Charles Foster on Living Prudently

Our culture tells us to follow our hearts, but self-deception can wreck lives. The therapist advocates a new model of prudence when it comes to major life choices, and recommends reading that illustrates his advice

Why have you suggested prudence as your theme? What do you mean by it, and how do we pursue it in our lives?

Prudence is a balance of caution and action. It incorporates creativity in thinking of options and tactics, along with a full awareness of the possibilities of deception, self-deception and ignorance. It is simply saying: Life is complicated, and just because I feel something I don’t necessarily know what’s best for me. We must be careful about the boundless ways in which we can delude ourselves – the boundless ways in which the heart can lie. The problem today, and the reason why prudence is my theme, is not that it’s so rare – it’s always been rare – but that imprudence is so honoured.

In practice so many life choices – especially in relationships – aren’t the products of calculated decision-making, they’re leaps of faith.

It’s fascinating that you use the word calculated. I think it is that word that gives the concept of prudence a bad reputation. People who are prudent are seen as being calculating, and calculation is the enemy of the heart, or so it appears to us.

Everyone wants to be spontaneous.

Precisely. In that sense we’re all prisoners of [18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques] Rousseau. We are all living a dream that our hearts are pure tuning forks, and we simply have to tune out the noises around us and listen to the pure vibration coming from our hearts, and then – beyond all concern for evidence or the reality of the way things work – we will know what to do.

Even Hitler, another child of Romanticism, was a proponent of this romantic attitude. The Nazis were incredibly romantic. Hitler said: “I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker.” Meaning he trusted himself in the same way that a naive and romantic 21st century person will trust his or her heart to know what’s right. We know this often leads to terrible decisions but God forbid we should be calculating! So we continue to go forth blindly.

Is it especially hard to achieve prudence in today’s society and culture?

It’s always been hard to sift through the fog of possibilities and false whispers that flood us within and without. But it’s especially hard today in the face of an anti-prudence ideology. In action movies, there is a hero and a villain. The hero is usually a good-hearted but rather impulsive person. He trusts his instincts and goes by his heart. You always know the villain because he’s the most thinky character in the movie. He’s the one who plots, strategises and uses cunning. So we are caught in a culturally constructed contradiction between thought and the heart. By being thoughtful, we think we are being calculating and therefore at risk of being manipulating, deceitful and false. We don’t like that image of ourselves. We like the hero who is pure of heart, trusts his gut, flies forward and deals with whatever comes at him.

Instead, what we should be aiming at is a full awareness that when we’re faced with a decision – from what to do about my marriage, or my job or where I’m going to live – we have to listen to our hearts but also be aware of the possibility that we may be deceiving ourselves. We are too often creatures of attitude. The deepest truth of our hearts is often an attitude that we have picked up from groupthink or the culture around us, or it’s some past decision that we have an unthinking allegiance to.

The recent book I’ve worked on [with Mira Kirshenbaum] is I Love You But I Don’t Trust You. When there’s been a betrayal in a relationship, you’re deeply hurt and terrified. The dilemma we face is that we’re often torn between imprudent alternatives. If you’ve been terribly hurt, you can be a prisoner of past decisions, of attitude, of other people’s expectations or of fear. Until you go through a process of challenging your fears and feelings against what’s possible and what’s real, you’re not making the most prudent choice. So much of my work [as a therapist] has been about rescuing people from imprudence – the imprudence of their current situation, where they’re on the verge of making bad choices, or the destructive cost of past imprudence.

You advise on decision making, and wrote a book about it. What are the essentials to keep in mind about making the right decisions?

In that book I was building on the Harvard Business School model of quantitative decision making, and looking at what I call the fuzzy decisions. In other words the decisions without data, which are the most vexing ones in our lives. For example, should I marry this person? I wanted to see what good decision makers did that bad decision makers didn’t.

I uncovered 30 rules of thumb that good decision makers follow that the rest of us too often don’t. The most distinctive rule was asking themselves: What is the one most important thing here? Bad decision makers piled up options and priorities – they wanted to somehow satisfy every single priority they had. This led to paralysis, or to being so overwhelmed by the possibilities that they picked any old option, like when you’re at the supermarket and there are so many choices that you just pick the item in front of you. The best decision makers think: What’s the one thing here that’s most important? If you’re marrying someone, is it that they have a pretty face or a good character? It can be hard to figure out what the one most important thing is, but you certainly make better decisions if you do that exercise than if you don’t. And that is an example of prudence.

It’s just stunning when you look at the decisions individuals – and nations – make when they never thought about what the most important thing was. When Donald Rumsfeld started the Iraq war and said “you go to war with the army you have”, he was acting like the most important thing was to go to war. Well if you’re fighting a defensive war, sure. But if you’re making war on another country, I think the most important thing is to be prepared for the war you know you’re going to fight.

So Iraq is another lesson for prudent action?

I think so. Don’t you? Just ask the relatives of servicemen and women killed in poorly armoured troop carriers. It’s a textbook case of imprudence.

The Odyssey

By Homer

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This is a good point to begin on your book selection with The Odyssey.

Yes, speaking of war. Here we have the introduction in Western literature to the concept of prudence, embodied in the character of Odysseus. You could even conceive of The Iliad and The Odyssey as a two-volume study of the nature of prudence and imprudence, because it begins with the imprudence of Achilles. Achilles has a fit about something that in the context of war is an extremely low priority. He’s pissed off because he doesn’t get some slave girl as a prize. He makes a low priority a top priority, which is one of the hallmarks of imprudence. And he does so in service of self, which is another.

And let’s not forget Paris’s act of monumental imprudence in stealing Helen.

There you go. And then you have Odysseus, in contrast. The epithets about Odysseus are always about his cunning and his prudence. In the first book of The Odyssey he is referred to as a “master tactician”. He’s always careful, and we see that most of all in his return to Ithaca and his wife. He doesn’t just waltz in, he comes in disguise. There’s no equivalent of a Western hero in modern times who would do the same. They would walk in with guns blazing. But Odysseus is careful. Why? Because he doesn’t know what he’s going to find.