Why do some people do the things they do?
Take Alexei Navalny. A man who could live the cushiest of lives with his family in the most comfortable of countries, lionized by western media as a noble soul against an oppressive tyrant, never having to ‘work’ for a living in the sense most of us do. And instead choosing the almost certain fate – and death – of the gulag, that too right after narrowly avoiding it once, an incident you’d think would instill fear in a person. Or Sophie Scholl, guillotined by Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets openly in Munich, an act one might think ‘pointless’ in that it achieves nothing, or immense, if one values the symbolic.
There are many such examples – Socrates in antiquity, or more recently, Witold Pilecki, Amrullah Saleh, Sophie Scholl – to name but a few. It’s when you go into one of them that you see the complexities, the possible motives, and above all, the ‘rationality’, and supposed lack of it.
The most common take, and the easiest one – easy because it dismisses the whole matter offhand, without trying to get into it – is that such an act is not ‘rational’. This take is also the one that stirred me to think about the whole thing, because I can’t write the matter off so superficially that it’s simply that some people are deluded, unable to reason as they ‘should’, and hence, make such choices. Rationality is reduced to making the choice of a cushy life, anything going against that is ascribed to irrationality. It is parochialism dressed as pseudo-rationality, the self-appointed custodians of rationality, who claim a monopoly over reason, deeming any choice other than theirs irrational.
If I allow, for a second, that someone who chooses something I may not have chosen isn’t simply irrational or deluded, then I unearth a slew of questions.
Take Navalny. Are first glances everything, and is it simply bravery and nobility that makes a person enter the lion’s den? Or is it merely a case of the universal maxim that people do what they want, and here the desire is masochistic, someone who, for whatever twisted reason, cannot be happy without doing what they did? Which is to say that there is no ‘bravery’ or even ‘stupidity’, merely people following their desires, which in some cases, like this one, happen to be weird, if not morbid?
From bravery then, as one possibility, to irrationality as another, to idiosyncrasy as yet another, you have a whole plethora of explanations. Even that is nowhere near exhaustive, however. You could argue that far from noble or self-sacrificing, such behaviour is actually shrewd, self-serving calculatedness, a gambling of the dice, risk-taking in the hope of reaping a spectacular payoff in the small chance it works. The expected value of such a gamble with a huge payoff with a microscopic possibility might come out just the same as a safe bet that yields small returns with higher certainty. Some people might well only play for high stakes – aut Caesar aut nihil.
The fact that we know the names of a few who take such large gambles doesn’t, of course, mean it’s always worth it – I’m sure there are countless more who pass away unheard, perhaps even regretting their choices. After all, Achilles, too, despite his eternal glory, tells Odysseus he would give anything to live. “No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man– Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”
There seems to be an infinity of possible motives you could attribute, if you really get into it, limited only by your imagination. The NYT piece mentions a gamble driven not by the lure of a payoff, but the fear of loss. A loss of relevancy, if he didn’t do something – which might be a better argument, since risk aversion means fear of loss is usually more compelling than the prospect of gain. That’s what it calls the ‘classical Greek tragedy’. The hero, as Achilles did, knowing doom awaits him, chooses to go to Troy anyway, for if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be the hero.
Another is the explanation of conscience. That to do nothing, or to do something as good as nothing – the usual route of criticism perched from a safe haven for example, might, for someone, be simply unbearable. The pull toward something can be as much a push from what you consider intolerable, never mind that others can tolerate, even glorify it. Perhaps someone couldn’t live with the hypocrisy of goading people to risk their skins in the lion’s den, while themselves snuggled cozily in a safe haven, waiting to swoop down for the pickings after others did the heavy, and dangerous, lifting. To a mind that deals in black and white, either you depart in silence, no longer a part of proceedings, or, if that is unacceptable, you enter the cave with the others. Both are, after all, legitimate and honest choices, the former saying you can live with, and accept, things as they are; the latter that you can’t. But you don’t try to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, be friends with the captain as well as friends with the crew.
Or you could consider it a selfless dedication to a cause, which becomes in someone’s eyes all important, to the extent that anything that might further it must be done, no matter the cost it extracts from them. Another calculation, this one maximizing not one’s own safety or potential gain, but that of whatever one believes in. In this case, hoping by one’s actions to inspire others to action, even if as a martyr.
Can it be simple ‘fearlessness’, that some people literally do not feel fear? Perhaps in a certain way – at least, I think, not the fearlessness of ignorance or brushing aside possible consequences, but the fearlessness induced by an acceptance of them. Socrates too, perhaps, if given a choice (in a vacuum, so to speak), might have preferred to live rather than die, but, unable to live on terms acceptable to him, did not fear, or even mind, death. Which is to say that he goaded his jurors, not from the conviction that they would not sentence him to death, but the acceptance that, even if they did, it would be a perfectly acceptable outcome – for in his (or Plato’s) words, “No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death“.
Of course, this entire calculus gets even more complicated when you factor in that Navalny (and Socrates too, for that matter) had families who would presumably miss them, and whom they would miss, and, more importantly, who depended upon them. In Crito, Crito desperately attempts to persuade Socrates to escape his death sentence. All arrangements are in place, and Crito argues, amongst other reasons, that Socrates ought not to abandon his children. And Socrates, admirably, logically, dispassionately, goes into the matter, whether he ought to escape or not, ultimately responding that his children would be better cared for amongst his Athenian friends in his absence, than by Thessalian strangers in his presence. The truth or falsity of the statement is irrelevant; the point is that, even after factoring this into their decision calculus, someone can still choose to go ahead, for better or worse.
Socrates’ conflict, at least, unlike Navalny’s, did not hinge upon others for its success; his struggle was a personal, rather than social one. The calculation is harder still, I think, when outcomes depend upon the support of others, particularly strangers. Think of a simple prisoner’s dilemma. Two prisoners, A and B, isolated from each other, unable to communicate. If one tells on the other and the other does not, the tattler gets away free and the one told on is sentenced to 3 years. If both tell on each other, they are locked up for two years, and if they each keep silent, they are jailed for one year apiece. If A thinks about B’s choices – either to keep mum or tattle – he realizes that in each case, he is better off tattling, either getting away free if B is silent (instead of a one year sentence if both are silent), or going to prison for two years if B isn’t silent (instead of three, if B tattles on him and he doesn’t tattle). Tattling is thus his dominant strategy, the one he believes serves him best no matter what the other person chooses. B applies the same reasoning, and so both might tattle, and be sentenced to two years each, and be worse off than if both had kept silent (and gotten a sentence of a year apiece).
The problem is clearly that each person’s dominant strategy – the one they believe is their best, regardless of what the other chooses – is collectively suboptimal, leading them to a scenario that isn’t the best for them. It would have been better for both to keep silent, but you only know that afterwards. If you had kept silent and your comrade had tattled, you’d probably feel like a damn fool and regret not tattling. In that sense, this strategy is “regret-free”, in that, though A and B go off to prison for two years, they don’t have any regrets – if A had not tattled, he’d have been sentenced for a year longer, given that B did tattle.
Obviously, there’s an unwritten assumption that a person prefers – wants – not to go to jail. That assumption is essential to infer that A or B would, in the absence of other information, tattle, that tattling is the dominant strategy for them. For in the absence of any such assumption, you don’t know what they want, and without knowing that, you can hardly guess what they might choose. That assumption is, more or less, justified, because it’s supposed to be rational, after all, to want to avoid prison or death. Although, you do sometimes come across someone who defies that assumption, who chooses the gulag over comfort, and whose behaviour, thus, is hardly ‘rational’…
The prisoner’s dilemma also shows something else that I think is interesting. If it’s hard enough to trust just one person to hold up their end of the bargain, how much harder is it to count on thousands, or millions of others, and that too strangers? If you consider a protestor in a tyrannical regime, he can either keep shut or speak up. His situation is, if anything, far more hostile to cooperation than that of A or B in the dilemma, because he is a drop in an ocean, and has an incentive to free-ride on others’ efforts. His speaking up, while bringing him near assured suffering, probably does nothing to influence the larger outcome. His silence saves him from suffering – impoverishment, unemployment, jail, physical punishment amongst others – and hardly affects the chances of success of the cause.
If the others speak up, then, by keeping silent, he might enjoy their success without any risk to himself, and if they keep silent, then again, his silence saves him from needless suffering. Again, underpinning this is a rather reasonable assumption that a person might prefer not to suffer pain, that such a person is ‘rational’. And so you can have millions, all sensible folks, each individually rational, in a situation which, if given a choice, perhaps none would want, but nevertheless is entirely stable, in each one’s interest, in the sense that cost-benefit would dictate continuity over change. Change, if any, requires irrationality, someone who doesn’t share that basic assumption, someone who, for whatever reason, makes an ‘irrational’ – or more plainly, stupid – choice, that others don’t or won’t.
The reason why someone’s actions might thus surprise or confound me is probably my presumption that my choice is the rational, reasonable, ‘right’ one; that any different choice is irrational, weird, if not stupid. If I believe that I have a monopoly over rationality, then I conclude that anyone who thinks, and thus acts, differently from how I would, is irrational. Since the likelihood of my being a sole beacon of reason in a dark, dingy, unreasonable world, however, is negligible to the point of being impossible, I’m almost certainly wrong. What I guarantee, though, with my assumption that my thought process is – or ought to be – the default one in the world, is that I am unable to understand others, always mystified by their apparently foolish decisions. And, worse, I think, that I’m unable to consider, let alone learn, what I don’t already know or believe in.
I write this not to eulogize anyone, or hold them as an exemplar to follow. That is, unfortunately, how it is interpreted when you write about anyone – it becomes about the person, and their story – rather than the message, one reason why I prefer the abstract and impersonal, even if it’s supposedly less catchy or hooking. This one, though, becomes abstruse without a concrete example, and hence the exception. Regardless, it is interesting, I think, to wonder why someone does what they do – all the more so when it isn’t what you think you’d do.