Always Double Down on Meaning

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

I was having a conversation about student loan forgiveness recently. The argument against it went like this: I made sacrifices so that my children could go to school and graduate debt-free. Why should all these other people who didn’t do it the right way, like I did, have their loans forgiven?

The Old Bayesian Fox would have countered in a nerdy, rationalist manner. So what you’re describing is what economists call “opportunity cost.” Instead of buying coffee on the way to work each morning, you put that extra cash in your child’s 529 savings account. And you’re suggesting that the people who graduated school with debt are the results of parents who chose the coffee instead of savings. The flaw in your reasoning is that it assumes discretionary spending. Millions of families live paycheck to paycheck and don’t have any money left over after paying their bills. So it’s not a choice of coffee vs. savings, it’s a choice of savings vs. dinner or fixing the car’s breaks or asthma medication or some other form of mandatory spending that you can't skimp on.

But I’m going to do my Amanda Ripley thing and try to get at the heart of the underlying cause that I believe leads to this reaction. Because I believe that the Old Bayesian Fox response I just gave would be just as effective as telling the person they are just racist or selfish or something about white supremacy. In other words, my response only addresses the surface-level rationalization rather than trying to understand the motivation behind the rationalization.

Because I think this is really an issue of meaning.

What's in the Box?

At the beginning of Dune, Paul Atreides is asked to put his hand in a box that will cause excruciating pain. The whole point was to prove his humanity, because humans are the only creatures that will endure pain. If any other creature does something that causes pain, they will cease doing that activity. But humans will endure pain if they believe it is meaningful.

Getting back to the student loan forgiveness argument, if someone made a sacrifice, which involves enduring some semblance of pain, they must have done so because they felt it was meaningful. Forgiving student loan sounds to them like saying “Hey, remember those sacrifices you made? Turns out they were totally meaningless! You could’ve just had coffee every morning and literally nothing would be different because the government will just bail you out.”

Now, this doesn’t mean that they are right. I just think it means we should be mindful when conversing with them. Because I think liberals will be going through something similar soon when the science reveals that cloth masks didn’t actually keep our kids safe in school and school closures were probably a net harm. We spent so much time defending the public health community’s advice to make these sacrifices because we thought it was meaningful. So people are going to be unlikely to be receptive to data that suggests it was all pointless.

We all double down in the face of evidence that proves us wrong. We all commit the sunken cost fallacy. We are human and we crave meaning. So just be a little kinder to one another, that is all.