Pascal’s Danger
What a 350 year old wager can tell us about avoiding cynicism and suicidal despair, living a better life, and averting global catastrophe
A quick announcement—you may already have noticed from the email subject, but I’ve recently changed my Substack’s name and subdomain from Daymaker to Inventory. The Daymaker name was always intended for a separate side project and quickly stopped making sense as I began writing in earnest. My updated About page, if you’re curious, will give you a sense of the philosophy behind what I’ve been up to, and will continue to be up to, here.
I’m about a week late from when I promised to get this new post out but I hope you enjoy, it’s another revived piece from last year that I still felt had a ton to say—after plenty of edits. God, suicide, global catastrophe—big stakes in today’s piece.
1 - The Wager
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century theologian, philosopher, and polymath, seems an odd choice of source for modern hope in the face of suicidal despair or global catastrophe. First of all, because, well, he’s a 17th century theologian. Second, because his most famous contribution to philosophy, Pascal's Wager, doesn’t have anything to do with either suicide or catastrophe. It was a novel argument against atheism, based on the idea that atheism was irrational—a bad wager.
Pascal’s Wager goes as follows:
God either exists or doesn't. Reason alone cannot settle this question.
Since reason is no guide, we're left with a 50/50 coin toss: heads, God exists, tails, he doesn't.
We must wager. It is not optional. The question of God’s existence is inescapable.
The possible outcomes of the wager are as follows:
If you wager that God exists and you win, you gain all—eternal life and happiness in Heaven.
If you wager that God exists and you lose, you lose nothing, except some mortal luxury.
If you wager against God and you lose, you gain nothing.
If you wager against God and you lose, you lose all—eternal damnation.
The only logical choice, then, is to believe in God.
In our secular world, it's easy to see Pascal's Wager as dated, even cartoonish. The Enlightenment luminary Voltaire, Pascal's near-contemporary, said as much. Pascal’s Wager, in his view, boiled the complexity of belief down into a mere transaction, a wager of rewards and punishments. God becomes an omnipotent bookie—put your money on him, and win big; bet against the house, and be damned.
But regardless of the staying power of Pascal’s specific arguments for or against God, his wager outlived its own argument by introducing decision theory, an enduring field of study that has led to related fields like game theory and its famous Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Table of consequences in game theory’s Prisoner’s Dilemma
In decision theory, we can refine our most complex or intractable choices into clear tradeoffs, by isolating the core decisions at play and probabilistically modeling their consequences. Much like Pascal’s Wager, these often take the form of binary choices: to take the Prisoner’s Dilemma example, do we snitch on our accomplice and get less time, or do we stay silent and risk more time if they rat on us?
In short, decision theory gives us a way to reason about, and even quantify, the big, difficult, even existential choices we make in the world.
I once stumbled into my own personal experience of the power this method could have.
2 - The choiceless choice
I was no stranger to thoughts of suicide as a younger man. These thoughts would come infrequently, but when they came they would swallow up my whole physical, feeling self. Like a hungry person at a supermarket, I couldn't see or think beyond my craving—a craving to be released from myself, to no longer have to face a shame and self-disgust which stained everything.
Some combination of physical cowardice, a countervailing desire to live, and a recognition that the worst would pass kept me from ever taking my own life. I can’t say I was ever close. I might wrap a belt around my throat and playact at hanging myself, but I never seriously contemplated an attempt.
For years, though, this question troubled me: why did my mind go there in the first place? Why was I tempted to kill myself? How do I escape that shame, and the temptation it gives rise to?
Now, this is an obviously fraught topic, so I want to make it clear that the feelings I’m talking about here are quite distant. For this reason, I’m not here to talk about the sources of shame or the history that gave rise to them, as important as those were for my work of therapy and self-healing. I now see them as the adolescent patterns and overreactions that they are. They still have their occasional emotional echoes, but they need only be recognized to be tamed, thereby to let the simpler truth speak out—life is to be lived, that’s all there is to it.
But before fully and thoroughly learning this, I would have these moments. The suicidal feeling would come up. The decision would be present in those feelings, the decision that could be made to take my life, even if that decision never felt close or real.
One night I went there again, feeling the suicidality, feeling the presence of the decision. I let the shame carry me to a point of total self-disgust. I felt up against an edge, a breaking point, the kind of point where “release” becomes a real temptation.
But then a realization came to me, gradually, and then suddenly. I knew I couldn’t kill myself.
Why? Easy. Who the hell was I to? Who was I to bring down a pain so heavy and unexpungeable on others—friends, family, loved ones? Still more—to thereby amplify the cycle of suffering, to let my death make someone else that much more likely to succumb to despair, to see suicide as a way out instead of an abdication of life?
It struck me that this was the most selfish error I could possibly make. The fact that “selfishness” wouldn’t be the final verdict passed on me, that pity for my pain would lead others to painfully but bravely forgive the error and try to make the best light of my memory, only made the selfishness stand out in higher relief. The fact that I, too, would strive with all my soul to regard someone who made such a decision with compassion and forgiveness instead of anger or judgment, still left my own decision completely my own, completely unforgivable, completely my responsibility not to make, never to make.
So if suicide was out of the question, then, of what use were suicidal feelings? Of what use was the shame that led me to the suicidal feelings, if the vector of its emotional progression always ultimately led to that one inconceivable decision? Anyone who has experienced a suicidal train of thought knows there is only one direction it goes in while it’s present: down. So why even entertain that train of thought?
It’s hard to capture just how clear this suddenly made everything. Prior to it, I strongly doubted that I could kill myself. But suddenly, I knew couldn’t kill myself—and this made the whole enterprise of grappling with suicide seem foolish, pointless, a waste of emotional energy. Occasionally a temptation still, yes. But with time that temptation diminished, too.
As Pascal had his decision about God, I had my decision about suicide. But in my case, the wager’s ultimate outcome was already decided in my heart even if not yet in my mind (as I’m sure it was for Pascal re: God, too):
Suicide is either permitted or isn't. Reason cannot settle this question.
But the heart can: it clearly is not permitted, for the harm it would do.
We must wager. It is not optional. One either does or doesn’t heed the feelings of suicide.
The possible outcomes of the wager are therefore as follows:
If I wager that suicidal feelings are not worth entertaining and suicide is not permitted, then I’ve lost nothing. All I’ve done is avoided the pain of entertaining suicidal feelings.
If I wager that suicidal feelings are worth entertaining and suicide is not permitted, then I make myself miserable for no reason at all.
These are the only two outcomes, because suicide is, in fact, not permitted.
The only logical choice, then, is to recognize that suicide is not permitted, and therefore to avoid the pointless pain of entertaining the possibility.
So, I give up on suicidality and the shame that inevitably leads to it. If suicide is forbidden absolutely, why even start down the road that ends up there? Why not live life, in general, in a way that accepts that life is simply to be lived?
3 - Pascal’s Danger: We Are Embarked
“You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked.”
- Blaise Pascal
A recent speech by famed linguist and political public intellectual Noam Chomsky sets out the stakes of climate change:
If we do not confront and overcome the existential threats we face [of climate change and nuclear catastrophe], then soon, the game is over, literally. The human experiment will have come to an inglorious end, bringing down much of the living world with it... These intolerable flaws can and must be remedied and soon. If humans are capable of stemming their drive to species suicide, other critical problems can be confronted and overcome.
Climate change, of course, operates on a very different level than faith in God. To not believe in God will doom you yourself, personally and eternally (on Pascal’s accounting, not mine). But for us to fail on climate change, that means we will be doomed as a species, or in the best case will inflict unprecedented pain and trauma on our collective human community.
And unlike belief in God, belief in climate change is table stakes. Having the right beliefs is not enough to warrant patting yourself on the back, because being right doesn’t solve the problem.
This is why it struck me recently that the equivalent Pascal-style wager we should be talking about for climate change is actually, fundamentally, no different than the wager I had come to discover in grappling with suicidality.
What the two have in common is this: the outcome case is not permitted. It can’t be allowed to happen. I could not commit suicide any more than we can allow climate change to reap the destruction it could reap, left unchecked—in Chomsky’s words, “species suicide”.
So, that being the case, we only have this one choice to make: how we are to think about it.
So, here's the danger wager for climate change:
Either we will avert the worst of climate change, or we won’t. Reason cannot settle this question (= we can’t predict the future).
But the heart can: we clearly must avert the worst of climate change. It is, ahem, literally our fucking future as a human race.
We must wager. It is not optional. One must feel some way about climate change given the urgency of our current situation.
The possible outcomes of the wager are as follows:
If we wager that we can avert the worst of climate change, and we do, we preserve a livable future for ourselves and our offspring.
If we wager that we can’t avert the worst of climate change, there’s really no way we can. Apathy and cynicism is no basis for collective change. And the more of us that fall into apathy and cynicism, the starker the stakes look.
These are the only two outcomes, because we must avert the worst of climate change. That isn’t a choice.
The only choice, then, is to believe that we can actually do something about climate change. And, by corollary, actually do something about it. This means not shrugging our shoulders and saying, “the politicians are crooks, Republicans are demon spawn, things will never change”. This means not hoping that things just stay nice and cushy where you live while far flung places of the globe bear the worst of it. If you think Trump is bad, increased climate refugee migration will make more authoritarian-style leaders an inevitability in the Western world in 20-30+ years. Roosters can and will come home to roost.
And it’s not as if there aren’t clear models for hope. If you’re over the age of, say, 25 or 30, you may well be unaware that the success of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest legislative effort to fight climate change in our history, came largely because of the continuous pressure being applied at all levels of government by climate activist organizations, especially the youth activist organization Sunrise Movement, and the pressure of insurgent, movement-driven, youth-energized campaigns such as that of Bernie Sanders.
Hope is available. It always has been. So given this possibility of hope, do you see something of what the Wager does, the bit of magic here? The neat trick?
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, of the right kind, the kind we ought to desire.
By recognizing that it was impossible for me to commit suicide, I let go of my feelings of suicidality. But by letting go of my feelings of suicidality, it became impossible for me to commit suicide. Self-fulfilling liberation.
By recognizing that is impossible for us to let climate change go unchecked and let the world burn, we let go of our feelings of cynicism and apathy. But by letting go of our feelings of cynicism and apathy, our world will remain whole. Self-fulfilling galvanization.
And perhaps the world won’t remain as whole as is ideal. There will still be pain, still be disaster and ecological change, without a doubt. But this is in the nature of being human, to want the ideal and be forced to settle for the actual. Letting go of suicidality did not make my life perfect. But it did make sure I’d never again fail to be committed to life.
Hope is not just possible. It’s the only choice. It’s the only choice because choosing it makes what is hoped for, come to pass.
The only difference between my personal choice and our collective choice is that we’re all tasked with making this choice about our planet together, instead of each of us individually about life (or for that matter belief in God).
For the first time in our human history, we’re being asked to truly decide in common, as a whole human world. That sounds daunting, especially given the divisions still raging between us.
But that should also give us a lot to hope for. Just imagine what that makes possible on the further horizon, after we’ve met this challenge as a people.
On the other side of this, we might truly be a more human world.
"Hope is not just possible. It’s the only choice. It’s the only choice because choosing it makes what is hoped for, come to pass." Yes. Yes. Yes. Great essay from JG today.