Values, Virtues, and Self-Governance
...an essay
I know I can’t be the first to make this observation, but here goes: The fundamental building block of a self-governing, self-regulated society is the self-governing, self-regulated individual.
Any self-governing, self-regulated society can tolerate a certain number of people who lose their “executive functioning skills” or become dysregulated in other ways to various degrees and for various lengths of time, but there are thresholds past which if too many people lose these, society as a whole starts to become less well governed and ultimately less governable.
So the best contribution we can make to a self-governing, self-regulating society is to build up our own capacities for self-governance and self-regulation. Good news is, in a healthy society, the values and virtues I have described in the last couple Substack posts contribute to a self-regulating individual. These include honesty, courage and compassion, for starters, plus many others like humility, sincerity, perseverance, conscientiousness and so on. That’s part of the reason these virtues, values, and higher personal qualities have been held up and valued as such for thousands of years in cultures around the world: They make life work.
And so, what are we to make of it when in place of the virtues of patience and forbearance, for example, our technologies explicitly encourage us to “react”? And what are we to make of businesses in areas like food & beverage, entertainment, and electronics that engineer products to promote overindulgence instead of moderation? Moderation is a classic virtue. It’s basic to biology. Overindulgence is by definition dysregulated and dysregulating. If it’s common, why is it so common?
Further, what are we to make of it when fear, stereotyping, name-calling and scapegoating are recast as virtues, totally acceptable, or when cruelty and war and torture find ready apologists and rationalizers only to then be conveniently forgotten in a kind of generalized amnesia? Related to this, what does it mean when simple recollection of events that conflict with the latest twist of the official narratives becomes a social faux pas? Or when honesty is widely taken to be whatever is expedient in the moment, because we now live in a “post-fact world”?
Well, my suggestion is these are not indicators of individual or social health. When “post-fact” becomes the defacto “fact,” a threshold has been crossed. Accepting such bald-faced contradictions as, “Fact is, we now live in a post-fact world,” requires people to lose their minds. Of course, the term ‘post-fact’ is now passé. The reality of it seems to be going full steam ahead, however.
These patterns represent a shift away from the personal qualities that make society work. Yet, if you’re looking for official or commercial sponsors for things like honesty, courage, compassion, faith, hope, trust and so on, you will find them, if not absent, then still conspicuously lacking. And I think I finally figured out why: the principal institutions of business, education and public life encourage dependency on these external structures. Problem is, we do need these structures or society doesn’t function. At the same time, what I’m seeing is that as individuals experience internal dysregulation, they tend to seek additional means of external regulation. These come at a cost. And who benefits?
So, we might hear on TV: Are you feeling sad? Here’s a pill for you. Ask your prescriber.
And please, I’m not trying to say anyone is wrong for what they do. Instead, it looks to me like we engineered a society that pretty reliably leads to depression for many of us. We then see how business entities market various drugs as a way to help people cope, socialize people to accept it as normal, and then collectivize the cost of all this through insurance schemes while privatizing the profits. Am I being cynical, or is the system simply abusive?
Here’s another one, and it’s a classic: Feeling insecure and crappy about yourself? Buy this! …whatever it is: new car, personal care product, latest fashion, brand of jeans, shoes or cigarettes. Buy this and you’re sexy, together, chic or athletic, one of the cool kids. You’re rugged, manly, a strong individual serving that brand of whiskey or behind the wheel of this pickup truck. You’re living a fun, carefree and adventurous life in the sun and have lots of friends with that bottle of sugar water in your hand. That bikini looks great on you! Surf’s up!
The contrast of such advertising images for soft drinks with the very sad-looking people I see pushing shopping carts loaded with soda pop through the slush in grocery store parking lots this time of year couldn’t be more stark. I seriously don’t think these drinks are working as advertised. Apparently, sugar is no salvation. However, I must say that it was remarkably innovative for so many major supermarket chains to open pharmacies right inside their stores to capture some of the profit from the disease that quite predictably results from consumption of so many of the other products sold there.
Then again, how about this one: Anxious about the world and concerned for the future? Tune in for the latest — we’ll keep you informed. Feeling threatened? Trust us. Then: Whoops! Is what we just told you bumming you out? Subscribe to this streaming service and we’ll keep you entertained. And here’s some mass-marketed carbs to go with that in case a thought pops up .
Or perhaps more fundamentally: Feeling lonely, isolated or lost? Here’s a device. Hook yourself up to it. You’ll find all the people you love inside that device. Problem solved.
Every one of these things come at a cost and most leave fundamental issues unaddressed and make things worse over time. And please, I’m not saying don’t text Grandma pictures of the new baby. Again, I’m asking the bigger-picture questions here, like why more people live alone than ever before. Is that really healthy? My suggestion is that there has never, perhaps in all human history, been a higher value or potential benefit from in-person interactions. Still, with a little prodding from advertisers, PR firms, politicians and other authority figures skilled at manipulating their fellow humans, customers and voters will double down on substitutes and false solutions. In fact that’s probably the whole idea: to get people to double down and buy into products and systems that clearly do not serve them. And it’s all been normalized.
That said, I also think it’s worth noticing how wonderful, virtuous, generous and amazingly strong people can be, despite the forces of negative socialization like those just described. I see this all the time, and in the last few days when I was in mild but thankfully transient quasi-zombie mode, some actual human beings kindly helped me snap out of it just by being present and friendly, helpful, alive and beautiful.
I know it’s very easy to start coming across like a cranky old man when writing about virtues and values. Virtues? I mean what the heck is that, even? This isn’t Ancient Greece, after all! And I know how it can sound when a person of threescore-plus years questions things we have been propagandized to think of as “technological advances,” but I really don’t care at this point. That’s one of the nice things about getting older. You can say things like: “Progress does not equal a person on the street who is carrying a smart phone but doesn’t have access to a toilet or running water.” And people can just think about that for a while.
Funny thing about text messages and emails for example, since I seem to be on a bit of a roll here: they may be fast, but are they better? For some things, clearly, yes, they are better. But recently I came across a box of correspondence dating back to the 1980s. In it are letters from my aunt and a cousin in Quebec, from my mother in Ontario, sweet thoughts from girlfriends postmarked Kalamazoo, Saginaw, and Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and Paris, France. There are birthday cards from another aunt in Michigan’s Thumb, and yes, even a letter from you, Daniel, as well as a huge volume of correspondence from a pal of mine who was stationed in Hawaii with the U.S. Navy, and a profound and personal letter sent by a friend whose camping trip out west turned into an unexpected spiritual pilgrimage. Those pieces of correspondence provide a durable record of these relationships at the time, and were delivered to me in a form that was entirely private, sacrosanct under strict provisions of federal law governing the U.S. Mail.
But it’s even deeper than that: In a handwritten note from a college sweetheart or from an encouraging relative, I have something that a digital record just can’t compete with: analog. An actual human hand, a hand that may have at one time held my own, or at least handed me a beer, a hand motivated by actual feelings that drew an actual pen across this actual piece of paper, the words and the quality of the handwriting capturing that moment, that personality, that motivation and those feelings in the form of a durable artifact that I can still hold in my own hands and reflect on. In contrast, the 5-1/4” floppy discs containing writings from about the same era? They just don’t have the feelz.
Now before you write all this off as just another old guy trying to live in the past, please let me try asking a serious question, assuming that’s still possible: What does it mean that people growing up today might not have such a box of private, written records, that virtually all their most intimate correspondence, photos and even phone conversations from their entire lives are digitalized, which means, in essence, commoditized, hackable, potentially, from anywhere in the world, tracked, data-mined, and now fed into the gaping maw of all-devouring AI?
One thing I can say is, such a setup would be ideal for anyone whose plans for the future require keeping the masses on the wrong side of this electronic one-way mirror. Yes, like the one-way mirrors so commonly used in psychological experimentation back in the day. With systems like this in place, it’s easy to see, for example, how the idea of a person standing up and making sacrifices for truth might slowly morph into something that is considered at best an antiquated piece of cultural nostalgia and at worst as a disruptive, dangerous, anti-social threat, and ultimately criminalized.
In behavioral science, it’s called “shaping”. This was how I taught our cats their names. I’d reinforce each successive step. Call the cat: “Mama Cass!” If she took even one step toward us, I’d give her a treat. Call again. Same intonation, like an ad jingle, that’s very important: “Mama Cass!” Two steps. Great, here’s a treat. Pretty soon Mama Cass would come whenever we called and from wherever we called her.
With humans, what we now call “normalization” is just powerful people with long range plans building systems of reinforcement and systemic corrals and chutes of various kinds to shape people who don’t know what’s going on and don’t usually question much, remember much or think very far ahead. And yes, these traits can also be shaped and encouraged.
And so maybe that’s how we got to the point where, hey c’mon, after all, truth is relative, there’s lots of narratives out there and there’s all sorts of opinions and whose side are you on anyhow, and it’s a lot of work and who has time and what’s the point and we need to move on and, uh… sorry… what were we talking about? I forget.
See what I mean? It’s distressingly common to hear this kind of thing these days. And going back to where this essay started, this pattern of dissociative coping suggests a profound loss of capacity for self-regulation. We don’t have to cooperate by adopting that mindset and going with the program, however. It’s really up to all of us, working together, to turn this around.
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