Seeing as he would have to repeat the entire semester course if he failed this supplementary exam, and seeing as he knew me as an honest person, and also as one not afraid of speaking the truth about idiocy, it was peculiar that he wanted to hear my answer to that particular time, where you’d presume his state of mind to be somewhat fragile. But the question was asked.

So, I set about answering, and was instantly struck with the atypical nature of my response, which went along the lines of telling him that I couldn’t possibly tell whether he was an idiot or not, based on the evidence available to me. Even though my course does teach and test basic reasoning skills, I said, it’s entirely possible that he simply wasn’t paying attention in class, or had a bad day at the exam, or may be a good thinker without being a good writer (a significant proportion of the final mark is derived from written assignments). I concluded by saying that I couldn’t know, and that he’d be in a better position to answer the question.

He nodded thoughtfully at times, and listened without interruption to an exposition on idiocy that lasted a good 5 minutes. Then he said: “Where did that come from?”, looking at me, clearly confused. The confusion transferred to me, given his question that started the encounter. I said, well, you asked me if you were an idiot.

“No - I asked ‘are you married yet?’”

And I had to laugh at the misheard question, and also answer in the affirmative, for two reasons: one, that the truthful answer was ‘yes’, and two, that I realised that the very tone and content of my response to the question that I thought he was answering served to answer his actual question also. One of the things that has happened in the course of meeting and then marrying S is that the answer that would have come naturally - typically a rather blunt and unsympathetic one - had been replaced by a different style of answer - one that no longer sees my interactions with random others as a competition by default, where it’s paramount to get your blows in first, just in case they don’t get the point that you’re higher up the food chain than you are. The arrogance is quite sad, in retrospect - and if there are any out there who I’ve offended needlessly in the past, I’m sorry. No apologies to any actual idiots, of course - you need to hear the truth, just in case you’re able to do something about it.

On stickK, you draw up an official commitment contract that binds you to achieving a personal goal, be it big or small. By agreeing to this contract, you publicly state your goal and commit to achieving it. Or, if grand public pronouncements aren’t your style, you can tell only people you select. Either way, you’ve committed to a goal and people know about it – so now it’s your reputation at stake!

To make you accountable as you work toward your goal, you file weekly reports on your success. (And don’t even think about lying — because you appoint someone you know as a “referee” to verify the accuracy of your reporting!) You also enlist as many Supporters as you’d like to encourage you, via the website, every step of the way.

If humans functioned as rational economic agents, it should be a roaring success, and lead many of us to find the motivation required to finish those Ph.D’s, stop smoking, eat less spam, or whatever. But as Herbert Simon (and common sense) tell us, while we’re certainly economic agents, we’re also very infrequently rational - often through little fault of our own. StickK provides an interesting thought-experiment, though, in that the first impulse that comes to mind (in my case, at least) is that - if I wanted to - I could quit smoking. But we’re often willing to leave that commitment in the hypothetical realm, and StickK offers a cheap, yet still incentivising, way to put your money where your mouth is. The key economic question that remains, however, is whether self-deception has a larger payoff than achieving one’s goals. For many of us, self-deception is so ingrained that we see little or no alternative to keep taking that payoff, no matter if it’s less than alternate rewards available. So again, we’re left with the essential prerequisite of escaping the circularity of our definitions of self. And this, fellow humans, requires a significant infusion of courage, as well as friends who are willing to tell you the truth.

One of the many disturbing scenes has early-teen (and younger) children praying to a cardboard cut-out George Bush for him to rid their country of the “evil” of abortion. Another has a young child in complete meltdown, as he tries to deal with the fact of not being able to feel the presence of god around him. Of course, there is no-one around to tell him that it’s okay to let go of your imaginary friends - only a significant amount of peer-pressure reminding him that his life will continue to be empty and meaningless until he gets his Jesus-groove back.

These children are being abused. They can’t help but trust what their parents and charismatic preachers tell them, because they don’t yet have the knowledge and acumen to discern truth from lies. And by the time they are old enough to possess those tools, most of their minds will have been putrefied to the extent that shaking these dogma will no longer be possible. Then, they become parents themselves, and pass the virus along. In the meanwhile, large numbers of the voting population take very important decisions on the grounds of spurious arguments and poor evidence. An army is being created, and that army fights for conservatism and prejudice.

But seeing as the current generation of parents were victims of the same process, it’s difficult to know who - if anyone - to blame. It’s difficult to find anyone who is actually intentionally misleading these children. The parties involve are sincere in their belief that they are spreading truth and righteousness, and we are left with being able to blame only the system, rather than any actual agent involved in reinforcing that system. This powerlessness makes me angry, as a system is less easy to fight than individuals. So what can we do, to try and secure a better future? First, we can present an attractive alternative to religious world-views, by demonstrating that atheists can be happy, moral people, who are capable of as much wonder at the world that surrounds them. In fact, we can probably be more so, in that we have more agency in the actions we take, seeing as they aren’t filtered through the intermediary of the spirit-world. Second, when we get the chance to allay the sorts of troubles and confusions experienced by the child mentioned above, we can embrace our responsibility to remind them that their confusions are generated by falsehoods, and that it really is okay for her to not suffer the same delusions as the god-botherers around her do.

In the meanwhile, my future is looking pretty damn fine. After starting on such a perplexing and traumatic note, it’s ended in the best way possible. An old friend has become a partner, after our wedding in November, and we’ll make sure to protect each other as best we can from assorted threats to reason and happiness. Some true friends have been discovered, and some baggage cast aside. It’s not that surprising how much fun was had along the way - more so that it was so effortless, in that genuine trust and understanding of others feels very different to what I thought it did. And once you know that feeling, the liberation is indescribable.

On reflection, I suspect that the mistake I’d always made was in imagining that human interaction was often a zero-sum game. It sometimes is, to be sure, but far less often than I once believed. Any principles worth holding dear are presumably only valuable because of the utility they generate for you (I’m excluding fundamentalist epistemologies here) and others (assuming we should factor others in at this fundamental level). My primary utility function rested in first doing no harm, which I interpreted as being as irreproachable as possible. This meant that while people may or may not have enjoyed interacting with me, they could at least not accuse me of deceiving them. But it’s not surprising that interaction often ends up being a zero-sum game with this outlook, as my primary engagement with others was largely inward-looking, as a result of the fear of betraying the demands of that utility-function. And being inward-looking, it’s likewise unsurprising that I was often more concerned with my own utility than with that of others - even though I’ve always argued for a contractarian account of morality, whereby what satisfies others may well satisfy me in the end also. A sizeable contradiction was staring at me all along, and it’s unfortunately taken me quite long to spot it.

Avoiding this contradiction was partly a factor of complacence and partly a factor of the support system I embraced, which involved people like-minded enough that the irrationality of my position never had to be exposed. But in being forced to observe the destructive nature of the selfishness that exists at the thin end of this mindedness, I was lucky enough to start being able to observe the alternatives - which, at the end of a very long story for another day - led me to the preacherman mentioned above. There is still much to figure out, but more importantly, there is much that can’t be figured out - and that’s quite alright.

More on this another day - a cocktail, followed by some molecular gastronomy, awaits.