Episode 104: The Devil Didn't Make You Do It

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “The Devil Didn’t Make You Do It.”

People will go to incredible lengths to protect their self-image. [ As much as we have the capacity to feel guilt over things we shouldn't feel guilty about, we also have the ability to smother that guilt and avoid it by stretching the truth, minimizing the seriousness of things, and blaming others. I don't entirely fault people for this.

Facing the truth behind our actions is hard. Few things are as hard to live with as recognizing that you've been a terrible person at times. Feeling terrible about yourself makes you sad. Some people feel their guilt so keenly they'll even find ways to punish themselves. But I believe there's a happy medium when it comes to guilt, which in my mind would be to allow our guilt over a thing to spur us on, toward becoming a different person and to let that guilt ultimately reside in the past.

I think guilt is what makes us accountable. The scariest people on the planet are the people that don't feel any guilt because no behavior is really off the table for them, in spite of how terrible it feels to carry guilt in our lives. I'm grateful for it, at least to some degree, because it does have a productive purpose if not taken too far.

More often than not, it seems like people will sooner find a way to hide away from guilt entirely, though. Instead of recognizing our mistakes and resolving to find ways to avoid doing them again, we'll sooner find a way to assign blame somewhere else or even change our values so that our transgressions no longer sit in the bad category.

Some people have a special talent for being chameleons when it comes to their values. When a moral framework no longer fits the way they live their lives, then suddenly they reject the entire framework to find something more convenient. Even thieves are often known to think of themselves, almost like vigilantes in the sense that they think they are rightly punishing people for being too stupid to lock up their house or for having loose security.

Some of them go so far as to justify their actions as a public good people will often seek out a moral framework or even a religion that finds a way to tell them that the way they live is how life is supposed to be lived. I personally believe that most atheists are drawn to it because atheism is completely free of right and wrong.

All sins are absolved when sin does not exist. I recognize that there are legitimate intellectual reasons for believing this way, but I feel like most of the atheists I know hold just enough resentment against religion that their beliefs don't appear to be entirely driven by their intellectual conclusions.

I think more often than not, people change their views of the world to avoid owning when they betrayed their values. Maybe simply because it's the harder thing to do. It's much easier to simply change your beliefs. At least then you won't feel guilty. So one of our favorite strategies for avoiding guilt is to simply minimize it.

I know I've been guilty of this one. We like to reassure ourselves that whatever we did wasn't actually that bad. Anyone else would've done the same thing we tell ourselves. Sometimes we'll point at someone that did something worse and we'll tell ourselves at least we weren't that bad. Or we might spread the blame by telling ourselves everybody was doing it.

Or maybe we hide behind a technicality by telling ourselves, well, we didn't lie exactly, or it wasn't actually cheating. On top of all of that, over time, people even have the capacity to remember events differently in a way that protects them to the point that in their own mind, no wrong even happened.

For better or worse, though, the truth is the truth. We did a thing we should not have, and we cannot truly minimize our wrongdoings out of existence. We will never be able to move on from it and be made into a better person if we just treat things like they were nothing. And last but not least, I think our favorite way to avoid guilt is by blaming someone else entirely.

It's pretty remarkable how good we are at finding ways to pin our wrongdoings anywhere other than ourselves. A few of the crowd favorites include the devil made me do it, or I'm easily led. I was carried away. It was the alcohol. I don't know what overcame me. The night took me or I wasn't myself. But it was us doing those things and we do bear responsibility for our actions.

All of those phrases serve one purpose, and that's to assign blame somewhere other than ourselves, if not to the devil, then to some mysterious force or spirit that takes us over. It's easier on us if we can feel like there is some separate being inside of us that's responsible for all of our wrongdoings.

That we don't have any control over, but that separate part of us is us. Though some of us want things both ways though. We want to think we're a good person while doing all the things we know aren't good. So, we tell ourselves the devil made us do it, or it can't be helped because some mysterious power moves upon us.

I know that there are factors at play in our lives that sometimes make it harder to behave the way we would like, but we still bear responsibility for our actions whether we like it or not. If you are not in a situation that you are happy with, there is almost always some way you contributed to it.

Other than children, nearly all of us bear at least some of the responsibility for our situations. The devil never made us do anything. He invited us into his house and we accepted. This is Skipping Stones - “The Devil Didn’t Make You Do It.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com.

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