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When I was buying school supplies yesterday, I had an epiphany. The only reason I was figuring out how many book covers I needed was because it helped to determine my grade in my classes. In general, book covers are not motivated by the student’s desire to be organized, or to prevent their books from being mixed up. Rather, book covers are motivated by the teacher’s desire to have the students adopt their organizational strategy. A student who covers their books because they have to will receive exactly the same grade as a student who covers all their books because they like using book covers. Clearly, the student who only buys the book covers they need is not motivated by their own desire to buy book covers. Rather, they are motivated by the benefit of having a good grade, or the converse, the fear of not having a good grade.

Fear is the mother of belief, and habit its nurse… Religion arises from fear of nature, morality from fear of human beings

—Jonathan Rée

Rée is saying that morality is grounded in fear. Every choice we make is determined by the fear of the consequences if we don’t make that choice. However, I think there is something deeper here.

Motivation doesn’t determine consequences. Action does. If someone blows up a bus, their motivation for doing so is irrelevant. What matters is that a bomb detonated on the bus, and now everyone who was on that bus is dead. However, motivation does determine action. If the person didn’t have a motivation for blowing up a bus, they never would have made a bomb and planted it on the bus.

Ultimately, our values determine our actions. According to Rée, there is only one value, and it is fear. However, I would disagree. If we only value fear, why do we even have the word “hope” in our language? Rejecting all values is a foolish attempt to escape from our own identity. Rather, we should determine which values define us, and act upon those values.