The authors of the “Solved Mind” present 3 ideas that in their opinion influenced crucial social phenomena in American society. Each of them is summarised in 1 sentence.
The first is, “What doesn’t kill you will make you weaker”, the second is, “Always trust your feelings”, and the 3rd is: “Life is simply a war between good and bad people.” The first of these ideas is reflected in the obsession with protecting young people from “a sense of danger”. The authors of the book, arguing with it, make an analogy between the functioning of the human body and the action of our psyche. For example, there are restrictions on children’s eating of peanuts in a kindergarten. They were expected to origin allergies in any children. Meanwhile, a survey was carried out on a example of the children – for any time peanuts were given, and others were not, but later fed to representatives of both groups. It turned out that 17% of children who did not eat peanuts reacted allergicly to them, while among those who ate peanuts only 3% had allergies.
In another words, children’s organisms adapted to food and became more resistant. The authors of the “Solved Mind” say that in 2 cases the improvement of the psyche of young people is mediocre – erstwhile they are highly stressed and erstwhile they do not experience stress at all, it is necessarily a substance of being in fresh social situations.
Our psyche works like our muscles. The man who will lie inactive in bed will greatly weaken his physical form, his muscles will begin to fade, he himself will become weak. This fact seems clear to everyone. At the same time, not knowing why, 1 of the truths adopted by a large part of American society, is that protecting young people from anything that contains even a small danger is essential for their appropriate development. Yet, fear is not only something human and natural, but a origin that allows the species to survive. The fact that courage is simply a virtue does not consequence from the fact that a brave man does not feel fear – fear is not just a psychopath. Courage is simply a virtue due to the fact that it involves the ability to overcome fear.
The Paradox of the Wall is known in psychology – the wall gives us a sense of security, but constant isolation from people and being behind this wall creates fear of the world. Imagine the situation of a prisoner who, after many years, goes free – the uncertainty of what he sees is his basic feeling.
The authors of the book mention to specified a view as “Sephytism”. It is interesting that the streets of American cities are safer than a fewer decades ago, while the parents of American children have more concerns about letting them out of their homes than decades ago. These children, on the another hand, make far more suicide attempts and are more depressed than ever.
The emergence in the sense of danger in American society is due to the redefining of concepts traditionally utilized to describe the situation of severe stress. There is simply a phenomenon of a diametric lowering of the threshold, after which intellectual disorder is diagnosed. Of course, there is most likely besides a feedback link – erstwhile psychiatrists lower the ceiling behind which the illness is located, people are more likely to see its symptoms, especially erstwhile it comes to “unacute” diseases, and so about our well-being, not defined by X-rays.
A change in the concept of "trauma" is significant. Once, trauma was diagnosed after a physical origin caused physical injury. Later, there was a "syndrom of post-traumatic stress", or PTSD – to talk about trauma was adequate utmost experience affecting intellectual health. At the same time, the criteria for specified an experience were clearly defined – according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of intellectual Disorders III (DSM III), trauma-induced experience must “cause crucial symptoms of stress in almost all man” and find “outside the scope of typical life experiences”. This textbook, which is simply a basic origin of psychiatric knowledge, emphasizes that experience is not subject to the assessment of who experienced it in terms of whether we have been dealing with the origin of trauma. War, rape, or torture were included among the traumatic-gene experiences.
The presently subjective injury has become the basis for identifying trauma. So – our emotions are valid for the kind of disorder that affected us. Fear to think what would happen if doctors diagnosed cancer on the basis of the patient's belief that he has cancer.
Always trust your feelings
To rise our feelings to the rank of the basic measurement for what happened to us was considered by the authors of the “Solved Mind” to be the second widespread and harmful idea. The book mentions cognitive distortions that task opinions made by people, and which consequence from unlimited trust in their own emotions. Among these are catastrophes, consisting of focusing on the worst possible scenario, excessive generalization, that is, perception of the full phenomenon by the prism of 1 aspect, dichotomic thinking, or seeing the planet in terms of "black or white", head reading, or unwarranted presumption that another people's thoughts are known, and filtering negative, or focusing on negative aspects of the phenomenon.
In their enquiry into the truth, wise people have formulated for centuries various guidelines: to separate opinions from facts, to separate 1 aspect from the full or, finally, not to combine what reason suggests with what emotions say. The thought that 1 should “listen to 1 another” would possibly be helpful in the definition of one's problems by a individual – but it is dangerous erstwhile it encourages the “voice of emotion” to be treated as a mirror through which the planet is viewed.
In the modern world, the presence of self-proclaimed psychologists is very visible – quite a few people treat psychology as a ‘substitution of knowledge’, most likely due to the fact that intellectual theories or specified aspiring ones can be expressed in infinite numbers, and their inverification from weakness becomes force, due to the fact that it frequently allows them not to learn about their own mistake. In fact, where wise people are most likely little than a decade ago, more people who would like to be wise are considered to be popular concepts in the field of psychology (there are respective of them) very useful – it is adequate to go to a club in Warsaw to hear about ADHD, toxicity, psychopaths, narcissists and introverts from alcohol and youth emotions. It's easier to impress and you don't gotta have a math head.
Another reason for the "psychology" of society is that people are increasingly seeing their pictures and little and little of themselves. Sometimes they are incapable to find whether they study life or relate Instagram in life. They request a key to even knowing the superficial ones that they look at more frequently than they utilized to and that they know little about than they utilized to. Psychology is fighting marketing today, just as cognition wants to outsmart the pose.
Life is simply a war between good people and bad people?
The 3rd false idea, and the widespread idea, is kind of a vulgarized manicheism. It allows us to describe reality in a way that does not make it easier to know it, but helps us not to lose it. Jacek Kaczmarski sang: “The 1 with us, the 1 against us – who was the worst enemy.” The planet is made up of tribes. Or sects.
Of course, a akin approach not only promotes confrontation, but besides conflicts with any experience of life – it is impossible for only good people to have certain views, but only bad ones. Moreover, people “only good” barely exist, as there are no “only bad”. Rather, life teaches that people are mostly medium, their different qualities are fighting each other, and depending on time and place another properties appear in the foreground. specified reflection is consistent with reality. So what if it puts our minds in order?
Since the individual with the other views from ours is simply a personification of evil, we must defender ourselves from it, due to the fact that we will inactive get infected with this evil – and if not, it can surely hurt us. Of course, this person’s deviance makes the evil grow in our eyes into caricature dimensions, due to the fact that it is compounded by the feeling of fear and our imagination, as well as the tendency to confirm the conviction we have.
The view of the planet as a confrontation of good and bad people, in addition to the function that organizes our perception of the world, besides serves as a building block for a sense of meaning of life. The greater the evil lies in my opponent, the more meaningful my life is to fight him.
Applying specified “total” measures to political views, the undisputed acceptance that moral values go along the lines of organization colors is questionable for respective reasons, though they can be justified fairly.
Such a "totality" of reasoning does not take into account, among another things, the fact that people make political choices for a number of different reasons, among which, as an expression of ethical minimalism, we can indicate a vote for a given formation, due to the fact that it will give us money, and as a manifestation of ethical maximalism, we must mention voting for individual who, in our opinion, best cares for the future of the country. The motivation resulting from supporting the views of its candidates is only 1 among many – in addition, we do not always agree with them all.
The ‘tightness’ of reasoning is defended by the fact that the attitude towards one's own state should be treated as 1 of the barometers of good and evil, and solutions resulting from certain beliefs in a manner verifiable to that State favour or harm.
The problem is that good and evil very frequently constitute a kind of axiological “overbuilding” for the fight of people whose dispute more than any value concerns common pretensions and antagonisms guiding them over the years.
Jacek Tomczak
Think Poland, No. 39-40 (27.09-4.10.2026)
