“Most people spend nearly all their energy trying not to change. This is what the philosopher [sic] William James meant when he wrote the mind’s main function was to be a fortress for protecting your ego from reality. When the mind has to accommodate a new fact, James argued, it doesn’t settle on the change to its model of reality that is most likely to reflect reality. It protects the fortress, calculating the smallest possible modification to its bulwarks that can account for the new fact.
It's not just brilliant, it's astonishingly modern. It's not out of the question for the late 19th century, because Freud and Nietzsche were both working this territory. Still, the formulation sounds contemporary (to us, not William James). Can anybody point me to where James wrote about this?
(It's glib, though, to say "The real key is Self-Awareness with Discipline". This is extraordinarily hard to do and to take it as anything less than a life-long task, let alone treat it as an item on a to-do list, is naive. Even one tiny example where you catch yourself doing what the quote describes is worth more than a grand general statement.)
Edit: after thinking about this for a bit, the quote seems understated. Even as much as "the smallest possible modification to its bulwarks that can account for the new fact" is atypical. Far more often than that, the new fact is either elided from consciousness or ejected by the mental equivalent of antibodies, and the "bulwarks" remain as they were.