Cognitive distortions
Catching up with my reading recently, I have been investigating twentieth century psychological thinking and it struck how many of the explanations for irrational and negative thought processes in individuals contained in this body of work can be applied to institutions and to our current dysfunctional culture as a whole.
I’ll give you an example; Karen Horney in 1950 talked about the ‘tyranny of the shoulds’, the notion that things should magically be different from how they actually are. Put in contemporary terms, this neatly describes the notion that Britain should still be an empire and a great power (when it is clearly neither) that characterises the thinking of so much of the pro-Brexit lobby. As Albert Ellis pointed out, building on Horney’s ideas, ‘the struggle to reconcile these thoughts with reality is a painful and unending one’, and this particular psychodrama has consumed British politics for the last several years.
In 1980 David Burns defined a whole series of similar ‘cognitive distortions’, specifically: Jumping to Conclusions, All of Nothing Thinking, Always being Right, Over Generalising and Catastrophizing.
These modes of thought seem to aptly describe our current political discourse, and are particularly applicable to much of the tabloid press, for whom every space rock approaching the Earth is the asteroid that’s going to end all life, every passing storm is a catastrophe in waiting, and every coming Winter will be the worst in living memory.
The problem facing us is that although it’s possible to counsel and treat the individual to rid them of such negative, irrational and self-destructive thought processes, how do you treat an entire culture?
As with all of our present irrationalities, the internet is the medium by which they can spread and infect the body politic and our popular culture..
Not much to report on volume seven of Lights in the sky this month; however chapter five of …when you wish upon a star is very nearly complete and ideas for the rest of the novel and more supplementary short stories (which will eventually be gathered in a compendium to be entitled, Tales from the Collapse), continue to flow unabated.
Some of you may be tempted to the view that my writing is also a symptom (or an example) of cognitive distortion, and there is an argument for that. However, in my defence, I would say that I know that what I’m writing is fiction, and as an author I’m commenting on the culture I find myself in. In short, I am capable of a degree of objectivity and can distance myself from cultural, political and societal tendencies that I observe around me.
However, out in the real world, objectivity seems currently to be in short supply…
The Author October 2019