Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [15]
The fact remains that when we act immorally, we feel guilty. But the guilt doesn’t simply happen. We do it to ourselves by thinking guilty thoughts. We inflict this suffering on ourselves out of an unexamined, usually unconscious, and entirely mistaken strategy for self-management. We punish ourselves for our immorality with guilt so that we’ll be wary of indulging in it again. That is, we treat ourselves as though we were another person whose will could be bent to our own. The essential features of this strategy are the same as if we tried to quit smoking by slapping our face every time we lit a cigarette. The procedure can’t possibly yield good results from the point of view of our own values. Either the self-administered punishment inflicts a smaller loss of value than the immorality itself, or it inflicts a greater loss. Let’s examine these two cases in turn.
If the punishment is less awful than the immorality of the act, it can’t possibly be effective. Presumably, the unhappiness due to committing the offense has proven to be insufficient to make us quit. How then can the smaller misfortune of the punishment have any effect? If a gentle slap could make us quit smoking, then the still more adverse effects of smoking itself could only be more effective. The slap would be superfluous. Similarly, a small dose of guilt can only be easier to bear than the violation of our moral sense. If the immorality of the act doesn’t dissuade us, neither will a little bit of guilt.
If, on the other hand, the punishment is more awful than the offense, it may indeed be effective—but we would by definition lose more than we gain. We would quickly stop smoking if each cigarette were followed by excruciating torture. And we would quit our immorality if it were followed by an unbearable dose of guilt. But who would knowingly take a medicine that makes us sicker than the disease? It may be in accord with our values to coerce others in this fashion. But we certainly wouldn’t want to do it to ourselves. If the self-administered punishment is worse than the offense, we would do better to give in to the lesser evil of the offense.
In sum, either guilt is ineffective, or it makes us lose more than we gain. Either way it’s a trap.
Even the most fortunate of lives must leave unactualized an infinite number of possible values. There are people we will never hear of who would have made excellent friends, career options we will never encounter that would have been fulfilling, unknown island paradises. But we don’t rue all these omissions from our life. The mere absence of a value isn’t yet enough to plunge us into reversion. We must first formulate the missed value as an aspiration that was higher than the actual course of events. We ruminate only about what we once wished for. The non-occurrence of a potential value must be conceived as a palpable lack in our reality before we revert to it.
But this distinction between mere non-occurrence and palpable lacking is a piece of mental magic. When an expected visit from a friend doesn’t materialize, we think that we’ve lost something and we are disappointed. If we had not expected him, however, the mere non-occurrence of his visit would have been imperceptible. In reality the two situations are exactly the same: there was no visit. When we remain rooted in what actually is, there can be no disappointment, for non-occurrences do not exist. To be sure, they might have existed. We might have received a visit from a friend. But the friend might have come even if we hadn’t expected him. It’s not the non-occurrence that makes us unhappy, nor the truth of the past-conditional. What is it then? There might have