The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.
We are in ancient Greece, around the year 400 BC. Yes, it’s 400 years before the birth of Jesus Christ… However, wise people did exist at that time; they pondered on important topics and enjoyed challenging each other intellectually. Christianity is not the beginning of knowledge or wisdom and the Bible is definitely not the only important book to be read. Also, the world did not begin with us or our social media era… and our struggles with the world and our life aren’t new at all…
We will meet Protagoras, a Greek philosopher you might never heard of. But you possibly heard about Democritus, Socrates or Pericles, who were contemporary with him and knew him well. And we know many things about Protagoras from Plato’s writings. I know, the classical Greek knowledge is so old, presumably so outdated, and nobody seems to benefit from studying it. One might say that we evolved – philosophically or psychologically – and all we need to know is some psychoanalysis and perhaps some existentialism so as to be able to have a decent dialogue about things close to our soul – psyche and heart. Yet, I hope that this article will challenge this world view.
What we often do in psychotherapy but also in any philosophical debate is called the Socratic dialogue. Yes, it comes from the aforementioned Socrates who meets Protagoras when he’s a young and intellectually agile man while Protagoras is old and experienced. A Socratic dialogue is an argumentative debate, based on reason and logic, aiming to discover or know reality as it is – the objective reality. Well, Protagoras had a different idea; he famously said that “Man is the measure of all things”, which caused uproar in Athens and he finally got kicked out of the city for this. What does this quote means? In means that everything is relative. It also means that there is not objective truth but rather subjective truths, each person having her own, very personal opinion about what is true and what isn’t. Protagoras points out that, since each person has a unique and different personal history, unique experiences and different expectations, she develops differently during her lifetime and ends up having subjective judgements, opinions and ideas regarding “the truth”. We inherit this thesis, 2400 years later, when we deal with “subjective truths” belonging to different people and we never seem to find a satisfying common-ground or compromise, and hence wars, suffering and all the misery you can see around you and throughout history. For exactly this very reason psychiatrists and psychologists say that “we work with the patient’s own perceptions about reality, with their own world view” and we don’t persuade the patient to adhere to our private opinions about what is right and what is wrong.
Well, there is a conflict here. On one hand Socrates says that there is an objective truth or reality; on the other hand Protagoras says that there are partial individual truths and therefore subjective realities. Which one is right? Take some moments to ponder before continuing the article: is there one unique objective reality or there are many realities… actually billions… as many as there are people in the world? How can you be sure that your reality is the “right” one? How can you be sure that what you see or perceive is truly… real? And if there are indeed myriad realities, how can you make the human society function smoothly on this “noisy background”? How can you negotiate? Or, if you don’t want to negotiate, you might be tempted to impose your “reality” on others, just like Hitler did. Or Google. Or the “woke” movement and its compelled speech requirements. The essence of tyranny is that “I am right and you are wrong”. Is it correct? Are you, the other one, flawed? Are you both right? Or both wrong?
The world has struggled throughout history to define and put into law what we commonly agree to be our “shared” reality. But this reality is deeply relative. For the same reasons related to the impossibility of defining what is objective and what is subjective, we cannot define what is “normal”. In psychiatry, we don’t work with this concept at all. Patients ask me “Am I normal?” and I have to label this question as baseless, because I don’t have a set of norms to compare each individual against. There are criteria for mental disorders, surely, but there aren’t criteria for normality or it is so generally defined that it is impossible to say for sure what is normal and what is not. Plus, the concept of normality varies with the geographical region and the historic time. For instance, homosexuality was only recently decriminalized, removed from the list of psychiatric disorders where it shared the same chapter with pedophilia, and there are still countries in the world where you can go to jail if you’re gay, while in the Western world it’s a variant of normality.
However, Protagoras didn’t aim to bring the world to the edge of generalized war because of these differences of opinion; on the contrary, he emphasized that, given the multitude of opinions regarding what is real, each personal vision about what is right should be respected as valid and this should give way to a democratic debate and finally to a common decision in the best interest of the community. He was also an accomplished teacher of rhetoric and a sophist and, perhaps becoming aware that the freedom coming from the fact that each is entitled to their own opinion about what is true can lead to the desire to impose one’s viewpoint on others through dictatorial means, he stressed the importance of teaching virtue (to be moral, social, intellectual and achieve excellence).
Our current civilization is based however on Socrates’s view. That’s why you probably heard (more) about Socrates but not about Protagoras. Pursuing the ultimate truth, the objective and the independently verifiable truth, fueled the development of science. In mathematics, 2+2=4. In Protagoras’s view… it depends… We cannot understate the benefits of the rational civilized world. You can read this text because you have the electronic devices able to render it, and those devices function because Socrates’s view on objective reality is valid and produces the same predictable results. Just imagine you switch on the phone or the computer and each time you get a different result!… Yet, the Socratic view doesn’t apply to people and their interactions. For these, we need Protagoras, the “father” of relativism.
Have you noticed that we are in a climate emergency? You must be blind so as to overlook the fact that we’re burning and boiling. Excluding some people with denial delusions, the majority agrees on the “objective” and “common” truth that we must reduce the pollution and the CO2 emissions. The greens are right: we’re experiencing climate change. I have a favorite quote that I often like to use: “I am right. Therefore… nothing.” Similarly, we are right about climate change and therefore… nothing. Nothing happens. 2+2= … well… it depends! It depends on what the scientists say. It depends on the price of energy. It depends on markets. It depends on the political will. It depends on voters and elections. It depends on economic development, on house heating, on the lobby made by oil companies, on bribes, on perceptions, on bureaucracy… It depends… It depends.
Each has a different opinion on what should be done in a climate emergency because each has a different vision of reality. And, following Protagoras’s advice some 2400 years ago, people should meet and democratically choose the best solution serving the collective interest. But even coming together is nowadays a matter of individual perception. What does coming together means? Who should come first and cut from its benefits of running on oil? Who should sacrifice first their respective wealth or possible future gains? Who is the first to be “stupid” and cede? It’s also a matter of pride… and also of geopolitical leverage…
We seem to struggle with the same problem we struggled 2400 years ago. The world and life definitely have not changed much. But unfortunately, there is no one to teach virtue, morality, critical thinking or the importance of a healthy society for each of its members. The wise old men are now in senior’s retirement homes, fighting loneliness or perhaps dementia due to understimulation, while the young are getting high and pathologically entitled on social media, when they don’t get high on drugs or alcohol. One thing that has however changed since the times of ancient Greece is that now we have atomic weapons and the potential to destroy the Earth several times. Protagoras and Socrates had truly harmless disputes: the worst possible outcome at that time was losing their individual lives…
We can also pick something closer to us if climate change seems too vague and general. Let’s talk about the individual value. What is your value as individual, your intrinsic value? Do you have an idea? Well… again… it depends. Your value is linked to your utility for society (if your skill set is sought on the market). Your value is also linked to how well connected you are with other people (if you’re a loner, you’re in trouble, as the ability to socialize predicts your success in life). Your value is also linked to how well you “sell” yourself, your charisma and your persuasive talent (everyone has that idiot colleague or that incompetent boss who is annoyingly better than him on people skills). Your romantic desirability is also famously NOT linked to your rational abilities or your technical skills (if you’re a man), but significantly linked to your income (not necessarily money, but your predicted ability to provide). I think you get it: when it comes to people, Protagoras rules!
What was the solution offered by this ancient philosopher of subjective truths? Protagoras was cunning and manipulative during his debates. He was highly persuasive. He would work with the perceptions of others and disregard the pursuit of an abstract and ultimate truth. He was famous despite his controversial methods. He was what we would call today an archetypal evil genius or a trickster. He still lives today through refined methods of corporate negotiation using emotional intelligence so as to defeat the opponents, in interrogation methods used by police and secret services, and in some powerful techniques focused on change, used in the therapy of highly resistant mental disorders.
Are you right? And therefore… nothing? You’re doing it wrong! Everything is relative! You don’t need to be right. It actually doesn’t mean if you’re right or wrong… or if the other is right or wrong… It matters if you can enter in the other person’s emotional world and make her see you as being right. It means temporarily sharing the other person’s perspective and guess her untold desires. Then substitute yourself to them. Each person’s inner life has an emotional logic that lies at the root of their functioning. Knowing how to speak according to this logic is the key that opens most of the doors.
The quote of the article belongs to Carl Jung. People seem to be mean and evil because they cannot say their stories. Used in the context of relativism and subjective realities, the quote might say that it is important to know the views of others and get to know their personal stories. Only getting to know them can we understand their perceptions, their judgement, and finally their actions or… non-actions.
