The Road Less Traveled (1978) M. Scott Peck
“Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs”
My mother gave me this book which she read routinely while my father was in federal prison when I was a wee lad. Having already read a ton of 1950’s-1970’s psycho-babble, I was not expecting anything I hadn’t already read. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which could be viewed more than anything as a work of philosophy, and give it a wholehearted five-star recommendation to anyone. It is easy to read, accessible, and relevant to our lives today. Our expectation that life should be easy is a smokescreen; life is hard. The path of spiritual growth and living a good life is even harder. For this reason, most shirk the effort required, experiencing psychological distress as a result. These are my top highlights below (4,500 words); they are mostly self-explanatory, I think.
· “Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?”
o “Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.” Some people are “not amenable to assistance” and until they are, they cannot be helped, such as the alcoholic.
o “When character-disordered individuals blame someone else-a spouse, a child, a friend, a parent, an employer or something else-bad influences, the schools, the government, racism, sexism, society, the “system”-for their problems, these problems persist. Nothing has been accomplished. By casting away their responsibility they may feel comfortable with themselves, but they have ceased to solve the problems of living, have ceased to grow spiritually, and have become dead weight for society. They have cast their pain onto society.” While there are certainly injustices, wronghoods, and terrible things that befall everyone, people have the choice of how to respond; they have one life to live.
§ “[There are indeed oppressive forces at work within the world. We have, however, the freedom to choose every step of the way the manner in which we are going to respond to and deal with these forces.”
· “The feeling of being valuable-”I am a valuable person” is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self discipline. It is a direct product of parental love. Such a conviction must be gained in childhood; it is extremely difficult to acquire it during adulthood. Conversely, when children have learned through the love of their parents to feel valuable, it is almost impossible for the vicissitudes of adult hood to destroy their spirit.” Learning to solve problems requires the discipline to be able to examine what the problem is in the first place; to “develop well-thought-out and effective solutions.”
o “When these gifts have not been proffered by one’s parents, it is possible to acquire them from other sources, but in that case the process of their acquisition is invariably an uphill struggle, often of lifelong duration and often unsuccessful.” People spend their lives “dealing with their position” (Berne).
o “Passive dependency has its genesis in lack of love. The inner feeling of emptiness from which passive dependent people suffer is the direct result of their parents’ failure to fulfill their needs for affection, attention and care during their childhood… Children growing up in an atmosphere in which love and care are lacking… enter adulthood with no such sense of inner security.”
· The author was feeling overwhelmed by all of his work, and was told by a fellow professional that he had a problem; the author became angry, until he realized the other party was right, that it was his own decision to over-burden his own schedule. “”Scott,” Mac replied, “I want you to listen. Listen closely and I will say it again. I agree with you. You do have a problem. Specifically, you have a problem with time. Your time. Not my time. It’s not my problem. It’s your problem with your time. You, Scott Peck, have a problem with your time.” Then he realized, “My time was my responsibility. It was up to me and me alone to decide how I wanted to use and order my time. If I wanted to invest my time more heavily than my fellow residents in my work, then that was my choice, and the consequences of that choice were my responsibility… these pains were the consequence of a choice that I had made.” When someone goes to another person and says “look at this problem I have,” they are giving the power to the other person to solve the problem for them, outside of, say, bouncing ideas off of someone else.
· People cease to be curious about the World as they age. It becomes too much work. “The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort… By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete… and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.” “We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality.” “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”
o “Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self-examination that the majority steer away from it.”
· “The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth… all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature-perhaps the one that makes us most human-is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.” People very much prefer comfort, as can be seen by the day-to-day activities of most people. “The healing of the spirit has not been completed until openness to challenge becomes a way of life.”
o “[Some] patients attempt to transform the psychotherapeutic hour into a kind of press conference. At best they are wasting time in their effort to avoid challenge, and usually they are indulging in a subtle form of lying.” Thus, they are not dedicated to change at all, but only justifications of behavior.
§ “[P]atients who made slips were not trying to hide themselves from me as much as from themselves… our conscious self-concept almost always diverges to a greater or lesser degree from the reality of the person we actually are.” “A major and essential task in the process of one’s spiritual development is the continuous work of bringing one’s conscious self-concept into progressively greater congruence with reality.” People may feel “Re-born” after this.
· “One of the roots of mental illness is invariably an interlocking system of lies we have been told and lies we have told ourselves. These roots can be uncovered and exercised only in an atmosphere of utter honesty.”
o “As must everyone, for as we negotiate the curves and corners of our lives, we must continually give up parts of ourselves. The only alternative to this giving up is not to travel at all on the journey of life.” Some people do not like reality and demand that reality be something other than it is.
· Mental health is difficult because it is effortful. It requires effort to try to do the right thing, it requires effort to have to debate with all of the facts, and if you have a full awareness, it puts on you an effort to carry out what you think is the ‘right thing.’ This is a recurring theme throughout the book.
o “[T]he process of making decisions with total awareness is often infinitely more painful than making decisions with limited or blunted awareness (which is the way most decisions are made and why they are ultimately proved wrong).”
o Of dependent people who just want to be loved, “The notion of effort was not involved in their daydreams; they envisioned only an effortless passive state of receiving care.” The author says to his patients, “’If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it. The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love…’ [P]assive dependent people[’s]… motive in doing things is to cement the attachment of the others to them so as to assure their own care. And when the possibility of care from another is not directly involved, they do have great difficulty in ‘doing things.’” Through this cementing of rigid role differentiation, people “make marriage more rather than less of a trap.”
§ “[D]ependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. It has its genesis in a parental failure to love and it perpetuates the failure. It seeks to receive rather than to give. It nourishes infantilism rather than growth. It works to trap and constrict rather than to liberate. Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people.”
o “Most people are quite correct when they say they do not want to achieve such a lofty goal or work so hard in life. The majority of patients… will terminate their therapy at some point far short of completely fulfilling their potential… They are content to be ordinary men and women and do not strive to be God.”
o “So original sin does exist; it is our laziness. It is very real. It exists in each and every one of us… Some of us may be less lazy than others, but we are all lazy to some extent. No matter how energetic, ambitious or even wise we may be, if we truly look into ourselves we will find laziness lurking at some level… pushing us down and holding us all back from our spiritual evolution.” We are lazy and so we do not have the dialogue between good and evil which exists in our head, somewhere. “They fail to consult or listen to the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides within the minds of all mankind… It is work to hold these internal debates. They require time and energy… if we seriously listen… we usually find ourselves being urged to take the more difficult path.” Thus, we are lazy, we take the easy way out, do the wrong thing.
§ “A major form that laziness takes is fear.” We fear change, that we might lose what we have. It is hard to update our views of reality.
§ “[Patients] become overwhelmed by fear of facing the seemingly impossible difficulties of living alone or apparently equally impossible difficulties of working for months and years with their mates toward radically improved relationships. So they stop treatment…” People want therapy to be the painless, effortless quick fix.
§ “For to recognize laziness for what it is and acknowledge it in oneself is the beginning of its curtailment.”
§ “If in our laziness and fear of suffering we massively defend our awareness, then it will come to pass that our understanding of the world will bear little or no relation to reality. Because our actions are based on our understanding, our behavior will then become unrealistic.”
· “You must forge for yourself an identity before you can give it up. You must develop an ego before you can lose it. This may seem incredibly elementary, but I think it is necessary to say it… [Many] want, and believe it is possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy short cut to sainthood. Often they attempt to attain it by simply imitating the superficialities of saints, retiring to the desert or taking up carpentry. Some even believe that by such imitation they have really become saints and prophets, and are unable to acknowledge that they are still children and face the painful fact that they must start at the beginning and go through the middle.” This the fate of many who buy into an all-encompassing ideology, whether they think they have achieved ‘self-realization’ or are perfect Christians. Also this illustrates why it is unhelpful to explain to someone point-blank why this or that thing matters relatively little, in the grand scheme of things; people have to go through their own motions and growth.
o “Ego boundaries must be hardened before they can be softened. An identity must be established before it can be transcended. One must find one’s self before one can lose it.” Thus, the process of maturation. People can be on very different points on this path even at the same age in one another’s lives. “[L]asting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through the persistent exercise of real love.”
· The author has many thoughts, similar to Maslow, on real love vs. dependency. His thoughts on love go back to the idea that people want life to be easy, not difficult; someone can just take care of me. “Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that “falling in love” is love or at least one of the manifestations of love. It is a potent misconception, because falling in love is subjectively experienced in a very powerful fashion as an experience of love… the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience… [furthermore,] the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary.” This butterflies feeling that draws people together is thus, semantically to the author, not “real” love.
o “Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.” Thus, while evolutionarily adaptive, the author sees the “myth” of romantic love as causing great psychological distress.
o “When you require another individual for your survival, you are a parasite on that individual. There is no choice, no freedom involved in your relationship. It is a matter of necessity rather than love. Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.” This requiring leads to grasping dependency. “I define dependency as the inability to experience wholeness or to function adequately without the certainty that one is being actively cared for by another.” The author acknowledges everyone’s mutual need for one another and our interconnectedness, but dependency hinders people’s normal day-to-day function with their demands.
§ He illustrates how, for many dependent people, having another is all that is required; someone who loses a “lover” in a breakup, is distraught, and then snaps back to normal as soon as there is someone else in the picture. One patient who had been “seriously depressed” after losing his family said to him, “But I did meet a girl last night down at my bar… I feel like I’m human once more.”
· [W]ealth or power have become for [some] such people ends in themselves rather than means to a spiritual goal. The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution.” Thus we see how so many shirk the path of spiritual development, in whatever form it manifests, instead chasing riches or power.
o “Thus hobbies may be a means through which we love ourselves. But if a hobby becomes an end in itself, then it becomes a substitute for rather than a means to self-development.” Witnesseth Strava. “Sometimes it is precisely because they are substitutes for self-development that hobbies are so popular… This dedicated effort to improve their [hobby’s] skill serves to give them a sense of progress in life and thereby assists them in ignoring the reality that they have actually stopped progressing, having given up the effort to improve themselves as human beings. If they loved themselves more they would not allow themselves to passionately settle for such a shallow goal and narrow future.”
· Of the martyr (in this context an overbearing father), “[F]ostering independence was more loving than taking care of people who could otherwise take care of themselves.”
o “If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.” Marxist jargon is not born of love.
· “The need for one’s parents to listen is never outgrown.” Even later in life, we want to share what we are doing with our parents.
o “The job of a parent is to be of use to a child and not to use the child for personal satisfaction.”
· “The process of growing up usually occurs very gradually, with multiple little leaps into the unknown, such as when an eight-year-old boy first takes the risk of riding his bike down to the country store all by himself… if you doubt that these represent real risks, then you cannot remember the anxiety involved.” “Many never take any of these potential enormous leaps, and consequently many do not ever realty grow up at all. Despite their outward appearances they remain psychologically still very much the children of their parents, living by hand-me-down values, motivated primarily by their parents’ approval and disapproval… never having dared to truly take their destiny into their own hands.”
o “As long as one loves one’s children primarily because one is expected to behave in a loving manner toward them, then the parent will be insensitive to the more subtle needs of the children and unable to express love in the more subtle, yet often most important ways. The highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity.” True love requires a feeling of love, which requires understanding.
· Echoing Dostoevsky and Hoffer’s critiques of the agitator and martyr, “There are, then, two ways to confront or criticize another human being: with instinctive and spontaneous certainty that one is right, or with a belief that one probably right arrived at through scrupulous self-doubting and self-examination. The first is the way of arrogance; it is the most common way of parents, spouses, teachers and people… The second is the way of humility; it is not common, requiring as it does a genuine extension of oneself; it is more likely to be successful, and it is never, in my experience, destructive.”
o “But those who truly love… know that to act is to play God. Yet they also know that there is no alternative except inaction and impotence. Love compels us to play God with full consciousness… that that is just what we are doing… not to carelessly play God. We arrive, then, at yet another paradox: only out of the humility of love can humans dare to be God.” Not throwing out the entire social order to the end of some abstract, poorly understood goal. Genuine love must be distributed carefully, considering the capacity of the people on the other end to do something with it, to make it focused. “[T]ere are many whose spirits are so locked in behind impenetrable armor that even the greatest efforts to nurture the growth of those spirits are doomed to almost certain failure.”
§ “Anyone who has worked for long In the political arena know that actions taken with the best intentions will often backfire and prove harmful in the end; or that people with scurrilous motives may promote a seemingly wicked cause that ultimately turns out to be constructive.”
o “Great marriages cannot constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss… Significant journeys cannot be accomplished without the nurture provided by a successful marriage or a successful society… It is the return of the individual to the nurturing marriage or society from the peaks he or she has traveled alone which serves to elevate that marriage or that society to new heights. In this way individual growth and societal growth are interdependent…” Cites Khalil passages on standing separately but together.
o “Passion is a feeling of great depth. The fact that a feeling is uncontrolled is no indication whatsoever that it is any deeper than a feeling that is disciplined… We must not assume that someone whose feelings are modulated and controlled is not a passionate person.” Passion without brains = many Dostoevsky characters who believe at the possibility for Utopia to arrive tomorrow, no questions asked.
· “This fact, not widely recognizes, if of the utmost importance: everyone has a religion.” We all worship something, as David Foster Wallace said. “The mind, which sometimes presumes to believe that there is no such thing as a miracle, is itself a miracle.” The author puts forth science does not know everything, and that though Christian theology might seem childish, it at least makes an attempt at explanation in the theoretical vacuum. “We cannot touch this force. We have no decent way to measure it. Yet it exists. It is real.”
o “[H]uman beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience.”
§ “Once perception is disengaged from the domination of preconception and personal interest, it is free to experience the world as it is in itself and to behold its inherent magnificence.”
§ “Human beings have a profound tendency to conceptualize in terms of discrete entities.” Humans want certainty even where none exists.
o Like Steinbeck saw in East of Eden, one of the author’s patients, “…came to see that behind the power of the Catholic Church lay the enormous power of her mother…” The lord wants this, nice girl’s don’t do that, etc. It is easier to adopt these values of the mother, and harder to reject a domineering parent, make ones own decisions, etc. “[S]he agonized over the innumerable small but independent decisions she was required to make in connection with her job.”
o Another patient, “[B]egan to focus more and more on things that were right with the world… He came to accept the necessity of suffering and to embrace the paradoxical nature of existence.”
o “The call to grace is a call to a life of effortful caring… It is a call out of spiritual childhood into adulthood a call to be a parent unto mankind.”
· “The most basic culture in which we develop is the culture of our family… the most significant aspect of that culture is not what our parents tell us about God… but rather what they do — how they behave toward each other… and… toward us…. the unique world they create for us by their behavior.” “[F]irst memories… symbolize the nature of a person’s early childhood… the flavor of these earliest memories is so frequently the same as that of a patient’s deepest feelings about the nature of existence.” i.e. that everything is awful.
· Things get better with time. “One seldom sees patients, for instance, who are not basically healthier mentally than their parents.”
o “Human behavior that we find repugnant and outrageous today was accepted as a mater of course yesteryear. A major focus of this book, for instance, has been on the responsibilities of parenthood for the spiritual nature of children. This is hardly a radical theme today, but several centuries ago it was generally not even a human concern.”
o “When we grow, it is because we are working at it, and we are working at it because we love ourselves… And it is through our love for others that we assist others to elevate themselves.” And this love has no explanation in science, says author.
o “Furies also symbolize the fact that mental illness is a family affair, created in one by one’s parents… But Orestes did not blame his family… he accepted his condition as one of his own making and undertook the effort to heal it… through this healing process of his own effort, the very things that had once caused him agony became the same things that brought him wisdom.” Most people are unable to take this path. “They choose rather to be sick and have the gods to blame than to be will with no one to blame ever again.”
§ “[A]n ephemeral something in the individual patient [could] be called a ‘will to grow.’ It is possible for an individual to be extremely ill and yet at the same time possess an extremely strong ‘will to grow,’ in which case healing will occur. On the other hand, a person who is only mildly ill, as best we can define psychiatric illness, but who lacks the will to grow, will not budge an inch from an unhealthy position.” You can only lead the horse to water. Author doesn’t fully understand what does and does not lead to this will.
· An angry patient said to the author as he explained the importance of awareness, “I don’t want to have to think all the goddamn time… I didn’t come here for my life to be made more difficult. I want to be able to just relax and enjoy myself. You expect me to be some sort of god or something!” Life is hard. “Most people want peace without the aloneness of power. And they want the self-confidence of adulthood without having to grow up.” It is not possible.
· “As has been described of the devil in religious literature, they [the evil] hate the light and instinctively will do anything to avoid it, including attempting to extinguish it. They will destroy the light in their own children and in all other beings subject to their power. Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of such self-awareness… They will take any action in their power to protect their own laziness, to preserve the integrity of their sick self.”
· “There is another problem with power: aloneness… Someone who is approaching the peak of spiritual evolution is like someone at the peak of political power. There is no one above to whom to pass the buck; no one to blame; no one to tell you how to do it. There may not even be anyone on the same level to share the agony or the responsibility… You alone are responsible… the person who has evolved to the highest level of awareness, of spiritual power, will likely have no one in his or her circle of acquaintances with him to share such depth of understanding.”
· “Everyone wants to be loved. But first we must make ourselves lovable. We must prepare ourselves to be loved. We do this by becoming ourselves loving, disciplined human beings. If we seek to be loved-if we expect to be loved-this cannot be accomplished; we will be dependent and grasping, not genuinely loving. But when we nurture ourselves and others without a primary concern of finding reward, then we will have become lovable, and the reward of being loved, which we have not sought, will find us.”
o “For the journey of spiritual growth requires courage and initiative and independence of thought and action… No teacher can carry you there. There are no preset formulas.”
o In fact, educated and successful people in any profession who admit ignorance are generally the most expert and trustworthy.”
