The Nope Impulse

If you see a train chugging along at a good speed and one or more of its wheels are off the track, you would probably be very frightened. I know I would, especially if I was near – or even on! – the train. That’s a lot of power and potentially destructive force just barreling along without anything keeping it from suddenly lurching off the track and into a suburban neighborhood or adjacent highway.

Some people remind me of that. There are some people who just make absolutely wild decisions, while simultaneously wielding quite a lot of power over the lives of others. If they were trains, they’d be doing 90 MPH with eight wheels out of twelve off the track. Choo choo.

Once, a long time ago, I worked in the service industry. On a break one day, a handful of my coworkers and I were standing around telling each other jokes. If you’ve ever worked with young people in the service industry, you can guess that some of these jokes were pretty rough. Nothing terrible, but definitely not jokes you’d tell to grandma. One of the guys in the group spoke up, like it was his turn to tell a joke. Instead, he went on a ten-minute rant about his extremely racist views on the problems of society and the sickening “solutions” that he would implement. Our eyes were wide with horror the entire time. He didn’t work there much longer, obviously.

But here’s what rattled me. It wasn’t that he held those views. I’ve read, you know, books. I know that there are people in the world with horrifying views, some even worse than his. What rattled me was that this guy had such an incredibly frightening lack of self-awareness that he thought it was appropriate to share them. Like, he looked around at a group of coworkers, at his job, that he didn’t know very well and that notably were not all of the same race, standing around telling jokes, and his brain went “Yup, this is the time and place for this screed I’ve had in my back pocket. This is going to go great!“

Of course, I know he didn’t think that. That’s what’s frightening – the only way he could have said that stuff at that moment is if the part of his brain that should make those decisions just didn’t work at all. In other words, wheels off the track. The part of his brain that controls his body wasn’t being held back by the part of his brain that’s supposed to control the other parts of his brain.

People have dark thoughts. I have dark thoughts sometimes! What makes that not worrying is that most people have a dark thought and go “Ugh, that was dark. Better stick that one in the vault and not act on it or say it out loud, and maybe go take a shower.” That’s an important safety feature of the human brain. Let’s call it the “Nope Impulse.” I like people whose Nope Impulses are in good working order. Those people are capable of looking at actions they’re about to take and say “Nope!” to the ones that shouldn’t be done.

There’s a concept in psychiatry called an “intrusive thought.” It’s just the term for the random thoughts that pop into your head that absolutely do not reflect any of your real views, opinions, or intentions. If you’ve ever leaned over a high ledge and some part of your brain said “jump,” that’s an intrusive thought. You don’t want to jump, you never would jump, but your brain is doing all sorts of A/B testing with thoughts and neurons all the time, so sometimes you see a Lego and your brain just suggests that maybe you should eat it.

If you have a good Nope Impulse, intrusive thoughts aren’t really a problem. They pop up, you go “nope,” and they vanish. That racist co-worker did not have a Nope Impulse. And that’s frightening, because if he didn’t say “nope” to that, what other things might his brain suggest to do that he has no defense against?

Choo choo.

Sometimes the examples are more mundane, but they still draw attention to the same mental defect. One of my clients, who had worked for his boss for fifteen years, asked for a week off for the birth of his son. The boss responded with: “A whole week?”

Think about that. This guy, who manages an entire factory and 200 employees with huge spinning machines and trucks and thousands of tons of cargo – this guy’s Nope Impulse wasn’t sharp enough to tell him not to say possibly the stupidest sentence he could have uttered at that moment. (The client quit, enjoyed 3 months off with severance with his wife and son, and then started his new job at double the salary, while the boss sent him numerous texts asking him to come back, in case you wanted the dopamine hit of the extremely happy ending to that story.)

But that boss still manages that factory. What if one day his brain says “Push that guy into that machine,” and he just doesn’t have the mental defenses to not give in to that idea? I know that sounds like an extreme example, and it probably is. But my point is that every time you see some inexplicably stupid action done by a human, I think they mostly trace back to that choke point.

Sometimes people do bad things for sensible reasons, at least in their context. A premeditated murder is a bad thing, but the person who did it at least planned to get away with it, whether they succeeded or not. But the person who just rams his car into a bunch of people because one of them flipped him off? There was a moment, however narrow, where his brain said “Oooh, step on the gas and turn right,” and most other people would have just gone “Nope.”

So that’s a frightening thing to me. More frightening to me than actual malice, which is at least held somewhat in check by the realities of a society that punishes those who try to harm it. More frightening than just stupidity, which is at least usually somewhat predictable and the places where stupidity can do the most damage have the most insulation against it – they don’t let absolute morons fly planes or build bridges.

But missing the Nope Impulse? You don’t have to be evil or stupid to have intrusive thoughts. And if you’re generally good and reasonably intelligent, you may have made your way to a position in society that gives you a lot of power over a lot of people. And if you’re the kind of not dumb, not evil person who nonetheless sends an email to a female co-worker telling her that she should wear heels in the office because you like watching her walk around in them, then I’m really afraid of letting you get near any big red buttons.

Choo choo.