Your brain is a lunchroom

Recently I was identified as an optimist by someone. I thought that was funny, because that’s not how I see myself. Or is it? Yes, sometimes. Very much so! But sometimes I’m also the biggest pessimist in the world. In fact, often I am those two things at the same time.

The question is, does it matter whether I think I am one or the other? Does it make sense to dive into myself and swim around there for a while, or should I spend my time thinking about the outside world?

The latter seems to be the judgment of Francis Fukuyama, who recently came out Liberalism and its Discontents examines the various critiques of liberalism. According to one of those criticisms, which he shares, liberalism leads to crazy individualism: many people see their personal autonomy as something absolute. The ‘search for the self’ that they undertake, with the help of yoga, meditation and coaching, is viewed with sorrow by Fukuyama, or rather, a look full of disgust and incomprehension.

Fukuyama fears that excessive self-reflection leads people away from social and political involvement. There’s probably something in that, but at the same time isn’t self-knowledge necessary for participation in public life?

I read something like this with philosopher Miriam Rasch in her recently published book Autonomy. A self-help guide† “In order to make decisions, you have to know what is important to you,” writes Rasch. This requires self-knowledge. “You have to get to work, examine your actions, motives and reasoning, question yourself and observe over time, learn to recognize and interpret your feelings.” That quest will not yield one in one piece: “The knowledge that the introspective detective gains will be as paradoxical as the self (and life) from which that knowledge springs.”

That is well said, because recognition of internal contradictions is exactly what is often lacking in the ‘search for the self’. All kinds of self-reflection, from therapies to online tests, try to bring people back to an essence that is hidden somewhere inside them. Canadian author Sheila Heti describes in Motherhood for example, her wish to have children, whether existing or not, is something she ‘keeps secret from herself’: thorough detective work is required to unlock this secret. Just like the people who want to find out if they deep down Whether an optimist or a pessimist, Heti tries to catch her true self in this book.

I don’t really believe in that hidden ‘true self’. I think you can very well want and not want children at the same time, be an optimist and pessimist, introverted and extroverted. That does not mean that nothing is fixed in your character, but it does mean that that character consists of several characters, who sometimes flatly contradict each other. In me the doomsayer sits next to the irrational optimist, and one is sometimes in better shape than the other. There are days when the optimist doesn’t get out of bed at all.

I have to think about The men I am made ofan old bundle NRC¬ columns by Alfred Kossmann in which he gave the floor to his internal characters. “‘Our brain is a bar,’ said the first speaker. ‘We sit there drinking milk and chatting, you, you, you, you and you and eat our little roll. Not a pub, a lunchroom. A brain a lunchroom.’”

I think that’s a beautiful image: our true self as a table at which all different selves sit. Such an image can also help in the public debate. People often take a fixed form in this: not only are their identities fixed, but also their points of view. They are for or against migration, windmills and wealth tax – that’s just the way it is.

In reality, the frightened hare in you may be CCTV, and the freebooter may not be. It’s helpful to listen to the conversation between the two, as you may well develop empathy for the faint-hearted and free-spirited in others.

Every brain is a lunchroom, and you are not, as grumbler Fukuyama seems to think, a navel-gazer if you put your ear to it. Only when you know the people that make up you can you go out into the outside world together.

Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC