Fear… is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always… so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.” — Yann Martel, Life of Pi
We will focus on how to reframe things so morality related fears don’t get us stuck in sheep mode. Because if we’re moral but also stuck, we won’t be helping ourselves, other people or the world.
Our past decisions become our story, literally who we are.
What is the structural difference between the morality of a single decision and the complexity of life with its rich timeline of thousands of consecutive decisions? There are 4 main factors:
1. Number of total possible choices and exponential complexity
With a single decision the choices are limited. In such a small and constraint system the relative cost of errors is higher. So it’s important for each individual decision to try to do no harm if possible. The creativity of searching for more options helps your Hunter mode, Speed and Scale.
The number of total possible choices along the big timeline is close to infinity. The failure may become a success or the success a failure. It’s a total mess where planning can work only partially, only short term. Long term planning makes us miss the random opportunities in life. It doesn’t work because of our lack of control. In such a complex system it’s impossible to be perfect. It’s playing as Simon Sinek puts it, The Infinite Game, where the only goal is to keep playing (living).
2. Maximize happiness
From the point of view of Utilitarianism we have to maximize happiness for everyone. Making people happy makes us happy too, a win-win.
Maximizing happiness is all about quality multiplied by scale. And here comes the real conflict. Scale is impossible without small pockets of harm done, without feelings getting hurt. Almost every famous person receives death threats. It’s simply inevitable to scale and not hurt a single person’s feelings. The important thing is how many people did you make happy? How many did you inspire?
In some cases you have to actively destroy a structure to maximize happiness and even hurt small groups of people in the name of scale and maximizing happiness.
3. Maximize freedom
The more freedom in life you have, the more of your choices will be about what to create and how to help.
Freedom is priceless. It gives us time, space, energy and creativity. There is no morality without freedom, because you lose your choices.
Freedom + Resources is what you need to change the world. Freedom + Resources + Morality and you’ll almost certainly change it for the better. Freedom + Resources + Morality + Luck and you will certainly change it for the better.
It all starts with Freedom. It helps you attract people and resources. Then you are no longer battling scarcity and it’s easier to adhere to higher moral standards and develop altruism. And with enough resources to try many times you can even influence luck.
4. Chances of predicting the consequences of our actions
There is one principle that makes it simple. You can just base everything on Freedom valuations.
Did your actions improve someone’s freedom? You helped long term, in fact you changed a life.
Did your actions reduce someone’s freedom? You didn’t help or even caused harm long term.
You’re just one person. You can only generate so much happiness. The real deal is when you empower others to do the same. And we already showed how it all starts with Freedom.
The main obstacle of Freedom in The Game of Self is the artificial concept of Purity (being always moral).
There is one huge group…
that needlessly suffers from one of the world’s most hidden and pervasive fears…
with zero advocacy because they value morality above freedom and believe their only freedom is…
…within the framework of moral purity and there is no existence elsewhere.
This group is made of all truly moral, honest people that always do the right thing.
It’s a paradox, but it’s true. The hunter-sheep dynamic is so powerful in the long term, that the fear of being immoral can seamlessly get integrated into your life. Like all fears it leads to doubts, slow speed, small scale and inertia that slows every ambitious project, involving other people, to a grind. Moral people are born with the empathy and honesty to lead nations, only to end up as bystanders most of the time. They can’t realize their huge leadership potential, leaving control of the world’s political and financial systems disproportionately to bad guys.
The largest obstacles society faces are not the systems, it’s Game of Self stuff. People have endless potential but don’t fulfill it.
Well-meaning people stuck in inertia do suffer from the feeling that they could change the world but are not doing anything about it. Deep down they know they can.
We have to burn to the ground the freedom-destroying concept of purity. Life is messy and will present you with hard lose-lose choices sometimes. You don’t have the control needed for purity.
Bad things come in two forms simultaneously. The bad thing itself and the fear of it happening. Most everyday Game of Self stuff is only frightening in our thoughts and then it happens and it turns out there is nothing to fear. Next time it happens, we don’t care that much and after a few times it’s totally fine.
If we define ourselves as being above all a decent, moral, honest person, what is the biggest fear? To lose this beautiful, pure story, to lose moral purity.
The more strictly moral we are, the more the danger that this fear will start controlling all decisions in our life, leading to the loss of Game of Life advantages, lack of resources and in the end, even immorality (out of desperate need for resources).
If the central fear in your life is being immoral, here is what can happen:
- You empathize with non-living structures (systems). You fight for the wellbeing of projects worth being scrapped, companies worth failing and governments not worth supporting, just because you’re supposed to be loyal to them.
- You don’t leave behind toxic people fast enough
- You have way too much tolerance for bullshit as calling it out is often a confrontational act.
All of this is a completely internal process. It can not only be invisible to your friends and family but also invisible from you.
It just becomes a part of you to limit yourself to the options where you will never, ever fail others.
The end result is stagnation, Inertia and Sheep mode. The more you let any fear control you, it just grows. There are no good fears. You may leave some people unhappy with your choices but you are also responsible for yourself and everything you can give and create for this world. Don’t sacrifice all that potential for the imaginable concept of purity. Nothing and no one is perfect. Just live!
Immoral people, they just take advantage of all this. They form a majority in many positions of leadership. Just because the beautiful people of this world are busy staying small for the sake of purity…
Do you really want to let the bad guys win?
The largest unused resource for world change are the quiet, well-meaning, moral people afraid of their own power and the change it might bring in their lives. We need you!
