How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything-yes, Anything!

by Albert Ellis

  27. Science-Related Irrationalities

  a. The belief that science provides a panacea for the solution of all human problems

  b. The belief that the specific method constitutes the only method of advancing human knowledge

  c. The belief that all technological inventions and advances prove good for humans

  d. The belief that because the logico-empirical method of science does not give perfect solutions to all problems and has its limitations, it has little or no usefulness

  e. The belief that because indeterminacy exists in scientific observation, the logico-empirical method has no validity

  f. The belief that because science has found evidence and explanations for hypotheses that originally only existed in the human imagination (e.g., the theory of relativity), it has to and undoubtedly will find evidence and explanations for other imagined hypotheses (such as the existence of a soul or of God)

  g. The belief that because a scientist gets recognized as an authority in one area (e.g., Einstein as a physicist), he or she must have authoritative views in other areas (e.g., politics)

  h. The strong tendency of highly competent, exceptionally well-trained scientists to act in a highly prejudiced, foolish manner in some important aspects of their scientific endeavors, and to behave even more foolishly in their personal lives

  i. The strong tendency of applied social scientists—such as clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, and clergymen—to behave self-defeatingly and unscientifically in their personal and professional lives.

  The forgoing list of human irrationalities, which in no way pretends to exhaust the field, includes 259 major happiness-sabotaging tendencies. Some of these, admittedly, overlap, so that the list includes repetitions. At the same time, it consists of only a bare outline; under each of its headings we can easily subsume a large number of other irrationalities. Under heading 1.h., for example—irrationalities related to courtship, marriage, and wedding customs—we could easily include hundreds of idiocies, many of them historical, but many still extant.

  Psychotherapy represents one of the most tragic examples in this respect. It is mentioned briefly, under heading 27.i.—science-related irrationalities—as “the strong tendency of applied social scientists—such as clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, and clergymen—to behave self-defeatingly and unscientifically in their personal and professional lives.” This hardly tells the tale! For psychotherapy supposedly consists of a field of scientific inquiry and application whose practitioners remain strongly devoted to helping their clients eliminate or minimize their irrational, self-destructive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Actually, the opposite largely appears to hold true. For most therapists seem to have almost innumerable irrational ideas and to engage in ubiquitous antiscientific activities that help their clients maintain or even intensify their unreasonableness.

  A few major irrationalities of psychotherapeutic “helpers” include:

  1. Instead of taking a comprehensive, multimodal, cognitive-emotive-behavioral approach to treatment, they fetishistically and obsessively-compulsively overemphasize some monolithic approach, such as awareness, insight, emotional release, understanding of the past, experiencing, rationality, or physical release.

  2. They have their own dire needs for their clients’ approval and frequently tie these clients to them in an extended dependency relationship.

  3. They abjure scientific, empirically based analysis for farfetched conjectures that they rarely relate to factual data.

  4. They tend to focus on helping clients feel better rather than get better by learning specifically how they upset themselves and how they can stop doing so in the future.

  5. They dogmatically assume that their own system or technique of therapy, and it alone, helps people, and they have a closed mind to other systems or techniques.

  6. They promulgate therapeutic orthodoxies and excoriate and excommunicate deviates from their dogmas.

  7. They confuse correlation with cause and effect and assume that if an individual hates, say, his mother, and later hates other women, his former feeling must have caused the latter feeling.

  8. They mainly ignore the biological bases of human behavior and assume that special situational reasons for all disturbances must exist, and, worse yet, that if one finds these special reasons the disturbances will almost automatically disappear.

  9. They tend to look for (and “find”!) unique, clever, and “deep” explanations of behavior and ignore many obvious, “superficial,” and truer explanations.

  10. They either promulgate the need, on the part of their clients, for interminable therapy, or they promulgate the myth that easy, quick, miracle cures exist.

  11. They turn more and more to magic, faith healing, astrology, tarot cards, and other unscientific means of “transpersonal” psychotherapy.

  12. They strive for vaguely defined, utopian goals that mislead and harm clients.

  13. They make irrational, unscientific attacks on experimentally inclined therapists.

  14. They apotheosize emotion and invent false dichotomies between reason and emotion.

  This list is not exhaustive and could easily be doubled or tripled. To repeat the main point: Virtually all the main headings and subheadings presented in the list of major human irrationalities have a score or more further subdivisions; moreover, for each subdivision a fairly massive amount of observational and experimental confirmatory evidence exists. For example, we have a massive amount of observational evidence that innumerable people overeat, procrastinate, think dogmatically, lose considerable amounts of money in foolish gambling, devoutly believe in astrology, and continually rationalize about their own inept behavior. In addition, we have considerable experimental evidence that humans feel favorably biased in regard to those whom they consider attractive, that they backslide after giving up a habit like overeating, that they go for specious immediate gratifications instead of more enjoyable long-term satisfactions, that they repress memories of events they consider shameful, that they frequently attribute feelings to others that these others do not seem to have, and that they have an almost incredible degree of suggestibility in regard to an opinion of the majority of their fellows or of a presumed authority figure.

  Granted that all the forgoing major human irrationalities—and many more like them!—exist, can one maintain the thesis that, in all probability, they have biological roots and stem from the fundamental nature of humans? Yes, on several important, convincing grounds, which follow.

  1. All the major human irrationalities seem to exist, in one form or another, in virtually all humans. Not equally, of course! On the whole, some of us behave much less irrationally than others. But go find any individual who does not fairly frequently subscribe to all of these major irrationalities. For example, using only the first ten main headings that apply to personal self-sabotaging, do you know of a single man or woman who has not often slavishly conformed to some asinine social custom; not given himself or herself global, total ratings; not held strong prejudices; not resorted to several kinds of illogical thinking; not fooled himself or herself into believing that his or her strong feelings represented something about objective reality; not acquired and persisted in self-defeating habits, not had any pernicious addictions; remained perfectly free of all neurotic symptoms; never subscribed to religious dogmas; and never surrendered to any foolish health habits? Is there a single such case?

  2. Just about all the major irrationalities that now exist have held rampant sway in virtually all social and cultural groups that have been investigated historically and anthropologically. Although rules, laws, mores, and standards vary widely from group to group, gullibility, absolutism, dogmas, religiosity, and demandingness about these standards remains surprisingly similar. Thus in the Western civilized world, your parents and your culture advise or educate you to wear one kind of clothes and, in the South Sea Islands, to wear another kind. But where
they tend to inform you, “You had better dress in the right or proper way so that people will accept your behavior and act advantageously toward you,” you irrationally escalate this “proper” (and not too irrational) standard into, “I must dress properly because I absolutely need other people’s approval. I can’t stand their disapproval and the disadvantages that may thereby accrue to me. And if they do not like my behavior that means they do not like me and that I rate as a completely rotten person!” Although your parents and your teachers may encourage you to think in this absolutistic, self-downing manner, you seem to have the innate human propensity (a) to gullibly take them seriously, (b) to carry on their nonsense for the rest of your life, and (c) to invent it yourself if they happen to provide you with relatively little absolutism.

  3. Many of the irrationalities that people profoundly follow go counter to almost all the teachings of their parents, peers, and the mass media. Yet they refuse to give them up! Few parents encourage you to overgeneralize, make anti-empirical statements, or uphold contradictory propositions; yet you tend to do this kind of thing continually. Your educational system strongly encourages you to learn, unlearn, and relearn; yet you have great difficulty doing so in many important respects. You encounter strong persuasive efforts of others to get you to forgo nonproductive and self-defeating habits, like overeating and smoking. But you largely tend to resist this constant teaching. You may literally go, at your own choosing, for years of psychotherapy to overcome your anxiety or tendencies toward depression. But look at the relatively little progress you often make!

  You may have parents who raise you with extreme skepticism or antireligious tendencies. Yet, you easily can adopt some extreme religious orthodoxy in your adult years. You learn about the advisability of regularly visiting your physician and your dentist from grade school onward. But does this teaching make you go? Does widespread reading about the facts of life quiet your Pollyannaism or utopianism—or rid you of undue pessimism? Thousands of well-documented books and films have clearly exposed the inequities of wars, riots, terrorism, and extreme nationalism. Have they really induced you to strongly oppose these forms of political irrationality?

  Virtually no one encourages you to procrastinate and to avoid facing life’s realities. Dangerous excitement-seeking rarely gets you the approval of others. Does that stop you from indulging in it? The vast majority of scientists oppose magical, unverifiable, absolutistic, devout thinking. Do you always heed them? You usually know perfectly well what moral and ethical rules you subscribe to, and almost everyone you know encourages you to subscribe to them. Do you? Low frustration tolerance and short-range hedonism rarely prove acceptable to your elders, your teachers, your clergymen, and your favorite writers. Does their disapproval stop you from frequently giving in to immediate gratification at the expense of future gains? Who teaches you to rationalize and reinforces you when you do so? What therapist, friend, or parent goes along with your other kinds of defensiveness? But does their almost universal opposition stop you? Do significant others in your life reward you for demanding perfection of yourself or of them, for whining and wailing that conditions must transpire the way you want them to turn out?

  Certainly, a good many irrationalities have an important cultural component—or at least get significantly encouraged and exacerbated by the social group. But a good many seem minimally taught, and many others get severely discouraged—yet still ubiquitously flourish!

  4. As mentioned before, practically all the irrationalities listed in this appendix hold true not only for ignorant, stupid, and severely disturbed individuals but also for highly intelligent, educated, and relatively little disturbed persons. Ph.D.s in physics and psychology, for example, have racial and other prejudices, indulge in enormous amounts of wishful thinking, believe that if someone believes something strongly—or intensely experiences it—it must have objective reality and truth, fall prey to all kinds of pernicious habits (including addictions like alcoholism), foolishly get themselves into debt, devoutly think that they must have others’ approval, believe in the power of prayer, and invent rumors about others, which they then strongly believe. Unusually bright and well-educated people probably hold fewer or less rigid irrationalities than average members of the populace, but they hardly have a monopoly on rational behavior!

  5. So many humans hold highly irrational beliefs and participate in exceptionally self-defeating behaviors so often that we can only with great difficulty uphold the hypothesis that they entirely learn these ways of reacting. Even if we hypothesize that they largely or mainly learn how to behave so badly, the obvious question arises: Why do they allow themselves to get taken in so badly by the teachings of their culture, and if they do imbibe these during their callow youth, why don’t they teach themselves how to give up these inanities later? Almost all of us learn many significant political, social, and religious values from our parents and our institutions during our childhood, but we often give them up later—after we go to college, read some hardheaded books, or befriend people who subscribe to quite different values. Why don’t we do this about many of our most idiotic and impractical views, which clearly do not accord with reality and which obviously do us considerable harm?

  Take, for instance, the following ideas, which just a little reflection will show have little sense and which will almost always lead to bad results: (a) “If my sister did me in as a child, all women appear dangerous and I’d better not relate to them intimately.” (b) “If I lack competency in an area, such as academic performance, I rate as a totally worthless individual and deserve no happiness.” (c) “Because you have treated me unfairly, as you absolutely must not, you have to change your ways and treat me better in the future.” (d) “Since I enjoy smoking very much, I can’t give it up; and although others acquire serious disadvantages from continuing it, I can most probably get away with smoking without harming myself.” (e) “Because blacks get arrested and convicted for more crimes than whites, they all rate as an immoral race and I’d better have nothing to do with them.” (f) “If biological and hereditary factors play an important part in emotional disturbance, we can do nothing to help disturbed people, and their plight remains hopeless.”

  All these irrational statements, and hundreds of similar ones, clearly make little or no sense and wreak immense social and individual harm. Yet we devoutly believe them in millions of cases. Even if we can show that some significant part of these beliefs stems from social learning (as it probably does), why do we strongly imbibe and so persistently hang on to them? Clearly because we have a powerful biological predisposition to do so.

  6. When bright and generally competent people give up many of their irrationalities, they frequently tend to adopt other inanities or to go to opposite irrational extremes. Devout religionists often turn into devout atheists. Political right-wing extremists wind up as left-wing extremists. Individuals who procrastinate mightily may later emerge as compulsive workers. People who surrender one irrational phobia frequently turn up with another equally irrational but quite different phobia. Extremism tends to remain as a natural human trait that takes one foolish form or another.

  7. Human beings who seem least afflicted by irrational thoughts and behaviors still revert to them, and sometimes seriously so, at certain times. A man who rarely gets angry at others may on occasion incense himself so thoroughly that he almost or actually murders someone. A woman who fearlessly studies difficult subjects and takes complicated exams may feel that she can’t bear rejection by a job interview and may fail to look for a suitable position. A therapist who objectively and dispassionately teaches his or her clients how to behave more rationally may, if one of them stubbornly resists, act quite irrationally and agitatedly dismiss that person from therapy. In cases like these, unusual environmental conditions often bring out silly behavior by normally sane individuals. But these individuals obviously react to these conditions because they have some basic disposition to go out of their heads under unusual kinds of stress—an
d that basic disposition probably has innate elements.

  8. People highly opposed to various kinds of irrationalities often fall prey to them. Agnostics give in to devout, absolutistic thoughts and feelings. Highly religious individuals act quite immorally. Psychologists who believe that guilt or self-downing has no legitimacy make themselves guilty and self-downing.

  9. Knowledge or insight into one’s irrational behavior only partially, if at all, helps one change it. You may know full well about the harmfulness of smoking—and smoke more than ever! You may realize that you hate sex because your parents puritanically taught you to do so, but you may nonetheless keep hating it. You may have clear-cut “intellectual” insight into your overweening egotism but have little “emotional” insight into how to change it. This largely arises from the basic human tendency to have two contradictory beliefs at the same time—an “intellectual” one you lightly and occasionally hold and an “emotional” one you vigorously and consistently hold, and which you therefore usually tend to act upon. This tendency to have simultaneous contradictory beliefs again seems part of the human condition.

  10. No matter how hard and how long people work to overcome their irrational thoughts and behaviors, they usually find it exceptionally difficult to overcome or eradicate them, and to some degree they always remain exceptionally fallible in this respect. We could hypothesize that because they overlearn their self-defeating behaviors at an early age, they therefore find it most difficult to recondition themselves. But it seems simpler and more logical to conclude that their fallibility has an inherent source—and that their early conditionability and proneness to accepting training in dysfunctional behavior itself represents a significant part of their innate fallibility! Certainly, they hardly acquired conditionability solely through having someone condition them!