Beliefs and Actions

Homo Economicus

We like to think that we, and everyone else, make choices by considering what we believe to be true, examining our desires, and then choosing the action that we predict will maximize the fulfillment of our desires. I believe apple fritters are delicious and I desire an apple fritter for breakfast, therefore after consideration I chose to get an apple fritter. Enlightened self-interest. But this is blindingly fallacious. We hold contradictory claims as truth. We have conflicting desires, and often don’t know what we want. And we regularly choose to act in ways that we know will be harmful to our own interests. But assume for a moment that everyone acts with enlightened self-interest: All you would have to do to fix behavior is teach a better understanding of the world or change desires. However, teaching is hard (or rather making someone learn is hard).1 And changing someone else’s desires is both hard and manipulative.2 Consider how successful you have been at changing your own desires. Even if we all acted with enlightened self-interest, still correcting our faults would be unceasingly difficult.

What we believe about the ourselves, others and the world may inform our choices. And our beliefs may define for us what we see as our options from which to choose. But our beliefs do not determine our choices. You know this to be true because you constantly do stupid things that you knew were stupid and that you didn’t want to do. You examine a prior choice, regret it and the consequences, commit not to do it again, and then you do the same thing all over again. At least I do, but not you. You nail the basics. You always stick to your diet. You never lose your temper. You make consistent progress towards your goals each day. Your house is clean. You arrive on time and well rested.

Scientology

Psychology is a failed science. Nor will neuroscience’s attempt to explain cognition with a physical model of the brain succeed. The best that psychology can offer are moderately interesting statistical phenomena that are almost measurable on the margins – if you are exposed to words that prime you with associations about old age, it is possible that you will move somewhat slower for some indefinite period of time afterwards, or maybe you’ll move somewhat faster. If we have explanatory models that effectively predicted human behavior, then where are they and to what use are they being put? Who is putting their explanation of human behavior to the test by actually changing the outcome of an election, or measurably driving of sales of a chosen product, or demonstrably reducing crime, or consistently healing individual mental sufferings.

Psychology is as if you went to an orthopedic surgeon to get your broken arm addressed, and the only thing the surgeon knows about arms is interesting patterns of freckles. They don’t know what bones are, they have no method to identify if a bone is broken, and no model telling them what the broken bone is supposed to look like. They don’t have a scalpel, an x-ray machine, antibiotic, or even an advil. If the bone shards puncture the skin and deform what was an interesting freckle pattern, then maybe they can repair the freckles. And maybe that’s better than nothing.

It is true that most people most of the time behave in predictable ways. Predictable either because you are specifically familiar with them individually – she always goes on a walk in the afternoon, so she will go on a walk this afternoon. Or predictable through generalities – everyone feels self-conscious and insecure at the center of attention in unfamiliar circumstances, so she almost certainly feels that way here in this analogous situation. Being predictable in broad strokes does not imply determined. Being able to offer a believable explanation of behavior does not imply that the behavior was caused anymore than being believable makes the explanation accurate. The clearest proof of this is that despite being predictable in broad strokes, people remain resistant to manipulation. With billions of dollars at play, advertising remains only measurably effective at the margins – you can “trick” someone into buying a large coke rather than a medium coke, but not into buying a coke rather than using the restroom.

Psychology cannot help but fail because it cannot offer a definition of “healthy”. Blind leading the blind.

Mens Rea

It’s the thought that counts.

What you were trying to do matters. The “why” of an action matters and cannot be inferred from the action itself. We recognize this in our justice systems – killing with intent to kill is categorically different from killing unintentionally, even though the actions and effects are in themselves indistinguishable. Sacrifice your son, your only son whom you love, on the mountain to appease Molech versus sacrifice your son, your only son whom you love, on the mountain because God commands it. Turn from your wicked ways to save yourself through your own righteousness vs turn from your wicked ways to participate in sanctification. Was their locking the door a compulsive behavior, a wise precaution, or a response to fear.

What we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves no in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul…But my soul is hidden and invisible. I cannot see it directly, for it is hidden even from myself.3

It is impossible to examine the behavior of another and derive from that their beliefs and desires. We assume that we can read people. That we can observe their words and actions and from that understand their inner world. And we are wrong. Wrong to attempt to see inside someone else because it violates their right to keep secrets and control their self-revelation. Even God covers our nakedness. Wrong to see others as objects, as machines to be explained and controlled, as less than people. Even if it wasn’t morally wrong, we are too often factually incorrect – we constantly misunderstand people when they are trying to tell us something; how much more do we misunderstand them when we think we are seeing what they are not trying to tell us. How often do we misunderstand the beliefs and desires behind our own actions, and still we pretend to have access to the inner worlds of others.

Faulty Logic

You deceived me and I was deceived.4

Your beliefs are your own. No one can force you to hold to the truth or to hold a lie as the truth. They can invite, encourage, or argue. They can manipulate, disguise, or threaten. Force imposed upon you can compel action or speech, but no torture or trickery overcomes your responsibility in your inner self to affirm the truth.

Know Thyself

we ought to have the humility to admit that we do not know all about ourselves [so how much less do we know our kids], that we are not experts at running our own lives [so how are we experts at running our kid’s lives]. – 3.8

Your soul is opaque, even to yourself. You don’t know yourself. You have special access to your own internal world, and still that world remains uncharted to you. How much less insight do you have into the souls of other people.

To “Know yourself” is good advice. But to know ourselves doesn’t mean to analyze ourselves. Sometimes we want to know ourselves as if we were machines that could be taken apart and put back together at will. At certain critical times in our lives it might be helpful to explore in some detail the events that led us to our crises, but we make a mistake when we think that we can ever completely understand ourselves and explain the full meaning of our lives to others. Solitude, silence, and prayer are often the best ways to self-knowledge. Not because they offer solutions for the complexity of our lives but because they bring us in touch with our sacred center, where God dwells. That sacred center may not be analyzed. It is the place of adoration, thanksgiving, and praise. – Henri Nouwen in Bread for the Journey (HarperCollins ebooks) reading for 22 March.

Dehumanization

To the extent that you claim for yourself control over the soul of another, to that same extent you make them less than human. For you they become objects, things to push, stones to shape. God is able to claim the power to move and shape souls without dehumanizing because he is both higher than human and knows each of us more fully than we know ourselves.

To dehumanize a person is in itself immoral. It is lying to look upon an enfleshed immortal soul and see it as an object to be shaped, a machine to be programmed, an animal using inherited behaviors to react to external stimuli. It is a lie to claim to have plumbed a person’s depths (your own, much less another’s). It is a lie to assert an ability to diagnose another’s ills much less prescribe the cure.

How can anyone understand his own way.5

We claim an understanding of our children’s inner world that we don’t have of ourselves. We claim an influence into shaping that inner world that we don’t have over our own inner world. We claim an ability to fix their souls that we have never effectively used to fix our own souls.

Beliefs and Actions: It is not possible, as a general rule, to determine what a person believes by looking at their actions.

What it means “to teach” can only be understood in light of the purpose, goal. Is the goal to get the student to pass a test? To give the accepted answers to given questions? Go and make disciples, teaching them all I have commanded you. Not teaching more than I commanded – It is as wrong to do more than your job as it is to do less. Teaching is more than “go and say.” Jonah did the bare minimum. Utilize creativity and situations to teach in a way that “can be understood. Not agree with. Not changed by. Not accepted. Not even understood. Merely understandable. Teaching so as to be able to be understood does not mean that it will be understood. Because understanding requires participation, work, from the learner. Let him who has ears to hear. Jesus came to testify to the truth, but only those who are of the truth hear his voice. The parables are not examples of great story-telling that aid understanding – they were intentionally designed to testify to the truth in a way that only those with ears to hear could understand.

If you had taught them the truth effectively, then they would have understood and accepted it. They would be living that truth. Because who wants to live a lie. You’ll know you’ve taught them rightly by the way they live. If they aren’t living the truth, it’s only because they haven’t heard it. If they haven’t heard it, it’s only because you haven’t been intentional enough and creative enough in your presentation.

If shaping the depths of someone were this easy, then advertising would work better. We would all drink Coke® and everyone would still smoke cigarettes. Manipulation of even insignificant surface level behaviors is hard and hardly effective. Funded by billion dollar corporations and driven by the potential for massive profits, advertising still manages to succeed only on the margins – to swing the probabilities by fractions. But the goal of this “shaping” is to change someone’s core beliefs. If you think yourself able to see into the depths of others and then reach in and shape those depths, then go make your billions – advertising, sales, poker, stocks. Game theory – Your choice of action is informed in part by how you expect others to interpret and react to those actions – your actions can be intentionally deceptive. Billios to be made from effective advertising and billions spent on advertising, and the effectiveness is far smaller than any child raising method assumes is prevalent much less possible.

The failure of therapy is root in the counselor’s ignorance of the truth. Therapists don’t know the truth about themselves, much less that of others or of God. They lack a definition of healthy and so cannot recognize disease or propose a cure. The blind leading the blind.

We are allowed to hold to a philosophical claim of determinism – I may not have the capacity to trace the chain of cause and effect backwards from my choice to the first mover, but the chain must exist because there cannot be an uncaused effect. Though we may hold that philosophically, we are in practice required to live as though we and all other people have enough free will to be moral agents. I will be judged as though I were a moral agent and not simply a complex bio-chemical organism responding programmatically to external stimuli. And if I look at other people as less than moral agents, then I am profaning them in a way that itself merits judgement.

The soul is uncaused, untouchable. Not even directly accessible to itself. Less a beetle in a box, more a chinese room. Body provides means of input and output, but the input does not determine the output, and the output does not define the soul.

  1. Is it morally acceptable to teach someone something they have not chosen to be taught? A lecture is a method of punishment.↩︎

  2. What are the methods to change desires (apart from offering alternative truth claims) that you would not consider to be manipulation?↩︎

  3. Merton 7.1↩︎

  4. Jeremiah 20:7↩︎

  5. Proverbs 20:24↩︎