This Is Your Manifesto: Slow Down, Stand Up, Speak for Yourself!

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SECOND THOUGHTS

The Italian word manifesto, derived from the Latin manifestus, meaning “clear” or “conspicuous,” means to reveal (clarify), to declare (assert), and to demonstrate (protest)

Manifestos can be addictive! This is my third one and it practically dictated itself to me in the bosom of a busy schedule. My first manifesto, a call for calm deliberation before action, the Slow thought manifesto published in Aeon Magazine,¹ was featured in Julian Hanna’s The Manifesto Handbook in the section on “Acceleration and reaction.”² It was translated into Italian and Portuguese and received a lot of attention from the French press in both Quebec and France, and just recently inspired an article by French psychiatrist Samuel Bouloudnine, MD, about mobile mental health crisis teams, exhorting them take time to meet the patient and to adapt to their rhythm and choices.³

As manifestos go, that first effort was overly long. The spirit of the manifesto is something you devour on the run, fast food for the fevered brains of militants who are manning the barricades, storming the ramparts. My second manifesto was even longer, a detailed appraisal of the evolution of social psychiatry and a call for a 21st century social psychiatry.⁴

It is possible, of course, to “announce that the moment has come to make a declaration,” as my mentor Alain Badiou does in his Second Manifesto for Philosophy with a tightly reasoned but lengthy argument.⁵ That intense philosophical moment came about in France during the 1960s and 1980s. Badiou’s introduction is an apology for his first manifesto filled with the bitterness and regret of the late 1980s for the French left. He revisited the manifesto form, judging that the moment had truly come for the ideas that were elaborated in great length in his masterwork, Being and Event,⁶ and needed a compact expression. He took up that task again soon after in his Philosophy for Militants with its blood red lettering and the image of a red automatic handgun splashed against a jet-black cover.⁷

For me, too, this second stab at a version of my slow thought manifesto reheats the leftovers that did not make it into the first one. This time, I take up the dialogue again as I have done in other work⁸ and call for narrative and nuance, dialogue and diversity, slowness and subjectivity.

This Is Your Manifesto: Slow Down, Stand Up, Speak for Yourself!

1. Speak for yourself. You do not represent anyone else.

Political corollary: We are in a crisis of representation, making representative democracy improbable.

2. The attempt to be objective only deepens your subjectivity and partisanship.

Neil Postman: “Technopoly is at war with subjectivity… Technopoly wishes to solve, once and for all, the dilemma of subjectivity. In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is a controlling metaphor and considered to the instrument of progress, subjectivity becomes unacceptable.”⁹

3. Look for meaning, not for truth.

Truth is a collective verdict in the slow cooker of time, not an individual alloy smelted in the crucible of the moment.

William James: “Neither the whole of the truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.”¹⁰

Neil Postman: “Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.”⁹

Social science corollary: We are in a crisis of replication in the social sciences.¹¹

4. Tell a story, do not recite facts.

Narratives are more convincing than facts.

Biological and scientific studies succeed by telling compelling stories.

Biology is really a set of stories – biological mechanisms work best as metaphors. Freud’s greatest accomplishment was not as “a man of science” as he hoped, but as a writer for which he won the prestigious Goethe Prize.

The story you tell should be your own story (see #1).

5. Understand complexity, celebrate diversity, tolerate ambiguity. Certitude is slippery.

At best, technique is a means, not an end. Better still to focus on meaning (see #3) and stories (see #4).

Neil Postman: “Diversity, complexity, and ambiguity of human judgment are enemies of technique.”⁹

6. Activists, militants and partisans do not write history. Slow thinkers do.

“We need a philosophy of Slow Thought to ease thinking into a more playful and porous dialogue about what it means to live” – from my Slow Thought Manifesto.¹

Radical corollary: Not only will the revolution not be televised, as Gil Scott-Heron warned, it will not be planned either.¹² It is an event—contingent, unpredictable, uncontrollable.⁶

7. Resist ideology, embrace complexity.

Ideology appeals to purity and principles but demands blind obedience through the suspension of disbelief (see #5).

It creates 2 kinds of people: true believers—and those who do not.

The best way to avoid binary thinking and polarization is to get used to thinking about connections, patterns, and relations.

Gregory Bateson exhorted us to look for “the pattern that connects.”¹³

8. Communication is a dialogue, not a monologue.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight about narratives is that even in a soliloquy on stage or an interior monologue in a story, the protagonist is in a dialogue with a presumed audience.¹⁴

St. Francis may have been talking to the birds, but he made sure that a human was within hearing distance of what he had to say.

Even in his Confessions, St. Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, he addresses the reader as a potential convert. In today’s parlance, he is making a pitch for your morals.

Relational corollary: The greatest gift we can give to each other is to listen, to witness, and to testify to each other’s stories.

9. Assume good will, but ask questions.

Post-modern, post-whatever society, has become transactional.

Everybody is making a pitch. Be careful—you are being recruited to a cause (see #7).

Be sure it is your own.

10. Pitching yourself—public relations is propaganda.

The dominant vehicle of communication is now advertising.

Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, literally wrote the books about public relations¹⁵ and propaganda.¹⁶

Politicians say that the only poll that matters is the election. Do not believe it—they do not. Ads and polls, campaigns and platforms are part of the political selling machine.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky called it “manufacturing consent.”¹⁷

The closest thing to an autobiography that philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wrote is called Selected Exaggerations.¹⁸

Norman Mailer called his autobiographical collection, Advertisements for Myself.¹⁹

Mentoring corollary: Look for people who are not making a pitch.

American cultural critic William Irwin Thompson²⁰ and French anthropologist René Girard²¹ are 2 masterly thinkers who did not sell out.

Thompson refused to do talk shows to sell his books and Girard rejected “the hordes of psychologists” to test his theories.

This alone endears them to me as mentors. Find your own.

Commentary by Claudia Gómez Robledo

I met Claudia Gómez Robledo last year when I was invited to conduct a Master Class at the International Annual Practicum organized by the CRISOL Centro de Postgrado en Terapia Familiar y de Pareja (CRISOL Postgraduate Centre for Family and Couple Therapy) in Mexico City, Mexico. We have collaborated on various projects ever since and she translates my articles into Spanish for the Boletín CRISOL, their systemic therapy newsletter. When I sent Claudia my manifesto, she replied with the following commentary:

You made me think. I perceive in a critical and coherent way that the meaning of the text lies in its rejection of the superficiality and manipulation of the digital era and politics, proposing a return to authenticity, complexity, and slow dialogue.

It is a reflective critique and a call to action in the face of the dynamics of contemporary society, marked by technology, ideology, and mass communication, which leads to a loss of authenticity.

It not only invites me but also affirms me in being the narrator of my own life, to think beyond ideologies and to listen genuinely, resisting the machinery that reduces me to a product. It is a manifesto for inner freedom in a world that pushes us to be commodities or mere passive spectators.

I hold onto the idea of advocating for a more human, complex, and conscious approach to life, resisting the traps of simplification, propaganda, and uniformity imposed by modern systems like technopoly, social media, and political structures. I could not agree more with the pursuit of a return to slow thinking, personal narrative, and authentic relational connections as an antidote to alienation and superficiality.

Saludos,

Claudia

Resources

Here are some sources and resources for balancing the calm pace of slow thought and slow psychiatry with the imperative mood of the manifesto:

• Carl Honoré. In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. HarperSanFrancisco; 2004.
• Carlo Petrini. Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should be Good, Clean, and Fair. Rizzoli Publications; 2013.
• Vincenzo Di Nicola. Take your time: seven pillars of a slow thought manifesto. Aeon. February 27, 2018. Accessed April 9, 2025. https://aeon.co/essays/take-your-time-the-seven-pillars-of-a-slow-thought-manifesto

On the other end of the spectrum, the manifesto is quick, urgent and imperative, demanding that you seize the moment:

• Julian Hannah. The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form. Zero Books; 2019.

Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist, and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is professor of psychiatry & addiction medicine at the University of Montreal. He is also clinical professor of psychiatry & behavioral health at The George Washington University and president of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). Dr Di Nicola has received numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships, and fellowships. Of note, Dr Di Nicola was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (FCAHS), given the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and is a Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists (FACPsych). His work straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr Di Nicola’s publications include: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of a prize from the Quebec Psychiatric Association), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021).

Claudia Goméz Robledo is a family therapist and community organizer in Mexico City, Mexico. She was born in Bogotá, Colombia and raised in Managua, Nicaragua. She has a Master’s in Systemic Therapy with a ⁠Specialization in Couples Therapy from the CRISOL Centro de Postgrado en Terapia Familiar y de Pareja (Postgraduate Centre for Family and Couple Therapy) in Mexico City and is the Executive Director of COLECTIVO 7 Mental Health, a therapeutic space dedicated to mental health with an integrative model, combining the expertise of various therapeutic tools.

References

1. Di Nicola V. Take your time: seven pillars of a slow thought manifesto. Aeon. February 27, 2018. Accessed April 9, 2025. https://aeon.co/essays/take-your-time-the-seven-pillars-of-a-slow-thought-manifesto

2. Hannah J. The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form. Zero Books; 2019.

3. Bouloudnine S. Équipes mobiles: Hâtez-vous lentement! Santé Mentale. 2025;294.

4. Di Nicola V. “A person is a person through other persons”: a manifesto for 21st century social psychiatry. In: RR Gogineni, AJ Pumariega, R Kallivayalil, et al, eds. The WASP Textbook on Social Psychiatry: Historical, Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Perspectives. Oxford University Press; 2023:44-67.

5. Badiou A. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Burchill L, trans. Polity; 2011.

6. Badiou A. Being and Event. Feltham L, trans. Continuum; 2005.

7. Badiou A. Philosophy for Militants. Bosteels B, trans. Verso; 2011.

8. Di Nicola V. Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. Atropos Press; 2011.

9. Postman N. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage; 2011.

10. James W. On a certain blindness in human beings. In: W James, On Some of Life’s Ideals: On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, What Makes a Life Significant. Henry Holt & Company; 1900:3-46.

11. Replication crisis. Wikipedia. Accessed April 9, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

12. Gil Scott-Heron. Wikipedia. Accessed April 9, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron

13. Bateson G. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bantam Books; 1979.

14. Bakhtin MM. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Holquist M, ed. Emerson C, Holquist M, trans. University of Texas Press; 1981.

15. Bernays EL. Public Relations. Bellman; 1945.

16. Bernays EL. Propaganda. Horace Livewright; 1928.

17. Herman ES, Chomsky N. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books; 1988.

18. Sloterdijk P. Selected Exaggerations – Conversations and Interviews 1993-2012. Klein B, ed. Margolis K, trans. Polity; 2016.

19. Mailer N. Advertisements for Myself. Harvard University Press; 1959.

20. Thompson WI. At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture. Harper & Row; 1971.

21. Girard R. Violence and the Sacred. Gregory P, trans. Johns Hopkins University Press; 1977.