Book Summary: The Courage to be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

This is a summary of The Courage to be Disliked, which features a series of conversations between a youth and a philosopher. The philosopher has three central claims, based on the philosophy of Austrian psychiatrist, Alfred Adler:

• The world is simple.
• People can change.
• Everyone can be happy.

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Key Takeaways from The Courage to be Disliked

• Life is a series of moments, and we should live in the here and now.
  • There is no trauma. We are not determined by our experiences, but by the meaning we give them.
  • We can change our lifestyles (worldviews), and therefore our lives. But change takes courage.
• Live your own life, not someone else’s.
  • Every person has their own “tasks”. Conflicts arise when people try to intrude on others’ tasks.
  • Courage to be disliked – liking or disliking you is someone else’s task.
• The key to happiness is community feeling – a sense that you belong.
  • Everyone is part of a community. No one lives completely alone. At the same time, no one is the centre of the community, either – we are each just a part of a bigger whole.
  • To get a community feeling, we have to switch from self-interest to social interest. This requires three things: self-acceptance, confidence in others, and contribution to others.
  • Your relationships should be horizontal (equal), not vertical (hierarchical). You should see people as your comrades, rather than as superior or inferior.

Detailed Summary of The Courage to be Disliked

Adlerian psychology

• Along with Freud and Jung, Adler is recognised as one of the three giants in psychology. His influence is present in books such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
• Adler was one of Freud’s contemporaries, but their approaches were almost polar opposites.
  • Freud focused on the past, and tried to explain things through cause and effect (aetiology). This leads to “determinism”, because it suggests our present and future have already been determined by the past, and the past cannot be changed.
  • In contrast, Adler focuses on present “goals” rather than past “causes”. This is called teleology – the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause.
• An example of how these approaches differ is in their view of trauma:
  • An aetiological view would argue that a person’s suffering stemmed from some cause in the past. This can be consoling as it explains that the suffering is not the person’s fault.
  • The Adlerian view would say that no experience is in itself a cause of success or failure [that is, it’s not a sufficient cause]. We make out of our experiences whatever suits our purposes. So we are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.
• In Adlerian psychology, the individual is a unified whole. This approach is known as holism. It does not consider the mind and body as separate, nor reason and emotion, nor the conscious and unconscious mind.

The world is simple

• The world is not complicated, but we make our own worlds complicated.
• None of us live in an objective world. We each have our own subjective world, and my world is different from yours.
  • For example, well water stays at pretty much the same temperature year-round. But when you drink it in summer, it seems cool and when you drink it in winter, it seems warm. This is not an illusion – the water is cool or warm to you in that moment. It’s just that your world is subjective.

Life tasks

• There are two objectives for behaviour:
  • to be self-reliant, and
  • to live in harmony with society.
• And there are two objectives for the psychology that supports these behaviours:
  • the consciousness that “I have the ability”, and
  • the consciousness that “people are my comrades”.
• You can achieve these objectives by facing your “life tasks” (also called “social ties”).
• There are 3 types of life tasks:
  • Tasks of work. Interpersonal relationships of work tend to be the easiest. There is usually a common objective so that people can cooperate even if they don’t get along, and they are also required to cooperate.
  • Tasks of friendship. Friend relationships are difficult to initiate or deepen. It’s not about quantity, but about quality – the distance and depth of the relationship.
  • Tasks of love. Tasks of love are probably the most difficult of the 3 types. These are further divided into two types: love relationships and family relationships. You shouldn’t restrict your partner (e.g. stop them from socialising with friends of the opposite sex) as that is an attempt to control them. It also comes from a place of distrust. Adler thinks that if two people want to live together on good terms, they need to treat each other as equal personalities.

People can change

We each have a different lifestyle

• A person’s “lifestyle” is their personality, worldview, and outlook on life.
  • The philosopher prefers talking about lifestyle or worldview, as the word “personality” suggests it is unchangeable. Whereas it’s easier for people to accept that a worldview is alterable.
  • If you change, your world will change. This means the world can be changed only by you, and no one else can change it for you.

People are not ruled by emotions

• Adlerian psychology denies that humans are controlled by emotions.
  • Anger doesn’t cause people to shout or take other actions. Instead, people use anger as a tool to try and make others submit.
  • For example, a person in an angry tirade will often shift their tone suddenly if someone else interrupts and they don’t want to appear angry in front of that new person.

We can change our lifestyles

• Adlerian psychology’s view is that people first choose their lifestyle/worldview around the age of 10. It may not have been an entirely conscious choice, though it was still a choice. But people can choose to continue on with the lifestyle they’ve had, or choose a new lifestyle entirely.
• Our past does not determine our future. (This is the aetiological view vs the teleological view explained above.)

Life is not linear

• Life is not like climbing a mountain, where you just make a line for the top. If life were like climbing a mountain, most of life would be spent “en route”, trying to get to the top. If you don’t end up making it to the top, what does that imply for your life?
• Sometimes adults will try to impose a linear life onto young people. But a well-planned life is impossible.
• Freudian aetiology sees life as a story based on cause and effect. The problem with this is that you’ll then try to lead a life in line with that story. The past looks like a straight line only if you keep choosing not to change. You may deny your own agency and then blame other things – your past, environment, etc – for how things turn out. But that is a life-lie.

Life is a series of dots

• If life is a series of dots, you don’t need a story. The future is a blank page.
• Life is more like a dance than like climbing a mountain. It is made up a series of moments, where the process itself is treated as the outcome. It doesn’t matter if you don’t make it to the mountaintop or not. We only live in the here and now.

Focus more on the now, than on the past or future

• When we focus on the here and now, it’s harder to see the past or future. It’s like standing on a theatre stage under a bright spotlight – you can’t even see the front row. You could only see the back rows, dimly, if you turn off the bright spotlight (on the “now”).
• This does not mean we just “live for the moment”. You can still set objectives for the distant future and work towards them in the here and now. (But the philosopher says it’s also okay not to have objectives, as he tells the youth not to take things too seriously.)

But change requires courage

• Change generates anxiety, whereas not changing (when a person is currently unhappy) generates disappointment.
• Adlerian psychology focuses on “encouragement” – helping people get the courage to change.

Life lies

• Life-lies are pretexts that people come up with to avoid their life tasks. They run away from their life tasks by shifting their responsibility for the situation onto someone else. They avoid their life tasks because they don’t have courage.
• Some examples:
  • You follow your boss’s instructions and end up failing. Telling yourself that it’s your boss’s responsibility, and that you were just following orders, is a life-lie. You could have refused the orders, or proposed a better way of doing things. By thinking there is no space to refuse, you avoid responsibility.
  • A person dreams of writing a novel but never finds the time to do it. The reason is because he doesn’t want to expose his work to criticism or rejection, and he wants to keep being able to claim that he can do it if he tried. He doesn’t want to risk finding out that he doesn’t have the talent for it.
  • The youth in the book doesn’t want to get hurt in relationships with other people. So he achieves that by focusing on his shortcomings and not entering into relationships in the first place. That way, if others snub him, he can blame it on his shortcomings.
• But you are the only one that determines your lifestyle, so that is where the responsibility lies. You can’t shift it onto someone else.

Feelings of inferiority can cause change

• Feelings of inferiority are subjective. For example, the philosopher reveals that he used to be concerned about his height. But if other people didn’t exist, he’d have no reason to think that he was short. So his feelings about his height were all subjective feelings of inferiority.
• Everyone has feelings of inferiority. Such feelings are not necessarily bad.
  • When we’re born, we’re helpless babies. We all want to escape from this helpless state – this is the pursuit of superiority. The feeling of inferiority is the counterpart of the pursuit of superiority. Neither of these are necessarily bad.
• The feeling of inferiority and pursuit of superiority can stimulate normal, healthy striving and growth.
  • Pursuit of superiority doesn’t mean kicking others down while trying to climb higher. It just means that you’re trying to move forward on your own feet, not with a competitive mindset.
  • A healthy feeling of inferiority comes from comparing yourself to your ideal self, rather than to others.

But sometimes feelings of inferiority can manifest in an inferiority or superiority complex

• People who don’t have the courage to change and grow end up developing an inferiority complex instead.
  • An inferiority complex is the condition when someone uses their feeling of inferiority as an excuse (a life-lie).
  • For example, “I am uneducated, so I can’t succeed”. The flipside is that it implies that, “If only I were educated, I’d be successful”.
• An inferiority complex may evolve into a superiority complex.
  • A superiority complex is where the person acts as if they are superior, or tries to attach themselves to powerful and successful people to get some glory by association.
  • Adler’s view is that people boast only out of a feeling of inferiority. Truly confident people don’t feel the need to boast.

Feelings of inferiority can also manifest in bragging about one’s misfortune

• A person who brags about their misfortune tries to make themselves “special”, superior to others.
• The person can also control their family and friends by worrying them and restricting their speech. In the same way, the baby is the strongest person in our culture because of his weakness. The baby rules over adults and no one can control him.
• Similarly, a child may try to get their parents’ attention by being especially good. If this doesn’t work, they may act out and engages in bad behaviour to attract attention. But both of these is pursuit of easy superiority. While the child may succeed in being “special”, it is unhealthy.
• Adler talks about the “courage to be normal”. People who try to make themselves special probably do so because they cannot stand being normal. But being normal isn’t that bad – after all, everybody is normal.

Everyone can be happy

Interpersonal relations are the source of both unhappiness and happiness

• To be happy, one has to feel they are of use to someone, feel they are contributing to others.
• It is impossible to live life completely alone.
• You cannot avoid or ignore a relationship, no matter how distressful it is. Even if you end up cutting a relationship, you still have to face it first.

Separate your tasks to improve your interpersonal relationships

• Separating your tasks from other people’s tasks can dramatically change your interpersonal relationships.

How to separate your tasks

• To work out who a task belongs to, think about who will ultimately bear the consequences of the decision.
• For example, studying is the child’s task, not the parent’s. If the child doesn’t study, it’s the child who ultimately bears the consequences of possibly falling behind in class.

Don’t intrude on others’ tasks (but you can interfere)

• All interpersonal relationships are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having others intrude on your tasks. Intruding on other people’s tasks makes life difficult and full of hardship. Separating your tasks is therefore a way of setting boundaries.
  • For example, when it comes to trusting your partner, believing in them is your task. But how your partner acts with regard to your expectations and trust is their task. If you try to control your partner’s actions, that intrudes on their task.
• However, intruding is not the same as interfering. You can interfere by being ready to lend a hand, but you should not intrude on the other person’s tasks. In other words, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. It is important to maintain this kind of moderate distance, even in close relationships.
  • For example, a parent who orders the child to study is intruding on the child’s task. But non-interference would be not caring about what the child is doing at all – Adler does not recommend that, either.
  • Instead, the parent should let the child know that studying is his task, and that the parent is ready to help when he needs it. Children are independent individuals. They do not become what their parents want them to become.

Separating your tasks gives you the cards in your interpersonal relationships

• Many people mistakenly think that the other person holds the cards in an interpersonal relationship. But if they can separate their tasks, they end up holding all the cards.
  • For example, the philosopher’s father hit him when he was young. An aetiological approach would say that, because his father hit him, they have a bad relationship.
  • But the Adlerian approach reverses that. The philosopher brings out the memory of being hit because he doesn’t want his relationship with his father to get better. He could then use having a bad father as an excuse when his life isn’t going well.
  • Under the Adlerian approach, the philosopher holds the card to changing the interpersonal relationship.

Live for yourself, not for others

• Seeking recognition or approval from others is a sign that you haven’t separated your tasks. All you can do is live your own life, even if that means being disliked.
  • If you seek recognition or approval from others, you spend your life following others’ expectations.
  • Freedom is being disliked by other people. If someone dislikes you, that’s proof that you are exercising your freedom and living according to your own principles. (This doesn’t mean you should go do horrible things to try to be disliked, though.)
  • It’s natural to not want to be disliked by others. But in order to achieve that, you would have to constantly gauge others’ feelings and try to please all of them. This is impossible, not to mention very un-free. You would be lying to yourself and to others, and those lies will eventually catch up to you.
• This also means that you shouldn’t expect other people to satisfy your expectations. So if they don’t act how you want them to, you shouldn’t get angry – what they do is their task, not yours.
• People who seek recognition are actually very self-centred. They are concerned solely with themselves, not with others. It is only because they want others to think well of themselves that they worry about others – which is not true concern for others.
• Seeking recognition is a way that others try to get that feeling of contribution, to feel they are of use to someone. But if you truly have a feeling of contribution, you will have no need for recognition from others, as you’ll already have the real awareness that you are of use to someone without needing others to recognise that.

Build horizontal relationships and see others as comrades

Seeing others as comrades will make the world seem a lot more pleasant

• When you view others as your comrades, your worldview will change. The world will seem a lot safer and more pleasant and your interpersonal relationship problems will greatly decrease.
• A competitive mindset makes you see people as enemies.
  • Competition in a person’s interpersonal relationships will lead to relationship problems and misfortune. Because a competition involves winners and losers, which makes you start seeing everyone as an enemy.
  • Even if you keep winning, you will not have a moment’s peace, else you might lose. You’ll find it hard to trust people.
  • The pursuit of superiority means you should be moving forward on your own feet, not with the mindset of competition where you’re comparing yourself with others.

Vertical relationships are not freeing

• When you praise or rebuke someone, you create a hierarchical relationship, even if unconsciously. This is because praise involves a person of ability passing judgement on a person with no ability.
  • For example, a parent might praise their child for helping prepare dinner (“You’re such a good helper!”) but they wouldn’t do that for an equal -they would express gratitude (“Thank you for helping”) instead of praise.
  • Adlerian psychology is highly critical of reward-and-punishment in raising children as the intent behind it is to manipulate them.
• If you derive joy from being praised, then you are dependent on vertical relationships. This acknowledges you have no ability of your own, so need someone with ability to pass judgement on you.
  • If you strive to receive praise, you’re living a life according to another person’s values, not your own. This is not freedom.
  • Vertical relationships can therefore give rise to inferiority complexes.
• When you intrude on another person’s tasks, that is because you see the relationship as vertical. It is because you see the other person as beneath you that you intrude and try to lead them in the direction you want. But this is just manipulation.

Horizontal relationships are judgement-free

• In a horizontal relationship, people are “equal but not the same”.
• We should seek to make all our interpersonal relationships horizontal, rather than vertical.
  • The most important thing is to avoid judging others.
  • As soon as you build one vertical relationship, you will soon find you end up treating all your interpersonal relationships as vertical.
  • As noted above, you shouldn’t praise or rebuke others, but you can encourage someone by offering assistance.
  • You can also express gratitude and respect. There is no judgement in a “thank you”. When someone hears gratitude, they know they’ve made a contribution to another person.

Don’t get drawn into power struggles

• If you feel angry due to another person’s words or actions, it could be that the person is challenging you to a power struggle.
• Even if you manage to “win” a power struggle and the other person withdraws, it doesn’t end there. The other person goes away and plots revenge, and will come back with an act of retaliation. Once the interpersonal relationship reaches the revenge stage, it’s almost impossible to come back from it.
• When you feel someone is challenging you to a power struggle, you cannot be drawn in to it.
  • This doesn’t mean you have to “grin and bear it” – that is still caving to the power struggle.
  • Instead, you just communicate calmly, without any anger. It’s okay to feel anger, you just shouldn’t use it.
• Keep the discussion focused on the rightness of the arguments, rather than on who is right and who is wrong.
  • If you start thinking “I am right”, that implies the other person is wrong. This sets up winners and lowers.
  • Once someone is in a mindset of not wanting to “lose”, they won’t want to admit mistakes, apologise, or step down from the power struggle.

Recognise that you are part of a community

• Each of us is a member of a community.
  • Although “I” am the protagonist of my life, I am no more than a member of a community, a part of the whole. I am not at the centre of it.
  • Adler uses “community” in a very broad sense, to include all of humanity and even plants, animals and inanimate objects – although Adler himself acknowledged this was an “unattainable ideal”.
  • The smallest unit of society is just “you and I”. Community emerges even in this small unit.
  • None of us can ever be truly alone or separate from community. Even when buying food, the food we buy is produced by others, and the money we pay goes to those producers.
• When we encounter problems in our interpersonal relations, we can “zoom out” to the larger community.
  • For example, say you have a problem with your teacher’s authoritarian manner in school. The power your teacher has over you operates only within the school community.
  • When you zoom out to the larger community of “human society”, you and your teacher are equals. So you can object to your teacher’s demands if they are unreasonable.
  • If the smaller community breaks down just because you raise an objection, that is not the sort of relationship you need anyway. You can always find other communities.

The goal of interpersonal relationships is “community feeling”

• “Community feeling” is the sense of seeing other people as comrades and having a place of refuge – a sense that you belong. That sense of community feeling, or belonging, is something you acquire through your own efforts.
• You have to make the switch from attachment to self (self-interest) to concern for others (social interest) to gain a community feeling.
• To do this, you need three things: self acceptance, confidence in others and contribution to others. The three link together in sort of a circular structure:
  • When you accept yourself as you are, you can have confidence in others without fearing they’ll take advantage of you.
  • When you can have unconditional confidence in others, you can engage in contribution to others.
  • And when you contribute to others, you gain a deep awareness that you are of use to someone and accept yourself as you are.

Self-acceptance

• Self-acceptance is not the same as self-affirmation, which involves making suggestions to yourself (e.g. “I can do it”, even when something is actually beyond your ability). That is lying to yourself.
• With self-acceptance, you accept yourself as is. You can change what you can but some things you won’t be able to change. So even in those cases, just move forward to do what you can.

Confidence in others

• There is a difference between trust and confidence. Trust comes with conditions – e.g. lending money on the condition that someone pays it back is trust. In contrast, confidence has not conditions. It is about unconditionally believing in others when you don’t have objective grounds to do so. When you see people as comrades, you can have confidence in them.
• When you believe in others unconditionally, sometimes you’ll get taken advantage of. So it does take some courage to overcome. That courage comes from self-acceptance, and recognising that whether someone takes advantage of you is their task, not yours. And people find it hard to repeatedly betray someone who has confidence in them.
• Adler doesn’t advocate having confidence in others unconditionally based on a moralistic system of values. Rather, unconditional confidence will improve your interpersonal relationship and build a horizontal relationship. The opposite of confidence is doubt – you can’t build a positive interpersonal relationship on that.
• You don’t have to have unconditional confidence in everyone – you can also sever relationships that you don’t care to improve. But if you are afraid to have confidence in anyone, you will not be able to build deep relationships.

Contribution to others

• Happiness is the feeling of contribution. By making contributions to, and helping others, you will feel you are beneficial to the community.
• Contribution to others does not mean self-sacrifice. Adler even warns that those who sacrifice their own lives for others are people who have conformed to society too much.
• You can make a contribution other than by your acts – you can contribute simply by being. For example, even if a baby or an invalid does nothing, they support their family’s psychological states simply by being alive. So they are still contributing to the community.
• You are not the one who decides if your contributions are of any use – that is the task of other people. But there is no real objective way you can know whether you have really made a contribution. All you have is the subjective sense that you are of use to someone – the feeling of contribution.
• It is only when you feel beneficial to the community – i.e. that you are of use to someone – that you find happiness and have a true sense of your own worth. That sense of worth then gives you courage.
• Adler describes contribution to others as a “guiding star” that helps when people lose their way. As long as you keep moving in the direction of contribution to others, there is happiness.

Other Interesting Points

• Socrates never wrote a book himself. Instead, he spent his time having public debates, especially with young people. His disciple, Plato, was the one who put his philosophy into writing. Similarly, Adler preferred to engage in dialogue in cafes and discussion groups, rather than write.
• Life in general has no meaning. But you can assign meaning to your life.
• Don’t judge the whole when you only see a part:
  • Some people generalise and throw around words like “everyone” and “always”. These people see only a part of things, but feels able to judge the whole.
  • For example, one in 10 people might criticise you no matter what. Two in 10 might accept everything about you, and you become close friends. The other 7 are somewhere in between. If you lack harmony of life, you will only see the one person who criticises and forms a judgement of the whole world based on that.

My Thoughts

The Courage to be Disliked is a very interesting book in a number of ways. Its use of the Socratic method itself was unusual – I had not seen that before in a book.

The ideas in the book seemed to have a good deal of overlap with Stoicism (though I should confess I have only a passing knowledge of Stoicism and it is an area I would like to learn more about).

The Courage to be Disliked was relatively easy to read, but rather difficult to summarise. Each chapter is very short, and the book is somewhat repetitive. Not in a bad way – it’s because a lot of the ideas are related, and the youth keeps challenging the philosopher. This isn’t such a problem when reading, but it did make it hard to summarise. Initially, everything sounded like it could be important and I felt like I ended up highlighting way too much. It took quite a bit of time to distil what I think the actual key points were (as opposed to mere examples or elaborations of the key points), and how they all tie together.

When I first read it, there were parts I found a bit odd. But later, when writing this summary, I was having an argument – an interpersonal conflict – with my sister. Some parts of the book on re-reading really hit home then. There are other parts that I think may take even more time to marinate and really sink in. It may be a book I’ll pick up again in a couple of years – perhaps after I’ve read a bit more on Stoicism.

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If you enjoyed this summary of The Courage to be Disliked, you may also like:

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• Book Summary: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert