Who is to blame for your first thought

Someone walks past your desk, looks away, says nothing. Before you have decided anything, it is already there: he has something against me.

You did not choose that. There was no moment at which you weighed two options. The thought was there, complete and full of conviction, faster than you could stop it.

The question underneath is older than psychology and more interesting than most of the answers to it: are you to blame for that?

The first movement

The Stoics, who have a reputation for severity, were surprisingly mild about this.

In his treatise on anger, Seneca describes how there are first movements that no one can hold back. The startle. The colour draining from your face. The stab that goes through you at an unpleasant message. That first movement, he says, is not yet anger. Anger begins only when you go along with it.

There is a story about a Stoic who visibly turned pale during a heavy storm at sea, and who explained afterwards that the fright had simply happened to him, but that he had not assented to it. Whether that story literally took place, no one knows; it has come down to us through later authors. As an illustration of how they saw it, it holds up.

The teaching behind it is that of impression and assent, worked out by Chrysippus in the third century before our era. An impression comes in. It brings a proposal with it: this means such and such. And then something happens that you rarely notice: you say yes.

From that yes onward it is no longer a proposal. It is what has happened.

The cylinder

Chrysippus had an image that explains it better than any modern variant I know. Cicero preserved it for us.

You push a cylinder down a slope. The push comes from outside, you did not choose it, it happened to the cylinder. But that it rolls, and how far and how fast, comes from its own shape. A block simply stays where it lies.

The push is the impression. The shape is you.

That is a more precise notion of blame than the popular "you choose your own reaction". You do not choose the push. Nor do you choose your shape on the spot, it grew over years, out of everything you have lived through and taught yourself. What you can do, slowly, is work on that shape. That is less heroic and a great deal more honest.

Where the blame does begin

Take the chain apart and it becomes usable.

The impression is not yours. Something comes in, a meaning appears. You had no say in it, and there is no reason at all to feel guilty about a thought that presented itself.

The assent is partly yours, but often in a fraction of a second and usually unnoticed. Here lies a grey area where no one can say with a straight face how free you are.

The second look is entirely yours. That is the only moment in the whole chain where it is indisputably your turn. Not the moment the thought arrived, but the moment you can go back over it.

So the responsibility does not lie with what came into your head. It lies with whether you looked when it mattered.

The counter-voice, because otherwise this is too easy

Modern research suggests that a large part of that appraising runs automatically, fast and outside your awareness. If that is right, and I think it is broadly right, then the Stoic picture of an inner judge who neatly says yes or no is too orderly. Then "go back over your judgements" is not an instruction you can follow all day long, but at most a few times a day.

So I keep to a more modest claim, and it is expressly an assumption: you cannot raise the number of moments at which you go back and check without limit, but you can move them to the places where being wrong is expensive. An assumption about a client. A judgement about an employee. A conclusion about why a collaboration ran aground.

And there is a second objection that carries weight. This kind of thinking can tip over into the other extreme, in which no one is responsible for anything any more because it all runs automatically in any case. That is not wisdom but a way out. The cylinder rolls because of its own shape. And you are, measured over years, the only one who can work on that shape.

A thought to carry with you: you are not to blame for the thought that came. You are responsible for the thought you let stand.

What to do with it

Take one judgement from this week that you accepted without checking and that can still be reversed. Usually it is a judgement about a person: a client who did not respond, a colleague who was curt, a supplier who failed to deliver something.

Call that person. Not to talk it out, but to ask what was going on at their end.

That is not a soft exercise in understanding. It is the cheapest correction there is, and the only one that works at the point where you are blind yourself.