One of the things I’ve been thinking about since watching Inception is the power of ideas. Here are two quotes I’ve been thinking on…
What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.
The seed that we planted in this man’s mind may change everything.
There are thoughts that we might wish we could un-think – lines of enquiry that we reach the end of only to find conclusions that make us wish we’d never started. Perhaps sometimes it’s true that ignorance is bliss or at least more comfortable. Perhaps it’s be better to strive to be happy than to be right. We all live inconsistently anyway so why not choose inconsistencies that allow us to live fulfilled rather than desperate?
But is that even a choice we can make for ourselves? Often ideas come like an infection. Small, nagging doubts that what we thought might be true may not be (as in Inception’s “what if everything you know isn’t real?”) that start as almost unnoticed seeds but can grow into consuming thoughts that transform our entire internal model of the external world and either enhance or impair our ability to live and thrive in it.
However, we don’t seem capable of choosing only the ideas that enhance – partly because we struggle at the time to identify which ones they will turn out to be – but the whole process of cognitive behavioural therapy is based on the idea of choosing what weight to put on the things we believe about ourselves and our individual and social place in the world.
We all believe both true things and false things about ourselves and we believe each of them to a greater or lesser extent depending on our current circumstances. Large factors in how I see myself are my aspirations for who I want to be in the future and the way I think other people see me in the present. We are all more or less insecure as we go through life, with imperfect knowledge of how people see us or how external factors may change our situation.
The success of CBT seems to be in allowing us to choose to put more faith in the good things we think about ourselves and dismiss the bad things as not true. Whether or not the good or bad things are actually true takes a back seat to finding a position that allows for happiness. Maybe this apparent internal dishonesty is ok though, not least because the person we seem least able to be objective about is ourselves.
P.S. Everyone should go see Inception while it’s on the big screen (at least once)
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