This is a response to an article from brainpickings, about how our internal critic holds us back from realizing our full potential, and becoming our true selves.
This article was first published in the spring of 2016. It resonates with me. It is similar to what my therapist has been saying all these years. It seems intuitively true. But in the winter of 2020, it seems to be advocating that everyone become more like Donald Trump, a man with no functioning internal critic at all. It seems like the reviewer is on a cold mountain slope, looking toward the happy valley from one side, and sees clearly the dangers on her own mountain. But she doesn’t recognize the dangers of the other mountain, of too little self-criticism.
To be fair, she does come back, at the end, to the idea that you need a balance, and that too little self-criticism is bad too. So does the author she is reviewing. But the whole emotional thrust of the review and the article that inspired it is that we criticize ourselves too much. After that, the nod to balance feels like lip service. It feels like the superego taking back control after letting them go on their little rant about how the superego is so bad. Despite railing against it, they are still in its powerful grip. Because if they were not, then they would be advocating that we be more like Donald Trump.
It may say something about Trump’s appeal, though. People recognize the danger of too much self-criticism—or they just get tired of it—but they don’t know how to stop, or it takes too much emotional work to stop. It’s much easier to latch on to a leader who exhibits the qualities we want, than to work to develop those qualities in ourselves.
So, an interesting article, whose unbalanced nature has been revealed by the march of time. But it is unsatisfying, and unbalanced, in another way too.
The internal critic resembles what in eastern religions is called the monkey mind. And yet it is not the same thing. That part of Donald Trump which tells him to do and say outrageous things is also part of the monkey mind, but is different from the internal critic; in fact the opposite of the internal critic. And there are more. The internal frat boy. The internal supplicant, hat in hand. The internal bon vivant. The internal miser. The internal saint. The internal asshole. All of them are part of the monkey mind.
The problem with the internal critic is not that it is a critic, but that it is internal. We need the critic, hence the half-hearted call for balance at the end. But we don’t need the constant cacophony of internal voices pulling us this way and that, burying us in our own heads, isolating us from the real world around us.
The review, and presumably the article it is based on, does not mention the solution to the problem they raise: meditation. Rather than strive for a delicate balance along one dimension, reduce or eliminate all the voices.