Conscience

Definition

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You know I learned when I was a kid, little older than a kid, that almost everything that I said was one form of lie or another. And I wasn’t any worse, I would say, that the people I was associating with. Or any better. And the lies were manifold you know. They were attempts to win arguments for the sake of winning the argument, that might be one. Attempts to indicate my intellectual prowess when there were competitions of that sort. Maybe just the sheer pleasure of engaging in an intellectual argument and winning. My inability to distinguish between ideas that I had read and incorporated because I had read, but hadn’t realized that I hadn’t yet earned the right to use all of that. And you know, I had this experience that lasted a long time while I would say it’s really never gone away… And I think this was the awakening of my conscious essentially. And I didn’t realize this until much later when I was reading Socrates apology. This voice, for lack of a better word, made itself manifest inside of me. And it said, every time I said something that wasn’t true, and that’s usually what it said, ‘that’s not true.’ ‘You don’t believe that.’ Or there was a sensation that was associated with it. I don’t think this is that uncommon you know. I asked my psychology classes for many years in a row if they had an experience, this experience; that they had a voice in their heads, let’s say it’s a metaphor or a feeling that communicated to them, when they were about to do something wrong. And it was universally the case that people agreed with one of those statements or another. And the other thing that I would ask is, well, do you always listen to it? And the answer was definitely no. But that’s also very interesting you know, that you can have this faculty, this conscience, this seems to me very tightly associated with the idea of free will, that you can have this internal voice, this Daemon, the root word for democracy.

Applications

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Your Conscience is Not Fully Informed, It Needs a Lifelong Dialog With You

Well, you know, it’s funny. I think that is well laid out in the story of Pinocchio, in the Disney story, which is a very strange and complicated story, not least because it draws an analogy between a cricket and Christ. Cricket, Jesus Christ, and the conscience: they’re all the same thing, which is very, very, very strange. But the cricket is obviously a higher entity in some sense, because it’s the conscience, so it’s the judge. But the movie’s very interesting, because it presents that as flawed. As Pinocchio stops being a puppet, his conscience stops being a sort of wandering tramp. They both hone themselves, and, at the very end, Pinocchio turns into a real boy, but the conscience turns into something that’s akin to the stars. It’s a gold star. I spent a lot of time thinking about that. It’s like, "what the hell is that? What’s going on there, exactly?" What it is, is that that judge that you’re talking about—and I wrote a little bit about this in 12 Rules. That judge that you have internally, which is, let’s call it, the voice of conscience, suffers from a certain generic quality. It’s judging you in a cliched manner. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it’s cliched. It’s not fully informed. So what you want to do throughout your life is have a dialog with that, because it needs to learn—just like what it’s judging needs to learn—and maybe, if that dialog… You know, it’s not that much different than having a long-term relationship, like a marriage. You’re continually communicating, with any luck, and you’re modifying each other in the communication.  

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