Ethics Part 2 – Endorphins, Free-Will, and Persuasion

This blog post will be a bit different from my other ones. I needed to find a missing piece to the puzzle, and I think persuasion is that missing piece. I starting thinking about persuasion from Scott Adams, and read his book Win Bigly. From there he recommended Robert Cialdini's book Pre-suasion. And I'm currently reading his Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. Both, great books. And also, if it's confusing, I'm writing this preamble a couple months after the following is written. I'm also going to cut this post a bit short, just because I think it's an important topic.

I have recently occupied my mental energies with the task of discovering the relationship between emotions, rationality, and free-will. There is a distinct similarity between these three categories of physiological human response - and that similarity is persuasion. Moreover, persuasion is less of the driver and more of the topic of interest when concerning oneself with humans - and that is to say, concerning oneself with emotions, rationality, and free-will. This article will discuss free-will as a residual effect of the former.

Emotions are typically set at a contrast to rationality often because its all too frequently associated with irrational behavior - crimes of passion, [off the cuff] purchases, and poor decisions in general. They belong in a third category perhaps as I’ll posit. To refer to my earlier blog posts, anything that can’t be verified is probably not true - however, as actions taken out of emotions are the empirical effect of endorphins we cannot say they are untrue; and indeed the endorphins themselves are the ‘real’ counterpart to emotions. Thus, from an individual’s perspective, emotions are a very real and clouding effect - and can provide insight to the inner psychology given the empirical surrounding circumstances. Thus, emotions themselves aren’t irrational, and nor are they rational. So, I’ll place emotions into a third category - like the category of morally neutral ethics - the nonrational.

Emotions are however often to the detriment of rationality. And this is rather explainable (the likes of which comes from the science of influence - persuasion). Humans have limited computational resources. Our brains can focus, truly focus, on one thing at a time. And evolution, nature, has dictated that when confronted with something of significant emotion, it deserves our utmost attention. Think about fear when in a dangerous situation - there’s no time for thought, nor is it important that homework is due tomorrow. No, the fear, that is - the endorphins - take presidence. And so when the brain encounters something empirically that triggers an emotional response - it’s probably pretty important; but so can it be detrimental.

Persuasion maneuvers itself into this position precisely - it hijacks the focusing mechanism of the brain to steer the person of interest to a more favorable line of thinking. However, there is a key method to think clearly, introduced to me originally by Brian Johnson - a part-time teacher and counselor at NMSU-Grants. It’s to live in the moment.

What does living in the moment mean? First, before I spoil the ending, let me derive for you the line of thought that lead me to this conclusion. In a scenario where a persuader is hijacking your sensibilities, what would be the most preferable outcome? To be rational. Where do we know rationality comes from? The material world. How do we connect to the material world? The senses. Living in the moment requires direct focal attention to the environment around you. Mike Cernovich has an excellent book on “mindfulness” or equivalently - living in the moment - which is an effect that supports a rational mindset; check out his 'Gorilla Mindset' on Amazon.

Walk with me for a moment through this persuasive line of thinking:

Where are you? Are you sitting, standing, walking? What are you sitting on? How bright is the screen you’re looking at? Are there people around you? Is there music playing? Is there somebody nearby you’ve questioned at times? How many questions have I asked in this paragraph alone?

Take a second, think about what you’ve focused on while reading that paragraph. Focus on it again.

You’ve just taken a step into mindfulness. It’s as simple as focusing on your immediate surroundings. Living in the moment.

Philosophically, mindfulness is the following: it refocuses your attention onto ‘the real,’ ‘the physical',’ ‘the rational; which in essence is the sole driver of reasonable thought. The thought experiment above is what Mike Cernovich considers “checking-in.” Examine your surroundings. Examine your physical location. Examine those around you. Look for details. Small details. Described them to yourself. Take a moment. Consider the following trigger to place in your life:

If I’m feeling overwhelmed, then I must “check-in.”

If you’re feeling overwhelmed - check in. It’s simple, effective, and as ethics dictates, will lead to a happier life - with choices you make, not your emotions, not your past, you.

And this is the key to free-will - the key to rational thought - the first step to quality relationships.

Now back to ethics - what about the attribution of action and persuasion? How does that work?

The key component to attributing blame in a scenario involving persuasion must consider the parts that can be analyzed objectively. The only objective parts of a situation involving persuasion are the actions and the actor to which the actions belong. This is because we cannot dissect someone’s brain and decide that the persuasion was an instance of direct mind control (it isn’t), and thus we cannot attribute persuasion as the means by which an actor acts.

So, are Nazi foot-soldiers to blame for the deaths of Hitler’s persuasion? No, although we can say he had some culpability - he was not the direct actor of the actions. To summarize, the foot-soldiers are each individually responsible for the moral crimes they committed. And so, we can say - to generalize - an immoral action taken by an actor is immoral; an immoral action taken by a persuaded actor is immoral. In a simpler sense, persuasion lies in the morally neutral category, or perhaps in the aesthetics category.

Conclusion

So, to recap: persuasion to do something immoral is immoral - but the culpability lies with the moral actor. The internal process of free-will is only possible with rational thought - that is, thought that is grounded in empiricism or in reason. Because the internal process of free-will isn't externally verifiable, it is necessary that each individual retains their capacity of moral acting. More importantly, read the two books I recommended above! Understanding persuasion is a giant step toward acting rationally, always.