Why Intelligence and Critical Thinking Are Not Enough
Théodore Géricault, La Monomane de l’envie—or what three hours of scrolling can do to you.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
We have more access to information than ever before, but the information that we see is that which is most likely to grab and hold our attention. We might wonder whether this is knowledge at all—or, in fact, the opposite of knowledge.
Fake news is not new. A year after the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Cleopatra sent word to Mark Antony that she had killed herself. Believing the report, Antony stabbed himself—only to discover that Cleopatra was still alive. What’s new is the speed and precision with which a falsehood can be targeted at millions.
How Manipulation Works
Manipulation seldom consists in an outright lie. Rather, it consists in controlling the picture. Each statement may be true, while the picture created by those selected statements is profoundly false.
Imagine two reporters covering the same protest. One focuses on the peaceful marchers; the other, the broken windows. One interviews the protesters; the other, the shopkeepers. Both reports may be factually accurate, and yet leave us with a misleading picture of what happened. That’s why fact-checking, though important, can only take us so far. Facts need context, proportion, and balance.
Manipulation works because we are biased. We tend to notice the information that confirms our existing beliefs while ignoring what challenges them. The first person to manipulate me is not a politician or an algorithm, but myself.
Engagement algorithms are designed in ways that exploit this. They show us not what is most true or important, but what is most likely to captivate and agitate us. Artificial intelligence then gives those selected fragments fluency and persuasive force, so that they hit harder and I am more likely to share them—thereby amplifying the message and lending it whatever credibility I may have.
How to Defend Ourselves
Whenever words give us a strong feeling before they give us a good reason, we should pause to create some mental distance. In that breathing space, we should ask: Who is speaking? What do they want from me? And what have they left out?
But most importantly, we should ask: Why do I want this to be true?
Truth requires more than intelligence. It requires qualities such as self-knowledge, humility, and justice.
Manipulation feeds us misleading fragments; truth asks us to recover the whole.
We Know More and More—but Understand Less and Less
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Greater perspective is the beginning of wisdom.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Wisdom begins with the willingness to hear difficult truths, especially about ourselves. Our problem is not merely that we are no wiser than our ancestors; in many ways, we are less wise.
One reason for this is that we have abandoned wisdom as an ideal. The word ‘wisdom’ appears 222 times in the Old Testament, and ‘philosophy’ in the original Greek literally means ‘the love of wisdom’. But today, anyone who speaks seriously about wisdom risks sounding grandiose or ridiculous—like me right now.
We admire intelligence, productivity, and innovation because they can be measured and monetised. Wisdom, however, is quieter, and often goes against the grain.
What Wisdom Is
Having replaced wisdom with expertise, we confuse knowing more with being wiser. But if wisdom simply amounted to knowledge, learning the name of every river and mountain in the world would make us wise, and every modern school-leaver would be wiser than a Socrates or a Seneca. Socrates was declared the wisest of men not because he knew everything, but because he understood what he did not know.
Aristotle took a different view. He said that wisdom is the understanding of causes: the wise person knows not merely that something is, but why it is. Wisdom consists in seeing the relations between things, for example, the immediate action and its distant consequences, the present moment and the shape of an entire life. It’s not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.
Why We Lack Wisdom
If wisdom is perspective, our lack of wisdom becomes easier to explain. Today, knowledge is increasingly specialised and compartmentalised. Nobody is responsible for assembling the fragments or asking what they are for. There is no job description for someone like me, who falls between the cracks—and, unfortunately, no salary either.
In addition, we suffer from an overload of information. We’re always checking our phones, flitting from fragment to fragment, living in abstract bubbles. Our ancestors may have known far less, but they were exposed to the rain and the wind: to nature, mortality, connection… to the things that can give us perspective.
Although, to be fair, our ancestors too struggled with wisdom. Wisdom derives from the Indo-European root, weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin sacrifices one eye at Mimir’s well in exchange for a higher kind of vision. Later, he hangs for nine nights from the world tree, pierced by his own spear, to win the runes. That’s what wisdom demands: the courage to see what we would rather not see.
The duck–rabbit: nothing changes but the way of seeing.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
How to think outside the box and have more original ideas.
The word ‘insight’ is sometimes used to mean something like ‘self-awareness’, including awareness of our thought processes, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on, and of how they relate to one another and to the truth.
Of course, self-awareness comes by types and degrees. Owing to chemical receptors in their tendrils, vining plants know not to coil around themselves, and in that much can be said to have awareness of self and not-self. Infants only begin to develop reflective self-awareness at around 18 months of age, enabling them to recognise themselves in pictures and mirrors.
But insight is also used to mean something like ‘penetrating discernment’: a deep understanding of a person, problem, or situation. Such understanding may emerge gradually, but it can also arrive all at once, with a previously hidden truth—or the solution to a previously intractable problem—suddenly flooding the mind. This sudden apprehension of an insight is sometimes called an epiphany (Greek, ‘manifestation’, ‘coming into the light’), revelation, or ‘aha’ moment.
It is this epiphanic form of insight with which I am principally concerned. Unlike analytical thinking, which proceeds consciously and laboriously from one step to the next, it seems to come from nowhere. One moment, we are staring helplessly at the problem; the next, we can see straight through it. It is rather like climbing a mountain in fog, turning round, and suddenly seeing the entire landscape spread out below.
The Anatomy of Insight
Such ‘aha moments’, epitomised by Archimedes’ cry of Eureka! Eureka! (Greek, ‘I found it! I found it!’), involve a sudden shift in understanding, often by seeing something familiar in a new light or bringing previously disconnected elements together. They carry a characteristic feeling of clarity and conviction, and often delight—though they can also devastate, depending on what has been apprehended.
It is said that, upon sinking into his bath, Archimedes noticed the water level rising and suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced corresponded to the volume of the parts of his body that had been submerged. Less rarefied examples of aha moments include suddenly understanding a joke, or suddenly ‘seeing’ the other aspect of a reversal image such as the duck-rabbit (pictured).
Aha moments, it seems, primarily arise from unconscious and automatic processes, and—you might have noticed—our eyes naturally tend, when mulling over insight problems, to look away from visual stimuli. Brain-imaging studies suggest that this withdrawal of attention, or ‘looking inside’, may be part of the mechanism of insight. By screening out the immediate environment, the mind creates the spare capacity for loose associations to come together. The flash of insight may be sudden, but the work that produces it is not. Indeed, that work may draw upon a lifetime of experience and study.
This helps explain the so-called incubation effect. We wrestle with a problem, reach an impasse, and put it aside—only for the answer to come to us in the shower, on a walk, or upon waking. Had Archimedes not already been wrestling with the problem of measurement, his bath would not have become so famous.
Insight is closely related to intuition. If an intuition is a disposition to believe without conscious deliberation, an epiphanic insight is the sudden apprehension of a previously hidden relation. Intuition may lead to insight, but it can also remain no more than a hunch—rather than a sudden coming together.
Aha moments of the Archimedean kind might be distinguished from uh-oh moments, in which we become aware of an unforeseen problem, and from d’oh moments, popularised by the Simpson patriarch, when a foreseeable but unforeseen problem hits us or we have a flash of insight into our complete lack of insight.
In all three cases, something previously hidden is suddenly revealed, be it an answer, a danger, or our own stupidity.
Although insight often puts us in touch with some truth, there can also be false insights. Insight, therefore, is not exempt from analytical verification. Insight proposes; reason disposes. The highest thinking is not the one or the other, but both together.
The Price of Seeing Differently
‘Thinking outside the box’ is a cognitive feat. When we understand something in a particular way, it is very difficult to apprehend it in any other way, even in the face of the strongest contradictory evidence. It is not merely that we cannot imagine the answer; often, we are trapped inside the wrong question or assumption.
In When Prophecy Fails (1956), the social psychologist Leon Festinger discusses his experience of infiltrating a UFO doomsday cult whose leader had prophesied the end of the world. When the end of the world failed to materialise, most of the cult members dealt with the dissonance that arose from the cognitions ‘the leader said that the world would end’ and ‘the world did not end’ not by ditching the cult or its leader, as you might expect, but by rationalising that the world had been saved by the strength of their faith. Taking their assumptions for facts, the cult members simply reinterpreted the evidence in a way that preserved their existing beliefs.
Very often, to see something in a different light also means to see ourselves and the whole world in that new light, which can threaten and undermine our sense of self and raise atavistic defences. It is more a matter of emotion or self-conception than of reason or intelligence, which explains why even leading scientists can struggle with contravening evidence.
As the physicist Max Planck (d. 1947) observed, ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ Or, to put it more pithily, science advances one funeral at a time.
What is true of eminent scientists is true also of us. Our life cannot possibly have been a long list of mistakes. A new insight can demand a new self—which is a higher price than we are willing or able to pay. Younger people, having less to lose, can still afford to be open to ideas—but not for long. By the age of about 22, there is little left of the god in them.
Our attachment to our beliefs is so strong that contravening evidence or attempts to convince us otherwise can in fact entrench them—which is why, as a psychiatrist, I rarely challenge my patients, or indeed anyone, directly. But you don’t have to take my word for it: in a study, supplying ‘corrective information’ to people with serious concerns about the adverse effects of the flu jab made them less willing to receive it. This more than substantiates the German proverb: ‘Never give uninvited advice. The wise won’t need it, the fools won’t heed it.’
Some Insights Into Having Insights
So, short of dissolving our egos, which might take twenty years in a temple, or, ironically, an unusually strong ego, what can we do to increase our cognitive flexibility?
Naturally, it helps to have the tools of thought, including language fluency and multiple frames of reference as given by knowledge and experience. But more important is to develop that first sense of insight—namely, insight as self-awareness.
Self-awareness enables us to distinguish the problem from the assumptions that we have brought to it. At a practical level, we can change the way in which the problem is represented: draw it, explain it aloud, reverse it, reduce it, enlarge it, or translate it into an analogy. More searchingly, we can ask: What am I taking for granted? What would someone from another discipline, culture, or period see here? What if the opposite were true? What am I reluctant to notice because noticing it would cost me something? And how much more is it costing me to be that sort of person?
More benignly, we need to create the time and conditions for thoughts to connect. My own associative thinking is much more active when I’m both well-rested and at rest, for example, standing under the shower or ambling in the park. The very title of this essay came to me while cooking dinner and pouring a glass of wine, after the essay had been written. Jack Welch (d. 2020), as Chairman and CEO of General Electric, spent an hour each day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time’. And August Kekulé (d. 1896) claimed to have discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming about a snake biting its own tail.
We tend to treat looking out of the window as the opposite of thinking. Often, it is thinking relieved of its supervisor. In my early twenties, as a strategy consultant in Paris, I would get told off for going out for walks. I once responded, ‘How do you expect me to think, locked up in a cubicle?’ (They didn’t like me.) Modern life supplies endless stimulation and very little mental vacancy, leaving us rich in information but poor in opportunities for this information to reorganise itself.
Time is a very strange thing and not at all linear: sometimes, the best way of using it is to waste it.
The West’s Dangerous Obsession With Analytical Intelligence
The Oracle at Delphi. The West before the West.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Everyone wants to be intelligent. But no one is quite intelligent enough to know what intelligence is.
There is no agreed definition or model of intelligence. By the Collins English Dictionary, intelligence is ‘the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct’. By the Macmillan Dictionary, it is ‘the ability to understand and think about things, and to gain and use knowledge’.
In seeking to define intelligence, a good place to start might be with dementia. In Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, multiple higher cortical functions are disturbed, including memory, thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language, and judgement. In my time, I have worked with over a thousand people with dementia, and I think it significant that they, along with people with severe learning disabilities, cope very poorly with changes to their environment, such as moving into a care home or even into an adjacent room.
Taken together, this suggests that, at its broadest, intelligence refers to the functioning of a number of related faculties and abilities that enable us to adapt and respond to environmental pressures. Because this is not beyond animals and even plants, they too may be said to be possessed of ‘intelligence’.
We Westerners tend to think of intelligence in terms of analytical skills. But in a close-knit hunter-gatherer society, intelligence might be defined more in terms of foraging skills, hunting skills, or social skills and responsibilities. Even within a single society, the skills that are most valued change over time.
In the West, the emphasis has gradually shifted from language skills to more purely analytical skills, and it is only in 1960, well within living memory, that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped Latin as an entry requirement.
In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published the seminal paper on emotional intelligence, and EI quickly became all the rage. In that same year, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser. Today, we cannot go very far without having some considerable IT skills (certainly by the standards of 1990, or even 2010), and computer scientists are among the most highly paid professionals.
All this to say that what constitutes intelligence can vary quite considerably according to our values and priorities.
The West Before the West
The Western privileging of analytical skills is rooted in Ancient Greece—but the story is more complicated than it first appears.
Before Socrates, there was the Oracle at Delphi. For centuries, prominent Greeks travelled to Delphi to consult the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, whose cryptic pronouncements were thought to issue from the god of light. One of these pronouncements concerned Socrates himself.
According to Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ friend Chaerephon asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Pythia replied in the negative. When Socrates found out about this, he did not know what to make of it. So he went about questioning one man after another, first the politicians, then the poets, and then the craftsmen, and found that those with the greatest reputation for wisdom were, in fact, the most foolish of them all. By this exercise, he came to understand the oracle’s meaning: that the wisdom of men is little or nothing, and those who know this are as wise as any man can be. Inspired by this revelation, he entered the service of Apollo, seeking out anyone who laid claim to wisdom and putting his wisdom to the test.
Thus, one of the founding stories of Western rationalism begins not with some argument, but with a rather irrational oracle.
Socrates held that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. He typically taught by the dialectic or Socratic method, that is, by questioning one or more people about a particular concept such as courage or justice to expose a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoke a reappraisal of the concept.
But even Socrates, the great champion of rational enquiry, made room for another kind of knowing. At various times, he claimed to have a daimonion or ‘divine sign’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as going into politics or fleeing Athens after having been sentenced to death. When, in Plato’s Crito, his friends urge him to flee Athens, he refuses on the authority of his daimonion: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; this voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.’
So here we have it: the father of Western rationalism, in hock to some mysterious voice.
The Rule of Reason
Plato and Aristotle built upon the legacy of Socrates, while underplaying his more mystical side.
For Plato, reason could carry us far beyond the confines of common sense and everyday experience into a ‘hyper-heaven’ (Greek, hyperouranos) of ideal forms. He famously fantasised about putting a geniocracy of philosopher kings in charge of his utopic Republic.
Aristotle—who for centuries came to be known simply as ‘our Master’—argued that our distinctive function as human beings is our unique capacity to reason, and therefore that our supreme good and happiness consists in leading a life of rational contemplation. To paraphrase Aristotle in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘Man more than anything is reason, and the life of reason is the most self-sufficient, the most pleasant, the happiest, the best, and the most divine of all.’
And with that, where else could the West go?
Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, also conceived of God as ‘thought thinking upon itself’ (noesis noeseos). In later centuries, reason became a divine property, found in man because made in God’s image. If you struggled with your SATs, you now know who to blame.
When Intelligence Becomes Human Worth
As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, the West’s obsession with analytical intelligence has had, and continues to have, dire political, social, and, above all, moral consequences.
Immanuel Kant—probably the most influential philosopher since Aristotle—most memorably made the connection between reasoning and moral standing, arguing (in simple terms) that, by virtue of their ability to reason, human beings ought to be treated, not as means to an end, but only ever as ends-in-themselves. From here, it becomes all too easy to conclude that, the better you are at reasoning, the worthier you are of personhood and its rights and privileges.
For centuries, women were deemed to be ‘emotional’, that is, irrational, or less rational, which justified treating them as chattel or, at best, second-class citizens. The same could also be said of non-white people, over whom it was not just the right but the duty of the white man to rule.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) begins with the lines: Take up the White Man’s burden–/ Send forth the best ye breed–/ Go bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives’ need;/ To wait in heavy harness/ On fluttered folk and wild–/ Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/ Half-devil and half-child.
Although this sounds appalling today, at the time most of Kipling’s countrymen would have approved of the sentiment. In his lifetime, Kipling was offered (and turned down) a knighthood, the position of Poet Laureate, and the Order of Merit. He was not writing from the fringes.
People deemed to be less rational—women, non-white people, the lower classes, the infirm, the ‘deviant’—were not just disenfranchised but dominated, colonised, enslaved, murdered, and sterilised, in all impunity. As late as 2015, Virginia agreed to compensate surviving victims of its state-sponsored sterilisation programme for, among others, the ‘feeble-minded’.
Today, of all people, it is the white man (that is, the white male) who most fears artificial intelligence, imagining that it will usurp his status and privilege.
But even on its own terms, analytical intelligence is not quite what we make of it.
According to science, IQ is the best predictor of job performance. But that is not altogether surprising given that ‘performance’ and IQ have been defined in similar and overlapping terms, and that both depend, at least to some extent, on third factors such as compliance, motivation, and educational attainment.
Genius, in contrast, is more a matter of drive, vision, creativity, and luck or opportunity, and it is notable that the threshold IQ for genius—probably around 125—is not all that high.
William Shockley and Luis Walter Alvarez, who both went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics, were excluded from the Terman Study of the Gifted on account of… their unremarkable IQ scores.
In later life, Shockley developed controversial views on race and eugenics, using his ‘formidable intellect’ to make claims about the intelligence and worth of others.
And so it was that a Nobel Prize winner who had failed to qualify as ‘gifted’ came to advocate eugenic measures on the basis of supposed differences in intelligence.
Of course, analytical intelligence is of value. But it is not intuition, it is not imagination, and it is not wisdom.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
‘Hypersanity’ is not a common or accepted term. But neither did I make it up. I first came across the concept while training in psychiatry, in The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967) by RD Laing. In this book, the Scottish psychiatrist presented ‘madness’ as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. For Laing, the descent into madness could lead to a reckoning, to an awakening, to ‘break-through’ rather than ‘breakdown’.
A few months later, I read CG Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), which provided a vivid case in point. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung broke off his close friendship with Sigmund Freud, and spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.
As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’. Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Heracles, Orpheus and Aeneas before him, Jung travelled deep down into an underworld where he conversed with Salome, a young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard, the wings of a kingfisher and the horns of a bull. Although Salome and Philemon were products of Jung’s unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. In Philemon, Jung had at long last found the father-figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the wise old man of Zürich. As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the prima materia for a lifetime’s work’.
The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Ancient Greek means something like ‘uninhibited thought’, ‘free speech’, or ‘full expression’. Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply: ‘I am just looking for a human being’ – thereby insinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even much aware of, their full human potential.
After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes emigrated to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to deface – metaphorically this time – the coinage of custom and convention that was, he maintained, the false currency of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’, and elected to live in a storage jar (pithos) and survive on a diet of onions. Diogenes proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not complicated every simple gift of the gods.
The term ‘cynic’ derives from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon or ‘dog’. Once, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, Diogenes regretted that it was not as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach. When asked, on another occasion, where he came from, he replied: ‘I am a citizen of the world’ (cosmopolites), a radical claim at the time, and the first recorded use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. As he approached death, Diogenes asked for his mortal remains to be thrown outside the city walls for wild animals to feast upon. After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians erected to his glory a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.
Jung and Diogenes came across as insane by the standards of their day. But both men had a depth and acuteness of vision that their contemporaries lacked, and that enabled them to see through their facades of ‘sanity’. Both psychosis and hypersanity place us outside society, making us seem ‘mad’ to the mainstream. Both states attract a heady mixture of fear and fascination. But whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering.
After reading The Politics of Experience, the concept of hypersanity stuck in my mind, not least as something that I might aspire to for myself. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, the implication is that mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. This, I think, is most apparent in people’s frequently suboptimal – if not frankly inappropriate – responses, both verbal and behavioural, to the world around them. As Laing puts it:
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last 50 years.
Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people. In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture – and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life – mysterious, magical life – slips through their fingers.
Hypersanity is not simply a matter of intelligence. Intelligence can make us more ingenious in defending our prejudices and rationalising our desires. Hypersanity requires something more: the ability to step outside ourselves, to see our lives in proportion, and to question the assumptions that we were weaned on.
We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there were another route to hypersanity, one that, compared with madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a backdoor way, there were also a royal road strewn with sweet-scented petals?
In fact, the ancient philosophers cleared several such paths. Socrates sought to free himself from false opinion through relentless questioning; Diogenes, from convention through radical simplicity; the Stoics, from destructive emotion through reason and perspective. In India, the Buddha went further still, seeking liberation from the attachments and illusions of the self. I’m busy recovering them all.
Besides Jung, are there any modern examples of hypersanity? Those who escaped from Plato’s cave of shadows were reluctant to crawl back down and involve themselves in the affairs of men, and most hypersane people, rather than courting the limelight, might prefer to hide out in their back gardens. Perhaps, then, we should not expect the hypersane to be famous, or even conspicuous. To recognise them by worldly achievement would be to judge them by the very standards they have transcended.
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