development. What I am suggesting is that a habit of introspection over the course of one entire life, or at least one’s entire adult life, can make a difference.
At the most generic level it would seem that the capacity for introspection may be something like a muscle. With regular use it becomes flexible and strong and can be very helpful to its owner. Without regular use it atrophies and becomes useless. In the most extreme case of neglect of the inner life, one not only loses the capacity to introspect deeply; one also can lose the awareness that there even exists any significant internal territory to explore through introspection. Such a loss makes one extremely vulnerable to the Hitlers of the world, which in turn makes all of us vulnerable. Just as there is increasing evidence that regular mental activity can counteract the loss of cognitive capacity that often accompanies aging, so regular introspective activity could be expected to sustain the capacity to introspect.
Although the Hitlers of the world give a dramatic lesson about our vulnerability as a species if we lose sight of our internal resources, more mundane examples abound. The young retail clerk who cannot make the simplest of change without using the calculator built into the cash register has lost sight of an internal ability to calculate. The weatherman who tells us that tomorrow will be a miserable day because rain is predicted invites us to forget that we can decide for ourselves whether we enjoy rainy weather. The increasingly bizarre warning labels that come with electronic appliances, telling us to refrain from all sorts of things that would only be done by a person too handicapped to live outside an institution or a person