Two amazing truths Buddhist teachings identified before most of us did: (1) we are all a little mentally ill, and (2) we absorb the pathologies of our parents.
I say this in the nicest, most loving way. I carry no judgment about this. In fact, there is a little magic in being a little mad – there is fertility in chaos and it is not inherently problematic as long as it is grounded in some order. The wilder you are on the inside, the more structure you may need. That’s all. And about our parents, well you can refer to the last post about intergenerational knots: parental pathologies are simply a mode of transmission for “stuff” that needs a team to be figured out and resolved. We have to rub up on struggle to grow for one, and for two, I sincerely believe that we are on this earth to figure some things out. We all have a little piece of the puzzle, like little ants, carrying it forth to the hive to build something better, more intricate, more parsimonious, etc. You can make that as woo or as concrete as you wish.
Okay, now to the point. Humans are not rational beings. I don’t know if you ever thought they were, but many have and they clearly are not. In a philosophy course about human nature, our lovely professor whose name I forget reviewed quite a few major societal and economical crashes, thus identifying exactly how these assumptions of rationality had contributed to the massive-scale failures in our societies. For example, give everyone more money? Seems great, right? Humans would all be happier with more resources! Well, as it turns out, humans care about something called relative deprivation, which ties to things like status and your place compared to others you interact with socially (and now see on social media too – a clearly stellar addition to our very well-regulated selves). So, many humans are happier if they have more than their neighbors, no matter the absolute value of their current resources (i.e., most would rather have more than peers and be in misery, than be in luxury and have less than their peers). Wild, right?
Humans may think they simply want every comfort and goodness, and they may even tell you about their wants that you can help with quite openly, but then blow the process up in ways that defy all mathematical reasoning… Whether it is Poe’s imp of the perverse at play, or just wanting to know that they have control/are not being consumed by another/the past/culture/etc. (often at any cost), they really do some weird shit sometimes… Leaves you scratching your head, especially as you try to collaborate with them.
So, here we are, with our big brains, at the “pinnacle of evolution” (ha!), our big brains that vastly overestimate their own abilities and have developed to the point that they have made it really hard to manage being alive (let alone happy or at peace). We have these illusions of control and driving the bus; brittle illusions we can sort of see through, thus making us even more unstable and irrational. We often struggle with the deep truth of how little control we have and how much uncertainty there is. Look at how we’d rather judge, shame, or pathologize someone in dire straits, instead of having compassion and sitting with the uncomfortable fact that that could so easily be us. “They must have done something wrong or be bad people in some way” is a lot more comforting than realizing they are just. Like. Us. And yes, I love the idea that my consciousness or behavior are not merely epiphenomenal or self-emergent processes, that I am driving this bus! But you know what else I know? Surrendering can sometimes yield amazing results, especially when you trust the stability of your own core and your ability to work your ass off and recover. Allow, let go, and observe more often. Take control when it’s actually relevant and appropriate. Balance using acceptance and change strategies.
I would like to conclude this particular reflection with a great quote about all this, i.e., how we defend this notion of control that we pretend we have, and how it (among other things) makes us act irrationally. “It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself – as though that were so necessary – that men are still men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone that he will attain his object – that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated – chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know?” (one of the translations of Dostoevsky’s tales from the underground)
Basically, we’d often rather cut off our noses to spite our own faces, rather than surrender our sense of agency.
I’d like to invite you to think about where this may be coming up or have come up for you. Are there any places or moments in your life where you may have acted irrationally, entrenched your position during an argument where you knew/suspected you were wrong, supported yourself with logic/thinking errors to remain in control (e.g., denial, minimization, rationalizing), or engaged in any other form of rejecting reality (e.g., avoidance, dismissing the valid concerns of another, numbing, putting another down, ignoring the issue, getting angry about something else, projecting…)?
(for the most comprehensive list of biases that I have found to date, please consult the cognitive bias codex by John Manoogian III.
