The Antidote (13 page)

One final implication of thinking about selfhood in this way

– and arguably the most significant one – concerns the idea of selflessness. We know from personal experience, and now from decades of psychology studies, that helping other people is a far more reliable strategy for happiness than focusing solely on yourself. One of the more distasteful aspects of positive thinking – and
of conventional approaches to happiness in general – is the way in which they seem to encourage self-absorption. Then again, ‘selfless' approaches to happiness can lead us into a conceptual muddle: if you take on a weekly volunteering assignment, say, with the aim of becoming happier, are you being selfless at all? Do you have to make yourself
miserable
in order to be truly self-less? The questions go on and on. Perhaps the answer to all these conundrums isn't to act selfishly or selflessly, but to question the notion of the self on which those distinctions are based. Both ‘selfish' and ‘selfless' activities are liable to end up merely feeding the ego, which thrives on dissatisfaction. Loosen your grip on selfhood itself, Tolle argues, and you'll stand a far better chance of cultivating happiness – your own, and other people's – without the distraction of ego.

It's quite possible that all this simply leaves you cold – that it fails to chime in any way with your own inner experience. If that's the case, there is one more angle from which it can be demonstrated that selfhood is not all that it seems. This argument takes the form of an extended thought experiment, which I've adapted here from the work of the self-styled ‘spiritual entertainer' Alan Watts. A bearded, plummy-voiced Englishman who made his home on the West Coast of the United States, and who died in 1973, Watts didn't have any breakthrough insights of his own. He was a populariser, intent on explaining the philosophies of the East to the populations of the West. Few professional philosophers today would consider him worthy of their title. But his insights – which rely on no New Agery nor pseudoscience at all, just rigorous, rational thinking – may, in a surprisingly enjoyable way, warp your mind.

Watts begins with what seems like an utterly straightforward question: what do you take to be the boundary of yourself – the place where you end, and where ‘the rest of the world' that isn't you begins? For most of us, the answer, as he puts it, is that we think of ourselves as ‘packages of skin'. It is the envelope of skin enclosing the physical body that defines the boundary of our selves.

You might spot one immediate problem with this. Sometimes, when we use the word ‘me', we seem to be using a different definition – one in which ‘me' refers not to the whole body, but only to something inside the head. According to this definition, the rest of the body isn't ‘me' to the same degree as the head. Suppose your foot had to be amputated: would you consider that you had become less ‘yourself'? (Probably not – but if your
head
had to be amputated, things would be remarkably different.) Already, then, we seem to have two rival definitions of precisely what physical matter we're referring to when we refer to ‘me'. But let's stick with the ‘packages of skin' definition for now.

Suppose you were to zoom in, using an ultra-powerful microscope, on a part of your left hand, until all that you were looking at was a tiny region of your index finger, and a tiny part of the air surrounding it. Given sufficient magnification, what you would see through the microscope would be nothing but a cacophony of molecules: some making up your finger, and some making up the adjacent air. Which brings us to the next question – or really the same question, in rephrased form. What exactly is your rationale for drawing a boundary between some of these molecules and others, so as to define some of them as ‘you', and some of them as the world outside you? At this magnification, it's readily apparent that all we're talking about is molecules, after all. What makes some of them so special as to count as ‘you'?

One obvious answer that springs to mind has to do with conscious control. You seem to be able to choose to move your index finger, for example, in a way that simply doesn't apply to things outside your skin. Perhaps this, then, is why the skin boundary is so important: on one side of it, you have conscious control; on the other side of it, you don't. But Watts has a ready response to that. Do you really exert conscious control, he wonders, over your breathing? Do you actively and consciously pump the blood through your veins, or dispatch antibodies to fight viral infections? You don't: those things just happen. Even thinking itself – as I had come to understand so acutely at the Insight Meditation Society – isn't as voluntary as we might like to imagine. Most of the time, thinking just seems to happen.

Fair enough, you might reply; perhaps I shouldn't have said
conscious
control. Unconscious control is plainly part of it, too. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I control everything inside my skin, and nothing outside it. Except, of course, that's not true, either: you exert control over plenty of things that are outside your skin. Using the right tools, you can build a swimming pool in your back garden; using your powers of persuasion, you might persuade hundreds of thousands of people to depose a dictator. You might argue that this is different – that it's an
indirect
form of control, while the control that you exert over your limbs feels more direct. But Watts wouldn't let you get away with that objection, because it relies on circular reasoning: it presumes an answer to the very conundrum that we're engaged in trying to untangle. After all, the distinction between ‘direct' control and ‘indirect' control is defined by nothing more or less than where you draw the boundary between ‘yourself' and the rest of the world. And it is exactly this boundary – and whether we truly have good reason for drawing it where we traditionally draw it – that is at issue.

By now, the awkwardness of your situation ought to be apparent. Whatever criterion you propose as the basis for drawing the boundary between ‘you' and ‘not you', there seems to be a counterargument which, at the very least, throws the matter into doubt. It is at this point that Watts reveals the most disorienting part of his argument. Encountering it for the first time – I speak from experience – can be a little like ambling to the top of a gentle hill only to discover that its brow is also the precipice of a sheer, high cliff, dropping down to crashing waves below.

The argument goes as follows: that no matter where you draw the boundary – even if we could agree on a place at which to draw it – you would not really be drawing a boundary, in the conventional sense, at all. Because (here it comes) the very notion of a boundary line depends on it having two sides. When you think about it, it doesn't make much sense to describe a boundary as something that keeps two things apart. It makes more sense to describe it as the place at which they meet – or, more accurately, the place at which
they are exactly the same thing.
The inside of the boundary relies for its very existence on the outside, and vice versa; they are, inextricably and by definition, part of the same whole. You simply can't have the peak of a wave without the trough, or darkness without light.

This is the insight behind the ancient Chinese symbol of yin and yang, but there is nothing religious or even especially ‘spiritual' about it. It is merely the conclusion, Watts argues, to which rigorous thinking must lead. There cannot be a ‘you' without an ‘everything else', and attempting to think about one in isolation from the other makes no sense. Nor is this some vague, insipid, flowers-and-incense observation about how ‘we are all one'. It holds true on every level, from the most abstract to the most concrete. Yes, it is true that you wouldn't be you without the
relationships you're in, or the community to which you belong. But you also wouldn't be you if it weren't for all the physical objects in the world that aren't you.

We spend our lives failing to realise this obvious truth, and thus anxiously seeking to fortify our boundaries, to build our egos and assert our superiority over others, as if we could separate ourselves from them, without realising that interdependence makes us what we are. ‘Really,' Watts wrote, ‘the fundamental, ultimate mystery – the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets – is this: that for every outside, there is an inside, and that for every inside, there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.'

That phrase ‘they are different' is important. The case being made here is not that boundaries don't exist – that the ‘true' way to perceive the world would be as some big, boundary-less mess of stuff, like half-melted ice-cream. The fact that ‘you' and ‘everything else' are intrinsically interconnected needn't mean you don't exist. Our sanity depends on maintaining a coherent sense of self, and on setting healthy boundaries between ourselves and others – and neither Alan Watts nor Eckhart Tolle wishes to imperil your sanity. Instead, the conclusion to which both their thinking leads is that the self is best thought of as some kind of a fiction, albeit an extremely useful one – and that realising this, instead of doing everything we can to deny it, might be the route to fulfilment.

Others have remarked on the way that Eckhart Tolle's quiet presence seems to burn up people's scepticism, and this applied to me, too. Reluctant though I was to admit it, he really did seem to exude a palpable stillness, which seeped into the corners of the small Vancouver apartment and eventually, by the end of an
afternoon's conversation, into me. The silences that had felt so awkward when I arrived slowly became more tolerable, then actually enjoyable, as my compulsion to fill them with talking began to subside. For long stretches of seconds, Tolle blinked and smiled, and I found myself smiling comfortably back.

Yet, still, I couldn't quite bring myself to believe that his inner life was as marvellously tranquil as he claimed. When, I wondered, was the last time that he had become really irritated? ‘I can't remember the last time it happened,' he replied. ‘I think maybe it was … ‘ Earlier today? Yesterday? ‘I think it was a few months ago,' he said, after a while. ‘I remember that I was walking outside, and there was this big dog, and the owner wasn't controlling it – it was pestering a smaller dog. And I felt a wave of irritation. But [the irritation] doesn't stick around, because it is not perpetuated by thought activity. It only lasted moments.' In
The Power of Now,
Tolle writes admiringly of watching ducks in a pond near his home, and what happens when they get into a fight. They tussle, but then, the confrontation over, they flap their wings and ruffle their feathers, as if to shake off the memory of the encounter. Then they swim peacefully once more. Ducks bear no grudges. People, with egos, do. Indeed, when Tolle hits his stride, there is no human outrage afflicting the world that he is not willing to attribute to our efforts to defend and strengthen our egos. War, tyrannies, and injustices of all kinds stand exposed as little but the efforts of insecure egos to fortify themselves: to harden their boundaries, to separate themselves, and to impose upon the rest of the world the thought patterns on which they have come to imagine that their very lives – although, in reality, only their egos – depend.

When I finally rose to leave the apartment, I hesitated for a moment – for some reason, shaking Tolle's hand seemed
inappropriately formal – when he suddenly stepped forward and enveloped me in a bear hug. Then I took the lift to the ground floor, called a taxi, and sat on the wrought-iron bench outside the building, waiting to be collected. I felt curiously light-headed and peaceful, and it occurred to me that it might not be such a bad thing to stay sitting on that bench, in the fading light, doing nothing in particular, for several more hours. But that wasn't an option. I – whatever
that
meant – had to get to the airport in time for my plane home.

Security is a kind of death, I think.

– Tennessee Williams, ‘The Catastrophe of Success'

O
N
13 J
ANUARY
2002, during the edgy, watchful months following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a pilot named Elwood Menear – ‘Woodie', to his friends – arrived at Philadelphia's International Airport. The forty-six-year-old was due to fly a routine domestic journey to Minneapolis on behalf of his employer, US Airways, and he had no grounds for imagining that his name might soon be making the headlines alongside that weekend's other most memorable news story, which involved President Bush choking on a pretzel.

Security screening procedures at Philadelphia, in common with those across America and the rest of the world, were becoming progressively tighter. Less than a month previously, Richard Reid, the would-be ‘shoe bomber', had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby initiating the era of compulsory shoe-checking for all travellers. Pilots were not excused all these rigorous new checks, and when Woodie Menear's
turn came, the security screener expressed concern about the presence of a pair of tweezers in his cabin baggage. As it happened, tweezers – unlike corkscrews, or metal scissors, for example – were not on the list of forbidden items; Menear was not breaching regulations by trying to bring them on board. But the official paused just long enough to spark frustration on the part of the pilot, who, like his colleagues, had been growing ever more exasperated by each new restriction. This time it was too much. Menear did not explode in rage; he merely asked a sarcastic question. But it was one that would lead to his immediate arrest, a night in jail, his suspension by US Airways, and months of legal wranglings before he was finally acquitted of ‘making terroristic threats' and permitted to return to his job.

‘Why are you worried about tweezers,' Menear asked, ‘when I could crash the plane?'

Given the time and the place, it was an idiotic thing to say. But the insight that it crystallised was anything but idiotic. As aviation security restrictions grew more and more intricate in the years after Menear's arrest – culminating in the 2006 European ban on all but the tiniest of quantities of liquids in carry-on luggage – critics grew more strident in pointing out that the logic behind the whole policy seemed flawed. It made sense, of course, to keep guns and other weapons out of aeroplane cabins. But those had been prohibited for years. Beyond that, the new rules seemed destined to cause great inconvenience for millions of innocent passengers while doing very little to eliminate the risks posed by a dedicated hijacker. What 9/11 had shown, these critics argued, was not that light-duty ‘boxcutter' utility knives were the next frontier in terrorism. What it had shown was that a terrorist who had reconciled himself to suicide would always have the upper hand against people who were
unwilling to die – no matter which specific objects had been banned.

Bruce Schneier, an American security consultant who is one of the fiercest opponents of the post-9/11 crackdown, has made a name – and a few enemies – for himself by explaining the many ways in which one could easily hijack or bomb an aeroplane today, in spite of all the new measures. Garottes, for example, can be improvised from fishing line or dental floss, while the snapped-off handle of a wheeled bag makes ‘a pretty effective spear'. Alternatively, you could buy some steel epoxy glue from a hardware store: it comes in two tubes, one containing steel dust and the other containing hardener, which you could combine in-flight, and mould into a stubby steel knife, using a metal teaspoon as a handle. (Neither steel epoxy glue nor metal teaspoons are prohibited on planes – unlike, say, snow globes, which are banned under American regulations.) Schneier's point is not, of course, that wheeled bags and dental floss should be urgently added to the list of items forbidden in flight. It is that you cannot make air travel significantly safer by banning each new item that a terrorist thinks to use, or that you fear he might, unless you're willing to ban
every
item – and perhaps also to force passengers to be strapped into their seats, too, given that hijackers could always use their bare hands. Not long after the 9/11 attacks, a reporter asked Schneier whether any measures could be taken that might guarantee that such a tragedy would never happen again. Sure, Schneier replied: just ground all the planes.

‘There are precisely two things that have made air travel safer since 9/11: locks on cockpit doors, and teaching passengers that they have to fight back,' Schneier told me. He is forty-nine and ponytailed, and speaks in the quiet tones of someone who is confident of the truth of his opinions, and not especially concerned
about winning you over. ‘You can argue that there's a third – sky marshals. But actually, once you tell people you have them, you don't really need them. It's the
idea
of sky marshals that makes us safer, not the marshals themselves.'

If what Schneier says is correct, then an obvious question follows: why do governments continue to impose these expensive and time-consuming restrictions? Why carry on playing a cat-and-mouse game with terrorists, in which the terrorists will always be one step ahead? There are many possible answers to this question, having to do with the pressure that politicians and safety officials feel to show that they are doing something, and to impress those who elect them or pay their salaries. But at the root of it all, Schneier argues, is the fundamental human desire for a
feeling
of safety and security – even though this feeling may be only indirectly related, at best, to
being
more safe or secure. Schneier coined the term ‘security theatre' to refer to all those measures that are designed primarily to increase the feeling of security, without actually making people more secure. Indeed, it is perfectly possible to argue – Schneier has often done so – that security theatre in fact makes us
less
secure. It swallows resources that might otherwise be expended on more effective anti-terrorism measures, such as intelligence-gathering, and it makes passengers and security staff less alert to the kinds of suspicious behaviour they ought to be noticing. After all, if everyone's luggage is being so scrupulously examined that even snow globes are being intercepted, it might be easy to assume that you could let your guard down.

Start to look at security through Bruce Schneier's eyes, and some of the ways in which society approaches the issue begin to appear profoundly ridiculous. In 2007, for example, Britain's then prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a barrage of measures to beef
up security at the nation's airports, railway stations, and other transport hubs, including the construction of blast-resistant barriers. A posting on Schneier's blog explained that the barriers would be constructed at Liverpool Lime Street, that city's primary rail station, but that they would not be constructed at less busy suburban commuter stations, a few miles along the same stretch of track. The blog post was headlined: ‘UK Spends Billions To Force Rail Terrorists To Drive a Little Further'. Brown's announcement was a classic piece of security theatre: a costly way to make travellers
feel
safer – so long as they didn't reflect too closely on the details – while doing nothing to deter an even slightly diligent terrorist.

In this book so far, we have seen how some of the most basic doctrines that dominate our thinking about happiness fail to work because we struggle for them too strenuously. It's easy to see how Bruce Schneier's critique of air security bears a superficial resemblance to this argument: in reality, many of the things we believe make air travel more secure don't do so, or make things worse. But the connection goes deeper – because ‘security' in the context of air travel is really only one facet of a much bigger question that brings us to the heart of the ‘negative' approach to happiness. The desire for a feeling of security and safety doesn't only lead us into irrationality in the field of counterterrorism. It leads us into irrationality all the time.

As we'll see, a staggering proportion of human activity – in politics, business, and international relations, as much as in our personal lives – is motivated by the desire to feel safe and secure. And yet this quest to feel secure doesn't always lead to security, still less to happiness. It turns out to be an awkward truth about psychology that people who find themselves in what the rest of us might consider conditions of extreme insecurity – such as
severe poverty – discover insights into happiness from which the rest of us could stand to learn. And if the most radical proponents of the ‘negative path' are to be believed, in turning towards insecurity we may come to understand that security itself is a kind of illusion – and that we were mistaken, all along, about what it was we thought we were searching for.

It is easy to feel, these days, that we live in uniquely insecure times, and that things are only going to get worse. Several years ago, the 2020 Project, an initiative of the American intelligence services charged with making broad forecasts about the future, published a report with a chapter bluntly entitled ‘Pervasive Insecurity'. By 2020, the project's analysts wrote, ‘we foresee a more pervasive sense of insecurity, which may be as much based on psychological perception as physical threats.' Among the chief causes for anxiety, they predicted, would be ‘concerns over job security', ‘fears revolving around migration', ‘terrorism and internal conflicts', and even ‘conflicts among great powers'. And all of that was written some time before the financial collapse of the late 2000s, which brought a new wave of insecurity to millions.

Yet it is easy, too, to find evidence that people have
always
believed that they are living in times of unique insecurity. In 1951 – a relatively happy and prosperous moment, all things considered, after the deepest pain of the post-war recovery and before the worst of the Cold War – Alan Watts captured his era's sense of insecurity well. There was, he wrote, ‘the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years or so, many longestablished traditions have broken down – traditions of family, and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.' Then again, that
was how plenty of people felt in 634
BC
in Rome, as well, when they were convinced that the city was destined to collapse after 120 years of existence. It is how people have felt at countless points in history since then. Try searching Google's library of digitised manuscripts for the phrase ‘these uncertain times', and you'll find that it occurs over and over, in hundreds of journals and books, in virtually every decade the database encompasses, reaching back to the seventeenth century. ‘As a matter of fact,' Watts insisted, ‘our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change and death are nothing new.'

So people have always wanted to feel more secure than they do. Yet as Bruce Schneier's work in the field of air security helps to demonstrate, there's an enormous pitfall waiting for us

– because the strategies that are designed to bestow a
feeling
of security often don't actually leave us more secure. They may even have the opposite effect. ‘Security is both a feeling and a reality,' as Schneier puts it, ‘and they're not the same.'

The feeling and the reality of security diverge in specific and predictable ways. Much has been written in recent years about ‘cognitive biases' – the ways in which our judgments about reality tend to depart from reality itself – and many of these help explain the chronic mistakes we make when it comes to security. For example, we habitually fear threats from other humans more than threats from the natural world. We fear threats that we can easily call vividly to mind more than those we find difficult to picture – the so-called ‘availability bias'. We fear situations in which we feel as though we have no control, such as flying as a passenger on an aeroplane, more than situations in which we feel as if we have control, such as when at the steering wheel of a car. No wonder, then, that we sometimes risk making ourselves less secure by chasing feelings of security. You're vastly more likely to be
killed as the result of a car crash than an air crash, and vastly more likely to die of heart disease than at the hands of a violent intruder. But if you react to news stories about air terrorism by taking the car when you'd otherwise have taken a plane, or if you spend time and energy protecting your home from attackers that you could have spent on improving your diet, you'll be letting your biases guide you towards a greater
feeling
of security at the expense of your real safety.

Psychologists are not unanimous about why these biases should have developed in the first place, but Schneier makes the plausible argument that the explanation lies in evolution – specifically, the discrepancy between the rate of evolutionary change and the rate at which modern society has developed. Adopting the long view of our species, across evolutionary time, it is easy to see that these biases might once have served our survival well – but that they fail us now because we confront situations for which they were never intended. Some animals, surprised by a car's headlights, may leap wildly from one side of the road to the other, in an instinctive effort to throw off the predator, which doesn't work when your predator is a 4 x 4. And ‘like a squirrel whose predatorevasion techniques fail when confronted by a car,' observes Schneier, ‘or a passenger pigeon who finds that evolution prepared him to survive the hawk but not the shotgun, our innate capabilities to deal with risk fail when confronted with things such as modern human society, technology, and the media.'