Your bad habits will always give consent to your bad actions

For most of my life, I have been like a card carrying member of the left. And I still believe in a lot of the principles of the left. But I've always had an uncomfortable relationship with the ideas of political correctness, and needing things to follow a script about what is and isn't allowed.

One of the suspect concepts is the concept of consent, especially the broader concepts of consent.

This criticism that I'm lobbing is not against the whole idea of consent, but is really about the boundaries of when consent is helpful and when consent is not helpful. 

The straw man that I would beat up is the idea:

  giving consent is good. And anytime consent isn't given, it is bad.

Insert here the common example where in general the patient consenting to a procedure is a good idea. But there may be times, maybe 90% maybe you just 5%, where consent isn't helpful. There could be times where a doctor can highly recommend a procedure but the patient or medical proxy doesn't want to give consent because of fear or confusion or delusion. And there could be times where a patient wants to do something that isn't medically advised; consent is not really enough in this case.

But this is a blog about Buddhism, and the most important transgression where consent isn't useful because around our bad habits and our confusion.

 Imagine there is a magic little worm that lives in your brain and is generally very very painless. But it's hungry for certain types of experiences, experiences that wear us down, cause stress. If that magic little worm can somehow hijack your brain and generate consent, we would consider that little worm to be a little bugger and not a friend. But suppose that magic little worm is just able to whisper to your brain, to your consciousness. And the choice is still yours. But through sweet talk and hormones and neurotransmitters, that magic little worm convinces you to give consent. And it's not really that harmful, not at first. You actually kind of like those nice experiences. But when you're not in a hot states of craving, you admit to yourself that you don't really want to follow the magic little worm.

That magic little worm, in buddhism, is sometimes called our defilements. I never liked the word, defilements, because it sounds very weird. Borrowing from my upbringing and pop culture, there is the storytelling trope of the troublemaker. I like troublemaker better. Thanissaro Bhikkhu has called them something like fake friends. These are friends that get you into trouble and then disappear when the trouble shows up, so that you are holding the bag when the cops or danger appear.

I don't know your individual circumstance but I know patterns that I've seen and I know my own brain. In my own brain is a few hundred devilish little magic worms. And they have a very strong survival instinct. They'll let me have my calmness for a little while . But if I starve them, that's when they'll start fighting hard. And those little worms will whisper and lie however they can to get the consent and the assent of my mind.

Be careful of consent that doesn't really take into consideration your overall well-being or the well-being of the world. It is true that the world is full of tough decisions and weighing of competing needs: our needs, our friend's needs and the rest of the world's needs. What wise people do is make decisions and take actions knowing those causes and the consequences. What fools do is make decisions quickly and then turn the justification dial up to 11, pretending that the causes and consequences don't exist.

So I'm a little wary of the notion that people by virtue of being people always make good decisions when they're giving consent to things. That was a clumsy and long sentence. The sharper, and less precise, way of saying it is that I don't believe that people know what's best for them.

A skilled debater would retort, if they don't know who's best, who should know what's best period? do you think you know what's best for them? There's another blog post about that, based on a quote from Gore Vidal, maybe. The gist of it is: no, I don't know what is best for them. And it is very important that people have choice. Without choices, people are forced to be good, and they don't build up their motivation, understanding, or watchering muscle. And then when you give them a choice, it's very very messy socially and psychologically. 

The way to resolve this is to take a middle path. And that middle path can be characterized by being careful. Careful that the biggest dangers are sometimes the blind spots that we hold on to for years or lifetimes. And often with our consent, if not complicity.