How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (6 page)

However, the problem of not being awesome doesn't lie in bad experiences, but in how you deal with them. Not-so-awesome people tend to hold external factors responsible for their own misery. “I didn't get my book published because the book market is too focused on making easy money nowadays!” or “I
will always be insecure because my parents mistreated me!” or “She doesn't want a relationship with me because she has a fear of commitment!”

These not-so-awesome people cease to feel responsible for their actions. The world just isn't fair. That is why they are miserable. Because ‘fate' has a different role in mind for them. Their past has determined the way they are now. They can't help it, they just have become the way they are.

These not-so-awesome people seem to think that they are not responsible for who they are. And that's where they're wrong. You are responsible for yourself, and you have to take responsibility for your actions.

Most events in your life are indeed beyond your control. But it's wrong to blame everything on the events that have had a bad influence on you. For instance, maybe the reason why you didn't get your book published is not that publishers are only concerned with selling commercial books, as you'd like to think. Maybe you just don't know how to write. It takes a step to acknowledge that. The second step is to either become a better writer and work for it like hell, or to realize that you are not that much of a writer. Maybe your authentic way of living does not include writing.

How I Met Your Mother
gives us another example. Lily has always wanted to be a painter. Marshall compliments Lily on every painting she makes, which makes her believe that her paintings are actually good. Which they obviously aren't. After numerous failed attempts to sell her best painting, she realizes that maybe she isn't a good painter after all. She becomes sad, but she doesn't blame anyone for that. She feels responsible for her own failure, which is a very brave thing to do. Later on, Marshall discovers that Lily's paintings have a relaxing effect on dogs. Because Lily really enjoys painting, she decides to continue to make art—for animals. She has encountered the unpleasant realization that maybe she is not an artistic genius, but she handles that realization responsibly. She takes responsibility and finds another way to validate what she loves doing. That's why Lily is so awesome.

I don't want to suggest that we're completely responsible for every emotion, as cognitivists tend to say, but I do think we're responsible to some extent. We can't control the things that happen to us. We cannot even control our direct affective
responses towards them. But we can control how we deal with our emotions, just like Barney does.

On the other hand, I also don't want to argue that Barney's entire character should be an example for everyone. He has some serious flaws too. Barney treats women with disrespect, he is sometimes very egotistical, and he can act really childish.

Yet, from Barney, we can all learn the importance of taking control over our emotions. How little or how great the control over our emotions may be, we have the power to awesomize them. Instead of losing out to self-pity and complaining, we have to take responsibility for how we deal with our emotions. We can shape our expressions in such a way that emotions aren't drawn into negativity, but awesomized into positivity. By being creative with our narratives, we can turn our existence into a story of awesomeness. Responsibility and power lie in our hands. So, the next time you feel sad, just stop being sad and be awesome instead.
²

¹
I feel obliged to give you some references so that you don't think I'm making this stuff up. In
Deeper than Reason
, Jenefer Robinson summarizes a lot of contemporary science of emotion in order to understand emotions as processes. Most prominent figures in the science of emotion are: Joseph LeDoux, Robert Zajonc, Richard Lazarus, and Antonio Damasio. A good book on emotion and narrative is Peter Goldie's
The Emotions
.

²
I am grateful to Annelies Monseré, Violi Sahaj, and Alex Schuurbiers for their useful remarks.

3

Me! Me! Me!

T
HOMAS
A
INSWORTH

Charity? You're seriously talking to me about charity? Dude, I am Mr. Charity. I frequently sleep with sixes, chubsters, over-thirties. . . . I am the Bill and Melinda Gates of the sympathy bang.

            
—B
ARNEY
S
TINSON
in “False Positive”

The good person must be a self-lover.

            
—A
RISTOTLE
,
Nicomachean Ethics
, Book IX, Chapter 8

K
ids, in “The Playbook,” Barney has just broken up with Robin, and is determined to resume his philandering ways. He does so with the help of the Playbook, a black leathery tome full of scams, cons, hustles, hoodwinks, gambits, flim-flams, strategems, and bamboozles that he has devised to pick up chicks and give 'em the business.

Barney's series of seductions culminates in the grandiose meta-play, the Scuba Diver. Lily has discovered the existence of the Playbook, and her disgust is exacerbated when Barney uses it on a work colleague whom she had intended for Ted. In retaliation, she has stolen it and is threatening (Bond-villain style) to post the contents on the internet. Defiantly, Barney announces he is going to perform one final play, the Scuba Diver. Lily tells Marshall to post the Playbook online, but is surprised to discover that it includes no mention of a play called “The Scuba Diver.” Down in MacLaren's bar, the whole
How I Met Your Mother
gang finds Barney in a booth, dressed in full scuba gear.

He reveals that he plans to seduce the blonde at the bar, but, when questioned about the Scuba Diver, he breaks down and confesses that he has taken his break-up with Robin worse than they had realized. His recent behavior has been his way of coping. Lily and the others persuade the blonde that Barney is a good guy, and that she should give him a chance and go for coffee with him. Only after they have left does Lily receive a text from Barney, telling her to look under the table, where they discover the missing page of the Playbook, which contains the Scuba Diver. The page reveals that all the preceding events in the episode—the revelation of the Playbook to Lily, the seducing of the work colleague so that she would steal it, the faked break-down over Robin—were designed for the sole purpose of getting Lily and the others to tell the blonde at the bar what a great guy Barney is, and thus to make them complicit in her seduction.

“How could anyone behave in such a dastardly manner?” (I hear the more prim, or Ted-like, among you cry.) Nor is this particular example a one-off. The manipulative lows to which Barney is willing to stoop with a view to duping attractive women into sleeping with him are legen . . . wait for it . . . dary. If that weren't bad enough, he has been known to indulge in outrageous displays of conspicuous consumption, buying diamond-encrusted suits, thousands of dollars of postage stamps, or multiple televisions just for the purpose of smashing them, when there are children in Africa dying for lack of oral rehydration salts.

It's not just in his personal life that Barney exhibits an unusually lax moral sense. He does, after all, work for the shady organization Goliath National Bank and is remarkably evasive when asked what precisely he does for them. Everyone would love to have near limitless funds and an endless supply of hot chicks. Practically everyone anyway. However, Barney persistently ignores the feelings and wishes of others in his relentless pursuit of a good time. His selfishness is so extreme that some philosophically ignorant viewers have questioned whether he isn't becoming a poorly drawn caricature of an investment banker, or at least not a character with whom we can feel much sympathy. Philosophically educated members of the audience know better. Barney's selfish behavior is best explained by one simple hypothesis: Barney Stinson is a committed
egoist, the most important egoist in recent TV history. (Sorry, Chuck Bass!)

What Egoism Is and What It Isn't

An egoist is not to be confused with his superficially similar cousin (dyslexics, pay particular attention!) the egotist. According to my dictionary, an egotist is “a conceited boastful person; one who thinks or talks too much of himself.” Calling someone an egotist is probably an insult. An egoist, on the other hand, is just someone who holds a certain philosophical position, and you should try not to take philosophical disagreements personally.

What philosophical position is egoism? An egoist is typically defined as someone who believes either that everyone always aims to maximise their own self-interest, or that everyone should do so.

An egoist may not always in fact
act
in a way which maximizes his own self-interest: sometimes he may accidentally do something which fails to achieve this through miscalculation, or clumsiness; and sometimes even the most committed egoists are affected by peer pressure, and, through weakness of will, end up acting in an unselfish way. To qualify as an egoist you merely have to
intend
to act so as to maximize your own self-interest. The point is sometimes put, equivalently, by saying that the egoist seeks his own good, or happiness, at the expense of others.

What does it mean to maximize your own self-interest? Now there are manifold different views about what self-interest, or happiness, or the human good, consists in. Some philosophers (subjectivists) think it is having your desires satisfied, whatever your desires happen to be. (That's something Barney achieves on a regular basis . . .) Others (objectivists) think it is acquiring certain things, such as virtue, knowledge, a wife and children, or plenty of bimbos and a hot-dog toaster, whether or not you happen to desire these things.

Quite a lot of philosophers have (somewhat suspiciously) thought that a key component of happiness is being a philosopher. The egoist does not need to take any position on what the human good is, or whether it is the same for everyone. Indeed he is best advised to remain neutral on this point, saying that, whatever the human good turns out to be, that's what everyone
does or should aim at. The point of saying that the egoist aims to
maximize
his own good is so that he is not constrained to pursue actions that are good for him in the short term but that end up costing him in the long run. Eating that last iced bun might contribute to your self-interest over the next five minutes, but you're going to be carrying it around with you on your thighs for a lot longer than that.

There are a couple of other unconventional moral views, that your mother would disapprove of, but which it is important not to confuse with egoism. Immoralism is the rather perverse position that one ought to do the opposite of whatever conventional morality enjoins. “Evil, be thou my Good,” Milton's Satan declares,
¹
and thereby admits to being an immoralist. As with most of these unconventional moral positions, it would be unwise for him to admit it, except among fellow-travelers.

Apart from Satan, and his followers, immoralists are a pretty rare breed. A more popular position that is often confused with egoism is moral skepticism, together with its closely related variant, moral nihilism (or amoralism). The moral skeptic believes that no one has (or can have) any moral knowledge. The moral nihilist adds that this is because all moral claims are false. Morality is bunk. It is an invention of the weak to fool the strong into being nice to them. The skeptic and the nihilist agree with the immoralist and the egoist that conventional morality is either unknowable or outright false. It's simply not true, for example, that you ought to give all your worldly goods to the poor. All of these unconventional moralists may even agree about the origins of conventional morality in a conspiracy of the weak to constrain the strong. However, while the immoralist and egoist go along with the skeptic and nihilist in their contempt for conventional morality, they don't concede that all morality is bunk. To the immoralist and the egoist, there are moral facts; they are just not what people ordinarily think.

Of these unconventional moral views, egoism seems to fit Barney the best. However, you may already have spotted a significant stumbling block for this interpretative claim. ‘But wait!' I hear you cry. ‘What about the time when Barney flew to California to try and get Lily back with Marshall, and kept heroically stealing his dates so that he wouldn't cheat on her
(“Bachelor Party”)? Or how about when, on hearing that Ted was in a car accident, he rushed out of an important business meeting, ran all the way to the hospital, and was run over by a bus, breaking every bone in his body (“Miracles”)? Admittedly on the face of it these don't look like the actions of an egoist.