#2: You’re more difficult to take advantage of
This is one of the most important reasons to really invest in the quality of your decision-making.
Your ability to make good decisions can affect how often you are a victim of unfortunate events.
There is no way to completely eliminate risk in life and sometimes, we are the victim of circumstance. But when you’re an adept decision-maker, you’re not only able to identify opportunities better, but can more easily spot dangerous people, places, organizations, and actions. Our instincts alone are not enough or designed to sniff out all the danger in the modern landscape (early humans didn’t have to think too hard about internet scams).
You’ll develop the ability to prevent problems or leave situations before traumatic things can happen to you. And trauma, while you absolutely can recover, further damages your ability to make decisions and traps you in a cycle that can be difficult to interrupt.
Here’s the bad news: almost all of us are being influenced or outright taken advantage of by existing forces, in degrees. In the most extreme cases, many people are still being enslaved, traded and forced into child marriages— a horrific, total stripping of their decision-making abilities and mental health for profit.
Many governments (arguably all, again in degrees) around the world operate in ways that they outwardly tout to be in the interest of all, but often involve suppressing various members of the population (usually women and whoever the minority groups are) and serve to extract resources to enrichen a small group of people.
In more subtle, but still harmful ways, societies encourage us look and behave in certain ways regardless of how well that fits our individual lives. Different cultures have ways of rewarding and punishing people who comply and people who resist these pressures. If you don’t consciously direct your life, there are plenty of controlling external forces (governments, religious organizations, local communities, family, peer groups, etc) who will direct your life on your behalf in the direction of their agendas.
And of course, we cannot discuss being taken advantage of without talking about relationships. While it’s reasonable to fear the danger that lurks outside of your community, that instinct misplaces our attention. Strangers are much less harmful to you than dysfunctional relationships for a few reasons. The first is trust.
Most people are automatically wary of strangers and better guarded against them. A person you already know and trust has greater access to you. The people we know, like and trust have greater influence on us, even in ways we do not immediately realize. You’re more likely allow them close to you, your assets, and your loved ones. This is actually a good and helpful aspect of humanity when the trust is well-placed. We have thrived as a species largely due to strong collaboration, but trust does inherently place you in a very vulnerable position. You are significantly more likely to have a crime committed against you by someone that you already know. According to a 2012 study published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, strangers committed about 38% of non-fatal crimes (like robbery and assault). This figure increases when you separate the type of crimes. According to a 2007 analysis published by Washington University Law Review, robbery is the only crime a stranger more consistently commits against another person. Assaults and murders are far more likely within existing close relationships.
Similarly, our modern concept of kidnap is usually of an almost cartoonishly dastardly figure luring a child away. While that definitely exists, a child is actually far more likely to be kidnapped by a family member than a stranger, specifically their parent. They are not victims of dreaded strangers but rather more often caught in the frayed relationships of their caregivers.
This isn’t meant to stir up paranoia in your relationships or go cutting people off so easily. Good relationships with other people are a critical component of our health and happiness. I am trying to illustrate the very real impact that developing discernment makes in your life and the level of protection and peace it provides. Great decision-making (tied closely with emotional intelligence) helps you decide more accurately who deserves your trust. It’s about developing the knowledge, experience, and skill to better vet who you keep close, collaborate, and grow with. You are better able to make definitive choices about who will enrichen your life and who is poison to your health and happiness. Even better, you can turn inward and ask yourself whether you are demonstrating character that others with high personal standards would trust.
This concept of trust extends to leadership and who we decide to follow. Cults routinely cultivate trust in order to siphon resources, labor, and loyalty from their followers. In this recent pandemic, misinformation about Covid home remedies and denials of its seriousness for personal and political gain flourished. Baseless voter-fraud claims made by President Trump allowed him to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters in order to “stop the steal” and power a defense fund that did not actually exist. According to the January 6th committee, that money was actually diverted to several other destinations including his own businesses and political action committee. In fact, the heavily tumultuous period of the last few years provided excellent and harrowing insight into the importance of competent, morally sound leadership that engages in evidence-based decision making and relies on other competent experts wherever possible. The onus is also on us to develop personal discernment and recognize who to trust in order to choose great leaders to follow and avoid being taken advantage of where we can help it.
Of course people are imperfect, and we all go through moments when we fall short of our character ideals or realize that we need to outgrow a harmful learned pattern. But this reason to develop our decision-making skill lands in the #2 slot because directing and deciding our lives often involves learning to recognize, evaluate and avoid seductive traps along our journeys.
This skill helps us cut through emotions when they cloud our judgment and allow us to believe and take appropriate action when a person, organization or endeavor demonstrates they are cancerous to our lives and growth even if we deeply love them.
Sources:
Hare, Brian. Woods, Vanessa. Scientific American. “Humans Evolved to Be Friendly”. August 1 2020. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-evolved-to-be-friendly/
Bureau of Justice Statistics. "Victimization During Household Burglary." Bureau of Justice Statistics, Oct. 1993, bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvcs9310.pdf.
Folkenflik, David. "House Jan. 6 Panel Says Trump Raised Millions For A Nonexistent 'Election Defense'." NPR, 15 June 2022, www.npr.org/2022/06/15/1105162597/house-jan-6-panel-says-trump-raised-millions-for-a-nonexistent-election-defense.
Akram, Susan M. "The Public Interest in Immigration Reform." Washington University Law Review, vol. 91, no. 5, 2014, pp. 1149-1183, openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1149&context=law_lawreview.
Johnson, Alex. "Child abduction: Numbers and research." Journalist's Resource, 28 Nov. 2012, journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/child-abduction-kidnap-number-mothers-research/.