Feb 15

Feb 15 Why Do We Do the Things We Know Will Hurt Us?

Why do we do the things we know will hurt us? Arguably it is human nature to do so, no matter how much modern psychology may tell us that doing what we know will hurt us is the mark of addictive behavior—something that can and should be constrained and restrained within ourselves.

The ancient Greeks had a term for this—akrasia (ἀκρασία)—which means, roughly, weakness of will or lack of self-control. Although Plato thought that people never knowingly do wrong, one could arguably say that we knowingly do wrong all the time but simply fail (or don’t truly want) to constrain ourselves from acting against our better judgment. So there is something to the concept of akrasia worth investigating.

The interesting question for me is not merely whether we sometimes act against our better judgement and do the things we know will hurt us, but why we do the things we know will hurt us—not just psychologically, but in terms of human potential as seen from an artistic and aesthetic standpoint (being as much a poet as I am a philosopher).

While Plato thought that akrasia simply doesn’t exist—that we never knowingly choose the things that we think will hurt us—and while Aristotle thought that this tendency of humankind could be trained out of people through the formation of better habits, and while modern psychology tells us more than we’ll ever need or want to know about addictive behavior, I myself prefer a different interpretation of why we often do the things that hurt us.

One of my most formative television-viewing experiences was of the miniseries The Thorn Birds, starring Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward and based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Colleen McCullough. Within it is recounted a legend of a bird who searches its entire life for a perfect thorn on which to impale its breast, and, dying, it rises above itself to outsing every other creature:

There is a legend about a bird which sings only once in it's life, more beautifully than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, it impales its breast on the longest, sharpest thorn. But as it is dying, it rises above its own agony to outsing the Lark and the Nightingale. The Thornbird pays its life for that one song, and the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles, as it's best is brought only at the cost of great pain; Driven to the thorn with no knowledge of the dying to come. But when we press the thorn to our breast, we know, we understand.... and still, we do it.

So what can we learn from The Thorn Birds about human nature and why we do the things that we know will hurt us? The Thorn Birds gives us a simple answer: because we long to sing. We long to rise above ourselves and the agony of human life, to live in and create and know and experience—perhaps only once in an entire lifetime—complete and utter beauty and bliss, true ecstasy and fulfillment, wholeness instead of emptiness, delight instead of despair at life’s meagerness. We long to have every need in us fulfilled, even as we toil and struggle through the endless searching for the things toward which we are most driven by our inner natures. And we will search and search and search until we find it, no matter the cost to ourselves or the agony it causes us, perhaps even to our own demise.

Should we seek to constrain this inner nature—our drive toward inevitable anguish in the things that make us rise above ourselves and truly sing? We humans are, as the legend goes, different from the thorn bird. The thorn bird has no knowledge of what it does or the harm to itself to come—it is driven by instinct alone. In contrast, we know and we understand; we see in advance the effect of the thorns of life, both their dangers and their tantalizing ability to make us soar and sing and rise above ourselves. And we impale ourselves anyway, sometimes more than once, over and over and over again in search of the things that drive us equally intensely inside, but with full knowledge of what it will do to us when we find that one tantalizingly perfect thorn on which our very life, our very essence, depends.

If it’s true that the greatest things in life—the most authentic and the most beautiful and the most fulfilling—come only at the cost of great pain, then we must continue to search and search, as if driven by instinct. Arguably the greatest artistic achievements of human history have depended on it—from poetry and music to art and literature. But even more important than the artistic and aesthetic justification for our human thorn-bird-like quests, at stake are our very selves, our human joys and our human potential. To be the best version of ourselves, to hear our human songs within ourselves and to show them to the world, to know contentment and passion and harmony, we must continue to impale ourselves on the thorns of our desires—whatever they may be and whatever the cost. Only then will we truly be able to sing.

See below for my favorite scene from The Thorn Birds, in which the legend of the thorn bird is recounted: