Thou shalt not strive to understand thine own mind

When an animal is hungry, it seeks food. A human, unlike an animal, knows this. And thus humans are capable of fasting. In other words, if psychology can articulate a causality mechanism, it has raised the possibility of altering it.

A stimulus-response machine can have no knowledge of itself. And yet the new psychologists enumerate stimuli and responses, showing that the mind can indeed have knowledge of itself. This contradiction, if we look into it deeply, tells us much about what’s happening to intellectual life today.

Knowledge a mind obtains from introspection—the understanding of hunger that allows it to fast, for example—our social scientists tell us is pure illusion. Introspection, with only one data point, can never reach “statistically significant” conclusions. Statistics the collective scientific enterprise collects about many minds, on the other hand, are objective facts.

A majority of minds pursue lucrative careers and lavish vacations. Only a tiny minority is interested in an ascetic contemplative life. The exceptions were once revered as saints and holy men. But times have changed. Introspection is now a pathology—perhaps a form of late-onset autism. As conformity is elevated to a principle of diagnosis, and dissent becomes pathology, the final nail is driven into the coffin of individual intellectual life.

Humans are stimulus-response machines, social scientists report, thinking they have discovered a fact about man. In reality they have discovered a fact about present-day man—secular, conformist, non-reflective, non-introspective man. As humans have forsaken all attempts at introspection, we have become stimulus-response machines. The social sciences can hardly be faulted for observing this. And yet I can’t help but wonder—did the social science teachers of the last two generations, teaching stimulus and response in a value neutral way, assigning no moral value to overcoming it, offering no praise for a life of self-awareness and self-control—did they perhaps bring about the very change they were measuring?

If competent introspection is recognized as a scientific virtue, the psychologist must recognize that some experimental subjects have this virtue and others don’t. The idea that psychology can be “value neutral,” like physics, goes right out the window.

Asceticism has always been a revolutionary idea. The less money I need, the less readily I respond to the incentive structures that keep us all chained to our desks. Self reliant intellects seek truth rather than wealth. They tend to ask embarrassing questions about the legitimacy of power rather than eagerly reporting to Monday morning meetings.

I’m not proposing a conspiracy. We know perfectly well that we have abandoned introspection and intellectual self-reliance to experts. We may not be particularly self-aware, but we're not stupid. We know we have handed over care of the mind to caregivers, be they in government, religion, or medicine. The Edenic apple of psychology was too dangerous to leave in the hands of individuals. And we couldn’t exactly hand it back to God. It had to be collectivized.

The new commandment of today is: Thou shalt not strive to understand thine own mind. Or not directly, anyway. It’s okay to read psychopharmacology textbooks. It’s okay for psychopharmacologists to perform experiments on cohorts. But the individual is never, under any circumstance, permitted to bypass the experts and experiment on himself.

Psychologists in the 1950s hoped they could put patients into a profoundly altered, yet still aware state of mind—a kind of waking dream. This altered state could provide an alternative “angle of introspection” that might yield profound and true psychological insights. Parts of the mind unconscious in one state might be conscious in another. By alternating between states, larger portions of the mind could be brought to light.

But one angle of introspection was already one too many for rulers who need us to accept what they tell us is good and true and just without asking inconvenient questions.