With a certain mindset, there can be genuine satisfaction, a genuine feeling comfort and peace in inflicting some degree of discomfort, or withholding some pleasure from ourselves. This effect is very strong if you are raised with a mindset that valorizes asceticism or moral scrupulousness–say, Roman Catholicism–but it’s true for other things also. If you worry about the environment, carefully sorting your garbage can be a way to reduce that anxiety, because at least you’re doing something; if you’re concerned about poverty, then giving money to a panhandler can feel good even if it’s not systemic change (and obviously empathy is probably part of it, too; but if you were a totally callous person you probably wouldn’t care about poverty in the first place).
Our brain can attach pleasurable stimulus (albeit one that originates from within) to neutral or even unpleasant actions, related to our self-perception and our desire to be seen a certain way by others. As a neurological feature, the former is probably related to the latter–I suspect our ability to introspect and judge ourselves along any axis, whether morality or coolness or hotness or w/e, is just taking the neurological tools of social bonding and applying them to ourselves. Primate intelligence has its origin not in internal experience, but in the benefits of external interaction, after all!
This positive attachment can be very strong, ranging from a mild satisfaction to overpowering. It would take an overpowering stimulus to make a hermit scourge himself in the desert! It can be rooted in changeable aspects about ourselves, like political opinions, or it can be rooted in very deep elements of identity, like spirituality or body image.
What is most interesting and puzzling to me is when this positive attachment is changeable and when it is not. If you become convinced to be an environmentalist, you might take pleasure is sorting your garbage, even though it’s a little bit of a chore, while if you cease to care about the environment, you might find it easy to stop. For other such attachments, like moral scrupulosity, it can be very hard to abandon those attachments to a behavior that is even actively harmful, even when you have long since abandoned the religious or spiritual environment that inspired them.
There is a strong connection here to beauty standards. I’ve seen some people point out that, while intellectually acknowledging beauty standards are BS, they still have a powerful desire to live up to those standards, and feel satisfaction in doing so. There’s clearly some module in the brain that cares deeply about them, even if the person as a whole would prefer not to. That’s super interesting! It’s strongly reminiscent of sexuality, in that sexual preferences, while forming fully only in adolescence, are often shaped by early childhood experiences–you are more likely to be attracted to people of the races you grow up around, for instance; the features of that attraction are strongly shaped by dominant beauty standards in your society; kinks arise out of the sexualization of salient cultural features, social interactions, and common social tensions (cf. cuckolding, BDSM, anxiety about unsafe sex turning into a fetish for “breeding”, sex that highlights or transgresses social rules about race and gender). And the person whose actual beliefs stand directly opposed to their sexual drives is so common as to be a cliche.
But there are things about ourselves we cannot change; what turns us on seems to be one of them. It might change a little, slowly, over time; but we know of no way you could turn yourself from a Kinsey 0 to a Kinsey 6, or vice-versa. Many kinks, even ones someone is so ashamed of they contemplate suicide (like a foot fetishist Jesse Bering mentions in Perv, who did in fact commit suicide because of that shame), seem likewise intractable. Some hangups, sexual and nonsexual, are amenable to change, like purely aversive disgust reactions. Examples about of bigots forsaking their bigotry, which is often reinforced through a feeling of disgust; but many other examples like treatment for extreme phobias, or just getting used to something that used to gross you out (like parents changing dirty diapers), also exist. It seems much easier to change what we hate than change what we like.
Some people, implicitly or explicitly, seem to believe all visceral reactions are rooted in considered (or consider-able) beliefs: that if you are afraid of getting fat, you are on some level fatphobic, and with enough self-reflection identifying and working through that phobia, your fear will dissipate. I don’t think that’s true, and I have two competing hypotheses why. One, for fatphobia (and beauty standards generally; and also possibly some elements of sexuality), we are subject to some system within our brains that really is deeply rooted in early experiences and is primitive to other systems for social interaction built on top of it; the fact that sexuality and beauty standards are inescapably of the body is not a coincidence, because judgement of the body is important even to relatively dumb primates. It helps to judge what is your species and what is not, for instance! Or two, it’s about the positive attachments thing: there are positive rewards (again, even if only internal) we learn to associate with actions even if they are unpleasant in the moment. We abstain from food; we feel hungry, but virtuous. The bridge in this hypothesis between beauty standards and sex is that both are about pleasure, albeit of two different kinds, whereas disgust or anger are purely aversive and thus more easily overcome.
Sexual pleasure and desire are conceptually simple, but also extremely powerful. Anybody who knows the experience of stumbling across that sex act or piece of erotica or just incidental stimulus that really does it for you, and being instantly hypercharged by arousal, can confirm this. But you know what is also powerful? Probably as powerful as sexual desire? The need for social approval and positive attention. Like sexual desire, it’s not experienced universally, but it is extremely common; people will go to insane lengths to get it; and as social animals, it’s an equally foundational element of a significant part of our cognition.
And the fact that dieting and body image and disgust toward our own or other people’s appearances is couched in moralizing terms is not a coincidence either, I suspect. Moral approval seems in many ways to be the first and strongest manifestation of our social instincts. That also makes sense: a cognitive systems centered around cooperation will probably naturally come up with something that looks like morality, and the fact that our moral reasoning arises first out of a sea of contradictory intuitions built on how we are raised and socialized, rather than reasoning from simple prior principles, is why the field of moral philosophy is so complex. Everything gets reduced to terms of moral judgement sooner or later: sex, food, money, politics, even pure aesthetics. Being able to feel positively about our own virtue is crucial to our mental health; less crucial, but still quite common, is to be able to derive pleasure from looking down on others, itself a kind of social hierarchy judgement. And while some of our gut moral judgements may rest on disgust, some do not; it is easier for me to imagine someone getting over a moral opposition to homosexuality than it is a moral opposition to murder, for example. Perhaps it’s not aversive reactions generally that are fragile, but only disgust, which is, after all, often openly amoral.
I don’t want to speculate too heavily on the evolutionary aspect of these psychological forces, because I think evo-psych is in practice pretty garbage, and it’s not nearly as interesting to me as how these forces actually work in our brains and our society now. We can basically stipulate our brains are evolved systems, and move on. Fundamental to cognition may not mean evolutionarily early, although I suspect it is in this case, because the basic tools of social cooperation are widely spread among animals generally and mammals in particular. And I want also to distinguish between, like, the system within the brain that gives rise to moral intuitions and reasoned-about morality, whatever the form that reasoning takes. Even if the latter exists as an enterprise only because of the former (imagine a solitary intelligent species that has no need for cooperation and thus no morality), it is still separate. I can imagine a being, say a modified human that’s a product of some mad science experiment, that lacks our gut-level moral judgements, but is still capable of reasoning about ethics, and still has empathy and higher-level moral values. In some ways, they might be more rational than us on certain moral matters, because they have fewer entrenched biases, and no immediately conflicting intuitions they must overcome.
But of those most entrenched, circumstantially-conditioned gut reactions, like beauty standards, is this something within ourselves it is genuinely possible to change? Or can we only reach an awkward detente with them, like an impossible-to-realize kink? I wonder sometimes what a world in which we could make ourselves look however we wanted would be like; but equally interesting perhaps would be a world where we could make ourselves like whatever we wanted. A world where you could choose to find anyone (or everyone!) intuitively beautiful would be fascinating!
