Dwight: Let's dig into a topic I'm calling "The Car Authorities."

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Aiko: Alright, Dwight. What's the angle—are we talking about literal regulatory bodies, or something more conceptual, like who gets to define car culture?

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Dwight: Nothing like that. Let's imagine that nearly all car authorities insist that, in order for a car to function properly, drivers must accept that for many GPS destinations (which are always assumed to be correct), the brake will frequently try to override the accelerator. The only way to reach those destinations is to push harder on the accelerator despite the brake’s resistance. This is considered normal—even though it causes a lot of damage.

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Aiko: So they're treating the friction between brake and accelerator as a built-in feature, not a flaw—even when it tears up the system in the long run. What's the rationale they're giving, if any?

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Dwight: Let’s examine the rationale that “The People Authorities” use to justify this belief. These are the people who hold ideas about how humans are supposed to operate—parents, teachers, ministers, politicians, neighbors, even you. It’s rare to find a person who doesn’t buy into at least one of the following ideas:

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• Life is hard.

• We should sacrifice now for the future.

• We should put others before ourselves.

• We should be kind.

• There are givers and takers.

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These are just a few of the countless beliefs most of us accept. And every one of them, directly or indirectly, promotes the idea that in order to get where the GPS says we should go (and there are many "shoulds" that set the GPS), we have to override one part of ourselves (the brake) that resists another part (the accelerator).

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Aiko: So the “proper operation” of a person, according to these authorities, is basically internal conflict—where doing the “right” thing means forcing one part of the self to submit to another. 

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Dwight: The key point here is that if someone made a claim about cars saying the only way to reach many desired destinations (as indicated by your GPS which is preset) is to accept that you’ll constantly be burning out your brake—and that hopefully your accelerator (which, in practice, the brake will often override) is strong enough to push through to the GPS-validated location (because GPS is assumed to never be wrong)—we’d immediately see how absurd that is.

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Aiko: Exactly—and yet when it comes to people, we normalize this same dysfunction. The internal damage, the wear-and-tear, is just called “growing up” or “being responsible.” Why do we treat mechanical self-destruction as wisdom when it’s applied to human lives?

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Dwight: There are many factors that could help explain this, but the root of nearly all of them is the foundational idea that there must be something inherently wrong with some of our desires. To correct this, we divide desires into “good” and “bad,” and that fundamental belief lays the groundwork—and the justification—for all the internal conflicts that follow, each one reinforcing and expanding on the implementation of that premise.

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Aiko: So once you buy into that original split—good vs. bad desires—the war inside becomes not only inevitable but morally necessary. It’s like installing conflict as the operating system and then wondering why nothing runs smoothly.

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Dwight: Once you start labeling things as good or bad in ways that are disconnected from actual benefits and possibilities—short- and long-term—for yourself and others (which should define “good”), and from real costs and risks (which should define “bad”), then “good” just ends up meaning what gets you praised and accepted, and “bad” becomes what gets you blamed and ostracized.

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Aiko: And at that point, you’re not navigating reality—you’re navigating approval. The brake isn’t slowing you down to avoid a cliff; it’s grinding because someone’s watching, and you were taught that looking good is more important than going where you actually want to go.

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Dwight: So let’s begin questioning those beliefs—whether coming from ourselves or others—that tell us what we should or shouldn’t do, when those beliefs aren’t actually grounded in maximizing real benefits and possibilities or minimizing genuine costs and risks in our lives.

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Aiko: That’s where the real recalibration begins—not just questioning authority, but questioning the internalized map that keeps sending us into the same traffic jams, over and over.