Brainstorm: A fit of rage, melancholy, etc.; a sudden change of mood or behaviour; (also) a sudden and severe attack of mental illness … In later use also figurative or hyperbolically: a temporary loss of reason, a serious error of judgement. (Oxford English Dictionary)
“If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
The phrase ‘the grouch and the brainstorm were not for us’ is little discussed. I suspect ‘the brainstorm’ is not referred to because its meaning in the contemporary popular mind is vague, and its meaning in context is obscured by a modern, derived sense of getting together with others to elicit inspired ideas on a topic, which is not the sense intended by the author of the book.
The elements of the above definition of brainstorm I find helpful are: the fit of rage, the sudden change in mood, the attack of ‘mental illness’, the temporary loss of reason, the error of judgement. When these are taken together, they well describe a state I find myself in when I get exercised about an aspect of my life, or, more broadly, organisations, institutions, the community, society, or humanity as a whole. My mind goes into an unrestrained overdrive of attack and argumentation, building complex cases using the artefacts of reason but without reason’s checks and balances. The failure of reason is this: I assume a particular conclusion (typically the object of my examination is evil, malicious, stupid, corrupt, dishonest, etc.), and then I fit the evidence to hand to reverse-engineer the basis for this conclusion (this being referred to as ‘begging the question’). What is frightening about this is that my condition appears to me, in the moment, to be quite reasonable. Reason has been left at the door, however, as soon as this state of mind is activated.
What brought this home to me was chancing across a talk radio slot in a foreign country where the speaker was attacking a political opponent in a clever, rabid, but unreasonable and irrational way. The abuse of language, evidence, and reason was repellent, but I could feel the emotional draw of the arguments, as though I was being sucked into a vortex. With horror, I saw myself in this speaker.
I have constructed a checklist of telltale signs I’m in a brainstorm, which are indications that I need to calm down, back off, and drop the topic entirely, returning to it, if at all, only at a time when sanity has been restored.
- Caricaturing the opponent then attacking the caricature
- Cherry-picking evidence that supports my cause
- Conspiracy-hunting
- Construing situations as a personal attack
- Cynicism: assuming the corruption of the opponent
- Exaggeration and scare-mongering
- Inflammatory language
- Personal insult in the place of addressing the argument
- Positing stark, black-and-white oppositions
- Presumption of others’ ill intent, stupidity, and incompetence
- Reductio ad absurdum: false extrapolation to extremes
- Seeing connections between the unrelated
- Viewing the whole through the lens of a problem
The brainstorm is not for me!