It was an unlikely way to investigate the roots of liberal society, but three years ago Jules Evans began to meet up with other desperately anxious people in the back room of a pub in north London where they would devise ways of humiliating themselves in public. Each would be given a task and, one by one, they would step out into the nerve-jangling thoroughfares of Islington and ask shoppers for money, demand directions to the North Pole or sing loudly in supermarkets.
Social anxiety - the problem shared by those in Jules' group, and not to be confused with mere shyness - receives less sympathy than perhaps any psychological disorder short of its opposite, sociopathy. Jules and his colleagues suffered from a crippling terror of human contact. And their way of dealing with it had an authentic therapeutic provenance. They were practising the "shame attacking techniques" advocated by Albert Ellis - co-pioneer, with Aaron Beck, of cognitive behavioural therapy.
Unlike others in his group, however, Jules' own disorder had not emerged from an escalation of childhood fears, or ostracisation at school. Quite the reverse. He had gone to Eton, where his quicksilver wit and intellectual brio made him an alpha adolescent. His problem, he believes, derived not from his lack of social skills, but in his over-dependence on them. "I was one of those people with an excessive opinion of themselves," he says. "And the self is like the stock market. The stock gets a buzz around it and its value inflates beyond its fundamentals. And then it can go in the opposite direction, becoming excessively deflated."
In a crashing descent, aged 18, Jules flipped from alpha dude to gamma reject. The crisis was triggered by a series of disturbing LSD and cannabis experiences in which he found himself transported into a paralysed negative of his own self-image: mute and abject in the presence of other people, and so tormented by the experience that he was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Most cognitivists argue that resolving such extremes of self-assessment is a case of revising false beliefs. But Jules points out that it's not merely subjective. The world will conspire to reinforce your beliefs. Pulling himself together after a nervous breakdown, Jules' first job merely ratified his paranoia: at Tatler magazine - "Can you imagine a worse place to have social anxiety?" And at his next job, his colleagues made it clear to him that he was, indeed, unlikable. If you believe you are the object of derision, he says, you generate scenarios in which people really do despise you.
Jules views his Etonian background not as a peculiar social exception but as a high-pressure representation of British values. "The culture of Eton is indicative of a society built around self-presentation, social and communication skills. It was founded on the liberal arts and, in liberal society, God is replaced by other people. 'Man is the measure of all things' - that's the Protagorean definition of liberal society. The judgment of strangers - citizens, jury, voters, the market - is everything."
Caught in a five-year spiral of panic attacks and a horror of being judged by other people, Jules thought his drug experiences had damaged him neurologically. But a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder also gave him insight into patterns of acceptance and rejection that went to the heart of western civilisation. He'd had a series of nightmares in which a deranged tramp either pursued him, or needed to be saved by him. Recognising himself in the tramp, it also brought to mind Diogenes, the philosopher of cynicism, who in the 4th century BC spurned the absurdities of custom, turning himself into the wild "dog" of Athens to prove that social shame was nothing to fear.
Which is where Ellis took inspiration for the "shame attacking" exercises of cognitive therapy. By making an idiot of himself on the London streets, Jules not only conquered his panic attacks, but became fascinated by the way cognitive psychology had drawn its philosophical legacy from the stoicism inspired by Diogenes, above all the admonition of the stoic Epictetus that "we are disturbed not by events, but by the views we take of them".
By learning to survive without social skills, Jules, now 29, seems, paradoxically, to have found some of his old charm again, albeit streaked by realism. He has nearly finished a book about social anxiety, which is less a work of psychology than a history of liberal ideas as viewed through the practical precepts of cognitivism. "If ever there were a psychosocial disorder," he says, "then I had it." He sees social anxiety as an illness of liberalism, without wishing away the society that goes with it. "I would say not that I'm recovered, but recovering," he says. "We're all socially anxious."
