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In The Last Messiah (1933), the philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe argued that the human capacities for reason and self-awareness break with nature, giving us more than we, as a part of nature, can carry or bear.
So as not to go mad, ‘most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.’
It is not just that people limit the content of consciousness, but also that they fill it with less or other than the truth.
In particular, most people think more favourably of themselves than is warranted: they have an inflated sense of their qualities and abilities, an illusion of control over things that largely escape them, and a misplaced optimism about their likely outcomes and prospects.
For instance, most people claim to be better than the average road user, citizen, parent... which is, of course, mathematically impossible, since not everyone can be above average! A couple on the verge of tying the knot is likely to overestimate the odds of having a sunny wedding, a heavenly honeymoon, or a healthy child, while underestimating the odds of suffering a miscarriage, falling ill, or getting divorced.
It all brings to mind that line in Game of Thrones, uttered to a young Cersei Lannister by Maggy the Woods Witch: "Everyone wants to know their future... until they know their future."
Positive Illusions
The concept of positive illusions first appeared in a 1988 paper by Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown entitled, Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health.
Still today, it is commonly held that mental health corresponds to accurate perceptions of the self, the other, and the world; but in their paper, Taylor and Brown argued that the evidence suggests otherwise, and that positive illusions are characteristic of normal human thought.
Positive illusions are helpful insofar as they enable us to take risks, invest in the future, and fend off despair and depression. After all, how many people would get married if they had even half a sense of what awaited them?
But in the longer term, the poor perspective and judgment that come from undue self-regard and false hope are likely to lead to disappointment and failure, to say nothing of the mental blocks and emotional disturbances (such as anger, anxiety, and so on) that can derive or descend from a defended position.
Depressive realism
Just as it is commonly believed that mental health corresponds to accurate perceptions of the self, the other, and the world, so it is commonly believed that depression results in, or from, distorted thinking.
While it is true that people with low mood are more likely to suffer from thinking errors, the scientific literature suggests that many people with low mood can also have more accurate judgment about the outcome of so-called contingent events (events that may or may not occur) and a more realistic perception of their role, abilities, and limitations—a phenomenon that is referred to, controversially, as ‘depressive realism’.
The concept of depressive realism first appeared in a 1979 paper entitled, Judgement of contingency in depressed and non-depressed students: sadder but wiser?
On the basis of their findings, the authors, Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, argued that people with depression make more realistic inferences than ‘normal’ people, who are in some sense handicapped by their positive illusions.
On the face of it, this suggests that people with depression are able to see the world more clearly for what it is, while so-called normal people are only normal insofar as they are deceiving or deluding themselves.
This is a seductive proposition for someone like me, who has long been arguing that depression can be good for us.
But here's the rub: people with depression are pessimistic even in situations in which pessimism is unwarranted, suggesting that rather than being more realistic, their thinking is merely ‘differently biased’, and just as rigid and distorted as that of normal people with their positive illusions.
Wisdom, it seems, consists in being able to shed our positive illusions without also succumbing to depression, although, for many, depression may be a necessary staging post along the way.
Read more in Growing from Depression: A Practical and Philosophical Self-Help Guide.
