A short time after that, another thirty-seven-year-old man, this one from California, revealed:
I cheated in a student election by tossing out a vote from my opponent’s friend, who I knew had only come to the meeting to vote for his buddy. I don’t think I even needed to do that in order to win, which made compromising my integrity that much sadder.
Three men with regrets that span a wide swath of territory—an Australian marriage, a Canadian childhood, a California election. But how different, really, are they?
All involve a moral breach. At a moment in their lives now stamped in memory, all three faced a choice: Honor their principles or betray them? And at that moment, all three chose wrongly. On the surface, their regrets poke through different patches of life’s landscape. Below the surface, they grow from common roots.
SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE
If you’ve ever traveled to a place where people speak a language different from your own, you might have felt a twinge of envy when you encountered a four-year-old. I know that’s happened to me.
I began trying to learn Spanish as an adult. It was not bonita. I mangled irregular verbs. I mixed up genders and misplaced adjectives. And the subjunctive? ?Dios mío! Yet whenever I saw preschoolers in a Spanish-speaking community in the United States or abroad, their speech appeared effortless.
The work of Noam Chomsky helped me understand why. Until the late 1950s, most scientists believed that children were linguistic blank slates who learned language mostly by repeating adults. When children’s mimicry was accurate, they’d be praised. When it was off, they’d be corrected. And over time, this process would etch onto their little brains the circuitry of whatever language their parents spoke. The wide variety of tongues spoken around the world testified to this truth. Yes, some languages—Danish and German, for example—shared a history. But language itself lacked a single common foundation.
Beginning with a 1957 book called Syntactic Structures, Chomsky capsized these beliefs. He argued that every language was built atop a “deep structure”—a universal framework of rules lodged in the human brain.[1] When children learn to speak, they’re not simply parroting sounds. They’re activating grammatical wiring that already exists. Language wasn’t an acquired skill, Chomsky said. It was an innate capacity. A child learning to speak Vietnamese or learning to speak Croatian is not much different from a child learning to walk in Hanoi or learning to walk in Zagreb. They’re just doing what humans do. Yes, individual languages differ—but only in their “surface structures.” Hindi, Polish, and Swahili are individual variants on a single template. Underpinning them all is the same deep structure.
Chomsky’s idea revolutionized the study of linguistics and expanded our understanding of the brain and mind. He acquired a few detractors over his career, including some who rejected his left-wing politics. But his contribution to science is as undeniable as it is enduring. And one consequence of his work was the realization that among the languages of the world, similarity often conceals difference and difference often conceals similarity.
To cite one of Chomsky’s most famous examples,[2] these two English sentences seem nearly identical:
John is eager to please.
John is easy to please.
They both contain five words—a noun, followed by a verb, followed by an adjective, followed by an infinitive. Four of the words are the same; the other varies only by a few letters. But one layer down, the sentences are quite different. In the first, John is the subject. In the second, John is the object. If we restate the second sentence as “It is easy to please John,” the meaning holds. But if we restate the first sentence as “It is eager to please John,” the meaning crumbles. Their surface structures are the same, but that doesn’t tell us much, because their deep structures diverge.
Meanwhile, these two sentences seem different:
Ha-yoon went to the store.
???? ? ??? ??.
But one layer down, they’re identical—a noun phrase （Ha-yoon, ????）， a verb phrase （went, ??）， and a prepositional phrase （to the store, ? ???）。 Their surface structures differ, but their deep structures are the same.
Chomsky demonstrated that what appeared complicated and disorderly wasn’t the full story; beneath the Tower of Babel cacophony ran a common human melody.
It took me a while to figure out, but I’ve discovered that regret, too, has both a surface structure and a deep structure. What’s visible and easy to describe—the realms of life such as family, education, and work—is far less significant than a hidden architecture of human motivation and aspiration that lies beneath it.