Beyond Self-Betrayal: Cultivating Philosophical Health Amidst Inherent Systemic Dissonance.

Hello and welcome to wild:philosophy.

Nathan (Nate) Kinch and I published a new episode on philosophy and organizations - in this one, we talk about the growth imperative, that is so pervasive in most organizations.

Also, we had our third PhilosophyGym at Grokkist - which was wonderful. You can still join.

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Philosophical health is as a way of knowing, being, and acting in resonance with our ecos - our home, in its broadest sense.

Hartmut Rosa describes resonance as a specific mode of world-relation, a dynamic process where subject and world mutually touch and transform each other - a responsive vibrating connection where we feel called by the world and are able to meaningfully answer it, leading to a sense of aliveness and belonging. When we are in resonance, we are touched by the world; we can be touched in a way that we can transform, because there is sufficient openness to let this transformation happen.

But is resonance really worth striving for? What does that even mean? And if resonance is the goal, should we avoid dissonance?

Resonance vs. Cognitive Dissonance

One specific form of the opposite of resonance is cognitive dissonance.

We know what we should do, yet we don’t do it.

That gnawing discomfort.

In therapy, people who experience a strong sense of cognitive dissonance might be treated to improve on that. Particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can be very helpful in addressing cognitive dissonance. Therapists guide clients in recognizing inconsistencies between their beliefs and actions, offering tools to align behaviors with values and cultivate acceptance.

That these goals align fundamentally with philosophical health is no coincidence, by the way. Both Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck (the founders of rational emotive behaviour therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy, respectively) explicitly acknowledged the role of Stoicism as the philosophical precursor of their treatment approaches.

In sustainability science, the challenge of cognitive dissonance is often raised as a major mental challenge, as a chasm between our awareness of ecological crises and our often-unsustainable actions.

It is something I have always thought to suffer from immensely. As I have written before, I have become acutely aware of all the ways I am not acting in line with my values, a kind of daily, low-grade self-betrayal.

I tried to therapize that, but that wasn’t successful. And how could it be? I live in a system that is inherently - in many ways - the opposite of what I value. The idea that we can therapize our way out of this systemic misalignment is, frankly, absurd.

Now, the way I saw it, I had three options:

1. Hate the world because of its inherent contradictions and its active role in fostering my dissonance. Or at least be perpetually angry at it.

2. Hate myself because I am unable to live up to my own standards within this dissonant world. Or at least feel like a constant failure.

3. Deconstruct the very idea of dissonance as solely negative and reconstruct a belief around dissonance that is not wishful thinking, but actually aligns better with the messy reality of existence and growth.

We’ll explore option three today.

The Creepy Nature of Perfection

Promises of resonance, especially around health and well-being, often point to an almost unachievable end state of a frictionless paradise. But any pursuits of flawless harmony is not only fertile with possibility but at the same time potentially harmful.

I want to share a sort of lengthy story from William James that illustrates this beautifully:

“In upstate New York, in the Appalachian highlands ten miles above Lake Erie. A visitor writes: A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels one’s self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast. You have magnificent music - a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model secondary schools. You have general religious services and special club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and scrambled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.

I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear. And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: “Ouf! what a relief. Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things - I cannot abide with them.” William James, "What Makes a Life Significant," in his Talks to Teachers (New York: Henry Holt, 1925), 268-69.

The dream he was living was worth than an Armenian massacre.

I have come to understand a relentless pursuit of eliminating dissonance as a similar kind of massacre.

The Massacre of Resonance

from the movie Wall-E

From a perspective informed by what some thinkers, like Zak Stein or Mark Gafni refer to as Cosmo Erotic Humanism, dissonance might not merely be an irritant but the very engine of desire - in a good way.

Cosmo Erotic Humanism posits that reality is fundamentally erotic - propelled forward by the tension of desire, an attraction toward greater connection, complexity, beauty, and value. Dissonance - the gap between "is" and "ought," between our current state and a sensed potential, between conflicting values or realities - is the generator of this erotic tension. In this sense, the discomfort of cognitive dissonance is the ache of unrealized possibility, the signal of an erotic charge pulling us towards a more integrated, complex, or authentic expression. Without the friction of dissonance, desire withers. There is nothing to reach for, nothing to solve, no higher union to achieve. Eros, as the animating force of Life, requires dissonance as the engine of its becoming.

When our inner values clash with external reality, or when our understanding bumps against the unknown, this gap does then not have to be experienced as a void or pure negativity. It can also be a fertile space where yearning and desire are born. Desire, in this Erotic sense, is the universe’s ache to become more, to explore its potentials, to bridge the chasm between what is and what could be.

According to Stein and Gafni, Eros is the animating force of all growth and evolution.

“Eros is the radical aliveness that animates and drives all of reality.”

Similarly, Andreas Weber writes that

“Eros is the principle of creative plenitude, the principle of superfluity, of sharing, of communication, of the self-actualization that lies dormant even in rocks and minerals - the self - actualization that, as painful as it always is, cannot be avoided if we want to remain in contact with the reality of this world, whether as a thinker or as someone who simply is.”

A world aspiring to a constant, unblemished state of superficial resonance would paradoxically be a world devoid of this vitalizing desire. If there is no friction, no sense of lack or incompletion, then what propels us forward?

I found that life, in its most vibrant expression, is not characterized by an absence of problems, but by an engagement with increasingly complex, interesting, and meaningful ones. The toddler finds out how to open the cookie jar, the scientist grapples with quantum physics, the artist strives to articulate the ineffable. The same goes for moral questions. Our moral development, according to Kohlberg similarly complexifies, from caring about ourselves to the global.

Each stage of development, individual or collective, is marked by the overcoming of previous dissonances, only to encounter new, more nuanced ones. A relentless pursuit of dissonance-free living would, in essence, be a commitment to stagnation, a refusal to participate in life’s existential inquiry. It would be the ultimate massacre not of resonance per se, but of potential, of the very drive that makes life come alive.

Philosophical health than is not the absence of dissonance, the resonance it strives for though is existential. And that’s a totally different cup of tea.

Existential Resonance

Of course, we could also make the point that maybe we don’t need to be propelled forward, that loving what is - like the practice of acceptance in Buddhism, or the Stoic’s amor fati - are much more strive-worthy, than a forward movement with increasingly complex dissonance.

I would actually agree.

There is a flaw in our language, which can lead to misunderstandings, that treats different levels of experience as on the same plane. I can desire on one level of being, while on the existential level, I experience a deep resonance with the world just as it is. A desire from that deeper existential level should be named something different, in order to express that difference. Or maybe just existential being suffices (that’s one of the reasons why I love

Jim Palmer

’s writing on existential health).

So we can distinguish between at least two layers of resonance:

• Surface level or Conditional Resonance: This is the Chautauqua resonance. It is contingent upon external circumstances aligning with our desires and expectations. It feels good, often very good, but it is inherently fragile and often dependent on a carefully curated environment that excludes or papers over life's inherent messiness. It’s the resonance of "everything going my way." The obsessive pursuit of this layer can lead to a kind of spiritual bypass, an avoidance of necessary discomforts.

• Existential or Unconditional Resonance: This is not about the absence of dissonance, but about being in resonant relationship with the totality of existence, including its dissonances, its uncertainties, its pain, and its joys. This aligns with the ideas of acceptance and amor fati. Existential resonance is not a feeling of everything being perfect, but a deep sense of okayness within the imperfection, a fundamental trust in the unfolding process of life, even when that process involves significant cognitive or emotional dissonance. One can be in deep existential resonance while experiencing acute cognitive dissonance regarding a specific issue, recognizing that dissonance as a valid, even necessary, part of a larger, meaningful whole.

The true massacre, then, is when our attachment to achieving and maintaining superficial resonance blinds us to, or actively undermines, our capacity for existential resonance.

When we attempt to iron out all the wrinkles, seeking a bland, frictionless state, thereby sacrificing the texture, depth, and erotic vitality that arise precisely from living into those wrinkles. In such a pursuit, we risk silencing the very desires that call us into a deeper engagement with ourselves, with others, and with the world.

When I talk about philosophical health as a way of knowing, being, and acting in resonance with our ecos, I refer to this deeper existential level of resonance, while on the surface, dissonance might have the time of its life. When we confuse the two, philosophical health risks becoming a normative endeavor that let’s people say things like “I just don’t resonate with that person - I don’t want to have anything to do with him; this place is not my vibe - I am leaving”, missing out on all the bittersweetness that can only come from dissonance and thus chance for desire.

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