Intent

The intent behind a given behavior is the source of the meaning of that behavior. Arguably, an action driven by an intent that is fair or better has the potential to contribute to the pursuit of Happiness and an action driven by an intent that is less than fair has the potential to get in the way of it.

The spectrum of Intent stretches from selfish to selfless. It can be divided into the the following five categories:

1. Selfish

2. Self-centered

3. Fair and equal

4. Kind and generous and

5. Selfless.

To illustrate the meaning of each of these categories imagine the following scenario: you and another person (who is much like you — of the same gender, about your age and size) are lost in the desert. You are both overheated and dehydrated, staggering aimlessly and getting increasingly desperate. All of a sudden, you stumble on a jug full of safe drinking water. At that point you must choose one of five behavioral options, each representing one of the categories on the intent continuum.

The lowest option on the quality scale is the behavior driven by a selfish intent. Acting selfishly implies the actor has full awareness of the other’s need for the resource at hand, yet, in spite of this awareness, the actor actively dismisses the value of the other’s need.

In our example, you are aware of your companion’s need for water and you know full well that it is identical to yours: If either one of you continues without water they will perish. Nonetheless, you may make a selfish choice and opt not to share your find, ignoring your companion’s desperate pleas.

In opting for the selfish option one dismisses the importance the other’s need, emphasizing the importance of one’s own need, even thought the needs are recognized as identical.

The next scenario illustrates the self-centered option. In this example, when you stumble on the jug of water you become so excited with your discovery that you momentarily literally forget about your mate’s existence and thus lose sight of his/her needs. All that your mind holds at that moment is yourself — your thirst, your need for hydration, and the sudden availability of the resource that can satisfy it.

As in the previous scenario you start chugging the water. However, in distinction from the selfish behavior, when your mate starts pleading for water you are forced to wake up from your self centered absorption. The pleas remind you of the existence of the other person and the existence of his or her needs, forcing you to take their existence into consideration which underscores the fact that the self centered state a transitory, “on the fence”, state.

Self centeredness is based on passively ignoring, rather than actively dismissing, the needs of the other. When the reminder arrives, in the form of pleas in our example, one is forced to “get off the fence” and choose either lower side of selfishness or to the higher side – the fair and equal option.

Children operate exclusively out of self-centered intent. The human brain requires, more-or-less, twenty years to mature to the point of automatically taking the needs of others into consideration. Children are not selfish, they are self centered by a neuro- developmental necessity. Self-centeredness is transitory in a psychological developmental sense. The capacity to automatically take the needs of others into consideration is a key developmental milestone that is met in early adulthood. Because all adults have a history of fifteen to twenty years of self-centered behavior, all adults are capable of regressing into acting in self centered ways with relative ease (particularly under stress). We therefore tend to perceive an adult that acts self-centeredly as immature or childish.

Back to our exploration of the categories of intent. The next level up is the fair and equal intent. In our ‘lost in the desert’ example — driven by a fair an equal intent, upon discovering the water jug, you would share the the water (i.e., the resource) in a way that reflects your perception of the relative magnitude of the need each of you has for it. If you realize that your needs for the water are the same, the fair and equal intent, and thus conduct, would be to divide the water into two equal parts. If your needs were not equal, for example – if the other person happened to be pregnant, which implies that she has a greater need for water than your (assuming you are not pregnant), the fair choice would be to distribute more than half to her, the needier party, and less than half to you.

A kind and generous intent, the next level up, would be manifested in your choice to give your companion more than half of the water and make do with less than half (i.e., less than your fair share) even if you recognize your needs as equal.

At the highest level of intent your own thirst — the importance of your own need, would be negligible in comparison to the importance you give to the need of the other. Operating at that level you would hand over the jug of water and encourage your fellow traveler to drink it all.

The link between the nature of one’s intent and the pursuit of happiness exists with or without conscious awareness of it. Normal adults are motivated by a fair intent — the default setting is on fairness. Well adjusted, content, healthy human adult instinctively act fairly and are made uncomfortable by actions that are driven by a less-than-fair intent. Actions driven by a fair intent are good enough to support an effective pursuit of happiness.

Suffering can, and often does, cause regression to a self centered (or lower — selfish) state. Actions driven by a less-than-fair intent tend to cause problems which contribute to the actor’s suffering. Therein lies the Buddhist concept of the Cycle of Suffering. Consistently, actions motivated by a self-centered or a selfish intent cannot contribute to the pursuit of happiness. Such actions can only make matters worse.

Examples of higher level of intent, i.e., acts of kindness and generosity, are not uncommon. Circumstantial evidence associated with acts of kindness and generosity seem to support the claim that a better-than-fair intent tends to support the pursuit of happiness more robustly than mere fairness.

Kindness and generosity is often displayed by ordinary people. Selflessness, on the other hand, is very rare. The one exception to this is in the parent-child relationship. Ordinary parents are hardwired for selflessness toward their children.

If I imagine myself in the example above — lost in the desert and finding the jug of water, the only person I can say with confidence whose need for water would be more important to me than my own need is my child. (Personal side note: In case the reader is one of my children, I believe this applies equally to each of you.)

Therein lies the primary reward for the overall thankless job of parenting: The parental role offers ordinary people a proof of their inherent ability to operate from the highest level — to function as selfless beings. This, in my opinion, is the main link that connects parenting with the pursuit of happiness.

To complete our discussion of intent we need to consider one additional concept — the self-sacrificing intent. Behavior driven by a self-sacrificing intent is, by definition, ingenious. It attempts to create an impression of oneself as more “evolved” that one truly is, either in one’s own mind, or in another’s mind.

To illustrate this I will use our lost-in-the-desert example one more time. Upon finding the water you hand the jug over to your mate and offer him or her to drink all the water. Motivated by a self sacrificing intent (which can be conscious or subconscious) you wish to create the impression that you are selfless. The self-sacrificing person expects that their offer would be turned down. The genuine motivation is to create a reputation for oneself as an evolved, selfless person. If their offer is accepted, the self-sacrificing person feels resentful rather than elated, which is the result of a genuine selfless act.

Lack of clarity about that which constitutes fair can also lead to a self-sacrificing intent. In this case, self-sacrifice is the results of one’s fear of inadvertently taking a less-than-fair actions. This threat may be addressed by overshooting the mark of fairness, essentially, to be on the safe side. To avoid such inadvertent self-sacrifice it is necessary to know what constitutes ‘fair’ in a given situation, and to be comfortable leaving it at that, to just be fair. Genuine acts of generosity (or better) require such clarity of and comfort with mere fairness.

Self-sacrificing intent can be subconscious and may be difficult to identify before acting on it. It is, however, relatively easy to identify one’s own self-sacrificial intent following acting on it. That is so because self-sacrificing behavior is invariably followed by frustration and resentment. In comparison, genuinely kind, generous or selfless behaviors are invariably followed by a sense of reward and satisfaction.

Intent and Social Interactions

Our social interactions exposed us to the behaviors of those around us. Since the meaning of all deliberate actions is in their underlying intent, our brains are continuously challenged to interpret the intent behind the behaviors to which we are exposed correctly. The normal human brain accomplishes this automatically and unconsciously. As such, the attribution of intent happens with a varying degree of accuracy. Normal functioning of the brain’s automatic ‘intent interpreter’ supports smooth and satisfying social interactions. The actions of people around us make sense and our responses tend to be appropriate. When the ‘intent interpreter’ malfunctions, as is the case in psychiatric disorders such as paranoid schizophrenia and autism, the results can be crippling.

Errors in the attribution of intent can happen sans a brain pathology. For example, imagine a stranger sitting next to you on the bus suddenly slapping you on the head(!). Chances are that, as a result of being shocked and hurt, your mind will automatically attribute a negative intent to stranger’s action. Since the meaning of the act is in the intent, a negative intent means that the act is negative. You are therefore likely to respond with hostility, maybe even hit your offender back. Imagine that, following you hostile reaction, the stranger that hit you points to a dead hornet on the floor. The sight of the dead insect proves that the intent behind the slap was positive — it was intended to protect you. Given that the hitting behavior was motivated by a positive intent makes it a positive act. Interpreting the intent correctly is likely to make you feel awkward and regretful for reacting with hostility; imagine how apologetic you’d be if you had already punched the stranger before you had a chance to correct your misinterpretation of his intent.

Confidence in one’s ability to make accurate assessments of other’s intent plays a big role in the capacity to trust. Trust, in turn, is of the utmost importance in creating and sustaining intimacy. Given that, as a defining trait, humans fail to thrive without intimate connections, any disruption in the normal processes that leads to developing trust is likely to have serious consequences (more on this elsewhere).

Intent and Art

Our relationship with art offers an example of the ‘intent interpreter’ at work. In the context of the topic at hand, think of a continuum of the intent behind the production of things humans produce as stretching between pure art at one end and pure obscenity at the opposite end (this continuum is parallel to the continuum of general intent presented above, with pure selflessness at one end and pure selfishness at the other). The further the perceived intent behind a given production leans in the direction of selflessness, the more likely it is that the product would be perceived as a work of art .

As stated earlier, our brains automatically, and usually subconsciously, attribute an intent to the behaviors of others around us. This applies to everything produced by humans: The meaning of the product is inseparable from the intent attributed to it’s production (this is so regardless of when it was produced, e.g., the Lascaux cave paintings which are estimated to be have been produced about 20,000 years ago).

Productions perceived to have been motivated by a selfish intent are automatically considered obscene. If they involve sexual themes we refer to them as pornographic; but a production can be obscene without being sexual, or pornographic. For example, muzak: To the extent that the producers of muzak, like the producer of pornography, are exclusively interested in their profit and have complete disregard to the needs of anybody else (i.e., the listener and the performers) the product is obscene.

The intent attributed to the production of pure entertainment is fair. A fair intent is in the middle of the spectrum, between selfishness and selflessness and correspondingly,  the entertainment product is in the middle of the spectrum — between pornography and art. In other words, entertainment producers are interested in profiting and in the needs of others who are involved in the production and consumption of their product.

Pure works of art are motivated by a purely selfless intent. Note that the designation of purity (as in “purely pornographic”, “pure entertainment”, or “pure art”) is theoretical. In reality, intent is never 100% pure. A work is pornographic if the intent behind it’s production is mostly selfish. It is an entertainment production if the intent behind it is generally fair. As the perceived intent behind a production moves beyond ‘fair’, in the direction of selflessness, the product gains more artistic value.

A work is considered ‘contemporary art’ when the intent behind it is perceived as leaning toward selflessness by contemporary consumers. When the intent is perceived to be selfless persistently, over a number of generations, it is considered classic art.

Since love can be defined as the enthusiasm for selflessness, artistic expressions are expressions of love, which explains such sayings as “all songs are love songs”.