• We simplify our choices to reflect long-term strategies more than short-term gain.

• We simplify our choices to reflect long-term strategies more than short-term gain. These may shift over time, but generally we don't recalculate day by day.

Once we find an approach that seems to work for us, we tend to stick with it even in situations that put us at a short-term disadvantage. We may not be aware of calculation at all. As kids we inherit values and strategies from adults (the ones we don't reject outright), then change them as we learn from trial and error. If we mess up too badly, we may seek out and learn better strategies later on. But it wouldn't make sense for us to reexamine every single choice we make every day; that would overwhelm our capacity to process information, while adding needless stress if there are no better alternatives. Who wants to second-guess every day our choices for partners, jobs, religions? Maybe once a year, with lots of drugs on New Year's Eve. For the most part we follow the strategies that have worked so far, with minor changes as circumstances change, that over time add up to a career or a family or a season in Abu Ghraib.

As mentioned above, there is great advantage to patience and persistence. Most people have to work long and hard for reward; we suffer many setbacks; we learn that, if we can hang on long enough, we might see the payoff.

Even if we're heading in the wrong direction, at least we're getting somewhere. We can't know all the twists and turns life holds for us, all the opportunities and disappointments, but many times steady incremental gains finally let us reach, if not the original goal, at least something we can accept. Unless there's massive new information to guide us, frequent course changes put at risk that bit-by-bit progress.

There are folks who rethink their game at almost every turn --life's day traders-- perhaps because they see a world of possibilities. We tend not to trust them because we don't know what they'll do next. They find themselves back at square one over and over again.

The way we really operate discredits the fantastic model of human behavior put forth by early economists. They, too, were trying to understand human behavior in terms of self-interest. The year the U.S. Constitution went into effect a Brit name a Bentham was trying to work out the "felicific calculus" that would tell us the total sum of pleasure and pain any individual or collective action would produce, in the hope of directing us to the greatest good for the greatest number.

Unfortunately for Bentham’s project, we are not walking calculators. We don't consider anew every decision in our lives --what toothpaste to use this morning, what to eat for breakfast, what career to have, what names we go by-- against the universe of possibilities, weighing costs and benefits in the light of all our experience, to come up with today's choices. Nor would it help us if we did, given the confusing, leaky nature of our information environment. There's too much information in the world, and not enough good information. We can't be the perfectly "rational" beings the theorists hoped for. It would cost far more to reconsider every decision we make than to accept outcomes that are not absolutely optimal, but merely good enough.

Herb Simon's description is much more apt. Under the rubric of "bounded rationality," he

maintained that a core criterion of intelligence, whether in a human or in a machine, is the ability to reduce the complexity of choices confronting the mind when it is considering a problem. It is useless to search all possible paths toward a solution, wasting time in blind alleys and fruitless choices. His heuristics, or rules of thumb, were intended to find shortcuts through the forest of branching ways, and such shortcuts were universal, necessary devices . . . . (JeC 27).

One way to simplify is to make a choice once, and stick with it. We pick a brand of shampoo, lottery number, pick-up line, mutual fund or political party, and stick with it even when it looks to lead us straight over a cliff. Reevaluating and changing course bring their own risks. And even trivial choices are directed by larger strategies, such as how we shop (do you always buy the cheapest, or the brand names, or wait for special sales?), how we understand risk, what we expect from politicians and big organizations. So our stories of self-interest tend to be remarkably stable, long outlasting changes in our objective circumstances.

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“Q: Why doesn’t God stop all the evil in the world? . . . .
“A: I have pondered questions like this most of my life-- and to be honest, I still don’t have a full answer to this difficult problem. Someday, we will understand-- but not now. . . .
“But which is better: to decide that God hates us and doesn’t care about us-- or to believe that He loves us and wants to help us in our times of grief or fear? I suspect you know the answer: It’s far better to trust God and believe in His love, even when our path is dark.”
-- Rev. Billy Graham (Knoxville News Sentinel 4-9-09)
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After we have developed a few general strategies we still have to figure out when to apply them. That depends on how we classify the situation we are facing. Is this a You can't beat city hall kind of problem? A Pursue your dreams problem? A Man's gotta do what a man's gotta do sort of problem (even if I don't understand why or how much it will cost)? Is this where I don't sweat the small stuff, or can't afford to fail? Is this my problem at all, or someone else's, and to hell with them? We impose a grid on reality and hope most of the challenges fit into one or another of our boxes; into one or another of our stories.

Very often we define our interests by the roles we accept or resist: soldier, student, parent, boss, servant, and so forth. Each comes with a set of scripted behaviors, obligations and expectations of reward that may be hard to achieve in fact, but at least simplify the choices we have to make. If I do everything I'm supposed to in order to carry out my role, I can expect these specified rewards and privileges. If I care at all about these particular rewards, it may be in my interest to play the role.

It's when a society can no longer generate the promised rewards that the roles fall apart, as often with gender roles. But my first reaction to such disappointment may be simply to try harder, while demanding my due more loudly, rather than to turn my back on the false promise. Roles are a very important way we reduce the scope of our decisions. In the Stanley Milgram simulated-torture experiments, where the whole context reinforced the experimenters’ role as employers and experts, and the subjects as dutiful employees, most subjects were not able to challenge their orders (Kelman 148ff.).

With respect to electoral politics, we often use a single issue or set of issues as our litmus test for candidates. This doesn’t mean we don’t care about a variety of issues, but we’ve decided to focus on which are most important, or at least seem to represent the broader range of important issues. Thus, what candidates say about abortion can be read as attitudes toward gender, culture, and security in general. According to Lau and Redlawsk, narrowing the focus makes voters more likely to choose candidates who reflect their stated interests, than “rational” voters who search diligently for everything they can learn about every candidate (Steigerwald). Perhaps that’s what happened with some of my teaching colleagues, responsible and research-oriented citizens, who in October 2008 still couldn’t make up their mind between Obama and McCain.

Another variation of the choose-once strategy is when we choose others to make our decisions for us, based on our experience of trust and/or competence. There may be several areas where we leave the heavy lifting to others, even though we are deeply affected by their decisions. Probably in every working partnership, for instance, there are fields in which one partner has a bigger say than the others. "That's your call," or, "I'll leave that up to you."

If we look at health care, some people are very actively involved in determining their own medical treatments, while others leave it into the hands of the doctors (who may leave it mostly up to the nurses, or to standardized procedures). I remember how tough it was in some organizations to get the clerical staff to speak up at staff meetings. "You decide," they'd tell the rest of us. Perhaps they felt the cards were stacked against them (by their co-workers' status and bureaucratic skill), so that participation would be just another, more hidden form of domination. They would have had to shoulder more responsibility with no assurance of outcomes any closer to their liking.

Elsewhere you might hear, "O, I leave all that stuff to Myrtle," about paying the bills, changing the diapers, getting the kids to church every week, inspecting livestock for mad cow disease, targetting Arab homes to bomb. Our personal lives and citizen groups alike would grind to a halt if we didn't delegate some decisions to other people. But as with everything else, we have to be careful in who we trust and what to trust them with.

Sometimes it's a process we trust rather than a person-- computerized stock trading, standardized educational testing, the scientific method, and so forth-- I favor "education" as the solution to all our ills, though it's probably not-- as if we can just feed in the data to this goshamighty black box and out pop decisions that may not be the best, but are good enough.

That's the advantage of adversary systems such as our courts or collective bargaining. I accept that my job is to look after my interests and yours is to look after your own. This is just the sort of "spirit of faction" Washington and the other old white guys warned us against, even as they were indulging in it themselves. But we do it because it can be more efficient than other kinds of collective decision-making. We acknowledge that our own self-interest or perhaps the complexity of the situation makes finding an objectively fair solution impossible; instead, we rely on the fierce contest of opposing parties, fighting by known rules. Not surprisingly, the results can be pretty ugly-- but sometimes we accept them, or barely object, because we accept the process.

There are many procedures we follow to economize on decision-making, from medical diagnosis to the conventions of the scientific method. They don't always produce the best answer, but they are efficient ways to process very large amounts of information.

The habit of delegating decisions to others is one reason revolutions are necessarily initiated by minorities (the other is the sheer impossibility of engaging millions in conversations and commitments while Red Squads and death squads terrorize). But Metzgar's insight also shows why folks might be very skeptical of such a mighty change, knowing how limited our understanding is and how poorly we manage even in stable conditions.

Perhaps most commonly, we don't consciously calculate self-interest at all. We don't weigh alternatives, trade-offs, or the cost / benefit ratio; instead, we inch forward from one day to the next, advancing when we get more of what we want, changing direction when we don't. It's the kind of feedback loop that regulates many natural and mechanical processes. Ever watch a caterpillar crawl up the trunk of a tree?

As inexpensive as this approach is, in terms of the time and energy we might otherwise spend trying to understand and decide, it has obvious drawbacks. We may find ourselves in a blind alley with no way to turn around, or stranded on an ice floe as it breaks apart. Moreover, by controlling our options in the short term, Halliburton & Co. already shape how we think of our self-interest; if we merely plod from one very narrow choice to another, we never see the big picture or our real choices.

Sometimes, misjudging the magnitude of a choice (say, not bothering to put on the condom, or publishing something stupid on-line), we unknowingly narrow our options for the future. In what sense can we call decisions of this nature acting in our self-interest, or even contrary to it?

As I noted earlier, some people don’t like to think in terms of their self-interest at all; they prefer to pray about a decision, or "intuit," or "go with their gut," which, oddly, they feel is a more Spiritual way to proceed. This doesn't mean they aren't self-serving. As the psychologists describe it, intuition is merely subconscious processing, a way of sorting information without paying attention to how we do it. We may refuse to consider self-interest when we are in situations where we have very little personal control, and don't want to take responsibility for the outcomes. It can also be a way of pretending we are not as selfish and calculating as the people who push us around. (How would I know? you ask.)

When you get to know people you begin to recognize some of their strategies (and through them maybe your own). I know a kid who has learned to bully his parents by engaging in high-stakes showdowns, where the parents always back down. I know kids who developed a deeply ingrained leave-me-alone, fly-under-the-radar strategy that helped them survive jail or abusive families, but guarantees they will be shunted aside in situations that demand more sharing. Some people find it safer to postpone decisions, while others can leave no concern unattended. Some people have learned to suck up to the powerful and scapegoat the most vulnerable. I won't tell you my strategies; I'm still trying to figure out what they are. In any case, all these affect in turn our political attitudes and actions. Of course!

Perhaps the main way we simplify is to develop postures to guide our strategies. I am going to take this attitude toward the world and will make my decisions accordingly. Check the options that apply:

1. _____ Most people are like me-- goodhearted and well-intentioned.
_____ You can't trust anyone.

2. _____ There is some essential part of me that makes me unique and valuable.
_____ I am what I do.

3. _____ The world is dangerous-- look out!
_____ The world is fragile-- take care of it!
_____ The world is full of opportunity-- grab it!

4. _____ We have to stick together to survive.
_____ We can't let the weak and stupid hold us back.

5. _____ The biggest danger is disunity.
_____ The biggest danger is conformist thinking.

6. _____ People are the people closest to me. Everyone else is prey, fair game.
_____ My security and prosperity depends on the general welfare.

7. _____ Change is inevitable, and an opportunity.
_____ Change is danger or betrayal.

8. _____ The way I do it is the right way.
_____ The way I do it is one way.

9. _____ There are just so many good things to be had in the world. My gain is necessarily someone else's loss.
_____ There's plenty to go around. Grab what you can.
_____ There's not enough to go around, unless we share.

10._____ The world is chaos. Daddy must show me the way.
_____ The world is understandable, and I can make my way in it.

I use these just as some examples of the postures I've seen or adopted. Of course the choices I pose are too simple, and you could come up with many more. But a lot of the choices we make are based on a set of relatively simple attitudes or strategies that we have developed, probably from very early on in our lives. They explain the world and how we fit, with implied guidelines for action.

Once we’ve developed a set of strategies, the strategies themselves start to look like self-interest. This works for me, so I’ll defend it to the death. In holding on to our core strategies we can even lose sight of the goals they were meant to achieve.

Seeing the world this way helps me understand why so many of our decisions seem to contradict our immediate self-interest-- why we attack our co-workers, buy useless products, send money to Katrina victims, or don't rob our neighbors. If I've tied my fate to the fortunes of a particular politician or gangster, it usually doesn't pay to cut and run at the first sign of trouble. If I've invested in a religious community, it hardly makes sense to bail out over fine points of doctrine (e.g. whether women are the spawn of Satan or merely mindless beasts of burden). If I'm caught in a war and my life depends on the others in my unit, I'm likely to put up at least a pretense of fighting hard-- even though, right now, it would be safer to dig a deep hole and pull it in after me.

Once when I was a kid I challenged a friend to cut down a telephone pole. "You can't do it," I told him. "You're programmed not to do it." I couldn't do it, either, and that bothered me. Why not? Not that it would help me to cut down telephone poles. It was that I couldn't feel free to even consider that as a choice. It makes more sense to me now: the important choices are the ones we make or accept on a much bigger scale.