Motivation is the master of reason. To improve your reasoning, change your motivations.
-Robert Barnes
Ratiocination, or the process of exact thinking, is easy to conflate with rationalization. Both are related to our innate human capacity to reason, so what is the difference? It all comes down to motivation. If you’re able to develop some degree of conscious understanding of your motivations, it becomes possible to align and direct them to facilitate ratiocination. Without deliberate attention to this detail you can expect that where ratiocination undermines your primary motivations, rationalization will prevail. In a world where narrative often trumps reality, this has become the default setting for an entire class of people often referred to as Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in meme culture. It isn’t that NPCs are incapable of reason, it is that their capacity for reason is being directed towards rationalization over ratiocination.
Motivation
Since the psychology of motivation is somewhat complex and there are several theories that have been developed that are tangential to the point I’m trying to make, I’ll be taking some liberties in order to simplify enough to provide actionable advice on where best to focus attention on motivation in order to improve reasoning in the widest possible context. As human beings, the largest looming motivations that we have relate to social factors. If you subscribe to evolutionary theory this shouldn’t be a surprise. We are first and foremost social creatures, so social factors can be expected to have an outsized impact on evolutionary fitness in the environment that selected our ancestors from whom we inherit traits that reflect this importance. To understand our motivations, we must understand how these factors impact us. Toward that end,
provides a great primer by sharing a transcription of a lecture he gave for a Peterson Academy course.To get a sense for the concept you should read the whole piece, but to tie this into social motivation specifically, I’m going to focus on two particular social factors covered near the end of the article.
Communion/Getting along with others
Agency/Getting ahead of others
As Rob describes, these factors can be thought of as two perpendicular axes that exert powerful influence on our behavior. We are driven to get along and we are driven to get ahead. These drives often conflict, and which one predominates probably depends on a host of other factors, especially personality. Nonetheless we all experience both. These drives motivate us. They motivate our behaviors, but they also motivate the reasoning that seeks to explain such behaviors in a manner that satisfies these same drives. Once upon a time this was highly adaptive, but what about now that our environment has changed so drastically?
The Current Environment
Just as developing deliberate nutrition, exercise, and sleep habits to stay healthy in an environment so different from the one that shaped our biology is often necessary, targeting certain cognitive habits can be equally beneficial. Knowing that we are driven to both fit in and stand out can help guide us towards environments that enable the integration of habits that enhance our reasoning.
Shaping Your Environment - Fitting In
With respect to fitting in, this comes down to choosing who you socialize with. There is a reason sage parenting advice expounds upon the importance of influencing who your children socialize with. The best parents in the world can’t hope to have the kind of influence that a child’s friend group has in shaping behavior. This is because we can’t rationalize away the powerful negative emotions that accompany social rejection. If you end up in a social environment where pro-social behavior causes you to be rejected, you can expect to be powerfully motivated to habituate anti-social behavior. Whatever your values are, it makes sense to try to insinuate yourself into friend groups that will accept you because of your values and reject you if you fail to live up to those values. Put another way, make peer pressure work for you by choosing peers that are more likely to accept you for internalizing effective/healthy habits.
Shaping Your Environment - Standing Out
It isn’t enough just to fit in. To some extent we all want to stand out as well. To stand out, we need agency/competence. The question then becomes, agency and competence in what sense? If we are able to accomplish tasks we set ourselves to, then we can be considered competent. What is important to consider here in terms of environment is to make sure you choose an occupation (or sector within an occupation) that confers prestige to competence at tasks you deem worthwhile. This ties into that whole spiritual domain that I like to talk so much about. In whatever field you find yourself in, you will be driven, at least a little bit, to stand out. To perform. To be able to accomplish the tasks within that field that confer prestige so that you may ascend in the hierarchy. All that said, for this drive to not interfere with your reasoning and/or cause perpetual cognitive dissonance, pursuing work that satisfies your ultimate purpose in a spiritual sense is critical. That is easier said that done these days, but if you desire the capacity for ratiocination above rationalization, being situated just so is incredibly helpful.
Choosing Your Ultimate Motivation
I’m not sure everyone, or even most people, or perhaps even anyone can actively choose their own ultimate motivation. Whether we are shaped by God’s divine hand, nature (environment + genetics), or some combination thereof, there are factors that will influence this that seem to be outside of our control. Regardless, if you want to have the clearest and most exact reasoning, your ultimate motivation has to be closely aligned with understanding the truth as it is, as opposed to how you might prefer it to be. I imagine most normies believe they are very concerned with the truth, while practically not being concerned with it at all. Riffing on
’s latest, those with left hemisphere dominance probably equate what best facilitates fitting in and getting ahead WITH truth. My favorite heuristic that I use to keep myself disabused of the notion that the pursuit of truth is easy, is that everything worthwhile has a price. The price of putting truth first will be believing things that invite rejection and loss of prestige. This can be mitigated by actively curating your environment as described above, but it is no panacea. There will still be conflict and consternation that you will face for subordinating self-satisfying rationalization to the inconvenient perspectives and beliefs that accompany ratiocination. This is why most are incapable of it. Not because they lack the cognitive resources, but because they lack the will to use them in a way that they understand at a visceral level will cause them short term pain.Ratiocination and Communication
Communication is hard. It becomes ever more difficult should you think to exploit a loophole astute readers will have noticed. What if you allow yourself to ratiocinate in private, accept the consequences of your deliberations, but then falsify your beliefs in polite company? This is no doubt a game the sociopaths excel at playing. You will never beat them at this game if you have neurotypical capacity for empathy. As you falsify your preferences your cognitive function will decline. Like all cognitive processes, this preference falsification has a cost, which is why the efficient self-deception of rationalization became the modal strategy in the first place. As we say in the rehab business, neurons that fire together wire together. You can practice ratiocination and candor in communicating what you truly believe, or you can practice rationalization and/or preference falsification to get along and get ahead. You will groove those patterns and become more proficient at what you practice. If you find yourself surrounded by people who would be horrified to learn you believe there are biological difference between men and women you can’t speak your mind without experiencing conspicuous social rejection. If you are working in a career field where actions you conceive of as virtuous are widely understood to be low status, you can expect to lose the motivation to excel/perform at a high level. By succumbing to the pressure to conform in such circumstances, falsifying preferences, and practicing communicating in a manner not aligned with your ultimate purpose, you risk transforming yourself into a creature unable to step off that path.
A Final Tactic and Closing Thoughts
Another tactic that can be used to facilitate ratiocination is to extrapolate from principles established without a context that would threaten to bias you. If you identify a principle that you reason is sound, then you should be especially wary of discarding it when confronted by a situation that makes adherence to said principle inconvenient for you. This helps to provide a check on the pervasive drive to rationalize and moralize self-interest. Ratiocination probably won’t help you achieve fame and fortune. Quite the contrary, it will probably get in your way. What it will do is help you fulfill your true and ultimate purpose if you’re lucky enough to have such a thing identified. Without a deliberate effort to elevate ratiocination over rationalization, even knowing your ultimate purpose is no guarantee that you will stay true to your values and that your actions will align with this purpose. There will always be a voice that tells you that in order to achieve your purpose, you need influence. It will tell you that you need power. Power and influence accompany fitting in and standing out. There will be many times where rationalization to achieve power will not only seem justified, but downright righteous. Clear exact thinking on the matter will probably inform you otherwise, but you’ll never know if you’re unwilling to pursue the truth as it is and accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
Nice post. As Thomas Ligotti concludes in "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race", “If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.” Some feel a drive to pursue it anyway (given we are human, none of us ever captures the full truth, merely subjective facets of it).
Rolo Slavsky comments sometimes with wonder at his innate desire to pursue truth despite having the capabilities to fool the retarded masses to cash in, which is just giving them what they want, to be told that all will be OK and the world is a good place where Truth and Justice (tm) naturally prevail without their own effort or risk -- but the drive for it, when the truth is generally dark and depressing, leaving a knot in your gut, is a curious thing...
Great post. I think Aristotle is very helpful here. In Book I, chapter 5 of Nicomachean Ethics, he discusses those who make honor their highest good. What happens to these people is that their reason becomes enslaved to the validation of other people. I think this captures well the drives to fit in and get ahead that you mention in this essay. Psychology, not logic, takes over.