Addiction, Faith, and the Limits of Willpower (with Meghan O'Gieblyn)

Introduction to EconTalk and Megan O'Giblin

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A personal story of faith and addiction

0:36Today is September 14th, 2026, and my guest is author Megan O'Giblin. Her latest book, the subject of today's conversation, is Will and Attention, a memoir. Megan, welcome to EconTalk. Thanks so much. Happy to be here. Now, this isn't an easy book to summarize. It is a memoir, but its themes go deep into questions of addiction, rationality, religion, what it means to lead a good life. And just to set the stage, tell us a little bit about your personal story, which is the memoir

1:09part, which is the thread that runs through the book. You've had some interesting experiences. Yeah. So, I guess the first thing to say is I grew up in a very religious home. My parents were evangelical fundamentalists. And so, that was a big part of my early childhood. I went to Moody Bible Institute to study theology when I was in college. Moody is one of the oldest and most conservative evangelical colleges in the country. And ended up, you know, I had a lot of good experiences there,

1:45but I also ended up having a faith crisis, largely around the problem of evil. And I left the school after two years. I ended up leaving the Christian faith altogether and had this period of sort of being in the wilderness, so to speak, where I was, you know, fell into, I was drinking a lot. I was working at bars. I fell into an addiction, was not really connected to anybody from my former life. And I ended up getting sober when I was 28 years old and really found my way back into a sense of community

2:23healthy and just a much more stable, healthy life, largely through my participation in 12-step programs. And, yeah, and, you know, that whole experience gave me my life back or maybe gave me my life for the first time. I was sober for 11 years. I got married. I started writing during that time. And then, you know, around the late 2010s, so I don't know, 2018, 2019, I became really attracted to

2:59Catholicism for reasons that were unclear to me at the time. I had, you know, not identified as a Christian for over a decade. I was not, you know, I called myself an atheist, but I found myself drawn back to attending mass every day. I started talking with a priest and became very close to converting in the end. I didn't. And then shortly after that, I, you know, for reasons that were totally baffling, returned to drinking. And I drank for about a year in secret without telling anybody.

3:32And this was, you know, after I had spent years, you know, working with other alcoholics, you know, telling my story from the podium of church basements, talking about how much better my life was. So, it was this completely irrational in both cases, this return to Christianity, which had not worked the first time and didn't work the second time, and then also this return to drinking. And so, that's, the book begins as I was sort of coming out of those experiences and trying to make sense of them and figuring out this problem of, like, why do we keep doing

4:03these things that we know we shouldn't do? Is it a problem of willpower? And yeah, that was really the starting place for the book.

Curing faults through attention not will

4:13And I want to start with the quote, and we're going to talk somewhat about a thinker that I always thought was pronounced Simone Weil, W-E-I-L, but sophisticated people say Simone Weil. So, if you hear they, we're talking about a woman who was born Jewish, who becomes deeply attracted to Catholicism, does not convert though, finds it, as is in your story, a bridge

4:44too far for a variety of reasons. Maybe we'll get to those, maybe we won't. But you start early in the book with a really amazing quote from her, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. And that's the quote. It's a seemingly simple sentence. A chunk of the book is trying to untangle what that actually means. So, take a crack at that. In some way, the whole book grew out of my desire to understand that one quote, which

5:22I was totally, you know, the first time I read it, I was on one hand attracted to it. I knew that willpower didn't work. So, that part of it, I really recognized. I knew that it had not worked in my own life, that if anything, it led to more problems. You know, and I guess I'll just say in context, like it didn't work with addiction. I couldn't, you know, cure myself of alcoholism by gritting my teeth and trying harder. And it didn't work with spiritual belief either. You can't will yourself to believe in God, right? And the part that

5:53mystified me was attention, because I had never seen those two words talked about together or set in opposition to one another, that attention could help cure faults that could not be cured through will. And I was really fascinated by what they meant by attention. And the more of her work that I read, the more elusive it became in some ways. She writes about, I mean, I guess just for context to her, spiritual writing that we have today was not published during her

6:26life. It was composed mostly in private notebooks that she wrote during the last years of her life. So the early 1940s, late 1930s. And it was compiled after her death by a friend of hers. And one of her most famous books is Gravity and Grace. And what that was, was basically her, her friend, who is a French Catholic farmer, Gustave Thibon, he basically went through her notebooks and took all of these

6:57isolated quotes. Some of them she wrote in a way that was very aphoristic. So, you know, she has these, like, like the quote about attention and will, that sounds really gripping, but there's no context around there in her journals, which is, which is really maddening. Yeah. But, you know, in Gravity and Grace, there's basically, Thibon took these isolated aphorisms and organized them by theme. So there's a piece in Gravity and Grace called Attention and Will. And, you know, it has all of

7:29these, these phrases that she jotted in her notebook about the relationship between these two ideas. But it sounds like you're, you're talking, you're listening to someone who's like talking almost in a way of like negative theology, like, like, almost like she's trying to understand these concepts herself. But I gathered through, through, you know, reading actually her journals themselves and reading a bunch of essays and books that she wrote during her life, that attention was not at all the way that we think about it today. You know, I think most people when we talk about, you know, waning attention

8:02spans, there's a sense that attention is this hyper focus, almost like a really rigid kind of tunnel vision, like you're, you got to look at the screen and focus on this one thing and ignore everything else. And for her, attention was almost the opposite of that. It was a kind of directed receptivity. It was a willingness to look and not grasp. So she talks about attention in the concept in the context of art, you know, when you're looking at a painting and trying to understand it. She says,

8:33sometimes you move from one end of the room to the other, look at it from different angles. Sometimes you have to repeatedly come back to the same thing day after day until the light dawns and that that process is largely mysterious. It's something that you can't enforce. And she talks about it too, in the context of, you know, paying attention to people who are suffering and that that requires to actually, actually listen and to give someone your full attention requires a kind of self-empting that you can't, you know, be trying to, I don't know, you can't be thinking about

9:07yourself. You can't be thinking about you, what you want and be paying attention at the same time. So in that way, you know, will is really the, the enemy of attention. And so I started, yeah, just reading a lot of her writing and thinking about that, how that applied to addiction for one thing, where it does feel like you, you can get in your own way when you try to, I mean, one of the, I think the delusions of addiction is that you can somehow figure it out, you know, like, oh, if I just, you know, try harder to control my drinking, or if I just drink the right thing at the right time, then I'll be able to master this. And the truth is what works for a lot

9:43of people is you have to give up that delusion and just, you know, basically stop fighting surrender. And for me, it came through, you know, showing up into this community and listening to other people's stories. And I think that's the type of attention.

The limits of free will in human behavior

10:01So I'm going to read a quote. You say, the most important things in life completely elude the will. Cheerfulness can be summoned through sheer effort, but not happiness. Piety, but not faith. Seduction, but not love. Productivity, but not genius. I know from experience that it's impossible to will oneself out of an addiction. And I know that you cannot force yourself into faith no matter how hard you pray or starve or grit your teeth. I very much want to live a good and virtuous life without alcohol and drugs, which has made my life

10:33miserable. And I still long to believe in God despite the resounding silence that suggests he does not exist or is not interested in us or in me specifically. But my actions suggest that part of me does not actually want these things or that I want them only provisionally or part of the time, my will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things and easily distracted. And I just want you to expand on this idea a little bit because I think in, I would call it Western

11:07civilization. I don't have a better phrase for it. There's a deep, deep belief that our choices are ours and we bear responsibility for them. So when we make a bad choice, whether it's addiction or something cruel, something evil, it's our fault because we should have willed otherwise. And you're suggesting it's not a hundred percent or maybe at all in our control.

11:36I mean, I'm very interested in the question of free will as a philosophical problem. And I do touch on it a little bit in the book. I think I was more interested in the practical first person experience of trying to will something and just having it completely resist any kind of effort. And I mean, the other place where I've experienced this is in creative work or intellectual work, right? I think everyone recognizes this point where you're just banging your head against the wall. You've hit an

12:06obstacle and you can't figure it out. And what doesn't work in those cases is to just grit your teeth and try harder. Usually what works is to get up, go for a walk, take a shower, you know? And the answer arises almost just from outside of yourself. Somehow. Somehow. Yeah. Physicists have this phrase that they use to describe the places that are most likely to give way to a breakthrough, the three Bs, the bed, the bath, and the bus. And I mean, I think everybody can recognize that, right? That it's

12:41almost when you're relaxed and not trying that the answer comes. And so I was really interested to, I mean, Ve writes a lot about, you know, this idea that, you know, when you try to force those things that can't be forced, like spirituality, virtue, creativity, love, you end up with what she would call idols or sort of false, false versions of what you're trying to achieve. And I think that's especially true in any type of moral or spiritual life where, you know, if you try to, you know,

13:15act more virtuous than you are, you end up with a sort of false piety that isn't really rooted in a true spirituality. And, you know, that was something I recognized in my experience in 12-step programs, you know, where I think for a lot of my time there, I was sort of walking the walk and talking the talk, but didn't really have that deeper belief or had some really deep unresolved problems with the idea of a higher power and the whole spiritual aspect of that ideology.

13:47And so, yeah, I think the thing I was interested in is how can attention to those things that we're trying, like, instead of trying to will something, paying attention to what it is that you're not being honest with yourself about or what you're not looking at, how can that sort of offer a way through? So, I often say on the program, when these kind of issues come up, that part of growing up is becoming self-aware and realizing you're not the center of the universe, which is the way human

14:17beings start. You are the center of the universe. You're an infant, you're a child, and you get a lot of attention because otherwise you're not going to survive. And it's hard to do anything else except put yourself in the first. So, I say there are four ways to grow up and become self-aware.

Paths to self-awareness and personal change

14:39Religion, meditation, literature, therapy. You've done all four. You write about all four in the book in some detail. And I would say in some sense, your book is about, asks the question, is this possible even? Is there any sense in which we control our own destiny, that we can forge ourselves, that we can become better? I'm Jewish. We're in the time of the Jewish calendar between Rosh Hashanah and Yom

15:13Kippur, which are the 10 days of return. They're called the 10 days. Sometimes it's translated as repentance. I think that's a mistranslation. But the idea is this is a time of self-reflection and you should improve yourself. Now, it's really hard to do. And we all understand that. But in Judaism, it is a core belief that it's possible. That belief might be wrong. But I'm curious, what's your take on that? Is it possible to make yourself a better person? Is it possible

15:49through attention, say, maybe not through will, but through attention and various techniques, religion, meditation, reading, great books, therapy, to become a better person, become a different person? Let's just even start with that.

16:10Yeah, I like your four things. I would agree with all of those. I would add maybe a fifth, suffering. Oh, good. I think is how you would. Very Christian. Yeah, yes. Well, and I mean, it's been true for me, too, that I oftentimes, you know, I know something intellectually, but it doesn't really sink in until I've suffered the consequences of not doing it. And this is a thing that's really maddening me because I'm a slow learner and have to learn things firsthand, that you really don't transform that, at least for me,

16:40you don't transform that intellectual knowledge into actionable wisdom until you've had some sort experience with it in life. But yeah, I mean, I think the ideal of any kind of religious pursuit or moral pursuit is to try to change and improve without having to constantly suffer consequences before you do. And yeah, I mean, I fiercely believe in change. It does feel like it's a slightly unfashionable idea. I think a lot of people today are skeptical that people can change.

17:11But I've seen it happen in my life multiple times. I've seen it happen in the lives of other people, specifically through, you know, recovery from addiction. But it's hard because, I mean, it's an incredibly slow process and it's not direct. I think that's the thing that is sometimes frustrating about it is that most things in life, you know, if you want something in the material world, like success, or, you know, I don't know if you want to change your life through wellness or

17:49fitness or something like that, there's very sort of clear steps to doing so. Not always easy, but there's sort of a path. And for me, the idea of inner transformation is, it's largely circular in some ways. It's about sort of having to come back either through ritual or through these successive acts of attention to the same thing and constantly sort of reminding yourself of these truths until they sink in. And yeah, I do think, you know, it's oftentimes the case where the change happens once

18:27you've given up changing in some way where you've sort of just committed to doing these things for their own sake. And then suddenly you realize the problem that you've been struggling with is gone or that the wall that you've been sort of pushing against, it suddenly falls over where before it wasn't. Well, I thought one of the themes, which of course is a fascinating question in human behavior for economists, economists tend to ignore it, but economists assume that you look at your

19:00situation, you decide what's best for you, and that's what you do. Well, that's like classical economics, right? Yeah. There's some modern variance on it, but not so much. It's hard to get very far if you don't assume rationality. So then you need a model of irrationality. There's a good one usually. But what I like is various points in your book, you concede that as human beings, we often tell stories to ourselves to explain what we did that aren't

19:32the real reasons, and we may not even have access to those reasons. And I thought, it's a beautiful quote I'd never heard that you use from William James. You say, it's impossible to know how or when it will bear fruit, some technique. And you quote William James saying that he believed that the crisis of religious conversion was the last stage of a long incubation that had taken place in the unconscious. James writes, quote, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall. And I love

20:06that because it looks like something was decisive, the touch, but there's decades sometimes or years or months that set the stage for that change. And I think people want to have a lightning bolt or a crisis or not just, I'm just talking about religion or about any transformation where people decide, say, to lose weight or to stop drinking or to start drinking. You know, any kind of transformation,

20:38good or bad, it's usually we attribute it to a dramatic moment. And James is saying, actually,

The unconscious incubation of life changes

20:46that's really not the right way to think about it. And I think a lot of your book has that theme underlying it. Yeah, I was so fascinated by James' work, which I'd read the varieties of religious experience before, but I went back and read it again. It had been several years when I was writing this book. And I mean, he's talking about the very problem that I'm, you know, wrestling with in the book, which is this problem of being at war with oneself. And he talks about these people who have divided wills. You know, they have some sort of a higher aspiration, but then they keep running into

21:19problems. And sometimes it's spiritual doubt, sometimes it's temptation, sometimes it's excessive self-criticism. And that there's often this moment that comes, which he calls the crisis of self-surrender, where the person kind of just stops the war, says, I'm going to hand over my problem to some sort of higher power, or I'm going to simply admit defeat. And then the solution becomes possible. And yeah, he did believe that that moment of self-surrender was not the lightning bolt,

21:51that there was all this work that had been happening, maybe even throughout the struggle, that this work had been happening unconsciously. And, you know, James, I don't think he ever uses the word unconscious in that book. He talks about the powers outside of the conscious mind. He talks about, oh, he has this great phrase too, which relates to the idea of rationality. I think he said that the change happens below the loquacious level of rationality, which I love. It's almost this

22:25idea that we're like constantly, right, telling ourselves these stories, right? And if you, sometimes you just need to like shut up and listen. And yeah, I think that so much of, you know, modern psychology and even this idea of like cognitive biases, you know, rely on this idea that we are fundamentally rational creatures with, you know, maybe some glitches here and there in our thinking. And I mean, the thing that I really love about psychoanalysis or even the whole Judeo-Christian

22:57tradition is that there seems to be this notion that the human mind and the human heart has vast depths that are not accessible to the person, the individual themselves. And, you know, I really became interested in that larger sense of the unconscious and its role in change. And I don't necessarily mean like the Freudian unconscious. I just mean everything that we're not paying attention to, right, everything that we're not focused on. And with this idea that maybe the solution lay

23:27outside of that narrow focus. Yeah, I'm reminded of the line from Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, writing about, he talks about writing about the human heart in conflict with itself. And this is, you know, I think it's related to other work you've done, which I'm not very familiar with. But I think there's this temptation to see the brain as a machine. Now we see it as an LLM, which is a neural network,

23:58which, of course, it has neurons. There is a network. It has electricity. But it's a rather meager view of the complexity of the human experience. But ultimately, it's like, oh, yeah, it's got this, there's this bug called cognitive bias. We'll just correct that. Let me explain it to you, by the way. Let me tell you what this bias you have. And once I tell you, you will be protected, you'll be inoculated. Doesn't work that way. Right. And, and it's a, it's a, it's an endlessly

24:32fascinating challenge, the, our war with, with our own self. And it's part of, again, what I mean by growing up or living. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, it's old, maybe one of the oldest problems. I mean, this is what the Greek philosophers called akrasia, this idea of weakness of will, right? You know, something's good intellectually, you know, what you should be doing. And yet, you don't do it, you did the opposite. And I was really fascinated by these quotes that you find both in Eastern and

25:05Western spiritual traditions. You know, I was exposed to it through first, I think that my first awareness of this was through the Apostle Paul, who says in his letter to the Romans, you know, I don't know what I, why I do what I do, the thing I want to do, I don't do, and what I hate, I do. And yeah, I think that really just sums up the heart of the problem. And, you know, I think through, you know, the Christian interpretation of that problem is, yes,

25:38your will is weak. You need to rely on God and not trust in your own hubris or your, you know, your own ability to change. You need grace. And today, you know, I think, I don't know, obviously, you know, Christianity still has a long legacy in our culture, but I'm really interested in these, these more contemporary metaphors about the mind being a machine and how that changes our view of our own minds and our view of what can be changed and what can't. And, you know, I

26:10think that the, the thing that is most pernicious about that metaphor of the brain as a computer is this idea that like, well, you know, there's, there's really no point. Everything is sort of an automatic process. There's no point in actually pay, right. There's no point in actually paying attention, right. To what your mind is doing. And this is so much of what Vae writes about and Iris Murdoch writes about this idea of you, like, you really need to pay close attention to your thoughts and to the stories that you're telling yourself because your actions are a result of those thoughts

26:43that, you know, your, your, your will is not this sort of isolated power that, you know, and where you're facing a choice and you, you have total freedom to choose one thing or the other. It's really the outcome of what you've been thinking, how you've trained your attention, how you've changed your mind and those habits, um, over a much, much long period of time. I want to read another, uh, quote, which I found fascinating, uh, from referencing, uh, GK Chesterton and who's, who is famous on EconTalk for his fence, Chesterton's fence gets talked

27:19about a lot in here, the idea that you see something that doesn't make sense. So you should just, of course, tear it down rationally. Well, why would you leave something that doesn't make sense? And then you, cause you don't really appreciate the complexity of the world. You don't realize why the fence was put there in the first place, that the problem that it solved is still there and so on and so on. But here's another insight of Chesterton that is really kind of cool. Um, and it relates a little bit to what you were just saying. So I want you to

The protective value of senseless taboos

27:43talk about it. You say, uh, quote, I'd read an essay that summer by GK Chesterton and had underlined a passage about the importance of taboo. Now I'm going to step out of my quote for a second. A taboo is completely out in our modern culture. Taboos are irrational. They're silly. Well, you shouldn't have any taboos. Almost by definition, a taboo is something that you believe in that's obviously you're afraid of or you stay away from, but there's no reason for it. I mean, it's just a weird cultural bias. Anyway, back to the quote. All myths and fairy

28:18tales, he pointed out, Chesterton, rest on a completely senseless taboo. Cinderella has to make it back from the ball before midnight. The milliner's son cannot stand on his head in the fairy place. Adam and Eve cannot eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Why? The stories never answer this. They simply insist that all the magic and wonders of paradise depend on respecting this one senseless rule. These stories, Chesterton argues, preserve a very old and very deep human

28:51truth. Quote, that happiness depended on not doing something that you could at any moment do and which very often it was not obvious why you should not do it. Close double quote. Say anything about that you like. It's just a really interesting idea. I was fascinated by this idea too. And I had not until you mentioned it, connected it to that other writing of his about the fence, which is, it's almost exactly the same thing. Although I think here he's talking about almost this sort of mystical

29:21plane. Yeah. And yeah, I agree. I think like the idea of a taboo is so, especially like a senseless taboo, right? Is this so antithetical to, to any type of, you know, rational contemporary thinking about, yeah, maternity. Um, and, uh, I, I was fascinated by this quote, particularly when it came to thinking about addiction, because, you know, I think like, yeah, the one thing that you can't do as an alcoholic is drink. And so long as you don't drink, your life can be great. And the

29:57thing that's gotten me in trouble and a lot of other addicts I know in trouble is starting to be like, well, you know, let, maybe the taboo can be negotiated. Maybe I was just really young when I was drinking, maybe different now, you know, maybe I didn't try hard enough. And, um, you know, once your mind goes down that path and tries to start thinking rationally about that taboo, you, you can talk yourself back into something that's completely irrational. And, you know, I think this is something that I was really interested in the book is that even reason can be used to, to arrive at

30:29completely irrational, destructive conclusions and, um, that you need to be skeptical of your reason and sometimes trust, you know, the idea that these taboos exist for a reason, particularly when they're embedded in a community, you know, like, you know, I've, I've heard, uh, you know, countless people in recovery communities talk about, you know, why, uh, this one rule is the center of their lives. And, um, that sometimes we just need to respect that there's a hard limit to something and something that we can't understand. You know, I, I'm never going to figure out why

31:03I'm an alcoholic. Um, but, you know, I, I know for a fact that my life is better when I, I heed that, that one rule. Yeah. I've talked on the program before about the challenge of a modest violation versus a cold turkey rule. So it is remarkably easier to eat no potato chips at a party than, than one. And when you say to yourself, but one potato chip is not harmful

31:37and it isn't, it's, that's a true, that's true. So you take the one and of course, 30 seconds pass and it's still the case that one is okay. And after a while you've had 40 and that's just not good. Um, and so it's better to have a rule. I don't eat potato chips. Um, and I'd like to keep, I'd like to have that rule, Megan. I, I sometimes have it. And, and part of what your book talks about is that there are times when you seem to have control of your will and times when, when you

32:10don't, do you think it is a personality? It's a terrible way to describe it, but, uh, that some people have an addictive personality versus others, you know, for them, alcohol is not an issue. It's just, it's never an issue. And you can't, in your case, you can't have one. You can't have the potato chip. And so is it a, is it a part of our nature for some of us that we struggle with certain things like that? Or is it everyone who has that for different things? Yeah. I mean, this is something

32:44I think about a lot. I certainly think that there, I mean, that it's idiosyncratic, right? That it's, it's different for everybody. And, you know, I am somebody who, yeah, I absolutely cannot have one drink of alcohol without it becoming totally destructive. I can have an occasional cigarette and I'm fine. Whereas I have friends who can't, and I don't know what that has to do with, you know, brain wiring or experience or what, but, um, I, I think, uh, you know, and that's, this is also, I think one of the things that's so baffling about willpower when it comes to those addictions and

33:19compulsions and things that we can't control is like, you know, when I was drinking, I, I had an incredible will and, and, and a lot of other areas of life. I was able to show up and, you know, to work for, for a time. Uh, I was able to do anything else, you know, moderate my eating, exercise, all that stuff. You know, I had a very healthy will, but it went, came to this one thing. I just could not, the willpower was completely useless. And I think that thing is different for everybody. Um, but yeah, what you're saying about the potato chips too. I mean, the great thing about having a taboo

33:51is that you don't spend, waste all of this mental energy constantly negotiating like, okay, when is, when is one chip turned into two chips and when do I need to stop? Can I do another one? And you're completely distracted and outside of yourself. Whereas if you just have a hard rule, you can stop thinking about it and it frees up an enormous amount of space in the mind. Yeah. I had a friend too, um, who would tell me that, uh, there should be no overweight Orthodox Jews because Orthodox Jews are really good at self-control. They don't eat pork because certain types of food, even that are

34:25non-pork that are certified as kosher. They don't use their phone on, on the Shabbat on Saturday. So they have this incredible will. So how could they be overweight? And, um, welcome to the real world. Yeah. My theory, which is not a theory, but an amusing to me thought is that, you know, you have a, you have a certain amount and you use it up on some things that it spills over elsewhere to, to not be available in those other things. So you have, you just have to have some things you

The mystery of desire and ego depletion

34:55struggle with. I don't know. It's a mystery. It is a mystery. Yeah. And there's been a lot of, I mean, but the way you're talking about, about the will being sort of finite, I think there was a really popular, uh, framework called the ego depletion theory that was, um, yeah, throughout the late nineties, early two thousands, maybe that was sort of the dominant paradigm for, for self-control research. And this idea that like, yeah, the, the will was a muscle that could be overextended and that it sort of, uh, declined the more you used it, or maybe that you could also

35:30strengthen the muscle. Get better. Yeah. Right. And, um, I don't know, that's, I think there's some truth there, but like a lot of theories, it feels incomplete too, because there's, you know, I don't know, it's, it's a mystery there. It's, I think the problem of will for me is that it also extends backward and ad infinitum, like where do you, you know, you, you can maybe talk about, okay, I have a desire. I can, when I really want something, I can do it and I can achieve it. But where did the desire

36:02come from? You know, like, I think everyone's had this moment where it's like, oh, I wanted so badly to get fit or skinny that I finally was able to stick to a diet. But why did it happen at that moment that you were so motivated? And Schopenhauer talks about this. There's a famous, I think it's actually a paraphrase of what he wrote, but he said, uh, a man can will what he will, but not will itself. Basically you can, you can do what you desire, but desire itself is dependent on some previous experience or conditioning that we're not in control of. So it's, it's really this really

36:36deep, uh, problem of, you know, freedom and determinism that goes back to the person's birth essentially. Yeah. Um, uh, my dad smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for a good chunk of his life. And we, his children, when we were younger would beg him to stop. Um, and I would talk to, I would be maybe, I don't know, 13, 14 years old. I talked to his mother, my grandmother and say, uh, can you get

37:06dad to stop smoking? And she would look at me with total sincerity and she'd say, he would do anything I told him. I said, could you tell him to stop smoking? And she would never do it. Now, I don't know if she wanted to challenge her view of her relationship with her son or whether she knew that in this one case, it wasn't realistic. Um, but that's a complicated example of what, you know, what you're talking about. Ultimately, by the way, my dad stopped smoking somewhere. I think it is,

37:39he spoke probably from 20 to 60 or 20 to 50 something. He had to have a, uh, surgery and he had to stop smoking for the surgery, which he managed to do because he could. Wow. Yeah. And then he didn't start again. He went cold Turkey. He didn't say, well, I'll go down to two packs or one back. And I think, yeah, just, I, I'm a deep believer in zero being the right, the only really effective. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with food. It does. It's hard to have zero food. If you want to lose weight. Um, so, uh, let's turn to an issue, which, um, is on my mind these

38:17days. And it's, it's really about religion writ large more than, than your personal or my personal

Secular religion and the longing to submit

38:23story. Um, one of my favorite quotes and I, I quote it often is David Foster Wallace in his, um, famous commencement address that's been called. This is water. Um, he says, everybody worships. Hmm. And in that passage, after he says that, he says, um, you know, some people worship, if they don't worship God, they worship money, fame, beauty, uh, youth. Um, and he says, those

38:58are all false gods. And he then recommends that you pick one of the older religions that have stood the test of time. Um, and I've always found that interesting. And it turns out, Simone Weil says the same thing. You write, they believed that many of the totalitarian movements of the 20th century were forms of idolatry and expressed a desire that was essentially spiritual, the longing to surrender one's will to some higher authority. If people don't have some spiritual absolute to

39:30abandon themselves to, she argues, they will be vulnerable to the seductions of authoritarianism, ideology, and institutional religion, which similarly demand a swooning submission. And I want to say two things about that and then I'll let you react. I've always thought about the Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace quote about adoration. Everybody worships, everybody finds something that they, uh, adore, but it's also, I started to realize recently, it's also about something to submit to

40:02something to be commanded by the way religion does. Religion has all kinds of demands, either on your beliefs or your actions or your practices or your rituals, restrictions on your freedom. And I start to worry that as religion retreats in the West, which it is doing now, it could change, but I'm not optimistic that it will be replaced not by, um, Hegelian and Kantian, uh, wisdom or Voltaire, uh, but rather by people

40:39submitting to different religions that have other negative, uh, consequences. I think we're, we're at risk of risk of that in, in, in our time, very much so. And, you know, the rise of populism, the strong leader, um, and, you know, human beings like to be free, but they also like to be commanded. And, you know, as a child, we have both of those urges. We, we want to be, to do what we want. We don't like to be told

41:11what to do, but we also like limits. And we don't find our limits in religion. I worry we're going to find them elsewhere and it will be a dark, dark time. What do you think? Yeah. I could not agree more with that. Um, I think a lot of my writing, um, even from the very beginning has been about how essentially religious or spiritual impulses find their way into weird corners of secular culture. Um, my last book was about how that happened with technology, you know, this idea that, yeah, that, that all these, you know, spiritual metaphors and that come

41:48up in conversations about AI or how this, this sort of techno optimist view of the future has a lot of similarities with Christian, Christian eschatology. Right. Um, and yeah, you see it. And I think about it a lot with politics too. And, and the idea that, you know, we like to say that we want freedom and endless choice. Um, and the truth is that that is an enormous burden. And I think that people are looking for any way out of that. And I think that that couldn't, it can be a healthy thing when it's

42:18channeled towards something, um, toward a, right, a religious community that has sort of ethics built into it. And it is also about something, this is, you know, going back to Vae, she talked about why religion was, uh, was the right thing, or I guess spirituality, she would say is, is sort of the better thing to submit to, as opposed to, uh, an authoritarian leader or this sort of fascist politics, um, were, was that, you know, you're, you're looking at something transcendent. Um, in, in a spiritual tradition, she talked about how God was the void in this idea of surrendering to

42:52mystery, to, you know, something that we fundamentally can't understand because, you know, if you're submitting to anything in the human world, that's promising to give you answers or control, you know, that's going to come back to bite you and you're in the same place that you started out. And, and, um, yeah, I mean, I think a lot, especially, you know, in the U.S., I think the extent to which, uh, you know, Christianity itself has become wed and bound up with an authoritarian strain of, of politics is, has been really confusing to me. And it seems like a lot of, um, I mean, it's,

43:29it's not confusing in a way. I mean, there's a way in which these things could be opposed to one another or different alternatives, right? You know, submit to God or submit to this other ideology. Caesar. Caesar, yes. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that, you know, the Christian nationalism just confuses that in such a strange way. And a lot of evangelicals, I think here, you know, tend to almost put politics over their belief system or see the belief as, as sort of subservient to this larger political ideology. Um, and, you know, so I, I think, you know, that,

44:04that there is also this countervailing trend, I think, in the U.S. and Europe of young people who are trying to, you know, go back to traditional religion and returning to, you know, um, especially, I mean, most of the press has been about Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, about an enormous amount of young people that are returning to those traditions and, um, who are, you know, in some cases doing so as a retreat from, from politics, which I think has become kind of a religion, um, at this point of

44:34time. And you reference, you know, the Brothers Karamazov, which has an extraordinary immortal scene of the dilemma or distinction between organized religion and true faith, right? And it's always an issue. It's an issue in every religion. It's an issue in Judaism. It's an issue in Christianity. It was, is this version that we are practicing now, uh, a, is it apostasy? Is it heresy? Or is it the true,

45:05it's capturing what the essence of, of what we think our purpose is? And, um, I think we're gonna, we're in a very, there's a lot of ferment, I think, in, in, to the extent that religion is still a, a viable outlet for these urges in 2026. Uh, I think it's gonna get complicated. I think it's gonna get more diverse. I think, as you say, I think there's gonna be all kinds, there's gonna

45:35be a lot of innovations, the way I would say it. I, I, I can't help but notice, I was in Italy, which is a very unreligious country. It is the, it is the home place of, right? It's the, the Vatican is in Italy. Um, and yet Italians are, I think, very unconnected to the church. And I, I suspect, as an economist, I like to believe that the government's control of religion in many countries has limited the innovation that would have allowed it to evolve into more healthy or

46:07more attractive, at least, competitive ways. Um, we'll see. Yeah, I mean, it's, I, I, I've, I'm similar, kind of bewildered by what's happening with religion these days. It feels like there's so many different facets of it and different, different directions in which it's going. But I, I do think there's this, this sort of, um, this, I don't want to say trend, but this, this sort of pattern in the history of Christianity where, you know, you have Christianity become,

46:39you know, bound up with power, institutionalized in some way. Um, and then you have this movement to, let's go to the wilderness, to the desert, you know, um, or, you know, the Protestant revolution, this, this idea that we need to get back to the true faith, back to the first century church. And I think there's a way in which the, the faith has constantly renewed itself through those movements. Um, but it does feel like it's sort of this eternal cycle that the faith is going through.

47:07Let's talk about Iris Murdoch for a minute. I, I never read anything by her until very,

Iris Murdoch and the piecemeal moral life

47:13very recently. And she's a fascinating thinker and, and intellect because it's a very serious philosopher and she's a very serious novelist. Um, and I hope to read more of her novels. I may read some, some of her philosophy, but you have a really interesting, uh, variation on some of the practices we've been talking about from Murdoch. I'm going to read this. This is Murdoch. It goes to the question of what is attention and, and this difference between focus and,

47:48and other things. Murdoch writes, if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not, but it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small and piecemeal business, which goes on all the time and not a grandiose

48:21leaping about unimpeded and important moments. The moral life on this view is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial, close quote. And that's a really interesting commentary on all the things we were talking about earlier. So add your thoughts on that. I love that passage so much. And it was really not until I read Murdoch, because in, throughout that,

48:55that book that you quoted, um, the quote comes from her book, The Sovereignty of Good, um, which was just a long essay that she wrote, uh, in the late sixties. And, um, it was, she was basically trying to, um, interpret and build upon Vey's ideas of intention and will. And, uh, I think she does so in a way she, she, she, she's famous for having taken Vey's ideas and secularize them. Like instead of God, she talks about the good, um, which she saw in this very platonic sense. But, um, I think that she

49:29makes the Vey's ideas about attention and will so much more clear and practical. And the idea, as I understand it, is that, you know, we all think that we're free at any moment to take any choice, right? And, uh, when you are faced with a temptation or in the crucible of some sort of moral dilemma, you've basically already become the person who's going to make one choice, right? It's, it's not like you are totally free in that moment. You're actually, um, you know, been conditioned by everything that you've done, uh, especially in the, the, the weeks and months and years leading up to that,

50:03where you've paid it, what you've turned your attention to, how you've tried or not tried to, you know, um, uh, condition your mind through paying attention to your thoughts. Um, that, that that's actually what counts and not these big moments of choice, that the choice comes down to those much simpler, um, acts of attention that we perform every day. And she gives an example that I've found really useful, um, especially when it comes to paying attention to one's thoughts and self-interrogation, um, where she says, you know, imagine that there's this woman, a mother-in-law,

50:39uh, who, who finds her daughter-in-law to be uncouth and vulgar. And, um, you know, she's very self-controlled. It doesn't, uh, affect her behavior in every way. She still treats her graciously, but she has this prejudice in her mind. And then one day she decides, you know what, maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe she's not, uh, simple and vulgar. Maybe she's actually spontaneous and youthful. And, um, Murdoch's point is that, that, that action, uh, happens completely in the woman's mind.

51:11There's, there's no action attached to it. And yet she says, we have to be able to talk about that as a moral act. And, you know, Murdoch was writing in the sort of shadow of, uh, behaviorist and existentialist theories of, of, um, of human nature, um, and, and philosophy where there was this idea that, um, the will was radically free, um, and that action is what counted. And she's saying like, no, everything that happens in your mind and how you have controlled your mind or not is what, what counts. And, um, yeah, I, I just found that to be utterly, like, it felt like one of those

51:48moments where you read something that has distilled the truth that you've, you've known for a long time, but haven't been able to put into words. And, um, I think that that, that idea, um, was maybe one of the most transformative, transformative things that I encountered in my, my work on this book. I think it's incredibly profound, especially if it's true. Um, I like to think it's true. Yeah. This idea that we form ourselves day by day rather than through some great rational study of

52:22morality or religion or whatever, we actually, we're making choices constantly, most of them quite small. Yeah. And we think, well, it's small, so I don't have to really pay attention to it. And what Murdoch is arguing, which again, if true is profound, is that it's the small decisions that add up to form you and allow you to become the person that makes the right choice when it's a

52:52big decision. And I think so often we fool ourselves into thinking that this thing we're doing that's actually quite self-interested is probably okay because it's just a small thing. You know, it, it, it, it's not stealing. It's, it's a corporation or it's not, you know, whatever is my rationalization. Adam Smith actually writes about this very profoundly in the theory of moral sentiments, the, the sort of slippery slope of small, um, indiscretions and inappropriate

53:24things. And, um, you know, we, I recently, we interviewed, I interviewed Adam Mastrioni on this idea of incentives that economists like that explain behavior. So if the incentive to do something slightly dishonest or slightly unattractive, I'll, I'll pick a tiny one. I wish I'd talked about it when we, when I interviewed him, I'm leaving my office at the end of the day. Should I turn the lights off? I mean, it's a very, the cost is tiny, but I could say to myself, it would be, I think the

53:57wrong thing to say, but I could say to myself, well, you know, we, the college that I'm the president of, we, we rent the building and the electricity is included. So we're not billed for it. So I don't have any incentive to turn the lights off. So I should just leave them on. If I want to come back, they'll be on already. That's a horrible attitude. First of all, it's wrong because when we renegotiate our lease, they'll notice we used a lot of electricity because we didn't turn our lights off at night. They'll probably pick a higher number. So it's an illusion that it's not, we're not paying for it. We are paying for it. It's embedded in the,

54:29in the price of the rent. But the more important point is that every time I make a decision like that and say, oh, well, it's a small thing and I'm going to get a little bit of benefit and I won't pay a cost, regardless of whether it's the right or wrong thing to do, is you're degrading, you're eroding your moral sense. And every time you do the right thing, I think you're strengthening that muscle. That's my view. So I like Murdoch. Yeah. I mean, and I think that those types of moral dilemmas, even though it almost seems too

55:00small to call them moral dilemmas about whether to turn on the light or not, or turn off the light or not, or whether to recycle or, you know, just all these other small choices that we have in these enormous, you know, economies of scale that we're immersed in. It feels almost like you're completely powerless to do anything. You know, what does it matter if I call my congressperson as opposed to, you know? But yeah, I agree that it's like, there is something to the idea of doing something just for the sake that it's right and doing it because it's a principle that you've

55:33chosen to live your life by that, you know, not only I think strengthens your own moral sense of yourself, but also just makes life so much easier because you're not constantly thinking about, right? Those questions of like, what does this count? Will this matter? All those things that have to do with outcomes. And I think, yeah, probably Murdoch would say like that's that the outcome is not even the point. It's about what's happening inside of you. And, you know, she has an interesting point that she makes too. And it's really difficult one at first, or it was difficult for me to wrap my

56:06head around where she says, the ultimate goal of a moral life is not to expand your freedom, but to actually restrict it. And she says like the person who is, you know, who has really trained their moral sense through these small acts and through attention. When they arrive at a moral dilemma, they don't have to deliberate because they automatically know what's good, right? That

56:36you sort of, you act according to your principles or toward your higher aspirations, so long as you've done the work leading them to that point. And I struggle with that idea a little bit because it almost seems like she's encouraging thoughtlessness or something like, like she, there's, there's actually a line in Vey where she says the same thing where she says, basically, we should become automatons of the good, right? Almost like we should, doing good should not require any kind of struggle

57:08because you, you have trained yourself to desire the good to such a point where it doesn't feel like a struggle. And I think there's some truth to that. But yeah, then it does raise this question of like, well, are you, you know, what about like the thing about moral dilemmas is that they're incredibly difficult and nuanced and you can't, you can't really apply some rule that fits every situation. You really have to think about the context and all of these other things. And yeah, so that was one thing I struggled with. I do think that there's truth to this idea that like,

57:39it's, it's not, I don't think Vey or Murdoch are encouraging thoughtlessness by any means. I think they're encouraging the kind of deep self-reflective introspection in, again, this sort of longer piecemeal period leading up to a choice so that the choice becomes more obvious when, when you are, you know, in the trenches of a temptation or, or a moral dilemma of some kind. Oh, I would think of it. And again, I don't know if they'd agree or you can just tell me if you agree, but I think of it as, it's not so much a muscle that you're strengthening. It's, well,

58:13that's half of it. The other half is you're developing a moral intuition. Because if you continually are thinking about what's the right thing to do here and you, and you systematically urge yourself to do these small, relatively low-cost, selfless things, things, then when the more complicated ones come around, you'll know, you're not going to have to study it for so long. And that's been my experience. And especially, I think as you get older and you go through the experiences that you referred to earlier, which I do think are really the,

58:46very much, maybe the only way that you learn. As Adam Estrone in a different episode talked about, the brain's not connected to the ears, the things that you're told don't really go in. You have to suffer or experience them or learn from them. And intuition, which has, I think, a very bad name in some circles, because it's, quote, your gut, and it's not rational. It's not, you know, you haven't done a careful analysis. I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how thinking and reason should work and can work.

59:20So, I think to give Vey and Murdoch their due about the thoughtless part, it's that it's thoughtless because you just, you feel it. You don't have to study it and pretend that you've done a careful analysis. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what you're describing, I totally agree that, and I like the idea of thinking about it as a moral intuition, and I think this is what basically we mean by wisdom, right, is the ability to, you know, because you've experienced so much, you have these internalized rules that you

59:55maybe don't have conscious access to the way that you do with, you know, and I think once you get to a point of mastery with anything, with art, writing, or music, or something, you sort of just know what to do in a certain situation. And it is a type of knowledge. It's something that is often difficult to articulate according to rules or maxims, but it is maybe the most valuable kind of knowledge that there is. Yeah. Beethoven knew what note to put next. He couldn't explain it, but he's really good at it.

Writing a brutally honest personal memoir

1:00:26Yeah. Let's close with a personal reflection. This is a brutally honest book. There's some very hard things in it to read, and I assume they weren't easy to write. Why did you do that? Why did you choose yourself? Why did you expose yourself the way you do in this book? Your challenges with addiction. If I were a really bad psychologist, I would say you put them

1:01:04down on the page so that you would be able to be held responsible for them. I don't think that's what you did, but maybe that was part of it. Can you talk about that? And if you don't want to, you don't have to. No, no. I'm interested in this question. I mean, because to some extent, it's a mystery to me, too. Like, why am I led to write anything? It felt, I mean, I think with anything that I write, I wrote it because it felt like it was the only thing that I could write, I mean, that I felt was urgent to write. And I guess with this particular book, I did not plan on it being so

1:01:40personal when I first started off. I really conceived of it as more of a biblical memoir. I thought I would be talking about these ideas and maybe have an anecdote here and there from my life. And as I was writing more and trying to understand, you know, this one passage about will and attention, I realized that these ideas are so elusive and abstract that they really didn't make any sense unless I put them in conversation with my own life. And the thing that I was thinking about during this period was obviously addiction and religion and these things that I've just

1:02:12struggled with throughout my life. And, you know, it is always a danger to put yourself into such a center point of a narrative because once you start telling your story, people want to know more. And so, the personal stuff became bigger and bigger. But I also think, I mean, if I could speculate now after the fact about why I felt compelled to write about this is that writing is really the only way I know how to pay attention. And this book, which took about two

1:02:45and a half years to write, was just a way to lock me in to looking at these problems, looking at these thinkers, and then looking at my own life to see how those ideas were playing out and how my misconceptions about will and attention had led me astray. And, you know, I think anytime you start writing a book, you think you're going to get the answer at the end of it. You almost need that delusion to think, I'm going to solve this. And, of course, you never solve it. If anything, I think the best thing you can do is just articulate the problem to the best of your ability and to maybe

1:03:19create something beautiful out of that struggle that puts the questions to rest or transcends them.

Inverting the problem of evil into grace

1:03:26Actually, I want to ask you one other thing. I'm sorry. I thought that was going to be the last question. You mentioned in Pascal a few times the problem of theodicy, which is why there's suffering in the world, why good people suffer in particular. And you have a beautiful, we haven't devoted any time to, enough time to your lyricism as a writer. So, I'll just encourage listeners to go read the book because there's some really beautiful writing in here. And there's a long passage where you talk

1:03:58about going swimming with your husband and you're watching these young men, and they're mostly men, but they're all young, jumping off of a ridiculously steep cliff down toward rocks below and just sometimes barely avoiding them. And that during this time, no one was hurt. And you write, it was at this point that I realized the problem was not about cliff diving, but about gravity itself.

1:04:30Why didn't each of those divers fall immediately to their death? Which is to say, why were all of us fragile, earthbound creatures not always constantly falling to our deaths? Why in this universe ruled by force and blind chance was everything not crashing relentlessly into everything else? How is it possible that healthy babies were ever born? That car trips were completed without accidents? That lights departed and landed every day without a crash? It was as though the theodicies that had preoccupied me for years suddenly inverted themselves. The riddle was not the problem of evil.

1:05:05It was the problem of good. Close quote. And I think for those of us who choose some kind of religious path, we have to deal with this, especially in the modern world, we think about it a lot. I think any thoughtful person who chooses a religious path has to think about evil. And I always find comfort in the idea that there's also good, an immense amount of good. There's an immense amount of evil is the problem. But there's also an immense amount of good. And Brian Doyle, who you mentioned, I think, once, writes about this very beautifully. He's a person of faith who has great suffering

1:05:41and challenges at various times in life, as all human beings do. So, I thought that was a really interesting and nice thought. Can I say something about it? Yeah. I mean, I think the moment that I'm describing, too, is sort of an example of what we were talking about earlier, where it's like, you know, you're struggling with some problem for a really, really long time, can't solve it. And then you sort of are one day just sitting and looking, and this insight comes. And, you know, I'm trying to articulate in a sort of logical,

1:06:14rational manner what the thought that took hold of me, which was really just a deep, you know, feeling or intuition, or maybe a sense of wonder. Yeah, why is, I mean, it goes back to this really fundamental question of like, why is there anything instead of nothing? And why is there beauty? Why is there order? Why, if the universe is just sort of blind chance, and, you know, a cosmic accident, why do we have all of this? And I've just never been able to fully buy into atheism because of that

1:06:46question, I guess, even though I know sort of the logical response to it. But yeah, and that is the thing about that moment is that it's stuck with me since then. Like, I don't really think about the problem of evil anymore. I mean, it is something that I think that we all wrestle with, and that is unavoidable in any kind of spiritual pursuit, but it hasn't become an obstacle to faith in the way that it once was for me. And, you know, I think a lot of this too was the outcome of the reading

1:07:16that I've been doing, you know, leading up to that moment. And Simone Weil talks a lot about gravity and grace being these two fundamental laws of the universe, and gravity is just sort of the blind, you know, laws of nature, that, you know, the world is sort of run by these, by these laws.

1:07:37And, you know, there's, there's a lot of chance and accident and sort of, she talks about it as a sense of fate almost. But then there's also grace, these things, these moments of beauty, wonder, human goodness, the idea that people can, you know, attain these sort of moments of heroic virtue that just doesn't, it doesn't seem like it applies to those same laws of cause and effect that run the rest of the world. And so, I don't know, I think any spirituality kind of has to hold those things in tension, the gravity, you know, that keeps us sort of, you know, maybe returning to old

1:08:11habits, you know, keeping us in sort of a fallen state, and then these moments of self-transcendence that are really rare, and that you can't will, but nevertheless happen. My guest today has been Megan O'Giblin. Megan, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Thank you so much. This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, go to econtalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings

1:08:45related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for EconTalk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.

1:08:59EconTalk.