Arthur Brooks: belief

Transcript context

…It’s not possible, usually. It’s pretty hard. I tried to live like a Kantian and tell exactly zero lies, and it’s a miracle that my marriage survived. That’s all I can say. I’m not a Kantian, it turns out. The truth is that the ultimate Kantian idea of pure honesty is to not lie to yourself. The truth is that there’s a lot of self-protection that goes into it. Of course, a little of that can go a long way. The whole idea of convincing yourself of something that’s fundamentally untrue is harmful. The best way to live, I think, to find the right balance of this came about from the teachings of William James, who really is the first social psychologist, the father of modern psychology. He wrote The Principles of Psychology, and he separated the psyche into the I-self and to the me-self. The me-self looks in the mirror, the I-self looks outward, and we have to do both. The essence of consciousness is this ability to be two people and know that we are two people. This is why Homo sapiens, with their abundant prefrontal cortex—30 percent of your brain by weight—are so dominant as a species is that we can be two people in this particular way. He says you have to get the balance right if you want to live a good life. Most of that is not even bothering to deceive yourself because you spend more time looking outward and understanding the world as opposed to thinking about yourself in the first place. In the Soviet Union, it was sometimes the case if people had terminal diseases, they wouldn’t tell them until they had to. What do you think of that?…

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