An assassin is coming to kill you! At midnight tonight! Unless you do 100 pushups first, that is.

If this were true, you would do the pushups, no question, no problem. Any motivation issues would evaporate, thanks to your assassin. If the assassin did this every weekday, you’d have amazing pecs, even if you didn’t want them. Your fitness would become an inevitable result of circumstance.

The real question is how to get yourself to do 100 pushups, or some other rewarding feat, without an assassin coming to kill you. If your amygdala isn’t getting forcibly activated by an Anton Chigurh-like force, you have to rely on something else.

But why is that “something else” so much less dependable? Why is it so hard to just do the thing we think is best?

Someone emailed me a while ago and said, “Hey Dave, I notice what you mostly write about is self-control. Why all the talk about self-control?”

I do have my particular struggles with self-control, but I also regard the battle for self-control as the central theme of human history. Everything people argue about, all the news, all the political discourse, all the gossip and outrage, all the big religions, all the punditry and proselytizing — it all centers on what some person, or all people, should do or refrain from doing. All humans care about is good and bad, and the voluntary human actions that make good and bad happen.

Another word for this fixation on human self-control is morality. Everyone agrees that it matters what we do. A given person, at a given moment, might do a good thing or bad thing, and a lot hinges on that – much more than just that person’s own fate.

Other species don’t obsess over morality. I assume dogs and dolphins and other animals have consciences, emotions, and empathy, but they don’t agonize over hypothetical future states of their lives or their societies. Elephants don’t etch timeless elephant maxims into stone tablets, or publish elephant newspapers about the scandalous behavior of other elephants.

Humans underwent something unique in our development. We evolved, or were granted, the ability to imagine circumstances that don’t yet exist. This allowed us to understand ourselves as having multiple paths into the future, depending on our actions. Because some of these futures are way better than others, we really care about which actions are taken, whether it’s our own choice or someone else’s.

Not coincidentally, we’re also the only species to have cities, advanced tools, trade, literature, food production, laws, and a compounding technology tree that constantly gives us new abilities and possibilities.

After the Big Insight

This unique mental ability to contemplate a range of different fates separates us from the other animals, and puts the issue of self-control at the center of our lives.

For eons, mammals and other creatures basically operated on an approach/avoid axis. You move towards the things that make you feel good, and avoid the things that make you feel bad.

All that’s necessary to navigate this singular dimension is instinct. Instincts prod the being to move towards the Feels Good end, with its generally pro-survival outcomes, and away from the Feels Bad end and its potentially deadly outcomes. It’s a crude program, but it works well enough to keep a species going.

Note that there isn’t much for such a being to contemplate. At all times, you’re on a one-dimensional road and your feelings tell you which way to go.

Natural selection changes the form and shape of creatures over time — the specific things they approach and avoid, and how they do that, but the basic approach-avoid program remains at the core.

Our hominid ancestors, for example, were social creatures like us, so Feels Good for them partly meant getting in good with the tribe:

But then, at some point, something crazy happened. Abstract thought develops in humans, allowing them to consider hypothetical scenarios – events that aren’t happening, but could. They could now envision multiple different ways the future might go down.

This changes everything, because now they can see that there are times when it’s advantageous to approach a thing your instincts say to avoid, or avoid a thing your instincts say to approach.

For example, a human might reason that even though approaching a woolly mammoth fills the body with fear chemicals that tell you to run away screaming, successfully hunting it could result in the biggest score your tribe ever had, and your everlasting fame.

Similarly, refraining from doing a thing you want to do, such as hoarding all the gathered berries for yourself instead of sharing them, might result in a healthier tribe with less infighting.

Humans Eat the Fruit and Are Never the Same

What humans have discovered here is the possibility of making sacrifices. As hard as it is, you can give up things you covet, and you can move towards things you fear, even as your instincts beg you not to. And the rewards can be tremendous.

After this development, humans technically no longer need the assassin to force them to do the hundred pushups. They aren’t stuck on the approach-avoid axis anymore. Instead of operating by what feels good and feels bad, they can begin to discern what is good and is bad — independent of their feelings — with respect to their survival and well-being.

This is a whole new value system, and it blows things wide open. Humans can now travel along a second, perpendicular axis, which is much tougher to navigate, but is far more relevant to their ability to flourish.

The landscape becomes much more complex, and much more fraught. Approach-avoid is still strong as ever, but there’s now this perpendicular set of concerns, which has perhaps even higher stakes, and affords many more possibilities.

Some things Feel Good and are Good, but quite often doing an act of Good is difficult and counter-instinctual.

Privileging Good action over Feels Good action is hard, but can be deeply rewarding. It allows not only for voluntary pushups, but for new kinds of co-operation, generosity, endurance, meticulousness, trust between peers, and personal achievement. People can now deliberately confront their fears, save for a rainy day, and live by rules and codes.

Having people in your tribe who could wield this instinct-defying magic, and teach others to do it, would massively improve your chances of survival. It would utterly change what survival even looked like.

Seeing how much better this kind of wisdom could make society, people would naturally want to model the Good behaviors for their children, and warn them away from Bad ones. They would tell stories around the fire intended to highlight this difference. They would build shrines to honor this idea of Good-seeking, and invent symbols to remind people of it.

Some people would think about this powerful new axis all the time, and try to explain it to each other. What granted us this ability? What is this all-seeing force behind everything that seemingly rewards sacrifice and discipline, and punishes selfishness and cowardice? Clearly there’s something out there, maybe in the stars, that just knows when you’ve done something un-Good, even if nobody saw you do it. Something out there sees your industriousness and bravery, and rewards you and your people with good fortune.

Now in Book Form

Wise and trusted sages, in many societies, would eventually collate their best instructional stories and dictums into an authoritative collection of literature. Such a collection might be seen as so vital, so pertinent to the fate of humanity, that people just call it The Book.

There were probably many such Books, but only a few got so popular that people still read them.

The most famous of such books begins with exactly the scenario I described above, just without the Darwinian framing.

It tells of the very first people, who were once like the other animals — no sense of time, no worries, just instinctual living. Then their troublesome curiosity gained them a permanent new dimension of awareness. They could now see, for better or worse, an ever-branching tree of possible futures, a kind of knowledge once possessed only by the all-knowing, all-judging Force.

After that, they don’t get to live with the animals anymore. They get cast out of this timeless, abundant place, this straightforward way of being, into human history and its agonizing struggle with morality.

Their first children illustrate that struggle perfectly. They had two boys, who both understood the importance of what’s now called Good and Evil, but the younger brother really got it and the older one seemingly just got the basic idea. The great guiding Force, now officially called God, favored the younger brother, so the older one, perplexed at their differing outcomes, succumbed to his base impulses and murdered his brother with a stone.

The rest of The Book goes on to illustrate, using more stories, the tragedy of our species mostly not getting the big insight, mostly being like the well-meaning bad brother, but still having some awareness that there is a far better path than the default one. There’s a light you can see, or feel, and therefore navigate by, even through a driving sandstorm.

We struggle with it because it’s literally the hardest thing possible. Good is sometimes easy, but often tricky, counter-instinctual, unattractive, and uncomfortable. When the “storm” is bad we easily end up getting turned around and headed straight for Feel Good, because we always know where it is.

It’s especially easy to get sidetracked by Feels Good if you regard yourself as a zealous advocate of this or that Book, as a knower of moral rules. The Book is just literature, an extremely influential story collection pointing us to the immense potential of the Is Good axis, but some people take it literally, or self-identify as a Good Person among the not-goods, which can only lead to extremely confused expressions of approach-avoid.

Religion’s successor, political philosophy, often leads to the same mistake: becoming a self-identified Good Person against the not-goods. Doubt of one’s own “good” status is unusual in political discourse.

Good is a new capacity for humans, so our efforts usually get co-opted by Feels Good. Our various moral projects, religious and secular, have achieved some real Good, but most of them degrade into more Feels-Good-driven activity, devoid of self-reflection. Sloganeering feels good. Performative moralizing feels good. Being accepted by the in-group feels good. Smiting the out-group feels good. So it goes.

All of that is the broad view though. What we’re really concerned with is how to do a bunch of pushups without a hitman coming to kill you. This is the great spiritual question.

It remains a genuine mystery, mostly. Do you know how to always do the right thing, the Good thing? Sometimes we pull it off and sometimes we don’t. No wonder they write 700,000-word books about this question and study them for centuries.

What we do know for sure about Good is that it’s possible. The light is real, and we have some capacity to navigate by it. Each of us has seen it. We’ve been it. Civilization is built on this possibility, which might be the most important human discovery since we figured out how to stand up and walk on two legs.

Some say we shouldn’t have eaten the fruit. But we did. We have to learn to walk this new walk, and we’re just getting started.

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Doing Things is Good

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[What is How to Do Things?]

Images from Miramax, Pixabay, imgflip, Wikimedia commons. Illustrations by David Cain.

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