I Led 5 Lives

I Led 3 Lives was a popular TV show during the Red Scare of the 1950’s. The premise is obvious: an American is recruited to spy for the Soviet Union while in fact he is working undercover for the FBI. For many Americans it was our first exposure to double agent intrigue.

In the real world, we’re all living multiple lives all the time and I’m not just talking about the ‘faces we prepare to meet the faces that we meet’.  (Eliot) I’m talking about 5 specific lives that I think each of us leads, mostly without realizing it. And no one needs to go to ‘spy school’ to pull it off.

We imagine that our lives are fairly mundane and in some ways that’s true…and most welcome! Imagine a world in which things we never ‘mundane’; talk about chaos! But the tranquil appearance is betrayed by the fact we are each living at least 5 lives all at once…even if we don’t have a ‘second family’ two counties over.

The famous late 20th century physicist, Richard Feynman, speculated that the true legacy of any event at the quantum level is the sum of all the event’s potential outcomes, each outcome weighted according to its relative probability.

It’s election day in the U.S. The Democrat candidate for President has a 3 point lead in the polls. The British odds makers have handicapped the race at 3 to 2. Bet $100 on the Democrat and win $50; bet $100 on the Republican and win $150. Of course, you can be sure of one thing: you’ll either win or lose.

That’s at the classical level of analysis. At the quantum level, both candidates win and both candidates lose. The result ends with the Presidency split: 60% Democrat, 40% Republican. Sound crazy? This is the model embedded in the U.S. Constitution of 1789, before it was amended (recall the Adams/Jefferson administration).

Apply this to life as we know it. To understand me, and it’s all about me after all, you need to juggle 5 different lifelines. The accompanying graphic (above) illustrates the concept.

Begin with the events of my life, viewed objectively with no hint of evaluation or judgment and no consideration for anything other than the events themselves: no motives, no purposes, no causes and no consequences. These are the events that constitute your life, laid out in a straight line, like beads on a neckless, viewed from an entirely objective perspective. There is no right or wrong, better or worse; on this line, it’s “Just the facts, Mam” (Dragnet). This is life unjudged, unevaluated, unexamined – in other words life not worth living according to Job, Socrates, and Nozick. 

Call this flat line (A). Line (A) is us, pure and simple, but we don’t live there. We live on Line (B)…or at least we think we do. Here there is right and wrong, better and worse. Your life is evaluated and, guess what, you come out smelling pretty sweet. Just one problem: you’re the one performing the evaluation! Can you spell ‘confirmation bias’? 

I attended a conference once where the speaker asked the members of the audience to consider how they thought they compared with the other audience members (all strangers) on two parameters: 

1. Are you more or less intelligent than the median member of this audience?

2. Are you more or less ethical than the median member?

   
   

Surprising to me, the results came back the same on both questions: approximately 2/3rd of the respondents rated themselves above median. Of course, objectively speaking, this cannot be the case. By the definition of the word ‘median’, half of all respondents must be ‘above’ and half ‘below’; but we don’t see ourselves that way. We imagine ourselves as we’d like others to see us: “perfect in every way” (Bye Bye Birdie); well, if not ‘perfect’ at least ‘well above average’ in every department. 

Bottom line: we have an exaggerated sense of our own virtue. But there is a corollary: we must therefore have a diminished view of the virtue of our mates. And we do!

If Line (B) is a product of home team bias, we might expect that ‘objective’ Line (A) would take its place, but it doesn’t. Remember that events on Line (A) are shorn of all traces of valuation. People cannot perceive naked reality; we see the world through a prism of judgment and evaluation. All perception is subjective. We can’t perceive events as they exist on Line (A).

Line (C) on our graph shows how others actually perceive us. The odor is not so sweet. But we should not be at all surprised. Remember our corollary (above): We must therefore have a diminished view of the virtue of our mates.

Line (C) is the mirror image of Line (B). How could it be otherwise? Our exaggerated valuation of ourselves requires us to devalue our neighbors proportionately. Everyone is right in their own eyes and therefore everyone else must be wrong.  No wonder the world’s in a perpetual state of war!

Are you with me so far? Good, because you may not be when you hear what’s coming next. Much as you aggrandize your own virtue and much as others depreciate that valuation, there is another level of ‘you’ that is even less favorable…the dreaded line (D).

Yup, even your neighbors overestimate your virtue. Here, I know, things get personal. I just ask one question: Are there things about you that even your closest compatriots don’t know and that you would go to some lengths to keep them from finding out? Then you are less virtuous than your peers believe.

I will go further. There are unsavory aspects of ‘you’ that even you don’t fully realize. In fact, discovering those things, and changing them if you can, is a life’s work. Some call it ‘examination of conscience’; others call it ‘psychoanalysis’. Freud blames the Id; Jung the collective unconscious; Adler, the will to power; others, original sin. 

This is your life laid bare; this is how you’d be perceived by an omniscient and objective intelligence, by someone like ‘God’ for example. You are not only not as ‘good’ as you think you are, you’re not even as good as others think you are…and that’s saying something!

All this would be pretty discouraging were it not for Line (E). This line traces your actual impact in people’s lives. Oops! My AI Bot wants me to correct ‘in’ to read ‘on’, but that is not what I mean; I do mean ‘in’. 

I’m not talking about the objective impact you’ve had on the world through the medium of other people; I don’t believe that is measurable and I doubt the concept is even meaningful. I don’t even mean the impact you’ve had on the objective details of other folks’ lives, on their (A) Lines.

I’m talking about the subjective impact you’ve had in the lives of other sentient beings. Specifically, have you made their experience of life a little better than it would otherwise have been? Have you ever relieved suffering or spread joy, however inadvertently? After all, at the end of the day, there is only ‘experience’…yours, mine, and perhaps, God’s!

Amazingly, here the results are surprisingly positive. Intentionally or not, you’ve brightened a lot of folks’ lives. Imagine you’re the designated ‘flower bearer’ at a relative’s wedding but, naughty as usual, you chose to run away, depriving the married couple of their floral bouquet. (No malice, you just wanted out! I totally empathize.)

But as you run, flowers fall out of your basket all along the route. Curious children pick them up, so do stressed adults and senile seniors. Some throw the flowers in the trash, but most don’t. Some take them home and put them in water, some turn them into boutonnieres, some pass them on. In many ways, many others get to experience the beauty and joy of your flowers.

Imperfect as you are and without any hint of benevolent intent, you have unleashed a ripple of joy across the ocean of the world. Your ripple will not relocate the ocean or even alter the timing and height of the tides; it will, however, impact every bit of the ocean’s surface. How did you, and everyone around you get so lucky?

If you are religious, you credit this to God’s grace. The old saw applies, “Man (sic) proposes, God disposes.” (Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!) If you’re not, then you probably have some other explanation, like Fate or Nature or Gaia or Universe. Nomenclature is less important here than Reality. So live the best life you can and put your faith in Line (E).

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.