On the curious art of outsmarting yourself.
Socrates once claimed that he knew that he knew nothing. It was a humble statement, and that is why it has become so rare. Today almost everyone knows exactly what went wrong, why it was not their fault and who is to blame. That we feel so little ignorance in the process may well be the greatest progress of human reason. In the past, the village idiot had an opinion on the square in the local café, where nobody really listened to him. Today they have a platform and reach all the other village idiots in a deafening clatter of keyboards full of nonsense and wasted time.
In a soured society everyone has an opinion, but self-criticism is apparently in short supply. Everyone analyses, concludes and corrects, preferably someone else. Because whoever is convinced they are right no longer needs to think. And whoever also writes an extensive analysis of it calls that intelligence. The most foolish thought is perhaps not that you are wrong, but that you are intelligent enough never to notice it yourself. That is why I write in the first person, so that nobody feels threatened, offended or addressed.
It always starts with a first point: you need a minimum of intelligence to know that you are stupid. But. I am quite clever and critical, often much cleverer than I think I am. I know this is true, because I made an extensive analysis of it myself, with conclusions I find convincing. Only when I reread the analysis do I notice that somewhere along the way I came to believe I am even cleverer than I already thought. It is a modest thought, and so mostly my own.
That is also why I always have enough time. The second point: I always have more than enough time, but never enough. The paradox resolves itself as soon as you realise that time is mostly a feeling you get when you have not started yet. As long as the painting is not finished, there is room to make it better. That after three months it still looks exactly the same, I put down to a lack of time. It is the only problem that never goes away. Perfection kills performance. Time is the alibi of perfection: as long as there is time, it can be better; as soon as time runs out, we call it finished. And so perfection becomes the art of beginning endlessly without ever having to end.
The third point is that I can always handle more than I think. I can do 15 projects at once, two jobs and an evening course, and if one in five fails, that mainly proves how much I actually juggle. So I have no shortage of capacity. I only have a shortage of the things I did not do.
And then the fourth point, the finest of the whole argument. In every root cause analysis, the cause turns out to lie outside me. It was someone else’s planning, the circumstances, the timing, the system. I am the only person who can track down all the causes, and therefore also the only one who does not think he is one of them. That is no coincidence. That is method.
Intelligence works like an excellent secretary here. It handles the documents, puts the facts in order and makes sure everything looks neat.
It is tempting to conclude from this that I am no good. But that conclusion is also somebody’s fault: the reader who finds this too cynical, the editors who thought it too long, or the Socrates who seemed so ignorant. And so the snake goes round in a circle. Each of the four points explains the next, and each explanation is cleverer than the last, so the snake feels ever wiser, and ever less responsible.
Is there a way out, then? Perhaps one small, uncomfortable question. Not ‘why was my reasoning logical?’, because the answer is always yes. But: ‘which of these four points can I not reason away?’ Whoever honestly tries that notices that the snake is still holding its own tail, and that it mostly hurts when you let go.
That does not solve the problem. But it explains why we so often end up with a clever story instead of an honest decision. And perhaps that is the greatest irony of our thinking: we are so intelligent that we can justify everything, except ourselves.
Perhaps self-justification is the only analysis in which intelligence leads not to a better conclusion, but to a more convincing excuse.
Nico Seymus