All That Matters

Mind It

One of the things we all need to “be good” is to have a conscience. We must mind our actions and care about their consequences. We need to program ourselves to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong, to instinctively seek the first while aiming for the best global outcome allowed by our limited individual aptitudes.

Believe it or not, most of us (about 80%) are born with a moral compass1. Most babies instinctively reject those who harm others and, most impressively, they also seem to seek retribution against those who do that, meaning we are also born with a sense of justice. (We should probably smother the remaining 20% of babies in the crib.)

The fact that both of those notions are, as a rule, innate to human beings shows how much they matter. If natural evolution made them an intrinsic part of [most of] us, it’s possible that we may not even have survived this far without them. Still, when we look around, what we see is chaos. We see murderers, thieves and conmen; we see countless parasites taking advantage of others for a living. And this happens for two reasons: first, because babies are not perfect – we are also born with plenty of flaws. And second, because what happens after we are born strongly reconfigures our moral values.

I wish I could tell you how to improve your personal moral code and how to make it so that you automatically act upon what you believe is ethical, sticking to it no matter what. But I can’t, because far too many experiences we may have in our lives can alter our ethics and ethos. Each one of our minds is also unique, our intellects differently limited, our emotions and moods unpredictable, and everything combined makes this a problem that cannot be solved by a single, all-encompassing answer. But I can make one general suggestion.

Personally, I believe the most significant thing we can do to keep our moral compass pointing north is, ironically, to suffer. Only by enduring pain ourselves can we truly know the harm we can and might cause to others. It’s the only way to know, in practice and for sure, how bad it is. It’s the only way to truly understand why anyone [who doesn’t deserve it] should be spared from having to endure it.

We don’t feel a high enough level of empathy for someone who’s ill unless we’ve been ailed ourselves by the same condition in the past. We don’t care nearly as much as we pretend to about someone who lost a child unless we’ve lost one of our own. Hearing about another person being fired from their job means nothing to us unless we have personally once been unemployed, homeless and starving.

Perhaps that’s why some Catholics say “pain brings us closer to Jesus.” Probably not but, inadvertently, they might have been on to something there.

Although suffering is only one way to improve our conscience, only a part of the solution, it’s also not so simply effective as it initially sounds, because too much of it, and especially too early in one’s life, can lead to traumas, loss of empathy, or downright sadism, which is the very opposite of what we are aiming for. Balancing how much we need to suffer to avoid causing it to others is an issue on its own.

Out of the pains we can suffer, I’d say humiliation is the most apt to improve one’s personal moral code. It makes a person aware of their own limitations, showing them that they are flawed, that they can make stupid decisions and embarrassing mistakes, and also that they can be punished if they come to deserve it. It shows us we are not so much better than everyone else as we like to think. Being humiliated is a direct and somewhat traumatic psychological hit, working as a frequent and long-lasting reminder of one’s imperfections. And even minor humiliations are unpleasant enough for anyone to never want to feel them again, yet being nothing that physically maims or is otherwise too crippling.

Although for the time being that’s the best I can offer as a means to improve our individual moralities, I will spend many of the upcoming pages talking about our flaws as individuals, as societies, and as a species. And all of that, so long as it makes you wonder, should help you tune your own moral compass a little better.

Before we leave the subject of “how to [generally] conduct ourselves properly,” I must remind you of one thing: that to try is the best we can do.

Since we are all flawed, with varying degrees of competence in many different areas and unable to accurately predict the future, mistakes are bound to happen in spite of our best intentions. Even those among us who do have a proper conscience and effectively act upon it, meaning to do well, fail every now and then. There’s nothing we can do about that.

Some people like to say that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” What is the road to heaven paved with, then? Bad ones? Certainly not. (People go around repeating any nonsense so long as it sounds nice.)

To be a good person and contribute to the betterment of humanity’s existence, all you have to do is try – to try to do what is right.

What Drives Us

When I was 15 years old, I met a guy who was on his late twenties. He was a judge and, over multiple occasions, he tried to teach a few friends and me some unusual things. Besides proposing some philosophical debates, he taught us how to detect lies by observing people’s eyes, how to improve our peripheral vision, some ninjutsu moves, and he promised to teach us things such as how to become aware inside a dream and live an entire life in it in a single night.

We never got to most of it and, honestly, I was skeptical about most of his promises. I did once see, though, with my own eyes, him getting “stuck to the ground.” He told us to push him with all our strength while he stood still with his feet aligned, and none of us – including a guy who weighed 110kg (about 250 pounds) – could move him a single millimeter. When he told us how to do it and we tried it ourselves, we could all push each other a whole step back with a single finger. To this day, I still don’t know how that was even possible. Anyway, as decades passed since we lost contact, I came to realize that that guy was actually right about many things he told us. I now suspect he was indeed as wise as we, being young and stupid, believed back then.

One of the things I remember him telling us is that humans are driven by two major forces: avoiding pain and pursuing happiness. From what I’ve said before, you already know I agree with that. But my point here is an extension of it: to enjoy ourselves is not our priority – our top priority is to avoid suffering.

Seeking enjoyment – making life actually worth living – only comes into play after every single item on the “pain list” has been crossed out. We cannot enjoy a good meal if we are nauseated. We don’t go out to play if we are sick, and we can’t do it inside either if we have migraines. We are unable to relax when we have work to do and a deadline nears. We cannot have sex when in dire need of using the toilet, or watch a movie while having a heart attack.

Bad things always take precedence over good ones.

Pain is also much stronger than pleasure.

Imagine the best case scenario for your life:

You feel great! You have an amazing family, great friends, much love and many lovers. You hold the power of life-and-death over hundreds of millions of people, owning yachts, planes, cars, palaces and bank accounts to match an oligarch’s but without having had to exploit countless people for any of it. Your own private island is bigger than Manhattan, you have everything money can possibly buy, and you honestly earned all you have, having contributed more than anyone else on Earth to the advancement of mankind. Your knowledge and understanding of the universe and everything contained in it are second to none, and your conscience is crystal clear. You spend your time doing whatever you please, with no restraints other than self-imposed ones. The entire human race literally worships you, and you are still 22.

Okay. There’s a lot in there – a lot of joy to enjoy.

Now imagine the worst case scenario:

You have literally nothing and live on the streets. Naked. Suddenly, a drunk guy shows up and pees on you while you are sleeping on the sidewalk. In the winter. The next passerby pours gasoline over your body and lights you on fire. With matches. You wake up in a public hospital with third degree burns covering 97% of your body. And blind. The police show up and question you about what happened. You tell them the whole truth, and end up being arrested. Presumed guilty. In prison, your life goes on from one rape to the next. Appeals denied. You get ill often, and physically and psychologically tortured on a daily basis. Hell is real.

Okay. There’s a lot in there, too – a lot of agony to endure.

What if I said you could live the first scenario mentioned above for twenty years, but then you’d have to spend the following twenty living the second? Would you take that deal?

Only an idiot would.

Getting beaten up is much worse than beating someone else is good. The best meal in the world is not worth eating if it causes food poisoning. Hate is much stronger than love, it lasts forever, and we can loathe billions of people at once whereas managing to love a single one is already a nearly-impossible task. Nothing is worth getting tortured for.

This life’s pleasures are no match for its pains. The relationship between good and bad things is heavily asymmetrical in favor of the second.

To make matters worse, suffering is perpetual while happiness is ephemeral.

Buy that Ferrari you have been dreaming about since you were a [greedy] kid, or marry that beautiful girl you had a massive crush on in high school. See how long that “merry age” lasts.

Or imagine you have achieved everything you ever wanted, and far ahead of schedule. But then you trip and accidentally drop your 1-year-old son down the stairs. You jump out trying to catch him, but you fail and the baby dies. As you tumble down after him, you break your spine and end up in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, unable to ride it on your own because you can no longer move your arms either. How do you think you’d feel?

A single tragedy is enough to ruin any and all happiness you might have, forever.

All good things end or can otherwise be destroyed. Plenty of bad things last for life and nothing but death can fix a large number of them.

Life is a constant struggle against pain, fear, stress, anxiety. It is the need to study, work, and find a suitable mate, to eat, use the toilet and sleep. It is the nightly prayer that begs for nothing terrible to befall us in the morrow. The very word “need” derives from suffering: whenever it’s applicable, it refers to something that must be done to prevent some kind of pain – that’s what distinguishes “needing” from “wanting,” the strictly necessary from the superfluous.

Living, on the other hand, is what we get to do during the few moments when we don’t need to do something.

One could argue that that qualifies human life as not worth living. And I would agree, if not for believing in the possibility of something actually good and lasting in our very distant future.

Though I cannot say for sure, it seems fair to assume that this “pain over pleasure” principle I’ve been talking about is valid for any primitive organic life form with a functional neurological system. I doubt ours is the only life that sucks.

As something to reinforce the idea that human life is indeed miserable, there’s this thing not many know about called “fading affect bias.”

The FAB is a mechanism our brains developed and use to make the emotions we feel when we recall memories fade. It makes them fade slower when the memory is good, and faster when the memory is bad. Though the contents of our memories are not altered, how we perceive them is. As time passes, we are programmed to recall positive events fairly accurately (though our minds also have a tendency to embellish them) and to remember bad ones as not having been as horrible as they actually were.

This bias is interesting for a few reasons. First, because it makes it so that our entire understanding of reality is an illusion. Since the future doesn’t exist because it hasn’t yet happened, and the present, technically, doesn’t either because it’s already gone at the exact instant when it comes to be, all we have is the past. Having only the past to assess the reality we live in, and the value we attribute to everything in it being altered by our brains, we are almost completely disconnected from the real world.

The only thing we can actually call real is our immediate past and future (which, despite technicalities, combined form what we tend to call “the present”) because, in the first case, our memories haven’t been biased or partially erased yet and, in the second, we already know what is about to happen with enough certainty to deal with it as it truly is.

The second interesting point about the FAB is the fact that the human brain evolved to make us believe our lives are better than they actually are (or “were”), which implies this belief is necessary for us to survive. Without it, eventually making life worth living might be impossible since, by realizing our existence consists of much more suffering than pleasure, any minimally reasonable person would kill themselves. And those are exactly the people we need to improve life, because the unreasonable ones, who may have somehow survived without the fading affect bias, are the ones who make everything worse.

To make life’s purpose attainable, our brains hide reality from us, keeping us alive so that one day we may justify all the suffering and disgrace we constantly cause and endure.

The fact that the fading affect bias works even when we are fully aware of it is also interesting in itself, because it demonstrates how irrelevant what we know (that everything sucks) is compared to how we feel (“Oh, it’s not that bad”); and because knowing about it should stop it from working, but it doesn’t (just as being aware of our universe’s deterministic nature doesn’t detract from our lives).

We might be able to counteract the FAB by deliberately lowering the value of our good memories and increasing that of our bad ones, grounding ourselves closer to reality on purpose. But no one is going to do that; no one is going to try to make themselves feel worse. And this makes the fading affect bias an auto-immune mechanism.

Finally, this bias encourages the repetition of acts that make us feel good, while also not inhibiting the repetition of those that make us feel bad as much as it probably should. This is a bit of a tricky point because, in most cases, that’s alright – it is better for us not to feel too bad about certain things, because we initially fail and need to retry most of them. If we felt too bad about failing, we would hardly ever succeed. But when dealing with moral questions and situations, the fading affect bias has a negative practical effect: it makes us not care about harming others as much as we should. We think, “It wasn’t so bad. I broke half the guy’s teeth, but he got new ones. He’s fine. Look! He can even kind of smile again!” and then we proceed to break someone else’s, thinking it’s not a big deal (this is when we need someone else to break ours).

The fading affect bias is a weird mind-trick. It fools us into believing life is better than it actually is, drastically lowering the number of us who commit suicide. It helps to keep us living and makes us feel better than we would without it. But it also encourages re-harming ourselves and others, ultimately making life worse for everyone.

As a side point: for us to feel good, our brains must be “injected” with certain neurochemicals (naturally synthesized or drug-induced). And the more we process those substances, the more resilient we become to them – as it happens with drugs, repeating the same stimuli (of any kind) yields diminishing returns. Try spending a whole year watching football on the TV, playing the same video game, eating the same food, sleeping with the same person, or shooting heroin, every day, all day long, and see how you feel about that particular activity afterwards. You don’t really have to, because you already know what I’m talking about: anything done too frequently and/or in excess loses all of its initial appeal.

To feel bad, on the other hand, we don’t need anything. If for some reason our brains stop producing/receiving/processing serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, norepinephrine, gamma-aminobutyric acid, etc., we feel terrible all the time.

Those substances, and thus how we feel, interfere with how we think. They interfere with the value we attribute to things, with how we see the world and interact with it. They are responsible for a large part of how each of us interprets our environment; for a large part of our “personal realities.”

To be happy, or even “just fine,” we must be high. Most of us have never been truly sober in our lives. So, just as tantalizing questions, I ask you: is it possible to be sane without being sober? Has any of us ever dealt with actual reality?

I’ll leave answering those up to you because, despite being interesting questions, their answers don’t really make any difference – we couldn’t care less if we are literally crazy or not.

And we are.

What Drives Us, Part II

We are semi-irrational beings whose top priority is to avoid suffering. Emotions, not reason, spearhead our actions, and one among them is pointier than all others: fear.

Fear plays the protagonist’s role in human decision-making. It weighs in when we decide what route we’ll take to work, because we must avoid traffic, being robbed, shot at or kidnapped. It interferes when we consider going to a party or not, because we might experience potentially awkward social interactions, run into people we don’t like, drink too much, embarrass ourselves, or end up getting into a fight. Fear determines what team we root for, because going against the local majority’s choice will get us harassed often and possibly physically assaulted from time to time. It chooses our careers for us, because we need a decent job to pay the bills and avoid stinking to death while sleeping on a different curb every night.

Nations exist because of one people’s fear of others. Governments can only govern thanks to the fear the police causes in their own populations. Diplomacy is based on how much one country fears another one’s armed forces. Wars are fought because a state fears it will eventually be defeated unless it strikes first. Nuclear weapons are mass-produced because one nation fears a second one’s capacity to do the same.

Fear doesn’t come into play only when we try to avoid suffering, but also when we decide what we actually want to do. Whenever we are not busy doing what others want us to or ailing, thus being free to choose an activity, we fear making the wrong choice. We fear we might waste the rare opportunity we found to briefly live a little. We fear we might not enjoy our chosen pastime as much as we hope to. We fear our free time might be better spent doing something unpleasant but profitable. We fear drinking that so-longed-for pack of beer will give us a hangover. We fear the insurance of a car we want to buy might be too expensive. We fear purchasing a new sofa because the dog might chew, pee and crap on it. We fear a movie we intend to watch in the theaters may not be worth the ticket’s price. We fear making a mistake, because the time and money we have available to enjoy ourselves are both scarce and fleeting, so we cannot afford to waste either.

Fear is what emanates from our constant attempts at avoiding any and all kinds of pain. It materializes as hesitation, doubt, worry, anxiety, dread, panic, terror.

It’s not pain itself but the fear of it that stands at the very center of human life’s stage, orchestrating every beat we dance to. Fear is what shapes human culture and society; it is the pen that authored our entire history and the one that will keep writing our future for a long time still.

Without fear, we could do what we want, follow what we truly believe in, and endure the necessary pains to do what is right or ultimately collapse under them as we attempt to. With fear, we stop ourselves and cowardly abide by the will of others instead, however wrong they may be, mitigating our own personal suffering while causing even more of it to others.