If the online hustlers had it their way, you'd be chained to the throne of discipline; Holy Emperor of absolute certainty sending every ounce of treacherous doubt to the guillotine. In their world self-certainty is God. There's no time for pondering or wondering, no time for confusion or doubt. “Time is money” they'll tell you, and doubt only devours it.
These hustlers have misguided confidence. They believe they’re the new elite, sitting pretty in their imagined penthouses looking down on the filthy peasant class. But they don’t realise their ideals are the same as the generation before them, buying into the same old rat-race. The only difference between this generation and the last is the playing field; it’s no longer the career ladder in corporate tower blocks, but digital communes where group signalling has become currency. The same motivations lie below the surface, though; the desire for status, or wealth. But deeper still lies the true determinants in the dogmatism that litters our online landscape—fear and doubt.
Two Types of Doubt
The dogmatic discipline of hustle culture is, in fact, born from doubt itself. It’s a hidden doubt, lurking in the back of the mind, born from the mould forced upon it during schooling. In those classrooms there’s no time for day-dreaming or creativity. You’re a number, a statistic, a footnote in an annual shareholders report. The wild delight and curiosity of the inner-child is relegated to the recesses of the mind; it becomes unconscious and unknown, never expressed except through vague dreams of creative longing. How many times have you heard someone say they wish they could paint, or write, or sing? Creative curiosity is begging to be explored. And if it isn’t? Well, the ego must compensate1.
As the mind-moulding begins, the ego builds an identity aligning with its new inputs; repetition, memorisation, and regurgitation (the only strings on schooling’s rotten, creaking bow, it seems). There’s no time for wondering, no time to discover our own learning preferences. Ideas aren’t explored, they’re spoon-fed; even art class forces us to draw a bowl of rotting fruit. All true creativity is disregarded, and so the ego compensates for this lost treasure. It’s cast aside, thought of as pointless, helpless; “you can’t make a living as an artist!” All of a sudden we’re faced with dogmatic rationalism where logic reigns as Holy Emperor and creativity is just for children and madmen. All because of unconscious doubt. Doubt that we’re not all there, that something is missing, crying to be heard.
Conscious doubt isn’t so insidious, although we often assume it is. Conscious doubt ‘plagued’ the likes of Franz Kafka, Leonardo da Vinci, and Paul Cézanne. It sat at the forefront of the mind, so clear and obvious that it couldn’t be ignored. Kafka often assumed people disliked him, he even went as far as requesting his novels The Castle and The Trial be burned upon his death. Cézanne spent his whole life painting, trying to create ‘a piece of nature.’2 He languished at his slow progress, questioning whether he would ever achieve his aim. Both of these artist’s doubts were unfounded. Most of those who met Kafka thought of him well, and the books he wanted burned were published and now stand as some of the greatest literature ever written. Cézanne, although you could argue whether he created a ‘piece of nature,’ changed art forever. The likes of Picasso, Matisse, and especially Braque recognised his genius. Braque, through Cézanne’s influence, went on to pioneer Cubism with Picasso, solidifying Cézanne as the grandfather of the avant-garde.
Cézanne’s process and philosophy illuminate a profound aspect of creation; art cannot be removed from the context of experience. All art is representative of the artist and their soul. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a painting, a sculpture, or an essay; all are the essence of the artist frozen in time. Honoré de Belzac said it well: ‘A hand is not simply part of the body, but the expression and continuation of a thought that must be captured and conveyed. That is the real struggle!’3 Cézanne spent hours deliberating before he decided on a single brush stroke. A still life would take one hundred sessions. A portrait? Five hundred. He encapsulated the eternal struggle of the artist; to express and articulate each spectre of thought exactly as it sits in the mind’s eye. To coax them out, and bring form to their ghostly essence. This is the valley of doubt, the cavernous pit between what is real and what is just a thought. Have you ever tried to elucidate a complex chain of ideas into words that hold both beauty and utility simultaneously? If you have, you’ll know the meaning of doubt. The paper in front of you feels like a desert, bone-dry and perilous, but a desert you have to cross nonetheless. No wonder the artist doubts, no wonder few ever try.
Creativity: The Cradle of Doubt
Creativity is defined by its capacity to create something new, and this always induces doubt. Conversely, the online hustlers skulk around the digital world, buying each other's courses and reading each other's how-tos, building a culture of copycats locked in an echo chamber. Nothing is new, it’s the same ghost haunting a thousand minds. Why? Because there’s nothing to doubt. The path has been trodden and laid before them. They don’t dare step off it, walk into the unknown, alone, when they lack the courage forged by facing doubt.
Imagine, for a moment, society as an enclosed circle. Inside the circle we find the infrastructure that keeps society intact; financial systems, energy systems, public transport, emergency services, and communication to name a few. They operate to benefit the inhabitants of society, keeping it afloat, but only in its current iteration. Artists, on the other hand, serve to push the boundaries of society, to recognise its flaws and innovate new iterations. They sit on the peripheries of the circle, looking out into the unknown, trying to catch a glimpse of chaos beyond the border, and even venture out in hopes of bringing back something extraordinary. They are Kafka and Cézanne.
Exploring this chaos demands we drop our maps and charts, blueprints and dreaded how-tos. There is no path already pressed into the soil, no person to follow. We have nothing but our wits to hack away dense thickets of emerging patterns and new ideas. And so we doubt. We doubt we cannot tread this new path and we doubt our abilities; and who wouldn’t? Leaving the familiar circle is no different than crossing a desert without a map nor compass.
The Virtue of Doubt
If unconscious doubt and its dogmatism is a vice, conscious doubt is it’s virtue. Artists around the world have experienced the pain of thinking what they do isn’t enough. An encroaching feeling that their work and how they approach it is somehow wrong or worthless. Yet, this feeling serves a wonderful purpose.
Cézanne was the epitome of the doubting artist. He strived for an almost impossible vision. He wanted to create nature and doubted he would ever succeed, but he didn’t stop; he painted while being hunted by the police, he painted on the day his mother died. Who knows what those sessions entailed, but the point is he was steadfast in his aim and never faltered. I’m not trying to allude to the cliché of persistence, although persistence is invaluable. I’m making the case that Cézanne’s doubt was his driving force.
Now, this might seem counterintuitive. How can doubt drive someone? Surely it would stop most of us dead in our tracks. This is true, but not in commitment. Commitment transmutes doubt from the lead chains that confine creativity, to a golden beacon, illuminating the dark to reveal higher truths. Doubt becomes a servant of refinement. It tells us something isn’t quite right, our vision hasn’t come to fruition, and we must commit to reiterations until we uncover the man beneath the marble.
‘Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.’
–The Courage to Create, Rollo May
Doubt uncovers truth, the truth of art and the soul. It stands as its own intelligence; an aspect of consciousness guiding those who wish to truly understand. But we’ve learnt to distrust it, to avoid it wherever possible—and we suffer. We suffer from never taking a leap of faith.
The discovery of truth is ‘a never dying process,’4 it’s constantly unfolding before us through an impossibly complex chain of events. And if doubt uncovers truth, then doubt will never cease. Thus, we have two options; leap, or remain confined by the chains of doubt.
Those who leap create. Those who possess the heart to discover not only cultural and systematic innovations, but the facets of their own internal world and all it’s wonderful horrors; they are the artists, the bringers of the light, the catalysts of the new world. Commitment in the face of doubt is the meaning of courage, and the artists who find their vocation—and commit—hold the torch that illuminates the precipice. In our world of division and creative drought we need artists to look out into the abyss, and bring back some semblance of truth to guide and enlighten our lost souls. So find your doubt. Wonder on the immensity and ambiguity of the world. Realise your creative potential and despair at the endless jungle that it is. No path lies within it, but somewhere there’s a creative spirit that seeks to drive us all forward with wild curiosity. Take up your sword and cut your own path. Then you will realise the virtue of doubt.
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Second Essay (The Relation Between The Ego And The Unconscious), Part II, Chapter I, Carl Jung.
Cézanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), Honoré de Balzac.
The Courage to Create, Chapter I, Part V, Rollo May.
I am wondering what comes after "Take up your sword and cut your own path." Having slain doubt, I see that the thicket of the self is incredibly dense and intertwined with other people, living and dead. I can only show a fraction of myself and do not want to wound others who accidentally become part of my personal story (and yet I cannot tell the story without them). Compare the content from the photo of my 1994 Oxford pocket diary entries to the surrounding text and you will see how large the gap can be: https://eldermentor.substack.com/p/turl-street-not-exactly-diagon-alley.