Most people are indignant at the suggestion that they are not reliable authorities about their real wants. Such self-knowledge, however, is not the easiest kind of knowledge to acquire. Indeed, acquiring it often requires hard and even potentially risky work. To avoid such effort, people unconsciously convince themselves that they want what society says they should want. The main point of the argument is that ['people cannot really want what they should want', 'knowledge of what one really wants is not as desirable as it is usually thought to be', 'people are not necessarily reliable authorities about what they really want', 'people usually avoid making difficult decisions']