Episode #072 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday. And most of all, I hope you love the show today.

So, for the last few episodes we’ve been talking a lot about why we make the decisions we do. We’ve been talking a lot about what makes a decision moral or not, how we arrive at those sorts of moral criteria, not being a passenger to the world around us. Basically, we’ve been talking a lot about why we think and act the way we do. But it’s easy for me to imagine someone out there not really being satisfied with this discussion so far. There’s so much more to talk about. Human behavior, needless to say, it’s a pretty complex thing. Not going to cover it in a couple 30-minute episodes of this podcast. But we can make a dent, right? So, let’s try.

I could easily see somebody sitting at home criticizing this show, saying, “Okay, look, now I understand it. Okay? I understand the foundation of why I deem things to be right or wrong. But let’s not go off the rails here. Let’s not pretend like that’s the judge, jury, and executioner of why people do the things they do.” Think about it. There are tons of things that you, me, and everyone, for that matter, do on a daily basis that really have nothing to do with whether we’ve deemed it to be a morally justifiable behavior or not. That’s just not how it works. The reality is, we don’t go around faced with decision points in our lives, and then instantly we internally start talking to ourselves and saying, “Okay, okay, I need to make a decision: bowl of oatmeal for breakfast or blueberry pancakes for breakfast? Hm, how do I decide? Oh, I know. What would Jesus do in this situation? What would a moral exemplar do? What would the stoic sage do? Would the stoic sage eat blueberry pancakes for breakfast?”

Point is, although it’s entirely possible to do, and some people might, most of us—most of us laypeople—when it comes to these sorts of rudimentary tasks of day-to-day living, we don’t make these decisions by having some internal philosophical debate with ourselves. Then we decide on what the right thing to do is, and then we do it. That’s just not how most of us make these little decisions in our lives. But an interesting question to ask, maybe a good starting place is, why is there a distinction there? I mean, why is that the case? Why do most of us have these internal philosophical debates with ourselves only when we’re faced with potentially life-crippling choices? We only do it when a really unique decision point comes up in our lives, one that we haven’t seen that much. We don’t do it so much with the day-to-day stuff.

For example, we have no problem mulling over in our head and debating with ourselves what the right decision might be when it comes to big things like changing careers, who we should marry, what kind of cell phone plan we should have—which, by the way, Socrates said is the most important choice you’ll ever make in your life. Do not mess up on that one. We do it with those things, but for some reason we don’t do it with the little things. Why is that? Well, for one thing, it would be exhausting, right? I mean, who wants to do that all day? Having a brand-new, oxford-style debate in your head about every little, miniscule thing that you do in your day? I mean, even down to every step that you take—do I put this foot in front of the other foot? Would that get me closer or further away from the goals I’m trying to achieve? It would be paralyzing, not to mention probably impossible.

So, what do we do about it? How do we safeguard against this? Well, we pull from the archives, right? “Previously on your life…” We make use of old debates that we’ve had with ourselves at other times in our life. See, that’s the interesting thing. At some point in your life, you actually did think about that stuff, maybe not consciously. You thought about whether putting one foot in front of the other was a good idea or not. You considered all kinds of things about it: your gate when walking, gliding across the floor; the way your foot hits the ground so you won’t sprain an ankle every time you take a step, whether you have those Dr. Scholl’s arch support things in your wing tips. And by the way, that’s not all. This is just getting started. You thought about whether being able to move in general, being mobile, whether that was a better or worse thing than being entirely stationary. You thought about whether that movement, if you used it to walk to your car and drive to work, whether that was going to yield a better or worse outcome for you.

You’ve done the legwork, no pun intended. And now that decision that at one point in your life wasn’t obvious to you at all, now you just kind of, you know, drive to work every day. There’s no philosophical debate there. There’s no moral crossroad you’re at. You decided that moving and having a job is an integral part of your life long ago. And most of us don’t really question it that much; we just kind of keep moving until something goes wrong.

“Stephen, why are you talking about walking? I know how to walk!” Listen, I get it. Calm down. The question I want to ask you today is this: how many of these autopilot activities do most people have? How many do you think? Again, no question, we can’t think about everything. You can’t have that philosophical debate in your head about every single thing that you do. But how far does that extend? At what point do we start thinking about these things? What level of uniqueness? What’s an appropriate amount of questioning this stuff about whether what you’re doing is the right or healthy thing to do?

See, it’s a tricky question because there’s no definitive cutoff point. As I said before, almost everyone does it with the really unique life decisions: what career do you choose, who do you marry. But how unique does a choice have to be before it’s appropriate to think about what the right thing to do is? Now, the larger point here is that because human behavior is the beast that it is and there is no definitive, agreed-upon point where we’re all supposed to be thinking about this stuff, is that what happens is, we have that bell curve of voluntary human behavior, right? Some people get lazy, and they just do it as little as they possibly have to. They almost never contemplate morality. Maybe once every six months when a cop shoots someone on the TV, maybe when there’s an election cycle they’ll think about morality.

And really how about this: how about the fact that every single one of you listening to this show right now, we all wouldn’t doubt this at all? We all know tons of people that are like this. They’re all around us. We’re surrounded by them. I mean, all of you listening to this are the type of person that listens to educational podcasts. That says something about you. Many of you are probably identified in your groups of friends or coworkers as that person that enjoys learning and thinking about stuff. That contrast is only possible if there’s a strong percentage of the population that aren’t thinking about stuff. But can you really blame them? Are these people bad people? Of course not. I love these people. There’s no law against not thinking about morality. No one’s going to abduct you into an immoral spaceship if you watch Netflix instead of thinking about these things. So, it naturally follows that there’s just going to be a certain percentage of people that take the path of least resistance. It’s human nature.

We see this with any voluntary behavior. If left with a choice, people will choose to have these exhausting, taxing, very difficult philosophical debates in their head as little as they possibly have to. But the interesting this is, their behavior hasn’t stayed the same from birth, has it? It changes all the time. Just because you don’t contemplate morality doesn’t mean you just act like you’re five years old the rest of your life, never progressing on stuff. So, where are these people finding out how they’re “supposed” to be behaving? When are they making those value judgments about what proper decorum is? Or better yet, the real question is, who is making them for them?

Well, again, human behavior—really complex, not going to cover it all. But I want to talk about one of them. It’s something that all of us, every single one of us, are very familiar with. It’s not really a question of whether this thing affects your behavior. It’s a question of how much it affects the choices you make. The thing I’m talking about—the title of the episode—insecurity. What are you insecure about? Class, class, I want you to close your eyes and think about something you’re insecure about, because rest assured, you do have insecurities that affect your behavior.

When I was like 18 years old, I went to the first therapy session that I ever went to as an adult. And I remember walking into the place and having all these preconceived ideas about what insecurity was. I used to think, if you’re an insecure person, wow, you need to go to therapy, man. Like, really, like if you’re one of those people that are insecure, you need serious psychological intervention. You need help. You need some therapist to just get inside of that brain, just commit arson on the underbrush, burn all that old stuff away, and just start fresh, man. You need a brand-new plot of land in that brain of yours to work with.

But what I realized is that everyone’s insecure. I used to think insecurity was that you were flawed. I realized that insecurity is life. Look around you. Look at all these beautiful people around you. I don’t care how beautiful they are, they’re insecure about something, and it’s affecting their behavior right now. In fact, some people, if you really looked at them hard—if you really examined them and you understood them at a deep level—some people even build their entire lives around their insecurities. It really does navigate everything that they do. Really, it’s like building a house with a tree growing in the middle of it. You just kind of build around it. It’s not really the house you want, but there’s this thing there. You just got to kind of do the best you can navigating around it.

For some people, their insecurities run so deep they affect almost every decision that they make. For some people, their insecurities make up almost everything that has to do with who they even are. It’s why they have the job they do. It’s why they wear the clothes they do, what types of friends or what types of people they’re in relationships with, what hobbies they have. Insecurity really does leave no stone unturned in our lives if it wants to.

Now, we all realize that insecurity is something that is affecting the choices we make. But what’s not obvious is, is that a bad thing? I mean, we typically think of insecurity as a bad thing, carries a negative connotation. But why do we do that? What did insecurity do to you? What is it about insecurity that’s so wrong? I mean, you could even make the case, isn’t it a good thing? Doesn’t it sometimes protect us from horrible things that are going to happen to us? Well, sure. In fact, if you just look at insecurity alone next to morality, it’s actually a very similar thing to morality in a lot of ways. But in other ways, the two are complete opposites.

Think about it. Morality concerns itself with, there’s this outcome that either needs to be achieved that’s been assigned to me or that I want to achieve. And once I assign that end goal to the equation, now I can contemplate and use reason and arrive at a set of behaviors that will best produce that life that I want. Insecurity is, there’s a life that I don’t want. There’s something that I desperately don’t want to happen to me. I don’t want X thing to happen to me, so I will restrict myself from doing X behavior so that that world won’t come to fruition. Again, they’re very similar at face value, but there’s a key difference that we’re going to get to in a minute. And it’s best understood if we have some example of insecurity to reference. So, let’s do that now.

I’m going to weave a tale. Clothes your eyes. A lot of eye closing on this episode. Everyone close your eyes and think back to the days you were in school. If you’re already in school, great, it’s going to be very easy for you to imagine. Remember shopping for school clothes? Do you remember going out with your parents and picking out clothes? Well, imagine yourself, I don't know, middle school, high school. You come home after hanging out with your friends at the sock hop, an ice cream parlor. And your mom has a present for you on the counter. You open it up, and your mom got you, God bless her heart, a brand-new pair of denim overalls for you to wear for picture day at school. Yeah. Thanks, Mom. Thanks for the overalls.

Well, if you’re anything like I was when I was 14, and pretty much every 14-year-old that’s ever existed, what are you going to do? Of course, you’re not going to wear them. You’re not going to wear those overalls to school. Think of the social backlash. You would be ruth—the instant you walk in that school door, you would be ruthlessly socially castigated for wearing them. You would pay an immediate price. All your friends would laugh at you. Your enemies would laugh at you. The creepy old janitor that works at the middle school would even be laughing at you. That’s a low point. That’s rock bottom. Slowly, you’d become that guy that just sits in the cafeteria alone, eating food by himself. People throw food at you like you’re an ogre. They circle around you chanting something. That’s you if you wear those overalls to school. Fact is, you are insecure about what your friends will think of you if you wear those overalls.

Now, this is a great example of how it feels to be insecure about something, right? You know, thinking about that future world that you don’t want to live in, one filled with social reprisal and no friends and food being thrown at you, wearing overalls. You don’t want to live in that world. So, what you’re going to do is restrict yourself from this behavior—wearing the overalls—to prevent that from happening to you. Again, on the surface, it seems pretty similar to morality. But what’s different between them lies in understanding who is the driver of that car. Are you the passenger in the car or the driver of the car? The difference is not how we’re making the decision; it’s who is making the choices about how you should or should not be behaving. This really is the darkness of insecurity to me.

Insecurity robs you of your individuality, of your self-identity even. Well, actually, your self-identity just becomes something else. It just becomes a conglomeration of all the expectations that all the people around you have for you and how you should be behaving. In this way, you voluntarily surrender your autonomy. You just become this patchwork of what your mom expects of you and what that guy you hated in high school expects of you and what Barack Obama expects of you and what the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine expects of you. By not making decisions based on these philosophical moral debates about what the correct decision is, we effectively relegate ourselves to a life of just avoiding behaviors that other people have told us to avoid.

Now, at this point you may be saying, “Well, why is that so bad? Is that a bad thing? Sure, yes, I fully realize I would get socially castigated if I decided to murder someone. But maybe it’s a good thing to fall in line with society’s expectations of me. Keeps me out of trouble!” Well, I guess that would be true if the decision of whether to murder somebody or not was the only decision that you were going to make for the rest of your life, when in reality, everything you do is a decision. And to me, this is the most interesting/relevant-to-the-show/terrifying part of this entire subject matter, is that when you put these decisions in the hands of other people’s social expectations of you, sure, nothing bad may be seeming to happen to you. Nothing bad may actually be happening to you at all. You may go through your whole life completely happy, completely content with the way that you’re making decisions.

But the problem is, you don’t know what you don’t know. You’ve never been devoid of insecurities. You don’t know what that life is like. You don’t know the price that you may be paying in opportunity cost for any of these behaviors. All you know is, well, they’re working. I haven’t gotten killed doing them yet. Got to be doing something right! Still alive. But in all seriousness, is the fact that you haven’t died doing something yet a valid criteria for doing it that way for the rest of your life?

What if a wizard came up to you and told you that you could be 30% happier if you were just willing to have one difficult, internal philosophical debate about something and realize that a particular one of these expectations that other people are putting on you is making you less happy than you could be? Would you want to do it? The thing we have to understand is, there’s often a very real cost that comes along with putting your decision-making into everyone else’s hands. If you work at a job, a job that you despise, because it pays you 20 grand a year more than this other job that would actually make you not hate your life every day, be more fulfilling, be awesome, and the only reason you don’t switch jobs is because there’s these friends of yours; they make a lot of money, and you don’t want them to know that you make less money than they do a year—if that’s the only reason you’re doing it, you are paying a very real cost every day of your life, every second that you spend in misery, just so that—for what?—just so you can live up to this standard that they have of just how much money a grown man should be making when they’re your age.

On that same note, if you’re a 40-year-old man, and your dating record looks like a constant revolving door of 20-something-year-old girls—and there are other women out there that you could date, and you’d have a stronger emotional connection with them; they’d make you more happy—and the only reason you’re not with them is because you’re terrified of what your buddies are going to say when they see a picture of your girlfriend, you are paying a very real price every day of your life. For what? So you can live up to the standard of, “Dude, your girl, she’s so hot, man! Oh my god!”

This really underscores the problem with insecurity. The problem with insecurity is, what if the overalls are functional? What if you would have liked the overalls your mom bought you? What if they have a really great pocket in the front for your phone? What if they’re really comfortable overalls? What if you liked them like that? You know, they’re denim. What if you arrived at the idea that they were stronger than other clothes? What if they were on sale? They’re more cost-efficient than other clothes. There’s benefits here. What I’m saying, in other words, is what if you could reason to the fact—you know, have one of these internal philosophical debates—and arrive at the conclusion that wearing those overalls would have yielded a much better life for you than not wearing them. And the only reason you didn’t is because you’re trying to live up to a standard that somebody else or something else conferred onto you of what you shouldn’t be wearing? Again, there’s often a cost that comes with putting your decision-making into somebody else’s hands.

See, I’d even say that most of the time insecurity comes with an opportunity cost. And the reason why is because of just how completely arbitrary it is. These standards that people have of you, the ones you’re relying on to show you how you should be behaving for fear of embarrassment, it’s not like they’re appealing to some constant, static social standard. These social standards are constantly changing. What somebody would make you feel embarrassed for 50 years ago is completely different than today. Who was more right, though? What behavior was “better:” 50 years ago or 2015?

On that same note, it gets even more complicated. Not only are they constantly changing, but it’s not like there’s one single standard that people are holding you to, alright? These standards drastically change just based on the people that you’re seeking approval from. For example, what if you wore those overalls to school? Yeah, okay, let’s say your friends may laugh at you. The janitor’s going to laugh at you with his mop in his hand. But look, those people over there wearing the cowboy hats—they would welcome you in with open arms. They’re not going to judge you for wearing overalls. That’s a badge of honor where they come from. On that same note, if you wear black nail polish and the black shirt of an emo band that nobody’s ever heard of before, yeah, some people are going to think you’re a freak. But there’s plenty of other people out there that would embrace you for it, even appreciate how you were dressing.

You can’t make everyone happy. That’s the warmed-over truism that’s relevant here. And by attaching your identity to a way your particular circle of friends behave and then spending the rest of your life vehemently opposing any change for fear that they’re going to negatively judge you, it’s not necessarily wrong. It’s just certainly not the recipe for the happiest life possible.

Now, that said, so far we’ve been talking about the individual cost for being led around by your insecurities. Something else to consider that’s interesting is this doesn’t just affect us. We may be causing a great deal of suffering to the people around us, oftentimes the people we love, inadvertently by projecting our insecurities onto them. We do it all the time. Let’s think of an example. How might somebody be hurt by insecurity, or at least not be living as happy a life as possible?

Well, one thing we can all relate to is the modern paradigm of a monogamous relationship, right? Well, of course, relationships, just like human behavior, are incredibly subjective. No way I can paint all of them with a broad brush, but I think you guys all understand the type of relationship that I’m talking about and how insecurity and that expectation of how your partner should behave, I mean, it just absolutely pervades every expectation we that have about how they should be behaving.

Think about it. What is cheating, really? Is there a dictionary definition of the exact point in a relationship where somebody’s cheating, or is it entirely subjective? Is it constantly changing? No, there’s no standard about what cheating is in a relationship in the same way there’s no standard about whether it’s acceptable to wear overalls on picture day. What happens is, usually, you get a boyfriend or a girlfriend. You have this, most of the time, unspoken verbal contract about this line that you’ve defined that you can’t cross when it comes to members of the opposite sex. Now, the thing is, this is kind of a blurry line, right? This line is different in every relationship that you’re in.

There’s this girlfriend I had once. And we’re going through the KFC/Taco Bell drive-thru, you know, that snaking narrow lane where you pick up the poisonous food. And I’m ordering my food. And the person on the other end of the microphone was a girl. And she was just being friendly, just a nice person. And she said something about my order. I made a joke back. And it made her laugh, and she laughed on the microphone. Big mistake. Look, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I finished ordering. I drive down the narrow, snaking lane to pick up my food. And I look over at my girlfriend and she’s just, like, scowling at me. It was scary. It was like looking into Medusa’s eyes. I’ll never forget it. She said, “That’s disgusting.” I’m like, “What did I do?” What did I do? She was mad at me for the rest of the day. Apparently, I crossed the line. Apparently, I’m a habitual line stepper.

We had this contract set up. I wasn’t aware of the parameters of the contract, but I wasn’t supposed to try to make the opposite sex laugh. That was crossing the line. And to be fair to her, she was completely right. I mean, that was her line. I may have not agreed with the line, but that was her line. And she entered into this relationship under the expectation that I wouldn’t be doing that stuff. You have to be compassionate to her. I mean, in her eyes—this is what I was telling myself at the time—I basically had cheated on her right in front of her eyes.

But the point is, there’s no line, right? That line changes and shifts in every relationship that you’re in. There are relationships where you can openly flirt with other people, and your significant other doesn’t really care. You know, you can look, but you can’t touch. That’s the maxim. Now, on that note, there’s perfectly healthy, functioning, loving relationships out there where you actually can touch other people, where both people love each other’s company, and they make each other really happy, and they don’t burden themselves with needing to fulfill any fleeting desire that their partner may have. They don’t want to restrict them from having those experiences that may make them happy. They realize they’re not superwoman or man. And when they’re not together, they can do anything they want.

The point here is, there’s no standard of what cheating is. It’s not in Webster’s Dictionary. And understand that whenever you have this expectation of what the other person can or can’t do, if you look close enough, any expectation that you have is ultimately founded in insecurity. Again, before you feel attacked by that, you’re not talking about your own behavior here. We’re not regulating our own behavior; we’re regulating theirs. That’s the insecurity. And by the way, the fact that these restrictions we place on somebody else is ultimately founded in insecurity really says nothing about the legitimacy of your relationship. I don’t want you guys to think I’m labeling everyone as secretly wanting to cheat on each other. But I am saying that oftentimes we find ourselves in incompatible relationships.

If you find yourself in one where you guys love each other dearly, you’re monogamous, you both understand the value of foregoing short-term gratification for long-term, and you want to build the life for yourself that involves that deep connection that you can only have with somebody that you’ve been with for a long time, that’s fine. I’m not attacking you guys at all. I’m talking about really probably the way you dated people all throughout your life until you arrived at that one where you really cared a lot about them. And any of these restrictions of behavior ultimately, if you look at it close enough, is founded in insecurity. You’re terrified that by allowing your significant other to have these experiences with other people that they are going to like that person more than you. They’re going to realize all the shortcomings that you have, leave you for them. And you’re going to be left all alone in your front room eating a half gallon of rocky road ice cream.

Now, if you doubt that it lies in insecurity even for a second, just consider this: how interesting is it that when you’re in a relationship you don’t restrict your significant other from doing most things? You don’t restrict them from eating pumpkin pie. You don’t restrict them from going to Disney Land. You don’t restrict them from going down to the mall with their friends. How convenient that there is this one specific subset of behaviors that you restrict them from, oh, and it prevents them from finding anybody else but you. You know, we claim to love these people. We say all kinds of really melodramatic stuff. We say we’d do anything to make them happy, anything. Yet oftentimes we spend our entire lives keeping them locked in this emotional cage that we’ve set up, shutting them off from the outside world, trying to blind them from what’s out there for fear that they’ll realize that they’re actually happier outside of this cage and leave you.

We essentially blackmail our significant others with the relationship. We say things like, “You know, if I ever found out that you were on a date with somebody else, I’m breaking up with you! It’s over!” Really, that’s the relationship you want to be in? That’s the fantasy? The only thing stopping your significant other from dating somebody else is the fear that she can’t talk to you anymore and you’re going to remove her on Facebook?

One thing should be very clear here: this strategy has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with appeasing insecurity. And by the way, it’s a false sense of security at that. Let’s say the plan works. Let’s say your grand master plan works. Your girlfriend feels inside like there’s a void that needs to be filled. She feels like going on a date with a guy from work, but she doesn’t act on those feelings out of respect to your wishes, by virtue of her being a piece of your property that you’re controlling. I got news for you. She’s still the same person whether you have that expectation of her or not. She still wants to go on the date. You’re just blocking the exit with a fire extinguisher. Point is, that girl if she has those desires, she still lives every day of her life, every day she’s in the relationship with you for God knows how long, secretly feeling like some other life out there might make her happier. But she doesn’t act on it because of the insecurity that you projected onto her.

This is the darkness. This is the darkness of insecurity. This really is what they can do to the people around us that we claim to love so much. If I met a perfect stranger walking down the street and they approached me, and they told me, “Look, there’s this thing I want to do in my life. I’m thinking about doing it. I think, you know, my best guess is that it would make me a happier person if I did it. Should I do it?” I would say, “Absolutely, yes!” probably before they even finished the sentence. I mean, that is what I want for people to do. Improve your lot in life. Become a happier person. Gravitate towards what you think your best guess is at the moment of what’s going to make you happier.

Oh, but, conveniently, for the person that I supposedly love more than anyone in the entire world, oh, I reserve this extra-special way to treat them. I’m willing to force them to spend the duration of our relationship, however long that’s going to be, locked inside of an emotional cage simply because I’m terrified of looking at myself in the mirror and acknowledging that somebody else might be better for them. Think of that. They want to be happier, and somebody else might make them happier. Why wouldn’t you want that for them?

This insecurity, when we do it to ourselves and other people, it starts to sound downright sadistic at times. “Oh, you think you’d be happier with another life, but look, it’s my job to restrict you or bully you into not doing it because I don’t want to feel alone.” The point of this long-winded rant about relationships is that, when we’re satisfied with having our behavior controlled by our insecurities that are completely arbitrary, we don’t only hurt ourselves in that endeavor with the opportunity cost; we potentially hurt other people around us, ones that we love.

That’s the other thing—one more thing on relationships. Let’s say your worst nightmare comes to life, right? Let’s say your girlfriend or boyfriend leaves you for somebody else because you let them go on the date, and they ended up liking them more than you. Isn’t that information that you would want to have? Like, how many of you have been in a relationship way longer than you should have? Maybe you’re together for a year, two years, seven years, and you find out there’s some fundamental disagreement that was present all along that’s a dealbreaker—a fundamental disagreement, by the way, that could have easily shown itself two weeks into the relationship if somebody didn’t feel like they had to cater to the insecurities. It’s a game that we play. Just saying, it benefits you too when you’re making decisions with good information.

To pack this all together for future episodes, here’s what I want to say. Questioning morality really is an antidote to insecurity. But it’s not a panacea. It doesn’t fix it all. Every person listening to this is going to continue to have things that you’re insecure about. They will continue to cause you to look in the mirror, kind of turn side to side, and feel inadequate because you don’t perfectly embody this generation’s paradigm of beauty. It’s going to happen. They will continue to cause you to turn red and be embarrassed when you slip up speaking in front of a group. All I’m saying is that how much or how little these insecurities affect our decision-making and our identity, for that matter, it’s not out of our control.

I guess what I’m also saying is, look, I honestly—unless if it was like a good guy friend of mine where we, you know, that’s what guys do, they rib each other back and forth. It’s like, it’s a thing. It’s hilarious. What I’m saying is, I would never judge or laugh at anyone for wearing overalls. That’s just not the kind of person I am. I don’t see myself as the litmus test that I dunk into everyone’s choices and tell you whether you’re red or blue. What I’m saying is, if you’re a person that feels insecure all the time, maybe the thing that makes you feel insecure is not so much you; it’s the people you’re hanging around with. Come be my friend. That’s what I’m saying.

Like, you know that game show variation of the prisoner’s dilemma? Let me explain it real quick because I think it’s a good comparison. The game works like this: there’s $20 up for grabs, some money. You and one other person have to decide what you’re going to do about that money, and you can’t tell the other person what you’re going to do. Your choices are either to share the money with the other person or steal the money all for yourself. But the other person has the same choice. Now, if you both decide to share the money, if that’s what you both choose, you each get half. If you both decide to steal the money, neither of you gets anything. And if one decides to share and the other decides to steal, the person that stole gets all the money. Now, knowing that those are the parameters of the game, what would you choose to do? Would you steal the money or share it? Keep in mind, if you’re thinking share because you’re an altruistic person, you have no idea if the other person’s planning on just stealing it from you when you say share, and then you get nothing.

Well, many of you have probably heard this before. But by far the most common thing that people choose to do at that decision point is steal the money. And when we think about this decision through the lens of this episode that we just did, we can start to understand the reasoning, right? It’s entirely fueled not by what the right thing to do is but what future world would we want to prevent for fear of social reprisal. That’s a long-winded way of saying it’s just like insecurity, right? These people playing this game show, just like an insecure person making life choices, would restrict the possibility of sharing the money with the other person for fear of worst-case scenario, getting taken advantage of and embarrassed by the other person. What if the other person steals the money from me? I’ll be ruined! They’ve asserted themselves as superior to me. I can’t deal with that!

Well, it’s a good parallel to insecurity. Something to think about. But that said, they could just be stealing because if you steal the money, you get all of it or nothing. If you share it, you get half of it or nothing. Just a better choice.

But, that said, I hope these episodes we’re doing are helping us understand the variety of different reasons people use when making a decision. It’s not just about arriving at a moral system and doing the right thing every time. See, the larger question of this show that’s important for the chronology of the show moving forward, is when is it acceptable to hold someone morally culpable for an action? It’s very easy as outsiders—it’s very easy for us to arrive at our own personal code for how other people should be behaving. And then when they do something that we don’t like, something that doesn’t correspond with ours, attack them, hold them morally accountable for it. But in reality, think about what we just talked about. They may not be making a moral choice at all. They may have not even been thinking about it. And as we head into future episodes, think of the peace that comes along with understanding that.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.