Some Words of Advice . . . on Advice

By: Ira Allen

Years and years after the retirement of the original Abby of Dear Abby fame, newspaper columnists around the world are still offering answers to people’s most pressing, private and personal questions (well, those that they need to publicly share in the newspaper, at any rate). Much of that advice, in my opinion, is pretty terrible. But that’s not the topic of this article.

This article is about understanding what we’re looking for when we’re looking for advice. There are those who have suggested that advice-seekers really just want confirmation that their perspective is "right"; and I’m sure that’s not without its grain of truth. But that also begs a larger question: why do we feel like we need that confirmation in the first place? Why do we feel like we need advice?

I ask this because advice seems qualitatively different from, say, input. If I ask for your advice, I’m already lending your words the potential status of truth, of authority. On some level, I’m expecting from you an overarching solution (maybe one that confirms what I’ve already come up with, or maybe one that frees me from the responsibility of coming up with one in the first place), a decision. If I take your advice, all that is left is for me to implement the decision that you’ve made.

If I ask for your input, in contrast, I’m using the metaphor of a machine; I’ll take your input, combine it with other pieces of input, process the lot, and process a finished product: et voila! A decision. So, when I’m asking for your input, it seems I’m retaining more direct control over the final decision. When I ask for your advice, I’m abdicating that responsibility—or at least pretending to.

But this brings us back to that troubling scenario: pretending to. Why would I pretend to need you to make a decision for me, when what I really want is for you to validate the decision I’ve already made? (Not that this is always the case with requests for advice—far from it—but it’s surely often enough the case to be worth considering.) Wouldn’t it make more sense, in precisely this case, to ask for your input? At least there wouldn’t be this false sense that you are being placed in an authoritative position, when in fact I’ve already served as my own authority (i.e., have made the decision for myself already).

But this gets exactly at the heart of the concept of advice itself. Why do we need advice? Precisely because we cannot trust our own authority. We know that, on the whole, we can’t be trusted to consistently crunch the numbers, process the input, and produce sane and wise decisions. How do we know this? Because we always know, on some level, that the world is far bigger than we can effectively think through—even for any given decision, even something as simple as whether to brush our teeth before bed-time. Granted, most of us do manage to arrive at a decision regarding that oh-so-difficult question, but I suspect that research would reveal that most of our motivations for this action can be traced back to the authoritative weight of our parents’ voices, the great advice-givers, our first gods.

Fundamentally, for this and other reasons to numerous to go into here (do I smell a Part II?), most of us are at least (or at most) dimly aware that making any sort of decision on our own authority is the height of insanity. In a world as complex as that in which we live, where every decision can potentially spread across the globe (think: the butterfly effect), who are we to ever even imagine we could aptly take into account all the necessary factors for any decision.

And so we look to others—big others, says philosopher Slavoj Zizek, following psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: the ones presumed to know. We want to feel a sense of security and certainty, and we know on a fundamental that to offer that sense to our selves would be absolute madness, so we seek out the advice of our big others, of those we trust to know. We seek advice (far more often than input, really) because we want to feel able to trust our own decisions to be right. And, paradoxically perhaps, we can only trust our own decisions when they are not really only our own.

Tune in next month for more Advice on Advice, with some consideration of the role of language in all of this. . . .