I won't hide that this idea has been walking around with me for many months, so I suspect you can guess, reader, that this topic is fairly serious for me. Even so, over the past week I took on all kinds of research around this whole puzzle, asking myself, "why do we do bad things, knowing full well how bad they are?" The question and my answers (and even the figure I'll be using) may be just as controversial as last week's essay on morality, if not more so. Even so, I believe the essay's main subject, the whole idea, and my own personal experience will get you started on understanding, and if not, will at least leave you with something to think about. And with that word of introduction, let me present a figure you may well already know.

Saint Augustine is perfect for the current idea, and as one reader predicted in a DM, "the confessions of Saint Augustine would fit perfectly." And yes, they fit perfectly, I knew that already a couple of months ago when I first sat down with the text itself, it was instructive, but it left an empty space to fill, which I've decided to fill this week. Whether or not you know Augustine's biography, let me sketch out briefly who we're dealing with.

Born in the year 354 in Thagaste, in Roman Africa, in what is now Algeria. He was, to my mind, something almost superhuman, though at the time it was fairly common, namely he was a teacher, philosopher, priest, bishop, writer, theologian and literally much more, influencing through himself and his ideas figures like Martin Luther, Descartes, and John Calvin.

A Christian mother and a pagan father, that's the picture of his parents that has come down to us. Although his mother truly had a great influence on him, from a young age Augustine didn't consider himself a Christian at all, he received the lessons but couldn't even imagine living that way, let alone becoming a "saint" one day. So from his youth alone we can picture him as more godless.

He was a man of the late Roman world, which means his intellectual makeup was shaped in large part by classical culture first, and only much, much later by Christianity. As the sources tell us, he studied first in Thagaste, then took lessons in rhetoric, grammar, literature, the art of speaking and argument (mainly the humanities) in Madauros, and finally in Carthage. So we can also assume our main figure understood from an early age that language could serve as a tool for changing how people perceive reality, and although that sounds absurd, I assure you this thread will matter a great deal later.

Let's move to the moment when Augustine turns 18, because this is where he encounters Cicero's Hortensius, and as I read, the text itself hasn't survived, so we don't really have much insight into exactly what wisdom he drew from it, but we know this reading brought about no small change in him, because for the first time he stopped looking at philosophy as an intellectual exercise, he turned it into what we would now call a way of life, and began asking himself, "how should one live?"

Next, probably in the year 373, Augustine encounters Manichaeism, and I'll explain this religion as simply as I can. Manichaeism can be treated as a doctrine trying to answer the question of where evil comes from, and one that generally approaches the world in a dualistic way, in the sense that the world is a place of struggle, where good fights evil, and you as a person stand in between. And this doctrine drew Augustine in for about 9 years, because it answered, in a very pleasant way, that good and evil are mainly elements of a cosmic conflict and that human choices aren't the problem. But as I mentioned, he liked it, until a certain moment.

That moment turned out to be the biggest turning point of his life, because he began to consider that evil might not be some separate substance at all, that it might simply be the absence of good. They formulated it as "privatio boni," a lack, a deprivation, or a want of good. So generally we arrive at a point where Augustine concludes that a thing itself doesn't have to be built entirely out of evil, it can be good in itself as a being, but deprived of a certain proper order. And this idea (only clumsily presented here by me) becomes one of the most distinctive elements of Augustinian metaphysics of evil.

In 384 Saint Augustine became a teacher of rhetoric in Milan. Which became the most important point in his life. Here he came into contact with Bishop Ambrose, who remains a very important figure in his story, and mainly not because he simply "convinced him of Christianity," but because in a certain sense he showed him that Christianity could be interpreted intellectually, seriously. Because Scripture had struck him as trite and naive, and it was this very bishop who taught him to read it allegorically.

I honestly have no idea whether I'm a masochist for giving myself such heavy topics, or whether it's simply chance, though this particular subject demands unusual concentration from me, because I don't want to lead you into even the smallest error. On the other hand, before we start reflecting, I also have to admit to you that in the account of his life above there is probably some small amount of material I prepared for you, but unfortunately it's too long to include.

Saint Augustine of Hippo, somewhere around 397 to 400, publishes a piece of literature that is true gold for this essay, I mean the Confessions, which are in themselves problematic, because we assume right away that this is some kind of autobiography of a man (and though it partly is), it rests on ground that is far, far more complicated, and, more importantly, far more interesting for our essay.

Imagine a little man who knows something is wrong. He doesn't merely suppose it, he hasn't heard somewhere that it might be wrong, he truly believes it's wrong. He understands why it's wrong, and in some cases can even tell someone why they shouldn't do that thing. And yet this invented figure of ours still does it? It makes no sense, but it's exactly out of this lack of sense that the puzzle is born, because if simply knowing what's good were enough for a person to be good, then there probably would never be a problem with morality, ever again. But this is exactly where things get complicated, because it seems people just aren't that simple.

As Augustine himself describes his own life, in a way that is generally, at times, uncomfortable. And it's really not that he did things he later regretted, because that much is human, and it would be strange if he hadn't. But what I mean is that he noticed within himself a certain terrifying conflict between what his reason wanted and what his desires wanted. And we really should stop here for a moment.

Because maybe the question "why do we do bad things, knowing full well how bad they are?" is poorly framed. Maybe the problem isn't a lack of knowledge at all, because we know perfectly well what we should do, it's just that some part of us wants something entirely different. And Augustine is a perfect example here, because for a time he didn't even fully want to stop wanting what he wanted. And yes, that sounds absurd, but that's precisely why it's so human.

And yes, at this point we could start developing this into determinism, meaning, blah blah, or even go in a completely different direction, because after I put up some Instagram stories asking about this whole idea, a certain portion of you flew off in the direction of saying we can't even know "what is good and what is evil." So that group of viewers sent me back toward moral dilemmas, which I generally didn't want to focus on, but following that thread, I didn't want to focus on determinism and individual meaning either. So what am I actually getting at, reader?

Let's assume for a moment, then, that we know. We know something is wrong. We know we shouldn't do it. We even know why we shouldn't do it. And despite that, we do it. Saint Augustine's Confessions resolve this case, by showing us that the problem itself lies in something other than "I didn't know." Obviously he wanted change, but he didn't yet want to give up everything that needed to be changed. He wanted the good, but some part of himself still wanted what it had known before.

Desire itself can be absurd. You can know that a cigarette is bad for you and still feel like lighting one. You can know you should put your phone down and still keep scrolling for another hour. You can know you should apologize to someone you've hurt and still have your pride not let you write even one sentence. You can know a relationship is bad for you and still go back to it again. And it's exactly in moments like these that knowledge itself starts to look like something that doesn't even matter, because understanding what you should do doesn't yet mean you actually want to do it.

So personally I've come to the conclusion that sometimes we simply lose because, in a given moment, we want the bad thing more than we want the thing we ourselves consider good. And that's exactly what's unsettling about it, and it's probably about to get even more unsettling, because if a person can want two opposite things at the same time, then which of those two people is the real me?

The one who says "I should stop"? Or the one who, five minutes later, does exactly the same thing? And believe me, this has nothing to do with bipolar disorder, this isn't a mental illness. And although I don't know which person is the real one, because I have to admit, I have no idea. But that's no shame, because Augustine doesn't leave us an answer either, and did I ever have one? Also unclear.

But what is clear is that this whole idea is downright horrifying, because are you telling me that sometimes reason can perfectly well explain to us why we're doing something wrong, and still isn't able to stop us from doing it? I'm not surprised this topic followed me around for months, and it really is very easy to look at other people's bad decisions and say "well, he knew what he was doing." Only when we turn that gaze on ourselves, things stop being so simple.

Because how many times have we told ourselves "never again," only to do exactly the same thing a few days later? So maybe my original question, "why do we do bad things, knowing full well how bad they are?" is simply the wrong question, and I should instead be asking myself, "why do I sometimes trust my own desires more than my own reason?"

Human nature, sin, whatever you want to call it, isn't going to be solved by me (certainly not now), mainly because I still feel too immature for this idea, but on the other hand I want to leave you alone with this puzzle, reader, I don't want to sound flippant, and I don't want to pretend I know something I don't.

I think it is obvious that Confessions by Saint Augustine should find its place here. So, for those who have not yet had the chance to read it, this is the moment when I say it plainly: it is worth your time.

And I think that if someone asked me, "How can I become more emotionally intelligent?" or "How can I understand myself better?", I would recommend this book, along with a few other pearls of classical literature. Not another modern psychology book, but Confessions by Saint Augustine.

So if you have any further questions, I probably don't need to repeat that the reply button is right there waiting, and I will absolutely write back, thank you for reading these little "confessions" of mine.

Until Sunday.