The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Before seeking answers from the oracle, visitors first met with the words, ‘Know Thyself.’
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Critical thinking has never been more popular. Schools, universities, and employers encourage us to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and recognise cognitive biases. Entire books are devoted to helping us think more clearly.
Yet intelligent people continue to believe ridiculous things.
They buy into political propaganda, dubious medical claims, financial scams, cults, conspiracy theories, and all manner of comforting or self-serving lies. They do so not because they lack intelligence, and often not because they lack evidence.
They do so because modern critical thinking shares our greatest blind spot. It teaches us how to analyse arguments, but not how to analyse ourselves.
Most books on critical thinking treat reasoning as though it were mathematics. Learn the rules and you will think more clearly. But reason is not merely an intellectual achievement. It is also a moral and psychological one. We do not merely need sharper minds, but greater courage and honesty.
The greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance. It is our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.
Unlike ordinary deception, self-deception is unconscious. We do not deliberately lie to ourselves. Instead, we unconsciously reshape reality to preserve a comforting image of who we are. We rationalise our failures, project our faults onto others, and convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true. These are not simply errors of reasoning but acts of self-protection.
This is why intelligent people can cling to implausible beliefs despite overwhelming evidence. Often, they are not defending an argument so much as defending themselves.
To think clearly, then, it is not enough to study logic, rhetoric, and cognitive bias. We must also understand the unconscious forces that distort our judgement before reason has even had a chance to speak. Self-deception is not peripheral to critical thinking. It belongs at its very heart.
More than two thousand years ago, Socrates reached much the same conclusion. Rather than speculate about the natural world, he turned philosophy towards the study of ourselves.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, as they pass the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates politely declines the invitation. While still ignorant of himself, he says, he has no interest in such questions:
I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.
For Socrates, self-knowledge came before all other enquiry.
Perhaps it should also come before critical thinking.
Socrates had been inspired by the oracle at Delphi, the greatest oracle of the ancient world. Long before there were textbooks on critical thinking, there was a two-word inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Plato believed that bad arguments had condemned his teacher to death, inspiring Aristotle’s search for the principles of sound reasoning.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
History is full of brilliant minds who believed false things and defended absurd ideas. Isaac Newton spent decades trying to create the philosopher’s stone. Thomas Edison championed radioactive products as remedies for various ailments. Steve Jobs skipped bathing in the conviction that his vegan diet could cleanse his body of mucus and toxins.
The problem is not that intelligent people cannot think. It is that they are human.
We all have hopes, fears, loyalties, ambitions, prejudices, and desires. We are naturally drawn to arguments that flatter our opinions, excuse our behaviour, or confirm our suspicions.
More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks began studying arguments that were unsound and yet persuasive, calling them fallacies. Learning to recognise them remains one of philosophy’s most practical lessons. But more interesting than what they are is how they work.
Why Bad Arguments Persuade Us
Most fallacies succeed not because they overwhelm our intelligence, but because they appeal to our human nature and frailties.
We are more receptive to arguments that confirm what we already believe than to those that ask us to change our minds. We welcome arguments that flatter our side, condemn our opponents, simplify a complicated world, or promise certainty where none exists. Reason is less often an impartial judge than a disingenuous lawyer, excelling at defending conclusions that we reached for wholly other reasons. And, sadly, the brighter the mind, the more elaborate—and persuasive—its rationalisations.
From Rhetoric to Logic
The study of fallacies emerged in ancient Greece as a branch of rhetoric, the art and science of persuasive speaking.
Following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE, Athens became a radically participatory democracy. Citizens served as jurors, debated laws, and competed for influence not with swords but with words.
Sophists such as Gorgias, Protagoras, and Hippias enriched themselves by teaching this new art of persuasion. Gorgias was not merely a teacher of rhetoric, but a performer, master of verbal display, and intellectual celebrity. According to tradition, when he appeared in the theatre at Athens, he would invite the audience: ‘Come, propose me a theme.’ He took pride in his ability to speak on any subject and defend even the most improbable of positions.
For Plato, this represented a profound problem. It had been by bad arguments that his teacher, Socrates, had been put to death. If persuasive speech could triumph over truth, what hope could there be for philosophy?
Plato’s pupil Aristotle sought to address these concerns by laying the foundations of logic. If rhetoric explains how people are persuaded, logic asks when they ought to be.
Formal and Informal Fallacies
Logic distinguishes two broad kinds of fallacy: formal and informal. A fallacy is a defect in an argument, whether accidental or deliberate.
Formal fallacies arise from the structure of an argument.
If I have the flu, then I have a fever. I have a fever. Therefore, I have the flu.
The conclusion, of course, does not follow, since I may have any number of other pyrogenic (fever-inducing) illnesses. This formal fallacy is known as affirming the consequent.
Far more common are informal fallacies, whose weakness lies not in their logical form but in their content. These are the fallacies that fill newspaper columns, political debates, boardrooms, dinner tables, and social media.
We Prefer People to Arguments
The easiest way to answer an argument is often not to answer it at all. Instead, attack the person making it.
This is the ad hominem fallacy. Closely related are the genetic fallacy, which judges an argument by its source, and the appeal to hypocrisy (tu quoque), which dismisses an argument because its author fails to live by it.
None addresses the argument itself. They succeed because judging people is easier than judging ideas.
A striking example of the genetic fallacy came during the 2016 Brexit referendum. On 3 June 2016, the then Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, declared: ‘The people in this country have had enough of experts…’
We Prefer Easy Victories
Some arguments are difficult to refute. It is then much easier to invent a weaker one.
A straw man caricatures an opponent’s position before knocking it down. Closely related is the red herring, which changes the subject altogether. Neither brings us closer to the truth, but both bring us closer to victory.
Some regard straw man as a form of red herring, since both serve to deflect. ‘Red herring’ takes its name from the custom of using stinky smoked herring to throw dogs off a trail. Think of it as a form of pre-Internet trolling.
For example:
—Critical appraisal of the new Bordeaux vintage would be more objective and meaningful if the wines could be tasted blind.
—Just Bordeaux?
We Prefer Agreement
Human beings are social animals. This makes us especially vulnerable to social arguments.
An appeal to popularity asks us to believe something because many other people believe it. An argument to moderationassures us that the middle position must be right. A false dilemma presents only two options when reality usually offers many more.
These fallacies appeal to our desire for belonging, certainty, and simplicity.
False dilemma is often a veiled attempt to force a Hobson’s choice of ‘take it or leave it’. For example, Theresa May insisted: ‘It’s my deal or no deal.’ At times, she expanded this into a false trilemma: ‘It’s my deal, no deal, or no Brexit at all.’
We Prefer Simple Stories
The human mind delights in finding patterns—so much so that it finds them where none exist.
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (‘with this, therefore because of this’) mistakes correlation for causation. The gambler’s fallacy imagines that independent events, like a throw of dice, somehow remember what came before. Both satisfy our hunger for neat explanations in a messy world.
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc is also known as the Chanticleer fallacy after the fictional rooster who believed that his crowing made the sun rise. I prefer to think of it as the scientist’s fallacy.
We Prefer Being Right
Perhaps the most bone-headed fallacy of all is begging the question. Instead of proving a conclusion, it quietly assumes it.
For example, the argument that opposes same-sex marriage on the grounds that marriage is the union between a man and a woman is no more substantial than ‘I’m right because I’m right.’
Circular arguments persuade because they begin where we already stand.
The Discipline of Thinking Clearly
This article may have seemed to be about reasoning. It has really been about self-deception.
Logical fallacies endure because they satisfy our desires more readily than they satisfy the demands of reason. We rarely believe bad arguments because we cannot think. More often, we believe them because they tell us what we wanted to hear.
Learning to recognise fallacies in others is useful. Learning to recognise them in ourselves is the beginning of self-knowledge.
The Socratic Method: Why Socrates Is Remembered for His Method, Not His Answers
Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Article substantially revised on 4 August 2026.
Socrates is often called ‘the father of philosophy’. Yet unlike Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, he left no books, no philosophical system, and scarcely any positive doctrines such as Plato’s Forms and Aristotle’s Four Causes. Instead, he is remembered above all for a method of thinking, questioning, and undermining.
This method, known as the Socratic method or method of elenchus, might seem disarmingly simple. Instead of asserting, contradicting, and correcting, Socrates asked apparently innocent questions. Instead of lecturing or teaching, he enquired. Instead of telling people what to think, he led them, rather like a modern therapist, to discover for themselves that they knew far less than they had imagined.
But how did Socrates arrive at this extraordinary way of testing, teaching, and philosophising? According to his student Plato, the answer lies in a remarkable visit to the Oracle of Delphi.
The Oracle of Delphi
The story goes that Socrates had a characterful friend called Chaerephon who went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. Astonishingly, the oracle replied that there was no one wiser, leaving Socrates, who knew only that he knew nothing, perplexed.
To discover the meaning of the oracle, Socrates questioned several supposedly wise people—first the politicians, then the poets, and then the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ Socrates was the wisest of all people not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew what he did not know.
From then on, Socrates dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’ As a result, he acquired a reputation for wisdom and a following among young men of the richer classes, who began to imitate him. But he also earnt the enmity of those whom he had exposed, and of those who stood beside them.
Plato paints the oracle story as the turning point in Socrates’ career. By validating his skeptical stance to the philosophers who came before, it gave him the confidence, and the impetus, to develop his own, distinct manner and method of doing philosophy.
But is the oracle story even true, or is it just another of Plato’s myths? The oracle story conveniently serves to frame Socrates, who had been put to death as a heretic and corrupter of youths, as having been on a noble, divinely inspired mission, attached by the gods to Athens as upon a great horse which ‘needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly’. In favour of the story being true is that it is also related by Xenophon, who knew Socrates well, although in his version the oracle replies that there is no one more just (rather than wiser) than Socrates.
The Socratic Method
Plato might also have intended the oracle story as a sort of origin myth for the Socratic method, or method of elenchus.
But although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. For instance, in Plato’s Parmenides, the much older Parmenides himself uses the method of elenchus on Socrates to undermine Plato’s Theory of the Forms. But it remains that while the sophists of his day tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance.
The method of elenchus, especially as employed by Socrates, consists in questioning one or more people about a certain concept such as justice or virtue with the aim of exposing a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly precise or refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding—and hence that we know far less than we thought we did.
People rarely change their minds because someone tells them otherwise. They are more likely to change their minds when they discover, for themselves, that their own beliefs are inconsistent.
With our initial dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgment, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we have not first become angry and resentful.
Socratic Irony
Strictly speaking, the Socratic method is broader than the method of elenchus. Elenchus is the process of questioning and refuting by which Socrates exposes contradictions in his interlocutors’ beliefs. But it is only one of several techniques that he employs. Others include Socratic irony, in which he feigns ignorance while quietly steering the conversation; the search for rigorous definitions, by which he moves from examples to essences; and the so-called maieutic (‘midwifery’) method. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates compares himself to a midwife, helping others to give birth not to children but to ideas of their own.
To have our understanding of a moral concept undermined is also to have our values undermined, and, with that, our sense of self. As I argue in The Problem with Critical Thinking, the greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance, but our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.
To manage their anger and anxieties, and to keep them talking, Socrates often flattered his interlocutors while himself playing the fool. In the Orator, Cicero esteems that, ‘for irony and dissimulation’, Socrates ‘far excelled all other men in the wit and genius which he displayed.’ Simon Blackburn in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Socratic irony with brio as ‘Socrates’ irritating tendency to praise his hearers while undermining them, or to disparage his own superior abilities while manifesting them.’
Here is an example of Socratic irony, combined with a little mock flirting, from Plato’s Meno, so pushed as to be almost parodic:
Had I the command of you as well as of myself, Meno, I would not have enquired whether virtue is given by instruction or not, until we had first ascertained what it is. But as you think only of controlling me who am your slave, and never of controlling yourself—such being your notion of freedom, I must yield to you, for you are irresistible.
The technique resembles that used by the TV character Lieutenant Columbo to trap villains. One of the few miscreants who can see through Columbo’s fumbling and forgetful façade is the husband-killer Leslie Williams:
LW: You know, Columbo, you’re almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it’s the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks.
Columbo: Me? Tricks?
LW: The humility, the seeming absent-mindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family: the wife, you know?
Columbo: Really?
LW: Yeah, Lieutenant Columbo, fumbling and stumbling along. But it’s always the jugular that he’s after.
The Socratic Method Today
Despite its pitfalls, and its potential for underhandedness, the Socratic method remains popular in education, especially at its acme, and has also been severally adapted for psychotherapy.
In the 1990s, during an institutional audit at the University of Oxford, a team of external assessors met the philosophers and asked about recent developments to their teaching methods. The question was met with a stunned silence, finally broken by Christopher Peacocke, the then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, who observed that Socrates had discovered the right way to teach philosophy more than two thousand years ago and that nobody since had been able to significantly improve upon it.
Following his defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Marc Antony heard a rumour that Cleopatra had committed suicide and, in consequence, stabbed himself in the abdomen—only to discover that Cleopatra herself had been responsible for spreading the rumour. He later died in her arms.
“Fake news” is nothing new, but in our Internet age it has spread like a contagious disease, swinging elections, fomenting social unrest, undermining institutions, and diverting political capital away from health, education, the environment, and all-round good government.
So how best to guard against it?
As a medical specialist, I’ve spent over 20 years in formal education. With the possible exception of my two-year masters in philosophy, the emphasis of my education has always been firmly and squarely on fact accumulation.
Today, I have little use for most of these facts, and though I am only middle-aged, many are already out of date, or highly questionable.
But what I do rely on—every day, all the time—is my faculty for critical thinking. As BF Skinner once put it, “Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.”
But can critical thinking even be taught?
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates says that people with wisdom and virtue are very poor at imparting those qualities: Themistocles, the Athenian politician and general, was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and shooting javelins, but no one ever credited Cleophantus with anything like his father’s wisdom; and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.
In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates says that Pericles, who led Athens at the peak of its golden age, gave his sons excellent instruction in everything that could be learnt from teachers, but when it came to wisdom, he simply left them to “wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord”.
It may be that wisdom and virtue cannot be taught, but thinking skills certainly can—or, at least, the beginning of them.
So rather than leaving thinking skills to chance, why not make more time for them in our schools and universities, and be more rigorous and systematic about them?
I’ll make a start by introducing you to what I have called “the five enemies of rational thought”:
1. Formal fallacy. A fallacy is some kind of defect in an argument. A formal fallacy is an invalid type of argument. It is a deductive argument with an invalid form, for example:
Some A are B.
Some B are C.
Therefore, some A are C.
If you cannot yet see that this argument is invalid, substitute A, B, and C with “insects”, “herbivores”, and “mammals”.
Insects, clearly, are not mammals.
A formal fallacy is built into the structure of an argument and is invalid irrespective of the content of the argument.
2. Informal fallacy. An informal fallacy, in contrast, is one that can only be identified through an analysis of the content of the argument.
Informal fallacies often turn on the misuse of language, for example, using a key term or phrase in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one part of the argument and another meaning in another part—called “fallacy of equivocation”.
Informal fallacies can also distract from the weakness of an argument, or appeal to the emotions instead of reason.
Here are a few more examples of informal fallacies.
Damning the alternatives. Arguing in favour of something by damning its alternatives. (Tim’s useless and Bob’s a drunk. So, I’ll marry Jimmy. Jimmy’s the right man for me.)
Gambler’s fallacy. Assuming that the outcome of one or more independent events can impact the outcome of a subsequent independent event. (June is pregnant with her fourth child. Her first three children are all boys, so this time it’s bound to be a girl.)
Appeal to popularity. Concluding the truth of a proposition on the basis that most or many people believe it to be true. (Of course he’s guilty: even his mother has turned her back on him.)
Argument from ignorance. Upholding the truth of a proposition based on a lack of evidence against it, or the falsity of a proposition based on a lack of evidence for it. (Scientists haven’t found any evidence of current or past life on Mars. So, we can be certain that there has never been any life on Mars.)
Argument to moderation. Arguing that the moderate view or middle position must be the right or best one. (Half the country favours leaving the European Union, the other half favours remaining. Let’s compromise by leaving the European Union but remaining in the Customs Union.)
3. Cognitive bias. Cognitive bias is sloppy, if not necessarily faulty, reasoning: a mental shortcut or heuristic intended to spare us time, effort, or discomfort—often while reinforcing our self-image or worldview—but at the cost of accuracy or reliability.
For example, in explaining the behaviour of other people, our tendency is to overestimate the role of character traits over situational factors—a bias, called correspondence bias, that goes into reverse when it comes to explaining our own behaviour. Thus, if Charlotte fails to mow the lawn, I indict her with forgetfulness, laziness, or spite; but if I fail to mow the lawn, I absolve myself on the grounds of busyness, tiredness, or inclement weather.
Another important cognitive bias is my-side, or confirmation, bias, which is the propensity to search for or recall only those stories, facts, and arguments that are in keeping with our pre-existing beliefs while filtering out those that conflict with them—which, especially on social media, can lead us to inhabit a so-called echo chamber.
4. Cognitive distortion. Cognitive distortion is a concept from cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), developed by psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s and used in the treatment of depression and other mental disorders.
Cognitive distortion involves interpreting events and situations so that they conform to and reinforce our outlook or frame of mind, typically on the basis of very scant or partial evidence, or even no evidence at all.
Common cognitive distortions in depression include selective abstraction and catastrophic thinking.
Selective abstraction is to focus on a single and often insignificant negative event or condition to the exclusion of other, more positive ones, for example, “My partner hates me. He gave me an annoyed look three days ago.”
Catastrophic thinking is to exaggerate and dramatize the likely consequences of an event or situation, for example, “The pain in my knee is getting worse. When I’m reduced to a wheelchair, I won’t be able to go to work and pay the bills. So, I’ll end up losing my house and dying in the street.”
A cognitive distortion can open up a vicious circle, with the cognitive distortion feeding the depression, and the depression the cognitive distortion.
Cognitive distortion as broadly understood is not limited to depression and other mental disorders, but is also a feature of, among others, poor self-esteem, jealousy, and marital conflict.
5. Self-deception. Of the five enemies of rational thought, the most important by far is self-deception, because it tends to underlie all the others.
If we do not think clearly, if we cannot see the wood for the trees, this is not usually because we lack intelligence or education or experience, but because we feel exposed and vulnerable—and rather than come to terms with a painful truth, prefer, almost reflexively, to deceive and defend ourselves.
As I argue in Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception, all self-deception can be understood in terms of ego defence. In psychoanalytic theory, an ego defence is one of several unconscious processes that we deploy to diffuse the fear and anxiety that arise when who or what we truly are (our unconscious “id”) comes into conflict with who we think we are or who we think we should be (our conscious “superego”).
To put some flesh onto this, let’s take a look at two important ego defences: projection and idealization.
Projection is the attribution of one’s unacceptable thoughts and feelings to other people. This necessarily involves repression (another ego defence) as a first step, since unacceptable thoughts and feelings need to be repudiated before they can be detached. Classic examples of projection include the envious person who believes that everyone envies her, the covetous person who lives in constant fear of being dispossessed, and the person with fantasies of infidelity who suspects that they are being cheated upon by their partner.
Idealization involves overestimating the positive attributes of a person, object, or idea while underestimating its negative attributes. At a deeper level, it involves the projection of our needs and desires onto that person, object, or idea. A paradigm of idealization is infatuation, or romantic love, when love is confused with the need to love, and the idealized person’s negative attributes are glossed over or even construed as positive. Although this can make for a rude awakening, there are few better ways of relieving our existential anxiety than by manufacturing something that is ‘perfect’ for us, be it a piece of equipment, a place, country, person, or god.
In all cases, the raw material of thought is facts. If the facts are missing, or worse, misleading, then thought cannot even get started.
Sisyphus, by Titian. Sisyphus is condemned to push his rock forever. Worse than that, he can never put it down.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.
A horse galloped down the path at speed. It seemed as if the rider was on some urgent and vital mission. ‘Where are you heading?’ hollered a bystander. ‘I don’t know!’ came the already distant reply, ‘Ask the horse!’—A Zen story
The manic defence is the tendency, when confronted with threatening thoughts and feelings, to distract the conscious mind with a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts and feelings.
A paradigm of the manic defence is the person who spends all their time rushing around from one task to the next, unable to tolerate even short stretches of inactivity. Other examples include the socialite who attends one event after another, the small and dependent boy who charges around declaiming that he is Superman, and the insecure teenager who laughs ‘like a maniac’ at the slightest intimation of sex. The behaviour or activity need not be frantic or compulsive. It might involve working, exercising, socialising, travelling, even helping others.
But that is all beside the point. What matters is what is being blocked out.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), one of several ways in which Clarissa Dalloway prevents herself from thinking about her life is by planning needless events and then fussing over their every detail. In the 2002 film The Hours, which takes its inspiration from Woolf’s novel, the poet Richard Brown puts it rather more cruelly: ‘Oh, Mrs Dalloway… Always giving parties to cover the silence.’
The Essence of the Manic Defence
The essence of the manic defence is to prevent feelings of despair and helplessness from entering the conscious mind by occupying it with opposite feelings of euphoria, purposeful activity, and omnipotent control.
This might be why people feel driven not only to mark but also to celebrate such depressing milestones as entering the workforce (graduation), getting ever older (birthdays, anniversaries, New Year), and even, in more recent times, death and dying (Halloween). Our forefathers would be turning in their graves if they could see what had become of All Saints’ Day.
It can be no coincidence that Christmas, originally a pagan solstice festival, is celebrated in the bleak mid-winter, in the shortest and darkest days of the year. A few years ago, I spent Christmas in New Zealand, where it is summer at that time of year—and the people there made much less of a fuss of it.
The manic defence may also take on more subtle or covert forms, such as creating a commotion over something trivial; filling every ‘spare moment’ with reading, study, or talking on the phone to a friend; spending several months preparing for some civic or sporting event; seeking out status or celebrity so as to be a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’; entering into baseless relationships; and even, sometimes, getting married and having children. Of course, I don’t mean you.
When the Manic Defence Becomes a Problem
Everyone uses the manic defence, but some people use it to such an extent that they find it difficult to cope with even short periods of unstructured time such as holidays, weekends, and long-distance travel—which explains why airport shops are so profitable.
Since the advent of smartphones, it can be a struggle to go a few hours, or even the space of a toilet break, without checking our device. God forbid that we should be left alone, even for five minutes, with our own thoughts. The significance of the smartphone is that it has put the manic defence in your pocket, available anytime, anywhere.
Of course, keeping busy need not be unhealthy. It becomes so when we cannot bear to stop—when the activity serves not simply to live or exalt life, but to avoid being alone with ourselves.
‘To do nothing at all,’ observed Oscar Wilde, long before the advent of the smartphone, ‘is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.’
People with a strong manic defence are unable to live in the moment, unable to be truly alive. They leave themselves no opportunity to integrate their thoughts or process their emotions, that is, no opportunity to gather perspective or come to terms with reality, that is, no opportunity to grow.
Because they never let it in, they lose all immunity to despair. And so when it finally hits them, it hits them like a tidal wave.
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