Conatus and the Will to Persist

A SCARS Institute Scam Victim Recovery Insight

What is Conatus?

The 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza used the term “Conatus” (Latin for “striving” or “endeavor”) to describe the fundamental, innate drive of every single thing in the universe to persist in its own existence. It is the core principle of his entire ethical and metaphysical system.

In essence, the conatus is the “will to live” or the “effort to be.” For Spinoza, it is not just a psychological desire but a universal, physical, and metaphysical law that applies to everything, from a stone to a star to a human being.

Key Aspects of the Conatus

A Universal Principle: Spinoza believed that everything in nature, as a mode of the single substance he called “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura), is endowed with this striving. A stone’s conatus is to resist being moved or broken; it “strives” to remain a stone. A plant’s conatus is to grow towards the sun, absorb water, and reproduce. An animal’s conatus is to seek food, avoid predators, and survive. In each case, the object is actively working to persevere in its current form for as long as possible.

The Essence of a Being:

For Spinoza, the conatus isn’t just something a being does; it is the very essence of that being. He famously stated, “Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persevere in its being.” This means that to understand what a thing fundamentally is, is to understand the specific way in which it strives to continue existing.

The Foundation of Human Psychology and Emotion:

The concept of conatus is the bedrock of Spinoza’s theory of human emotions. When this striving to persevere is successful, we experience it as joy or pleasure. When our striving is hindered or diminished, we experience it as sadness or pain. For example, eating food when you’re hungry enhances your power to exist (your conatus), which feels good. Being lied to in a scam diminishes your power to exist by destroying your trust, resources, and sense of self, which feels profoundly bad. All human desires, motivations, and emotional states can be traced back to this fundamental striving and its encounters with the external world.

The Drive for Self-Preservation:

The conatus is the ultimate expression of self-preservation. It is the instinctive force that makes an organism flee from danger and seek what is beneficial to it. This is why, for Spinoza, every being is ultimately self-interested. Even acts of altruism can be understood through the lens of conatus: helping another person can increase our own power to exist by creating a more stable, supportive social environment, which brings us joy.

Conatus and Freedom

For Spinoza, the key to human freedom and happiness is to understand the conatus, both our own and that of others. An ignorant person is a slave to their conatus, driven by fleeting passions and external stimuli without understanding why. They chase short-term pleasures that may actually lead to long-term diminishments of their power to exist.

A free and wise person, by contrast, uses reason to understand the true nature of their own striving. They can recognize which things genuinely enhance their power to exist in the long run (knowledge, healthy relationships, self-understanding) and which things only offer a temporary, fleeting pleasure at the cost of their long-term well-being. By aligning their actions with the rational understanding of their conatus, they achieve a state of empowerment and tranquility he called “freedom.”

In summary, Spinoza’s conatus is the universal, defining impulse of all things to continue to exist. It is the engine of all action, the source of all emotion, and the central concept around which his entire philosophy of nature, humanity, and ethics revolves.

Affecting Scam Victims

Spinoza’s concept of Conatus provides a powerful philosophical lens through which to understand the profound paralysis of traumatized scam victims. For a victim unable to move forward with recovery, their conatus, the fundamental drive to persevere in their being, has not disappeared. Instead, it has become hijacked, distorted, and trapped in a self-defeating loop.

Here is how this plays out, breaking down the victim’s state through the lens of Spinoza’s philosophy:

1. The Conatus Becomes Obsessed with Avoiding Pain, Not Enhancing Power

Spinoza argues that our core drive is to increase our “power of acting” or our capacity to exist and flourish. Joy is the experience of this increase, while sadness is the experience of a decrease. A scam delivers a cataclysmic blow to one’s power of acting. It shatters financial stability, social standing, and, most importantly, the internal sense of self-trust and agency.

For the victim who cannot move forward, their conatus goes into emergency mode. It correctly identifies the recovery process, the grief, the self-reflection, the vulnerability, as intensely painful and as a further decrease in their power of acting in the short term. Their conatus, in a state of panic, reorients its primary goal from “flourishing” to “avoiding any more pain at all costs.”

• The “Logic”: “Thinking about the trauma hurts. It makes me feel weak and foolish. Therefore, I will not think about it. I will stay busy. I will distract myself. My primary goal is to avoid the feeling of sadness.”
• The Spinozan Trap: This is a tragic misapplication of the conatus. The drive to persevere is now channeled into activities that prevent the very work needed for long-term perseverance. The victim is striving, but they are striving to remain stagnant, which is a slow, passive form of self-annihilation.

2. The Creation of a False Self to Preserve a Fragment of Being

Faced with the annihilation of their original identity, the victim’s conatus desperately clings to whatever it can to “persevere.” This often leads to the construction of a false, protective self. This might be the “I’m fine” self, the “too busy to care” self, or the “bitter and cynical” self.

• The “Logic”: “The person who trusted and got hurt is gone. That identity leads to pain. I must create a new identity that cannot be hurt again. I will be the person who is always on guard, who trusts no one.”
• The Spinozan Trap: This new persona is a shell. It has no real “power of acting” because it is defined by what it avoids, not what it pursues. It is a limited, impoverished mode of existence. The conatus is successfully “preserving” a fragment of the self, but in doing so, it is preventing the authentic, resilient self from being born. The striving is aimed at preserving a corpse.

3. The Inability to Form Adequate Ideas

For Spinoza, freedom and empowerment come from forming “adequate ideas”, a true, rational understanding of ourselves, our emotions, and our place in Nature. Trauma shatters this capacity. The victim is left with “inadequate ideas”: “I was stupid,” “I am unlovable,” “The world is a malevolent place.”

The victim who avoids recovery is trapped in a prison of these inadequate ideas. They refuse to engage in the work (therapy, support groups, self-reflection) that would allow them to form more adequate ideas, such as: “I was targeted by a sophisticated predator using my best qualities against me,” “My capacity for trust is a strength that I must now learn to pair with discernment,” or “While evil exists, goodness also exists, and I can choose to build my life around it.”

• The “Logic”: “Thinking about these ideas is too painful. It’s easier to just accept the simple, negative ideas I have now.”
• The Spinozan Trap: Without adequate ideas, the person is not free. They are a slave to their passions and to the distorted narrative created by the trauma. Their conatus is blind, thrashing about in the dark, unable to see the path that would lead to a true increase in their power to exist.

4. The Paradox of Self-Destruction

This is the ultimate tragedy. The victim’s conatus, the very essence of their striving to exist, becomes the engine of their own destruction. Every act of “staying busy” to avoid pain, every moment of numbing, every refusal to trust again is an act of perseverance in the short term that guarantees a greater diminishment of being in the long term.

It’s like a person drowning who, in their panic, refuses the life raft because climbing into it requires effort and the temporary discomfort of facing how cold they are. They are “striving” to avoid the discomfort of the climb, and in doing so, they ensure their ultimate end.

• The Path Forward: Realigning the Conatus
• For Spinoza, the solution is always reason and understanding. The path to recovery for a trapped victim is to help their conatus see the long-term truth. It is the difficult process of demonstrating that the short-term pain of grief work is not a threat to their existence, but the only path to a genuine, long-term increase in their power to act. It is about replacing the false goal of “avoiding pain” with the true goal of “building resilience.” It is about helping their fundamental striving to see that the life raft, despite the cold shock of getting in, is the only way to truly persevere.

How Can Victims Move Forward?

This is a profound question, and it touches on the very heart of Spinoza’s philosophy.

The critical first step is to reframe the problem: a person in this state does not suffer from a “lack of Conatus.” The Conatus is the fundamental essence of their being; it cannot be absent. What they suffer from is a profoundly distorted and self-sabotaging expression of their Conatus. Their striving to persevere has been hijacked and is now aimed at self-preservation through avoidance, which is a slow path to self-destruction.

Overcoming this is not about generating a new will to live, but about realigning their existing, desperate striving with a path that leads to genuine flourishing. It is about turning their ship away from the whirlpool of avoidance and toward the open sea of empowerment.

Here is how someone can begin to overcome this state, framed through a Spinozan lens:

1. The Shift from Avoiding Pain to Seeking Strength (The Fundamental Reorientation)

The core work is to consciously reframe the goal of recovery. The victim’s Conatus is currently screaming: “Avoid the pain of memory at all costs!” This must be slowly and gently replaced with a new, more rational understanding: “Engage with the past in order to increase my future will to exist.”

How to do this:

This starts with language. Instead of seeing therapy or grief work as “reliving the trauma,” it must be framed as “learning the terrain of the wound.” It is not punishment for what happened; it is an intelligence-gathering mission. The mission’s objective is to understand the scammer’s tactics, your own vulnerabilities, and the mechanics of trauma and grief so you can build better defenses. This reframes the work from a painful ordeal into a strengthening act of strategic self-preservation. The Conatus can get behind a mission; it struggles to get behind self-flagellation.

2. Harnessing Tiny, Adequate Ideas (The Power of Active Understanding)

Spinoza believed that freedom comes from “adequate ideas”, true, rational understanding. A traumatized mind is flooded with “inadequate ideas” (e.g., “I am stupid,” “I can’t trust anyone,” “My life is over”). Trying to argue against these massive, emotionally charged ideas is futile. The key is to build tiny, unassailable islands of adequate understanding.

How to do this:

Start small and external. The first adequate idea is not about you; it’s about the scam. Learn everything you can about the specific type of scam you experienced. Understand the psychological manipulation tactics like love bombing and future-faking. Read about the psychology of scams and the neurobiology of trauma. Each new piece of factual knowledge is an “adequate idea” that displaces an “inadequate” one.

• Inadequate Idea: “I was a fool to believe them.”
• Adequate Idea: “Love bombing is a sophisticated manipulation tactic that mimics genuine intimacy to bypass rational defenses.”

By building these external, adequate ideas, you slowly create a foundation of rationality that your Conatus can stand on. It gives your striving to persevere a foothold of solid ground in the quicksand of emotion.

3. The Calculus of Joy: Actively Seeking Small Increases in Power

For Spinoza, joy is the experience of an increase in one’s strength of acting. A person in despair feels no joy because their power is at a nadir. The strategy is to consciously engineer tiny, measurable moments of joy by creating small increases in will.

• How to do this: This is not about “cheering up.” It is about taking action. The Conatus is about striving, not passively feeling.
• Financial Will: If finances were lost, the smallest act of financial agency can be powerful. Creating a realistic budget, saving $5, or canceling an unused subscription is an increase in your financial power.
• Acknowledge it. This is a moment of joy for your Conatus.
• Physical Will: Going for a 10-minute walk. Eating one nourishing meal. Getting 7 hours of sleep. These are not chores; they are acts of increasing your body’s power to exist. Your Conatus responds to this.
• Knowledge Power: Learning one new thing (see point #2).

Each of these actions is a message to your Conatus: “See? We are not just surviving. We are increasing our capacity to act. This is a path worth striving for.”

4. Finding an External Anchor for the Conatus (The Power of Community)

Isolation is the poison that allows the distorted Conatus to thrive. The victim is trapped in a feedback loop with their own pain. Spinoza understood that humans are social beings, and our power to exist is magnified through positive associations with others.

How to do this:

The Conatus needs an external object to strive for with. This is the role of a support group, a trusted friend, or a good therapist. The goal is not just to vent. The goal is to join your striving with another’s. When you hear another person say, “I feel that way too,” your own burden is lightened, a small increase in power. When you offer support to someone else, you feel effective, a small increase in power.

The group’s collective Conatus becomes a life raft that can pull an individual’s drowning Conatus out of its self-absorbed loop.

5. The Act of Will: Choosing to Understand the “Why”

Ultimately, Spinoza’s philosophy calls for an act of will, a rational decision to prioritize understanding over passion. For the victim, this is the moment they stop asking “Why did this happen to me?” as a cry of despair and start asking it as a genuine scientific inquiry.

How to do this:

This is the culmination of the previous steps. Armed with adequate ideas, having experienced small increases in will, and supported by a community, the person can finally look at the trauma not as a shameful event, but as a data set. They can analyze it with detachment. “Here is where my empathy was exploited. Here is where my hope was used against me. Here is what I will do differently.” This act of rational analysis is the ultimate triumph of the mind over the passions. It is the Conatus finally being guided by wisdom, and it is the most powerful act of self-preservation there is.

Overcoming this despair is not about finding a new will to live. It’s about taking the desperate, misdirected will to survive that is already burning inside you and gently, systematically, and rationally teaching it a better way to strive.

Prof. (Emeritus) Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.
July 2026