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An Unpopular Perspective
How a relatively new way of looking at human behavior can reveal important truths about ourselves
As a small child, I struggled to understand the behaviors of the adults around me. Somewhere around the age of six I discovered it was impossible to reconcile the statements people made about their behaviors and the behaviors themselves. This was particularly puzzling because so many of those behaviors were clearly harmful: endless smoking of cigarettes, drinking to excess every night of the week, inability to cope with even modest setbacks without recourse to even more cigarettes and alcohol, and so forth. I began to realize that the adults who were supposedly “grown up” were in reality blind to their own motivations and so I came up with a simple rule that later I discovered had been invented long before: pay little or no attention to what people say about themselves; watch intently what they do, and draw logical conclusions from these behaviors.
It’s common that children whose parents are addicted to substances and who are very unreliable, become obsessed with attempting to predict human behavior so as to mitigate the many risks that arise from being subject to the irrational whims of their supposed protectors. This was certainly my case, and as I grew older I simply became better at predicting what people would…
