9. The game we're in
How much do we want to know about who we really are? How much can we stand to know?
For most of our time on earth we humans have been a mystery unto ourselves. We tamed fire, invented tools, developed language, created agriculture, and domesticated animals, all while knowing next to nothing about our inner workings. We made our most important breakthroughs with big brains that were black boxes. We felt so familiar to ourselves in everyday ways, yet we each had a stranger living inside us.
But maybe we’ve done well precisely because we’ve known so little. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors depended on the robust cooperation of the whole group. They needed everyone to follow the same set of social mores, and that being so, perhaps individuals taking deep dives into their personal psyches would have fractured that precious, precarious social unity and put the survival of our species in jeopardy and maybe we’d have disappeared long ago and wouldn’t be here now agonizing over our fate.
But while knowing too much can be a problem, not knowing enough can be a problem, too. St. Paul gave scads of earnest advice to his followers about how to behave, yet when it came to himself he wrestled with his puzzling lack of self-control: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” And now we’re experiencing St. Paul’s despair on a global scale. We say we want to survive but our behavior contradicts us. The things we need to do to save ourselves, those we do meagerly, but the things which are killing us, those we do abundantly.
In just the last two hundred years, we’ve learned magnitudes more about our inner workings than in the preceding two hundred thousand, the entire life span of Homo sapiens. It’s ironic that we’re getting this burst of self-knowledge just in time to say goodbye to ourselves.
What Darwin and his successors have discovered about human evolution and what therapists and researchers have discovered about human psychology is breakthrough stuff. It’s not that every bit of it has been accurate or helpful, but enough of it has been that we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to know ourselves in the deepest way—down to the level of our operating system.
But do we really want to know? Because if we go down to the bottom, what we will find there is the scariest place in the world, the place where we come face to face with the source of human evil, and where we experience full-force the death of hope.
And why would we want to do that?
The ancient Greek philosophers urged their fellow citizens to “Know Thyself!” They inscribed that exhortation over the doorway of the temple of Apollo, where seekers went to find the famous Oracle of Delphi. Some of those ancient guys were not really into self-knowledge. To them, “know thyself” meant you should know your place in society and stay there. For others, though, it meant more like what we mean by it today—figure out why you do what you do and what might make human community work better. But those intellectually ambitious Greeks could be happy in their pursuit of self-knowledge only because they weren’t delving down into the deepest wellspring of human behavior.
These days we’ve got New Age teachers who urge us to know ourselves, but they say it like this: “Know your true self.” And what they’re actually telling us to do is cherry-pick: Take all the things you like—caring, kindness, creativity, compassion—gather them together in a bouquet, add a bow, and call that your true self. Anything you don’t like—envy, greed, gossip, hatred—call that your false self, cram it into a garbage bag, and dump it.
The one thing I like about this reframing is its aspirational flair. You imagine the person you wish to be, then do your best to live up to that wish. If, however, you start believing this invented “true self” is the same thing as the whole of the real self that evolution has given you, you’re going to get into trouble because those rejected parts don’t go away. You can suppress them, but only for so long. Eventually they will leak out or break out and sabotage you. But maybe that doesn’t sound so bad when you realize that if, by contrast, you venture down to your source, what you will find there is your too-true self and it will shake you to your core.
So why would we want to go deep? Two reasons. The more we understand how hard it is being us, the more compassion we will have for ourselves. And the more we understand this damnable game we’re in, the better we’ll know how to fight for ourselves.
There’s the old saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Our operating system is our first and greatest enemy. Knowing it intimately gives us the power, not to play the game better, but to play against the game.
