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is emotion itself. Sadness is a feeling of powerlessness to make up for a
perceived loss. Anger is the desire to equalize through force and aggression.
Happiness is feeling liberated from pain, while guilt is the feeling that you
deserve some pain that never arrived.
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This desire for equalization underlies our sense of justice. It’s been
codified throughout the ages into rules and laws, such as the Babylonian king
Hammurabi’s classic “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” or the
biblical Golden Rule, “Do unto others what you would have done unto you.”
In evolutionary biology, it’s known as “reciprocal altruism,”
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and in game
theory, it’s called a “tit for tat” strategy.
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Newton’s First Law generates our sense of morality. It underlies our
perceptions of fairness. It is the bedrock of every human culture. And . . .
It is the operating system of the Feeling Brain.
While our Thinking Brain creates factual knowledge around observation
and logic, the Feeling Brain creates our values around our experiences of
pain. Experiences that cause us pain create a moral gap within our minds, and
our Feeling Brain deems those experiences inferior and undesirable.
Experiences that relieve pain create a moral gap in the opposite direction, and
our Feeling Brain deems those experiences superior and desirable.
One way to think about it is that the Thinking Brain makes lateral
connections between events (sameness, contrasts, cause/effect, etc.), while the
Feeling Brain makes hierarchical connections (better/worse, more
desirable/less desirable, morally superior/morally inferior).
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Our Thinking
Brain thinks horizontally (how are these things related?), while our Feeling
Brain thinks vertically (which of these things is better/worse?). Our Thinking
Brain decides how things are, and our Feeling Brain decides how things
ought to be.
When we have experiences, our Feeling Brain creates a sort of value
hierarchy for them.
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It’s as though we have a massive bookshelf in our
subconscious where the best and most important experiences in life (with
family, friends, burritos) are on the top shelf and the least desirable
experiences (death, taxes, indigestion) are on the bottom. Our Feeling Brain
then makes its decisions by simply pursuing experiences on the highest shelf
possible.
Both brains have access to the value hierarchy. While the Feeling Brain
determines what shelf something is on, the Thinking Brain is able to point out
how certain experiences are connected and to suggest how the value hierarchy
should be reorganized. This is essentially what “growth” is: reprioritizing
one’s value hierarchy in an optimal way.
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For example, I once had a friend who was probably the hardest partier I’d
ever known. She would stay out all night and then go straight to work from
the party in the morning, with zero hours of sleep. She thought it lame to
wake up early or stay home on a Friday night. Her value hierarchy went
something like this:
Really awesome DJs
Really good drugs
Work
Sleep
One could predict her behavior solely from this hierarchy. She’d rather
work than sleep. She’d rather party and get fucked up than work. And
everything was about the music.
Then she did one of those volunteer abroad things, where young people
spend a couple of months working with orphans in a Third World country and
—well, that changed everything. The experience was so emotionally powerful
that it completely rearranged her value hierarchy. Her hierarchy now looked
something like this:
Saving children from unnecessary suffering
Work
Sleep
Parties
And suddenly, as if by magic, the parties stopped being fun. Why?
Because they interfered with her new top value: helping suffering kids. She
switched careers and was all about work now. She stayed in most nights. She
didn’t drink or do drugs. She slept well—after all, she needed tons of energy
to save the world.
Her party friends looked at her and pitied her; they judged her by their
values, which were her old values. Poor party girl has to go to bed and get up
for work every morning. Poor party girl can’t stay out doing MDMA every
weekend.
But here’s the funny thing about value hierarchies: when they change, you
don’t actually lose anything. It’s not that my friend decided to start giving up
the parties for her career, it’s that the parties stopped being fun. That’s
because “fun” is the product of our value hierarchies. When we stop valuing
something, it ceases to be fun or interesting to us. Therefore, there is no sense
of loss, no sense of missing out when we stop doing it. On the contrary, we
look back and wonder how we ever spent so much time caring about such a
silly, trivial thing, why we wasted so much energy on issues and causes that
didn’t matter. These pangs of regret or embarrassment are good; they signify
growth. They are the product of our achieving our hopes.
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