that your partner is an asshole and you’ve done nothing wrong, your Thinking
Brain’s immediate reaction will be to recall instances when you, in fact, were
a beacon of patience and humility while your partner was secretly conspiring
to ruin your life.
In this way, the two brains develop a really unhealthy relationship that
might resemble your mom and dad on road trips when you were a kid. The
Thinking Brain makes shit up that the Feeling Brain wants to hear. And in
return, the Feeling Brain promises not to careen off the side of the road,
killing everyone.
It’s incredibly easy to let your Thinking Brain fall into the trap of merely
drawing the maps the Feeling Brain wants to follow. This is called the “self-
serving bias,” and it’s the basis for pretty much everything awful about
humanity.
Usually, the self-serving bias simply makes you prejudiced and a little bit
self-centered. You assume that what feels right is right. You make snap
judgments about people, places, groups, and ideas, many of which are unfair
or even a little bit bigoted.
But in its extreme form, the self-serving bias can become outright
delusion, causing you to believe in a reality that is not there, smudging
memories and exaggerating facts, all in the service of the Feeling Brain’s
never-ending cravings. If the Thinking Brain is weak and/or uneducated, or if
the Feeling Brain is riled up, the Thinking Brain will succumb to the Feeling
Brain’s fiery whims and dangerous driving. It will lose the ability to think for
itself or to contradict the Feeling Brain’s conclusions.
This effectively turns your Consciousness Car into a Clown Car, with big,
springy red wheels and circus music playing over a loudspeaker wherever you
go.^19 Your Consciousness Car becomes a Clown Car when your Thinking
Brain has completely capitulated to your Feeling Brain, when your life’s
pursuits are determined purely by self-gratification, when truth warps into a
cartoon of self-serving assumptions, when all beliefs and principles are lost in
a sea of nihilism.
The Clown Car invariably drives toward addiction, narcissism, and
compulsion. People whose minds are Clown Cars are easily manipulated by
whatever person or group makes them feel good consistently—whether it is a
religious leader, politician, self-help guru, or sinister internet forum. A Clown
Car will gladly steamroll other Consciousness Cars (i.e., other people) with its
big, red rubbery tires because its Thinking Brain will justify this by saying
they deserved it—they were evil, inferior, or part of some made-up problem.
Some Clown Cars merely drive toward fun—they’re all about drinking