Slackers or Emerging Adults

Some people grow up; some grow down; some don’t grow at all.

Mix the current weak job market with a culture that devalues work in favor of indulgence, and you create a generation that is more likely than ever to finish college and move back in with Mom and Dad.

If these young people feel that somehow they are slacking off, they can turn to the latest psycho theory and discover that they are living out a new developmental stage. They are “emerging adults.”

I assume this means that they are not about to merge any time soon.

Released from duty, obligation, and responsibility, these emerging adults are following their bliss on a multiyear voyage of self-discovery.

Psychologists are largely nonplussed about this systematic moral abdication. They are gnashing their teeth over the dire possibility that these young people might suffer a wound to their self-esteem.

So, they invented the category of emerging adults so that no one would be tempted to call them shirkers, slackers, decadents, or professional parasites.

The man who invented emerging adulthood is Clark University psychologist Jeffrey Arnett. This new developmental stage has been extensively chronicled in New York Times Magazine by contributor, Robin Henig. Link here.

But now, a Harvard graduate student named Rita Koganzon has skillfully revealed it for the moral cop out that it really is. Link here.

As I see the emerging adult stage it has much in common with extended psychotherapy. For those who still do not believe me when I say that therapy, as a cultural phenomenon, has not yet gone the way of alchemy, I would offer this notion of emerging adulthood.

Back in the old days, beginning with Freud, therapists told their patients to forgo major life decisions during treatment.

When you are giving yourself over to the daunting task of intense, introspective self-exploration, you should not allow yourself to be distracted by reality.

They were all following Freud’s lead. The great Viennese neurologist claimed that if you had not psychoanalyzed your motives then you would be acting out your neurosis in your life choices. But once you had thoroughly rummaged through your memory bank and dumped it all into the Oedipus complex, you would naturally make better and freer decisions.

If a neurotic is someone who does what other people want him to do, a well-analyzed soul has discovered his heart’s desire, his true passion, and what he really, really wants.

Once he does that he will naturally set off on a pathway that might lead to success.

That was the claim; that was the rationale for extended, intense psychotherapy. It didn’t really work very well, for reasons that Koganzon analyzes, but it was highly saleable.

Anyway, Koganzon cuts through the psychobabbble about identity exploration and feelings of in-between-ness to ask the right question: “If the twentysomethings who are living with their parents and meandering in and out of work and relationships are not trying to find themselves but really trying to find increasingly elusive jobs, then there is nothing to celebrate.”

But why would we want to celebrate aimlessness and anomie? Perhaps, because the psychologist who is celebrating it has made a reputation for himself by doing so. Or else, as Koganzon says, it is good for your self-esteem to rebrand: “indolence as self-discovery.”

With their rebranding, psychologists have once again wrung the ethics out of behavior. By refusing to see these adults as products of a sharp economic decline, facing a daunting job market, they are saying that they need therapy more than jobs. To be more precise, by rebranding the problem therapists are marketing their services to a whole new patient population.

What will therapy do for these emerging adults? It will do what Koganzon says that the new theory promises: rationalize their indolence as freedom and self-realization.

Why so,  you ask? Because psychologists have decided that decisions made under duress-- as in, you need to find a job to support yourself or your family-- are, by definition, less free.

Does this mean that the only people who are truly free are those who do not have to work for a living? As Koganzon notes, there is some very strange and faulty reasoning going on here.

First, she notes, because there is no evidence to suggest that as we get older and more jaded, we necessarily make better decisions.

Worse yet, you cannot learn to make decisions unless you actually make decisions. The only way you can learn to take responsibility for yourself is to take responsibility for yourself. The longer you postpone these inevitable steps into adulthood the more difficult they will become.

In fact, the great drama of extended unemployment is that the longer you go without work the more difficult it is to enter the workforce. When they ask you on that job application what you have been doing for the past few years, you cannot put down: working through my emergent adult stage.

If you have been exploring the workings of your psyche while your peers have been exploring the workings of the marketplace, they will have developed work skills, along with the knowledge and contacts that only come through experience.

Where the psychologists claim that young people are being freed for self-exploration, the truth is, as Koganzon astutely notes, is that they are being freed from responsibility.

In her words: “Noble as it may sound to aspire to selflessness, independence of mind, and responsibility for one’s actions, these qualities are subjective, limitless, and have little specifically to do with adulthood.

“Moreover, if adulthood comes to be defined as independence from other people — ‘standing alone‘ — then it is at odds with family and indeed, most of the social life of adults, which has the tendency to trap one in a web of pesky obligations and dependencies without which society cannot persist.”

Koganzon adds that there is no real evidence suggeseting that previous generations, the ones who had to make major life decisions while they were relatively young, were choosing badly.

She might have mentioned the greatest generation, a generation that went off to fight World War II, out of necessity, not out of choice, and that came home to get an education and to get to work, out of necessity, not out of choice.

Worse yet, the theory of emerging adulthood implies that we are a very, very wealthy nation that can support years worth of post-adolescent indolence. If that is the lesson we are passing on to the young generation, we are doing it a serious disservice.

Once these young adults discover what they really want to do with their lives, life will have largely passed them by.

And what is going to happen to them when they run out of their parents’ money and when their insurance will no longer cover all of their therapy sessions. They will be without prospects, set permanently adrift.

If the nation needs everyone to get to work in order to get us out of the trouble we have gotten ourselves into, then it is socially irresponsible for psychologists to tell young people that it is just as good not to work.

Looking for Your Inner Truth

If you had to choose between appearance and reality, which would you choose? If you had to judge a person based on the appearance he had crafted to go out in the world or based on what is truly in his heart and soul, which would you consider to be the most important?

Does your truth lie within, whether in your heart, your soul, or your mind, or does it lie in outward appearances, in your clothing, your fashion sense, or your behavior?

Do clothes make the man or woman, or do they express something about the man or woman? Should we think inside/out or outside/in?

After all, our therapy culture has so thoroughly habituated us to think inside/out that we find it strange to try to think any other way.

If you know someone who is consistently getting things wrong, do you think that he can change that behavior without getting to the source, the roots, the inner spirit that is moving him?

Is bad behavior an expression of some unresolved mental issue, or is it just bad behavior, something that can be corrected by retraining?

In principle, psychotherapy wants to explore the psyche, thus the mind or soul. It wants people to look inside themselves to find hidden truths, the ones that are directing outside behavior.

The process assumes that appearances deceive, that they are mere superficialities that sometimes rising to the level of symptoms that point to hidden truths.

And most of us, if not all of us are on the side of hidden truths, profundities, and deep feelings.

And yet, we know what a person looks like with far more certainty than we know what he really feels. And we know how a person conducts himself with far more certainty than we know his motives and intentions.

Think about this: we in the West think that who we are is something hidden deep within: our mind, our heart, or our soul.

In China, they think that who you are is your FACE… that is, your external appearance, the part of you that you show the world, the part that allows others to identify you, and a part of you that you NEVER see directly.

Does this mean that we are more inner directed than the Chinese? Perhaps, it does. Does this mean that the Chinese have a better sense of what it means to be a social being? Likely, it does.

It is fair to say that there is more to Western culture than navel-gazing. The impulse to look inward, to introspect comes down to us from Romantic poetry and from psychotherapy.

Much of Western culture is still, and has always been, concerned with appearances, with propriety, with decorum, and with good social behavior.

In the West the Industrial Revolution produced massive social dislocations and pervasive social anomie. Some responded by working to reconstruct the social order, to create new rules of etiquette and new forms of political and economic interactions.

But, society’s grounding was uncertain. So some groups of people turned inward, to look for what they had in their hearts and souls. Unable to define themselves by their social being, they started to believe that they were their heart and soul.

Whether you call it your heart or your soul or your mind, your inner being is necessarily private. It is yours and yours alone-- which does not mean that it is you and you alone.

You are the master of this inner being and you are the ultimate authority on what it thinks or feels. Your inner thoughts and feelings and fantasies are not subject to public scrutiny; no one really knows them as well as you do.

At least, they were until Freud arrived on the scene. Freud’s work was based on the strange idea that he knew your mind better than you did, that his technique would allow him or one of his followers to know what you wanted better than you did.

To say that this is disrespectful and manipulative is to state the obvious. Yet, Freud and his followers managed to persuade people for over a century that they knew our minds mind and that we did not. More than that, they convinced us that our true inner being was filled with Freudian desires and motivations.

It will surely go down as one of the greatest confidence games in intellectual history.

Had you asked Freud why you did not know your own mind, he would have said something to the effect that your  heart’s true desires are so ugly and depraved, so contrary to your appearance as a respectable bourgeois, that you have been working overtime to repress them, to keep them out of consciousness, to refuse to accept them as your own.

And yet, when a psychoanalyst tells an unwitting patient that he harbors an Oedipus complex, the patient, who presumably had spent a lifetime refusing to face this horrid truth, shrugs his shoulders.

Beyond the fact that it is so well known that it has become a banality, the Oedipus complex does not horrify, does not provoke resistance, and does not make anyone defensive.

Most educated intellectuals will be thoroughly unmoved by this ultimate Freudian truth. And yet, they will accept it; they will embrace it… because they know that having an Oedipus complex makes them human, and that knowing about it makes them superior to the rest of humanity, the happy many, I would say, that ignore this truth.

Psychoanalysis may not make them feel better, but it will make them feel that they are better than everyone else. 

As it happens, when it comes to inflicting psychological pain, to provoking a defensive reaction, the worst thing you can do is to find fault with someone’s appearance.

You think that the two or you are in love; you think that you love each other for who you really are, not for what you look like. But, if it should happen that one tells the other than his or her appearance is sadly defective, to the point where it is becoming increasingly impossible to be seen together in public, well, then you will see some real resistance, often leading to mortal combat.

As Elizabeth Bernstein puts it: “In our minds, a romantic partner is supposed to love us unconditionally and find us attractive even if we're wearing a burlap sack. Criticism from a sexual partner can cut to the quick.” Link here.

If you don’t believe that appearances are important, Bernstein recommends this: “Ask my brother-in-law, JJ. When my sister, Rachel, recently asked him how her outfit looked, he answered, ‘Like something a grandma would wear,’ and added that he couldn't picture any of his female classmates in law school wearing it. I wish you could have seen the look Rachel gave him. She didn't speak to him for the rest of the day—and brings this comment up every chance she gets. ‘So much for honesty,’ JJ says.”

We all believe, as we have been taught, that such matters are mere superficiality. Why would anyone care if her hem is irregular or if his tie sports a stain? It doesn’t’ mean anything; it doesn’t say anything about who either of them are. 

And if it does?

Now, the real question: what do you do about a partner who does not know how to dress appropriately for this or that occasion? Is it a symptom of some inner disaffection? Should you rush out to a therapist to find out what it really means?

If you do, you are making it personal, an expression of one person’s feelings for the other. Doing that will put yourself on the royal road to relationship failure.

If it is a bad habit, a pattern of behavior that has been ingrained through decades of slovenliness, then it might simply require some wardrobe coaching.

Nagging will not do the trick. Attempting to dress the other person will also arouse the worst kind of resistance. But when you are embarrassed to be out in public with someone, it is surely a problem.

Given the hypersensitivity of the matter, fixing it is not that easy. But often enough, the inability to do anything about it can threaten a marriage. 

So what should J.J. do when his wife Rachel wants to wear a dress that is going to make her look like a grandmother? 

Easy... he should let her wear it, most especially to a function where all of the other law students will be dressed differently.

Assuming that Rachel has not discovered the latest fashion trend-- point which J.J. will hardly be competent to judge-- how much time do you think it will take Rachel to look around the room, compare her dress with that of the other women in the room, and draw the correct conclusion.

Given the chance most people do want to get it right.

Feeling Less Pain

What a difference a few words make. It is far from being intuitively obvious, especially when we believe that we are independent, autonomous beings, but when you are feeling the pain of an injury, the degree of your pain will depend on whether or not another person has inflicted it intentionally.

To be brief, getting hit by someone who means it hurts more than getting hit by someone who doesn't mean it.Pain inflicted intentionally hurts more than pain inflicted accidentally.

The few words that make the difference: I didn't mean it.

Let's try to make this a little more complicated, and, hopefully, a lot more interesting.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely reported the research on his blog. Link here. Test subjects received a series of electric shocks. Some of them were told that a human being was inflicting the shocks, thus that human intention was involved. The others were told that a computer was generating the shocks, thus, that there was no human intention involved.

The first subjects were induced to believe that the shocks were meaningful, that they represented a fellow human's feeling toward them. The second group was induced to believe that the shocks were being inflicted at random, thus that they did not represent anything about another human's feelings about them.

As you can imagine, those subjects who were told that the shocks were meaningful gestures felt more pain than than did those who believed that they had been accidental and meaningless.

Let's expand and reflect on some of the possible implications of this research. First, it seems to suggest that when you have been injured, your pain will depend on whether or not the person who has injured you has or has not meant it.

How does he let you know that he hurt you accidentally, thus that he did not really mean it? By apologizing, of course.

When he apologizes he is saying that, even though he is responsible for hurting you, he did not intend it. He was flailing his arms in a dramatic gesture, not knowing how close you were, and he hit you. When he apologizes, he is not denying that they were his arms. He is telling you that his action does not mean anything about your relationship.

If someone you had thought to be a friend drops a brick on your foot and does not apologize, that tells you that he meant it, and that he is willing to do it again. Even if, in his heart of hearts he did not mean it. His unwillingness to apologize trumps whatever is happening in his heart.

If he pretends that nothing has happened or that someone else is responsible then you would be correct to conclude that he is no longer your friend. That would surely cause you a certain quantity of mental anguish, which would aggravate the pain of the injury.

A person who shifts the blame is not only missing the opportunity to relieve your pain by performing the gesture that only the responsible party can perform-- telling that his act was not intentional-- but he is also allowing you to believe that the party that is truly responsible did mean it. Thus, he will have aggravated your pain.

But what about purely psychological pain? What is the role of apology in traumatic abuse, or even in everyday rudeness?

Surely, people suffer considerable mental anguish for having been abused. They also suffer some mental anguish for being insulted or treated rudely.

If we apply our principle here, when you suffer an indignity, you will feel less pain if you hear that the person inflicting the pain did not mean it, feels sorry for it, and promises never to do it again.

Whether you are dealing with major psychic trauma or everyday minor trauma the key to reducing the pain lies in whether or not you hear an apology.

If you do not hear an apology, you are obliged to protect yourself by reducing your contacts with the offending person.

If other people have such a decisive influence on how much pain we feel from the injuries they inflict, then why do so many of us still believe that we can reduce the pain of psychological injury by working with a therapist to discover its true meaning.

Doesn't this research tell us that introspection is especially worthless as a means to reducing psychological pain?

No introspective process is going to tell you whether or not the person who abused you meant it or not. What you really need is to hear an apology. 

What does it mean to make the trauma meaningful. Most therapists will say that it means folding the experience into a coherent narrative.

But doesn't that make the trauma a meaningful experience, by definition.  Stories have their own rules, and one of those rules is that they cannot function if pain or trauma or crime is merely an accident, is simply unintentional.

Making a trauma part of a narrative would then make it more of an intentional action and would cause you more pain.

Just in case you were wondering why this form of psychotherapy does not cure what ails you.

Resourceful therapists have therefore had to find other ways to diminish pain and suffering. Among them is empathy.

As you may know, I have been slightly dubious about the value of empathy. Feeling someone else's pain might easily tell that person that the pain is meaningful.

But it would also be fair to say that when you listen to someone recounting a painful experience, you might well be reducing the stigma associated with the pain.

Trauma isolates people; it makes them feel disconnected. If a therapist connects with a patient while listening to an expression of pain, the connection itself might reduce the pain, by reducing the stigmatizing effect of trauma.

After all, when we say that traumatic pain feel worse when it feels intentional, we are also saying that intentional pain hurts because it makes you feel that you have lost a friend.

I don't think that the important point is the therapist's ability to feel the patient's pain. After all, why should the patient feel that he has accomplished something when his therapist feels his pain.

I prefer to think that what is being covered by this concept of empathy is the therapist's ability to connect with the patient despite the fact that he has heard the patient's worst.

Clearly, in Freud-influenced therapies, where therapists are strictly forbidden to connect with their  patients, empathy would be largely ineffective as balm for the soul.

More Cognitive Fluency

Let's call this a follow-up post to my original post on cognitive fluency. Link here.

As I mentioned before, the only real problem with the concept of cognitive fluency is that it is not, in itself, cognitively fluent.

If cognitive fluency refers to the virtue of conceptual simplicity over complexity, to the value of a concept you can grasp easily without having to labor over it, then it should be renamed. There is precious little about the formulation that tells you what it is.

I would caution against oversimplification here. Cognitive fluency has much in common with simplicity, but it really refers to the ability to extract the essence from a complex issue and state it clearly and directly.

The recent Massachusetts Senate race took place during a rather raucous national debate about the Obama administration's policy toward terrorists. In the midst of that debate candidate Scott Brown came up with a formula that was very high concept, and that certainly attracted voters. His formulation: we need to spend our money defeating terrorists, not hiring lawyers to defend them.

You might think that that oversimplifies a complex issue. You might even think that we are rich enough to do both.

Of course, Brown's slogan was directed against the practice of giving terrorists the best legal talent the country can offer, that is, seeing terrorism as a criminal justice issue, and that is still a sticky political issue.

Brown's statement was clear and direct, and it presented the policy choices starkly and intelligibly.

Anyway, academic psychology is awash in new studies about the virtue of conceptual simplicity over conceptual complexity. For a good summary, see this article in Psyblog. Link here. Via Simoleon Sense.

One study highlights a point that I have found to be less than self-evident. It asserts that we normally believe that people who speak clearly and directly are more intelligent than those who speak in complexities that we cannot understand.

If this is true, someone should have told French intellectuals, who, for having made a fetish of nuance and complexity,have been crowned with laurels for their surpassing intelligence.

Even today college students, young and old, will grant obeisance to a quasi-French intellectual like Slavoj Zizek, whose talent for complexity and obfuscation is seldom equaled.

But is this an exception that proves the rule, or are we seeing a form of academically-induced mental deformity? If the research is correct, then idolizing the incoherent ramblings of pseudo-philosophers must involve something other than choosing who is or is not smart.

When you are dealing with a thinker whose thought is only penetrable by a select few, you are seeing a form of self-aggrandizement. Such thinkers are trying to attract have cult followers; they are demonstrating their contempt for the hoi polloi and inviting others who share their contempt to join them.

In other words, excessive complexity is a trick designed to seduce impressionable minds. And of course, it works. If it didn't, no one would do it.

Psyblog has found many different research studies that have demonstrated the truth of cognitive fluency.

One has discovered that we are less threatened by substances with simple names less threatening than we are by substances with more complex names. Even when both names are invented.

They show that when a product label is simple and direct, easy to read and understand, the product is more likely to become a household staple.

As I have suggested, cognitive fluency creates affinities. It elicits feelings of pleasure and attraction, for a reason that is fairly easy to understand. When someone speaks to you clearly and directly, without nuance, without obfuscation, he is showing you respect, speaking to you as an equal and as a friend. Surely, this is preferable to those who obfuscate to show off their superior mental powers.

The Uses and Misuses of Psychiatric Medication

Many moons ago, when I was training to become a psychoanalyst, my supervisor told me that since I was not a physician I should not be offering an opinion about psychiatric medication.

The advice was sound then; it is sound now.

My supervisor had good reason to insist on this point. As I was learning, any time anyone declares that psychiatric medication is bad for you, the people who are quickest to latch on to the message are those who need it the most: schizophrenics and paranoiacs, thus, psychotics.

When I was training many people were enraptured by the anti-psychiatry of R. D. Laing and David Cooper. As it happened, Laing and Cooper were physicians. Yet, when they encouraged psychotics to refuse treatment they caused far more harm than good.

For the record, Laing and Cooper felt that schizophrenics were not insane; they were expressing truths that had been repressed by capitalist-imperialist-warmongers. They believed that psychiatrists wanted to medicate schizophrenics to shut them up, to silence their inconvenient truths.

The issues surrounding the use and misuse of psychiatric medication are difficult to grasp because we often do not make the most important distinctions.

On one side psychiatrists deal with psychotic patients whose problems, current research suggests, derive from defective brain structure. Schizophrenia and paranoia would thus not be psychological disorders.

Psychiatrists also treat those who suffer from bipolar illness, which is now considered to be a metabolic disorder, not a psychological disorder.

In those situations medication is imperative; no psychological treatment has ever been shown to work. No one should ever suggest that these patient groups should ever forgo medication.

Aside from these extreme cases, psychiatrists also treat patients whose conditions have a biochemical component, and thus, that can often respond to medication, but that can also respond to other forms of treatment.

Take the example that opens Louis Menand's New Yorker article: "Head Case: Can Psychiatry Be a Science?" (link here.) A man has been laid off from his job. He becomes withdrawn, demoralized, and dysfunctional.

From a psychiatric perspective he is suffering from depression. If you hook him up to a PET scan you will discover that his depression manifests itself in inhibited brain functioning. We will grant that there are medications that will alter the chemical composition of his brain to the point that he will feel better.

(As Menand explains, the last point is controversial. For the sake of argument, I will grant it.)

It is true that medication might help this man. But then again, so will a new job. Since inactivity and joblessness are an important cause of depression, Dr. Richard Mollica of Harvard Medical School once famously asserted that: "the best anti-depressant is a job."

Let's say that for someone who is jobless a new job will cure depression. We might even add that for someone who is socially disengaged, a new circle of friends, a new group membership, coupled with activities might produce the same effect.

Let's imagine that such "cures" produce an improvement in brain chemistry.

But what about the patient who cannot, of his own volition, get off the couch and start looking for a job. Perhaps his depression is so severe that it must be medicated. But it might also be the case the he has been taught by the culture that if he does not feel that he really wants to start looking he should not force himself to get up and get out.

I have said it many times before, this piece of accepted cultural wisdom makes an important contribution to the persistence of depression.

Of course, a job is not the only thing that can produce an improved biochemical balance in brain chemistry. If I recall correctly, cognitive treatment can also produce these effects, while improving mood, attitude, focus, and concentration. We also know that aerobic exercise also improves mood, attitude, focus, and concentration. And finally, many forms of psychotherapy have also been shown to ameliorate a depressive condition.

(I will mention in passing that therapy helps depressed patients if the patient and therapist make a human connection, if they converse and show each other mutual respect. Dare I say that classical psychoanalysis would never allow such a thing, so that when someone like Menand says that psychoanalysis can help a depressed patient, he should have added that this is only true if the psychoanalyst (or the therapist, for that matter) is functioning more like a life coach and less like a therapist.)

These thoughts raise some pertinent questions. If a job is the best antidepressant for a man who has just lost his, why would Prozac not be part of his treatment? Surely, it might have a place, but it does not function in the same way that a job does.

Prozac will make the man feel better whether he has a job or not, and we can ask ourselves whether that will make him more or less likely to do what it takes to find work.

Even if we grant that Prozac will improve your mood, it does not supply you with social skills. It does not contain a program that will naturally impel you to do the right things in your job search. You may need medication to get up off the couch, but you will surely need a clearer action plan if you are going to solve your unemployment problem.

Anyone who imagines that Prozac alone will cure you of joblessness or of social isolation and anomie is simply being naive. It is simply not true that social and work skills are lying dormant in your mind, only needing the prod of Prozac to be awoken and put into action.

I would add that taking pills is basically a passive experience. You are not doing what you must do to get a job, and thus feeling that you have earned your better mood. When you rely on Prozac you are passively allowing a chemical substance to induce an improved mood that has nothing to do with your own efforts. Then we might ask that a cheery attitude that you have not earned by working for it, whether on the job or following a plan for improving your life, is really yours.

If Prozac provides people with the impetus to go out and do what they have to do, then it surely has a place. If it works wonders for people who do not respond to anything else, then, well and good. But if it creates a false impression that taking a pill is all you have to do, and that it will help you to feel good about being unemployed, then it is not working for you. It is working against you.

Cognitive Fluency

It's all the rage among serious psychologists. They call it "cognitive fluency" and they use it to refer to the fact that the human mind consistently expresses a preference for simple over complex theories and explanations. Link here.

As I have been at pains to point out, high concept trumps nuance; a clear policy formulation is better than a conceptual muddle.

In fact, this is not a very new idea. It dates at least to the Middle Ages where it is called: Occam's razor. More about that later.

The irony here is that the term cognitive fluency is actually cognitively disfluent. So, psychologists invented a term that barely expresses their own concept. Cognitive fluency is anything but self-evident, simple, and cognitively fluent. As for this invented word: disfluency... scientists would do better to leave such creative gestures to James Joyce.

If we were to seek out the opposite of Occam's razor we might come up with something like: Occam's beard. That would at least be somewhat amusing.

Anyway, high concept and cognitive fluency adhere in more concrete images, rather than in high-toned abstraction.

High concept means that you can tell your story in single sentence. If you cannot, your screenplay will probably be incoherent and disorganized, difficult for any audience to grasp. It will also be less likely to attract and engage the spectator.

In politics high concept refers to statements of policy. A leader's policies should be expressed clearly and concisely. Otherwise how will the people charged with implementing them know what to do.

The concept of cognitive fluency suggests in addition that staff will find clearly expressed concepts more attractive and engaging, more worthy of their commitment.

Simple is more attractive than complex.

We must mention that our culture often associates simplicity with ignorance. When you accuse someone of being a simpleton or simple-minded you are not offering him a compliment.

We have been conditioned to believe that people whose opinions are more nuanced, more complex, more multi-faceted are smarter than those who traffic in clear and intelligible thought.

If I can understand it, we seem to believe, how smart can it be?

In recent years we have made something of a fetish out of nuance. Especially when it came to defending political candidates who could not think clearly or could not make up their minds or who tried to straddle too many competing opinions at once. John Kerry and Barack Obama were widely proclaimed to be geniuses because they engaged in cognitive disfluency and low concept.

Of course, the mere fact that our brains are naturally drawn to clear and simple thoughts does not mean that all simple policies are correct. Some are and some are not.

Yet, when a policy is expressed clearly, like "containment:" the famous one-word policy that defined America's relations toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War, we can debate it openly and honestly without being accused of not having understood it.

Despite what we all believe, then, people who over-complicate things are not necessarily more intelligent. They may be less experienced; they may not have worked hard enough; they may be more confused; or they may be hiding their true opinions.

People who can take a complicated issue and express it clearly in simple terms might be functioning at a higher cognitive level.

As I mentioned above, cognitive fluency sounds an awful lot like Occam's razor. If so, it dates to the 14th century, and we owe it to the Franciscan scholar, William of Occam. Link to the Wikpedia summary here.

Why the image of the razor? One scholar explained: "The term razor refers to the act of shaving away unnecessary assumptions to get to the simplest explanations."

As I said, this concept is easier to grasp than the notion of cognitive fluency.

Obviously, Occam did not call it his razor. His own statement of the concept was: "Plurality ought never to be posited without necessity."

He means that we should never offer a complicated explanation when we have a simple one at hand.

For a psychological example, imagine that a person is feeling despair for having lost his job. Losing a job is a perfectly adequate explanation for his despair. You do not need to complicate the question uselessly by introducing childhood antecedents or the Oedipus complex.

For those who like such things-- count me among them-- Thomas Aquinas offered an earlier version of the concept. In his words: "If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments when one suffices."

Today's psychologists are closer to this concept than you might expect. They assert that cognitive fluency is adaptive behavior because when we are walking alone in the woods and come across a familiar object we feel more attracted to it and happier to have seen it. When we come across a strange object, we are not only more suspicious, but we also become more confused. Our mind goes into overdrive trying to figure out whether the strange object is friend or foe.

Which means that cognitive fluency is consonant with nature's way of functioning. And I will happily concur that the human brain, whose functioning forms the basis for recent psychological research, is a part of nature.

Of course, given the proclivities of thinkers like Aquinas and Occam, you might well guess-- I would-- that they are thinking that nature was created by God and that God, whatever you think of Him or him, is not confused.

Up and Down With Positive Thinking

When cognitive psychologists started working on positive thinking, aka, learned optimism, it was a perfectly reasonable step. They were working with depressed patients who had fallen into extreme pessimism. Feeling trapped, seeing no possible positive outcomes to any action they had stopped trying and had withdrawn from the world.

It made, and still makes, perfectly good sense to try to train these patients to engage in more balanced thinking. Cognitivists never wanted people to become mindless optimists; they wanted their patients to see both sides of all issues, beginning with the issue of their own worth.

A patient who was suffering from thoughts that told him that he was good-for-nothing was not supposed to learn that everything he did was always right and good. He was taught that his failures, real as they were, should always be balanced against his equally real successes.

Cognitive therapy for depression was an exercise in balanced, even temperate judgment.

From there, under the aegis of Martin Seligman, psychology advanced into happiness studies. This took hold because the field was still haunted by the shadow of Freud's relentless negativity, his tragic vision of human life.

Where Freud wanted his patients to engage in the regressive exercise of looking backwards, cognitivists wanted theirs to redirect their focus onto the future, and to the possibility of progress.

Once these ideas escaped the narrow confines of their discipline, they went viral. They made their way into the culture at large and morphed into something called "the secret." The book and other audio-visual tools that promoted this bit of infantile thinking persuaded millions of avid listeners that they could change the world by indulging some positive and optimistic thoughts.

You want to find a parking place? Just think that one is going to open up, and lo and behold, the next time you come around the block someone will be pulling away from some prime parking space.

It was simply an exercise in magical thinking. Yet, it persuaded intelligent people that they did not really have to work to change their lives. They could think positive thoughts... and the world would transform itself before their eyes.

The ideas infiltrated the culture, and went viral. By now we have all suffered the aftereffects of this virus called positive thinking. So says Barbara Ehrenreich and it is difficult to disagree with her. Link here.

Positive thinking induced too many of us to believe in mind over matter. Worse yet, we acted accordingly. We threw caution to the winds. We were confident that if we kept thinking positive thoughts we would cure disease, become increasingly rich, borrow and spend as much as we pleased, and live in a world filled with peace and love.

Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I would like to think of it as the last gasp of the counterculture.

Here is Ehrenreich's view: "... the constant effort of maintaining optimism in the face of considerable counterevidence is just too damn much work. Optimism training, affirmations and related forms of self-hypnosis are a burden that we can finally, in good conscience, set down. They won't make you richer or healthier, and, as we should have learned by now, they can easily put you in harm's way. The threats we face cannot be solved by wishful thinking, but by a clear-eyed commitment to taking action in the world."

Ehrenreich is promoting realism, but that term is subject to misinterpretation too. Take the comments offered by Jim Selman, who offers a startling take on the question, to the effect that reality does not care what you think. Link here.

Where Ehrenreich wants us to go out and take action in the world, Selman proposes a more philosophical attitude: we should just accept reality for what it is.

In his words: "To allow reality to be whatever it is and concentrate on just Being Present to whatever is occurring in the moment."

This is all well and good unless you simply ignore the car that is hurtling in your direction and that will, if you do not take a few steps back on to the curb, will make this Present moment your last.

This to say that I object to this advice to live in the Present. Selman's attitude is pure fatalism. We cannot do anything to change the world, so we do not need even to make plans. If there is only the present, then it makes no sense to plan for the future.

If the human species had contented itself with just being present to what was happening in the moment we would still be hunter-gatherers living in mud-huts. With luck, that is.

Reality may not especially care what we think, but we do have the power, by taking action in the world, to modify some of it. We can, as I would put it, negotiate with reality. Sometimes we can even make a deal with it.

But we cannot make plans for the future without having an optimistic attitude about their eventual realization. If you plan to have dinner with friends tomorrow evening, you are going to look forward to the event. You are going to anticipate it. You will be happier if it occurs than if it is canceled.

And if your growing family is going to require that you move into a larger home, then you are probably going to increase your savings, and perhaps even work more. You are making a plan; you have a sufficiently optimistic attitude toward the future to imagine that your children will grow up and be well.

All of this to say that you cannot take action in the world unless you think positively about the future. Surely, this does not mean that you have not thought of other eventualities, or that you believe that your new home is going to appear magically just because you have been dreaming about it. But you cannot take action and cannot plan for the future if you train your mind to ignore it.

Positive Psychology and the Science of Happiness

The advent and popularity of positive psychology portends a brighter future for psychotherapy. Where previous therapy tried to eliminate negative emotions and pathological behaviors, positive psychology emphasizes the value of doing the right thing.

Instead of trying to figure out why people get things wrong, positive psychology aims to help them get things right.

Positive psychology originated with Aristotle's ethics. Therein we find the basis for a psychology that encourages self-improvement, good habits, virtuous action, and happiness.

For Aristotle happiness came to those who did the right thing, not necessarily to those who followed their bliss, acted according to their desires, or acquired what they wanted.

This does not mean that you can be happy with nothing. It means that you will not be happy merely by getting what you want. And it also means that while you can control and be responsible for your actions, you cannot control the actions and decisions of another person.

You should not base your happiness on whether or not you find the lover of your dreams. Making your happiness depend on the choices of another person may bring ecstasy, but it is more likely to bring despair.

The concept of virtue might well be confusing here. Aristotle and positive psychology have one notion of virtue; religions have another.

In religion most virtue involves abstaining from sinful actions. We can even call it a morality of inaction. If you slip up and fail to abstain, religion offers ways to repent the sin.

When it comes to positive virtue, Christianity, for example, sees it wholly in the practice of a certain kind of love, called "agape," which translates as charity.

Where positive psychology emphasizes doing the right thing in the sense of being a good friend, being responsible, reliable, loyal, and trustworthy, Christian love involves giving alms to the poor.

As for happiness, Christian religions generally identify happiness with the eternal bliss that will be yours in the after-life.

Psychoanalysis transformed this into the notion that you will be happy when you complete treatment... except that treatment never really ends. In Freud's words, it is interminable.

If classical psychotherapy-- the kind that seeks to cure through insight into the past-- has survived this long without ever really offering a cure, the reason must be that it has been selling hope. Hope for a Promised Land or for a Paradise that would be yours in some ill-defined future.

Our secular culture has transformed this version of happiness and offered the notion that we are happiest when we are on vacation. Happy people do not bask in the glow of God's love; they return to a more pagan version and see happiness as an afternoon of sun worship on the beach.

Making vacation (and its cousin, leisure) the prototype of happiness means that happiness involves being absolved of all responsibility, no longer having to work, and being liberated from all of the rules that society imposes on us.

Better yet, this version of happiness involves inactivity, even passivity. It has nothing to do with the Aristotelian concept of virtuous action.

Is Venting Therapeutic?

Today they call it "critical incident stress debriefing." As therapy for trauma, debriefing instructs victims to recall the event, to recount it in detail, and to vent the proper emotions.

This technique echoes Freud's initial attempt to treat hysteria. With one difference. Where Freud's treatment involved remembering forgotten traumas, debriefing involves traumas that are fresh in memory.

Still, debriefing owes a debt to Freud. It follows his lead in suggesting that the effects of trauma can be mitigated once the event is narrated with sufficient anger and anguish.

By now this has become the commonly accepted approach to dealing with trauma.

Any time a trauma victim appears on a talk show or writes to an advice columnist or is depicted in a television drama, someone inevitably declares that the person must seek counseling to talk it over, to work it through, and to vent intense emotions about it.

All of which begs the question: Does it work?

A recent research project led by Dr. Mark Seery from the University of Buffalo suggests that it does not. An essay on this research is posted on Psyblog. Link here.

Studying the effectiveness of debriefing in cases of traumatic stress, Dr.Seery discovered that victims who kept silent were more likely to do better than those who had expressed their feelings and told their story. Venting was most often associated with a worse outcome.

Psyblog offers one correct explanation. Debriefing mistakes a metaphor for reality. Based on the assumption that negative emotions build up in the mind like compressed gas, debriefing suggests that if they do not find a release valve, they will eventually explode.

Other therapists have gotten beyond hydraulic metaphors, only to fall into a different mistake. They assume that trauma produces bad ideas, thus mental toxins. Then they propose removing those toxins by attaching them to a story and expelling the whole mess orally.

All in the interest of another metaphor: mental hygiene.

We can also consider that if trauma injures by demoralizing, thus stripping away human dignity, perhaps the correct response is to cover up, not to open up.

When a trauma victim tells his story and vents his emotion he is not asserting a better version of himself. He is using the trauma to behave in a way that he would normally consider beneath himself.

Psychologists have known for some time that venting anger is countertherapeutic. The immediate cathartic rush always yields to feelings of emptiness and foolishness.

These begin the minute the venting individual takes a step back and starts saying to himself: What was I thinking?

Exposing yourself as a trauma victim and making a display of your private emotions is indiscreet. It runs counter to the ethical principles that guide our lives.

I would explain Dr. Seery's results by saying that a person who acts ethically under the stress of trauma is on a better path to overcome its debilitating and demoralizing effects than is someone who uses the occasion to compromise his principles.

The Perils of Mental Health

Most people agree that we were not prepared for 9/11 because no one had imagined that it could happen. You cannot prepare for something you cannot imagine.

Perhaps we do not prepare for these "black swans" because it is not the most efficient use of our mental resources. If we spent all our time trying to imagine the worst, we would never get anything done.

But no one ever suggested that we spend our working time thinking up future "black swans."

The task can be accomplished by a few, sufficiently paranoid individuals. Note the accent on "paranoid." How many of us, given the choice, would rather be wrong and mentally healthy than right and paranoid?

We are all proud of our mental health. We have worked long and hard to achieve it. We are not going to give up this new status symbol for the dubious achievement of predicting a catastrophe.

Mental health involves a positive attitude, a glass-half-full state of mind. Along that road true happiness lies. When people are mentally healthy, they do not spend their time forecasting calamity. They dismiss end-of-the-world scenarios as paranoid, the stuff of psychiatric wards.

To remain a member in good standing of the therapy culture you need to express appropriate emotions appropriately. You should not admit to thoughts that involve scenarios of great destruction and calamity. If you do, you will immediately be accused of having unresolved issues. Don't we all agree that emotional extremes are symptomatic?

As for the current financial crisis, we did indeed have soothsayers in our midst who predicted it. You know the names: Nassim Taleb, James Grant, and Nouriel Roubini.

Of course, very few people actually respected their views. They were more often discredited as cranks: bizarre, weird, strange, and melancholic.

When we label a negative forecast as a function of a melancholic disposition, we are ignoring the reality that it reflects.

Don't we all believe that emotional excess is a pathological symptom that must be suppressed by medication or talk therapy? Our culture has told us that extreme anxiety and deep despair cannot possibly reflect real events in the real world. An overwhelming emotion must express unresolved past traumas or defective brain chemistry.

Most psychiatrists work hard to distinguish between emotions based in reality and emotions based in fantasy. Clearly, there are emotional states that have biochemical origins.

Nonetheless, it is much easier to write a prescription than to formulate and execute a plan of action that will overcome a real external threat.

Sometimes it is normal to be very afraid or very depressed. Often these emotions are telling us something about the state of the world and our place in it. The real issues are: first, how we can recognize what the emotions are trying to tell us; and second, what we can do to rectify the situation.

If we choose the right course of action, we will often improve our state of mind too.

And think about this: when you are told that a person with a good attitude should see the glass as half-full, not half-empty, keep in mind that in both cases, you will still have something to drink.

If we change the metaphor just a bit and ask whether you see the swimming pool as half-full or half-empty... either way you would do best not to jump in.

Learning to Win

Recently Brett Steenbarger wrote on his blog that the inability to deal with trauma is often a trader's enemy. Not sexual trauma, not childhood traumas, but the trauma of losing money.

Ever since Freud psychotherapy has labored under the notion that the best way to deal with trauma is to talk it out. It has recommended telling the story of your trauma, gathering up a few insights, and then pretending that you understand the meaning of what happened to you. This enhanced consciousness is supposed to constitute cure.

Need I mention that it never works. In some recent posts Steenbarger offers a good explanation of why. Losing money in a bad trade or in a series of bad trades sets up a conditioned response, one that bypasses thought and reflection. Negative experiences-- like losing money-- are more powerful and influential because they cause people to vow "never again." If you have been hurt badly at some activity the chances are good that you will avoid, not only that activity, but anything that remotely suggests it.

Steenbarger adds that since traumas bypass thought to create automatic responses they cannot be influenced by more and better thinking.

Let us say that a trader was traumatized by a loss? How will he conduct himself to avoid it every happening again?

He may be too quick to take small profits because he panics about the possibility that they will disappear. He might allow his bad positions to decline too long because he refuses to take a small loss.

In the end he might become accustomed to losing money because he has gained extensive experience at it. And he will accept it because he will feel that trauma has defined him as a loser.

No one is going to get over this by talking it out or talking it over or talking it through. No one is going to learn to win by discovering why he likes to lose or why he wanted to lose.

Once traumatized a person might well need a trading coach to guide him back into the markets. A coach will teach him how to get out of his Self and back into reading the markets. He will not do as many therapists do and puff up his self-esteem. As Steenbarger said: "It's not about thinking more positively about yourself; it's about removing the self from pure performance skill."

Still and all, someone who has gotten too used to losing must figure out some way to learn how to win. And as Steenbarger suggests, he must do it through experience, through the experience of winning.

How do you do that? East... you take up golf... or tennis or bridge. You go outside of trading to find an activity where you can learn to win with humility and lose with grace.

Golf is like meditation, only with a competitive kicker. You do not have to introspect to discover how good your concentration is... the trajectory of the ball provides an instant reality check.

Golf will teach you how not to get too full of yourself when you sink a long putt or make a great chip shot. It will teach you how to get your concentration back when your drive lands in the lake.

Similarly, with bridge. If you are not in the bridge world you may not know but a great many of the finest bridge players are also traders, generally options traders.

I would add here that children need to learn how to win and how to lose, that is, how to complete, when they are growing up. This ought not to need emphasis, but there are enough mentally-deficient educators in our country who want to ban dodge ball and spelling bees, to say nothing of grades, because they are afraid someone's feelings will be hurt. What they are really doing is creating children who are incapable of dealing with failure. It is a sorry legacy of the self-esteem movement, and one can only hope it has not infected too many school systems.

Is Virtue Its Own Reward?

Let's talk money and markets. Specifically, the skills required to trade markets. For that we are going to turn to Brett Steenbarger. Having worked in the field of brief psychotherapy Steenbarger now coaches stock market traders. The point that most intrigues me in his approach is the bald assertion that social skills and trading skills are the same!

First, a caveat. For most people trading markets-- moving into and out of them quickly-- is very, very difficult. It is not for the faint of heart or the short of funds. It is inherently risky.

If you are not a professional, and if you have not trained yourself for trading, you would do better by investing, that is, buying stocks and bonds and holding them for the longer term.

That much said, even investors must decide when to buy and to sell. When you stock is moving ahead smartly, should you let your profits run or should you take some off the table? And when your stock is falling like a rock, should you take your losses, hold on for dear life, or buy more?

There is always an element of trading in any investment decision. And there is also an element of psychology, what market players call sentiment.

The best-known principle of market psychology is this: whatever the strongest prevailing sentiment, do the opposite. If everyone is long energy and short financials, then short energy and go long financials. This is called contrarian investing.

In ethical terms, it is a play on temperance. It says that you should always go against emotional extremes.

Legendary investor John Templeton told people that going against the crowd was a sign of moral virtue. If people want your stock that badly-- by offering a ridiculous price for it-- you can be a good person by letting them have it. And if they want to get rid of their stock that badly-- by offering it an an absurdly low price-- you can be a good person by taking it off their hands.

In practical terms, when everyone at CNBC tells you that it can never come down, you should sell it. When they say that it can never go up, you should buy.

Of course, you must have a notion of value to play the game. Sometimes people will sell you something cheaply because it is worthless. John Templeton was one of the world's great value investors.

Beyond that, Templeton's idea suggests that virtue is not merely its own reward. It pays off in other ways too.

I was reminded of this when I was reading Brett Steenbarger's blog, TraderFeed. Yesterday he wrote:

"I personally find it interesting that traders who lack social skills-- who don't read people well-- also seem to struggle with markets. I listen carefully to the market views of defensive, abrasive, or socially inept people; they're uncommonly wrong, which makes their opinions useful in unintended ways."

To most people this is not self-evident. Many of us learned about Wall Street traders by reading Michael Lewis's book, Liar's Poker.
There Lewis offered that the great bond traders at Salomon Bros. had dubbed themselves: Big Swinging Dicks.

Apparently these overgrown frat boys were aggressive, rude, and abrasive to an extreme. A BSD would throw his mother off a cliff for an eighth of a point, and would gamble on anything, like the arrival time of the pizza delivery boy.

The value of Lewis' take lay in the notion that these were not traders, they were gamblers. And gamblers always lose in the long run.

As for the Big Swinging Dicks from Salomon Bros.... where are they now? One of the major BSDs was John Meriwether who went on to found Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that could not fail... until it did. The collpse of LTCM was extravagant to an extreme. It nearly destroyed the financial system. You can read the story in Roger Lowenstein's book, When Genius Failed.

Steenbarger's advice is intriguing because it runs directly counter to the ethos of the Salomon Bros. bond traders. Clearly, his is the more sober, sensible, and profitable direction.

He is telling us that successful traders do not get caught up in the emotion of the moment; they do not follow their bliss or their despair. And he was telling us that the same applies in your relationships with other people. Good social skills are essential to good trading, good investing, and a good life.

Why? Because people who succeed in the markets are people who respect the markets. As Steenbarger brilliantly put it: "It is not about imposing your views on what markets 'should' be doing; its about reading what they 'are' doing...."

In more interpersonal terms, people who are abrasive and obnoxious are trying to impose their will on others. They believe in their genius; they are convinced that they are right; they believe that they can and must control others. They become so totally enamoured of their own genius that they miss the signs that other people are turning away from them.

A market is made up of billions of individual decisions. To imagine that you can walk into it and make it do what you think it should do is a recipe for financial ruin. Humility, not pride, will make you a better trader and a better person.

Steenbarger is telling us that people who respect other people do better than people who want to assert their own needs, no matter what. Can you, for example, tell when your friends are tiring of your complaints or when they feel you are depriving them of your presence? Do you persist in the face of subtle discouraging cues or do you insist that they keep listening? When someone offers a subtle hint that they do not want to go out with you, do you keep asking or do you withdraw gracefully?

Reading people well is like reading markets well. A lot of it involves following subtle cues and knowing how to take a hint. Despite what many therapists say, it is a bad thing to have to spell everything out, to explain yourself all the time, to insist on satisfying your needs, and to assert yourself against friends and neighbors.

Being tactful and considerate, respecting other people's feelings... these are the ways to get along with others, and they are at the core of the kind of ethical behavior that will improve your life and your trading.

You can be as right as rain, but forcing your truth on others is simply wrong. As Steenbarger might suggest... if you disagree, try forcing your truth on the stock market.

Virtue may be its own reward, but it may also reward you in other, less mysterious ways.

A Nation of Whiners

How does culture influence the way we deal with trauma? That question animates a recent David Brooks column in the NY Times.

In it Brooks recounts his interviews with survivors of the recent Sichuan earthquake. A catastrophe of mammoth proportions, the quake took around 70,000 lives. Brooks wanted to know how they were dealing with the trauma and the grief.

Three months after the quake Brooks was shocked to discover that the villagers he interviewed, all of whom seem to have lost loved ones, were not suffering any visible emotional aftershocks. None seemed mired in grief; none was consumed by rage against the government or the gods. All of them seemed, to Brooks, in relatively good humor.

And yet, none of them had undergone psychotherapy. None had had the opportunity to give full expression to their feelings; none had used talk therapy to process the pain of trauma.

A lesser thinker than David Brooks might have denounced them for being in denial. To Brooks' credit he emphasized their resilience. They had thrown themselves into the task of rebuilding their towns and villages and were gaining sustenance from their community spirit.

Of course, we know nothing of their private psychic pain. All we can say is that they chose not to share it with an American journalist. They had not been taught by their culture how to turn personal tragedy into international psychodrama.

We do not know these people's feelings. We know that their way of dealing with trauma has little to do with the prescribed Western approach.

When Brooks asked them point blank how they were handling the pain of their losses, they seemed almost nonchalant. They said that they tried their best to put such thoughts out of their minds. Again, Brooks grants them the benefit of the doubt. He does not say that they are repressed or that we should be awaiting the return of the repressed.

A less savvy American would have showered these people with a disbelief bordering on contempt, and would have added a blanket imperative: Get thee to a therapist!

After all, if people can get over the worst kinds of human trauma without direct therapeutic intervention, how will therapists stay in business?

My only quibble with Brooks is his ending. There he compares the Chinese response with the inane histrionics of our reality show contestants. People who appear on these shows have an unusual talent for making themselves into public spectacles. Why compare a self-selected group of shameless self-promoters with a group of humble villagers in central China.

It would have been better to compare the trauma-processing behavior of these villagers to the way everyday New Yorkers responded to the attack on the World Trade Center.

Surely, America responded by mobilizing an army of psychotherapists. Do-good organizations ran multiple television commercials advertising the availability of these services.

And yet, as Dr. Sally Satel remarked in a NY Times op-ed New Yorkers showed an unexpected psychological resilience. The people who availed themselves of therapeutic services were mostly people who had done so before. The rest stood together as a community and worked quietly to put their lives back in order.

Obviously, there were differences in the way New Yorkers processed the 9/11 attacks. But that is likely because there is a fundamental difference between a natural disaster and a terrorist attack.

So Brooks was not quite on point when he compared the Chinese villagers to reality show contestants. Still, he was correct to note that Americans do complain a great deal. Perhaps not at a time of national emergency, but when it comes to everyday traumas, Americas have learned that the right way to respond is to complain, criticize, and psycho-dramatize.

This approach is a culturally-induced distortion of normal human behavior. Brooks does not say it but I suspect he would agree with me that the Chinese approach is more normal than our own therapeutically-sanctioned mode of seeking solace by expelling emotional gas.

The therapy culture has not given us a new and better way to deal with trauma. It has given us a fictional narrative that tells us how we should feel when we have suffered a trauma and what kind of drama we should live out in order to palliate its effects.

Does this new way work? Not really. It is surely less effective than the methods adopted by a group of humble villagers in central China.