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I do not believe I have ever claimed—in my previous book or, indeed, this one—that it would be necessarily sufficient to live by the rules I have presented. I think what I claimed—what I hope I claimed—was this: When you are visited by chaos and swallowed up; when nature curses you or someone you love with illness; or when tyranny rends asunder something of value that you have built, it is salutary to know the rest of the story.
We need instead to take heart, and to take spirit, and to look at things carefully and properly, and to live the way that we could live.
I can tell you what has saved me, so far—the love I have for my family; the love they have for me; the encouragement they have delivered, along with my friends; the fact that I still had meaningful work I could struggle through while in the abyss.
Neither the state of order nor the state of chaos is preferable, intrinsically, to the other. That is the wrong way to look at it.
He was the best personal and practical exemplar of something I had come to realize over my more than twenty years of psychological practice: people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized.
For Drs. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the great depth psychologists, sanity was a characteristic of the individual mind.
Freud and Jung, with their intense focus on the autonomous individual psyche, placed too little focus on the role of the community in the maintenance of personal mental health.
If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, I consider that my new client is insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that. People exist among other people and not as purely individual minds. An individual does not have to be that well put together if he or she can remain at least minimally acceptable in behavior to others. Simply put: We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded
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If you begin to deviate from the straight and narrow path—if you begin to act improperly—people will react to your errors before they become too great, and cajole, laugh, tap, and criticize you back into place.
She delighted in doing so, particularly when her pointing called forth the attention of the adults surrounding her. This indicated, in a manner not duplicable in any other way, that her action and intention had import—definable at least in part as the tendency of a behavior or attitude to compel the attention of others. She thrived on that, and no wonder.
If you are not communicating about anything that engages other people, then the value of your communication—even the value of your very presence—risks falling to zero.
Every word is a pointer, as well as a simplification or generalization. To name something is not only to make it shine forth against the infinite background of potentially nameable things, but to group or categorize it, simultaneously, with many other phenomena of its broad utility or significance.
The social world narrows and specifies the world for us, marking out what is important.
The individual is molded by the social world. But social institutions are molded, too, by the requirements of the individuals who compose them. Arrangements must be made for our provisioning with the basic requirements of life. We cannot live without food, water, clean air, and shelter. Less self-evidently, we require companionship, play, touch, and intimacy.
It is worth considering more deeply just how necessity limits the universe of viable solutions and implementable plans. First, as we alluded to, the plan must in principle solve some real problem. Second, it must appeal to others—often in the face of competing plans—or those others will not cooperate and might well object. If I value something, therefore, I must determine how to value it so that others potentially benefit. It cannot just be good for me: it must be good for me and for the people around me.
A good solution to a problem involving suffering must be repeatable, without deterioration across repetitions—iterable, in a word—across people and across time.
These universal constraints, manifest biologically and imposed socially, reduce the complexity of the world to something approximating a universally understandable domain of value. That is exceptionally important, because there are unlimited problems and there are hypothetically unlimited potential solutions, but there are a comparatively limited number of solutions that work practically, psychologically, and socially simultaneously.
So, I must take the complexity of the world, reduce it to a single point so that I can act, and take everyone else and their future selves into consideration while I am doing so. How do I manage this? By communicating and negotiating.
Things of import must be done, or people starve or die of thirst or exposure—or of loneliness and absence of touch. What needs to be done must be specified and planned. The requisite skills for doing so must be developed. That specification, planning, and development of skills, as well as the implementation of the informed plan, must be conducted in social space, with the cooperation of others (and in the face of their competition).
This variance in ability (as well as the multiplicity of extant problems and the impossibility of training everyone in all skilled domains) necessarily engenders a hierarchical structure—based ideally on genuine competence in relation to the goal. Such a hierarchy is in its essence a socially structured tool that must be employed for the effective accomplishment of necessary and worthwhile tasks. It is also a social institution that makes progress and peace possible at the same time.
Among more differentiated and complex creatures—the larger and commonly recognizable denizens of the natural world—the sensory and motor functions separate and specialize, such that cells undertaking the former functions detect patterns in the world and cells in the latter produce patterns of motor output. This differentiation enables a broader range of patterns to be recognized and mapped, as well as a broader range of action and reaction to be undertaken. A third type of cell—neural—emerges sometimes, as well, serving as a computational intermediary between the first two. Among species that
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Negotiation for position sorts organisms into the omnipresent hierarchies that govern access to vital resources such as shelter, nourishment, and mates. All creatures of reasonable complexity and even a minimally social nature have their particular place, and know it.
A newborn infant is equipped with relatively deterministic reflexes: sucking, crying, startling. These nonetheless provide the starting point for the immense range of skills in action that develop with human maturation.
Play with others depends (as the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget observed5) upon the collective establishment of a shared goal with the child’s play partners. The collective establishment of a shared goal—the point of the game—conjoined with rules governing cooperation and competition in relationship to that goal or point, constitutes a true social microcosm.
Piaget suspected, for example, that games undertaken voluntarily will outcompete games imposed and played under threat of force, given that some of the energy that could be expended on the game itself, whatever its nature, has to be wasted on enforcement. There is evidence indicating the emergence of such voluntary game-like arrangements even among our nonhuman kin.6
And life is not simply a game, but a series of games, each of which has something in common (whatever defines a game) and something unique (or there would be no reason for multiple games).
No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn. It was for this reason, among others, that Carl Jung regarded the Fool as the archetypal precursor to the figure of the equally archetypal Redeemer, the perfected individual.
Great mythologized heroes often come into the world, likewise, in the most meager of circumstances (as the child of an Israelite slave, for example, or newborn in a lowly manger) and in great danger (consider the Pharaoh’s decision to slay all the firstborn male babies of the Israelites, and Herod’s comparable edict, much later). But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master. Thus, it is necessary even for the most accomplished (but who wishes to accomplish still more) to retain identification with the as yet unsuccessful; to appreciate the striving toward competence; to carefully and with true
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He made up his mind to become more diligent and reliable and to see what would happen if he worked as hard at it as he could. He told me, with an uncontrived smile, that he had been promoted three times in six months.
The young man had come to realize that every place he might find himself in had more potential than he might first see (particularly when his vision was impaired by the resentment and cynicism he felt from being near the bottom).
As might be expected, the young man who had something to say to me was thrilled with what had happened to him. His status concerns had been solidly and realistically addressed by his rapid career advance, and the additional money he was making did not hurt, either. He had accepted, and therefore transcended, his role as a beginner.
It is good to be a beginner, but it is a good of a different sort to be an equal among equals.
To be surrounded by peers is to exist in a state of equality, and to manifest the give-and-take necessary to maintain that equality. It is therefore good to be in the middle of a hierarchy.
They can delay gratification long enough to take their turn while playing a game that everyone cannot play simultaneously. They can begin to understand the point of a game played by several people and follow the rules, although they may not be able to give a coherent verbal account of what those rules are. They start to form friendships upon repeated exposure to children with whom they have successfully negotiated reciprocal play relationships. Some of these friendships turn into the first intense relationships that children have outside their family.
Peers distribute both the burdens and joys of life. Recently, when my wife, Tammy, and I suffered serious health problems, we were fortunate enough to have family members (my in-laws, sister and brother; my own mother and sister; our children) and close friends stay with us and help for substantial periods of time.
To maintain good relationships with your colleagues means, among other things, to give credit where credit is due; to take your fair share of the jobs no one wants but still must be done; to deliver on time and in a high-quality manner when teamed with other people; to show up when expected; and, in general, to be trusted to do somewhat more than your job formally requires.
It is a good thing to be an authority. People are fragile. Because of that, life is difficult and suffering common. Ameliorating that suffering—ensuring that everyone has food, clean water, sanitary facilities, and a place to take shelter, for starters—takes initiative, effort, and ability.
If the problem is real, then the people who are best at solving the problem at hand should rise to the top. That is not power. It is the authority that properly accompanies ability.
When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served.
But good people are ambitious (and diligent, honest, and focused along with it) instead because they are possessed by the desire to solve genuine, serious problems.
However, and more important, genuine authority constrains the arbitrary exercise of power.
The authority who remembers his or her sojourn as voluntary beginner, by contrast, can retain their identification with the newcomer and the promise of potential, and use that memory as the source of personal information necessary to constrain the hunger for power.
This implies, as well, that the ideal personality cannot remain an unquestioning reflection of the current social state.
Those who rise to the top can do so through manipulation and the exercise of unjust power, acting in a manner that works only for them, at least in the short term; but that kind of ascendance undermines the proper function of the hierarchy they are nominally part of. Such people generally fail to understand or do not care what function the organization they have made their host was designed to fulfill. They extract what they can from the riches that lie before them and leave a trail of wreckage in their wake.
The further danger stems from the counterpart to the corrupt but conservative processes that destabilize and destroy functional hierarchies: there are unethical radicals, just as there are crooked administrators, managers, and executives. These individuals tend to be profoundly ignorant of the complex realities of the status quo, unconscious of their own ignorance, and ungrateful for what the past has bequeathed to them.
All was going well until the discussion twisted toward the political. After discussing her personal situation, she began to voice her discontent with the state of the world at large—with the looming catastrophe, in her opinion, of the effects of human activity on the environment. Now, there is nothing wrong, in principle, with the expression of concern for planet-wide issues. That is not the point. There is something wrong, however, with overestimating your knowledge of such things—or perhaps even considering them—when you are a mid-twenty-year-old with nothing positive going on in your life
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was impossible for me not to conclude that some of what had reduced her to her monthslong state of moral paralysis was not so much guilt about potentially contributing to the negative effects of human striving on the broader world, as it was the sense of moral superiority that concern about such things brought her (despite the exceptional psychological danger of embracing this dismal view of human possibility).
Because doing what others do and have always done so often works, and because, sometimes, radical action can produce success beyond measure, the conservative and the creative attitudes and actions constantly propagate themselves. A functional social institution—a hierarchy devoted to producing something of value, beyond the mere insurance of its own survival—can utilize the conservative types to carefully implement processes of tried-and-true value, and the creative, liberal types to determine how what is old and out of date might be replaced by something new and more valuable.
To manage complex affairs properly, it is necessary to be cold enough in vision to separate the power hungry and self-serving pseudoadvocate of the status quo from the genuine conservative; and the self-deceptive, irresponsible rebel without a cause from the truly creative. And to manage this means to separate those factors within the confines of one’s own soul, as well as among other people.
Genie—genius—is the combination of possibility and potential, and extreme constraint.
