31. On despair
Eight features of 'a persuasive & consequential spiritual darkness'
Issue 31
Hello again!
Today’s post will explicate my theory of despair. This topic substantially impacts my daily habits, how I choose projects, and how I understand my long-term purpose. I hope others will find it useful.
I’ll start with an example.
“God doesn’t exist because God is an asshole.”
I sank into the couch, started the timer, and began to pray. Minutes passed. A sense of numbness began to emerge.
I realized I’d been experiencing the numbness all day. No - I’d been feeling it all week. No, actually - I had no idea how long I’d been feeling numb. It seemed like a rather long time.
The numbness said: “There is no point working on yourself. There is no point in praying. None of this is going to improve your habits or life or anything else.”
Intellectually, this seemed a little iffy. That very week I’d been ecstatic about the benefits of prayer. I’d written about prayer. Prayer is awesome. But the numbness continued. “There is no point to any of this. God doesn’t exist. There’s no reason to pray.”
I asked the numbness about the existence of God. (I often go down philosophical rabbit holes to make sure I still stand by what I’m doing.) But no real argument for atheism was forthcoming. On balance, the objection didn’t seem intellectual in nature.
After some confusing minutes, numbness gave way to anger. “God doesn’t exist because God is an asshole.” I thought about starvation, captivity, torture, sickness, hells of physical pain. “There’s no point living in a world where evil is this powerful. And God lets it all happen.”
By the end of the session, I came some conclusions on the meaning of all this darkness - though I’ll need to leave my thoughts on theodicy for another time.
But I remembered that prayer, because the case was so odd: a numbness, apparently years-old, subterranean. A feeling that used the language of atheism, but didn’t give way to intellectual argument—rather, to some kind of spite.
There are plenty of interesting intellectual objections to the existence of God, but this numbness didn’t come from them. It held its tongue in my day-to-day life, but it maintained that doubt—doubt of God, doubt of my ability to improve—not from honest uncertainty, but as resentment stemming from hopelessness.
The eight features of despair
With this example in mind, let’s get into the theory.
My theory of despair has eight key features:
It is 1) a mental or spiritual thing which is 2) characteristically dark 3) substantially hidden 4) consequential to life 5) persuasive, regardless of its truth 6) sticky, 7) changing, and 8) reinforced by our social environment.
Of these characteristics, I expect 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7 to be the least surprising and contentious. The real juice, as far as I’m concerned, is in 3, 5, and 8. Feature 5 is especially critical.
A compression of this theory might be to say that despair is a persuasive & consequential spiritual darkness. (Here 'stickiness’ is part of persuasiveness, and ‘spiritual’ things are considered generally hidden, changing, and socially reinforced.)
1. Mental or spiritual
“Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where I talk about ‘the mind’, someone else will talk about the spirit, the soul, the body-mind, the algorithms of the brain, or something else entirely.
Different theories of mind (or spirit or soul) refer to despair in different terms. I’m not sure ‘sin’ is exactly the same, but it’s important and nearby. Where cognitive behavioral therapists describe ‘negative self-talk’, I see them as intending to deal with a symptom arising from and adjacent to despair.
Despair is either a mental/spiritual thing, or a feature of mental/spiritual things. One can describe an outlook, worldview, individual belief, instinct, or general life orientation as ‘despairing’.
A mental or spiritual thing can have physiological correlates, which cause or are caused by the mental or spiritual thing. I’m not a materialist, but many materialists will agree that mental or spiritual-type terminologies can be used to refer to aggregate, high-level patterns arising from a physical basis.
As a mental or spiritual thing, I believe despair has teleological characteristics, can theoretically be accessed through introspection, and impacts behavior.
2. Characteristically dark
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.— The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Despair is not always witnessed plainly - maybe it is only rarely witnessed plainly - but when it is seen, it looks a certain way.
Despair can be indicated by sadness, bleakness, fatigue, bitterness, hardness, misery, alienation, solipsism, or a thousand other things.
Whether these are themselves varieties of despair, or indirect signs of a further independent thing called despair, or a collection of different things merely categorized to a bucket labeled despair, is not important to this theory.
Darkness might appear absent despair, but where despair is present and witnessed plainly, so is some kind of darkness.
Descriptions of mental or spiritual things are sometimes necessarily poetical or metaphorical; ‘I feel like there’s a hole in my chest.’ Articulated despair might appear as descriptive or evaluative claims about the world. ‘I feel like everyone I know hates me’. ‘It would be good if I died.’ Some have found tools like IFS or Gendlin’s Focusing (or making art) useful for accessing and describing mental features including despair.
3. Hidden
“Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”
— Brian Eno
When things go very badly, we experience despair directly - indeed it seems hard to experience anything else. Despair-as-experienced manifests as depression, apathy, sadness, etc.
But the mind is vast and substantially unseen. Because of this, I believe that despair can exist unseen, while being germane to a life or a person’s behavior.
This is the first place where my theory of despair diverges from common use. In common use, ‘despair’ is used to refer to what I’m calling experienced despair, distinguished from despair that isn’t experienced - or which isn’t experienced directly.
Just because despair isn’t observed in its loudest emotional form, doesn’t mean it’s not there, observable but quiet. Despair creates ripples on the surface of the mind-as-experienced, as well as subtle or not-so-subtle behavioral ripples that can be seen from the outside. Despair might be indicated by subliminal anxieties, aversions, uncertainties, or self-doubt. Or it might simply be indicated by absences; topics that a person mysteriously avoids or doable actions they never think to try.
Notcing despair in yourself and others requires a kind of emotional sophistication. ‘My mom can always tell when something’s wrong, before I even admit it to myself.’
Part of despair’s hidden nature is a ‘fish in water’ problem. We carry despair from years gone by, packaged and adapted to so adeptly that we forget it’s even there.
Some people can smell a storm coming. Some only notice once they’re drenched.
4. Consequential
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
— Carl Jung
The unconscious impacts our actions and perceptions in ways that would shock us into change, if we could only notice what’s happening.
But how might unseen mental things determine action? It depends on how you think the mind works.
You might think of mental stuff as composed of ‘propositional beliefs’, such as ‘the refrigerator is in the kitchen’ or ‘I am a software engineer’.1 On this kind of view, despair takes the form of belief in the pointlessness, inoperability, desperation or predetermination of one’s circumstance or certain aspects of the world:
‘No one is a good fit for me’ → doesn’t seek a good romantic partner
‘No matter what I do, my habits always go to shit’ → keeps snorting coke
‘No one cares about art’ → doesn’t pursue their passion
‘Only greedy assholes get promotions’ → doesn’t seek promotion, or becomes a greedy asshole
On the other hand, some hold that ‘mental stuff’ has nothing to do with propositional beliefs.
Jordan Peterson articulated the metaphor of a wheel which is ‘true’ in terms of being aligned on its axis and suitable for use. Through a variety of mechanisms, from the physiological to the spiritual, despair might simply tilt the wheel of our lives off axis. A ‘true mental wheel’, by contrast, yields actions leading to flourishing, wellbeing, and success.
5. Truth-orthogonally persuasive
“I am not yet wise in my grief, so this great darkness makes me small.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
One might object - “What if the despair is ‘correct’? What if the beliefs underlying it are true? Surely you’re not saying that any negative belief or attitude is confused?”
I cede the point! The world has many features which are both dark and real: the fact of death, the horrors of evolution, the rule of randomness and accident, the difficulty of being understood, endemic abuses of power, and more horrors besides.
And here, my use of the term ‘despair’ again diverges from common use: I use despair to refer to darkness which persuades, regardless of whether the beliefs or intuitions underlying it are true.
The basic intuition here is that despair is tricky as fuck. It is believed before it is understood. It has its way before our countermeasures kick in.
When it coopts our faculties of reason, the saddened heart goes to work in its service, writing its dark but confused arguments with eloquence and discipline.
When it coopts our bravery, it tells us that, after all, true bravery involves accepting the bitter truth that we could never be loved - regardless of whether that has anything to do with the state of the world.
When it coopts our pride, it tells us that we were singled out as special, the only ones who understand that the world’s not worth saving.
Or whatever. We go to battle with wet gunpowder.
This isn’t to say that virtue has no chance against despair. It’s the only thing that truly can. But “the Devil quotes scripture for his own purposes.”
In the cases when I’ve finally understood the internal structure of my own despair, I’ve felt compelled to admire the insane and bewildering cleverness with which it took root in my mind.
If despair is persuasive darkness orthogonal to truth, truth-based darkness is just something we believe and need to grapple with. Truth-based darkness induces the same symptoms and experiences with an importantly different basis.
If we return to the common use of ‘despair’ while retaining the properties of my theory, we might want to refer to honest and dishonest despair. Difficulty and misery drag us into motivated dishonesty.
In other words: some brilliant madness in you wants you to believe you’re screwed, and it will scour heaven and earth for tools to prove the point.
If despair is motivated, what is it motivated by? It is hard to say. Sometimes, it might feel malevolent - the Devil caught whispering in your ear. But it doesn’t need to feel ‘evil’, and frequently doesn’t at its root. It can just feel… despairing. Tired, melancholy, but sure.
There are dark and consequential truths, but because persuasive darkness is so prevalent, we’re better off approaching all darkness with a grain of salt. It may seem obvious that we’re doomed, but we’d better check our reasoning. We’ve been confused before.
6. Sticky
“We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Despair is especially pernicious when not noticed. And sometimes noticing isn’t enough.
When a life feels like it’s on an inevitable and predetermined track, I believe this means we haven’t introspectively found or accessed the ‘levers’ that would alter our course. That doesn’t mean the levers aren’t there. For me, this results in a certain view of psychological free will, wherein a person who knows and masters himself can choose a course, and a person who doesn’t follows a course determined by unmastered mental features.
Despair can be noticed helplessly, when we witness its impact but haven’t found an interaction that permits its alteration. Despair compounds; our worst issues are ones on which we see no possibility of resolution. As years, bad experiences, and failed attempts accrue, it becomes more natural to not try. Perhaps this is why much despair is revealed as overconfident - checking one’s own reasoning requires hope.
7. Changing
“God’s not finished.” —Kanye West
Despair’s total quantity and impact vary over the course of a life. It’s affected by a million things, like:
Intentionally or accidentally sought life outcomes
Truly random or accidental life experiences
The people we surround ourselves with
Helpful and harmful mindsets compounding the effects of hope or despair
Physiology, whether by natural defaults or the results of physical habits
The ideas and concepts we consume
And far more.
8. Social-environmentally reinforced
A bottomless curse, a bottomless sea ... Accepting of all that there is and can be. —Bloodborne
Despair roots in the belief systems of individuals. Just as individuals express and show their despair both intentionally and by accident, so do groups or societies. So as a group converges on a certain despairing outlook, the culture it expresses can be described as despairing on a certain topic.
For example, I believe the prototypical American despairs of the benevolence of personal power. We talk about how ‘power corrupts’, bring up Hitler or Stalin, and we describe how insane it must have been to have kings in the medieval world when you could end up with an addled tyrant who wrecks havoc on society.
That doesn’t mean that we aren’t of many minds about it; the powerful are idolized as much as they’re criticized. We love Elon, and we love to hate Elon. Being of many minds can be a sign of despair.
As a culture performs its worldview through art, music, politics, education, and media, that culture’s despair is also distributed to the society at large. Since despair is harmful, individuals who absorb the culture’s message will suffer the despair of their society at large.
I’m reminded of this quote:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
—Keynes
To amend it for our current purpose, I might say: practical individuals who believe themselves exempt from any spiritual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct meme, cultural event, geist-setting moment or artistic expression of a few years back.
Conclusion
Despair is the deepest darkness of our minds, sometimes witnessed, usually hidden, often noticed indirectly. It can preced or alter our decisionmaking, a hidden rudder deep beneath the sea of what is visible. It’s revealed not by its darkness alone, but by its trickiness, its temptations towards confusion in the guise of conviction and virtue. However pernicious, it also changes, whether by habits, mindsets, behaviors life events, or our fellow man - for better and worse. It is not just seen in individuals, but in an era’s collective assumptions and cultural expressions. To heal it frees us to choose; to leave it untreated risks letting it determine the courses of our lives and our societies.
I believe this theory is true enough to be useful, and can be practically adapted to a number of tasks, from introspective work to understanding people to understanding society-at-large.
In a future post, I hope to elaborate on the role this theory plays in the overall aim of my life: to build a spiritual infrastructure of benefit to civilization.
Thank you to the many people who directly or indirectly improved to my thinking on this topic, including Mark Lee, who gave me feedback on the essay. All errors are my own.
If you enjoyed this essay, I hope you’ll consider supporting my media and writing via Patreon, which I’m launching today:
Of potential interest here is Jer Clifton’s theory of Primal World Beliefs.