On the Nature of Human Nature

Theories of human nature underly theories of political and economic systems.
 
Some people attempt to justify capitalism with the Calvinist theory that says, because of Original Sin, the inherent tendency to evil, we should do our duty by working hard to absolve those sins and ensure acceptance into Heaven. This is the gist of the Protestant Ethic. 
 
Others attack capitalism by saying it assumes an inherent goodness in human beings, at which point they cry hypocrisy and list all the evil that goes on in the world.
 
Sigmund Freud’s theory of human nature is more sophisticated, albeit based on determinism. It says we have two fundamental drives, analogous to hunger or sex, that determine our behavior, namely the life or positive self-assertion drive and the death or destruction drive. The latter gives some of us a strongly aggressive personality that culture—civilization—must control. Hence, our “discontent” that results from living in civilization.
 
The theory of human nature best representing a free society holds that human beings possess free will, are self-responsible, and possess the ability, if they so choose to exert the effort, to raise themselves up from their original stations in life, that is, for example, to achieve and enjoy a higher standard of living than that of their parents.*
 
The theory does not describe human beings as inherently evil or inherently good, or as helpless victims of genes and environment—those theories deny free will.
 
Freedom of the will means that a person’s choices are the essential source of both good and evil, though culture—the environment we were reared in, especially family and education—are also important sources of our thoughts and behaviors. (See my post “On the Nature of Evil.”)
 
This free-will theory is sometimes said to be neutral, meaning we are born neither good nor evil. We have the equal potential for both. Nevertheless, we can challenge this complete neutrality by considering whether humans by nature have a stronger tendency to do good than to do evil. How so?
 
Just as the human body has a tendency to heal itself, so also does the human consciousness.
 
A minor cut on the finger or hand, for example, in most people clots and heals itself in a few days. The tendency to heal ourselves psychologically derives from the biological function of consciousness to use reason to perceive our selves and environment correctly, then choose values and take actions necessary to sustain and enhance our lives.
 
This tendency to goodness can be called, with qualifications, the will to do the right thing. We see this desire in children from their earliest years, depending on parental influence, eagerly seeking to live their lives in a healthy and happy way, and often continuing through adolescence and adulthood even after being confronted with major unpleasant environmental obstacles.
 
This will gives most people in a civilized society a benevolent intention in their lives and slants the theory of human nature more toward an inherent goodness.
 
What precisely do I mean by “the will to do the right thing”? Fundamentally, it is a psychological requirement for our consciousness to function. We have a need to feel right before taking an action. Does this mean we are always right? No. It is a theory based on free will, which means we can make mistakes or do evil things.
 
Psychologically, however, we must believe that we are right each time we select what to do; it is a perception of being right. Otherwise, we will not be able to act.
 
This perception of rightness, that I am calling the will to do the right thing, is analogous to the psychological concept of perceived risk. Just as risk perception varies from person to person, so also does “rightness” vary from person to person. **
 
“Being right” applies to everyone, both good and evil, with a continuum of “rightness” and multiple meanings of the word. Let us now look at some examples along that continuum.
 
The most common usage of the concept “right,” when talking about “doing the right thing,” means doing the morally right thing. It means especially being honest in thought, communication with others, and action. Most people, I submit, at least in American culture, do strive to be honest, so this statement probably can be applied to most Americans.
 
The “right thing,” however, within the science of ethics depends on the moral theory and standard of value one is assuming, though it usually means what we were taught as children.
 
A significant influence on American culture is the ethics of Immanuel Kant, who insists that telling the truth is an unconditional principle that is consistent with his categorical imperative of always acting in accordance with duty, never from inclination. This means it is one’s unconditional duty to tell the truth to a homicidal maniac who comes to your door looking for his or her victim. Kant says there is a difference between doing what is right versus what avoids harm to another person. Telling the truth in this situation is not wrong.
 
Ayn Rand, however, disagrees with Kant and says that both physical and moral principles can and do have qualifications. The statement that water boils at 212º Fahrenheit is not the end of the story. The qualification, varying by air pressure and purity of water, must be added.
 
Similarly, telling the truth does not mean qualifications or consequences be damned (as Kant’s theory says). Honesty means telling the truth unless confronted by direct or indirect initiated coercion, threatened with invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth might be unnecessarily hurtful to another person.
 
Thus, doing the right thing varies by underlying moral theory, but most people today, I would add (again, in our present culture), are uncomfortable with the strict Kantian ethics of duty over inclination and to a great extent with the concept of Original Sin.
 
Hence, as I continue to say, most people try to do the right thing, however they may understand it, at least on a practical level. None probably have ever had a homicidal maniac come to their door and many likely have fibbed to avoid unduly hurting a friend or relative.
 
My father, for example, seems to have been a good Kantian in ethics, though I am certain he had never heard of Immanuel Kant. He said to me once, “You do your work because it is your duty, not because you enjoy it.” He was raised Protestant on a farm and worked most of his life as a clerk in the post office. His intentions and honesty were decidedly right—and I do think he enjoyed his work.
 
Some people with psychological problems may, to an outside observer, appear not to be honest. Usually, however, such problems are not moral failings.
 
Psychological problems—typically involving self-doubt and the emotion of anxiety—trigger the strong need in us to allay, reduce, or blot out that feeling by adopting defensive habits, such as withdrawal, hostility, or a compulsive behavior. Often, as children, we develop defensive symptoms subconsciously, not knowing how we got them. Nevertheless, the purpose of a defensive habit is to give us the feeling of doing right while also assuaging our anxiety.
 
The psychological need to feel right is the source of what I am calling the tendency to do the right thing—however one might define “right.”
 
The extreme example on the negative end of the continuum of “rightness” is the criminal personality. Rationalization—excuse-making to feel right—seems to be the primary defensive habit of criminals whose self-esteem is low. As one put it, “I am a nothing. If I thought about it, I would have to kill myself.” Thus, the rapist says, “She really wanted me” and the murderer says, “He deserved it.”
 
Rationalization also describes dictators, as they are criminal personalities who must believe (rationalize) they are right in every action they take. See Ayn Rand’s comment, 246, on Nikita Khrushchev’s need to justify his behavior by reciting the mantra of dialectical materialism, and my use of Rand’s comment in Applying Principles, 314, where I attempt to explain why facts don’t matter to many people, including, or especially, dictators.
 
Doing the “right thing” for the criminal is definitely not the objectively moral thing to do, nor is this statement a justification or exoneration of criminal or immoral behavior. It is a psychological observation that criminal behavior feels right to the criminal and explains his or her actions.
 
Surely, then, one might assert, there are people who knowingly do the wrong thing. Yes, as a double standard. This is the criminal personality who enjoys getting away with the forbidden. Yes, the criminal says, I know it is illegal, but that is who I am. The criminal’s identity is such that he or she feels right to rob banks, and worse. 
 
Or, as one criminal said incredulously to a psychologist, “You expect me to get a job to buy what I want when I can just go into the store and take it?” Paying for goods in a store is for suckers, he said. He believed or felt, as his rationalization, that he was doing the right thing.
 
Only suckers, according to the criminal, obey the law. What he does is right, according to his rationalization-infested mind. (See Stanton Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind.)
 
Most people, as I continue to maintain, exhibit a will to do the morally right thing, indicating that human nature has built into it a tendency to do good, meaning most people can and do exhibit varying degrees of good intentions.
 
According to the theory of human nature presented here, I put most people on the scale of honesty and goodness.
 
Both values are required for a lasting free society.
 
 
* Psychiatrist William Glasser (chap. 1) assumed a similar theory when treating his patients. He said, “We choose our own misery. Thus, we can choose our own happiness.” His goal as therapist was to work with patients to help them choose healthier and happier behaviors.
 
** Perceived risk, also called subjective risk, means, for example, that some people need alcoholic beverages before getting on an airplane, while others like to walk on wings for a living. Risk perception exists along a continuum, which means we can now draw an analogy between epistemology where there is a difference between what we perceive or believe to be true­—and what is true, and ethics where there is a difference between what we perceive or believe to be right—and what is right. In both cases, people vary considerably according to what they believe to be true and right—and what is true and right.

On the Nature of Evil

“Evil” is a strong word.
 
The Oxford English Dictionary says it derives from Old English and, when applied to a person, is “the most comprehensive adjectival expression of disapproval, dislike, or disparagement.” It means the person is “bad, wicked, vicious” and causes harm.
 
The concept is on the extreme end of the continuum of immorality. Ayn Rand says that evil people are a small minority in any culture, though their evil is often unleashed by appeasers. Let us take a look at the source and meaning of the concept of evil.
 
Ayn Rand’s moral values and virtues (16) are those that sustain and enhance our lives as rational beings. We are the animals that possess a volitional consciousness and therefore must choose to exercise our rational faculty to successfully live our lives. Some of her derivative values are honesty, courage, integrity, and justice.
 
Most decent people, I would say, think of morality in terms of telling the truth (honesty) and being fair to oneself and others (justice). Lying and unfairness are immoral. What is this continuum of immorality and where does evil lie?
 
Every concept, according to Rand’s epistemology, identifies a range of referents that are similar to each other, such as large and small tables, but different from others, such as beds and couches. The concept table identifies a range, or continuum, of measurements, specifying its essential distinguishing characteristics without the measurements—flat surface with supports designed to hold smaller objects.
 
The continuum of immorality ranges from someone who occasionally tells minor fibs and sometimes treats oneself and others unfairly to the seriously wicked and vicious person who might be justifiably called evil. I put the criminal personality in this evil classification, though the concept of evil is itself a continuum, ranging from the bungling burglar who leaves his identity behind to the murderer who enjoys watching the blood ooze from his victim’s body.
 
The criminal personality, as identified by Yochelson and Samenow, is someone who lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden (348–57). It is the criminals’ way of thinking—their thinking errors—that causes them to become criminals.
 
Working for the courts, Yochelson and Samenow for years interviewed criminals who had claimed the insanity defense.* They found few who were psychotic, especially when committing crimes. Interestingly, the criminal’s departure from reality was often a psychosis of conscience (voices and delusions) that prevented them from committing crimes. When the psychosis lifted, they returned to crime (476–81).
 
Also, the authors reviewed the literature on the notion of “psychopath,” concluding that the research is confusing and fails to describe a separate personality that is psychopathic (89–106). They even quote one investigator who says the research is a “wastebasket of psychiatric classification” (99).
 
Yet, the range of evilness that is wicked and vicious, I submit, can reliably be called psychopathic, as long as we do not call them psychotic. They are people, for example, who really believe, as does the rapist, “She really wanted me” and the murderer, “He deserved it.” The beliefs are rationalizations, but that is what constitutes the criminal’s way of thinking.
 
On the less extreme side of evilness, though still talking about people who are decidedly not nice, are what Yochelson and Samenow call the “non-arrestable criminal” (chap. 7). Such behavior is not illegal but often leads to illegal activity.
 
The authors call this behavior “criminal equivalent.” The criminally equivalent person seeks power for its own sake at the expense of others, enjoying the excitement of manipulating, bullying, and giving orders (not always cordially). They exist in all walks of life, at home, school, and work. Some are attracted to law enforcement, the military, fire prevention, and politics.
 
Crossing the line of legality, for example, the non-arrestable firefighter may start a fire, then help to put it out.
 
Ayn Rand says that the root of immorality is evasion of thought, the refusal to exercise one’s reason before acting. And one can readily say that there is likely evasion going on in the criminal’s mind, from an early age. But a question I have raised before, is how does one know that someone else is evading? How do we, or can we, judge others without making the hasty-generalization mistake?
 
My answer in the past has been, “Not easily” (1, 2, 3). I question whether we can judge someone as immoral unless we know that person well. Throw in the fact that many criminals are con artists, pretending to be an honest person, and add hyperbole and BS that many honest people like to use in conversation. You can have difficulty drawing conclusions about your conversant.
 
Indeed, I question whether Ayn Rand could readily make the judgment of thought evasion about another person—because psychology plays such a big part in the determination of our behavior, and Rand acknowledged that she did not know much about psychology. She did allow for errors in knowledge, which is where we can classify psychological defenses.
 
What about public figures—politicians and journalists, for example—who seem to lie as a way of life? They may be “criminal equivalents,” but how would we know without personal contact? I would say that targeting one person or organization with what seems like repeated falsehoods is moving in that direction, while frivolous lawsuits and unjust fines and imprisonments have moved across the line, the latter two the legal line.
 
Can we know these persons’ motivations with certainty? I don’t think so, and, to put a point on it, what does it matter to our personal lives, unless we are the target?
 
If we are the target of harmful and seemingly immoral or evil behavior, we must call out that behavior as wrong. But condemning the person as immoral or evil is a serious charge. With incomplete knowledge, I recommend giving the other person the benefit of the doubt. They have psychologies, after all, just as we do.
 
The most frivolous of frivolous discussions today in ethics is what I call the fallacy of moralizing concretes: red meat is immorally unhealthy, drinking water out of plastic bottles immorally harms the environment, and owning a gun means you want to kill people. The appropriate response here, after an exasperated exhale, would be, “Seriously?” Concretes—red meat, plastic bottles, guns—are neither moral nor immoral. The truth of the first two statements is doubtful, though your doctor may recommend a different diet. The moralizer of concretes is possibly a criminal equivalent who wants the power—and excitement—of banning the concretes.
 
Moral values and principles are broad abstractions that each of us must apply to our own lives. Honesty is not Immanuel Kant’s dictum of never lying. It is the principle of telling the truth, unless under duress, threatened with invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth might be unnecessarily hurtful to another person. And justice means judging oneself and others correctly and, when appropriate, praising or denouncing.
 
The criminal suffers a deep character flaw of enjoying lying, cheating, and getting away with the forbidden. Crossing the legal line makes criminals easier to judge, though even here, one must ask, “Is the law valid that is being violated?” Am I immoral if I refuse to pay my taxes? No, but it is a practical issue. Ayn Rand paid her taxes because she did not want to go to jail. I certainly pay mine.
 
Most laws that criminals violate are crimes against person and property. This makes it easier to judge criminals as falling into the evil classification. Though even here, I am tempted to say that the really bad, wicked, and vicious ones are more on the psychopathic end of the scale, the types who enjoy watching blood oozing from their victim’s body.**

* Yochelson died at age 70 in 1976, but his co-author Stanton Samenow continued their work, and still continues today. Samenow has several books. I recommend Inside the Criminal Mind, The Myth of the Out of Character Crime, and Before It’s Too Late (advice to parents). I have cited this work on the criminal mind in earlier posts. See especially these two in Applying Principles (267–69, 280–83).
 
** Can ideologies and historical figures—such as communism and Hitler—be judged as evil? Yes, but extensive fact-finding must be done before condemning. A topic, perhaps for another blog.
 
Follow-up to last month’s post “On Writing”: I forgot to mention an important form of short writing in business: the conference memo. Say, you and your boss attend a meeting with the client. You, the junior person, will likely be the note taker and writer of the subsequent conference memo. The memo itself is no more than one page and summarizes the essence of the meeting, such as purpose, problem and suggested solutions, and, as the final section, next steps, which states who will do what, when, with a specific deadline for the project.
 
Speaking of deadlines, they do exist, whether for term papers and exams in school or for manuscript submission of books and articles (or, to go one further, for payment of taxes and credit card bills). My advice to students and myself: do the work ahead of time, allowing a chance for reflection on what might also need to be done. This is the subconscious “percolation” I mentioned last month, the process of filtering and integrating the knowledge you presently have. (And the deadline I give myself for these blogs is that it be posted sometime during the month.)

Defensive Habits as Obstacles to Exercising Our Free Will

Ayn Rand divides human volition into two stages: focus and thought. To focus means to direct and control our attention to something in particular, a landscape or a problem to be solved, or to let our minds wander. This, she has compared to throwing a switch (Peikoff, 58).
 
The second stage is the focus of our thinking to acquire knowledge without contradiction and to keep our subconscious minds well-ordered to guide our lives in moral and successful ways. Focus may be like throwing a switch—a dimmer switch more likely—but the decision to think or not, especially the quality of thinking we generate, can face obstacles.
 
Defensive habits in particular are a significant obstacle to clear thinking. Defensive symptoms of the neurotic type are a form of delusion—though not nearly as serious as the delusions of a person experiencing a psychotic episode.
 
A young man, for example, who is fired from his job and jilted by his lover on the same day may become depressed and conclude, “I’ll never find another job or lover.” * This is not true and can be called a delusion, a false belief about reality. This person, in addition, may, without help, have considerable difficulty doing much of anything for several days or weeks. His thought processes are turned off, partially or completely.
 
Much of what we think, feel, and do as adults has been influenced and shaped by the conclusions we make as children and teenagers. An influential part of our psychologies is what Edith Packer (chap. 2) calls core evaluations about our selves, other people, and the world in general. How well these premises have been formed, meaning how correct and healthy they are, determines how we will act later.
 
This gives rise to a question: how well can we focus our minds to develop a well-ordered subconscious when we experience a host of psychological problems? Not easily is the answer.
 
The formation of these premises depends greatly on our parental upbringing and teaching in school. What we believe and feel as adults is often not as simple as flipping a switch, though generally, absent drug influence or physiological damage to our brains, behavior is controllable. Which means we can refrain from pulling out a gun and shooting someone, or cheating someone through a dishonest act, but certain areas of our lives may not exhibit what an outside observer would call clear thinking.
 
The influence of defensive habits, I believe, is underemphasized in Ayn Rand’s writings, though she does call these types of failures to focus and think errors in knowledge, as opposed to willful evasions.**
 
Technically, this is true. The person with psychological problems does have free will and did in his or her younger years when initially creating the false premises, though the formation of many of these premises occur by emotional generalization and chance.
 
Many false premises become repressed and shaped into habits manifested as symptoms that cloud our perception of reality. Such a person often does not know how to correct the errors. And with the present influential view of determinism by genes and environment, many conclude, “That’s me and I can’t do anything about it.” However, free will as a controllable behavior means we can seek help, professional or personal, or continue to live our lives despite the obstacles. Dealing with our psychological problems is more difficult, especially in today’s culture, than many realize.
 
Alcoholics who want to stay sober, for example, must every day confront strong obsessive urges for a drink. Clouded thinking is often the result. The same is true of people with other psychological problems and their neurotic symptoms.
 
Let me conclude with this quotation from contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Shedler (432) who understands the relationship between psychological problems and free will:

Psychoanalytic therapists believe expanding our understanding of the meanings and causes of our behavior creates freedom, choice, and a freer will [my italics]. People can change, people do change, and psychoanalytic therapy helps people change, sometimes in profound ways. Every legitimate psychotherapist, deep down, believes in the human capacity to grow, change, and experience a greater sense of freedom and equanimity in the face of life’s inevitable hardships. If behavior were unavoidably determined, there would be no reason to practice psychoanalytic therapy or, for that matter, any form of therapy.

 
* I first used this example in Independent Judgment and Introspection (94).
 
** Rand seems to view our subconscious minds as equivalent to Sigmund Freud’s preconscious, the store of unrepressed knowledge that we are not now aware of but can recall at a moment’s notice. She does not make allowance for motivation by repressed premises and therefore is quick to condemn people as dishonest and immoral. Using her terms, though, non-self-defensive shooting of someone, or cheating, is clear evasion of what is right or moral for decent life. The criminal personality, as Stanton Samenow has well demonstrated, lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden.

The Two Senses of Self-Esteem and Pride—Moral and Psychological

Self-esteem and pride, respectively, are a moral value and virtue. Both rest on the more fundamental attributes of psychological self-esteem and pride.
 
The two kinds, moral and psychological, interact to produce the degree of self-respect or self-worth that we hold about ourselves.*
 
Self-esteem in the moral sense means holding one’s self as one’s own highest value, which means never sacrificing to others or others to oneself. The virtue of pride is the action of living up to one’s own moral values, which includes being true even to one’s non-moral, rational values, living for the sake of our own happiness.**
 
Moral values are what we seek to acquire and maintain to support our lives as a being that possesses the capacity to reason. Virtues are the acts or practice of acquiring and maintaining those values.
 
Ayn Rand describes pride as “moral ambitiousness,” always doing what one judges to be right. This means holding, and always acting on, the more fundamental moral values (and corresponding virtues) of reason, independence, honesty, integrity, courage, justice, and productiveness.
 
For this reason, Aristotle calls pride the “crown of the virtues”—the climax or point of culmination, so to speak, of morality.
 
Self-esteem and pride are required to uphold and practice a rational egoism that promotes and exhibits one’s self-interest and joy in life—without harming oneself or others.
 
However, neither self-esteem nor pride in the moral sense can be achieved or maintained without a store of psychological self-esteem and pride.
 
As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 95-96), self-esteem in the psychological sense:

is the degree of confidence or certainty we have in ourselves as a valuable person and as someone competent to correctly and rationally choose values and actions to make us happy in life. The two interacting and reinforcing components of self-esteem are worthiness and efficacy. Both are mental, that is, psychological, not existential or physical as in our high or low competence in changing a tire, though existential competencies derive from and are influenced by the mental ones.

Psychological self-esteem is our conviction of worthiness and mental competence to live life to the fullest. Pride in the psychological sense is an emotion, the emotional consequence and expression of self-esteem.
 
Pretending to or hoping to be worthy and competent, along with protestations that “I am a proud person” or “boy, I’m great,” are not genuine. They are the defensive result of psychological problems and conflicts, making the moral counterparts more difficult to achieve and practice.
 
Genuine self-esteem and pride produce a “quiet confidence,” as psychologist Edith Packer (p. 230) says, and a feeling that “I am fit for life.”
 
The development of psychological self-esteem begins in childhood and requires, for the worthiness component, an unconditional love from parents and other adults around the child. For cognitive competency, the child needs to be taught what is necessary to use his or her mind properly, which in particular means an unconditional commitment to reason and facts, along with methods of identifying the nature and causes of his or her emotions.
 
A child and, later, adult who has been given strong doses of love in childhood will conclude “I am loved and am capable of being loved by others because I am confident in and reliant on myself.” The child who feels competent concludes “I can and do use my mind well to guide me throughout life.”
 
As psychologist Nathaniel Branden (p. 130) points out, self-esteem and pride in both senses of the words often begin at the same time early in life—crawling, walking, and banging a spoon on the table, for example, can produce an emotion of the efficacy of psychological self-esteem combined with the virtue of moral pride.
 
Unfortunately, most of us were not taught much of anything about our psychologies. Thus, the psychological problems we suffer in childhood arise from errors in thinking about ourselves, other people, and the world in general—Edith Packer’s mistaken core evaluations (chap. 1). These errors not only undercut developing self-esteem in the psychological sense, but they also confound our understanding and practice of the moral concepts.
 
A weak worthiness or confidence component of self-esteem—“I’m no good and the world is out to get me”—for example, may affect the adult’s practice of integrity and courage. A weak mental competence—"I’m so stupid I can’t do anything right”—may affect the adult’s independence, sense of justice, and pursuit of a productive career.
 
Mistakes in morality due to the influence of our psychologies, it must be emphasized, do not necessarily deserve condemnation, as long as our fears and failures do not cause harm to others. This is called an error in knowledge, not a breach of morality.
 
The difference in briefest essence of the two meanings of self-esteem and pride are as follows. In the moral sense: I am good (my own highest value) and I do good (always doing what I know to be right). In the psychological sense: I have confidence in myself as good and worthy and can think and do things well to make me happy, with the resulting pleasure in accomplishment.***
 
The worthiness component of psychological self-esteem gives us confidence essentially to do whatever we choose to do and is a direct connection to moral self-esteem. The pleasure of psychological pride feeds into the desire for “moral ambitiousness.”
 
 
* It is unfortunate and sometimes confusing, though not uncommon, that the English language uses the same word for essentially different referents. That the moral and psychological interact with each other only makes clarification of the present terms more challenging. A brief discussion of the moral and psychological meanings of self-esteem and pride can be found in Branden (pp. 298-99).
 
** Non-moral, rational values are optional in the sense that they do not have to be accepted and practiced by everyone in order to have a good character. They might be universal for our physical well-being, such as the generic value of food, but if we specify vanilla ice cream, then that value is clearly not one that everyone has to accept. This optional nature of non-moral values can also apply to choice of career, romantic partner, or the means of building a bridge, though in some cases universal moral values may be relevant. See my discussion here.
 
*** Criminal personalities, on the other hand, according to Stanton Samenow (chap. 3), think of themselves as both worthless (“I am a zero, a nothing”) and evil, but “If I thought of myself as evil,” said one offender, “I couldn’t live.” Criminals, thus, are masters at rationalization to prevent themselves from being aware of their inner selves.

Why Don’t Facts Matter?

In several previous comments I have in one way or another attempted to answer the question that titles this post.

My first encounter with the issue occurred when I complained to a colleague about other associates whose selective memories seemed beyond the pale, because I had assumed it was impossible for the latter to have forgotten what was said in a meeting not too long before the immediate incident.

The colleague gave me a dead serious glare and said, “Facts don’t matter!” I briefly responded with an embarrassed “you can’t be serious” chuckle, but soon realized that the glare was not going away.

Naiveté aside—I am aware that there are dishonest people in the world—I nonetheless have a hard time understanding those who seem to be honest, yet clearly are not sticking to the facts.

In 2006 I wrote an academic paper about Harry Frankfurt’s little book On Bullshit, in which Frankfurt distinguishes liars from BS’ers. Liars care about facts in order to say the opposite. BS’ers, however, don’t care because their goal is to impress and sway whether or not what they are saying is true. Are BS’ers dishonest?*


In my paper I argue that there are a couple of continua operating here, the relevant one ranging from the deliberately dishonest to sloppy thinkers who are unware of their premises or where the premises came from.

This may somewhat account for those who seem to be decent people but at the same time are habitual hyperbolizers and habitually selective rememberers. But where do these habits come from?

In a 2008 blog post I make the not too original point that we learn—that is, pick up habits—from our parents, teachers, and significant others, which means our significant others learned from their significant others who learned from theirs, etc. In the absence of an infinite regress, however, someone somewhere along the line had to have chosen to embellish his or her statements and selectively ignore certain facts. Why?

Free will, of course, dictates that anyone in the present, or past, can choose to ignore facts. Is that it? Isn’t there more to the sloppy thinking that many seem to exhibit?

Consider the following cases.

1. Philosopher Sidney Hook describes two instances from his travels in the mid-twentieth century (Out of Step, pp. 585-88). In Japan, Hook relates, he was confronted by his academic hosts and the Japanese press with nothing but complaints about the US bombing of Hiroshima, yet not a single word was said about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In India, the conversation centered on US race discrimination—without mention of India’s caste system. Near the end of his stay, Hook invited an academic host to dine with him at his hotel, but the host, after several evasions, finally admitted that he could not accept—because the waiters at the hotel were Muslim and the host was Brahmin.

Hook does not provide an explanation for the stark logical disconnects in either instance, other than to imply differences between Eastern and Western cultures.

My conclusion would have to specify the lack of Aristotelian logic in the East and its presence in the West. Most westerners, however precariously they may do so, cling to the notions of non-contradiction and non-fallacious thinking, which means they maintain some respect for facts that apparently the educated in the East do not.

Respect for logic means respect for facts.

2. Anthony Watts, former television meteorologist and current climate change doubter (to use the Associated Press’s preferred moniker for global warming skeptics), blogs on wattsupwiththat.com, a site that enjoys three to four million page views per month. Several highly qualified guest climatologists also regularly post their thorough, technical analyses of “climate change” issues.

Last June, Watts reported the details of a meeting he had with journalist, ardent environmentalist, and staunch global warming supporter Bill McKibben. Instead of fireworks and hostility between the two, Watts described their discussion as civil and friendly. They discussed their respective agreement and disagreement on numerous climate and environmental issues.

Concluding his report, Watts said, apparently to challenge strong opinions within the denier community, “I don’t think Bill McKibben is an idiot.” He then added, “But I do think he perceives things more on a feeling or emotional level and translates that into words and actions. People that are more factual and pragmatic might see that as an unrealistic response.”

Why don’t facts matter according to the scientist Watts? Because emotion sometimes trumps facts.

3. Ayn Rand in her article “To Dream the Non-Commercial Dream” (The Ayn Rand Letter, January 1, 1973, reprinted in The Voice of Reason) emphasizes the significance of emotion trumping fact. She says this about “impassioned advocates” of altruism and collectivism:

They are not hypocrites; in their own way, they are “sincere”; they have to be. They need to believe that their work serves others, whether those others like it or not, and that the good of others is their only motivation; they do believe it—passionately, fiercely, militantly—in the sense in which a belief is distinguishable from a conviction: in the form of an emotion impervious to reality. (Emphasis in original.)

Deep down, in their psychologies, it is emotion that dictates to these “sincere” people what is true. Facts don’t matter because emotion says otherwise. Altruism and collectivism have become their entrenched beliefs.

Rand adds that this “depth”—the “deep down” part of these unexamined psychologies—can be “measured by distance from reality” and that there exists a continuum, based on the distance, that runs from “sincere” to totalitarian dictator.

Rand puts “sincere” in scare quotes, which probably means she is not entirely endorsing the term, but I still have to ask: are those on the “sincere” end of the continuum . . . sincere? And honest? Who, really, after all is a bad dude?

Rand goes so far as to acknowledge that the “butcher of the Ukraine,” Nikita Khrushchev, was compelled to believe the “truth” (my quotes) and magical ritual of dialectical materialism. He had to, she says, lest he “face something more frightening than death” (Rand’s quotes).

This comment on Khruschev takes me back to The Criminal Personality by Yochelson and Samenow. Criminals certainly are bad dudes. They lie (and BS) as a way of life and enjoy getting away with the forbidden. (“If rape were legalized today . . . I would do something else,” one offender told the researchers.)

And criminals, like Khrushchev, don’t have much deep down, that is, they are considerably deficient in self-esteem. What is there, as Rand puts it, is distant from reality. “I am a nothing, a zero,” several criminals confessed, but added that if they routinely thought that way, they would have to kill themselves. So they live by substitute thoughts, or rather rationalizations. Their accumulated mental habits have taught them to believe and say: “that guy deserved it” or “everything in the store belongs to me” or “she really wanted me.”

Khrushchev substituted the communist mantra.

So how can these bad dudes seem “sincere”? This brings me back to the liar and BS’er. The goal of the liar and BS’er is to sound good. Most criminals are con artists, which means they are consummate liars and BS’ers to make what they say sound good.

The same applies to dictators. Many have been charmers at cocktail parties. Hitler was.

So would I want to be friends with someone on the “sincere” end of Rand’s continuum?

Sidney Hook and Anthony Watts did not seem to find offensive the disagreements they had with their associates, but those associates were presumably not on the extreme end of Rand’s scale.

I would say that friendships, whether professional or personal, depend on how distant one’s contact is from reality. That is to say, on a scale of decency—by adapting Rand’s continuum—honest, fact-oriented people are at the top, scummy criminals and Khruschevs are at the bottom, but most decent people, the “sincere” ones Rand was talking about, fit into the middle to upper tiers.**

The difficulty in forming professional and personal friendships is in understanding the other person’s psychology and discovering that distance from reality.

Facts do matter.



*Frankfurt thinks BS’ers are worse than liars—and more likely to be found among the highly educated because of their facility with language.

**In Rand’s article she was talking about a retired editor of the New York Times.

Defending Hate Speech and Satire against the Criminal Mind

Because the criminal suffers a far greater deficiency of self-esteem than anyone else—“I am a nothing, a zero” was a frequent confession to criminal personality researchers Yochelson and Samenow—and because the criminal cannot tolerate the thought of being injured or maimed . . .

A not uncommon fantasy is that of a grand flourish in which the criminal shoots everyone in sight and is then killed himself. (p. 260)

When criminals actualize their fantasies, they produce Columbine, Sandy Hook, and now Charlie.

The enemies of free speech are criminals who just happen to latch on to some ideology as a front, cover, or alleged justification.

Je suis Charlie.

The Bureaucratic Personality: Similarities to the Criminal Mind?

The criminal personality enjoys manipulating and intimidating others. Excitement from lying and getting away with the forbidden is a way of life.

Intimidation includes verbal abuse and physical harm (robbery, assault, murder), which means bullies are potential criminals, actual when they get physical. Power over others is what the criminal  thrives on. Lack of empathy for victims and lack of conscience are nearly total.

Criminals, according to Yochelson and Samenow in their fifteen-year study The Criminal Personality, get away with substantially more crimes than they are ever arrested for—200,000 for one offender over 40 years with the only arrest sending the criminal to a mental institution, along with a “no criminal record” statement in his file.

Criminality, the authors point out, is a continuum of irresponsibility ranging from hardened psychopaths to less extreme arrestable criminals to a category they call “non-arrestable criminals,” the type of persons who on the surface look like responsible citizens but under cover of family and job lie, cheat, manipulate, and intimidate everyone they come in contact with.

Non-arrestable criminals seek the same power over others the hardened criminals do, as well as the jolts of excitement from getting away with the forbidden (in this case, getting away with what is considered unethical, rather than what is illegal).

Given this description of non-arrestable criminals, a startling question arises in my mind. Does bureaucracy provide protection for criminal personalities and therefore attract them?

The Role of Honor in Moral Revolutions

In her 1974 West Point Military Academy address, Ayn Rand said, “Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.” It is a sense of worthiness and competence that others can see in one’s deportment. It is not pseudo-self esteem that requires praise or respect from others lest an affront occur that demands satisfaction. It is not psychological dependence.

Yet that is precisely what Kwame Appiah in his book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen means by honor. The book is interesting because it chronicles the role of honor, or at least what certain cultures have understood to be honor, in supporting and eventually eliminating the practices of dueling, footbinding, and slavery.

Appiah also suggests a desperately needed role for honor in bringing about an end to the modern, horrific practice of honor killing.

Thoughts, Not Environmental Conditions, Cause Criminal Behavior

For over forty years, clinical psychologist Stanton Samenow has been interviewing criminal offenders for the courts (1, 2, 3). His conclusion is that criminals are not criminals because of their upbringing or environment, or because of what they see on television or in movies.

Criminals are who they are because of the thoughts they hold, and have held, in their minds from an early age.