Maybe it’s just that time of the month or because I’m back in NYC for a week, but sometimes I just need a good rant.  Usually it’s about something banal, like sandwiches. Why sandwiches you ask? Cause they’re easy to get right if you give two fucks but apparently most people don’t.

Perhaps that’s a metaphor for living a good life. If you actually took a moment to reflect, pause and care about what you were doing or even just be aware of it, you could do more good things instead of doing great things (to understand that distinction check out this article by Umair Haque).

Most of the time we’re not faced with the deep moral quandaries that perplex philosophers (e.g. having to choose between our child and our village; go watch the last episode of M.A.S.H.) but we still manage to mire ourselves in short term thinking couched in the language of reason or rationality (which are better described as excuses and rationalization).

It’s easy to tell yourself you’re doing the best you can, making things work with what you have, but are you actually doing the good thing? The action or course of actions that leads to a better world for iteratively more and more people?

But perhaps that’s the problem, that we don’t value a world that it is more vibrant and robust than when we started, or where more people are included in the dialogue to live in that vibrant and robust world.

The Hobbesian notion that we are first and foremost individuals whose lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” in need of social contracts to police our brutish tendencies has pervaded social, political and economic theory for a couple centures now. Yet contemporary research into neuroscience and psychology emphasizes that at our heart we are not brutish and individualistic. Instead we are social and communal creatures driven by a need to connect and empathize with others.

Empathy, not rationality, is our greatest strength.

Why is it then that we still glorify rationality and individualism (particularly in the U.S.)?

I don’t get it. We are not distinct agents disconnected from others and powered by our rationality to succeed or not by our own hand. There is no blank slate, no reset button.

This kind of thinking has done considerably more harm than good to the world on all levels, yet it gets perpetuated over and over again because it achieves great things. Things that are perhaps wondrous and effective yet to what end?

If you’re not doing the good thing, who cares if you’re doing great at it.