The One Thing Ruining Your Life
One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and millennia is that we humans are all hypocrites. But how does this link to the one thing ruining your life? Read on to find out...
One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and millennia is that we humans are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of others’ hypocrisy we only compound our own. We are blind to the logs in our own eyes. When a celebrity or well-known figure slips up, we so quickly and easily point fingers at them, but when we step out of line in a similar fashion, we try to justify our actions. Isn’t it funny how we judge ourselves by our internal motives and everyone else by their external actions?
Social psychologists have recently isolated the mechanisms that make us blind. The moral implications of these findings are disturbing indeed, because they challenge our greatest moral certainties. But the implications can, and will be, liberating.
There is a Japanese proverb that says, “Though you see the seven defects of others, we do not see our own ten defects.” From the person who cuts us off on the motorway to the Nazis who ran the concentration camps, most people think they are good people and that their actions are motivated by good reasons. As Robert Wright put it in his book The Moral Animal, “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.”
When Americans and Europeans are asked to rate themselves on virtues, skills, or other desirable traits (including intelligence, driving ability, sexual skills, and ethics), a large majority say they are above average. (This effect is weaker in East Asian countries, and may not exist in Japan).
We judge others by their behaviour, but we think we have special information about ourselves – we know what we are “really like” inside, so we can easily find ways to explain away our selfish acts and cling to the illusion that we are better than others.
In a study of 1 million American high school students, 70% thought they were above average in leadership ability, but only 2 per cent thought they were below average. Everyone can find some skill that might be construed as related to leadership, and then find some piece of evidence that one has that skill.
You cannot change these biases of other people. Emily Pronin at Princeton and Lee Ross at Stanford have tried to help people overcome their self-serving biases by teaching them about biases and then asking, “Okay, now that you know about these biases, do you want to change what you just said about yourself?” Across many studies, the results were the same: People were quite happy to learn about the various forms of self-serving bias and then apply their newfound knowledge to predict others’ responses. But their self-ratings were unaffected. The results show that each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, so others should agree with us. If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not been exposed to the right facts or else that they are blinded by their own interests and leaning ideologies. It is this sort of thinking that gives us a world full of good and evil, and this brings us the most disturbing implication of the Vedic advice about hypocrisy: Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.
In his book, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Aggression, social psychologist Roy Baumister examined evil from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator. When taking the perpetrator’s perspective, he found the people who do things we see as evil, all the way from spousal abuse to genocide, rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always think their actions are justified, especially in the moment. They often think they are the victims. Is this what happened to Hitler? Napoleon? Alexander? Maybe. Maybe not. Even more interesting was Baumeister’s research literature, in which he found that victims often shared some of the blame. Most murders result from an escalating cycle of provocation and retaliation; often, the body could just as easily have been the murderer. In 50% of all domestic disputes, both sides used violence. He also points out that, even in instances of obvious police brutality, there is usually much more to the story than what is shown on the news. (Remember, news programs gain viewers by satisfying people’s need to believe that evil lurks in every corner of known land.)
People usually have reasons for committing violence, and those reasons usually involve some form of retaliation for a perceived injustice, or self-defence. When George W. Bush said that the 9/11 terrorists did what they did because they “hate our freedom” he showed a stunning lack of psychological insight. Neither the hijackers nor Bin Laden were particularly upset because the Western world allowed women to drive, vote, or show their faces in public. Rather, many Islamic extremists want to kill Westerners because they see America as being almost Satanic, the current villain in a long pageant of Western humiliation of Arab nations and populations. They did what they did as a reaction to America’s actions and impact in the Middle East. However horrifying it is for terrorists to categorise all of the population into the category of “enemy” and then kill them indiscriminately, such actions at least make psychological sense, whereas killing because of pure hatred for freedom doesn’t. The major atrocities of the twentieth century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack.
To tackle our fault-finding nature, we can write down our thoughts, learn to recognise the distortions in the thoughts, and then think of more appropriate ones. This is kind of the basis of cognitive behavioural therapy too. When we extract a splinter it hurts, for a moment, but then we feel relief, even pleasure. When we find a fault in ourselves it will hurt, for a moment, but if we keep going and acknowledge the fault, we are more likely to feel relief. It is this taking responsibility for our own behaviour that allows us to live in peace. By seeing the log in our eye we can become less biased, and therefore less inclined towards argument and conflict. We begin to follow the perfect, focused way of living.
“Why is it that wherever we look, we see people being selfish? It almost seems like we can’t trust anyone… Why?”
He nodded and smiled, but he didn’t speak. He then picked up a book that was on the table next to him, and he opened it up to a page with a Post-it note on it. Then he spoke…
“See… here it says that everything is divine. In fact, everything is divine. We look towards people’s external qualities and judge them accordingly, but we fail to see everyone’s true identity as the atma.”
“Yes…” I replied, eager to hear more.
“Due to the influence of the three modes of nature and maya, every individual’s mind may be affected, and because of that people act and behave differently. But you should always remember that at the root of our being, everyone is divine. Realising this is key to achieving peace in life. Why? Because it’s the truth.”
This post is an excerpt from my second book Keshav, available everywhere online.