Why Don’t We Do What We Know We Should Do?

"Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?"  -- John Adams  (1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President   Source: the Novanglus, 1775

This question sits right at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, and lived human occurrences — Here’s layers: reasons, clichés, and then some human Truths.

1. The Brain Is Not a Single Decision-Maker:  Your “knowing mind” (prefrontal cortex) and your “doing mind” (limbic system) often disagree.

• The prefrontal cortex plans.
• The limbic system wants comfort, certainty, or dopamine now.

Knowing is cheap. Self-control is metabolically expensive.

 2. Present Bias (The Tyranny of Now):  We systematically overvalue immediate rewards and undervalue future consequences.

• Cake today beats health next year.
• Silence now beats conflict later.

Evolution favored survival, not long-term optimization.

 3. Cognitive Dissonance Avoidance: Acting against what we know creates psychological pain.  So instead of changing behavior, we: 

• Rationalize
• Minimize
• Redefine the problem

It’s easier to adjust beliefs than habits.

 4. Fear of Social Cost: Often we know what’s right but fear:

• Rejection
• Ridicule
• Loss of status
• Being “the only one”

Humans evolved in tribes; isolation once meant death.

 5. Habit Beats Intellect: Behaviors are established and faster neural circuits.  Logic interrupts these — but arrives late.  That’s why insight rarely equals transformation.

 6. Learned Helplessness:  Repeated failure teaches the brain: “Why bother trying?”  This isn’t laziness — it’s protective shutdown.

 7. Moral Licensing:  After doing one good thing, we subconsciously “spend” the credit.

• “I exercised today… dessert is earned.”
• “I vote… so I don’t need to stay informed.”

Well-Worn Clichés Persist for a Reason:

• “Knowing is half the battle.”  (The other half is doing — which is the hard half.)
• “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
• “I know better, but…”
• “Easier said than done.”
• “Old habits die hard.”
• “Do as I say, not as I do.”
• “Tomorrow is another day.”  (Which mysteriously never arrives.)

Deeper takeaways of these predicaments:

Democracy fails for the same reason individuals do:

• Knowledge without restraint          Power overrides accountability
• Desire outruns virtue                       Comfort beats discipline
• Intelligence disregards wisdom      Safety ignores courage.

Our human problem is not ignorance.  It’s acting against what we already know.

Why Don’t We Do What We Know Is Right:  George Washington understood something modern societies prefer to forget- free government depends less on intelligence than on character. Knowledge alone does not produce good behavior—either in individuals or in nations. The same weakness that causes a person to act against their better judgment is the weakness that causes democracies to unravel.

Washington warned that the greatest danger to republican government would not come from foreign armies, but from internal decay—specifically the loss of civic virtue and the rise of factional passion. He understood that human beings often know what they should do, yet fail to do it because of desire, fear, and habit overpower restraint.

This is not a flaw of education; it is a flaw of human nature.

In individuals, we see it when immediate comfort overrides long-term well-being. In democracies, we see it when short-term political gain overrides constitutional limits. In both cases, the mind knows—but the will yields.

Washington’s concept of virtue was not moral perfection. It was self-restraint: the capacity to limit one’s own power, appetite, or passion for the sake of the common good. He believed no constitution, no law, and no election could compensate for its absence. That insight explains modern democratic backsliding.

Today, democracies rarely collapse through coups. They erode through legalized impatience:

• Laws bent for convenience
• Norms abandoned for advantage
• Truth sacrificed to tribal loyalty
• Rights treated as conditional or negotiable

Just as individuals rationalize behavior they know is wrong, societies rationalize actions they know are dangerous—until the damage is irreversible.

The parallel: What habit is to the individual, faction is to the republic.  Both are easier to excuse than to discipline.  Washington’s farewell was ultimately a warning about self-deception. A people convinced they are virtuous no longer practice virtue. A democracy convinced it is stable stops protecting its foundations. The lesson is neither cynical nor nostalgic. It is preemptive.  Free government requires what human nature resists most: restraint exercised willingly, before forces make it unavoidable.   Stated plainly for our time: Democracy does not fail because people don’t know better.  It fails because knowing better is not the same as doing better. 

 The core argument anchored over historic across 2,500+ years.  

Why We Don’t Do What’s Right:  George Washington understood what many modern societies resist: knowledge alone does not produce good behavior. Free government survives only when citizens and leaders exercise virtues like restraint over impulse with harmony between factions and over self-interest. The problem is not ignorance—it is human nature.  This is ancient.

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”  — Aristotle, Politics   He warned that democratic systems fail when passion overwhelms proportion and justice.

 Majorities, like individuals, often confuse desire with what’s right.  Washington echoed this concern in his Farewell Address, warning that faction would become a “frightful despotism,” not because people were uninformed, but because they would surrender judgment to passion.

“The spirit of party… serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.” - George Washington, 1796  This mirrors the individual moral struggle: we know the better course, but choose the easier one. Societies do the same—rationalizing short-term advantage at the expense of long-term stability.  

 “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”  — Edmund Burke    Burke’s insight explains modern democratic backsliding. When citizens reject self-restraint, they invite external restraint. Laws expand when virtues contract.  This pattern is consistent across centuries: “The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.” -Montesquieu

Today, democracies rarely collapse through force. They erode through legality.  The bending of laws, weaponizing norms, and excusing behavior that would once have been unacceptable.  This is nothing new.  “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.”  — Cicero   The treason Cicero described was not always criminal—it was moral: the abandonment of duty for convenience.

Washington believed that constitutional mechanisms could slow decay, but never eliminate it. Without virtue, the republic becomes procedural but hollow.   

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  — James Madison, Federalist No. 51.   Madison’s insight cuts both ways: because men are not angels, power must be restrained—but because citizens are not angels either, democracy itself must be restrained.

Democracy doesn’t fail because people don’t know better.  It fails because knowing better is not the same as doing better.  And history keeps reminding us:  Freedom survives only where self-restraint arrives before force.