The Watcher spoke on, then, about how most people have selfish and unselfish parts—not selfish and unselfish components in their utility function, but parts of themselves in some less Law-aspiring way than that. Something with a utility function, if it values an apple 1% more than an orange, if offered a million apple-or-orange choices, will choose a million apples and zero oranges. The division within most people into selfish and unselfish components is not like that, you cannot feed it all with unselfish choices whatever the ratio. Not unless you are a Keeper, maybe, who has made yourself sharper and more coherent; or maybe not even then, who knows? For (it was said in another place) it is hazardous to non-Keepers to know too much about exactly how Keepers think.
It is dangerous to believe, said the Watcher, that you get extra virtue points the more that you let your altruistic part hammer down the selfish part. If you were older, said the Watcher, if you were more able to dissect thoughts into their parts and catalogue their effects, you would have noticed at once how this whole parable of the drowning child, was set to crush down the selfish part of you, to make it look like you would be invalid and shameful and harmful-to-others if the selfish part of you won, because, you’re meant to think, people don’t need expensive clothing—although somebody who’s spent a lot on expensive clothing clearly has some use for it or some part of themselves that desires it quite strongly.
It is a parable calculated to set at odds two pieces of yourself (said the Watcher), and your flaw is not that you made the wrong choice between the two pieces, it was that you hammered one of those pieces down. Even though with a bit more thought, you could have at least seen the options for being that piece of yourself too, and not too expensively.
And much more importantly (said the Watcher), you failed to understand and notice a kind of outside assault on your internal integrity, you did not notice how this parable was setting up two pieces of yourself at odds, so that you could not be both at once, and arranging for one of them to hammer down the other in a way that would leave it feeling small and injured and unable to speak in its own defense.
Relevant Eliezer post:
(That link seems to be broken. Here’s one that hopefully works.)
Thank you for the correction! I’ve edited the original to match.
(so now there’s like two of the same link in this thread but whatever haha)