We've looked at some of the disparate ways that a smart person, despite being smart, fails to notice that his brain has been lured away, that it's pestering him mercilessly, and that in other regards it seems not to see clearly what's going on. However, a smart person is also able to think clearly, at least some of the time. One of the results of thinking clearly, seeing clearly, and using his brain's available power is to see through the illogic and falsities around him—which produces a grave new set of problems.
First, it is alienating and upsetting to realize that the majority of people hold—and can be manipulated into holding—false and dangerous beliefs. If you know that the Earth revolves around the sun and if the authorities are putting people to death for holding that true belief, that is a calamity. If you can see through jingoist slogans and hack political arguments that are hijacking elections, that is likewise a calamity. Seeing clearly puts a given smart person at odds with his society; or, if he is another sort of smart person, it provides him with the means to cynically exploit the suckers around him.
That hundreds of millions of people believe that a man named Noah built an ark and put all of the world's species onto it two-by-two, that those species included dinosaurs—even though dinosaurs and man are separated by millions of years—that these people want this taught as science, that they want to get onto every school board and into every legislature to ensure that their view prevails, and that the mainstream media of a modern society continues to take this seriously, may only mildly annoy one smart person, perhaps one who grew up in religion and is tempted to give religion a pass. But it will seriously outrage—and almost derange—another smart person who is convinced that these views always come with an authoritarian edge and a coercive public agenda.
It will likewise strike a smart person as a ludicrous claim that the collectivist farms in her country are working beautifully when there is no food to be found on the shelves of any grocery store anywhere or to claim that a certain corporation is a mighty source for good and innovation when it is paying its employees peanuts and freely polluting. Misrepresentations of this sort affect our brain and our nervous system. They are an assault on our senses as well as our sense of right and wrong, and they bring pain and distress.
Of course, a given smart person may be participating in these falsehoods, invested in these falsehoods, and even the author of these falsehoods. We'll examine this matter in chapter 17 when we discuss the unfortunate truth that smart people do not form a community of virtue simply because they are smart. Smart people will distribute all along the spectrum of good and evil and can manifest as much blind self-interest as the next person. Here, in this chapter, I am picturing a smart person with progressive values who sees clearly at what great odds he finds himself with large segments of his society—whether the religious, the political, or the corporate—and who experiences pain as a result.
Second, his ability to see clearly will force him to see his own errors and shortfalls as well as the truth of his circumstances. He may simultaneously deny what he sees, as that defensiveness is entirely human also, but even as he works to deny what he is seeing, he is bound to be troubled by the fact that, for example, his beliefs do not hang together, that the house he is building is over budget, that the novel he is writing sags in the middle, that his son's explanations as to how he's been spending his time sound suspicious, and so on. If only in a corner of consciousness, these matters will plague him. He may try to get his blinders on as quickly as he can, but what he has seen has already registered.
Say, for example, that you decide to work for a company that makes lovely, inoffensive, harmless doodads that nobody really needs. You become their marketing manager and spend a million dollars a month promoting their doodad line. You can easily tally up the pluses of your choice: you have a lot of autonomy; you get to think about how to best market the doodad line, which makes use of your smarts; you rather like your coworkers; there is a nice lunch provided every day; and your boss isn't mean to you. All in all, the situation is just fine—except that you can't help noticing that it is completely meaningless to spend your time in support of these doodads.
You simultaneously understand why you are doing what you are doing as you see through what you are doing.
Then you go home and try to relax. Say you like action movies. Think of one of those action movies in which the hero, with whom we are manipulated into identifying, is getting away from the bad guys in a classic movie chase. Our hero is running for his life as cars crash all around him. Sometimes scores of people are injured or killed for no reason other than that our hero has the self-interested notion to save himself. In the context of movie reality, we root for him and ignore the carnage. In real life, if our son or daughter were killed in that melee, we would be much less willing to identify with that action hero and his needs. We might well want to say to him, “Give yourself up and spare those innocent people!”
In the context of movie reality, we are completely on his side—but in a corner of awareness, we see right through to the manipulation underneath. Not only may we suddenly stop enjoying the movie, but we may also get down on ourselves for our lapse in ethics and for wasting our time in the land of easy manipulation. And we may feel sad that we just lost one of our pleasures. Our ability to see through and to rightly appraise soured us on much of our day at work; now we are soured on our innocent evening pleasure.
Every time you step back and appraise, you are in danger of stepping into a self-pestering hole. The hole you've stepped into may amount to only a loss of what felt like an innocent pleasure, as in our action movie example. But every loss of joy makes us a bit sadder and a bit bleaker. You find a certain television personality charming, but you see right through to the fact that his show is a paean to gluttony. You enjoy taking a televised peek at beautiful houses, expensive yachts, and mega-vacations, but you see right through to the greed and the inequitable distribution of wealth that allow for such luxuries. There goes another simple pleasure and another idle entertainment!
One of the important consequences of this natural ability to appraise and to deconstruct is that you breed doubt in yourself. As a result of your ability to see through anything and everything, from your job choices to your entertainment choices to your views about the universe, you can end up mistrusting your own thoughts, your choices, your decisions, and even your values and principles. This vexing ability helps explain why smart people often seem indecisive and uncertain and, like Hamlet, have trouble knowing whether to be or not to be and whether to do or not to do. When you are good at deconstructing, you open the door to doubt.
The act of stepping back and appraising, which a good brain feels obliged to do as a moral imperative, reduces your ability to stand wholeheartedly behind anything. In war, if you step back and see your enemy as a person, that dramatically reduces your ability to shoot him without, however, contradicting what may be excellent reasons for shooting him. If he is trying to shoot you, it is not brilliant to construct a pacifist argument, to internally argue that privates are never responsible for their actions, or to feel some simple human kinship for him and his dilemma. That is a lot of pestering appraising to deal with when you have a split second to defend yourself.
You can see why appraising causes meaning drains. We were perhaps able to experience work as meaningful until we got to thinking about the senselessness of the doodads. We were perhaps able to experience our idle amusements as lovely vacations from meaning until we deconstructed them and experienced them not as vacations but as errors. We were perhaps able to experience our military service as meaningful until we thought too clearly about the other side's equally tenable positions. What we see when we step back and appraise is a purer vision of nature's ways, which can feel like a vision of the void. We become wiser, sadder, and more doubtful.
What can we do about what amounts to an inevitable, righteous, and sometimes useful ability to deconstruct that is simultaneously a self-pestering talent for pulling the rug out from under ourselves? What we can do is really learn the art of making value-based meaning. Unless we are very practiced at returning to our value-based meaning-making efforts at times of meaning crises, when even our values and our understanding of the world are called into question, we can doubt ourselves right into paralysis and despair. If, however, we are practiced at making value-based meaning, then we know this is coming and we know what to do: reconstruct the meaning that we just deconstructed.
If you just saw clearly that the novel you are writing is not good, you remind yourself that in your estimation, writing is one of your prime meaning opportunities and that you are obliged to make this novel better or else start a new novel. What you will not do is doubt writing, your writing intentions, or the universe. If you see through the action movie you are watching, you decide to close your eyes and enjoy it anyway, or you decide to move on with your day without recriminations or large doubts about meaning. What you do not do is turn your sensible desire to relax and your unfortunate vulnerability to manipulation into an indictment of you, your path, or the universe.
If you see through to the pointlessness of the doodads you sell, you smile that ironic smile that the situation warrants and decide to look for a new career, or else you enjoy the lovely lunch that's been provided while considering what meaning opportunities might supplement your not-too-meaningful day job. What you do not do is call life ridiculous and hate yourself, your bosses, and your choice or take your despair out on your children when you get home.
You look around you and you decide where and how to reinvest meaning or where and how to create new meaning. Side-by-side with your ability to appraise and deconstruct must sit an equally vibrant ability to reconstruct and repair meaning. Doubts come with the territory of being a smart human being and shouldn't surprise us, terrify us, or derail us. We simply make our next best guess—about, for example, whether we can spend another year selling doodads or not. And if we think yes, then we organize our attitude, our available personality, our idea of meaning, our additional meaning opportunities, and whatever else we need to organize into a team effort to make meaning in a world that includes doodads.
You may feel certain about your meaning choices and fiercely invested in your meaning choices. Or, just as likely, because you can appraise, deconstruct, and doubt, you may feel uncertain about your meaning choices and not particularly invested in your meaning choices. In that case, you must be doubly alert to the fact that you are responsible for the meaning in your life, that your doubts amount to meaning leaks, drains, and even crises, and that you must use your smarts to shore up meaning using the many principles and practices of natural psychology that are available to you.
For example, a useful practice in natural psychology is the morning meaning check-in. The idea is to spend a little time, as little as a few seconds, identifying for yourself what meaning investments you want to make on that day, what meaning opportunities you want to seize, and which parts of the day you want to designate as meaning neutral periods—that is, as periods that do not need to produce the psychological experience of meaning.
As part of your morning meaning check-in on a given day, you could, for example, make a decision about whether or not this is a day to countenance any deep appraising about your doodad job. If you decide that it isn't, you relax, accept your decision, look forward to some pleasant interactions with your coworkers and a good lunch, and commit to not pestering yourself about whether doodads hold meaning for you. If you decide that it is—if you decide that you really must tackle the meaninglessness of your doodad job—you articulate to yourself as clearly as you can what you intend to do: research a new job or a new career, talk to your boss about whether something of value can be added to the doodad, and so on.
On any given day, you have three choices with respect to your doodad job: you can be easy with it; you can name the concrete steps you intend to take to shore up meaning or make new meaning; or you can feel uncertain about it and start the day gloomy, unmotivated, and a little existentially nauseous. The last of these three is obviously the worst choice. It is much better to opt to reinvest in your current choice or to opt to make a new choice than to live upset and doubting.
In the first case, you shut off your appraising for the day (with that off switch that we wish we had but that we are endeavoring to cultivate through awareness training) and enjoy the day. If you opt for choice number one, you actually stop pestering yourself about your current choice: you use your awareness training and your cognitive skills to stop your brain from continuing its assault and from saddening you on what is otherwise a perfectly fine day. Nor do you want to let some small event serve as a trigger for renewed appraising and doubting. If, for example, you prefer French fries to coleslaw but lunch comes with coleslaw, that isn't reason enough to open up the debate about whether your job is meaningful enough. You've already decided that, for today, you will not engage in all that appraising, deconstructing, and doubting; therefore, you must not let coleslaw undo your hard-won decision.
In the second case, you decide to enjoy your day and to make some new meaning efforts, maybe by spending your lunch hour considering your next options (while enjoying that lovely lunch your work has provided).
A smart person, even if she can't help but see through, appraise, and deconstruct—even if her clear thinking puts her at odds with large segments of her society, and even if she has her doubts—can still energetically proceed in life. She can leave Hamlet to pace alone on the ramparts of Elsinore. Her ability to appraise both serves her and pesters her, and that is the hand she has been dealt. She can see clearly; she can see too clearly; she can see too clearly too often. But she can also maintain a proud, unwavering commitment to making value-based meaning even as her values shift in the earthquakes of living.