The Case for Living a Moral Life | Ronnie Janoff-Bulman

Okay, so I've been studying the story of Job. The story of Job is the story of suffering, yes, and meaninglessness, right? What seems like random events, right? Well, or worse than random—malevolent. Malevolent, right? So, worse than random. Okay, so this is how the story sets itself up.

We're told at the beginning of the story that Job is a good man, and we have the testimony of God himself on Job's account. So, God up in heaven, bragging away, so to speak, about how good Job is, and his sons come to observe, and one of whom is Satan. Satan says, "I don't think Job's that good; I think he's just fortunate." And God says, "No, I think he's good." Satan says, "Why don't you let me have a crack at him, and we'll see if he's good?" And so God says, "Yeah, okay, do your worst."

In consequence—and that's the malevolent element, let's say, at least the arbitrary element, but perhaps the malevolent element—Job loses everything that he's worked for—virtually everything he works for. He loses much of his family, he's very ill, and not just ill, but ill in a way that's disfiguring and shameful. Then his friends come along, and his friends tell him that, well, you know, if he had been a better guy, none of this would have happened. So really, it's his fault.

Job has a response, and this is why I'm bringing up this story. Job's response is to insist that, despite proximal evidence, it's a requirement to maintain faith in the essential goodness of the individual, especially an individual who has conducted himself ethically, which Job has been, by his own testimony and by God's testimony. We know Job is a good man. Job's wife tells him when she observes his suffering, she says, "There's nothing left for you to do but shake your fist at God, curse him, and die." And Job says instead—and he insists this to his friends—he refuses to lose faith in his essential goodness, and he also refuses to lose faith in the essential goodness of God.

There's something—it's something like this, and this is what's relevant to the shattered assumptions notion is that, in order to stabilize the structure through which you view the world, it is necessary to adopt as axiomatic the notion that whatever happens to you, if you conduct yourself ethically, is the best thing that could happen, regardless of the proximal evidence. Also, it's necessary for you not to lose faith in the essential goodness of being itself. And those are religious proclamations, right? They're proclamations of a kind of religious faith, right? Right?

Well, and it seems to me, too—and tall orders at that, right? Oh God! The tallest, in fact—the tallest of errors, exactly. Well, it's interesting because the Book of Job is one of the books that really sets the stage in the biblical corpus for the story of the crucifixion, right? Because the crucifixion story is the story of Job, expanded even more thoroughly.

Now, these shattered assumptions that you describe—they seem to me to be identical to axioms of faith, conceptually speaking, right? They're eight prior commitments, except, yes, at some level—except, you know, they develop, you know? The way we think—we should need to think about them is these developed from early infancy, from childhood. I mean, these are, they're based in, you know, it's not like somebody's taking a leap of faith. Faith is based on, you know, you don't need—sort of, um, the validity in the world is irrelevant. Do you know? That's what faith is about, right?

You don't—things don't have to—there's no proof, right? It's, it's, it's—it's an act of faith. These are fundamental beliefs based on experience. They're not, they're not just, you know, sort of pie in the sky. They're not things that, you know, I want to believe. These are not desires; they're based on, let's say, the infant who is getting good enough parenting—not great parenting—good enough parenting realizes the world is predictable. The child cries, the mother, the father come and help. The world becomes meaningful, becomes benevolent. You know, it's a good world. I'm getting fed; I must be worth something.

I mean, these are very, you know, rudimentary kind of beliefs, but it starts there. And it builds, and you know, what comes first obviously gets confirmed. I do think, though you were calling them naive at one level, it's what allows us to wake up in the morning and approach the day.

Okay, yeah, assuming our assumptions haven't been shattered. They haven't been shattered, that's right. But even if they have been shattered, what's also important to recognize is people that started with these positive assumptions actually do better in coping with the shattered beliefs because they actually have something to kind of move back to.

Okay, if you start with very negative beliefs about the world, if you start with, you know, you are going to be more prone to possibly the realistic view of the world being bad, if that's what you know. When bad things do happen in the world, right, to good people, right? Bad things happen to good people, then nevertheless you are going to be more prone to depression and anxiety—just, you know, living in the world. The world is harder.

So, some of these what seem like illusory beliefs are, you know, are what allow us to be—you talked about motivation—it allows us to get, be motivated on a daily basis to function and operate and, you know, love and care. And, you know, so I do think—and they have long-term consequences when bad things happen because what happens after the shattering is people try to rebuild these assumptions. In the best cases, and by the most cases—not the cases that all go to psychologists and whatever—if you did huge community surveys, which we did, you find lots of people have gone through some really horrible things and don't necessarily go to a clinician.

You know, not everybody goes to clinicians. Thirty, forty years ago, that wasn't the case. People coped; they did well. They had people who cared around them. Their own sort of internal worlds allowed them to deal.

One thing that I found that was fascinating, for example, is that self-blame was remarkably common after all of these things. Even when I did some work with people who are paraplegics or quadriplegics from being shot randomly on the street, or just truly random events—you and I would unquestionably call random, when as a victim. This, it would still engage in some self-blame. Now, why? It's not—and by the way, the only literature that talked about self-blame were rape victims because everybody was blaming the women anyway, right?

Which was just, because victims blame themselves doesn't mean they're blameworthy. Okay, so why blame? Why engage in this in, you know, in ways that seem inappropriate, given the true situation? It's because that allowed people to get some sense of control, to start believing the world isn't random, to start believing the world is not as bad as they thought, taking some of the blame on themselves.

Now, the sad part of that is, of course, other people could then blame them more if they were blaming themselves when that is not appropriate or legitimate. But what we do in terms of our own coping, I think, is really kind of fascinating.

That was something that was surprising to me, seeing all this self-blame. But there are lots of other ways people cope, you know? They think of worse cases—but people would, you know, sort of try to rebuild assumptions. Of course, initially, there's a lot of numbing, and people can't kind of deal with the situation. But over time, you get all the intrusive thoughts, right? Not the denial, but the intrusive thoughts when you're ready to work on it.

Our brains are, our, our human species systems are remarkable at working on things that need to be solved, even when we're not consciously doing it, right? And over time, what I found is people did remarkably well. That doesn't mean they never rarely return to the same, as you would say, naive assumptions, but they turn to more positive assumptions about the world and were sadder but wiser.