11 August

We celebrate peak human performance in almost everything. In sport, in work, in skills of all kinds, etc. But there’s one thing that breaks this rule. We absolutely don’t celebrate peak performance in thinking itself. Yes we honour and award ‘thinkers’ who don’t challenge the status quo much, who just seem a more capable version of what we think ourselves. But a thinker who challenges the core beliefs of our lives themselves? That is never forgiven. The most brutal social isolation is reserved for them. Like Spinoza. Nearly 4 centuries on, he’s still expelled from his community. It’s actually a true test of real thought. If it’s popular, it’s almost certainly wrong. But as Spinoza said, true knowledge is the only joy. He meant that physically, the only experience of true joy, is understanding. True understanding, which few achieve. That’s not a bookish thing, the caricature we make of thinking. The joys we experience in everyday life are all derived from us understanding it a little better. That’s the source of the joyful feelings, which we mistake for the events that trigger them. The brutal paradox of true thought and true joy is that it means social isolation. That will only bother a person to the extent that social conformity is their existence. There is no real joy in that existence, only anxiety. The constant assessment and action to ‘fit in’. We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. Few understand what that saying means, and its relationship to joy. From inside the social conformity straitjacket of life, it seems like some dark, miserable hermit life. It’s not that at all. It’s a social life, stripped of the conformity.