On Metaphysical Security

I began reading Elliot Cohen’s 2005 paper, The Metaphysics of Logic-Based Therapy. It’s fascinating because he outlines how cardinal fallacies can be addressed or treated through the application of corresponding transcendent virtues that serve as antidotes. A cardinal fallacy is an irrational way of interpreting the world that leads you to feel negative emotions to the point where they obstruct you from living an emotionally fulfilling life.

Cohen names eleven cardinal fallacies, including demanding perfection, oversimplifying reality, and offering an unsupported explanation. In this piece, I am specifically interested in exploring perfectionism, though each of the eleven end up mapping into each other in certain ways.

Demanding perfection is irrational because human beings and reality are imperfect and flawed by nature. All of us make mistakes. This truth shapes the weather of our lives. Natural disasters occur. Our actions affect people. We can spark joy, inspire thought, inflict pain, cause hurt, suffer, lose, and die. The antidotal virtue he assigns for addressing our demand for perfection is improving our metaphysical security. In other words, metaphysical security refers to how securely anchored our beliefs about the world are in truth.

Metaphysical security is developed by paying attention to empirical facts, the data that can be measured from evidence in the world.

When you operate in the world with the assumption that everything needs to be perfect to be optimal, there is an inherently flawed negation of what is factually true about yourself, others, and the reality of the world. This is discordant thinking because it attempts to control what can’t be controlled. It’s also a projection. How do you know that your concept of perfection is correct?

A narrow-minded focus can pigeonhole reality until you’re offering an unsupported explanation with distorted probabilities.

While I understand that emotions are valid, I believe this validity is due to how emotions are signposts. Heavy emotions imply there is a cognitive stake. If I am wrong about this, I will have to acknowledge how. It’s a lot of work learning how to navigate your inner world in a healthy way. However, one of the consequences of not doing the work is getting trapped inside a rumination loop.

The emotions grow heavier and more persistent until your mind resembles the inside of an echo chamber. At a slow enough rate, the over-reliance on what you believe to be true clouds what actually is true. The effects can damage trust, erode relationships, and fracture community.

Cohen’s work is compelling because it splits fallacious trains of thought into manageable parts. There are cardinal fallacies and there are transcendent virtues. A bridge between the two is stable when it’s built with logic and emotions that correspond with an acknowledgment of shared truths (like the fallible nature of humans and the world) and objective evidence in the world.

Click here to read Elliot Cohen’s paper.

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