No Pain, No Wisdom

There is no wisdom without pain, no growth of the individual without pain, no ‘freedom from the pattern of habits that we’re caught up’ in without pain. This is something that the ancients knew but which we do not! We’re entirely clueless in this regard…

In our age no value is seen in pain – the meaning that it might have had for us in the past (the meaning it has to ‘traditional’ cultures) has been debunked as a bunch of irrational hocus-pocus. For us, if we find ourselves in pain that we cannot do anything about, then this is wholly negative – this is a disaster, this is shameful, this is something to feel bad about. This attitude – whether we want to admit to it or not – is inherent in our culture – to be suffering from pain that we can’t do anything about is to be a loser. We won’t necessarily go around saying this, but it’s what we think nonetheless.

In our paradigm / worldview the only value is ‘doing well’ or ‘succeeding’ – we only value what seems pleasant and progressive to us. We don’t want anything difficult, anything that can’t be understood as ‘a positive’. We understand it to be the case that to be not ‘living your best life’ (i.e., to be falling short in some way) is to be failing, is to be unworthy – we are not deserving of any respect from anyone, least of all ourselves. We haven’t been able to ‘make the grade’ and that’s de-validating for us. We consider this to be a healthy attitude, a robust attitude that will – we feel – weed out weakness and result in a better (more fruitful) future for the human race (or some sort of vague nonsense like that).

In whatever way it has come about, this deeply pathological attitude somehow makes sense to us (and it certainly doesn’t bear much in the way of serious scrutiny), it has become the template for the way in which we are supposed to be looking at life. This template (or paradigm) doesn’t work out for us in the way that we think it should however – instead of making us stronger it makes an awful lot weaker. It makes us infinitely weaker – it is the ruination of us. Our determinedly positive philosophy backfires on us in a big way because by doing our very best to avoid the unattractive side of life (where everything isn’t just ‘plain sailing’) we have denied ourselves any opportunity to actually grow. We have completely overlooked that side of things, which isn’t very smart of us.

As a result of this superficial attitude we have ended up with the phenomenon of what Ivan Illich calls the anaesthetic society, which is a society where pain is seen as a type of ‘error’ that needs to be eliminated. ‘Eliminating the pain’ is the ideal, it’s the way things should be, and our medical / pharmaceutical technology is directed exclusively towards this end. If we’re left in pain (for whatever reason) and our medical ‘know how’ can’t fix that for us, then we’re an embarrassment. No one wants to know in this case – suffering from chronic pain isn’t very ‘positive’, after all! It’s not something anyone wants to be focusing on.  If we don’t respond to the pain management techniques that we have been given (which is often the case, since such techniques never work as well as we’d like to believe they do) then this is something that no one wants to deal with. If we can’t fix it, then we don’t want to know – we’re going to ‘turn our backs’ on anyone who happens to be in this situation. The problem – as Illich says – is that we are ‘adopting a purely technical approach to pain’ and this has proved to be a terrible mistake –

Traditional cultures confront pain, impairment, and death by interpreting them as challenges soliciting a response from the individual under stress; medical civilization turns them into demands made by individuals on the economy, into problems that can be managed or produced out of existence. Cultures are systems of meanings, cosmopolitan civilization a system of techniques.



If there is no meaning in pain then the suffering of this pain is going to be a meaningless thing too, and so the fact that we are there in this position of ‘suffering unnecessary pain’ – as we see it – is profoundly undermining for us, which is what Ivan Illich is saying. We have therefore shot ourselves in the foot.  This is the hideous spectre of ‘meaningless pain’ which we have made a reality for us; by turning our backs on pain in the way that we have done then – far from empowering ourselves – we have become ‘the helpless and deluded victims of our own avoidant attitude’, which will eventually bring us into a very dark place. This is something we just can’t see, however. We just don’t get it (and we don’t want to get it either) …

On the one hand therefore our ‘anaesthetic-seeking sensibilities’ mean that we will suffer far more than we would do if we weren’t embracing this half-baked self-punishing philosophy, and on the other hand we have deprived ourselves of the conditions that allow growth – the conditions that allow us to develop in a healthy way, to mature, to find genuine meaning in our lives, and so on. Instead, we end up in a helpless dependent state which is no good for us at all (although – all the same – we have to note that it is wonderfully convenient for the spurious authorities that wish to control us). There is a very great fear in us – namely, ‘the fear of growing up’, ‘the fear of taking responsibility’, the fear of leaving the playpen’, and the system is exploiting this fear of ours to the maximum.

We are only too happy to hand over all responsibility to the experts, to the rulers, to the officials, and it is always going to be the case that if we are in the grip of this fear (whilst of course not admitting this fact to ourselves) then forces are going to arise in our environment that will take full advantage of this unacknowledged weakness of ours. It is the lack of acknowledgment regarding this fear that puts us at the mercy of society’s mechanisms of control – if we don’t want to take responsibility then we’re putting an open invitation out there for anyone who wants to take our freedom away! What we’re looking at here is a kind of a natural ‘law’ or ‘principle’ – if it secretly suits us to be exploited then we are – when it comes down to it – conjuring up the mechanisms by which we will be exploited, by which we will be controlled, by which we will be hoodwinked. We always get the type of society we deserve, in other words…

Our attitude – as has often been pointed out – is that we want one aspect of life (the ‘feel-good’ aspect, the ‘euphoric’ aspect) whilst at the same time not wanting the difficult part. We want the rose petals but not the thorns. To this end we have come up with a philosophy of life that validates this, a way of life that ensures that ‘keeping it superficial’ is the road we go down. We’re not given the freedom to behave otherwise, we’re not permitted the freedom to see things from any other angles – our way of interpreting pain and responding to it is codified in the very structure of society. Society becomes the means by which we are facilitated in turning our backs on our own pain, facilitated in our denial of there being any sort of problem. What we call ‘mental health care’ isn’t about supporting us in witnessing our suffering (i.e., ‘bringing it to light’), it’s about managing the symptoms of our neurotic avoidance so that it becomes possible to carry on with it. Our idea of mental health is that it is ‘successful avoidance’, in other words, even though successful avoidance doesn’t really work. Our approach is a purely technical one – it’s about finding techniques for managing pain, not mounting a philosophical inquiry, not going deeper into life…

This is a classic vicious circle – we need to be wise in order to spot our own fear of maturity (and so not fall victim to the hidden need to avoid this fear) but without wisdom we will always put our money on the facile philosophy of life that tells us we don’t need to experience pain or difficulty and this ‘philosophy’ will to do nothing but engender ream upon ream of misery for us. We seek comfort and ease in all things and this idealisation of comfort (this idealization of happy / positive / cool stuff) means that we have put ourselves in a position where we aren’t going to become wise. We’re going to stay dumb! We’ve cut ourselves off from the core of life – which is its difficulty, which is the suffering and turmoil that comes with it – and as a result we’re just going to become more and more helpless, more and more deluded, more and more dependent and the forces that we have made ourselves dependent on don’t have our own best interests at heart, no matter what we might like to think…





Image credit – xxicollective.com



Revolution Versus Plagiarism

No one can tell us to be a rebel, or advise us in this regard. If they do and we take heed of them, then we are being a conformist, not a rebel. We are just being a slave, which means that nothing has changed. We’re following orders unquestioningly, which is the default mode.

We can relate this to what Gauguin said about art being either plagiarism or revolution; we might think that there are other possibilities in-between plagiarism and revolution, copying and creativity, but there aren’t! It is either one or the other – there is no halfway house.

What Gauguin said doesn’t just apply to art, though – it applies equally to the whole question of mental health and what that much talked-about state might consist of. We can say that each one of us is either heteronomous or autonomous, and that there is no way that the state of heteronomy (which is the state of being in which we bow to an external authority with regard to how we are supposed to see the world) can be called ‘healthy’. It isn’t healthy because it denies our actual individuality, because it crushes our creativity and because it involves the repression our essential autonomy.

The implication here is massive – straight away we can see that no one can tell us how to go about being mentally healthy, we can see that there can be no such thing as ‘an officially-sanctioned way or method to become better off mental health-wise’. The collective cannot advise us on that! Just as Krishnamurti says that ‘truth is a pathless land’, so too is mental well-being. There’s no mental well-being in walking in someone else’s path, someone else’s groove, despite the great convenience of it – all there is in this is heteronomy.

We don’t like to hear this of course. For one thing, it goes against everything we believe in, everything we take for granted, and for another, just as long as we are acting operating on the basis of the consensus viewpoint then we are constitutionally unable to grasp the point. When we are socially adapted then as far as we are concerned the well-worn path so the only thing we can relate to. The more well-worn the path the more we cherish it, and if something isn’t a path at all (if no validation or consensus approval can be obtained for it) then we are going to be totally averse to it. We won’t touch it with a barge pole.

‘It’s not safe’, we might say, ‘it’s unproven.’ And these objections – in one way – are completely true. ‘Safe’ is certainly not a word we can use here, and what we’re talking about is without any doubt ‘unproven’. We’re not going to argue about that. What we’re talking about here is life and life can never be safe. Existence is risk, as the existential philosophers tell us. There is no proven way to live life and to believe that there should be is an illness! To believe that there is (or should) be a ‘risk-free way of living life’ is an illness which we all collectively subscribe to. That is exactly what society is all about – following precedence. To do what has no precedence is to be beyond the pale.

If there is no way to live life then there is also no method to obtain mental health – the absence of good mental health is a part of life, our mental suffering is part of life and there is no way of avoiding it, no matter how clever or resourceful we might be. Mental suffering isn’t something we can ‘manage’ – despite all the talk we come out with in the mental health industries – it isn’t something we can manage because ‘managing’ means utilising a tried and trusted strategy and there’s no such thing. There are no strategies to help us with mental suffering and the desire to do so is nothing more than neurotic avoidance. It’s a form of neurotic avoidance that seems legitimate to us because we have collectively validated it.

Mental health doesn’t mean being clever enough to avoid suffering, it means responding to our suffering in a way that is autonomous, as Ivan Illich says. Responding autonomously means that we are engaging with it ourselves and not ‘handing it over’; naturally we want very much to hand it over (either to the experts or to some officially approved methodology) but it just so happens that we can’t do this. We have to do it first hand, we can’t get anyone else to do the work for us. Plagiarism isn’t the thing here. We have to be ‘original’ and the fact that there is no way to figure a way out (no way to deal with suffering is actually a gift in disguise. The fact that no one else can tell us what to do is a gift in disguise inasmuch as the pain that we cannot avoid pushes us and pushes us until we have to give up our tricks, and face it head on.

It is through being pushed that we discover our autonomy therefore, and so being pushed isn’t the unmitigated evil that we take it to be. Being ‘second-hand’ isn’t good enough, copying what everyone else does and thinks isn’t good enough – the only thing that is going to help us is when we shed the trappings of who the external authority (which is thought) says we are and take the unprecedented risk of finding out what – if anything – lies behind it. We can relate this to Saying 82 in the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said: He who is near to me is near the fire, and he who is far from me is far from the kingdom.” Taking this risk – which doesn’t make any logical sense at all – is an act of rebellion against the external authority to which we are enslaved; it is as Krishnamurti says ‘the only true revolution’. Either we rebel against everything we have been told, everything we have been led to believe, or we don’t – in which case we carry on living our lives in a second-hand way, as plagiarists, as ‘who we have been told we are’, which is ‘copying’ rather than ‘creativity’…



Art- Paul Gauguin, self-portrait