Pronoia

I recently learned a cool new word — “pronoia”.

The online Collins Dictionary entry for this word is as follows: in psychology, a belief that the world is conspiring in one’s favour.(1)

‘Pronoia’ can thus be seen as the humorous flip-side of ‘paranoia’. I say humorous because believing the whole universe is working to benefit you seems self-centered in the extreme, something naive, laughable and calling to mind tragi-comic figures like Dr Pangloss in Voltaire’s novel Candide or Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Those characters refuse to see reality for what it is, living in fantasy worlds they stubbornly cling to even in the face of tragic experiences to the contrary.

In a modern psychological context, pronoia has a slightly different and more serious meaning, denoting the pathological condition of believing, (contrary to the overwhelming facts) that everyone loves and admires you. Pronoia in this context is associated with various forms of delusional grandiosity and narcissism.

Pronoia has thus had largely negative connotations. More recently however in 2016, the psychologist Adam Grant used the term in a more lighthearted way to mean a positive sense that those around you have your back. In his TED talk Grant speaks about how successful organizations are typically dominated by a culture of ‘givers’ who look out for and promote each others’ interests. In such organizations a sense of pronoia is not fantasy but reflective of reality.(2)

The positive sense of the word pronoia however has more ancient provenance. It derives from the Greek ‘pro’ meaning before, and ‘noos’ meaning mind or thought. The online Oxford Reference Dictionary has the following entry: Pronoia, literally “forethought,” “care,” or “provision,” was the common Byzantine theological term for divine providence.

This entry places the origins of the word much too late as it was already used by Homer to simply mean divine foresight.(3) The word was most prominently used by the Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome though. The website ViaStoica.com advises that for the Stoics pronoia meant the divine forethought of the cosmos. It provides the following definition: Pronoia (πρόνοια) – Providence – Rational and benevolent foresight governing the cosmos.

I think the Stoic sense of pronoia is a valuable one but only if updated and re-interpreted along naturalistic lines. The Stoics today are mainly known for their philosophy about how to live a fulfilling and meaningful life in an ethical way. Perhaps their most famous maxim was that to live the best life one had to focus on what was within one’s control and to ignore what was not. In the pithy words of Epictetus, “Bear and renounce”, meaning learn to endure hardship, turn your mind away from life’s deprivations and focus instead on what you can do to improve things.

Ultimately, the Stoics argued, the only things we really controlled were our own thoughts and emotions. We might not be able to prevent all manner of misfortune whether disease, injury, injustice, natural catastrophe or poverty, or control what others thought or said about us, but we could control how we reacted to such things. Bad habits like fretting about possibilities that might never eventuate, dwelling on lost opportunities and past injustices, or over-reacting to current woes, was to preoccupy ourselves with things we couldn’t change anyway, only making whatever real problems we had worse. The Stoics argued that the most noble and rewarding goal in life was thus the pursuit of virtue. Virtue in their eyes meant being indifferent to fortune whether good or bad, and developing personal qualities like courage, forbearance (the ability to restrain negative emotions like jealousy, fear and anger), justice (treating others with fairness) and using reason to guide all our decisions. This was not just a theoretical issue for the Stoics, they put a lot of time into developing what have been called “philosophical exercises” to cultivate such qualities in a disciplined and regular way.

Stoic ethics and practice were not developed in a vacuum though but within a theoretical framework about reality as a whole. Stoics had theories about cosmology, physics and religion that reinforced their ethical beliefs and practices. In particular they believed the cosmos was governed by a kind of reasoning power they called the Logos, Zeus or Deus which coordinated all things according to a divine plan. In exercising their faculty of reason, humans were thus employing the divine essence of the universe, acting in accordance with destiny and the guiding forces of nature. Hence Stoic maxims like amor fati (love your fate), and “act according to nature.”

We no longer believe in fate, or the gods, or divine plans but there is a sense in which the universe is conspiring to do us good. Too often in life we think of ourselves as individuals jostling against others, like atoms in a pot of boiling water. But think about all the people who have helped you on your journey through life: from parents and family to old friends you shared adventures with in your youth; neighbours who help you out on occasion; your teachers, classmates, and work colleagues; to the nurses and doctors who attended you in hospital once; the cashier who is always up for a chat and the podcaster who thanked you for donating to his channel, to the anonymous people who keep you in comfort and security, who care for or teach your children, who mind your elderly parents, who stand by ready to respond in emergencies.

Think of the vast web of people who keep society and civilization going so you can sip your coffee in the morning, take a weekend drive or a hot shower. How many acts of kindness, consideration, gratitude, help, solidarity, civility, care, tenderness, respect, charity, duty, professionalism and love have gotten you to this point, making you who you are and sustaining your whole way of life? Billions no doubt, possibly trillions.

On an even bigger scale, ponder how not one single animal, plant, bacterium or fungus would be viable if the size of the earth’s orbit were even slightly different because it would be either too hot or too cold to sustain the complex chemistry necessary to life. Ponder the fact that the size and position of Jupiter are just enough to draw millions of meteors towards it that might otherwise cause mass extinctions here on earth, or the fact that had the constants of nature, like the strength of gravity, settled on different values in the first few seconds of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, things like stars, planets and galaxies would never have been able to form.

It would be wrong to suggest all this happened because of some divine plan or that it occurred for the purpose of benefiting you or humanity in general. Then again to describe this congenial alignment of forces as merely ‘fortuitous’, ‘serendipitous’ or mere ‘dumb luck’, fails to capture how extraordinary it is or why a sense of gratitude or wonder might be appropriate. In either case a naturalistic sense of pronoia, appreciating that we never truly ‘go it alone’ but are carried along by thousands of others, and indeed the entirety of cosmic history is something we should reflect upon once in a while.

In light of the above considerations, the following naturalistic definition of pronoia suggests itself: Pronoia — an attitude of appreciation for the vast number of people and natural events contributing positively to your existence and good fortune.

The great Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, expressed a sense of pronoia more eloquently though when he said “The works of the gods are full of providence … every part of nature benefits from that which is brought by the nature of the Whole … do not die a grouch, but in true grace and heartfelt gratitude to the gods …”(4)

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Notes:
1 https://www.collinsdictionary.com/submission/422272/pronoia
2 https://youtu.be/fxbCHn6gE3U?si=GghtjwMWvIpl1Vcm
3 see R.L. Gordon, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible Online,
https://https://referenceworks.brill.com/search?q=Pronoia@source=/db/dddo
4 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 2, para 3.