It is not enough to have intelligence. One also needs to act intelligently. Acting intelligently requires the general wherewithal to act in accordance with what knows. Now, it seems to me a striking feature of society that increasingly people are not acting intelligently. What they know and what they do are worlds apart. Presumably, the mental capacity of human beings has not, in the past 1000 years or so, changed much, if at all. So, what explains this increasingly unintelligent behavior on the part of individuals? I shall argue that modernity has cultivated a particularly interesting vice.
Spending well beyond one’s means is perhaps my favorite example of how having intelligence is utterly compatible with acting stupidly. After all, it is not as if a person who spends well beyond his means has not a clue as to the ominous ending that awaits him. On the hand, a little basic arithmetic makes it abundantly clear that overspending will have disastrous consequences. On the other, there is so much discussion of this in the media that it is simply impossible for a person not to be aware of the considerable woes that come with spending beyond one’s means.
Yet, people go right on spending well beyond their means. How can that be? Spending well beyond one’s means is in many respects a better example than overeating precisely people have to eat something or the other in order to stay alive. Most of what people buy they do not need; and the proof of that is that they are buying something else shortly thereafter.
What most intrigues me about overspending is the following question: “How can person know when he is spending well beyond his means?” Surely the obvious question ought to be: “How on earth is it possible for a person not to know that he is doing this?
Tips are commonly offered these days that will help people to grasp that they are spending beyond well their means. Interestingly, these tips seem not to be working all that well. But then that should come as no surprise. For needing a tip of that sort is rather like needing a tip that helps one to grasp that one does not know how to swim. Which part of drowning in the water—or in debt—does not convince one?
The credit bills come each month; and it turns out that month after month, the person cannot even make the minimum monthly payments. What else would it take to know that one has spent beyond one’s means?
They key to acting intelligently is really quite simple: Keep self-deception at a minimum. It seems to me that modernity has mastered the art of cultivating the vice of self-deception: nay, mass self-decepton. This, I believe, is why so many can be doing what is obviously harmful to themselves and not seem to realize it. This is why it has become necessary to belabor the obvious.
Again, spending beyond one’s means is a marvelous example. It rarely happened 30 or 40 years ago. Obviously, the explanation isn’t that people had more intelligence back then, though in this respect, it is clear that people acted more intelligently.
But the circumstances of life back then made exceedingly difficult for anyone who was spending beyond his means to delude himself into thinking that he wasn’t. It is not simply that credit card use was more limited. There was a mindset in society back then that invited enormous self-examination in this regard. The behavior of a person’s neighbors would have made it abundantly clear to him that his spending beyond his means was out of step with how he ought to be managing his monies.
Nothing makes self-deception more possible than the fact that “everybody is doing it”. “Everybody is doing such-n-such” facilitates our being able to say to ourselves “My doing it is at least not all that bad”. In fact, if everyone is doing something it can be very easy to think that there is something wrong with us if we are not. Or, at any rate, one is concerned with not fitting in: as the case of young guys wearing pants that will stay on their ass makes abundantly clear. Fitting in even trumps commonsense.
And when it comes to creating mass self-deception nothing has been more effective than advertisement.
Advertisement has been brilliant at cultivating desires, with something as simple as the McDonald’s Restaurant commercials being a marvelous case in point. The food at McDonald’s is not particularly better than food at other places. Yet, a McDonald’s restaurant rarely wants for customers.
Advertisement preys upon extant desires and reinforces them to the point that people act upon them without reflection. This is why advertisements are often more memorable than the programs. The very weak accede to their desires in this way; then the less weak accede to their desires in this way; and then the mildly weak do so. And soon we have a society a great many of whose members accede to their desires without reflecting upon them.
A society a great many of whose members accede to their desires without reflecting upon them is a society that is ripe for massive self-deception. Welcome to modernity.
The account offered explains the absence of basic commonsense that seemed so prevalent not so long ago. Stuff that everyone knew without anyone having to tell them explicitly. I mean everyone knew once upon time that working up a sweat on a regular basis was key to keeping the pounds off. Today, we have public service announcements informing us of that.
If these remarks are right, then they bring out the extent to which we human beings are indeed quintessential social creatures.
Self-deception and the unexamined life go hand-in-hand. Modernity, then, is contributing mightily to mass self-deception because modernity is increasingly undercutting the wherewithal of individuals to engage in self-examination.
How dumb are we? On the one hand, we are certainly not dumber than those who preceded us hundreds and hundreds of years ago. On the other, make no mistake about it: we are acting much dumber than anyone would ever have thought possible given the knowledge at our fingertips. This is because the self-examination that underwrites and affirms our humanity is receding into the background. Alas, so is our humanity.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw us clearly as anyone that the difference between human beings and animals lies in the former exercising the capacity for self-reflection. Take away the exercise of that capacity, and the behavior of human beings quickly comes resemble that of creatures in what Rousseau referred to as the State of Nature.