[Avodah] Pirkei Avot chapter 2 mishna 9

[Akiva Miller]

.
R' Joel Rich asked:

> ... when one sees the eventual reward and punishment for each
> of their acts they will never sin. ...
>
> ... if this is so obvious why do people sin? I would submit
> that it may be related to what behavioral economists refer to
> as hyperbolic discounting where people give more weight to
> rewards or costs that are closer in the present than those that
> are farther in the future. (i.e. they’ll take a dollar today
> rather than $1000 in a year from now.) or is it that we don't
> fully believe in reward and punishment? Thoughts?

It's not binary. BOTH yetzer haras team up against a person. Not only are
the short-term goals more tempting than the long-term goals, but there is a
perceived risk in pursuing the long-term goals.

If reward-and-punishment was perceived as a "sure thing", then the yetzer
hara would be totally disarmed and free will would go out the window. Sure,
we CLAIM to believe in it, but how often in our lives does something good
happen, such that we can unambiguously point to the specific mitzvah that
led to it? And how often does something bad happen, where we are absolutely
sure that it was because of a specific aveira?

Our inability to see the cause-and-effect makes the short-term
exponentially more appealing than the long-term goals.

PS: I am finding more and more questions which can be answered with "It's
not binary." Gan Eden was a binary world, where Emes and Sheker were very
clear. But then we ate from the tree, and ever since, *everything* has
become muddied up and unclear, composed of both a little bit of this and a
little bit of that. The desire for clarity is just another example of our
innate desire to return to Gan Eden, and in *this* world, it just ain't
gonna happen.

Akiva Miller
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