Sin and Pride from a Secular Perspective

Everyone wants to feel happy at every moment if he can. If someone is not happy, he tries to become happy gain as quickly as possible. This is adaptive for a simple creature with simple threats (like being eaten). But for a creature with advanced cognition and complicated chronic threats, wanting to feel happy again as soon as possible can often lead to self-deception. Examples could be not wanting to acknowledge an affair, not wanting to acknowledge problems in one's social group, or how one's own behavior causes problems. Pretending a problem doesn't exist can sometimes be faster than actually fixing a problem.

From an evolutionary perspective, one might expect maladaptive behavior (like self-deception) would be selected against. But possibly there is no available selection mechanism. Self deception comes from wanting to feel good + intelligence. Evolution can't select against either without harming the organism.

Suffering can often cause self-reflection. Suppose someone is doing something which harms his health, but he pretends that it's no big deal, nothing bad is really happening, and/or the ill-effects are caused by outside factors. Maybe at the start of this process, the pain of his bad choices is at level 2, but the pain of admitting to himself that he's doing something bad would be at level 5. So, he chooses to pretend that nothing bad is happening. But suppose later the physical pain rises to level 6. Then he can actually improve his emotional state by admitting to his bad behavior and trying to fix it, because he is in so much pain anyway, that the pain of admitting that he was doing something bad is smaller in comparison.

People typically deceive themselves so that they can do bad things while still imagining themselves to be good. And self-deception is usually also considered bad in-and-of itself. So, for a person to admit to himself that he is deceiving himself, typically he has to be in so much pain that admitting to himself that he is a bad person (so that he can begin to fix his behavior) is less painful than the status quo.

If the human mind were a single unit, then the idea of self-deception would be contradictory. In ordinary deception between multiple people, in order to deceive, the deceiver believes P while deceiving the deceived into believing not P. But for self-deception, that would mean that the subject believes both P and not P at the same time, which is nonsense. So, self-deception is only possible because the human mind is fragmented. There are left and right hemispheres, as well as conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. Frankly, I don't understand all the details of how this is. Anyway, self-deception in practice means that different parts of the mind believe different things. I think in this light, calling self-development in the Jungian system "integration" makes sense. A developing person unites or integrates different parts of himself which had previously been fragmented.

I think having a fragmented psyche and fragmented model for reality also makes it hard to notice contradictions (and thus self-deception) in general. Like if you have two similar objects in two different rooms so that you can only see one at a time, it might be hard to notice how they are different. But if you bring the two objects next to each other, then it can become easy to observe how they are different. I think it works similarly in the psyche as well. A large part of self-development means fitting things together.


Techniques for Mitigating Self-Deception:

A general note about self-improvement: try to learn only one new habit at a time, or else you will burn out.

I like to aim to do all the good I can do, but to judge myself based on my effort rather than the results. This way, I have no emotional incentive to interpret results better than they actually are. I also think this is honest, because I can directly control my effort, but not the result of my efforts.

A danger of judging one's self on efforts is that one might do some lazy or ineffective strategy and pretend like it is an effective and effortful strategy. One way to mitigate this is to keep one's self busy all the time doing everything good which one can. If you are always busy, then there is no laziness.

I also believe that sometimes your best means resting. I can observe when I am fatigued or have migraines. I rest in this case. I also make provision for "emotional rest", which I consider to be distraction from emotionally heavy problems that are troubling me. I try to choose distractions that don't have any known ill effects. I consider all manner of rest to be a concession for weakness. When I believe myself to be well-rested, I resume doing whatever seems to me at that time to be good.

Then there's an issue of what to do when the scope of your agency is uncertain. I had the insight once that I can't force insight. So I have the rule that I do all good immediately which I know how to do, I try to cut off desires that seem to be impossible, and let my mind wander freely in areas that appear to be uncertain. The wandering tends to sort more things into either "do it now" or "impossible" categories.

My life experience has also made me anxious about unknown unknowns. I believe on a visceral level that there is something I don't know about which will probably hurt me at some unknown time and place. I am always very curious about finding out what that is. I show mercy to myself though for not being able to uncover whatever it is at this exact instant.

I also have what I call a "Pride Filter". I define pride for myself as lies that one tells one's self in order to feel better. I thought that if people lie to themselves in order to make themselves feel better, then one can catch all the self-deception by investigating every positive feeling. I decided that the only honest positive feelings were self-congratulation for good effort (since we have the experience of being able to control our efforts), and gratitude or gladness for things outside of our control. Now, I think this is a good technique in principle, but I found it exhausting in practice both intellectually and emotionally. I decided later to focus on what is actively good, such as perhaps giving glory to God.

I also investigate every strong emotion generally, whether good or bad. If the emotion is good, I want to check that it is honest. If the emotion is bad, I want to investigate why I feel that way. If I have faith that existence as a whole is net good, then I believe it's likely that having prolonged negative emotions comes from some bad attitude or misinterpretation of what is going on. The ultimate aim of investigating bad emotions is to make them go away, but the immediate effect is always to make the feeling worse, because I am thinking deeply about what is making me upset.

Being willing to see goodness outside of ourselves is very useful for avoiding self-deception. If we are able to become happy because of things outside of ourselves, then the emotional incentive to have a false self-image is less. It is for this reason that I think the whole concept of self-esteem is quite bad. My imagined self-image has no bearing on how good or bad I really am.

I also think in general that having self-talk like, "I want to get better" or "I do my best" is healthier than self talk of, "I am good," or "I am good at X." If "I am good at X" is a part of your self identity, then your mind will come up with reasons to justify that to yourself, even if they aren't true. If you tell yourself, "I want to get better", then your mind will come up with ways of getting better.


Commentary on Christian Ethics:

It is a tautology that a person cannot do better than his best. If morality is limited to the choices we make, then doing one's best is the entire scope of morality. Therefore, the doctrines in many Protestant denominations which give "imputed righteousness" seem like nonsense to me. I don't want to be imputed with righteousness and remain as I am; I want to actually get better. It is for this reason that I like the Orthodox concept of "theosis", which means to become united with God and so be and act more like him. Although Orthodoxy does not even attempt to explain the mechanical details of salvation the way that many Protestant denominations try to, which may be intellectually unsatisfying. In general though I differ from most Christians in that I have very little interest in a future salvation. I want to behave properly today.

I will do a follow up post about interpreting many of Jesus' teachings through a psychological framework.

I came up with the following psychological model while living at a monastery. I wasn't consciously aware of being directly inspired by anything at the time, but since this model seems to fit so nicely with some parables, it's likely that they had some unconscious influence:

Values -> Emotions -> Thoughts -> Actions

More specifically on the emotions, (Values) + (Perceived Events Related to Your Values) -> (Emotions)

Every emotion has its own internal logic. Happiness is the acquisition of something good. Sadness is the loss of something good. Anger is when you believe that someone is attacking something that you care about. Etc. For someone new to inner work, using this technique as an aid to simply observe one's self is probably a good start.

As an example, if you cared about money, and somebody stole your money, you'd be angry. Anger would lead to thoughts about wanting to hurt the person who stole your money, which you may or may not act on. However, if you could convince yourself that you didn't care about money (change of value), or if you found out that you had just lost the money and that nobody stole it (change in perception), then you wouldn't be angry anymore. I'm not arguing that convincing yourself not to care is always advisable; I'm just saying in principle how one can control one's emotional state if one is motivated to do so.

On the first occasion I used this technique, I observed that I became grumpy whenever I was hungry. I made the observation that if I become grumpy with the people around me when I am hungry, that seems to mean that I value the comfort of my gut more than those people. The thought was humiliating to me, and the humiliation killed the anger. For the next several days, I became humiliated again every time I became grumpy. Then I mostly quit getting grumpy or having other emotional reactions to hunger and other common physical pains without any more conscious effort. I found a few years later after having lived in comfort for a while and then suddenly experiencing discomfort again that the emotional reactions came back, but it was easy to identify and to retrain myself again the second time. There are many more instances in which I have used similar techniques, but I will not discuss them right now.

I believe that several of Jesus parables address this:

There is a passage about how your heart is where your treasure is. I believe the interpretation is that your treasure is what you value, and your emotional experiences follow what you value.

There is a passage about how the eyes are a lamp to the body. The eyes represent what you put your attention on. Your attention affects everything else in yourself.

There is a passage about cleaning the inside of the cup, and then the outside will also become clean. My interpretation is that if you clean your values, emotions, and thoughts, then your actions will become clean without any further effort.

There is a passage about how if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, that you can tell a mountain to throw itself into the sea, and it will obey. The mountain might be thought of metaphorically as some obstacle within one's self blocking one's self from being the way that one would like to be. Because we can choose our values, and our values are the beginning of our control system, having faith the size of a mustard seed that you can become a better person often really is all that is necessary to really become a better person. But there is also a passage about how the mustard seed grows into a great tree. I interpret this to mean that this is a process and that you cannot expect transformation to take place instantly.

There is a passage about how if you drive out devils from a house, they come back and make it worse than before. My interpretation is that the mind is always active and wants to try to find something that is good. So, if you drive out bad thoughts and bad habits, but don't replace them with good thoughts and good habits, then your improvement is vulnerable to regression. I agree with Paul that you should actively guide your attention towards the good (Philippians 4:8).

Jesus also says knock, and you will find. Interpreted naively, this means that Jesus is a liar if you prayed for a pony and didn't get it. One interpretation from Jordan Peterson that seems edifying is that the passage means that if you ask yourself what you can do better, you will always get an answer. It is true in my experience and it seems to fit well within the passage.

On the Beatitudes:

I was taught at the monastery that the beatitudes are a guide for inner development.

Being poor in spirit means not making excuses for yourself how you are a good person. It means not saying to yourself, "I am good because of X"
Mourning comes because you let go of that false perception of yourself
Letting go of your previous attachments makes you more willing to bear with suffering (what I consider meekness to be)
Willingness to suffer leads to greater interest in righteousness for its own sake (doing what's right is often not easy)
and so on for the other beatitudes

My experience is that this description is true, but I have only ever used it in retrospect to understand what happened to me or what is still happening. I have not been able to use the beatitudes as a guide for future action. I believe this process can start over again whenever you let go of some illusion or attachment that was holding you back.

That is probably enough for now.