I got an email from Jacob L. suggesting I review my own post, to add anything that might offer a more current perspective, so here goes...
One thing I’ve learned since writing this is that counterfactualizing, while it doesn’t always cause akrasia, it is definitely an important part of how we maintain akrasia: what some people have dubbed “meta-akrasia”.
When we counterfactualize that we “should have done” something, we create moral license for our past behavior. But also, when we encounter a problem and think, “I should [future action]”, we are often licensing ourselves to not do somethingnow.
In both cases, the real purpose of the “should” in our thoughts is to avoid thinking about something unpleasant in the current moment. Whether we punish our past self or promote our future self, both moves will feel better than thinking about the actual problem… if the problem conflicts with our desired self-image.
But neither one actually results in any positive change, because our subconscious intent is to virtue-signal away the cognitive dissonance arising from an ego threat… not to actually do anything about the problem from which the ego threat arose.
In the year since I wrote this article, I’ve stopped viewing the odd things people have to be talked out of (in order to change) as weird, individual, one-off phenomena, and begun viewing them in terms of “flinch defenses”… which is to say, “how people keep themselves stuck by rationalizing away ego threats instead of addressing them directly.”
There are other rationalizations besides counterfactual ones, of course, but the concepts in this article (and the subsequent discussion in comments) helped to point me in the right direction to refine the flinch-defense pattern as a specific pattern and category, rather than as an ad hoc collection of similar-but-different behavior patterns.
I got an email from Jacob L. suggesting I review my own post, to add anything that might offer a more current perspective, so here goes...
One thing I’ve learned since writing this is that counterfactualizing, while it doesn’t always cause akrasia, it is definitely an important part of how we maintain akrasia: what some people have dubbed “meta-akrasia”.
When we counterfactualize that we “should have done” something, we create moral license for our past behavior. But also, when we encounter a problem and think, “I should [future action]”, we are often licensing ourselves to not do something now.
In both cases, the real purpose of the “should” in our thoughts is to avoid thinking about something unpleasant in the current moment. Whether we punish our past self or promote our future self, both moves will feel better than thinking about the actual problem… if the problem conflicts with our desired self-image.
But neither one actually results in any positive change, because our subconscious intent is to virtue-signal away the cognitive dissonance arising from an ego threat… not to actually do anything about the problem from which the ego threat arose.
In the year since I wrote this article, I’ve stopped viewing the odd things people have to be talked out of (in order to change) as weird, individual, one-off phenomena, and begun viewing them in terms of “flinch defenses”… which is to say, “how people keep themselves stuck by rationalizing away ego threats instead of addressing them directly.”
There are other rationalizations besides counterfactual ones, of course, but the concepts in this article (and the subsequent discussion in comments) helped to point me in the right direction to refine the flinch-defense pattern as a specific pattern and category, rather than as an ad hoc collection of similar-but-different behavior patterns.