On overthought

It appears to me that there is no more dangerous thought that that which conceptualises overthought. If overthought exists, it implies that some thinking is bad. Bad, not only in its content, but also in its very existence. In other words, where overthought is concerned, the problem that it is conceptualised as does not reside in what is thought but simply that it is thought. When we constrict our freedom of thought - or so the story goes - disastrous consequences ensue.

Therefore I recommend the reader never to stop thinking. Thinking is the means by which one solves problems and perceives oneself as part of the world. The idea of overthought implies that by ceasing to think about those problems, and about oneself, these two things will just simply disappear, as if they only existed in your mind.

This is clearly not the case. Perhaps to enjoy oneself more it may be necessary to quell the inner critic for a while, but He will always come back to haunt you. It is better to listen to his demands and treat them with Reason before attempting to stab the cloud of his vapours, and ignore the fire from which they arise.

I can think of nothing more proud and presumptuous than to consider oneself able to perceive in another the extent to which they should care about such and such thing. Not only does this encourage them to stop caring about something whose importance you cannot ascertain from outside of their brain, but it also ridicules them for every having cared about something in the first place. It's a dangerous game to go about prescribing which topics are worthy of care and which are not, given that you do not know what another can perceive. Perhaps - a radical thought, I am aware - what they can perceive is something which you cannot. Or, perhaps - as is probably the case - you are blinding yourself to what they can see for your own convenience.

Who would judge a thought before the associate action took place? Such reasoning would be to infer events from causes (a cause, paradoxically, implying an event): in other words, prognostication and augury-making. Jon Ronson was right to comment, on an episode of the Australian panel-show Q&A, that a study had been conducted which showed that the predictions made by TV pundits, when tested against reality, were less accurate than a tossed coin.

Maybe some thoughts are more useful than others. But how can one judge the quality of a thought if it is in the first place quelled, quashed, for its mere presence over and above a certain limit. Who is the arbitrator of this limit? Surely only those who underthink from wilful negligence consider overthought a problem.

Bref, the point I aspire to make, here, is that the essai can at one level be conceptualised as the representation of the surplus of thought coming from everyday life. How many times have I gone to bed willing to capture what has filtered through my head, realising that such a practice was eventually impossible, given that each thought I had was wont to divide into two as I found the reaction to my thought becoming a new thought, and a reaction to that a new thought, and so on, and so forth. But these thoughts do not go away. They are a part of our soul crying out and clamouring for help without their cries or clamours being heard. I do not consider myself God as in Evan Almighty, unable to filter through the prayers of his faithful. I do not pretend that my soul is somehow more sensitive than others' to the sufferings of others, except that it might be more sensitive than those who wish to quell my thought, dismissing it as irrelevant, for none other than their own selfishness and willingness to repose where they ought not. Apparently psychotherapists these days - so Slavoj Žižek affirms - hear much more from people who feel unable to enjoy sexuality than those who complain of being repressed; the shame of our days is supposedly in abstinence rather than voracity. At least I now know that he simply did not understand Will Self's demented appel à la masturbation (owing to Self's use of vulgar language - a little unfairly, if you ask me - in the presence of one not completely acquainted with the English language as he) and that, by consequence, it was not wilfully ignored.

But let's concentrate for a moment on what on earth Will Self thought he was doing when he boasted that he would prefer to sit at home and masturbate and "smoke pot" all day rather than think about how to go about solving the world's problems. How, on earth, did he consider that to be a good thing to say? Is it some blindness of my own that I see in him a strange social pride in having fondled his virile member? Perhaps he was aspiring to the heights of this much classier joke on the topic:

“Ever since I discovered that my god-given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.” (Christopher Hitchens)

At least in this one, the unexpectedness of it was a cause for humour. Yet does it not also completely undermine the seriousness of the issues that could have been discussed? Well, yes and no. I think by that point in the debate the seriousness had already been reduced to a certain point, and that this comment was nothing more than a revealing of that.

But who are we not to watch ourselves all the time, at every moment? Who are we to judge when it is and isn't correct to make such a comment? Is it simply a question of taste and decorum, of knowing one's crowd as well as one's self? I don't know. Or rather, what do I know? I know that I do not know very much, but also that I cannot know for sure whether I know that itself - so, again, what do I know? Or maybe, the question to ask is, 'why do I know?' or 'how do I know?' and this is perhaps the question answered by Voltaire and Locke etc. etc.