Psychological Preconditions of the Serious Life

There is nothing wrong with thinking there is something wrong with you. There undoubtedly is something wrong with you, and the precondition for any serious thought and growth is the recognition of this fact. Modern psychology is continually trying to persuade us that self-doubt, self-rebuke, and the periodic influx of shame and social discomfort, are illnesses to be cured, whereas these are rather evidence of life and health. Modernity, in its abstract nihilism and disregard for questions of concrete causality in human things, invariably associates health with comfort and stasis, as though this association were self-evident or even scientific. In fact, however, it is a mere moral bias, a value judgment as we moderns are wont to say, and therefore perfectly unscientific (in the modern sense of science). What if, on the contrary, we found — as I believe we would find, if we bothered to seek — that everyone who ever achieved any significant measure of wisdom, spiritual beauty, or moral greatness on this Earth was unhealthy in precisely the modern understanding of the term, namely in being routinely subject to the deeply troubling thought that something was wrong with him? Would such a discovery change our modern understanding of psychological health? Not likely: we moderns are also wonderfully clever at salvaging our biases with abstract rationalizations, regardless of the cost in life, civilization, and human actualization.

A thinking person will invariably have something of a loner’s nature. To be clear, he will certainly not be one of our moment’s hermits-by-lassitude, so obsessed with mindless amusements indulged in private that he gradually kills the natural urge to engage with others at all, let alone to find his life’s purpose in engagement with them. That is, he will not be one of today’s spiritually deflated mainstream, who have withdrawn from life due to learned habits of self-annihilation, but rather one of the happy few in all times and places who tend toward self-isolation as a matter of innate temperament and spiritual need, which is to say those who live as though constantly working on something that is not yet quite ready to be revealed, and therefore must not be interrupted in progress or exposed too soon.