building character isn't about willpower or sacrifice
correcting mental errors makes acting with honor the most practical and self-interested choice
I always used to think that character was hard to build; that it required Herculean feats of self-restraint, sacrifice, and discipline to maintain and uphold. Others always seemed to be able to do the right thing far more consistently than I did, and it felt like it required tremendous effort for me to summon the courage and strength to exhibit character in difficult moments.
This perspective of character is built through many narratives Western society embellishes and holds dear, espoused through philosophies like Stoicism. Self-restraint is the pinnacle of evolution; our triumph of reason and intellect over our animal instincts. Character is depicted as an endless war in which we can’t afford to lose a single battle.
It was probably easier for people to view this as worth the effort back in the day when everyone was instilled with an existential fear of God’s wrath. “Do no wrong, OR ELSE!”. I don’t think many people think that way anymore. It’s especially harder nowadays when we constantly see stories of people achieving all forms of success despite acting dishonorably. Why is it worth it for us to put in the effort, when other people constantly take shortcuts? They’re not paying for their choices, right?
Viewed in this light, acting with character or honor seems decidedly impractical. It was a dilemma I could never really figure out. What value is there in doing the “right” thing, if such a thing even exists?
I think I’ve finally figured out the answer to that question: acting without character is deeply rooted in the degradation of all the things that are essential to your well-being. It is akin to punching yourself in the face. I think two simple and basic axioms prove this:
We are deeply embedded in the systems around us
The degradation of systems around us causes us harm
I’m going to reach into my biology bag real quick because I think it offers a great conceptual model to work from. I think about the chart below all the time:
It makes it so clear that we, as individual human beings, are not isolated from any of the things we are around. We are fully dependent on the healthy functioning of the subunits that make up our body, and the larger systems that we’re embedded within are fully reliant on our healthy functioning.
Cancer is a great model for this. At an abstract level, cancer occurs when one cell blows through its internal self-regulation systems and starts replicating at crazy rates that are harmful to the tissues and organs that it makes up. This action in turn contributes to the death of tissues and organs, which consequently leads to the death of the cancerous cell itself.
I think many things in life are similar to this:
Companies/organizations — when one team or individual prioritizes the growth of the independent unit at the expense of the growth of the company, the company will be harmed, which will contribute to the harm of the team or individual itself.
Companies in predatory relationships with their customers — when companies prioritize profit over the well-being of their customers (gambling, drugs, health insurance, etc.), their customers will be harmed, which will contribute to the harm of the company itself.
Relationships/friendships — when one individual prioritizes self-interest over the health of the relationship (i.e. lying), the relationship will degrade, diminishing the ability of the relationship to provide any value to the individuals making it up.
Cancel culture — a strange phenomenon that’s happened over the last few years where a sub-unit of the human population makes a judgment that they’re better off with the exclusion of certain humans whose health and well-being become irrelevant without seeing that this contributes to the degradation of humanity as a whole, which in turn contributes to the degradation of every single individual making up humanity. We’re all interdependent!
The biggest lie that people tell themselves is that they can thrive independently of the healthy functioning of the larger units they’re part of. When people fudge numbers to make their team look better in a company, they’re implicitly telling themselves that they’ll be isolated from the harm their actions will bring to their company. When people have affairs in relationships, they’re implicitly telling themselves that they’ll be isolated from the harm their actions will bring to the relationship. When people say awful things to other people, they’re implicitly telling themselves that they’re isolated from the harm their actions will bring to humanity as a whole.
These. are. all. lies.
I think about this email that Steve Jobs sent to himself a year before his death all the time:
In order for us to thrive as individuals, we must be part of thriving families, communities, populations, organizations, and more. Dysfunction is never isolated to one level of organization or complexity; it filters both down and up. I was listening to a talk by a clinical psychologist the other day, and he said that in all of his years of clinical practice, he had never once seen anyone get away with anything. Their ethical transgressions always caught up to them. Haunting! It’s like a new-age version of “Do no wrong, OR ELSE!” with a more scientific spin on it that abstracts away the idea of God’s wrath.
The exciting thing about all this is that it works both ways! Healthy action ripples up and down levels of organization and increases the likelihood that other subunits at your level of organization act in ways that are aligned with the health of all the systems you’re part of. It’s like a tuning fork; when one person vibrates at a certain frequency and acts aligned with a certain set of intentions, it’s much easier for other people to resonate and act with a similar set of intentions. This is why individual people like Gandhi, MLK, Mother Teresa, etc. had such a significant impact on the lives that they touched; they were able to heal larger systems that they were part of through their transformative leadership and mode of being, which consequently caused many people to individually heal and act aligned with their teachings.
One day I will be able to understand the mechanism behind all this (I think chaos and attractor theory have some interesting ideas on this matter that I really want to learn and understand). Right now, it is enough to simply know that it is true.
Digression aside, it’s starting to become eminently self-evident that my only hope of staying afloat is by trying my best to stay aligned with the principles of unconditional honesty, transparency, care, and compassion. Maybe they’ll change, but right now, they’re the best ones that I’ve found that help me act in ways that are globally or holistically healthy for everything I’m part of. Every time I slip up is another lesson in humility and another blind spot in my morality where I was prioritizing the health of sub-systems at the expense of larger things I’m embedded in; more grist for the mill.
The best part is that all of this hasn’t required constant effort and willpower! It only required me to see that any other way of being is self-torture; it has only required me to see all the harm that I was constantly inflicting on myself through my lack of perspective. I only wish someone told me all this earlier.
brilliantly put, thank you!