An overly critical look at The Self and the Soul

Here is more or less my stream of consciousness as I read The Self and the Soul, a dialogue between N.S. Lyons and Freya India.

If I’m being honest I wouldn’t have read past this following bit if not for the fact that it was sent to me by someone I respect,

[Lyons describing Freya India] she does this with—as I think you will see here—a startling amount of what used to be described as wisdom. Exactly how such an old soul became trapped in a Gen Z girl, no one seems to know… It’s actually a little bit creepy to be honest.

“what used to be described as wisdom, […] how such an old soul became trapped in a Gen Z girl”…

I don’t know what to say about that condescending bundle of conservative (always hearkening back) fetishisation of the “girl” except that “It’s actually a little bit creepy to be honest.”

And who is N.S. Lyons? Here I must admit, I sometimes find it difficult to read a thing without prejudice when I know the author holds views that I find abhorrent somehow, eg,

We are now more than two years downstream from the fiery Year Zero of the Revolution, 2020, when, amid the most widespread and destructive riots in the nation’s history, nearly every public and private institution in American life (and then beyond, across nearly the whole of the broader Western world) simultaneously pledged allegiance to the same transformational illiberal ideology that had inspired the violence. The results were immediate, shocking in scope, and lasting in consequence: the primacy of racial consciousness and grievance was forcefully reintroduced into society in the name of racial ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’; police departments were defunded and criminal behaviour effectively decriminalized in the name of ‘social justice’, resulting in a deadly ongoing crime wave; elite medical and educational institutions, along with the American government, began not only to mainstream extremist concepts like the mutilating surgical ‘affirmation’ of children’s alleged transgender identity (among other innovations) in the name of ‘inclusion’, but to actively seek to criminalize any opposition to these and other practices; in a coordinated effort with the state, the world’s largest technology and media giants imposed a great wave of censorship in an effort to entrench and defend the ideological hegemony of the revolution and its values; mobbed by zealots, dissenters to the new ideological regime were summarily ousted from their positions and livelihoods; families and friendships were torn apart as the window of acceptable opinion shifted with lightning speed… This is only to scratch the surface of the traumatic upheaval that was thrust onto American society.

Elsewhere he rails against the “establishments” maligning of Trump. I’m also wary of people writing under pseudonyms while trying to influence public opinion or policy (as he does in his other writing). Lyons real identity is concealed, as with a number of the new crop of intensely Conservative commentators. See Who is “Peter Dukes” for another example.

Still, I welcome the opportunity to practice believing that wisdom can come from anywhere, so I’ll try to read it with an open mind.

no clean separation can be made between the “big” issues of our era – the ideological revolutions, the political turmoil, even shifting geopolitics – and the “little” struggles facing the individual human soul.

No argument from me here, in fact I think this is a notably good framing in that it recognises a strong similarity but not uniformity ( “no clean separation” ), a nuance that would be easy to miss, the omission of which would sound stronger but which would obscure truth.

My only objection then, the (mis)use of en-dashes where em-dashes belong :)

we dive into everything from why therapy culture and the cult of the self has been a disaster for the mental health of young women, and why the male quest for self-optimization can undermine human connection, to how moral judgements are needed to accurately perceiving reality and why the deconstruction of authority has disordered and demoralized society.

Good questions for the most part, even if I can’t help reading appeals against “the deconstruction of authority” as the eternal whistle of conservatism.

Given that the main thrust of this dialogue is about therapy, maybe I should acknowledge that I have never sought therapy. At a young age, as people pushed harder for me to see a therapist, I looked around and realised that all the people I knew who saw therapists were miserable, and that if I wanted to be something other than miserable I should probably take my advice from a different sort of people. Only, the foolish lesson I actually internalised was to not listen to anyone, and I remained miserable. Perhaps then I can’t say anything credible about the efficacy of therapy, but I can still say something.

I agree that the preoccupation with self is a dead and deadening end. I believe that therapy as a discrete pursuit is a weak tonic to symptoms not causes, and represents a kind of cultural failure to nourish the spirit. Well adjusted minds can heal forward, this over focus on healing backwards is spiritual wheel-spin.

At the real lows of mine and ma’s depressions we would despair most, not at our pain as incomparable, but at the awareness that — even knowing others endure much worse — we remained unable to think of anything else.

Therapy too often reinforces the disaggregation of self that is the single greatest cause of our pain, ie. an inability to integrate all that we feel into the self we express.

why our culture feels so utterly unsexy now, and why we all need to learn to be playful again; what men and women really want, and why we’re so divided; the nature of true love, and why love can rescue us from selfishness; why virtue is the only sure path to sanity; why we’ve both found ourselves drawn inexorably down a road to religious faith, and how we each try to grapple with that in our writing.

The introduction ends with this interesting run of conclusions disguised as questions.

1. “our culture feels so utterly unsexy now”

   Society needs to be more sexy? Does it? Why? And what does that even mean? Isn’t that actually part of the problem? I guess I’ll have to wait and see what Lyons means by “sexy”, but this feels like a dubious claim.

2. “we all need to learn to be playful again”

   That we need play is an absolute truth, amen

3. “what men and women really want”

   That people either don’t know what they want, or are unable to express that want is a conclusion I can broadly agree with, but again, it’s the particulars that matter here.

4. “[true] love can rescue us from selfishness”

   Maybe there’s an opportunity here to talk about the para-social relationships that seem to have swept into the world, and perhaps they’ll discuss the need to cultivate a love for all of humanity, but I doubt it. Probably they will just appeal to traditional Christian marriage.

5. “virtue is the only sure path to sanity”

   I’ll be interested to hear what constitutes “virtue” according to Lyons and India because, cynically, I’m weary of hearing “virtue” when what is meant is (deontological) “duty”.

6. “drawn inexorably […] to religious faith”

   That we need religious faith is a strong claim. I have no doubt that we need faith. And if “religion” can grow to include any healthy community of people enacting a shared story, then I’d go so far as to claim that we need religion and faith, but I’m very sceptical that we need religious faith as laid down to Abraham.

“therapy culture,” which “pathologises normal distress, and presents therapy as the solution to all problems.” […] just about everything now—especially online, and perhaps especially among women—seems to be viewed through, talked about in, and marketed using the language of the therapeutic. Spontaneous romantic chemistry might actually be a red flag for past “trauma.”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the straight white fella leading with what I read as a coded version of “why isn’t romance today like it was in the Hollywood movies I watched growing up?”

I think all the therapy and empowerment isn’t working because much of it is just a marketing strategy.

Freya manages to say a lot that is of merit, as above, interspersed with a load of nonsense and dishonest “statistics”,

In the UK, antidepressant prescriptions for children aged five to 12 increased by more than 40% between 2015 and 2021. Five!

This is a gross abuse of statistics without including any anchoring numbers. If there were 10 children of that age using antidepressants in 2015, and 14 in 2021, that would be a 40% increase! I’ve no doubt that the absolute number is a lot higher than 14, but that doesn’t make this rhetorical trick any less dishonest. Especially given that this window (2015 to 2021) falls within the reign of a Conservative government that has pushed more than 900,000 children into poverty, where prior to this government childhood poverty had been declining sharply for more than a century.

Rather than spend hours detailing every dishonest claim, I’ll string together some of the bits I can agree with,

girls are genuinely suffering in the modern world […] I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. […] It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. […] People assume that Gen Z feel too much, that we’re all too emotional, but I’m starting to think the opposite is true. We don’t let ourselves feel anything. We immediately categorise and diagnose and try to control every emotion. I don’t even think we know how to open up properly. We’re all so lonely. […] I’m not convinced, then, that therapy culture even helps us open up; I think it shuts down our ability to talk about our problems. Maybe you’re not anxiously attached, maybe you want to be loved deeply! Maybe you don’t have social anxiety disorder, maybe you grew up with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation in history! […] That doesn’t make you mentally ill. We’re so determined to de-stigmatise mental health issues we’ve started to stigmatise being human. Having human reactions to things. […]

The way I see it, girls are getting two contradictory messages: open up, talk about your problems, but also, being emotional is bad. If someone calls you emotional it’s an insult. Strong independent women aren’t bothered, don’t care. If women do get upset or emotional they must have anxiety, or trauma, or some mental illness. That’s a cruel and confusing message for girls. […]

they should be opening up face-to-face, honestly and vulnerably, in real communities, in meaningful friendships, in stable families […]

I broadly agree with this, whatever our claims about empowering girls and women, we seem to be failing in the creation of a world that supports their spiritual health. “Loneliness isn’t empowerment.”

Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole, it’s worth noting that this negative view was imposed deliberately by the therapeutic state. After WWII, intellectual pioneers of the therapeutic worldview like Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno fingered the “authoritarian personality”—and especially the patriarchal authority of the strong father figure—as the psychological root of fascism. As Philip Rieff summarized it, their conclusion was that the “revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old [authoritarian] political gangs and their leaders.” So they set out, with the backing of the U.S. government, to destroy that authority figure and replace it with emotional management via professional therapists and educational bureaucracies. It seems obvious that they succeeded pretty wildly in this pathologization of the authoritative father figure. How many young men and women feel they must turn first to the internet for advice and direction, even if they are lucky enough to have a father present in their lives? The result is a kind of widespread infantilization that many people fail to ever grow out of.

“Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole”… proceeds to get right into it with some raving revisionism.

Wilhelm Reich’s substantive writing about fascism was written and famous before WW2, and besides, if you’re really trying to re-establish authority figures as credible, maybe “stop picking on fascists!” isn’t the best rallying cry.

Lyons claims that the therapeutic era emerged as the result of a conspiracy between two German psychiatrists backed by the U.S. government, and that this is “obvious”, without any consideration for the fact that therapy took root after WWII not because of some conspiracy to rob men of all agency, but rather because millions of men had just returned from the bloodiest war in human history with what, at the time, we were still quaintly calling “shock”, and that nearly half a million of them hadn’t returned at all. And that’s only in the U.S., a country that sat out most of the war. The war saw approximately 80 million casualties worldwide and many more injured and traumatised. I mean, mightn’t that have something to do with it, pal?

Most of what Lyons goes on to insist about the need for and loss of “legitimate external authority” rests on the existence or at the very least a belief in the Abrahamic god. I find this unsatisfying, both as a given truth, and as any part of a journey toward god.

Of the many claims — broad and specific — made about relationships, the only one that seems to support itself is that strong gender roles made heterosexual relationships modelled in the Christian tradition simpler. This is true, in cultural and spiritual terms they were much, much simpler. Lyons goes on to conclude that they were, therefore, better. He fails to support this claim in any way at all, seemingly taking it as a (god) given or otherwise indisputable truth. His only (anecdotal) support for this claim is that during a single trip to Hungary (Budapest) he had an easier time flirting with women and he found that sexy. Hungary is more conservative, therefore conservatism is more sexy, so his logic seems to go.

Even ignoring how facile that is, he goes on to attach this to “an earlier time” which brings us to the trouble with the conservative line. Conservatism is a politics of nostalgia, and nostalgia is the minds device for misrepresenting the past as a comfort to out present selves. People are almost always expressing nostalgia for a time before they had responsibilities, or a time before they born. This narrow nostalgia is presumed to reflect the world as it was then, and “back then” was always simpler. Nostalgia abhors nuance.

Lyons then proceeds to set up a fantasy wherein meaningful love between a man and a woman must adhere to a pattern of male sacrifice followed by female submission.

Freya half-heartedly pushes back against Lyons assertion that women must submit to men, but only really disputes the when not the whether, and doesn’t make any objection to the bizarre and unsupported claim that men make the greater sacrifice in relationships,

From the beginning, a man’s love for a woman is expressed through sacrifice. He sacrifices time, resources, energy, attention, optionality, and more for her.

In what way is this distinct from the sacrifices a woman makes? What evidences is there for that?

He continues,

there is a kind of subconscious but fundamental asymmetry present in male-female relationships from the start, because a woman cannot afford to engage in the same kind of self-sacrificial love for a man.

What are you talking about man? Culturally speaking, in the time you’re nostalgic for and often still today, women sacrifice themselves constantly, every day, and for what? The hope that if an incredibly rare event (Lyons uses the example of a mass-shooting) occurs, he might make one big sacrifice in return? That’s a raw feckin’ deal, for everyone, but for women especially.

In fact it’s probably an important moment of maturation for any man to come to terms with the fact that, after having left boyhood, he can expect to receive unconditional self-sacrificial love from no one but God.

But while men cannot expect this particular form of love from a woman, they nonetheless obviously do need something reciprocal from her in a relationship. They can’t just sacrifice for her indefinitely for nothing.

Do me a solid and substantiate that, my guy. The world where it is anything close to a norm for men to “sacrifice for her indefinitely for nothing” is not the world we live in.

So both partners find themselves at an impasse. To her, he seems unsatisfyingly emotionally detached. To him, emotional detachment is the only thing keeping her attached and at least still sleeping with him. From my amateur observation a huge number of relationships today seem to end up stuck at this point, sometimes for years, and eventually crumble.

Ah, now we’re getting to it. Women find him unsatisfying, and he isn’t having as much sex as he’d like. Got it. Uncharitable? Maybe, but am I wrong?

How can this chasm be crossed? I think it requires a leap of faith—by both partners, but today maybe especially by women. She must choose to effectively make her own reciprocal form of sacrifice. Not of herself, but of her initial self-centeredness in the relationship. She has to subdue the self-interested pragmatism of her own nature, with its relentless desire to optimize, and choose him as the man he is, flaws included. This further requires recognizing the full value of the sacrifice he is offering her in his role, and the legitimacy of the claim, in a sense, this makes on her. Her own sacrifice is then a submission, not so much to him—though it may look that way to outsiders—but to loyalty and trust in him.

I promise I am trying to read this as something more than the wail of a conservative man who wants a legally-binding contract wherein a woman has to very convincingly pretend to like him. And I acknowledge that his feelings probably represent his lived experience, at least on some level, but is this really the experience people are having? And why is it everyone else’s fault but his?

And why is it here Lyons is identifying women as possessing a uniquely “relentless desire to optimize” when earlier in the dialogue he claimed this was the particular response of men in the atomised age?

This act functions as something like a miracle. The antagonism latent in the relationship is defused, the chasm overcome through a new unspoken covenant. In allowing herself to become fully his, the freedom is granted to him to reciprocate and fully open to her.

Lyons seems to want women to worship men as they did when they were made completely dependent on men for their livelihood, when they weren’t allowed their own income or to own anything, when they were servants to a clan that expanded at the whim of the man who ownded, ahem, married her.

I’ll skip making commentary on the rest of Lyons bit here because there’s really nothing in it except the lament of a man who didn’t get the subservient bimbo that Hollywood convinced him he was owed.

As before, Freya has more interesting things to say,

The problem is, for many young people, we never saw our parents play. We grew up in broken and blended households. Our parents are often two strangers who can barely look at each other. We associate relationships with trauma, turmoil, disloyalty, deceit, and suspicion. Relationships were always serious, strained, never relaxed enough, never safe enough, to play. You can’t play when you’re searching for threats.

once you’ve chosen someone, both men and women need to take that “leap of faith” […] but I would add that this of course only works with a partner they can trust. There’s no sense wishing your girlfriend would relax and stop nagging and being neurotic, if you aren’t making her feel safe. If you aren’t trustworthy, or even kind. We have to feel safe to relax into the relationship. That’s when the self-centredness drops, and the guard comes down.

Ultimately what both sexes need, I think, is a cultural message that it’s okay to depend on each other. We should depend on our partners—to stay, to be faithful, to give support. And from that we can be more independent. Long-term relationships shouldn’t be about losing yourself, but becoming more of who you are.

Good meaningful stuff that manages to identify real social issues and even hints at local resolutions, mostly because here Freya manages to avoid falling into the trap these two have created for themselves of blaming everything on “therapy culture”. Here she gets at something because she expresses real empathy, or perhaps not…

From things she’s written here and elsewhere, I get the impression that this is her own story, this describes her childhood and her experience of relationships so it isn’t exactly empathy, but rather self-sympathy. Which is no bad thing, I think her self-diagnosis is accurate and useful, I only flinch slightly because she spends a lot of words elsewhere in the dialogue railing against such self-diagnosis and inward looking.

But then, a leap,

But yes, the trouble is young people seem to have a core belief that love is transactional, a commodity that can be exchanged. Probably because we grew up displaying ourselves like products on social media, then advertising ourselves on dating apps, and maybe even had a parent who left the marriage for someone else. I see this belief in young people’s obsession with appearance, in the obsession with optimising ourselves, even in the terror of ageing we’re now seeing among teenage girls—all seems to me an attempt to become a better product, to avoid getting traded in, or exchanged for someone of “higher value”.

Eh? Freya uses the fact (linked article) that young people today are getting more cosmetic surgery than ever as evidence of an obsession with appearances? People are getting more cosmetic surgery today because today is literally the first time in history that cosmetic surgery has been widely available. Tell me of an age where disposable income was ever not first and foremost deployed in service of appearances. The only change is in the proportion of the population who have access to some amount of disposable income, and the (consequent) availability of treatments and products to satisfy that spending power.

And there are bits like this, where she identifies a truth, only to draw it to a non-sequitur of a conclusion,

We’ve been told that the meaning of life is self-actualisation, to achieve some perfect state of mental health and productivity. Don’t commit until you have perfect control. But I think that way of thinking will backfire. Because the end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive, super-efficient… and alone.

Too much control doesn’t make us robotic, it makes us neurotic. We become brittle, too fragile to tolerate the very thing we need, surprise and delight.

I agree that people are “trying very hard not to be vulnerable and get hurt” and that this is preventing connection but I can’t bear the sound of two people both describing themselves as “hopeless romantics” while hearkening back to a time when women were only a half step removed from property, where marital rape wasn’t a crime, where homosexuality was illegal etc. Not “hopeless romance”, just more nostalgia.

I’ve spent so much of my life quietly obsessing over how I feel. Stop feeling this way. You should feel more like this. Why do I feel so much? What’s wrong with me? […]

But over the years I’ve realised I have to cut it out. I can’t solve my feelings. To live my life and actually be helpful to people around me, I have to stop going inwards and start looking outward. Anxiety is very self-absorbed. The only relief I’ve ever gotten is by turning toward other people and their problems.

This is a good and healthy realisation, and should be applauded. As before, when she talks about herself and her own experiences, Freya is sharp and prescient. It’s only when she takes that thinking and didactically prescribes it to all, and moralises at the behaviour of others that her arguments seem to collapse.

Let’s go back to Lyons for a bit.

I was converted by Dostoevsky and Tolkien, Lewis and Solzhenitsyn, by people who in their genius showed the Truth rather than told it. And, even more than that, by witnessing people I knew and admired who, even when the world was falling apart, even in the face of personal trial and persecution, remained unbowed and undaunted from speaking truth with courage and doing right with love. Invariably I discovered they were people of faith—a quiet, happy, steel faith. Theirs was an evangelism that didn’t need words.

“I was converted by Dostoevsky and Tolkien, Lewis and Solzhenitsyn”. This reeks of self-masturbatory revision, but whatever.

Of course if you look back at historic figures you deem noble you will find almost all of them were religious, because nearly everyone was! That is not in and of itself a good argument for religion. The ritual sacrifices of the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Egyptians; the endless conquests of empires; the “holy” work of The Inquisition and The Crusades; the atrocities carried out at the behest of Leopold II; Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution; all of it in the name of God and religion. Similarly, if you look back through western history you’ll also find most of the “heroes” are white, this doesn’t support the idea that white folk are more heroic, only that almost everyone else was written out of history, unlikely even to be named beyond “savages”.

I say all this as someone who is increasingly drawn to faith myself, but let’s not launder history.

I don’t know quite how to put it, but when Christ tells his disciples to be “the light in the world,” I think this is what he means. Individuals have power beyond what they know, but that power is in the force of their example—in their deeds, in their inner virtue, not necessarily their words. Personally I think this is how someone who has found God can really best help those who are struggling (and who are liable to be watching even when we don’t know it): by showing that walking a better Way is possible in life. This doesn’t mean we can’t ever try to also put what truths we’ve learned into words, but I think those words can only ever be secondary to the truths we live. And that is hard enough.

Nothing here is particular to religion or belief in God, nor more specifically to Christian religion. Such people exist the world over, Christian, Muslim, Satanic, Jesuit, Jewish, Amish, and indeed, secular and agnostic too.

My cynicism about religion, as opposed to faith, arises mainly from it’s inherent need for a social hierarchy. Whether it’s the chosen peoples of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) who are empowered to evangelise (as missionaries), slaughter (as crusaders or jihadists against unbelievers/infidels), and rule (as colonisers) until only true believers remain; or the caste systems of Hinduism and certain sects of Buddhism which identify “Untouchables”, the lowest in the social hierarchy, on the basis of ethnicity.

The story of hierarchy is that it is “right” that some should have more and some should have less. Can’t we have a better story?