Generativity

by Andrew Lynn

  To reinforce this, there was deliberate modeling on eminent predecessors. The list is extensive. Tyson chatted with Muhammad Ali in October 1980, after prompting from D’Amato. His favourite boxer, however, was Roberto Duran (‘I was short and ugly and I had a speech impediment … Man this guy is me, I thought. He was not ashamed of being who he was.’) Tyson also fell in love with Jack Johnson (‘I loved his arrogance’). After moving in with D’Amato, he spent time reading the boxing encyclopedia and watching old fight films for up to ten hours a day.

  It was all about entering into the world of the great fighters, mentally becoming them in order to lay the foundation for his own victories. Tyson is explicit about this in his memoirs: ‘I was serious about my history because I learned so much from the old fighters. What did I have to do to be like this guy? Cus would tell me how vicious and mean they were outside the ring but when they’re in it, they’re relaxed and calm. . . . I would watch the fights on TV and I’d see the boxers punching with grimaces on their faces and their ripped bodies, and I wanted that to be my face and my body.’16

  * * *

  This is an approach that pre-empts much of the recent research on the relationship between mental state and performance.

  It’s now well known, for instance, that we can be ‘primed’ through exposure to certain words or images to respond in predictable ways – without even necessarily knowing about it. Expose people to a set of key words designed to bring about a high-performance goal (e.g., win, compete, succeed, strive, attain, achieve, and master) on a word-search puzzle, for example, and they will respond by better solving the puzzle. Participants in these studies are, however, not only not aware of the impact of the priming, but they are also not aware that there had been any priming going on at all. Most ‘appeared perplexed’ by the suggestion that the priming may have influenced their behaviour.17

  It’s also known that certain mental images can also improve outcomes. People who have been asked merely to imagine a typical professor for five minutes (listing such things as behaviour, lifestyle, and appearance) have tended to perform better at general knowledge questions than people who have been asked to imagine a typical secretary. This doesn’t require anything as fanciful as actually making someone instantaneously more intelligent. It could instead be that people allocate their effort differently, perhaps by concentrating harder. It could also be that people are induced to use smarter and more varied problem-solving strategies. Or it could even be that people have an altered ‘feeling for knowing’ and so may use their knowledge differently (e.g., more confidently).18

  Finally, we are in the process of finding out more about the significance of self-stereotyping. At one time it had been assumed that self-stereotypes were detrimental. Recent research suggests that this isn’t necessarily the case, especially because most of us have multiple identities and in any one situation at least one of those identities may facilitate performance. So, for example, when female Asian American undergraduates had their female identity activated, they tended to underperform a mathematics test relative to a control group, but when they had their Asian identity made salient, they tended to outperform the group.19

  Finding – or cultivating – the right identity is not only a matter of personal pride and wellbeing. It is also one of the keys to peak performance.

  Anti-Frame

  The concept of ‘frame’ can be used to describe the coherence of a person’s subjective reality, especially when under threat and especially when such coherence is productive. One’s ‘frame’ can be stronger or weaker according to the strength or weakness of the coherency. There is, however, a particular type of incoherency that has been observed by nineteenth-century commentators and reiterated in recent research. For convenience let’s call this ‘anti-frame’. What we mean by this can be best illustrated by a scene from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.20

  * * *

  An evening gathering has been arranged at a villa owned by the Yepanchins, minor figures in Russian high society. They invite to the party individuals whom they take to be the crème-de-la-crème of the national elite. There is Princess Belokonskaya, the central figure in this refined and elaborate world. There is an influential army general with a German name; he has attained one of the highest positions of the land and the wealth that goes with it, despite having no great achievements to his name (although once in five years he would offer a dictum ‘remarkable for its profundity’.) There is a middle-aged nobleman of rank and high birth – a great talker with a reputation as a malcontent and the habits of an English gentleman. There is Prince N, a wealthy and splendid-looking nobleman and also a seducer and conqueror of female hearts across Europe. And there is a smattering of middling people like the Yepanchins themselves, looking to establish their place in this exclusive little world.

  It’s all been perfectly arranged. But there’s a problem.

  The problem comes in the form of one Prince Myshkin. Myshkin is an idealistic young nobleman who has inherited a fortune – but he’s also an idiot. Afflicted by illness, he has spent his formative years in Swiss clinic away from the temptations of society; he is a naïf who has never had to make compromises. He’s what the Russians call a yurodivy, or a ‘holy fool’, a man whose simplicity proclaims his closeness to God. His idiocy is not a lack of intelligence or knowledge. On the contrary, he’s remarkably eloquent and well informed. His idiocy is that he tries too hard.

  Myshkin’s fiancée, Aglaya, has tried to warn him. She has been worried about him making a fool of himself (and her) at the gathering. For some reason her fears begin to centre on a particular Chinese vase that has been placed in the Yepanchins’ drawing room. It’s a valuable item and a present – and she knows that if it were damaged there would be severe consequences. She warns Myshkin about it in no uncertain terms; he vows to sit absolutely as far away from it as possible. The vase must not be damaged, he tells himself. But he’s afraid. Now that the vase has been mentioned, it’s in his head and he has a sense of foreboding that he will do something to bring it tottering to the ground.

  The gathering starts well. Myshkin is on his best behaviour: he’s been warned, remember – and he has sat himself just as far away from the site of danger as he can get. The guests start mingling, however, and Myshkin is drawn into the conversation. Inadvertently, he moves his seat nearer to the huge and beautiful Chinese vase. It’s standing on a plinth more or less at a level with his elbow and, by now, just behind.

  Conversation flows and the gathering comes alive. Myshkin’s getting carried away with it all. He rises from his seat. He waves his arm carelessly. He moves his shoulder – and…

  The vase totters and falls. The little German sitting there leaps away from its path and it smashes onto the floor. Then: a crash, shouting, precious shards on the floor, and astonishment from all around. Time stops for Myshkin. He stands there like a man apart – like a man watching from a distance an event that has no connection with himself. He sees the commotion and the fragments being cleared away and hears the sound of rapid conversation. The one thing he set out to avoid is the one thing that has happened. He has broken the vase.

  * * *

  What Dostoevsky is showing is something profound: that what is attended (the possible falling of the vase) trumps what is intended (doing whatever necessary to prevent it). What Myshkin fell afoul of at the dinner party was, in fact, a tendency of the human mind to bring into being precisely the opposite of what was intended by inadvertently fixating on it. There’s a name for this: ironic process.

  There’s a classic and easily demonstrable example of an ironic process. It’s disarmingly simple. All you need to do is this: try not to think of a white bear.

  You will probably have found that task a little harder than you might initially have thought. If so, you wouldn’t be alone. In tests where participants were asked to do precisely the same thing over a five-minute period, the average reporting of ‘white bear thoughts’ was 6.15. That means that they thought of a whit
e bear more than once every minute. Compare that with the number of times you think of a white bear in your day-to-day life and you see the point. It would be very unusual for a typical individual (working outside a zoo) to think of a bear one time in a month. Thinking of a white bear one time a week would be exceptional. But one time every minute?

  * * *

  In fact, similar ironic effects have been found across a whole range of mental activities: concentration (subjects asked to remember cities on a map remembering the cities they had not been asked to focus attention upon), mood control (subjects asked to try not to feel unhappy feeling unhappier), intentional relaxation (subjects instructed to relax ending up with reduced relaxation levels), sleep (subjects told to try to sleep taking twice as long to fall asleep as those with no instructions), belief and disbelief (subjects believing marketing messages when instructed to disbelieve and vice versa), pain control (subjects experiencing greater pain perception when they tried to suppress pain than when they tried to distract themselves), and self-presentation (liars found to be less successful when strongly motivated to lie).21

  * * *

  Nothing here contradicts the main proposition of this chapter – that inner state determines experience of reality. Bur this inner state is not reducible to the limited and arid act of merely intending an outcome. It comprehends the whole imaginative inner world. In the words of Coué, ‘When the imagination and willpower are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins’.22

  The Drowned and the Saved

  When Primo Levi, survivor of the concentration camps, reflected upon his experience, he concluded that all men had fallen ultimately into one of two camps: the drowned and the saved.23

  Levi had not been untroubled by the question of what was to be gained by looking back upon the horrors and brutalities of that experience. But he acknowledged that there was, all the same, something very important to be learned from the camps. ‘Thousands of individuals,’ he wrote, ‘differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs, are enclosed within barbed wire: there they live a regular, controlled life which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs, and which is more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life.’ The concentration camp had inadvertently become, he suggests, a ‘gigantic biological and social experiment’.

  Apart from the diversity of its inhabitants, what made the concentration camps so revealing from a scientific perspective was the narrow range of possible outcomes. In ordinary life, Levi says, it rarely happens that a man loses himself. We’re never alone; our lives are tied to the destinies of our neighbours; it would be exceptional for anyone to achieve unlimited power or fall into utter ruin. Usually we’re in possession of at least minimal resources, so the probability of ‘total inadequacy’ will be small. The final cushion is the law, which in a civilized society will prevent the weak man from becoming too weak and the powerful from becoming too powerful.

  In the concentration camp, all that changes. ‘Here,’ says Levi, ‘the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.’ If you vacillate, no one lends a hand; the weak bring benefit to no one. Those who find better ways to survive become stronger and are feared; the rest are knocked aside.

  The word they had for the weak, the inept, and the men in decay was ‘Muselmann’. The Muselmänner were the ‘drowned’. It was the easiest of matters to sink: all that was necessary was to simply carry out orders, eat only the rations, and observe the discipline of the work and camp. It would be exceptional to survive more than three months taking this approach. All of the Muselmänner who were defeated by the camps ‘have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea’. In their passivity they were overcome before they could adapt. For the Muselmänner, the path to perdition, as Levi puts it, was ‘single and broad’.

  How was one to avoid becoming a Muselmann?

  The paths were many, thought Levi. Some chose the dark route of camp officialdom: these became the directors, the superintendents, the night-guards, and hut-sweepers. These were the prominenten who had exchanged solidarity with their comrades for camp privilege. Then there were the true oddballs who would have been unsuited for life outside the camps but by reason of insanity, robust constitutions, or cunning were strangely suited for life within them.

  There were also the likes of Alfred L. Alfred L. had a strategy for getting through the camps. ‘L. had a “line”: with his hands and face always perfectly clean, he had the rare self-denial to wash his shirt every fortnight, without waiting for the bi-monthly change.’ That was harder than it sounds: to wash a shirt in the camps meant finding soap, time, and space in the washroom, keeping watch on the wet shirt without losing attention for a moment, and putting it on again still damp. ‘He owned a pair of wooden shoes to go to the shower, and even his striped suit was singularly adapted to his appearance, clean and new.’ Shirts, suit, wooden shoes – all this had to be paid for somehow. Alfred L. did it all with bread from his rations.

  By taking a course directly opposite to that of the drowned – by asserting and projecting the dignity of his inner nature irrespective of the adversity of the surrounding conditions – he would survive the war.

  What the survivor (the ‘saved’) had over the Muselmann (the ‘drowned’) was the cultivation of a resilient, productive, and self-aware inner state. The Muselmänner allowed themselves to be defined by their circumstances: they carried out their orders, ate only their rations, and observed the discipline of the work and the camp. The survivors, on the other hand, were able to preserve the coherence of their subjective reality in the face of external shock.

  The story of Alfred L. echoes the other accounts of human overcoming that we have considered in this chapter. In each case what we have seen is the triumph of subjective mind over objective conditions. We’ve seen that excellence in sports is characterized by heightened perception for features of the environment. We’ve seen the impregnable frame of top sportspeople and some of the techniques that have been employed to create and sustain it. We’ve seen how frame collapses. And we’ve seen finally how the same principle may have underpinned the resilience of prisoners in war.

  The great spiritual traditions call us repeatedly back to the principle that the inner governs the outer and that what we think and what we say determines how we act and whether we thrive. What we show here is that you don’t need to be religious to recognize the substance of this principle. In the eyes of believers the divine calls upon us to pay attention to our inner lights. But our own wellbeing makes exactly the same call.

  Answering that call is the first and most important component of generativity.

  2

  Regulation of Energy

  The Fox and the Lion

  In his powerful and provocative short book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (engraved circa 1790), the iconoclastic English poet and artist William Blake confronts the question of energy head-on.

  Here, through page after colourful page, Blake in imitation of biblical prophecy expands upon the true nature of humanity and the progression of the contrary universal forces of reason (heaven) and energy (hell). What quickly becomes apparent to the reader is that Blake has a very unusual idea of the relationship between heaven and hell, God and Satan, and angels and devils. For Blake, the former stand for the forces of reason and control; the latter, for irrepressible energy and joy. Here is no good and bad but a play of opposites, each of which reflects one aspect of the divine power.

  Blake gives us the Devil’s account from the outset. All sacred codes, says Blake’s Devil, have been the cause of several errors: first, that man has two real, existing principles – body and soul; second, that energy (called evil) is from body alone and reason (called good) is from soul alone; and third, that God will torme
nt man in eternity for following his energies. That’s all wrong, says Blake’s Devil. In fact, he says, the contraries are true: man has no body distinct from his soul, for body is ‘a portion of soul discerned by the five Senses’; energy is the only life and is from the body, and reason is its outward circumference; and finally, energy is ‘eternal delight’.

  Blake gathers what he calls ‘Proverbs of Hell’, and these proverbs are the heart of the work. They are vivid, dynamic, and enigmatic. They talk to us from a world beyond that of our mundane activity and concerns. That’s their attraction and their force. Yet for all their strangeness, they revert time and again to the themes of energy and restraint. Drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead – tradition must take second place to productive energy. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity – the incompetent always want to play safe; but this is unattractive and sterile, and without hope of bringing anything new into the world. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence – it’s unhealthy to harbor desires that are never acted upon. Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion – it’s not just that the authorities punish criminality and prostitution; in fact, through their oppressive need for control, they create that very criminality and prostitution in the first place.

  Finally: The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion. This one is more puzzling, but the answer may be this. The fox is the cautious, thoughtful, cunning animal: he can provide for himself. The lion, on the other hand, represents not thoughtfulness but raw energy. As such, it draws upon deep unfathomable power; it does not need to concern itself with pragmatism and calculation.