The Courage to Be Disliked
Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, 2013
Executive Summary
A philosopher and a young man talk for five nights. The young man is angry, unhappy, and convinced that his past explains him; the philosopher is an Adlerian who refuses every premise the young man offers. What follows is less a lecture than a demolition, conducted in the Socratic form: the youth objects, the philosopher reframes, the youth objects again, and by the fifth night the objections have run out.
The argument is a chain. The past does not determine the present, because the present uses the past for its own purposes. Every problem that matters is a problem between people. Most of the pain in those relationships comes from carrying tasks that belong to someone else, or from demanding that someone else carry ours. The remedy is community feeling: the shift from a life organized around being judged to a life organized around contributing. And the whole of it must be lived in the present, because a life spent waiting for a destination is a life not lived.
The title names the price of the last step. A person who needs to be liked cannot be free, so freedom requires the willingness to be disliked by someone. The Japanese original appeared from Diamond in 2013; the English edition followed from Atria Books in 2018. (Publisher’s page)
5 Core Arguments
The past is not a verdict. Adlerian psychology is teleological where Freud is aetiological: it asks what a behavior is for, not what caused it. On this account trauma is not an event that plants a cause in a person and forces an outcome; it is a story the present assembles to justify a purpose it has already chosen. The book’s famous example is anger: the philosopher argues that a person manufactures rage in order to win an argument, rather than erupting because the rage was caused. If that is true, then the person who says he cannot change is not reporting a fact about his history. He is announcing a decision.
All problems are interpersonal. Alone in the universe, a person would have almost no problems, because there would be no one to compare himself with, no one to disappoint, no one to lose. Inferiority is the book’s test case: it is not an objective fact about a body or a bank account but a subjective construction produced by comparison. The superiority complex is the same wound wearing armor. Life is not a competition, and the three tasks that structure it, work, friendship, and love, are tasks of relationship rather than tasks of ranking.
Separate your tasks from everyone else’s. The question that does the most work in the book is whose task this is. A child’s learning belongs to the child; a parent may assist and must then release the outcome. A colleague’s opinion of you belongs to the colleague. Most anxiety is the attempt to control a task that was never ours, and most resentment is the refusal to let someone else carry what is. Approval-seeking is the paradigm case: it hands another person the card that decides how you feel. Freedom, the philosopher says, is being disliked, because a life organized around avoiding disapproval is a life organized around someone else’s judgment.
You are not the center of the world. The goal of the interpersonal life is community feeling: the sense of belonging to a larger whole and being of use within it. That requires horizontal relationships rather than vertical ones, which is why the book rejects both rebuke and praise. Praise is a judgment delivered from above, and a person who works for praise is still working for a verdict. Encouragement replaces evaluation, and the ground of worth shifts from productivity to existence: a person is of use by being present, not only by performing. (Diamond’s page for the Japanese edition)
Live earnestly in the here and now. Life is not a line running toward a destination; it is a series of moments, and the only place a life is actually lived is the present one. The book pairs this with self-acceptance rather than self-affirmation: not declaring yourself wonderful, but accepting what is and working with it. Confidence in other people, contribution to them, and the courage to be ordinary complete the picture. Meaning is not discovered in the world; it is assigned by the person living the life.
Adler and the Stoics
Epictetus opens the Enchiridion by dividing what is in our power from what is not. The separation of tasks is that division applied to relationships: another person’s judgment is not in my power, so it is not my task, and the peace that follows is the peace of having stopped reaching for it. The two traditions also agree about emotion. For the Stoics, anger is a judgment and therefore something we do; for Adler, anger is manufactured to serve a purpose. Neither will accept that passion simply happens to us.
The differences are just as instructive. Stoic freedom is independence from externals, and the sage is sufficient to himself. Adlerian freedom is relational, and its endpoint is contribution rather than self-sufficiency: the philosopher’s answer to a broken community is not withdrawal but the instruction that someone has to start. Stoicism trains the individual to need less; Adler sends the individual back into the room.
The form of the book is itself part of the argument. Plato wrote dialogues because philosophy was a practice conducted between people, and this book borrows the shape for the same reason: the reader is meant to be argued out of a position, not lectured into one.
A Respectful Disagreement
The first night is the strongest writing in the book and the most dangerous idea in it. Distinguishing the claim that the past need not dictate the future from the claim that trauma does not exist is not a quibble; it is the difference between an encouragement and a denial. Post-traumatic stress is a clinical condition, not a story a patient tells to avoid a decision, and a reader who has been through the first will not be helped by being told the second. The useful half survives without the false half. A person can be wounded and still be free to act.
The doctrine of chosen unhappiness has the same flaw at a wider aperture. It is bracing when the obstacle is a habit and cruel when the obstacle is an illness, a wage, or a locked door. The book’s examples are almost all interior, which makes the argument feel universal and leaves it silent about the cases where the constraint is external and real.
Separation of tasks, meanwhile, can curdle into a philosophy of withdrawal. In a family or an institution, tasks are shared whether or not the parties agree on the boundary, and telling someone that the other person’s failure is not their task can be true and still be an excuse. The book has no account of power, only of boundaries.
Finally, the dialogue form stacks the deck. The youth raises the reader’s objections and loses every exchange, usually to an aphorism rather than to evidence. The conversion at the end is dramatic; it is not argued.
Bottom Line
The Courage to Be Disliked is the map, and its sequel is the compass. Read in that order, the pair makes more sense than either book alone: the first supplies the reframe, the second tries to live inside it. Taken by itself, this one is best read as a provocation. Its value is the shock of being told that a grievance you have carried for years is a decision you are still making; its danger is believing the reframe is complete.
For the sequel, which turns the theory toward teaching, self-reliance, and love, see The Courage to Be Happy.
Buy it from Simon & Schuster.
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