The Antidote (5 page)

But after a while, the memory of those two minutes began to gnaw at him. He read the
Tao Te Ching,
looking for clues in Taoism. He explored Buddhism. But ultimately it was Stoicism that spoke to him. ‘It just seemed so much more solid and down-to-earth,' he said. ‘I thought: “There's nothing here that I can argue with!”' His vision in the park, it turned out, mirrored the Stoics' own idiosyncratic form of religious belief. They too held that the universe was God – that there was a grand plan, and that everything was happening for a reason. The Stoic goal of acting according to reason meant acting in accordance with this universal plan. ‘Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul,' says Marcus Aurelius. ‘Whatever
happens at all, happens as it should.' To modern secularist minds, this is certainly the part of Stoicism that is hardest to swallow. Calling the universe ‘God' might be just about acceptable; that's arguably only a matter of language. But to suggest that it's all heading somewhere, in accordance with a plan, is far more problematic. Indeed, Keith explained with a sigh, he was always having to quell fractious arguments between atheist Stoics and theist Stoics on the International Stoic Forum – though as a good Stoic, naturally he didn't let it upset him all that much.

You don't necessarily need to accept the Stoic notion of a ‘grand plan', however, in order to embrace its flipside, which is much more important to Stoicism in everyday life: that whether or not there is some agency bigger than ourselves, controlling the way things unfold, each one of us clearly has very little
individual
control over the universe. Keith and Jocelyn had learned this the hard way. They would have preferred to live without Jocelyn's arthritis, without Keith's constant fatigue, and with more money. But without their ever requesting it, circumstances had taught them Stoicism's central insight about control, and about the wisdom of understanding the limits of your own.

As Seneca frequently observes, we habitually act as if our control over the world were much greater than it really is. Even such personal matters as our health, our finances, and our reputations are ultimately beyond our control; we can try to influence them, of course, but frequently things won't go our way. And the behaviour of other people is even further beyond our control. For most conventional notions of happiness – which consist in making things the way you want them to be – this poses a big problem. In better times, it's easy to forget how little we control: we can usually manage to convince ourselves that we attained the promotion at work, or the new relationship, or the Nobel Prize, thanks
solely to our own brilliance and effort. But unhappy times bring home the truth of the matter. Jobs are lost; plans go wrong; people die. If your strategy for happiness depends on bending circumstances to your will, this is terrible news: the best you can do is to pray that not all that much will go wrong, and try to distract yourself when it does. For the Stoics, however, tranquility entails confronting the reality of your limited control. ‘Never have I trusted Fortune,' writes Seneca, ‘even when she seemed to be at peace. All her generous bounties – money, office, influence – I deposited where she could ask for them back without disturbing me.' Those things lie beyond the individual's control; if you invest your happiness in them, you're setting yourself up for a rude shock. The only things we can truly control, the Stoics argue, are our
judgments –
what we believe – about our circumstances. But this isn't bad news. From the Stoic perspective, as we've already seen, our judgments are what cause our distress – and so they're all that we need to be able to control in order to substitute serenity for suffering.

‘Suppose somebody insults you – insults you
really
obnoxiously,' Keith said, leaning forward in his armchair as he warmed to his theme. ‘The Stoic, if he's a good enough Stoic, isn't going to get annoyed or angry or upset or disconcerted, because he'll see that, ultimately, nothing bad has happened. To get annoyed, he would first have to have judged that the other person had harmed him. The trouble is that you're conditioned into making that kind of judgment all your life.'

This is a relatively small example: it's easy enough to see that a verbal insult need entail no personal harm. It would be vastly harder to make the same argument about, say, the death of a friend. This is why the notion of a ‘grand plan' is ultimately so crucial to a thoroughgoing embrace of Stoicism: it's only by
seeing death as part of such a plan that one could one ever hope to feel serene about it. ‘Do not despise death, but be well content with it, since this too is one of those things which nature wills,' says Marcus. But this is a tall order. The best that Stoicism could do for an atheist, in this situation, would probably be to help her see that she retained
some
control over her judgments. She might be able to remind herself that it was possible to choose to be seriously but reasonably upset, instead of spiralling into utter despair.

Yet this hardly invalidates the usefulness of a Stoic approach when it comes to more minor, everyday forms of distress, which is where Seddon advised his correspondence-course students to begin. Try thinking Stoically, he told them, for the duration of a single trip to the supermarket. Is something out of stock? Are the queues too long? The Stoic isn't necessarily obliged to tolerate the situation; he might decide to switch to another store instead. But to become upset would be, in Stoic terms, an error of judgment. You cannot control the situation, so reacting with fury against that reality is irrational. Your irritation, moreover, is almost certainly out of all proportion to the actual harm – if any – that has been done to you by the inconvenience; there are no grounds for taking it personally. Maybe it's an opportunity to engage in the ‘premeditation of evils': what's the absolute worst that could happen as a result of this? Almost always, asking this question will reveal your judgments about the situation to have been exaggerated, and cutting them down to size will vastly increase your chances of replacing distress or annoyance with calm.

It is essential to grasp a distinction here between acceptance and resignation: using your powers of reason to stop being disturbed by a situation doesn't mean you shouldn't try to change it. To take one very obvious example, a Stoic who finds herself
in an abusive relationship would not be expected to put up with it, and would almost certainly be best advised to take action to leave it. Her Stoicism would oblige her only to confront the truth of her situation – to see it for what it was – and then to take whatever actions were within her power, instead of railing against her circumstances as if they ought not exist. ‘The cucumber is bitter? Put it down,' Marcus advises. ‘There are brambles in the path? Step to one side. That is enough, without also asking: “How did these things come into the world at all?”'

Or take somebody who had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned, said Keith. ‘Now, that person, as a Stoic, is going to say that having been unjustly imprisoned, in one sense,
doesn't actually matter.
What matters is how I engage with the situation. Now that I'm here, rather than anywhere else, here in this time and this place – what can I do? Maybe I need to read up on the law and appeal my case and fight for my freedom. That's certainly not resignation. But, rationally, I'm accepting the reality of the situation. And then I don't need to feel distressed by a judgment that it ought not to be happening. Because it
is
happening.' For Keith and Jocelyn, this struck close to home. ‘Without Stoicism,' he said quietly, gesturing at his wife and himself, ‘I really don't see how we'd have been able to keep going through this.'

Later, as I headed back out into the Watford dusk, I had the sense of having absorbed some of Keith's rigorously rational tranquility, as if by osmosis. Back in London, buying food to make dinner for the friends with whom I was staying, I did indeed find myself at the wrong end of a long supermarket queue, attended by one overworked member of staff and a row of malfunctioning self-service machines. I felt a flash of irritation, before I managed to call the Stoics to mind. The situation was what it was. I could leave if I chose to. And the worst-case scenario here – a few minutes'
delay before my friends and I could eat – was so trifling as to be laughable. My irrational judgments were the problem, not the supermarket queue. I felt disproportionately pleased with myself for recognising this. True, in the long history of Stoicism, it was a pretty minor triumph. It didn't really compare, for example, to staying tranquil while being forced to commit suicide by bleeding oneself to death, like Seneca. Still, I told myself – Stoically – you had to start somewhere.

For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones. And dwelling on the worst-case scenario, the ‘premeditation of evils', is often the best way to achieve this – even to the point, Seneca suggests, of deliberately experiencing those ‘evils', so as to grasp that they might not be as bad as you'd irrationally feared.

It was this last technique that was to prove especially inspiring, centuries later, to a maverick psychotherapist named Albert Ellis, who did more than anyone else to restore Stoicism to the forefront of modern psychology. In 2006, in the final months of Ellis's life, I went to visit him, in a cramped top-floor apartment above the establishment that he had named – with characteristic disregard for modesty – the Albert Ellis Institute, in uptown Manhattan. He was ninety-three, and did not get out of bed for the interview; to accommodate his severe deafness, he wore a chunky pair of headphones, and demanded that I speak into a microphone.

‘As the Buddha said two-and-a-half thousand years ago,' he said, soon after we'd started talking, and jabbing a finger in my direction, ‘we're all out of our fucking minds! That's just the way
we are.' To be honest, I would have felt short-changed if he hadn't used such language early in our conversation, such was his notoriety for swearing. But I knew he had more going for him than entertainment value. A couple of decades previously, America's psychologists had voted him the second most influential psychotherapist of the twentieth century, behind the founder of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, but – amazingly – ahead of Sigmund Freud. This was especially generous of them in view of Ellis's opinion of much of the world of conventional psychology, which was that it was ‘horseshit'.

In the 1950s, when Ellis first began to promote his Stoic-flavoured view of psychology, it was deeply controversial, at odds both with self-help's focus on positive thinking and with the Freudianism that dominated the profession. On several occasions, at psychology conferences, he'd been jeered. But now, with more than fifty books to his name – one typical bestseller was entitled
How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything, Yes, Anything!
– he exuded the satisfaction of intellectual victory.

A few days before, I had witnessed Ellis deliver one of his famous ‘Friday night workshops', in which he hauled volunteers on stage in order to berate them, for their own benefit, in front of an audience of trainee therapists and interested members of the public. The first participant I watched had been beset by anxiety: she couldn't decide whether to give up her job and move across the country to join her long-term boyfriend. She wanted to marry him, and she didn't much like her job, but what if he wasn't the one for her? ‘So maybe he turns out to be a jerk, and you get divorced!' Ellis shouted – because he was deaf, but also, I suspected, because he enjoyed shouting. ‘That would be highly disagreeable! You might feel sad! But it doesn't have to be
awful.
It doesn't have to be
completely terrible.'

This distinction – between outcomes that are completely terrible, versus those that are merely bad – might sound glib, or like a trivial quibble over vocabulary. To understand why it is neither, and why it goes to the heart of Ellis's outlook on the virtues of negative thinking, it is necessary to return to his youth, in Pittsburgh, in the first decades of the twentieth century. From an early age, thinking like a Stoic proved an urgent personal necessity for Ellis. His mother, as he remembered her, was self-absorbed and melodramatic; his father, a travelling salesman, was rarely around. At the age of five, Ellis developed severe kidney problems, condemning him to long stays in hospital throughout his childhood, during which his parents almost never visited. Alone with his thoughts, he drifted into philosophical speculations on the nature of existence, and eventually read Seneca's
Letters from a Stoic.
The Stoics' focus on the importance of one's judgments about one's circumstances struck a chord; his unhappy existence, he came to see, might prove a surprisingly useful crucible in which to develop Stoic wisdom. And so, by 1932, when he was a gangly eighteen-year-old with a crippling fear of speaking to women, he knew enough philosophy and psychology to try addressing his shyness problem by means of a practical Stoic experiment. One day that summer – the summer that Amelia Earhart flew the Atlantic, and that Walt Disney released the first Technicolor cartoon movie – Ellis arrived at the Bronx Botanical Garden, near his home in New York City, to put his plan into practice.

Every day for a month, Ellis had decided, he would follow an unbreakable rule. He would take up a position on a park bench, and, if a woman sat down near him, he would attempt to strike up an innocuous conversation. That was all. He ended up sharing benches, and attempting conversation, with a hundred and thirty women. ‘Whereupon thirty got up and walked away,' he recalled,
years later. ‘But that left me with a sample of a hundred, which was good enough for research purposes. I spoke to the whole hundred – for the first time in my life.' Only in one case did the conversation progress far enough for Ellis and his benchmate to make a plan to meet again – ‘and she didn't show up'. To an uninformed observer, the experiment might have looked like an utter failure. But Ellis would probably have rejected any such verdict as ‘horseshit'; for him, it had been a triumphant success.