Tighten or Loosen?

I recently read a great book by American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, called The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Science. Haidt draws on the great teachings and asks whether what they say is supported fully, partly or not at all by science so far.

One paragraph has kept coming back to me, because it contains a simple fact that challenges my own thinking about the benefits of philosophy. Here it is:

Clinical psychologists sometimes say that two kinds of people seek therapy: those who need tightening, and those who need loosening. But for every patient seeking help in becoming more organized, self-controlled and responsible about her future, there is a waiting room full of people hoping to loosen up, lighten up, and worry less about the stupid things they said about yesterday's staff meeting or about the rejection they are sure will follow tomorrow's lunch date. For most people, ... [the instinctive self] ... sees too many things as bad and not enough as good.

Instinct is a pessimist, because that's how you survive in the jungle. The consequence of missing an opportunity for a meal is relatively minor, compared with the consequence of becoming a meal for something else. That also applies to things like prestige: the Alpha Male is only as good as his last scrap. Win a hundred battles, all you get is another day in power. Lose one, and you're out. We are pre-programmed to be more fearful than hopeful.

But the observation of the psychologists troubles me, and I wonder if it does you.

The School has always advertised itself as offering ways to become "more organized, self-controlled and responsible", and only secondarily aimed to help people to loosen up. We lighten up, according to the School, only when we become disciplined. To be disciplined is, as His Holiness famously said, to "flow freely". What we do with this is to re-frame "lightening up" as being no more than a side-effect of adding discipline to life. The world is sliding into disorder, anarchy, atheism and immorality, and we have the answer - more discipline. Stop whinging and get back in that trench, you idle, complacent layabout!

Even more troubling than the thought that we might be losing customers by our approach, appealing to the odd one out rather than responding to the needs of most people, is the implication that we are perhaps siding with the instinctive, habitual nature against reason. That's to say, if basic instinct makes me worry too much, and I fill my conscious mind with worry as well, then I am going to become more repressed, more neurotic, more miserable. And in some sense, this seems to fit the stereotype, if not the inner reality - enthusiastic, cheering crowds in part 1; grey suits and silence later.

It may be that the world is getting too free-and-easy. Let's grant that it is, for the moment. Does that necessarily mean that a corrective prescription of heavy discipline and hard work should be administered? Have we the responsibility to weigh in the scale of discipline?

I don't have the answer to this, but one begins to suggest itself. I believe that HH is right about discipline and free flow, of course, but I also believe that we've interpreted him wrongly somewhere along the line. We must have done. I would come back to his classic formulation, "tender advice, showers of love, or a little hard discipline". It seems that His Holiness wants us to be careful about how we use the negative, but to pour on the positive without any limit. If human beings really are saddled with a base nature that makes them worry too much, then it must be so that encouragement, enthusiasm and hope are what they need. When we have reassured people that they don't face a threat, then perhaps we can employ a little hard discipline, but with the lightest of touches.