Freedom through Responsibility

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Pearson’s personality archetypes, particularly the Sage, which is at odds with some of the other stuff I’m writing about and requires a different approach, so I can’t get these thoughts out without really going into this separately.

One of the interesting things about the Sage is that they’re often associated with a lot of somber, rules-oriented thoughts, but many of the heroic examples of the Sage are going to be characters that enjoy their lives quite a bit. They’re not Puritans–or at least not Arthur Miller’s unhappy, scheming Puritans–but rather they’ve discovered freedom that is deeper than mere anarchic desire.

To the wise Sage, true freedom comes through responsibility, through recognizing the path that leads away from evil (however one wants to define evil; I’m a big fan of the simplified “infliction of deliberate harm” method as a short-hand), and through following the rules required to do what is right.

In a sense, the Sage who isn’t a total flaming wreck recognizes that there are rules that they need to follow, but that these rules serve an end. With that knowledge in mind, they can do something that is more potent than just going after perfect adherence to the rules that govern them.

The reason why this is important is that a mature Sage discovers the freedom to do what they need to do without having it consume them. They know what costs actually reside beneath the surface of their actions, and they can take responsibility for them. They make informed decisions that provide them with a brighter outlook for tomorrow than what was had for today.

This is part of living a happy, fulfilled life, and it is only possible when one finds meaning, or purpose. Victor Frankl, the famous psychologist and Holocaust survivor, notes that many of his patients made a tremendous recovery from devastating depression or anxiety when they were able to find a sense of purpose.

The Sage can find that purpose, and they hunt for the way to fulfill the role they must take on.

When they do this, they are freed from doubt, uncertainty, and all matter of trivial privations. They face challenges that are worth overcoming, and never created by their own mistaken actions.

However, without that core, there is nothing to guide life, and no reason to do anything other than live in the moment. It is responsibility, to society, to others, even to ourselves, that gives us hope.

This responsibility can’t be handed down from above, like the disastrous totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century attempted to do. Like over-sweetened foods, the efforts of these ideologies to control their prisoners often revolved around the notion of purpose–that the individual’s responsibility lies in the collective.

But it is only a small fraction of people, if any, who can find purpose for themselves in the machinations of such a regime. Real purpose is found through introspection, exploration, learning.

Too often we see people living lives of chaos. Their goals are unset, their purpose unclear. Devoid of responsibility they embrace only oblivion. This may provide some momentary satisfaction, but it never compares to the products of finding and accepting a purpose.

Likewise, it is important to remember that purpose is about finding something outside of the self. While self-improvement can be a valid route to purpose (for instance, I find that my current attempts to lose weight have a high amount of meaning in my life), it is not enough in and of itself. My weight loss is meaningful to me because it gives me an ability to pursue my other sources of purpose–writing, God, teaching–rather than as an end of itself.

To bring us back to the topic of the Sage, we can consider this: if you have purpose, but no rules to live by, you will be no more likely to achieve your goals than someone with no rules. Small challenges can be overcome by instinct; otherwise our species would have died out a long time ago.

Meaningful challenges–the ones that give us a reason to exist–require us to embrace the wisdom that comes with accepting our limitations. That includes knowing when to subordinate our judgment about what is right and wrong, which can become corrupted by our desires, to established codes (I’m religious, so you can take a wild guess as to how I do this), and also acknowledging the limitations of our perceptions.

However, the Sage goes beyond this: you do not just embrace the limits, but also what they allow you to do. It’s about recognizing the merits of the rules, which also allows you to find whether or not the rule itself has value. It’s very easy to know the consequences of the rules, and what the rules present, but when you can point to a rule and say what it does for you, it will be more effective.

Power, Restraint, and Generosity

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be good.

There’s no particular impetus for this, but I’ve stumbled upon a few things that I think might be of interest to people, and help explain some of the things that I believe could make the world a better place.

Goodness is difficult to define, but it’s easy to define evil: doing intentional harm.

Goodness, then, as the opposite of evil, can be loosely defined as doing intentional benefit.

I’m not some epic sage for the ages (or at least I don’t have pretenses of being one), but that’s a sufficient starting point to move onto my next idea.

We live in a day and age where power is feared. Power corrupts, we are told, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

However, there are very few people who give up power to pursue goodness. There are some, admittedly, who like Tolstoy give up everything and go after a state of renewed innocence, but the ascetic route doesn’t work for most people.

I personally don’t even think it’s necessarily good: there are noble ideas behind it, but it’s disastrous in execution.

If we look at the story of Genesis, there’s a moment in creation where humans are little more than God’s perfect creations; made in His image, but not capable of defying Him.

It is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that grants this decision making quality, and it is quite often described as having the potential for both good and evil.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/William_Blake_-_The_Temptation_and_Fall_of_Eve_%28Illustration_to_Milton%27s_%22Paradise_Lost%22%29_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/807px-William_Blake_-_The_Temptation_and_Fall_of_Eve_%28Illustration_to_Milton%27s_%22Paradise_Lost%22%29_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
“The Temptation and Fall of Eve”, by William Blake

This is a key point not just of the transformation of humanity in a practical sense (since evil now exists in the world, where it had not before), but also a metaphysical transformation.

Before the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was tasted, humans had only one job: to exist in companionship with God. It was innocence in its most perfect form.

Being powerless, especially by choice, is akin to this state of innocence. Orthodox Christian beliefs indicate that this state of innocence will happen after God returns to purify and save the world, and many utopian thinkers have drawn on a notion that they can achieve this sanctification of humanity on earth (this is not unique to Christianity; similar tenets exist in Eastern religions and in a variety of philosophies).

The problem lies in the fact that evil (defined, for reference, as intentionally caused harm) is a very real presence in the world. We can see its results, certainly, all around us; the decay and entropy of the world push people toward it, and the consequences both of action and inaction can be dramatic. Increasingly we have moved toward social schemes and political machines that attempt to remove the symptoms of evil from our world.

If you’re an optimist or a (little-r) romantic, you might preach that the power of good will always triumph over evil. If you’re a utopian, you might try to remove evil as a force entirely.  More dangerously, you might try to hide the outcomes of evil without doing anything to confront it.

I must confess that I am not an optimist. Evil is real, and it often “wins” from certain perspectives. The horrors of the 20th century, and the incredible displays of evil it contained, show that even though we might see some momentary waves of goodness, we’ll never fully eradicate evil, and we’re very prone to forgetting what it matters.

But I’m also not a utopian, and I don’t like hiding evil. There are millions–maybe even billions–of bodies that ought not to be buried. We move on, planning and scheming, trying to forget that humanity is capable of error.

However, we’re also capable of good, and I believe power is the only way to achieve goodness.

I don’t mean any one sort of power.

Power and Restraint

The pursuit of power has proven tragic more often than not, and people trying to be good without fully realizing what it means to be good can wind up committing evil acts and denying their nature, engaging in self-deception and becoming corrupt. This is especially likely when people focus on one type of power over all others (e.g. “I need to be President so I can fix X”) or view power as a zero-sum game and feel they need to take it from others. Making decisions for others on a large-scale is a great example of something that can cause “good” in the world, but also lead to a lot of damage in the long run, either because the decisions were faulty or the mechanisms of gaining power will later be abused (or, worse yet, both!).

Pursuing power must follow, not precede a pursuit of wisdom and discernment. Power must be checked by understanding, a realization that good intentions alone are not enough to protect from evil (and, for that matter, avoid doing actions that lead to or enable evil), and those who pursue power must take every care to ensure that their methods of doing so do not constitute evil themselves.

For instance, violence never leads to power without bringing evil. I am not trying to argue for pacifism, however: there may be times when those with power need to use force to stave off evil.

However, let us consider for a moment the implications of this. If I were to use force (and force and violence are intrinsically linked) to become the only provider of electricity because I provide clean power, and my opponents provide power that is dirty, I’m gaining my power through corrupt, evil means.

I place upon myself the responsibility for all of the consequences of my actions. If I am unable to supply enough power, people may die. This doesn’t even necessarily consider the people who lose things because of the force that I exert upon them (or convince someone else to exert upon them). Perhaps they recognize that their actions could be damaging the world, but they are doing everything in their power to redress these concerns, or have done a thorough analysis and found that the damage is not in excess of the benefits.

On the other hand, those who prepare themselves ahead of time and bring power into their possession through means that do not impose on others through independence, self-reliance, cooperation, and voluntary exchange have prepared themselves to be free to use their power in ways that directly confront evil.

Take, for instance, someone who uses a firearm to stop a mass shooter. It would be nothing short of an argument for society-scale suicide to say that their actions are evil. They are using threatened (if the shooter surrenders) or real violence to put an end to evil actions occurring around them.

The Christian faith teaches that the “meek shall inherit the earth”, and we hear that a lot when people talk about using force and power. After all, power reflects ambition and ambition can be a path to evil. This falls apart when one considers that in Greek, the word that is often translated as “meek” (πραεῖς [praeis]) refers to the notion of power under restraint.

Naturally, something can be said for imposing restraints on those who lack them, but this needs to be done with utmost care and caution. It must be a process of reaching a conclusion that unfitness has been demonstrated, not a lack of demonstrated fitness, as the restraint needed to responsibly exercise power is often an internal quality and not easily assessed by outsiders.

The absolute destruction of a person’s power (self-inflicted via ascetic lifestyle or not) is the destruction of any sort of meaningful self, and the destruction of praeis in the individual’s life. I believe strongly that everyone has value, and that people should not be restricted from earning power unless they demonstrate a clear intent to use it for evil. This is a consequence of the belief that freedom is required for any action to be “good”.

Consider the following scenario:

A child refuses to share with friends. The parent, mortified, forces his child to share. Ultimately, whatever should be shared is shared, but only by coercion and the child is embittered.

Nobody will argue that the child forced to share has done a great moral act. The force used may not be particularly harmful. In some cases, it could show that power is a means to get people to do what you want and encourage that behavior down the road, but I think the more likely lesson is that people use power to enforce behavioral norms.

However, this event doesn’t reflect an end of evil. There is no evil being done by the child. Not wanting to share is not intentionally harming others; there are times we deliberately do not share that have a benefit on society and the world (toothbrushes being a puerile example, and spouses being a more complex one).

Even if sharing wouldn’t cause any harm, however, the child is not brought to commit the good act of sharing to benefit others, or even to the awareness that selfishness can become (emphasis on can become, not necessarily is) a catalyst to evil acts.

It is restraint when seeking power, and restraint in using power, that enables goodness.

Generosity: When Power can be Good

I mentioned earlier that our definition of goodness as causing deliberate benefit is too simple to be useful.

Self-interest generally gets in the way of  goodness. This is why the wanton pursuit of power, especially when it is taken away from other people. Restraint involves knowing when it is acceptable to use power for self-interest (which is not inherently good), and when to use it to actively pursue good.

When power is used to acquire more power, it is the generosity and restraint of the individual acquiring the power that determines whether the outcome will turn out for good and for evil.

Generosity is not the only time power can be used for good. We want people who have demonstrated virtues to have the power at their disposal to protect us from evil (and to use our own power for the same purpose), and we wish to see power used to instill virtues and eradicate vices and the situations that cause people to commit evil out of necessity.

Generosity, however, is the act of giving power to promote power in those who need help. I’m a believer in the power of charity, the ability of an individual to invest in someone else for the sake of that person’s betterment. Hugo’s Les Miserables is a great example of the ways that this can play out.

Generosity is not blind giving, however. It is actually possible to create evil in this manner. There are many places where it is not economical to create goods and provide services because they are so heavily subsidized (as many third-world farmers can attest), simply because people who think that they are helping continue to send shipments of “free” goods and “charitable” services without any concern for the effect that has on development.

If so-called generosity impedes others gaining the power they need to achieve goodness, it’s nothing more than bondage. When executed competently, it’s little more than using force to fight against evil–a noble goal, but not one that is inherently good–and with incompetent execution is ignorant or, in some cases, malicious because it denies dignity and power to others. It is not a coincidence that the best charities stress training and equipping their beneficiaries, and may be selective in who they help, and that despite many government’s massive efforts to help people, which are often entirely well-intended, they rarely are considered a force for good in the world (try this at home: ask someone what the top five forces for good in the world are).

Generosity involves not just using power to help others, but making good decisions in how to do so. Virtue is learned by example, and generosity is a virtue.

Power and the Choice of Goodness

Power is a force for good when that power is used to deliberately benefit others. Removing power removes the ability of people to be generous.

More importantly, however, it ignores the reality of evil and goodness at its core. The complete abolition of power would lead to the entropy of the world taking over, and the monopolization of power in the hands of a trusted few is little better.

Instead, power linked to consciousness–knowing what a person is able to do and what good is–provides our only path to a better world, and is, perhaps, even a moral responsibility. Not only must an individual build their own power, but they should seek to empower others, not based on conditions but as a general course of action.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reader Response Theory

One thing that used to bother me as a writer is that I would always have a point I wanted to make, and not really know how to make it.

My attempts to be obvious were heavy-handed and artless, and when I was subtle I found that the stories I wanted to tell didn’t say what I wanted to say.

This was the cause of no mean frustration for me, since younger me wanted to make a point with everything, to the point of ultimately giving up and writing either stuff that I considered meaningless drivel or stuff that was so chock-full of symbolism and heavy-handed ideas that it lacked any real development or originality.

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The Importance of Reading

Since beginning a voyage of self-improvement in March, I’ve read 200 articles and at least 10 books just for the sake of reading more.

I spend at least one hour every day dedicated solely to reading, and I spend a fair amount of time reading stuff written by people who are wrong disagree with the beliefs that I hold.

And I’ve noticed a few positive trends in my life.

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Learning from Barbara Bush

This past week, First Lady Barbara Bush passed away. Her passing has left a major impact on the news cycle, but also in the hearts and minds of many Americans and even people overseas who have come to realize what a legacy one woman had on the nation and the world.

I’m not someone who writes about politics very often. I’m pretty apolitical, at least in public, so I don’t want this to stand as a striking endorsement or condemnation of any policy. In any case, I have no living memory of the Bush (senior) Administration. What I am writing about is based strictly on my reflections on the accounts of people who knew Barbara Bush during her life.

What I write is based on what I have heard her character described as, but the reports are so consistent and so broad that I have no doubt in their veracity.

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Principles: An Antidote to Deception

I was reading an article on Vox this morning about the  advent of realistic and easily accessible “fake” tools, which allow for the creation of altered video and images with relatively high rates of accuracy, relatively low resources required, and the vast expanse of the internet with which to spread them.

This is a very real concern as we head into the 21st century. Our lives have become controlled by society (whether we like it or not), and if society is controlled by deception, what chance do we have to really have to live our own lives in a good way?

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Happiness

While I was drinking my tea today (apple, if anyone’s interested), I had an interesting realization.

I have been happier in the final weeks of March and April than I have been at any other time in my adult life. Probably more so than at any point in my adolescent life, either.

Some of this has to do with a spiritual re-awakening, since I’ve been more involved in my church and the Scriptures, but a lot of it has to do with simple changes to my life.

I write about two to three thousand words a day on average. I’m more or less equally productive on my previous projects, but I have taken up blogging regularly.

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Learning from Man’s Search for Meaning

I’ve been reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (affiliate link) recently and I’ve been struck by how powerful his account is. I was turned off by the foreword of my edition, which I found fairly stuffy and difficult to process.

Once you get into Frankl’s work, however, the power of it is incredible. He is honest, open, and incredibly transparent in what he felt. He does nothing to diminish his own guilt or paint himself as a hero, but instead acknowledges with clinical precision how he acted and felt during the Holocaust and the horrors that had enveloped him. Although a prisoner, he refuses to be a victim.

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Living in History

Life does not exist in a vacuum. Every living organism is the product of complex chemical and biological mechanisms that we are just beginning to truly understand.

Minds, likewise, do not exist in a vacuum. Our days do not unfold in a vacuum: they are not sequences of events disconnected and disengaged from each other.

Yet we live, for the most part, like our actions do not connect to reality. We pretend that the events that unfold around us are something that we have no control over.

We pretend that we have no history and no past, because it lets us shape our future according to our whims and our fantasies.

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The Writer as Stoic

Stoicism is an important philosophy in the founding tenets of the Western world; it is frequently tied into Christianity owing to the religion’s nature as part of a Roman tradition (albeit one that grew to outstrip the political entity that eventually adopted it).

Stoicism involves the pursuit of morality and virtue above all else (which certainly helps explain its appeal to Christian scholars who saw a link between it and the teachings of their faith, leading it to be preserved for centuries with a great deal of fervor as a sort of secular proof of the rightness of a moral life).

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