I have been thinking about people’s moral horizons lately, and how one of the big differences between good people and bad people is how large their moral horizon is.

Let me give you an example.

Say you’re the CEO of a big sociopathic corporation. You sign off on a plan for one of your products that, because it uses a cheaper part, you know damned well will kill between 100-500 people but will save $5 per unit. You sign it because the lawyers say it will be cheaper to settle the wrongful death lawsuits than it will be to use a more expensive part.

By most people’s standards, what you just did is monstrous. Horrible. They can’t imagine how anyone could be so callous.

But look again. What did you actually do.

You went to a room with a bunch of people you know and work with all the time and you signed a piece of paper. That’s it. You signed it because people told you it was a good idea and you are a popular CEO precisely because you have a knack for agreeing with everyone. You signed it because you are pretty sure it will result in more money for you in the long run. And you signed it because like everyone else in this crazy world, you try to do what it expected for you.

You will never see the people you have just killed. They are a number, a statistic, an abstraction. You don’t even know who it will be. So these people have no faces, no names, no identities to you. They are just a range of numbers, and that can’t possibly hold as much weight in your mind as the immediate issues of doing what you are told, getting all the money you can, and doing what is expected of you.

And at the end of the day, you will still be a wealthy person with a lifestyle that tells you how special and important you are, and a very important sounding job that really impresses the boys at the club.

You can think this way precisely because your moral horizons are very close. You don’t really think about or connect with anything outside your immediate, personal life. You leave those abstruse abstractions to someone else. You are a businessman, not a social worker!

So the real crime that leads to such monstrous acts is not pure evil, but merely the act of keeping your moral horizons small. And that is an action people don’t even know they are doing. We are not, usually, aware of how our moral horizons expand and contract.

That’s how people can do damned near anything and feel no guilt, or at least, not nearly enough to keep you from doing it. That CEO probably felt a little guilt and a certain amount of pity for those faceless people who will die as a result of your signature. After all, he’s not a monster. But none of that is nearly as important as doing what is expected of him so he can keep feeling important and powerful as the CEO, and make a lot of money in the process, which makes your wife happy.

The thing that opens the door to evil, then, is not some melodramatic decision to devote yourself to coldblooded evil, but the simple act of deciding not to think about that kind of thing.

Even some of history’s greatest monsters have used this technique. A Nazi commandant orders a group of Jewish prisoners to be worked to death. But what did he really do? He signed a piece of paper and left the rest to someone else because that is all his job required of him.

Even the guards who gassed the Jews at Auschwitz could use this technique. We think we cannot imagine how these men lived with themselves afterwards. But what did they really do? They did a little plumbing then pushed a button. They didn’t have to be in the same room as their victims. Afterwards, they still got to go home to their wife and children and live a normal life. And they can just tell themselves that they didn’t make the decision to kill the Jews.

They were just following orders.

That is why the 20th century saw the birth of the idea of total personal responsibility. The Nuremberg Defense dies a little more with each passing day. We demand that people be held responsible for all the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, no matter how divorced by time and space they are from the consequences.

That Nazi guard knew what he was doing would kill Jews. That CEO knew people would die as a result of his signature. That Nazi commandant was fully aware of what the consequences of that work order would be.

Therefore, we hold them rightfully responsible for those actions, no matter how they “tried not to think about that kind of thing” and were “just following orders”.

It could be argued that some people have no choice but to have narrow, close moral horizons because they are just plain not smart enough to have anything else. And that is definitely a possibility.

But I think there are far more people who deliberately do not even try because they know that looking at the real, full consequences of their actions would make them unhappy and be terribly inconvenient.

It might even lead to risking their social position and comfortable lifestyle, and why should someone do that for someone they don’t even know?

So they keep their moral horizons very close, only ever thinking about their immediate lives, and letting other people deal with the messy bits.

This is how you can have an entire organization that does awful things all the time, but every person in that organization can deny responsibility. Who decided to kill those people?

Well, everybody, really. In other words… nobody.

That’s why the real heroes are the whistle-blowers, the Edward Snowdens of the world, who are willing to throw away everything in order to do the right thing.

It’s sad how few there are.

That’s all from me for today, folks! See you tomorrow.

Let’s talk about self-discipline.

I’ve been trying to increase mine lately. The secret, at least for me, is to imagine the person you want to be, the real actualized you, and dream of it happening. Imaging your destination. Then devote yourself to it.

And remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. What you want is constant pressure, not one bout of enormous effort. Change the little things first. Consider every time you reinforce a good habit to be a victory that gets you closer to your goal.

And if you slip, you slip. Feel guilty? Then get right back on that horse. This is your own game, and it is not possible to fail out of it. You can’t escape via failure. The task will still be sitting there, waiting for you, no matter how bad you screw up.

That’s the secret of why many people fail at life. They start out with good intentions, but once it starts being hard or complicated or scary, they just want to escape, and failure is the easiest way out.

It’s the equivalent of slinking off with your tail between your legs. Sure, you lost, but the important thing is that you got out of the situation as quickly and with the least amount of effort as possible.

That is how failure becomes an addiction. You know, deep down, that you can get out of things by failing at them, and so when the going gets tough, you fold like a house of cards and tell yourself trying is the first step towards failure.

And you think that, just because you keep telling yourself how much you suck after, that means you are not doing it on purpose. But notice that you are telling yourself that from a safe distance, in an emotional state that is far more tolerable and familiar than actually confronting the problem.

That is the crux of self-discipline and self-respect : deciding that this time, you will keep going no matter what. You will learn to stay instead of fleeing, and endure the tension and fear that you usually capitulate to, and find out what it is like on the other side of it.

I guarantee it won’t be nearly as bad as your fears make it out to be.

Take myself. Recently, I launched a movement called Science Is True. It’s a slogan I want to see on the chest and the bumper stickers of all people who support evidence over ideology and science over superstition. It is a thing desperately needed in a world where people don’t even believe in vaccines any more.

As of now, I have made a Facebook Page, a Tumblr, and a Cafepress store for it.

So that is the initial flurry of activity. Call that the honeymoon phase. Now the honeymoon is over, I have done the part that is easy for me (creating), and now I am at a very familiar crossroads.

This is the point where I usually give up because I genuinely have no idea what to do next. My mind is a blank. But this time, I know what is really going on. My depression is leading me to want to escape the situation rather than face up to the task of choosing what to do next, with all its scary possibilities.

This time, I am not going to fold. There is no reason to run away. I am in no physical danger. Nothing bad is about to happen to me. And so I will stay with this little movement of mine and wait for the blankness to fade, and then (and this is the crucial part) I will continue to think about the problem.

Like I have been telling my therapist for a while, the problem is never really that I lack knowledge. The phrase “not knowing what to do next” is deceptive that way. I am perfectly capable, when my mind is clear, of thinking of all kinds of possible next steps. Posting a link on an atheist or science based forum. Look around for other people working in the same general area. Make and buy some business cards online. Those kind of things.

So it is not logic or creativity that I have lacked in the past, although it may seem that way from the outside with how I talk. But I know all kinds of things I could do.

The hard part is just picking one and staying with it, and resisting the urge to try to fail out of the task and escape.

I am done with being the kind of person who avoids everything. I am going to become the kind of person who faces things and deals with them. And it is by pursuing the dream of being that kind of person, a better version of myself, that will give me the strength and determination to bend my personality to my will and make myself my own.

Self-discipline means bending yourself to your own will. All you have to do is dig deep and find that scared little animal in you, and convince it that the real way out is to change. Then it will be fear of being trapped forever in an unsatisfying life that will drive you forward.

Only through change can your scared little animal escape the badness for good. And change is in your grasp.

It starts with little things. Have a few fewer potato chips. Make room in your lifestyle for the occasional walk. Choose one thing to do now and not later.

And above all, when you feel the urge to avoid doing something via procrastination, do that thing right then, if possible. Don’t subject yourself to worry and guilt over not doing that thing yet. Do it now, and you can just go on with yourself, no longer trapped in an avoidance loop.

And remember, you are making these little sacrifices not just for the immediate benefit, or even long term direct benefit, but because you are building the person you want to be.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!