Why We Choose to Act Against Our Own Interests

We do not always act in our own interest. We may be altruistic and sacrifice our own good for the sake of the good of others. More often, perhaps, we are too apathetic or weak-willed to do what will benefit us. At other times, however, self-destructive behavior is due to a deeper, darker undercurrent. There are forces in the human psyche, inner demons that may come to the fore and propel us to act contrary to reason and our own well-being. It is these darker forces that interest me here. What are they? Why do we have them?

There is one type of case I wish to mention and set aside: self-harming behaviors, whose goal is relief from psychic pain by directing one's own attention toward a physical sensation and away from any mental torment.

To inflict pain on oneself in this way is not self-destructive in the sense that interests me. Mental torment can seem more unbearable than moderate physical pain, and if these are your only alternatives, it may not be irrational to choose the pain, though finding another way to mitigate suffering would, of course, be better. (In one study, people left alone in a room with a device that allows them to administer electric shocks opted, perhaps not irrationally, to shock themselves in order to avoid the boredom of sitting alone in an empty room.)

There are, however, other cases, cases in which self-destructive behavior seems unprovoked. What explains those?

Cartoon of a man facing his demons

Source: Fanette/Pixabay

Self-destruction that defies reason

Freud once suggested that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are not our sole motives but that, in addition, we have a death drive, a longing to return to the inorganic state we came from and merge with the non-living.

There is, perhaps, an element of what Freud labels “death drive” in some actions that we perform against our own interests. A smoker I know, for instance, said once that part of what he enjoys about smoking is, as he put it, “the taste of death.” If he knew that cigarettes are completely harmless, he said, he would not smoke. But an attraction to a state of non-being is not always a plausible motive.

One case in which the motivation appears to have a different character is that of attraction not to non-being but to the uncivilized and the disorderly, the bacchanalian. French dramatist Émile Augier labeled this “nostalgia for the mud" (“nostalgie de la boue,” “boue” being the French word for “mud”).

Freud actually talks about this type of case as well, in Civilization and its Discontents, where he suggests that in joining civilization, we agree to suppress natural instincts, but as those instincts cannot be eradicated, keeping them in check generates misery and aggressive energy that may sometimes be turned inward.

It is, however, Dostoyevsky who, in Notes From the Underground, plumbs the depths of our self-destructive instincts deeper still. The book is conceived of as a fictional diary of an imaginary man tortured by inner demons. At the beginning, the protagonist details a case of inwardly directed aggression:

I am a spiteful man… I believe my liver is diseased. However … I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors…I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite.

Dostoyevsky’s nameless protagonist goes on to discuss reasons for being spiteful. Perhaps, spite is a rebellion against nature. Being human means we must accept a lot of suffering for which no one is to blame, so we become resentful, and finding no proper outlet, we direct the anger toward ourselves.

But then, the anonymous narrator suggests that even if we built a utopia without pain, we would not thereby eradicate our self-destructive drive. Such is human nature that we would risk destroying our bliss for the sake of creating some chaos. Dostoyevsky writes:

Now I ask you: What can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.

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As we read the passage, we know that there is truth to it. A human utopia would face dangers from within: from our own impulse to self-immolate. Why would humans irrationally risk their bliss?

This is where Dostoyevsky’s narrator makes his most crucial point: Aligning our desires with reason perfectly would make us too much, as he says, like the keys of a piano, or — as we might say today — like well-programmed robots. We have, in fact, a complicated relationship with our own reason, and it affects the way we understand ourselves and what it means to be free and to have an identity. On the one hand, we think we are free and become who we are by using reason to stifle our wayward impulses. This type of freedom sets us apart from non-human animals.

On the other hand, however, we think that our unreasonable caprices are part of us too. We do not really want our desires to align perfectly with what is good and sensible. The narrator says:

….there is one case when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth… it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage—for … it preserves for us what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our individuality.

And also:

One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked…

If Dostoyevsky is right, then, pace Freud, at the root of the self-destructive drive is often not a death instinct but an instinct to self-expression and the assertion of identity. We may harbor fear that perfect orderliness, the full domestication, so to speak, of our desires by our reason, while it would appear eminently rational and advantageous, would, in actual fact, take from us much of what makes us human and makes life worth living.

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