THERE IS A BIG QUESTION which, stripped down to its most basic, can be stated like this:
How do we know what is right?
The answer is, we either figure it out for ourselves, or we believe someone else. There are dangers in both extremes. The easier way, as usual, is the most dangerous. Best is something in between, remembering always that the responsibility is ours alone.
In the coming world, they will not ask me: Why were you not Moses?
They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?
– Rabbi Zusya, after Buber
WE START OUT in life having to believe in and trust those more knowledgeable than ourselves, for our very survival. As time goes on, we try to make decisions based on our own experience. If that experience is more limited than we imagine, those decisions can have painful consequences. Fear can make us timid.
Then, too, decisions may require thinking, which is a skill very much like a muscle: it hurts when it has not been used. Intuition, meaning a comprehensive summation of a multitude of factors presented instantaneously, is a valid input for decisions, but because it is much maligned in modern Western society we will leave it out of the present discussion.
Many other factors discourage us from thinking everything out for ourselves. For one, the task seems enormous. Often, too, it involves having to break out of strictures such as “tradition” or “authority” and this usually carries penalties. Sometimes the penalties are threats about the “next life,” but they can be quite immediate, because one avenue to power is the offer to relieve the burden of thinking from people and tell them what is right.
It is easy to just believe someone else. And besides, how do you know that your personally-made right decision is “right”?
This hits the nub. What is the criterion for “right”?
In the beginning, “right” is whatever avoids pain for me. Then we learn that pain delayed is not pain avoided, and our viewpoint has opened up. We become more subtle, and learn that pain for others is similarly pain for ourselves. Our viewpoint has gained breadth. We learn to take a wide range of factors into consideration, learn to weigh them; we consider logic, recognise our conscious motivations and allow for our unconscious ones, add our emotional feelings into the mix, and make a decision.
OR, we take the easy way: “Right” equals “this agrees with What the Big Man Says”. The Big Man can be any authority: a book, a tradition, a school of thought, or of course a literal man or woman, living or dead. During the Mao Era in China the prevailing political climate was one in which the explicit criterion of truth was “Does this accord with the thought of Chairman Mao as contained in his Little Red Book?” When (finally, long after Mao’s death) a newspaper editorial suggested that “evidence is the only criterion of truth” it was considered a shocking and inflammatory political statement.
Youngsters may laugh, but not all that long ago such a laugh would have had your own melting skin dripping and sizzling past the ropes that bound you to the stake. Well, it should be no surprise. There is power to be had here: people looking for someone to tell them what to do and how to think will usually find him. Or her.
It seems too simple to be credible, but much of what is called education is really conditioning to accept this type of authority. At the secondary and even at tertiary level of schooling, one is frequently exposed to those who have adopted a master with a small or big M. For example, many of those who style themselves “a sceptic” are simply those who believe science blindly.
Again, medically speaking, how much of the allure of evidence-based medicine is the desire to avoid having to think it all out for one’s self? Clinic can be messy, it is fast and pressured. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a row of boxes with approved treatments into which one can drop a patient’s name? But Big Man help you if you try to do something different.
This is not yet the situation. It may not be far off.
If you meet the Buddha, kill him!
Yixuan of Linji Yuan, The Records of Linji
The danger lies in not recognising when we are failing to take responsibility for our own decisions. On the continuum ranging between these extremes, most of our decisions are somewhere in the middle. We don’t have to think it all out for ourselves from the beginning. It is both our good fortune and our burden as humans to have a long history of recorded experience from which we can draw information to help us make our decisions. Good fortune, because each individual need not have to repeat every mistake. Burden, because often when something worked in a certain context, it is tried again and again even when the context has changed and it is not only no longer useful but dangerous.
Knowing where we stand along that continuum between belief and experience on a given question helps us keep a balance within ourselves and within our communities large and small. Having that balance means that the decisions we make are formed both with reference to the past experience of the whole human organism and to our individual context, and are made in the light of our responsibility to be ourselves.
Read: not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Francis Bacon, Of Studies, 1625
The Fat Monk 
Thankyou Xiaoyao for this insightful and useful post.
I was wondering if you could perhaps say a little bit more about how we trust our perceptions of what is right, when as we go through the cultivation process we start to see how deep our own ignorance, biases and deceitfulness goes. Knowing how much these sway our perceptions, is it not then right to be dubious of our perceptions? But if this is the case, how do we maintain this awareness of our propensity to self deception without falling into self paranoia?
Thanks for the interesting question! The main point of the article was that we so often are not aware of how we make decisions, both as individuals and as societies. In both cases, all too frequently there is a drifting kind of sleep in which decisions are made, then a petulant outrage when the consequences of those decisions come home to roost.
If one is going through the cultivation process, the situation is different (assuming that one is receiving competent guidance): one has become aware of the difficulties at a much more subtle level. The process described in the article still applies:
“We learn to take a wide range of factors into consideration, learn to weigh them; we consider logic, recognise our conscious motivations and allow for our unconscious ones, add our emotional feelings into the mix, and make a decision.”
However, as the cultivation proceeds, the recognition of our conscious motivations, our unconscious motivations and our emotional feelings becomes much more refined, and we allow intuition to have its proper guiding place in the mix. This obviously will produce far better decisions.
A competent guide will point out the deceitfulness of perceptions, but will also notice if one is becoming bogged down in distrust of perceptions. After all, we do have to function, and in the end one can make a functional decision despite the faulty data, because we simply have no other choice.
There is also the fact that most decisions are not irrevocable. We often make decisions that seem good at the time, yet do not ‘age’ well. We then make another – hopefully having digested the full and complex impact of our previous decision(s). Growth is not always in a straight line. There will be branchings. But if, like the flower, we keep the light of the Sun as the orienting and guiding force in that growth, then all will be well with us despite the occasional odd turn.