W e are all fools in one way or another. Fools for love, fools for vanity, fools for greed and arrogance, laziness and envy.
In the fourth century AD, the Egyptian hermit Evagrius the Solitary classified human failings into eight major groups. In 590, Pope Gregory I revised Evagrius’ list to create the canonical seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride, which were to be defeated by the cultivation of the corresponding virtues of chastity, temperance, generosity (charity), diligence, patience, gratitude, and humility.
The struggle against vice and for virtue — what Aristotle called “the control of the appetites by reason” — is a constant. Laws punish, or at least threaten, our most egregious failings, and the cultivation of virtue of one kind or another thrives in venues as distinct as churches, diet and addiction programs, meditation studios, and CrossFit gyms. There are entire industries of self-improvement designed to help us overcome our real or perceived failings.
The study and classification of human failing also continues. Behavioral psychologists have identified at least 188 distinct cognitive biases that cause people to make bad choices, and economists have urged the design of systems that “nudge” people to make better ones.
But there are other industries, far larger and more pervasive, that nudge us to indulge our failings…
