Two Essays on Colin Wilson: "World Rejection and Criminal Romantics" and "From the Outsider to Post-Tragic Man" by Gary Lachman

When your first encounter a book by Colin Wilson and begin to investigate what else he wrote, you can very quickly become intimidated by the number and scope of his works. After looking over his impressive body of work, you can find some recurring recurrent topics among the titles, but you’d have a long slog to find a common thread without a guide. In 2016, Gary Lachman published what I believe constitutes the definitive long-form (book length) guide to Wilson’s work, his biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. But some might be intimidated by a book-length dive into Wilson. So, is there a work that allows one to dip one’s toe into the water, so to speak? In this case, I can recommend Lachman’s Two Essays on Colin Wilson: “World Rejection and Criminal Romantics” and “From Outsider to Post-Tragic Man.” The two essays date from 1994, thus pre-dating the end of Wilson’s career (as a writer he was truly prolific), but they still capture the essence of Wilson’s project.

Colin Wilson

The first essay plunges the reader into Wilson’s ideas about optimists and pessimists and how they arrive at their respective positions. The pessimistic view (‘world rejection’) gained the upper hand with the advent of the Romantic movement, and it has continued to maintain its prominence, especially in the artistic class. Of course, Wilson and Lachman can identify vital counter-examples (e.g., Nietzsche (his dourness and occasional vitriol notwithstanding), William James, and George Bernard Shaw), but many writers and artists in the 20^th century tended toward ‘world rejection.' After discussing various viewpoints, Lachman makes the following point (referring to Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov)

The whole point of Wilson’s The Outsider [Wilson’s first book and the one that brought him widespread acclaim-sng] and practically all of his subsequent books is that any halfway sensitive consciousness is faced with this dilemma: which vision is true, Alyosha’s or Ivan’s? In a way it comes down to a variation on Pascal’s wager: if the universe is pointless and worth rejecting, then to act as if it isn’t, as if it is meaningful and worth affirming, is a mistake with no worse consequence than any action or belief in a meaningless universe. But to act as if it is meaningless and worth rejecting when it is indeed meaningful and worth affirming is to throw away the possibility of having the kind of experience that Alyosha does when he feels that his consciousness is linked to the stars, or Nietzsche when he felt “6,000 feet above man and time,” or the Steppenwolf’s vision of “Mozart and the stars,” and the other visions of meaning and affirmation that Wilson has catalogued throughout his enormous body of work.
The thing to be remembered is that the affirmative vision is not the outcome of a reasoned argument, although after it one can use reason to remind oneself of its reality. The affirmative vision always arrives unexpectedly, from some source in ourselves deeper than our conscious egos. 

Lachman, Gary. Two Essays on Colin Wilson: “World Rejection and Criminal Romantics” and “From Outsider to Post-Tragic Man” (Colin Wilson Studies Book 6) (Kindle Locations 148-157). Paupers' Press. Kindle Edition.

Gary Lachman

Throughout the remainder of the essay, Lachman continues to explicate on this fundamental theme, just as Wilson did throughout his lengthy career. Both Wilson and Lachman embrace the view that life is worth living and counter the arguments of the world rejecters, although both Wilson and Lachman eschew Pollyannaish views on the subject. It’s not that evil and suffering don’t exist, it’s that these realities don’t carry the day.

One of Wilson’s key insights is that one overcomes the abundant prompts toward pessimism by “peak experiences” (Maslow’s term; Wilson was an admirer, then friend and biographer of Maslow). Of course, the Romantics (the originals and their descendants) craved peak experiences and sought them, often by drugs and alcohol, but Maslow and Wilson both believed that peak experiences were not “gifts of the gods,” but how ordinary consciousness should work. Indeed, the “criminal” part of the essay, reflecting a part of Wilson’s investigation, is the fact that at least some criminal behavior is sparked by the need for thrill and adventure, as well as power. While greed and simple lack of self-control (e.g., alcohol consumption) are behind most crimes according to my 30 years of experience as a criminal defense lawyer, in some cases, the motive seems to have been the thrill of it all. (Two check-kiters (back in the day) pop into my mind; they loved to tell how played the game so well—for a while.) Wilson cites many instances of either actual and imagined debauchery pursued by artists to heighten and engage consciousness to the level of a peak experience. But whatever temporary high they achieve then dissolves and becomes merely an elusive vision of a paradise lost. Some writers, like “William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer” almost deify the criminal and debauched elements in their writings, as against, for instance, Shaw, who created characters who sought out the extraordinary and to achieve and aspire greatly. (Again, my 30 years of experience with “criminals” prevents me from giving any credence to romanticizing them; the overwhelming number of them were simply occasional screw-ups; some wise-guy blow-hards with a bit of luck; and the congenitally anti-social. I never mustered any admiration for my clients, although I hasten to add that I always treated them with dignity and respect.) Thus, Wilson-Lachman (it is hard to separate the thinking of the two within the context of these essays) don’t have to work very hard to convince me of the folly of the romancing the criminal, or of ‘world rejection’ in general. Yet, because these authors are still read and perhaps have some following (beyond English departments?), the exercise is a worthwhile one.

So, while some of the essay critiques the futile (and to me, frankly boring) worldviews espoused by the pessimists, the other part looks at the problem from the affirmative perspective. Lachman notes:

While the Criminal Romantics treat the symptoms of what Wilson calls ‘life-failure’ by throwing themselves into one adventure after another, Wilson addresses the source of the problem.
That source, ultimately, is consciousness itself. Two things, Wilson argues, are essential in understanding the problem of ‘affirmation consciousness’; one is the curious relation between the conscious and unconscious minds, the other is recognizing the fact that we are all in a state of what he calls ‘upside-downness’. Since Sigmund Freud’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious, the popular notion has been that the conscious mind is in a sub-ordinate relation to the unconscious. We are all, the common myth goes, driven by unconscious forces. There is a one-way relationship between the two; in computer-talk, the unconscious ‘downloads’ into the conscious mind, but not vice versa. With Freud this scenario is exceedingly dark, since for him the unconscious is a kind of cellar full of nasty business we’d rather not think about. In Jung the situation is better; for him the unconscious is not a dumping ground for ‘repressions’ but a creative, purposeful centre in the psyche. But still, in Jungian psychology, the unconscious calls the shots. 

If. 619-628.

Wilson posits that the opposite may be the case: that the active, conscious mind may affect the unconscious to our benefit. In other words, our conscious, intentional acts—our active mind—may be the vehicle of our well-being and not a passive, “leave-it-to-the-unconscious” attitude that depth psychology (Freud and Jung) suggests. It’s certainly more than just “think happy thoughts,” but does begin with “don’t focus on negative thoughts.” Some balance, some lines of communication, between the conscious and unconscious mind must be opened, and Wilson suggests (and Lachman agrees) that the conscious mind can have a much greater role in promoting this increased communication that all too many have heretofore believed.

In the second essay, “From Outsider to Post-Tragic Man: Colin Wilson and the Case for Optimism” many of the same themes are further explored and developed. As Lachman explains in the opening paragraph:

Colin Wilson is a very good example of what Isaiah Berlin called a hedgehog, he who “knows one big thing.” Whether he is writing about the Düsseldorf sex murderer Peter Kürten or the Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Wilson’s subject is invariably the same, and has been so since his first book, The Outsider. For nearly forty years Wilson has been fascinated with the potentials of human consciousness and has produced under this rubric a massive and highly readable oeuvre on topics as diverse as existential philosophy, the occult, crime and the psychology of murder, literary criticism and sociology. In pursuit of his investigations, biographies of such dissimilar characters as Bernard Shaw, Wilhelm Reich and Grigory Rasputin have emerged from his pen, as well as many novels and much incidental writing. His output is unquestionably prodigious: at last reckoning the number of volumes from Wilson’s hand exceeds 100.

Id. 734-740.

Lachman’s opening comment that Wilson is a “hedgehog” according to Isaiah Berlin's distinction between thinkers as hedgehogs and foxes is a designation that wouldn’t on first blush attribute to Wilson, as I alluded in the opening of my review. His array of book topics, non-fiction and fiction, is astonishing, but Lachman is right: an overriding theme ties all of Wilson’s work together. Wilson is all about the potentials of human consciousness. As Lachman aptly puts it: “[W]hat is the “one big thing?” Put as briefly as possible, Wilson’s underlying theme is that questions of the meaning of human existence cannot be satisfactorily addressed without taking into account the intensity—or lack thereof—of human consciousness.” Id. 743-745. If like me, you perceive everything that we humans do as motivated by a desire to alter or sustain a particular state of consciousness, then you realize that Wilson must be right. Feeling sleepy? Then change to sleep consciousness (which has various levels as well). Hungry? Act to alleviate that uncomfortable state by eating. Bored? Turn on the television or attend to your smartphone (which may well lead to greater boredom, but it may distract you for a while. Horny? Well, you get the idea. Of course, my examples focus on basic needs and drives, but we can say the same about the need to create, to be inspired, to share emotions with a group, to feel the body in action, and so on. We constantly act to alter our state of consciousness. But not all courses of action are useful, and some are counter-productive to our (often ill-defined) intentions. I think that this is what Wilson (and Lachman) are getting at.

In the remainder of the essay, Lachman catalogs the developments of Wilson’s thought through his Outsider cycle (five books at the beginning of Wilson’s career). By the time he’d completed these books, Wilson had developed an alternative take on the existentialism of Sartre and Camus. A positive existentialism, if you will, is outlined in Wilson’s An Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). In this work, Wilson pens his answer to Sartre, Camus, and others in their line of thinking. Husserl’s phenomenology and its emphasis on intentionality and Whitehead’s distinction between ‘causal efficacy’ and ‘presentational immediacy,’ are the main ingredients with which Wilson brews his ‘new existentialism.’

Lachman continues his explication to include the “St. Neot margin” (a peculiar phrase but based on a terrifically telling story told by Wilson that brings it alive), ‘life failure,’ ‘the robot,’ and ‘Faculty X.’ Each of these terms expands and clarifies Wilson’s essential insights. In fact, my notes and highlights go on at some length in the book from this point, but I’ll stop here because for the few dollars it will cost you to buy this and read it on your Kindle (or free Kindle software), you should. Just writing the review makes me want to go back and read the two essays again cover-to-cover. The team of Wilson and Lachman is a potent one and one that you can return to repeatedly for inspiration and insight. To me, this is high praise indeed.

After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith by Judith Shklar

Judith Shklar: 

The state of the world today encourages the growth of unhappy consciousness. It is now the most prevalent of all intellectual conditions, and the one to which the most imaginative and subtle spirits are drawn. And who is to say that they are "wrong"? To be sure, they can offer no coherent account of nature, man, history, or society. They do not even try, for the defeat of the spirit lies in just this: that everything has become incomprehensible. But, then, the strange as this of “the world" is constantly pressed upon us. The romanticism of defeat is the simple submission to the "otherness" of nature and society. All that the unhappy consciousness can do now is preserve its own integrity against the encroachments of a hostile world. Its shortcomings, both practical and intellectual, are obvious enough, but one question remains. Is anything else possible?  163

This edition costs $36.99. Mine cost $2.95. Those were the days my friend!

One of the fun things about having a lot of books (and I do) is that you are subject to a degree of serendipity when you choose one, having so many that I’ve not yet read. Also, many of my books are packed in a hot, dark, crowded storage unit which I can now access at best once a year, and even then with a limited amount of time to ponder selections of what to pack to take to our next venue. So when I unpacked here in Bucharest, many of the selections came as a bit of a surprise. My goal was to grab a lot of my books on 20th-century European history (we had moved to Europe). I guess that it was with this in mind that I tossed in Judith Shklar’s After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957). I recalled the book because I read it before, in the fall of 1975. John Nelson assigned it for his class on “Contemporary Political Theory.” I’m not sure what I thought of it then, and enough time had passed that loved it or hated it, I would be like a new book to me. (I read a whole lot that semester, which is another story for another time.) Whatever I thought of it then, I can say now that I quite admire it.

Shklar’s aim is to explore the decline in political faith after the Enlightenment, which, roughly speaking, was right after the turn of the French Revolution into a blood bath that eventually brought Europe the figure of Napoleon. Of course, the Enlightenment had critiques before then, such as Rousseau, but the reaction to it reached full bloom after Rousseau and Napolean--each in his own way--critiqued it. So while the Enlightenment had great faith in the power of human reason, after the revolt against the Enlightenment, many elites began to doubt the ability of reason to construct a political system that capable of achieving its ends. While the Enlightenment movement was marked by optimism, intellectualism, and anarchism—in short, Reason—its heyday didn’t last long. Romanticism developed as a counter to Enlightenment, with individuality as its highest aim. But the movement was also marked by a sense of despair at the course of human events. Hegel dubbed this the “unhappy consciousness,” and he also provided us with the idea of the “alienated soul.” This trend continued throughout much of the 19th and into the 20th-century, with attitudes of pessimism and despair marking the work of many artists and thinkers. Some tried to buck the trend, but the list of prominent thinkers and artists who fit into these categories is a who’s who of leaders in thought and the arts. Of course, some tried to defy the trend, and as Shklar notes, because of these efforts, “today we have excessively intellectual poetry and philosophy that calls for more life.” (On the poetry end, try some Jorrie Graham is you don’t believe her.) Terms like “pessimism” and “fatalism,” “mass” and “crowd” come to the forefront of discourse. 

Romanticism cultivates an anti-politics that seeks to defy any social controls. Shklar argues that this morphs into the existentialism of Sartre and others like him: philosophical self-transcendence, historical despair, and aesthetic anarchism are existentialism’s inheritance from the “Romanticism of defeat.” Of course, in the political realm, nothing could prove less promising. As Shklar observes, “at first sight, nothing could seem less promising than an attempt to devise an ethic of isolated individuals.” She goes on: “[E]xistentialism has in its preoccupation with victimhood come to deny the reality of all those human relationships upon which systems of morality is explicitly or implicitly based.” (134) Although to be fair, this is much more true of Sartre than of Heidegger and some others associated with existentialism. (This shortcoming applies as well, I think, to a sympathetic critic and proponent of a more upbeat existentialism like Colin Wilson, who, so far as I can tell, seems to have largely ignored the social and political implications of our existential situation.)

Shklar also explores what she terms “Christian fatalism,” and those who developed “Christian social theory,” which, in short, holds that society and polity are failing because religion (specifically Christianity) has fallen out of favor in Europe (virtually all of the thinkers that she considers are European). But these thinkers provide thin fare, lacking any real explanatory power to back up their contentions. In the face of fascism and totalitarianism, merely alleging a decline of religious faith and practice doesn’t provide a satisfactory account. (She mentions Reinhold Niehbur briefly in a footnote, and I would have liked to have learned more about her perception of this work, which seems to me to go beyond that of the “Christian social theorists.”)

In all of this, even liberalism and socialism lose much of their drive. Shklar briefly discusses Tocqueville, Mill, and Acton, but on the whole, she doesn’t find much optimism in the liberal project, or the socialist alternative, either. (She is perceptive, however, in identifying the Mount Pelerin Society of Hayek, Friedman (Milton), et. al as a platform for promoting a traditional liberal politics and capitalism.) Her treatment of “conservative” liberalism is dated; when she writes this, Bill Buckley is just launching National Review, and of course, things have spun from that starting point in startling ways.

Shklar provides a description of liberalism that is worth pondering:

Liberalism is a political philosophy, romanticism is a Weltansuang, a state of mind which can adapt itself to the most divergent types of political thought. The basic problem of liberalism is the creation of an enlightened public opinion to secure civil rights of individuals and to encourage the spontaneous forces of order in society itself. It has nothing to say about defying convention, except to extend legal protection. The liberal sees the rights of individuals is based on justice or utility. The romantic makes a virtue of self-expression as an end in itself, and sees individuality as necessarily involving an opposition to prevailing social standards. The liberal fears majorities, because they may be too powerful to be just, and too ignorant to be wise. The romantic is revolted by their docility, their indifference to genius, their undistinguished emotional life. The liberal sees only the dangers of power abused. That the state may not interfere with society is a concept of an entirely different order than the idea of a man's first duty is to develop an original personality. Majority rule and minority rights are two central themes of political thought; the unique individual and his enemies, the masses, never enter its considerations. The romantic does not offer society anything but his defiance. Liberalism, on the other hand, attempts to regulate the relations of the individual to society and the state, and of these two to each other, by law. 231-232.

In the end, Shklar seems a bit despairing, but her concluding words betray a sense of what thinking and acting politically should entail. (N.B. She published this work before her fellow Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt, published her groundbreaking re-thinking of the possibilities of political life, The Human Condition (1958), which takes a positive view of politics.) Shklar writes:

The fact is that a curious situation exists in which everyone talks about or around politics, but no one really cares – at least, no one is sufficiently concerned philosophically to be capable of renewing the traditional political theory. Yet everyone is perfectly aware that it is in the realm of political life that our present condition and future life are largely determined. Politics impinge upon every moment of our existence, and yet we are incapable of synthesizing our experience into a theoretical picture. It is not only the civic consciousness of the Enlightenment but the entire tradition of political theory that is it at a standstill. 269.… The fact is that intellectually there is no escaping politics. Romanticism is surely not political in its initial inspiration, yet ultimately it too is forced to concern itself with questions of politics, even if only to exploit or to bewail. Indeed, the disgust with omnipresent political activity is the greatest incentive to romanticism.

Yet, despite her bleak assessment, it seems to me that she closes on a faint note of optimism, or perhaps it’s just determination,  a sense that we can find our way out of this predicament, which, although written 60 years ago, rings all too familiar: 

The answer to the quasi-politics of despair would be a new justification of some form of politics as culturally valuable and intellectually necessary. Yet such a thing is beyond us, even after all the countless failings of Christian fatalism and romantic despair--the two most extreme expressions of much general opinion--have been demonstrated. . . .  Paradoxically the fact remains that many people could never be satisfied by despair or by gloomy contemplation of the apocalypse. To a great extent the success of these attitudes is due to the absence of a satisfactory secular social philosophy. 270-271.
  . . . . 

The grand tradition of political theory the began with Plato is, then, in abeyance. A reason skepticism is consequently the sanest attitude for the present. Even skepticism is politically sounder and empirically more justifiable than cultural despair and fatalism. For neither logic nor history is in accord with these, and this even when no happier philosophies flourish. 271-272. 

Shklar's work is, of course, a history and appraisal of the works of high art and intellect within a mostly European tradition. Against this trend, many others were moved with an optimism fueled by amazing technological changes and increasing wealth. And while some despised politics, others jumped head-long into the fray. Some came away jaded or disillusioned, but others, liberals, Marxists, and all manner of different philosophies and outlooks, did not sit on the sidelines and despair. Of course, some of those who were active became authoritarians, fascists, Leninists and Stalinists, and Nazis. And the "masses"? They went about their lives in the midst of all of this economic, technological, social, and political change, wondering how it worked, but primarily concerned with the immediate circumstances of their own well-being and that of their families. Thus, Shklar's story is only a part of the whole, but it's nonetheless important and well-told, and one that still resonates with the world around us today. 

A Review of Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves

 

Several years ago, I was browsing a business section of a bookstore when I came upon an intriguing title: Leadershipand Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by the Arbinger Institute. The title intrigued me. Leadership books are a dime a dozen in the business section: business people apparently expect everyone to be a chief and no one to be a brave. So, it was the self-deception in the title that really caught my eye. While my leadership skills could without question use improvement, self-deception was something I actually thought I was probably too good at. Self-deception struck me as a subset of a problem that had intrigued me most of my adult life. The problem? Why do I do things that I know are not in my best interest? Most of us, I think, can recognize this problem, whether it involves eating and drinking too much, exercising too little, procrastination (a personal favorite), and, perhaps worst of all, mistreating those whom we care for most by impulsive and hurtful actions that we often come to regret. This is a long list!

We have pondered the problem of why we don't do what we know we should do from the time of the early Greek philosophers, who dubbed the problem one of akrasia. In modern parlance, it’s often referred to as “weakness of will”. St. Paul put the problem succinctly when he wrote plaintively: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Romans 7:15 (NRSV). Within the Christian tradition, St. Augustine took up this problem, and he’s credited as the first thinker to identify and wrestle with the problem of the will.

Thus intrigued, I bought the book. I pondered further the subtitle "getting out of the box". What the box was, I did not know, but that mystery was intriguing, along with the fact that the author was not an individual. I bought and read the book, and I was taken. I was taken because I recognized myself in it. Rather than being a recipe book about six steps to better leadership or a 12-step program to avoid self-deception, the book was a collection of vignettes about people and relationships. The vignettes presented problems in personal relations that were easily recognizable. The book suggests that the root of these interpersonal relationship problems come from self-deception, and self-deception puts us “in the box”. In the box, our view of others becomes distorted and leads to mistreatment of them.

That’s the book in a nutshell. This is a business book and therefore there are no footnotes. It's a quick and easy read. In addition, it served to pique my curiosity about where this came from. It seemed quite insightful. I decided to investigate further.

In the age of the Internet, I got online and looked it up the Arbinger Institute. I discovered that they offer information about their analysis and how one can avoid the pitfalls of self-deception. (The book explains this also). I learned that the person behind this intriguing perspective and the unassuming, but very deep thinking behind it, was a man named C. Terry Warner. Checking on his background, I learned that he had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale, that he had spent time at Linacre College at Oxford University, and that he taught at BYU. The website also linked to a short paper by Warner that outlined his thoughts in a more analytical way than set forth in Leadership and Self-Deception. While I had little doubt about the quality the insights, I did have a great deal of curiosity about how he came to his insights. The paper I read provides some hint at analytical framework that Warner developed into these insights.

Some extended quotations from the paper:

We human beings have little comprehension of what we are. The difficulty is not that we are ignorant. It's that we are self-deceiving. We systematically keep ourselves from understanding ourselves. We don't do this deliberately. In order to do it deliberately we would, Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “We’d have to know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it [from ourselves] more carefully." Instead, we do it by means of sin – by going against our honest feelings of what's right and wrong for us to do.

. . . .

It's impossible to betray oneself without seeking to excuse or justify oneself.

. . . .

Whether childishly rationalizing his moral failures or self-righteously claiming to be morally superior, the self-betrayer is blaming others and excusing or justifying himself. He can consider himself in the clear only if he can successfully find fault in others for what he is thinking or doing. There is no way around this. There’s no way of betraying oneself without living a lie – no possibility of sinning in a straightforward, guileless, and open manner. This can be seen by considering the solution to a version of a puzzle well known to the ancient Greeks. The puzzle is this: immorality – what I'm calling “self-betrayal” and “sin” seems impossible. It seems impossible than anyone could know in his own mind what is morally right for him to do and yet not do it. When we experience a genuine prompting of conscience (there is such a thing as false or distorted conscience, and I'll get to that later), way are in that moment obligated: we are requiring of ourselves the course of action it prescribes. (I'm not saying the prompting cannot originate from a source outside ourselves, but only that whatever its ultimate origin, when we experience it we recognize and accept its validity for us.) There is no room for wondering whether we ought to follow this course. In the very reception of a moral summons, we feel we ought to follow it. But if this is so, what sense can it make to say that we require this course of action of ourselves in the very moment and by the very act of refusing to comply with the requirement? What sort of self-requirement is that? None at all, the tradition has said. Either (1) we don't really understand the requirement, or (2) we aren’t really making it of ourselves, or (3) we lack the power or opportunity to comply with it. But the fourth alternative, that we are acting immorally—requiring moral action of ourselves in and by the very act of violating the requirement—seems to make no sense at all.

Yet we do make a more requirement of ourselves in by this kind of act. We do it by carrying out the refusal in such a way that it seems to us that we are doing the very best we can under the circumstances. We make the moral requirement of ourselves by denying that we doing what we are doing. In short, we do it by hypocrisy. The hypocrisy acknowledges, in a backhanded way, the rightness of what we are not doing. Paul wrote that when we violate the law of God written in our hearts, we “consent unto the law that it is good" (ROM. 7:16). Someone who is straightforwardly doing what seems to him right has no cause to excuse or justify himself; and someone who isn't doing what seems right to him shows that he does have such a cause. In the words of La Rochefoucauld “hypocrisy is vice’s tribute to virtue."

We are deceived by this hypocrisy of ourselves because it and the self-betrayal are the same event. We do not first betray ourselves and then, following a moment in which we recognize that we've got something to hide, act as if it is someone else's fault. If this were what happened, we could perhaps hang on to the momentary, accurate knowledge we had about ourselves and thereby keep ourselves from slipping into the lie, but that's not what happens. The self-betrayal and the lie we live do not come in sequence. They are two sides of the same act, for as we’ve seen the betrayal wouldn't be possible unless it were alive from the first moment. Blaming others and making it seem that were doing our best in spite of them is the way we betray ourselves.

                         . . . .

It is important to understand that emotions are always involved in the self-betrayers lie. It would not be the same if we merely told ourselves a lie. We would not be able to get ourselves to believe it.

. . . . 

This point enables us to understand what's really going on when individuals profess, as they sometimes do, to know full well that there what they're doing find that they're doing wrong and continue to do it anyway. They are “intellectually “or verbally admitting to the truth, but emotionally base are still caught up in the lie. Everyone knows this who has experienced the deep sorrow of repentance: it is an emotion that's worlds apart from the self-betrayer’s anxiety or guilt.

Collusion

Accusing others means making ourselves out to be the victim. We’re not responsible for what's going on because we’re helpless in the face of what we’re doing. We feel unjustly used by them – wronged, threatened, or disadvantaged. Feelings of psychological and emotional victimhood are telltale signs of self-betrayal.

. . . . 

One of our dominant, almost unexamined fictions is that we are not responsible for emotions. They are caused in us, we believe, by events outside of our control. Recently this dogma has been undergoing re-examination, and it is becoming increasingly clear that it is false. Accusing emotions are performances in which we engage. In the history of a particular people, patterns of emotion evolve as do patterns of rhetoric. They arise, flourish, and become extinct. Yet the metaphor dogmatically persists that such emotions are injuries because we invoke it anew whenever we compromise ourselves. (For example, if were angry with someone we cannot fail to believe that that person is making us angry.)

This dogma is the core of every self-betrayer’s self-deception.

As you can see read from the extensive quotations, this is pretty strong stuff. It challenges us. It strikes at our normal assumptions. I don't have to think outside the bounds my own experience to identify innumerable times when I rushed to claim the mantle of victimhood. (In addition, really, when you think about it, who the hell would rationally want to be a victim?) However, we do want to be the victim for the reasons that Warner argues. I saw way too much that was way too familiar in this paper to walk away at this point. But the paper, like the Arbinger Institute books and Warner's book Bonds That Make Us Free (which I'm coming to) spend a limited amount of time and analysis on the background of the theory. In fact, at the end of this paper, he lists some sources that he reports influenced his line of thinking. Warner writes:

When I set out to solve certain conceptual problems that recur in the human sciences and in philosophy, I discovered, gradually, the important things I finally prepared myself to say had been said before—some in Eastern religious texts, some in Western authors such as certain Christian mystics and Shakespeare and Kierkegaard, some in the commonplace wisdom of guileless people in many communities, but all of it better and shown in the Hebrew, Christian, and Latter-Day Saints Scriptures. Without having it as a prior aim, I've come to feel that my work is to convey something of the power of the Scriptures to those who do not know them, and endeavored it that admittedly loses important elements in the translation.

Though I am by no means the first to make these claims, it seems worthwhile to keep repeating them: our ignoble desires are not ultimately derived from an ignoble nature, and our anxieties are not the result of being unable to make ourselves whatever we are striving to be. These desires and anxieties stem from our betrayal of what we really are, from our refusal to love, from an exercise of our agency that ties that agency in knots—in short, from sin. If we are emotionally troubled, it's not because we were created to be that way but because we have betrayed, perverted, denied what we were created to be. The condition of our liberation from unwanted desires and anxieties is our responsiveness, in love, to what others need from us, and to the supreme loving act that makes our love possible.

Having read the paper cited from above and Leadership and Self-Deception, I was certainly hooked as a matter of intellect and, I hope, converted (if you will) to his way of thinking. Whether I reflect it in my actions is hard to say, except to the extent I’ve acted the better for it in any degree, it has been at best imperfectly. Of late, I've had occasion to think about my relationships and those of others, and I took up once again the book that I discovered Warner had written before the Arbinger Institute books came out. I bought a hard copy and read it, and recently (thank goodness for Kindle), I was able to re-read it and contemplate it anew. This re-reading led to this review

Bonds That Make Us Free (a wonderfully ironic title that reflects a deep truth) should first of all be described by what it is not: it is not a philosophy book or self-help book, at least in any usual sense. It is a book primarily about people and their relationships. Much of it comes from first-hand accounts of people with whom Warner has worked. He's obviously worked with a great number of people in applying these insights. In this way, Warner is a philosopher in the deepest sense of the word in that is analytical abilities are turned to building a better way of life. He embodies what Pierre Hadot has called “philosophy as a way of life”. This book is full of stories of people and their relationships, with relatively little analysis and only fleeting reference to well-known figures. Tolstoy, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Kierkegaard all get passing mentions or the briefest of quotes, but that’s it. This is not a philosophy book. However, there is one figure who Warner did not mention in the article cited above, but who receives repeated reference in this book (although not in any kind of philosophical explication). That thinker is Martin Buber, a German-Jewish intellectual who in 1923 wrote a book that was translated in English as I and Thou. (The translation I and Thou is controversial and considered by many to be a mistranslation. For Warner's purposes at it should be translated as I and You.) Buber's book argues that there are two ways of relating to others: either is a You or an It. Buber suggests that with others the You relationship is best. One can imagine how well this fits into Warner’s thinking. It is by treating others as an It that we can allow ourselves to sneak into self-betrayal.

The book's many vignettes offer opportunities for Warner to elucidate his insights and to answer questions that most readers will have. Because it is not a comprehensive work of philosophy, but a practical effort to provide insight into our actions, it does not seek to extend or delimit the work as a body of theory. Nevertheless, Warner answers every easy objection to his insights that a person might initially bring forth.

This book is for anyone. Although a Mormon, Warner's religious beliefs don’t intrude upon or limit his theories. Whether one is Mormon, Christian, or nonbeliever, I believe Warner's insights will still prove deeply insightful. (The fact that he can quote Jean-Paul Sartre and benefit from Sartre's insights suggests that Warner's mind is open. Also, although treated only toward the end of the book and briefly, Warner freely acknowledges his religious background and how it ultimately roots his thinking. In the paper, he also understands that some will have a skeptical attitude because of his religious faith.

So, to whom do I recommend this book? Anyone who seeks deeper insights into his or her relationships with others. Given that we are human beings—and perhaps only truly human—when we are in relationships with others, this means everyone. It is not difficult book to read. It’s relatively easy reading. The only hard part is when you see yourself and your loved ones in the tales that others tell of themselves in the many vignettes. Some of this is hard. Hard in the way that we have to look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning. It's not always a pretty sight, but by doing so we see ourselves as we are, and perhaps can make some improvements. I gave this book a five star rating on Amazon because I think it has the potential to change our ways of being in the world, and that's the highest compliment you can give to a book