RESISTANCE AND
RATIONALIZATION,
PART TWOR
esistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show
itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance
lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from
doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may
drive us to act in the face of fear.
Resistance doesn't want us to do this. So it brings in
Rationalization. Rationalization is Resistance's spin doctor.
It's Resistance's way of hiding the Big Stick behind its back.
Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and
impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a
series of plausible, rational justifications for why we
shouldn't do our work.
What's particularly insidious about the rationalizations
that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true.
They're legitimate. Our wife may really be in her eighth
month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home. Our
department may really be instituting a changeover that will
eat up hours of our time. Indeed it may make sense to put off
finishing our dissertation, at least till after the baby's born.
What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all
this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote
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