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icon:: 📖 purchased:: Feb 28th, 2024 start:: Feb 28th, 2024 end:: published:: length:: author:: @Alan Watts cover:: reading-time:: score:: - - Instinct, Intelligence and Anxiety - ==For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety==, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization. - The scope of our detailed information about the world is so vast that every individual, every responsible source of action, finds it too great to master—without depending upon the collaboration of others who are, however, beyond his control. **Collaboration requires faith, but faith is an instinctual attitude; speaking quite strictly, it is not intelligent to trust what you have not analyzed.** - It looks, then, as if there is conflict, contradiction, and thus anxiety in the very nature of intelligence. - Machines or other people must be trusted to assist: but how much must one know, **how many facts must one review, before deciding to accept a collaborator?** - **Intelligence, which is in some sense systematic doubt**, cannot proceed very far without also having to embrace its polar opposite—instinctual faith. So long as intelligence and faith seem mutually exclusive this is an impossible contradiction, ==for to the degree that intelligence is systematic doubt it cannot trust itself.== This is why lack of self-confidence is the peculiar neurosis of civilized man, id:: 65df524e-2ab2-4fc1-8a83-a6237ba04f0d - ==And we should note that a self-contradictory system of action breeds forms of revolt which are contradictory among themselves.== -