Honest with Yourself?

Am I? Nope. Do I want to be? Not really.

Have you ever noticed that even the biggest jerks think they are good people. Maybe that’s why they are such jerks; because they aren’t aware of how negative their behaviors are.

Are you and I any different from the jerks? Not really. It’s just a matter of degree. There is one good reason why we are unaware of our bad behaviors; we don’t want to know.

To regulate anything there must be knowledge and rules. Self regulation or self control is no different. We have the rules. Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t steal. etc. etc. Knowledge about ourselves and how we affect our world is harder to obtain, but it is available. So why don’t we do a perfect job of self regulating. I see three reasons: 1) fuzzy rules, 2) fuzzy knowledge, and 3) keeping the rules separate from the knowledge.

FUZZY RULES We all know about lying to someone to keep from hurting their feelings. That makes the lying prohibition fuzzy. How fuzzy is it? Is lying to your boss okay so you keep your job? Is lying to your partner a good way to preserve a relationship? I’m a lawyer. There are millions of pages of law that try to make our rules about lying less fuzzy. It difficult to be precise about right and wrong in specific circumstances. That difficulty allows us to rationalize the fuzziness to our favor. Unlike Supreme Court cases we don’t have the benefit of thousands of hours of analysis for every moral issue in our lives. We tend to rationalize within the fuzzy zone and keep on moving.

FUZZY KNOWLEDGE We can be pretty limited in out knowledge of both ourselves and our affect on our worlds. Looking for both types of knowledge takes work that we normally don’t do. Why? Maybe we are too busy. Maybe we don’t see the need. Maybe we are afraid to look because we might not feel comfortable with what we see.

RULES separate from KNOWLEDGE Rules must be applied to knowledge to discover if behaviour needs to be regulated. For any of us who are avoiding self regulation (and we all do to some degree) the solution is simple. Just don’t think about it. And if you cannot manage to keep the two separate in your brain find something else to occupy or even shut down your thinking. TV does a good job of letting the brain escape to la la land. Sadly, intoxicants work quite effectively too.

OK, that’s too much honesty. Is there a ball game on?