“If self-satisfaction follows an achievement; it was no achievement at all, compared to what it could have been. Depression after supposed failure, means that the attempt was wrongly structured. No real attempt took place, however much it may seem that there was one.” Idries Shah - 'Reflections'
This statement goes so much against the general tide of contemporary global culture many would say it is the antithesis of human nature itself. We are generally expected to feel somewhat down if we fail and pride in successes is considered a virtue in terms of maintaining a positive self image.
So, what did Idries Shah mean by this? I think he is suggesting an outlook that goes far beyond the often-expressed advice to, “not focus on failures and keep trying.” Part of what he is suggesting is that it is important to consider failure very carefully.
Being an average unenlightened pleb, I can only guess towards it, based on my limited experience of developmental science as described by those claiming to know something about it.
To me it is pointing at some kind of continuity. An outlook that looks beyond the steps and envisions what it may be like a little further up the path.
There is the self and there is the achievement. Not feeling self-satisfaction displays a sense of understanding that there may have been and probably were, numerous factors that came together to result in the outcome (so called achievement.) The time the place, the person/people involved. Things don’t happen in isolation. I cannot succeed in climbing a mountain if no mountain existed to climb. Part of the reason this kind of outlook seems so foreign, almost ‘false’ is that we tend not to think that way. It would be quite taxing to consider every stone and every hand that went into making a tarred road as I walk down it step by step simultaneously considering the biology of my feet and the chemistry involved...However, by his statement Idries Shah is not necessarily asking us to think about all that. He’s just asking us not to gloat in the fantasy that we were the sole active agent in bringing the situation about.
To feel satisfaction over a perceived ‘completed’ project is to discount a perfectly rational and experientially consistent truth that very little is known until it can be looked back on from a suitably advanced (in time and occurrence) vantage point. We say “hindsight is 20/20” but usually only after we’ve seen how incorrect our initial perception was. What Idries Shah is asking us to do is to understand this truth ‘pre-emptively’ that is to say, treat reality as real and not based on imagination. An achievement is in actuality only a link in the chain. Chain links are without function unless they are part of a chain. And the chain can only be seen when enough links are joined in succession to bring about its existence.
Photo by Lalesh Aldarwish from Pexels
The feeling of depression after a “supposed failure” is to discount the inescapable need for development to occur through the process of learning. Events that do not pan out as we imagined is real-time feedback of the dynamic discussed above. As the certainty of benefit or harm of any particular event is a grey area until many dynamic and interrelated aspects have been realized; there is no room for feelings of shame or failure ‘in media res’. Idries Shah describes the error in terms of being “wrongly structured”, implying that the fault is one of planning or initial outlook. It is easy to understand how embarking on projects without the anticipation of satisfaction is a method of preventing disappointment at not achieving it, but that is fairly elementary psychological trickery. I think Idries Shah is pointing at something even more significant than this. He may be indicating that the very act of considering success and failure, as being preventative to the learning process, and completely underming the potential for maximum development. It is a strong reminder that development should, and is ultimately the only goal worth valuing.
A “real attempt” (in planning, execution and outcome) is one when one is able to view the whole chain of events and related aspects with a wider, longer and larger perspective. Where one is not looking out for success, not focused on success, but looking out for what goes wrong and focused on working with it, and leaving it far behind. What the non-achievement could have been is foundation block for a meta-creation.