theater of pseudoscience. It’s untestable in itself. But even if you see Tarot cards, divination, horoscopes, dreams, and The Book of Changes as embarrassing quackery, it’s still true to say that often great, life-changing revelations can be born of them. A cynic might snicker at getting a certain Tarot card, but when they’re lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, they’re still asking the question, “What would that mean in my life?”

The question, the redirection, is the magic.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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At one end of the spectrum, you have philosophers who are mathematicians in disguise. They talk in syllogisms, have blackboards full of calcs, and put the “anal” in analytic.

A bit further along, you have the bookish bunch. “No parties or narcotics for me, please. I’m too busy re-reading Either/Or.” This lot finds more in common with 19th-century Denmark than any modern shindigging.

Next up, you have the philosophers-in-name-only. Their knowledge mostly comes from the internet or a few light books. They’re good for dropping in some cool aphorisms now and then, but they’re pretty much just like anyone else except they always carry a performative copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra wherever they go.

Then, you have the passionate philosophers. They are obsessed with one ideology or person. It could be Wittgenstein, Foucault, or De Beauvoir (which is ironic), but it’s almost always Marx. Loose clothes, a swishy scarf, and perhaps a beret. They have faded posters of revolutionaries on their wall, and they meet for drinks with The Resistance every other Wednesday.

Then, you have the cynics. They’ve read so much philosophy they don’t know what to believe. They mock Marx, they mock religion, they mock everything, actually. They’re often guilty of being patronizing — “Oh, I used to think that once, too” — but their jaded ennui has a Camusian cool.

Finally, nearer the other end of the spectrum, you get the dark philosophers. They have ridden through the shadowy, brutal, disturbing underworld of philosophy, and they’re not coming out whole or happy. They’ve seen some stuff. Even the cynics find it hard to mock them.

This week, we’re looking at the dark philosophers. We’re looking at three of the most negative, upsetting, pessimistic theories in philosophy and measuring just how damaging they are.

Go well,
Jonny

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at my perfectly groomed holiday.

You can find the companion article here: “Live deliberately”: The origin of America’s first philosophy

I’ve just come back from holiday.

It was the kind of holiday where you pay a month’s salary to get back in touch with nature. There’s a big swimming pool for the kids, adventure activities for the restless, and thousands of ancient redwoods for the tree-lovers.

“These trees can grow as old as 2,000 years,” the sign said, “but ours are 175 years old.”

One morning, as the cabin slept, I went for a sunrise stroll along the Cascade Way — a long gravel trail that ran alongside a stream. It was early enough and shaded enough to be perfectly cool, and about halfway along, as I turned a corner to see an especially handsome waterfall, I had a moment. I was stopped by the beauty of the scene. I gave a contented sigh. I felt myself falling into a warm, blanketed bed of absolute serenity. As far as I am concerned, just that single moment was worth the month’s salary.

But then, as I tend to do, I took it too far.

“I want to move to the woods,” I excitedly told my wife as I got back. “I want to live among the trees. I’m done with this exhausting choke of civilization. Take me to The Wild.”

A blank stare.

“See, look at this house.” I waved my phone in her face. “It’s got a lake! It’s got woods!”

“It’s in the middle of nowhere, Jonny.”

“But nature, babes. Nature.”

I’ve done this before. When I was 18 years old, I went on my first ever horse ride. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and, as countries go, Middle-earth is a great first place to start horse riding. But for months and months afterward, I harbored unvoiced fantasies about living in a cabin off in the wild. Jonny the Homesteader, living a life of bucolic purity. No one to bother me and no worries to have when you’re out riding in the woods.

But my holiday was not really nature. My horse riding was not really wild. And so, this week we look at the multilayered aspects of the wild.

Go well,
Jonny

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The natural sublime

In the mid-19th century, the American philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau led the transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism was a kind of mystical philosophy that argued religious truths are more often intuited than rationalized. We can feel the divine in many ways because we all possess a filament of that divine. But one of the best ways to do this is to be around nature. Go out into the woods, and you will find forces you cannot find in traditional worship. God is not easily found in temples, mosques, and churches. God is in chalky cliffsides, white-rushing rivers, and the frost-peaked mountains of the wild. So, get your hiking boots on. Get outside. Find God.

The problem is that when Emerson and Thoreau talked about “the wild,” they really only meant the closely manicured version most of us grew up with. Even in their own day, people pointed out that when the transcendentalists talked about “nature,” they really meant “park” or even “garden.” For example, when Thoreau wrote Walden, he lived a short walk away from his parents’ house. “We need the tonic of wildness,” he wrote, “…we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable.” And then he’d pop home to have his mother wash his clothes.

This isn’t to say that Thoreau is wrong. Just as my semi-mystical experience along the Cascade Way was very real and important, Thoreau’s celebration of nature is absolutely spot on. Being around nature is good for us. Studies consistently show that even a tiny green pot plant can lighten your mood and that spending sustained time outdoors makes you happier. So yes, we do need “a tonic” of nature, but the point is that there is a difference between nature and the true wild.

The kind of nature most of us experience is different from the one our forebears knew. Unless you really go out of your way to live in an abandoned bus in Alaska, most of our nature is at least slightly maintained and mostly defanged. People dive into nature like a summer pool and hop right out when they’re done. Even if you like to sleep under a bivouac in the cold of February with an amber warning of passing bears, you sleep knowing that a good hospital is not far away. You know you’re a phone call away from help. Even during his three-week rainfalls, Thoreau knew he could get out and get warm if he wanted to.

To many living today — especially those of us living in towns and cities — nature is beautiful. It’s restorative and calming. We can get outside and sip our coffee to the pleasing chirping of birds. I’m sure this gentle, soft appreciation was true thousands of years ago, as well. An ancient Greek could just as much appreciate the Sun twinkling along the sea as I can. But to pre-modern people, nature wasn’t just beautiful. It was also sublime.

Edmund Burke was one of the first to make the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, but then Kant took the idea and pushed it along with Prussian rigor. The beautiful is what we enjoy. It’s the buds of spring, the wash of an ocean, and the dog’s sleeping head in your lap. It’s pleasant. Most importantly, it’s safe. The sublime is what we dread or, perhaps, revere. It’s the heavy sheet of a winter blizzard, the crashing waves of a storm, and the distant howling of wolves. The sublime is both awesome and awful. It’s a great, terrible power that can utterly annihilate you. We are drawn to the sublime, and we even enjoy it a bit, but we enjoy it with a kind of morbid or masochistic frisson.

My woodland holiday was a beautiful nature retreat. It was a break from sirens and smoggy traffic. I saw more squirrels than I did pigeons for the first time in forever. But there were still roads and bikes zooming about. The Lakeside Shop sold microwave pizza, and the trees had signs.

I have never experienced the true sublimity of nature. I’ve never known the very real possibility that I could be maimed or killed by forces far bigger than me. I’ve never known the true fear that no one is out there to help me if worst comes to worst. I’ve never been battered or humbled by nature. In my leafy Oxfordshire bubble, humanity has hacked nature into a pretty and well-groomed country estate.

The myths and stories of old spoke about the wild in a way I no longer can. The religions and philosophies of a thousand years ago knew a nature with real depth — a nature that could awe you, humble you, swallow you whole. I have the beautiful, and they had the sublime. And I can’t, for the life of a newsletter, work out who’s better off.

What do you think?

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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This article is part of Big Think’s newest special issue, The Opt-Out Nation.

My dad called it a “Spanish omelette.” In reality, it was an excuse to clean out the fridge. Anything not-quite-rotting was his to use. Throw it in. To be fair, they were mostly delicious, but a generous flood of ketchup can hide a lot of things.

Every Saturday morning, as he whisked up our eggs, my dad would listen to Any Questions?, a weekly BBC Radio 4 panel show where host Jonathan Dimbleby asked politicians, business leaders, and the occasional celebrity questions from the audience: “In light of the recent intervention in Iraq, do the panel think we need to double down or withdraw our commitment to NATO?” So little changes.

As Dimbleby tried to referee the point-scoring and playground screeching, my dad would invariably chime in.

“Oh, he’s a bloody arsehole,” he’d grumble. Stir the onions. “The last government tried that and look how it turned out!” In go the crusty green olives. “Yeah, but of course she would say that, wouldn’t she?!” A garnish of wilted rocket.

As much as we might hate the idea, many of our values are inherited rather than consciously chosen.

I didn’t know it, of course, but as I ate my Spanish omelettes, I was digesting my dad’s ideas. His gripes became my gripes. His loyalties became my loyalties.

As much as we might hate the idea, many of our values are inherited rather than consciously chosen. Our beliefs — especially in our younger years — are a response to our primary caregivers’ beliefs. And so, “He’s an arsehole” ran through my head as I cast my first vote.

The world is a collection of individuals, and what is true for the molded youth is true for society. How we collectively think starts out as a reaction to the way our forefathers thought. We inherit the beliefs we learn to question.

In 1929, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the history of Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato set the rules of the game. He threw down the first philosophical gauntlet and challenged his toga-clad friends to a wrestling match: “The world is divided into spirit and body! FIGHT ME!”

Platonism birthed Aristotelianism, which birthed the “eudaimonic schools” such as Stoicism and Epicureanism. Scholasticism led to Rationalism. On it goes, in an overly simplistic but broadly true progression of thought.

It wasn’t until my 30s that I properly felt I had stepped out from the shadow of my dad’s Saturday rants, and it’s often not until quite later that a nation steps out of the shadow of its founding fathers. So, when did America step out from the shadow of its European birthplace? When did a distinctly American philosophy start to emerge?

Before the end of the 18th century, two major figures came to define America’s zeitgeist.

While there is no such thing as a perfectly “pure” nation-state marching in the uniform of a cultural monotone, the U.S. is truly a Spanish omelette of a country. It feels appropriate, then, that the earliest philosophy courses taught in America were just as hodgepodge, with formal establishments like Yale, Harvard, and William & Mary home to a kind of intellectual bricolage.

Teachers of philosophy, in general, can be reluctant to “identify [themselves] wholly with a particular philosopher or philosophical school,” writes historian Norman Fiering, but colonial thinkers were particularly so — fearful that they might discard ideas that “the light of history” would prove were worthy of consideration, they taught everything. Fiering attributes this to a lack of confidence caused by “the pervasive sense of intellectual inferiority that came with provincial status.”

Among all the ideas they were teaching, none came from what could be considered American philosophers. Like young Jonny voting for the first time, the earliest American thinkers still had the voices of their intellectual forefathers in their heads. At this point in the nation’s history, they were merely “tinkering with received ideas from overseas and looking forward to the day when various institutions — social, economic, educational — would exist here in sufficient strength to sustain independent work,” writes Fiering.

It’s hard to identify when the first strands of “American philosophy” emerge, but it’s easier to identify uniquely American philosophers. Before the end of the 18th century, two major figures came to define the nation’s zeitgeist: Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin.

American culture celebrates the self-taught hustler and the side-door entrant.

I feel a great affinity with Edwards and Franklin — a strange thing to hear from someone schooled in the British university system — because I never enrolled in a postgraduate philosophy program. I do not have a PhD. In some European circles, that’s a badge of shame. “Dr. Thomson” would open doors — often centuries-old and bolted with medieval iron — that “Mr. Thomson” cannot. And yet, here I am as the “lead philosopher” of Big Think, writing for a successful and prestigious American company. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a 50,000-word thesis on late Wittgenstein on my bookshelf. It matters that I can write about philosophy well and get it (mostly) right.

This is for good reason. American culture celebrates the self-taught hustler and the side-door entrant, from the self-made men of the early republic to the college-dropout CEOs of Silicon Valley, and the two dominant figures in 18th-century American philosophy lived, wrote, and excelled outside of formal academia.

Edwards went to Yale but did his most famous philosophical work outside its gates. He was the great theologian-philosopher of British colonial America and the leading voice of the “First Great Awakening.” Working from a pulpit in Massachusetts, he wrote treatises on free will and original sin. He argued that true virtue was not mere kindness or civic decency but a kind of cosmic affection that reached beyond family, tribe, or nation. He sought to marry the clockwork universe of Newton’s Principia with the inward fire of Puritan conviction, and the result was a theology that was as rigorous as it was strange.

Even Edwards is dwarfed by the titan that is Franklin. Called “the first philosopher” of America by David Hume, a leading philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, Franklin was born to a family that was too poor to send him to school past the age of 10, and so he retained a kind of frosty ambivalence towards the collegians dominating New England high society. Yet he wrote beautifully, with incredible wit, and covered a range of deep, philosophical issues, approaching them from a position of practicality and experimentation — setting him apart from the more abstract European philosophers of his time.

Nature is transcendentalism’s scripture, solitude is its method, and self-reliance is its golden rule.

By 1830, the U.S. had developed the idea of the power of the individual over institutions — as exemplified by men like Franklin — into its first full-blown philosophical movement: transcendentalism.

If the U.S. is the opt-out nation, transcendentalism is the opt-out philosophy. It espouses a belief that each individual carries within them a direct line to a spiritual, unifying truth. They don’t need the mediation of a church, government, or system of philosophy to encounter the divine. Nature is transcendentalism’s scripture, solitude is its method, and self-reliance is its golden rule. Henry David Thoreau — a father of transcendentalism, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson — took the idea to its extremes, leaving behind society for the solitude of Walden Pond.

“The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! … Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” Thoreau writes in Walden.

Just as I eventually broke free from my father’s political beliefs to develop my own, new philosophies eventually branched off from transcendentalism. Still, as Whitehead pointed out, each new idea is in response to those that came before it — continuing a tradition that dates back to Plato.

And, on a more personal level, to some very questionable Saturday-morning breakfasts.

Click here to check out The Opt-Out Nation in its entirety.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at questioning the world with new eyes.

You can find the companion article here: 5 dangerous lies we tell ourselves, according to philosophy

My son finally knows what I do. Well, kind of.

My wife is a structural engineer. It’s a highly skilled, highly pressured job that will very possibly kill people if it goes wrong. But it’s also quite easy for a six-year-old to understand. If not for the big cranes and four years at university, it’s basically Lego or building a stable den/fort/pillow house.

Freddie has no sense of social media — that’s a bridge I’m not ready to cross — but he does know I’m a writer.

“I write books about philosophy,” I tell him.

“Velosophy?”

“Good enough.”

“What’s velosophy?”

“Well, I ask big, hard questions and we try to see what’s a good answer. Do you want a go?”

A nod.

“Okay, what makes something kind or mean?”

Freddie gives a long vacant stare that means he’s either thinking or abducted.

“Mean is when you hurt someone’s feelings.”

A good answer. I drown him in praise. I kiss and cuddle him — here is Socrates reborn! He likes it, so he wants to carry on.

“Okay, where is heaven?” I ask. We’re not a religious family, but we’ve all come to use “heaven” as a useful starter concept for us to come back to later on.

“Well, Danny told me there’s two heavens,” Freddie starts. “There’s one a long way away you can drive to. Then there’s another one in the sky you can’t.”

Fair enough. Danny’s got three brothers and is a loose cannon. He’s probably talking about Lapland because he went there last year. Freddie wants to carry on.

“Okay, last one, then bed: What does love mean?”

Another abducted stare. A long one. And then he shuffles over and pulls me tight.

“It’s cuddling with you, and mummy, and Charlie.”

Well, now I’m crying. We’re done. No more philosophy tonight.

This week we’re looking at learning to question things with a child’s eyes again.

Go well,
Jonny

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Why are you wearing those clothes?

I think I lied to my son. Yes, philosophy starts with questions. It floats around them, dissecting others’ answers and occasionally offering new ones. But I’d argue that the true wonder of philosophy is found in the process of trying to find an answer. It’s the discussion, the debate, the critical thinking, the self-analysis, the introspection, and so on. The real treasure is what we found along the way.

My six-year-old didn’t solve the metaphysical question of an afterlife. He didn’t provide a comprehensive ethical system to live by (although probably not far off). But as we were talking — and we’ve done much more velosophy since — I learned a lot about him, and he learned a bit about himself.

(Were my wife not there to corroborate this entire incident, you’d be forgiven for thinking Freddie is an invented foil to frame a newsletter. “And then Freddie said, ‘But doesn’t ought imply can, Daddy?’ And everyone applauded.” But I can assure you, this is all true.)

It’s almost a cliché now to point out that children are natural-born philosophers. Part of this is because their brains are wired to question things: Why’s the sky blue, why can’t I stay up late, why isn’t that ladybird moving, and so on. But part of it is also because kids are undefined. They are still learning the rules of the world. They don’t know the “shoulds” and “nevers” most of us live by. A child hasn’t been trained to say, “It’s just the way it is” because they haven’t yet learned to see only one way.

But a child is also a good philosophical tool. We can all adopt a childlike mindset in how we approach the world, and doing so can be useful.

In aesthetics, there is an idea known as ostranenie, usually translated as “defamiliarization.” It’s when you take something that you’ve grown used to and look at it from a completely new angle. You look at things as if for the first time — as if you are a child.

We owe the term to the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, who read and admired this technique in action in Leo Tolstoy’s books and so coined the word. One of those books, Kholstomer, is a story almost entirely narrated from the perspective of a horse. Take, for example, this passage:

“I was quite in the dark as to what they meant by the words ‘his colt’… At that time, I could not at all understand what they meant by speaking of me as being a man’s property. The words ‘my horse’ applied to me, a live horse, seemed to me as strange as to say, ‘my land,’ ‘my air,’ or ‘my water.’”

Here, Tolstoy has taken a familiar idea — owning animals — and made us look at it from an entirely new point of view. We are meant to examine it as if for the first time.

This kind of defamiliarization is common in the arts world. It’s in Tolstoy, yes, but it also underpins the character Seven of Nine in Star Trek (human as alien) and Barbie’s Barbieland (stereotypical toy as satirical vehicle). For Shklovsky, defamiliarization is the hallmark of any good art, but I would argue it’s also the hallmark of good philosophy.

Philosophy is best when it seeks to unravel all the assumptions and the “that’s just the way it is” habits we inherit from whatever intellectual tradition we come dyed in. Even if the answer ends up being the same, philosophy magnifies our assumptions and asks “why?” “Why is it wrong to kill?” “Why is Shakespeare considered good?” “Why do humans have ‘rights’?”

Philosophy then becomes therapy when we try to unravel the assumptions motivating our behaviors or steering our lives. We have to unlearn all the rules we’ve forgotten we once had to learn.

So, a thought experiment:

Sit down with your inner child and imagine all the questions they would ask you.

“Why are you wearing those clothes?”

“Why did you get married?”

“Why did you buy this house?”

“Why do you cry about that?”

“Why do you watch those TV programs?”

Invert. Rotate. Turn your entire life upside down. See your life with ostranenie-eyes. And, in this topsy-turvy freefall, see what feels solid and good. As you journey through the psychedelic, undefined world of a child, the real treasure is the values you find along the way.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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We live according to our beliefs. Some beliefs we know well. A Christian knows they believe in God. An ethical vegetarian knows they believe eating animals is wrong. But other beliefs swish around in the rock pools of our unconscious. They are tacit assumptions that motivate our actions but never appear on an employment contract or in a legal document. And even though we rarely pause to examine them, these beliefs or narratives will steer our lives. They are why we get out of bed, think the way we do, and chase the dreams we have.

Philosophy has long been concerned about these narratives. It’s in ancient Greece, in the Bhagavad Gita, and it’s here in this Mini Philosophy article. Philosophers want to pull up our assumptions, rip them apart, and evaluate them. Then, we keep what’s good or useful, and throw everything else into the stinking cesspit of bankrupt ideas.

So, here are five ideas to start throwing in.

“I need to control everything.”

Unless I’ve gone wrong in my theology, you are not a god. You probably don’t even have any superpowers. And so, there will always be things beyond your control. You can’t breathe underwater, turn invisible, or transfigure into an eavesdropping fly on the wall. But you also can’t change your past, the inevitability of aging, or what other people think of you. It’s as silly to try and control everything as it is to push back the tide with a bristleless broom.

These days, the “dichotomy of control” is credited to the Stoics. Epictetus advises us to devote all our efforts and attention to what we can change while accepting all the many things we can’t. We can waste so much time and thought obsessing over what is unfixable, and we can spend both of them much better.

But of course, many other schools argue the same thing. It’s in Buddhism’s two-arrows doctrine and Daoism’s wu wei. It’s in all the major monotheistic religions. For example, Muslims will often say, “Inshallah,” or God willing. It’s all in God’s hands.

“When I find my true love, I’ll be happy.”

One of the most persistent narratives of our time — one sponsored by Disney and Hallmark — is the idea of a soulmate. I suspect most intelligent people accept that there is not one person destined to be our partner. Otherwise, in a world of eight billion people, love would be statistically impossible. And yet, many people still internalize the belief that they are one half in need of another — a jigsaw piece waiting to be completed.

In her various works, Simone de Beauvoir argues that this idea is dangerous. Because when we view ourselves as inadequate or insufficient in this way, we develop an unhealthy dependency on others for our own happiness. This kind of “you complete me” love turns toxic quickly when an independent, authentic human being finds themselves trapped or unable to choose on their own. It’s part of a wider pattern de Beauvoir calls “inauthentic existence” — where we collapse our freedom into one fixed thing, whether that’s a lover, a cause, or an obsession.

Of course, love is about compromise, companionship, and compassion. But it’s not about throwing yourself into a great romantic ocean, never to be seen again.

“I am who I am forever and unchanging.”

The idea that our identity has a permanent core is there in religious notions of a soul or spirit, but it was given philosophical pedigree when René Descartes started writing. The “Cartesian ego” is an immutable filament of our being. It interacts with the world in some mysterious way, but it’s largely just who we are. Forever. And today, so many people still carry this notion that we are who we are across all time.

The Dharmic philosophies have always offered a different position on this. In Hindu philosophy, for example, Atman is considered a universal, pure consciousness, but our individual egos or ahamkara are flickering, false impressions of constancy. The self is an illusion.

In the Western tradition, a century or so after Descartes, David Hume made it his mission to pop the Cartesian balloon. He effectively said, “Well, René, where exactly is this ‘ego’? Because for the life of me I can’t find it. I only find thoughts, sensations, memories, and so on. It’s all a flux. It’s a jumbly mess. At best, it’s a bundle of lots of things.”

Today, the philosophy of episodism takes this idea and turns it into a practical, workable philosophy. Nothing stays the same. We grow, change, and, of course, die.

“The universe owes me X / I am entitled to Y”

The world doesn’t owe us a thing. We’re born, naked and crying, with nothing at all. Everything and anything that happens to us, and all of the things we own or love, no matter how little or large, are the chance scatterings of a universe that marches to its own drum. The world and its laws are under no obligation whatsoever to give us what we want. We might feel entitled to this or that, but this is arrogance and vanity that the universe just doesn’t even consider.

Albert Camus’ absurdism centers on our desire to create meaning. We want a cosmic metanarrative to explain everything that’s going on: There must be a higher purpose or a greater good to all of this. Why else must I struggle through this pain or drudge my way through all the tedium? For Camus, this is it. This is the life we have, and if there is any cosmic purpose, it’s far too remote and incomprehensible to our temporal, primate minds.

We just have what we have and must make the most of it. Push the boulder, sweat it out, and try to have a laugh or two along the way.

“When I get more money, a better job, and a bigger house, I’ll be happy.”

We’ve all watched Fight Club. We’ve all heard the anti-materialist clichés that saturate social media. We nod along while also wondering why all these “you don’t need money” people almost always seem to have a lot of money.

But it has not always been so. Whether it be monks committed to a vow of poverty, Roman slaves who became famous philosophers, or Indian outcast laborers, almost all philosophers have agreed on one thing: After a certain point, more things will not make you happy. In ancient Greece, the Epicureans argued that we will only ever find peace by learning to live with who we are now and with what we have around us. As Epicurus put it, if you aren’t satisfied with a little, you won’t be satisfied with anything. Siddhartha Gautama created an entire religion built on the idea that craving things always leads to more suffering in the end.

In fact, this last dangerous belief is why philosophy is just so important. Because philosophy is what goes inward. It seeks to clarify our thoughts and understand our motivations. When the world tells us that happiness and fulfilment lie in the many fruits of winning this season’s rat race, philosophy says no. Happiness is and has always been in our heads. So, let’s hop inside, look about, and make sure everything is in order.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at the politics of simple answers.

The U.K. has had 6 prime ministers in 10 years.

And it’s soon to get a new one. To put that into perspective, in the 18 years between my gurgling birth and my first legal pint of lager, we had only 3 prime ministers: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair. But now 10 Downing Street has become a revolving fun house. By the time one prime minister has finished unpacking, their party already has someone else at the door.

While the U.K. is certainly peculiar in how it appoints its leaders, the general attitude underpinning this blurry carousel of political stripes goes wider.

Politics has become entertainment. We approach politicians with much the same attitude as any other celebrity. Get them dancing and vote them off. In some ways, it’s always been this way. Plato was pointing it out 2,500 years ago. Niccolò Machiavelli made his career teaching it.

Plato had two big problems with democracy. The first was that democracy executed his teacher and friend, Socrates. That’s a hard hatchet to bury. The second, more philosophical, problem was that Plato thought democracy reduces leadership to a popularity contest. Presidents, prime ministers, and elected officials have to spend as much energy on pandering to the masses as on making good, hard decisions. When your job depends on the support of thousands or millions of people, you have to look the part and say what people want to hear.

According to Plato, that’s when things end badly. If we imagine the country as a ship, then democracy means we end up with a vain, charismatic captain who knows nothing about sailing and a crew who are drunk on easy answers and sweet falsehoods.

So this week, I’m asking: Do we have the politicians we deserve?

Go well,
Jonny

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White-knuckle-clinging to anything steady

The world is complicated.

I know this, and you know this. And yet, we try to pretend it’s not. On some abstract, rational level, we know that simple answers are almost always inadequate answers, and yet we almost always prefer them.

For example, I’ve heard my fair share of debates. When you’re a philosophy graduate who went into teaching and then public philosophy, it would be a Humean miracle to avoid them. In all those years, the main thing I’ve learned is that the difference between a boring debate and a great debate is nuance. If a debater starts with, “Well, it depends,” “How are we defining that term?”, or “It’s a lot more complicated than just yes or no…” I know it’s going to be a yawny night. I want fireworks. I want polemics. I want clear, delineated positions and a good old-fashioned boxing match.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Leor Zmigrod about extreme ideologies (you can hear the whole thing here). Toward the end of our conversation, we discussed how depressing it is that we demand absolute statements from our politicians. We want clear answers, quick solutions, and people who “tell it as it is.” We all know that politics and governance are the ultimate “not that straightforward” jobs, and yet we demand our elected representatives pretend they are.

“Just shut the borders, send them back, and the country fixes itself.”

“Just tax the billionaires, take their wealth, and the country fixes itself.”

Neither is true. Both are sweeping sound bites of the populist. They sound good and give that warm, welcome feeling of quick-fix certainty. We lap them up.

Populism has always been a problem for democracies. It was there in ancient Rome with the Gracchi brothers, and it is here on our TV screens today. But why does populism ebb and flow? Why is it more of a problem for some ages and not others?

In his 1929 work, The Quest for Certainty, the political philosopher John Dewey applied a kind of psychoanalysis to our collective consciousness. It’s long been documented that when life feels insecure, we withdraw inward. When we feel unsafe, we cling to ideologies, other people, or unhealthy obsessions. So, too, with democracies. When the world is going through any period of great upheaval, we collectively spiral into a kind of crisis. If you put any living, self-protecting creature into a dangerous situation, they do weird things: fight, flight, or freeze. Go mad.

It would take an extreme form of willful blindness to ignore how drastically and quickly the world is changing. AI is just the cherry on the top of a cake made of demographic changes, geopolitical shifts, and climate change. It used to take a retired octogenarian to say, “Things were different back in my day.” Now, Gen Z could say the same thing, and we’d nod along. In their shortish lifetime, we’ve developed smartphones, social media, and live streaming. We’ve moved toward remote working, cashless societies, and Amazon for everything. We’ve got robot hoovers, electric cars, and Ozempic. History is spinning us around so fast, we’re worried we’re going to fall over.

So we grab what’s steady. We white-knuckle-cling to anything to hold us up. And that anything is often the wrong thing. We crave easy answers from our politicians because, bloody hell, we’ve got enough doubt and hardship in our day-to-day, and we can’t be having more of it from the suited lot in the corridors of power.

Dewey’s solution to this isn’t a limp, unhelpful “Get used to uncertainty.” That’s as pointless as saying, “Can’t you just be happier?” Dewey argues we should swap absolute claims for accountability claims. We should ask not for certainty but for hypotheses.

“I think immigration is causing the economy to shrink. So I’m going to reduce it for one term and then measure if that works.”

“I think billionaires are forcing capitalism into something dangerous. So I’m going to impose steep taxes to see if that helps small to medium-sized businesses.”

In this way, politics moves from some soothsaying pseudo-religion to something more like a political science. Hypothesis, method, expected results. It’s falsifiable, transparent, and it gives people that needed sense of “someone, somewhere, is trying to fix the problem.”

But for Dewey’s idea to work, we need one key ingredient: accountability. If someone has an idea and a strategy, great. If that strategy goes wrong and that idea turns out to be false, then move over, let’s try something else. Make room for someone else.

This is democracy at its best. It’s a constantly updating system of trial and error. We get rid of what’s not working, and keep what is. A rapidly revolving door of leaders is the natural consequence of electing politicians on the back of simple solutions. Unlike some arm-waving, charismatic rapture priest, politicians have a day of reckoning. There will come a moment when quick solutions break. And when those sound bites turn out to be falsehoods, the public will be furious.

We don’t need braver politicians. We don’t need better leaders. We need a better and braver electorate — one who’ll swap the comfort of certainty for the honesty of accountability.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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An extremist is different from someone with extreme views. Nazism is an extreme view, but you can be a flexible Nazi. Anarchism is pretty radical, but you can be an open-minded anarchist.

Being an extremist has nothing to do with the views you hold, but the way that you hold them. A flexible Nazi is willing to hear the counterarguments, weigh them up, and (we hope) abandon their Nazism for something more rational and evidence-led. On the other hand, you can also have a mild-mannered, well-to-do centrist who won’t budge on his views. He reads a respectable newspaper and always votes for the “safe pair of hands.” But ask him about anything — immigration, taxation, law and order — and his mind shuts down. His dial is superglued resolutely to the center.

Extremism is about what philosophers and psychologists call “cognitive rigidity.” And in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod about just this. Zmigrod is the author of The Ideological Brain, and our interview is jam-packed with gold about the philosophy of extremism. We talked about politics, existentialism, and, most interesting of all, a simple test we can all do to measure both our own and other people’s rigidity.

So, read on to see my write-up and watch the hour-long interview.

Go well,
Jonny

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