What's Your Angle

You're a good person, right? You're entirely without selfish motives. You never do anything for reasons other than desiring the best for humanity.

Guess what? You're a liar. Don't feel ashamed; we all want to think the best about ourselves (well, not all of us, but certainly most of us), and we all tell little fibs like the ones above. I do it, and I'm sure you do too. Even the best people do it; in fact, there's a school of thought which says that only by acknowledging your faults can you really be truly good, so I would imagine that people of that school probably would be happy to tell you that they occasionally believe better of themselves than they actually are.

But in even more interesting news, it doesn't matter, because even if you're a completely selfless individual who's only looking out for the greatest good, your definition of selfless and greatest good constitute an agenda of some sort, which means that you have a motivating factor for the things you do. The only way to avoid the upcoming discussion is to be a creature of perfect apathy, and that's hard to accomplish.

So we all have reasons behind what we do. We may be perfectly open about said reasons, even if they aren't noble. There are many people who are completely honest about their motivations for doing bad things (although there's another school of thought which posits that these people are only being honest because it keeps them from having to accept the motivations, but I'm not interested in talking psychology). Why is this important?

Well, you should always be asking, "What's their angle?" Again, as in all my previous paranoid posts, I'm not advocating universal distrust. But if someone does something for no good reason, even if it benefits you, it often pays to look that gift horse in the mouth.

Sure, occasionally it can come back to bite you. Someone really did do something for you for no benefit to them. But you don't have to let them know you're suspicious; suspicion can take many forms. Be quietly suspicious. Try to figure out what their motives are. If they say they're doing it for your good, figure out if they're telling the truth.

And sometimes it's true; they really are being good people, or at least being good to you. They really are only acting for your benefit. There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes they have an angle, but it's nothing surprising. Big companies don't give things away for free; they want to get something in return. But if that big company gets something from you that you feel is a fair trade for what they give, what's the problem with that? If a loss leader (or here since I don't completely trust wikipedia) works out in your favor, and you were going to buy the product anyway, what's wrong with that?

But you can't know there's no harm in it unless you figure out what their angle is, can you? There's no harm in simply thinking about it rationally; it doesn't mean you have to pass up on an offer, just make sure you know what you're getting into, what you're giving in return for the "free lunch" as it were. Maybe it's more than you think. It only takes once, and when all it takes to prevent this is some simple thought (combined with a little healthy suspicion) what's the harm in that?

Remember, don't trust them to tell you what their angle is.