Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

own beliefs and deservedness. Racists do racist things because they’re
certain about their genetic superiority. Religious fanatics blow themselves up
and murder dozens of people because they’re certain of their place in heaven
as martyrs. Men rape and abuse women out of their certainty that they’re
entitled to women’s bodies.
Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that
everyone else is evil.
In controversial experiments, now simply known as the Milgram
Experiments, named for the psychologist Stanley Milgram, researchers told
“normal” people that they were to punish other volunteers for breaking
various rules. And punish them they did, sometimes escalating the punishment
to the point of physical abuse. Almost none of the punishers objected or
asked for explanation. On the contrary, many of them seemed to relish the
certainty of the moral righteousness bestowed upon them by the experiments.
The problem here is that not only is certainty unattainable, but the pursuit
of certainty often breeds more (and worse) insecurity.
Many people have an unshakable certainty in their ability at their job or
in the amount of salary they should be making. But that certainty makes them
feel worse, not better. They see others getting promoted over them, and they
feel slighted. They feel unappreciated and underacknowledged.
Even a behavior as simple as sneaking a peek at your boyfriend’s text
messages or asking a friend what people are saying about you is driven by
insecurity and that aching desire to be certain.
You can check your boyfriend’s text messages and find nothing, but that’s
rarely the end of it; then you may start wondering if he has a second phone.
You can feel slighted and stepped over at work to explain why you missed
out on a promotion, but then that causes you to distrust your coworkers and
second-guess everything they say to you (and how you think they feel about
you), which in turn makes you even less likely to get promoted. You can keep
pursuing that special someone you’re “supposed” to be with, but with each
rebuffed advance and each lonely night, you only begin to question more and
more what you’re doing wrong.
And it’s in these moments of insecurity, of deep despair, that we become
susceptible to an insidious entitlement: believing that we deserve to cheat a
little to get our way, that other people deserve to be punished, that we
deserve to take what we want, and sometimes violently.