Tom's Views

It takes more than just effort to outperform our parents, though many compliment themselves for their sheer effort and tenacity that they say was solely responsible for their higher success.  Then, they blame those who do not outperform their parents for being too lazy and not putting forth enough effort.  However, while many achieve in life roughly what their parents did, this does not necessarily mean that they’re lazy.  Now it’s clear that in recent generations especially, more children than not manage to achieve higher living standards than did their parents; greater education, more wealth, better health care, safer neighborhoods, more opportunities, and so on.  So an expectation has grown up that anyone who does not outperform his parents by improving upon their lifestyles, is simply lazy and thus, flawed.

Certainly, a willingness to try is needed to outperform our parents. But like the flour in a chocolate cake (which is not the only ingredient necessary for creating a great-tasting cake by the way), voluntary effort is not the only component in the cake of success. We must also consider those inborn and nurtured traits like talent, ambition, aptitude, nutrition, and so many other qualities that impact the amount of effort required to succeed.  What we are born with and born into greatly impacts the amount of effort we must exert subsequently in order to outperform our parents economically and socially. 

Thus, we should be careful when judging people stuck in their traditional castes, because they’re likely fighting and succumbing to forces that we can not see. People all-too-quickly dismiss a person’s fatalism or resignation to his current life standard, as a simple unwillingness to pull himself up by his bootstraps and work hard to outperform his parents. True, some types would benefit from some good old fashioned tough love and forced discipline. But others have good reasons for their resignation and “laziness,” such as the profoundly disabled or the neglected.  We could enhance our own compassion for them by remembering that willful sloth (a voluntary choice to be lazy) is but a small part of all the apathy out there. Some people because of how they were raised, are just not cut out to achieve more greatness than their parents did.  The forces that converged upon them in their lives do not allow it. 

Finally, why are so many so opposed to acquiescing to more powerful forces than their own wills? I suppose that the succumbing to tradition indeed sounds a lot like God’s followers yielding their destinies to Him and his plan without question. I agree that this superstition is not healthy for a society. A truly enlightened culture would have no need to do it, and I regret that I won’t live long enough to see our society reach a total freedom from religion.  Yet many strong religious believers refuse to acknowledge the deep impact of child rearing in how much a child is able to outperform his parents.  They believe in an unseen God, yet downplay these objectively measurable forces.  Though the existence of God in my view has not been proven, there earthly forces have been.  In fact, these can be just as godly in power and scope, in determining how far we can outperform our parents.

Our challenge as humans is to discern which success limiters out of the complete set of forces, are mere phantoms, which are truly formidable yet beatable, and finally, which ones are simply too strong to overcome at all. A philosopher from antiquity – I don’t remember his name – said, essentially, that we need a healthy supply of   resignation   during life’s journey. Otherwise, we overestimate our capabilities, struggle to achieve excessively lofty goals, and therefore spend too much time disappointed. People need to know when it’s time to give up, and in order to know that, they must realize that, contrary to the moral of that   Little Engine That Could   story, quitting a particular pursuit is very often the best course of action.  For more discussion on this point, please see my   We Cannot Achieve Just Anything We Want   post.

Back to the original discussion about people outperforming their parents: Some folks fail to outperform those from previous generations because of factors beyond their control.  Thus, acrimoniously judging them is certainly not good, as it blames them for that which they cannot have power over, and wrongfully assumes that they can be in charge of things that they really cannot.  The blame in this case is therefore misplaced.  We need to stop this sort of misdirected blaming to improve our abilities at getting along with and accepting each other. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Accepting Limitations
• Are Self-Starters Privileged
• Book Of Job Lesson: Accept Your Plight
• Case For Tradition
• Fighting Fate To Get Rich
• Free Will, Yes, But Determinism Too!
• Hereditary Baggage
• If You Think You Can
• On Our Parents Defining Our Destiny
• Rising Above One’s Raising
• The Bonds Of Manifest Destiny
• We Cannot Achieve Just ANYTHING We Want

Dear [Mentat],

Certainly there is a degree of   free will   associated with self-actualizing people [referencing here Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. And until science can better quantify the proportions of what is   determinism   and what is  free will,   this debate will continue.

However, we can’t dismiss the  part of what a person accomplishes that is beyond his control.  This part is, though not measurable, a big piece of the accomplishments pie. The following will hopefully illustrate the non-voluntary parts, the  determinism   or   fate,   of any success:

• Did you choose your country of origin? No way. No free will here.  Yet clearly, where a person begins life strongly affects what he subsequently achieves. Americans come pre-bundled from the womb with more opportunities than third-worlders from Africa or the South Pacific, where chances for advancement, not to mention the diversity of disciplines one might pursue, are drastically limited.
• Did you make yourself blind? No! Again, where’s the free will in this?  Yet your overall productivity was severely impacted by your blindness. See my    Blind Hardships   post for a discussion of how blindness can seriously impact numerous dimensions of normalcy in a person’s life. 
• Did you choose your aptitudes? Again, no! Free will must have taken a vacation when innate aptitude was divvied out.  As we’ve discussed at length in our talks about Maslow’s work, people don’t seem to choose their motivations. Do they discover them? Perhaps. But they don’t choose them. If you don’t want to do something, all the free will in the world won’t make you into a world-class performer at it. Since we don’t control very much at all what we want and need, and since our desires overwhelmingly influence our proficiency at various endeavors, we therefore can only take a small part of the total credit for our accomplishments. Without desire, accomplishment of things of a higher complexity than routine tasks becomes unlikely, if not impossible.
• Did you pick how tall you are, the color of your skin, or the texture of your hair? Absolutely not. No free will again.  Studies have shown that a short person is less likely to have children or lead corporations, again, through no fault of his own. Sometimes, there may in fact, be nothing inadequate about a person’s motivation or effective efforts. Yet he still won’t win the prize if he’s too short. Not every hardship can be overcome by willfully pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps, contrary to conservative opinion. The presence of   prejudice   significantly mitigates one’s responsibility for his own successes. 
• Did you choose your parents, or the quality of rearing you received from them? Nope. Yet child psychologists agree that the single biggest influence in a child’s ultimate development is his parental structure – specifically, for boys, it’s the father who affects their growth most profoundly, and for girls, it’s the mother.  So where was the free will in this?
• Did you have any say in the fact that you were born with all your legs, arms, fingers, and toes? I don’t think so. Like vision, the absence or deformity of any of these affects the set of potential accomplishments we’re likely to achieve.  All the free will in the world would not completely compensate for a missing arm or leg; not in this day and age anyhow. 
• Can you take any credit for the fact that you were born with good hearing? No. Often, people site the accomplishments of that Miss America, Heather Whitestone McCallum, in the 1990s who was deaf. True, her will and tenacity were essential ingredients in her success. However, these were just two of many ingredients. Had her mother not worked with her for over twelve hours each day as a child to teach her communications skills and poise, I’m sure that this woman would not have become Miss America, no matter how completely and effectively she devoted herself to the task.  Though Heather exhibited a lot of will, her free will was just s part of what made her successful. 

My point is that no person ever achieves greatness entirely on his own free will.  Thus we humans cannot escape reliance on factors beyond our control to win. Survey after survey shows the high extent to which these attributes of determinism influence the types and degrees of successes we achieve. People come into this world with certain gifts as well as  crosses to bear,   and they have absolutely no control over just what that set is. They can decide (to a measure) what to do with these gifts. But what nature bestows is indeed, from the person’s perspective, a luck of the draw.  It’s fate.  It’s determinism. 

It’s true that a person who has achieved self-actualization did not do so entirely through luck. But a large part of his success is  indeed  luck, since his success rests on many pillars, of which only a few fall into the free will category. While luck is not a sufficient condition for success, it is a necessary condition.

See my   Accepting Our Personal Limitations   piece for a discussion about how detrimental it can be to assume too much personal responsibility for our natural limitations, and why it might be better to accept more of them.   

We should therefore not underestimate the importance of determinism, in driving how successful we become.  In my view, determinism is at least as big a factor as the free-will component.

Take care.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Accepting Our Personal Limitations
• Blind Hardships
• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs
• More Than Effort To Outperform Our Parents
• Thoughts on Bigotry

References

• Determinism   definition on Wikipedia
• Fate   definition on Wikipedia
• Free Will   definition on Wikipedia
• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia

When judging a person, people say often that a person’s mental attractiveness should trump or overshadow his physical attractiveness  in anyone’s mind who is considering him as a possible lover.  Their reasons for this mental-over-physical ideology are varied and go something like the following:

• Beauty (physical attractiveness) fades over time but personality (mental attractiveness) is more permanent and so, is thus preferred.
• People drawn to bodies (physical attractiveness) care nothing about what’s in the mind (mental attractiveness).
• A man who is physically unattractive will probably have a much more attractive mind (mental attractiveness); so we should ignore his outsides (physical attractiveness) and focus on his insides (mental attractiveness).
• A person’s mind (personality) (mental attractiveness) is more under his control than is the state of his body (physical attractiveness). Thus his character (mental attractiveness) should mean more to someone checking him out than his bodily health (physical attractiveness).
• People who reject another because of his appearance (physical attractiveness or lack thereof) but do not at all consider his personality (mental attractiveness) in this decision, all have the same beauty standards, meaning that those rejected by one, will also be rejected by all.
• Judging another based solely on looks (physical attractiveness) is a bad thing because it ignores that better part of a whole person.  It ignores his personality (his mental attractiveness).
• There’s a prevailing expectation that people should be able to love another regardless of how physically pretty or ugly.
• People can choose who they desire, and so can be faulted if they refuse to date someone physically unattractive to them.

Well, it’s unclear as to whether someone’s mental powers are any less susceptible to the effects of aging than are their physical bodies. In fact, the brain (mind) I would argue is subject to the same forces of aging that the rest of the body is. Why would it not be? It’s a part of the same body after all.  It draws energy from the same blood supply that other body parts normally associated with physical beauty do. The brain grows tired when pushed too hard just as do the legs. The brain functions erratically, or stops functioning altogether when deprived of oxygen, calories, and nutrients; just as do breasts, arms, and feet.

Aside from being the place where a person’s higher mental functions occur, the brain is no different than the rest of the body in terms of what can happen to it over time. Damage to the brain such as found in head injuries, may do more harm to a person’s mental being than say, a blow to a leg would.

The brain therefore, is perhaps the most fragile organ in the body because it does so much, and can thus be damaged very easily even by an injury to a very small part of it.

The physical body may grow old, and that they say, makes physical beauty transitory and thus not a good commodity upon which to base a love relationship. But the brain can grow skeptical and forgetful too as it ages. It can become too rigid in its thinking, refuse to accept new knowledge, and the brain can be irreversibly made less attractive by traumatic experiences; experiences that leave the rest of the body unharmed so long as there’s no direct physical trauma applied.

Does the brain’s susceptibility to more catastrophic injuries make it less of a good measure of a man than his visible physical attributes? I think not. But nor does this make the body less of a measure either. A person’s rationale may escape him eventually through the use of alcohol or from his chronically poor choices of foods. Perhaps dumb is forever but smartness is certainly not. One may be smart in her twenties but quite dumb in her sixties just as one may be thin in his thirties but quite obese in his seventies. People once considered very intelligent often lose their mental faculties over time; they lose their memories and cognitive abilities as diseases like atherosclerosis and Alzheimer’s run their courses.

So the brain suffers no less from the process of aging than any other body part.  Aging does not exempt the brain. Thus those cerebral qualities (mental) that people regard as the better measure of a man than his apparent physical attributes, can be just as short-lived as that sexy set of six-pack abs (physical) or those wonderfully proportioned curves (physical).

Exercise the body and it thrives and looks nice. Exercise the brain, and it too thrives and produces an attractive personality. But allow either of these to go limp for too long and both will wither. Thus in my view, the brain is no more impervious to the ravages of living than is the rest of the body.

So why would the personality, which emanates from the brain, be any greater a measure of a person’s attractiveness than any other physical part? In the end, every part of a person dies, including the brain. There’s nothing about the brain that makes it any more permanent than any other part of the body. So I just don’t get why people put guys down for liking other body parts in addition to the brain.

The mind (mental attraction) is certainly not always the better part of the person than the rest of her body (physical attractiveness). Some out there have some pretty simplistic or ugly minds; whether they’re visually beautiful or ugly (physical attractiveness). There are some whose minds are such that, rather than getting into deep conversations with them, I’d just as soon hold hands, and say nothing at all. I appreciate a good mind when there’s one around. But if it’s not there, it’s not fair for anyone to expect me to relish it.

Since the brain (mental attractiveness) is just another part of the body (physical attractiveness), it is just as subject as the rest of the host body is to change and deterioration.  So I believe that the mind (mental attractiveness) of a person is no better a measure of his overall attractiveness than his good looks (physical attractiveness).  Nature and nurture affect both and whatever desirable affects on a lover that the mind and body have, are largely granted by destiny, and either or both will eventually be snatched away too. 

Tom Hesley

There’s a popular rule that says essentially that whether you think you can or cannot, you’re right. 

Related Posts

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Once upon a time, blacks sharing the same water fountains as whites appeared to violate prevailing standards of conduct, probably because so many people found the idea blatantly repugnant. So, the question is: Did the mere presence of a standard make this behavior right? Standardizing does not make right any exclusionary or discriminatory behaviors that it promotes, even when widespread feelings of repugnance create it. Indeed to bring about real and lasting harmony amongst all people, any standards that wrongfully deny a group the same enjoyment of life as everyone else, even if many think it repugnant, become hindrances. So, they should be rooted out and abolished.

You may define any standard you wish and then claim it to be “right” if you also provide supportive but nonetheless arbitrary definitions. If you say for example that God is always just because He is the ultimate authority who determines what justness is, then there’s no logical way to refute that. No matter what He does, you say He’s always right, even when what he does might be wrong. Job’s story in the Bible hints at God’s arbitrary rightness.  But in issues of real-life discrimination, arbitrary definitions and public majority opinion, might does not always make right.

It’s easy to devise capricious definitions to exclude any group you wish from life’s higher pleasures; especially when these definitions are based on prejudice, doctrine, and common reactions of repugnance, as opposed to unbiased observation and fact-based conclusions. But where’s the objective proof that homosexual relationships harm society any more than straight ones?   I have yet to see it.

In fact, the Catholic-sanctioned “straight” relationship (marriage between a man and a woman) only seems to work at best, fifty percent of the time, and this only counts the failed marriages that actually end in divorce. Many marriages go on for years that really should end immediately; the partners stay together unhappily for the rest of their lives due to doctrine, financial limitations, and other compelling reasons. Statistically, these “walking dead” marriages are considered successful just because the couple is still together; not because they’re   happily together.

How can this be good for society? I don’t believe that it can.  So I say that if some people can have more fulfilling relationships as gays, then it would be best for society over all to support them, and not pressure them via discriminatory laws and practices, into heterosexual marriages. 

Who’s to say whether gays can fully experience the sorts of loving relationships that God intended for man-woman couples? Many gays I know seem to live very full and happy lives; they raise well-adjusted children, and are highly productive besides. Yes, they do break up from time to time.  But so do heterosexual couples.  So this dissolution does not fairly and uniquely characterize gay relationship.  That is: You can’t justify depriving gays of their marriage rights by claiming that homosexual relationships are bad for society because they end.  That’s silly. 

Gays do not choose to be gay any more than straights decide to be straight. At least, science and religion have not thus far objectively established choice as a significant factor in driving this. In fact, there’s mounting evidence to the contrary.  

So given all this, I’m inclined to challenge doctrine and dogma on the curtailment of a gay person’s rights to fully pursue his happiness. Stop denying them, people!

For further discussion on this gay marriage rights topic, see my   Support Same Sex Marriage Freedom   piece. 

Tom Hesley

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Children can indeed break out of their parents’ wakes, and accomplish something totally different either in form or degree of contribution than their parents.  There are indeed other ways to be successful than just imitating the techniques that parents used to become successful.  But the further from these already-blazed paths the children go, the greater the hardships they’ll likely incur due to the following:

• Children must learn things that their parent’s did not teach them.  I suspect that the earliest lessons a child learns become the most indelible to him. These lessons typically come via his parents. But the farther removed from parental beliefs, values, philosophies, skills, life styles and such that the child’s aspirations force him to go, the more he’ll need to learn once he’s older, that he didn’t learn when he was very young and much more pliable.  Learning later in life is more difficult than as a young child, and thus parents are in the best position to impart   their   ways to the child because they’re his first teachers, during the years when he is most impressionable. 
• Children must _unlearn_ things their parents taught them.  Again, should the child wish to pursue a career requiring contradictory values to his parents’, he must work (sometimes extensively) to overcome the weights of those initially learned values. 
• Children must sometimes defend their departing from the family ways to siblings and relatives.  This can be an ongoing and emotionally wrenching task, particularly in tightly knit immediate and extended families like those found in the Jewish community.  Family members will argue, jeer, and judge, and this can frighten the children into doing what their parents did, just to avoid the ridicule.  Few entrepreneurial-spirited children want to be the subject of such tribulations.  So, many opt to abandon their dreams of a different discipline, choosing instead to practice as their parents would have them practice.   
• If their choice of careers is controversial within the family, children will receive less support (academic, financial, spiritual, and otherwise) from their family groups.  If the parents are rich, and would have otherwise significantly subsidized the child’s education, they may not, if he chooses not to do what they did or what they’d prefer he do.  This can seriously degrade the child’s chances of reproducing and improving upon the parents’ financial successes, without his parents helping him or her.
• Once children start a divergent career, they’ll have less in common with their families, and may in fact have so little in common with them that he wishes no longer wishes to attend family functions like Sunday dinners, football afternoons, and so on.  So unless he starts up his own family, he may have to walk as a lonely person as a result.  This may not seem like such a big deal if you don’t espouse family values.  But for those who do, this is nearly unthinkable.  The absense of family contributes much to the feelings of loneliness in lonely people. 
• Often, a different career means that children must relocate, typically, a great distance from home.  This implies that their parents can’t help as much with household mishaps, babysitting, or other types of familial support that would normally take place if they lived close by.
• Children must contend with cultural differences between where they grew up and where they’re living currently.  I experienced this one myself.  Me the liberal moved to Dayton, Ohio, which is located less than an hour from the conservative capital of the country, Cincinnati.  The numerous debates I had with my coworkers and ham radio operators in the area were lively to be sure.  But they also stressed me, and I couldn’t rightly claim that they were very much fun, except of course when I won. 

Now I’m not suggesting that any of these complications either taken separately or together is insurmountable.  Indeed, children surpass thier parents’ success and status levels all the time, taking completely different paths to success than did their parents.  But these potential hardships do complicate life significantly for the child wishing to avoid the nepatism, strike out on his own, and not follow in his parents’ footsteps.  As such, these handicaps should be given due consideration when offspring choose careers which are very much different from their parents’.

Tom Hesley

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Often, people excessively blame others (or themselves) when success eludes them, as though we’re solely responsible for our successes.  I’d suggest however that there’s a   chance component   to success as well, particularly when mass competition for few rewards is fierce.  Watch the Grammies or the Oscars for example, and you’ll hear performer after performer thanking God above for providing those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities which were instrumental in the achievements of those stars. 

Those who regard their successes with thankfulness and humility truly understand that much of their good fortune did not arise from their own doings.  They appreciate the chance part of success.  For competitive successes, only so many people can win.  Practically all of those who try for positions of renown (for millionaire status for example) fall short.  For each person who enjoys the good life, thousands more do not.  So it seems like the highest positions of financial success are reserved for a very small few. 

This reminds me of my years in Amway.  I don’t remember the exact numbers but I believe that in order to achieve “Silver” status in the company, a person and the people beneath him in his pyramid had to sell ten thousand dollars of [in my opinion] substandard and expensive merchandise per month.  A Diamond member began receiving the residual incomes that so many people want these days, myself included. 

But as it was, higher rewards got harder to reach.  The hill that lead to the top got steeper and steeper, the higher up you went.  It was like this at [work] as it is in any competitive situation.  In our system of business, there’s only room at the top for a very small percentage of the people who strive to get there.  So when a person falls short, there may be nothing wrong with him.  It could just be that Lady Luck favored someone else more, or that there just wasn’t room at that table-at-the-top for him. 

Thus, striving for financial success is a long-shot gamble at best, and because of this, I suggest that once again, we have to limit the amount of kudos we attribute to successful people, and our reverence toward them.  We also should blame people less when they fail, because for most every successful person and business, luck played a significant part of getting them to that point.  Without that chance piece that favored them, there would be far fewer successful businesses I’m sure.

Tom Hesley

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Some of life entails defying the odds, that’s true. However, in the healthy person, another big part of it involves determining and then  accepting limitations.

Accepting limitations, a healthy supply of resignation regarding things we can’t easily change, is essential for sustained happiness. Today we spend too much time teaching people how to push excessively hard against their natures, and not enough time on how to be happy with what they have. As a result, society is chalk full of stressed-out, depressed, unhappy, and therefore, unhealthy people because they’ve not learned sufficiently well how to accept their   personal limitations.

Since we can’t objectively measure yet what a person’s real limits are, people tend with dogmatic fervor, to believe that such personal limitations do not exist or are way less formidable than they actually are. Many assume that what they don’t see   cannot exist.  We know well the Pollyanna-style rhetoric: You can do and be anything you want. To them, accepting limitations seems weak, lazy, whiny, and a sure sign of lacking personal responsibility and success potential. 

But like the blind person who wants to be an airplane pilot, history abounds with similarly fruitless pursuits.  When we fail at accepting our   personal limitations, we fail ourselves.  Would it be wise to conclude of the blind man, that he lacks enough of the value of   personal responsibility,   and that this is why he cannot fly an airplane?  I think not.   

We cannot realize much potential where there is little potential to start with. Failing to fully accept limitations can lead to chronic disappointment and senses of inadequacy.  Yet therapists get rich because patients enlist their aid to avoid even acknowledging their personal limitations. Therapists help them milk dry cows and to lessen the effects of the natural frustrations when the utter remains dry. In short: They pay therapists to help them avoid accepting their peronal limitations rather than simply owning up to them. 

Now it’s true that people would seem to be able to accomplish   more   with a therapist encouraging them, as evidenced by therapy’s growing popularity and increased success that’s attributed to it. But that’s so unnatural, and creates an unnecessary and costly dependence on the therapist. Indeed, I might have continued working [in the corporate world] if I’d wanted to keep seeing a therapist and refused to embrace my own personal limitations. But I wished not to remain tethered and reliant on therapy just to get me through the next week.

More people than ever before utilize the employee assistance programs these days, because society forces us to overly repress and cope via therapy with our personal limitations. But at some point, as happened with me, one must wonder how much of his success is due to his will and natural abilities, and how much comes via his therapist. Is he really succeeding if his therapist is always close by to pick him back up after a bruising confrontation with his personal limitations?  Yes, it appears that people are more successful these days. But this may be hollow success – a product of therapeutic propping as well as excessive collectivism and unhealthy conformance.

Currently, we can’t objectively measure how much each of nature, nurture, and choice contributes to personal success. No, our genes do not exclusively determine our behavior, but they do strongly influence it, and as time passes, we’re finding that they guide it more than previously thought. Even more so does the   combination   of genes and environment, particularly in the childhood years.  Personal limitatios do not derive exclusively from lackng willpower to overcome.  Some limits simply cannot be overcome, no matter how willfully we try. 

Again, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to do something different than what is born and nurtured into us. However, too drastically going against one’s grain, particularly in directions of lacking aptitude, can lead to a lifetime of alienation, disappointment, dependence on therapy, and unrealized potential in the areas in which one is   actually   suited to succeed.  We need to in some significant degree, embrace our natural abilities as well as accept our personal limitations as a  simple attribute of humanity

Now understand that I believe society should leave the individual to his dream quests. Despite the perceived long odds of a dream ever coming true, never should the desires of the individual be overpowered by   “the people”   so long as his pursuits aren’t harming anyone. But again, an enlightened society must also recognize that people that it deems unsuccessful are not always just lazy and dumb and avoiding accountability.  So they should not bear full personal responsibility for their failures. Perhaps they’re just fighting the forces of destiny; a fight that could be lessened by a healthy dose of acceptance of our limitations; both in ourselves and in others.  Society needs to better accept limitations of its members, just as members should accept limitations happily within themselves.  Maximal personal responsibility does not eliminate all personal limitations. 

Tom Hesley

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I’d point out that though more people would achieve higher levels of success if they pushed very hard against the sense that they’d fail (whether that impression is rational or otherwise), we should nonetheless, not ignore the negative impacts of blindly forging ahead without considering one’s built-in limitations.  Pushing yourself too far in defiance of your true desires and talents often results in the following effects:

• Increased incidents of mental illness, physical problems, and stress. Indeed, we’re seeing drastic upsurges in health issues and early deaths due to stress. Heck, people can’t even sleep the whole night through anymore without taking a pill. They can’t eat meals anymore without taking an antacid.
• Lowering of prevailing moral standards, which I suggest is due in large degree to decreased compassion for one’s neighbor. If we believe that people deserve what they reap because they reap what they sew, and that they reap what they sew because they have complete control of what they sew, then we’re less willing to empathize with another’s difficulties. Disregarding the complicatedness that they faced while sewing fosters a highly critical and judgmental attitude in how we regard our friends, family, coworkers, and lovers. It supplies us more reasons to suspect another of laziness, and then when we find anything that resembles laziness, we’re less likely to look beneath the surface to figure out whether that laziness actually results from willful and thus culpable belief patterns, or something less voluntary. When we hold people _too_ accountable for their choices without considering the involuntary nature of their motivations, we’re more likely to fight and argue with them, to form cliques, to wrongfully exclude, to bully, and generally become more difficult to interact positively with. Society as a result becomes less desirable to live in.
• More Conflict. Imagine yourself working on an auto assembly line. The boss wants you to record the colors of each passing car, because everyone else is too busy. Now wouldn’t it be ridiculous for him to ridicule you because you can’t tell colors apart if you were color blind? Such misplaced blame would tend to make you a little upset, particularly when that job shelters, clothes, and feeds you. We know that when the boss wrongly refuses to accept a person’s limitations as being beyond their control, the victims get angry, and sometimes violent. Not only on the individual level, but as a nation, we do this to our neighbors as well. I’ve heard people from abroad say repeatedly that America treats their own citizenry well, but regards the rest of the world as second-class people. America looks down its collective nose at foreigners and says, “Hmmmm, you really should believe and do things differently than you do, because we have no use for you if you don’t. Or we’ll kill you if we disagree strongly enough. It should be as easy for you to succeed as it is for us. And if it isn’t? Well then, that’s too bad. Your failures are your own fault.” This attitude certainly doesn’t make for peaceful coexistence, does it.
• Heightened sense of inadequacy.  When we’re not doing what we really wish we were, and when we’re attempting to do well what we wish we weren’t, we injure our self confidence.  If we choose a career because we think we’ll get rich, but lack the patience and tenacity to fully master its numerous mundane details, we still may perform satisfactorily at it; indeed, well enough to actually become rich.  But we would not find complete fulfillment in the pursuit, because we’d know deep inside that we’re not as qualified as we would be if we actually loved what we were doing, and felt at ease doing it.  It’s indeed easier to exude genuine self confidence while one utilizes his talents and desires rather than dismisses them due to the motive of money. 
• Dissatisfaction with work.

While it may be desirable for society to advance individually as well as collectively, we should not dismiss the pitfalls of such ill-gotten advances.   People attempting to compensate for lacking desire or talent in their career with sheer willpower to succeed at it is bad. Perhaps this [obsessive drive to achieve high degrees of success] at the cost of our deepest dreams and truest potential going unrealized, is hurting humanity.  Indeed, it’s not as noteworthy a force once we consider its downsides. 

Tom Hesley

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Humans cannot achieve just  anything   they want; at least, not always. They do have limits. 

Indeed, some, if they happen to want to achieve something great, can in fact accomplish that if they possess a set of desires and abilities that their particular genetics, upbringings, and living environments favor. But far more often, human desire reaches much further than its grasp.  This resembles a sort of collective neurosis fostered by unqualified motivational stories like   The Little Engine That Could. The upshot of this is that people waste a lot of time and money chasing dreams that, realistically speaking, they might never catch, and uncertainty and stress chases them the entire way as well. What a cruel and sad waste of human bandwidth!

One reason that we overestimate our abilities so much is that we don’t know yet how to precisely measure whether a person’s particular abilities (or lack thereof) come from nature, nurture, or from choices he makes to perform or not. Nor have we developed a meaningful test for this that would be equally accurate on all humans.  There’s no objective way yet, to measure talent. 

So, in the absence of such empirical data, the conservatives tend to underestimate one’s nature in importance, and overemphasize choice. To them, it’s more about a person’s behaviors than his desires and abilities.  Thus, they want to hold him fully accountable for his successes (and failures). I’m reminded of a school principal here in my hometown during my kindergarten through third grade years. One day, he said to my parents after I’d complained to him that the kids were making fun of me and the teachers were ignoring me, that all I needed was a good kick in the ass. He was a republican to be sure, and demonstrated no appreciation of the profound hindrances that low vision visits on a person [...]. Ignorant people like him, rather than encouraging the realization of a student’s maximal potential, actually quash it by insisting that the student reach too far beyond his means.

On the other hand, the liberals exaggerate the effects of nature’s role and nurture, but downplay choice (except of course, when it comes to the abortion issue). This shows itself in mothers who chronically de-emphasize their child’s motivational problems with statements like, “He just can’t help it.”

Neither of these views taken exclusively is correct because we can show that the motivation for actions comes both from    choice   and   nature.  But as I’ve said, we can’t measure how much of each impacts a particular behavior of a particular person. Someday, I hope that such measurements will happen routinely (that we’ll be able to better measure a person’s potential at birth). But in the meantime, we must in effect,   guess   about how much of a person’s behavior comes from choice as opposed to nature, and then attribute an appropriate amount of kudos for success, or blame for failure.  The widespread disagreement over where to place the fulcrum  creates much anger, hurt feelings, lost jobs, excess debt, broken hearts, fruitless pursuits, and failed dreams.

From my view point, it’s dangerous to err too far on the choice side because attributing misplaced blame elevates danger levels in society. I’m thinking of the gays, who unfortunately inspire hatred in many because   the many  feel that homosexuals are responsible for choosing how they feel, and then how they act. While the haters may be correct in a small way for blaming the gays for their actions, they’re just plain wrong in ridiculing them for their sexual orientations and expressing what they need to be sexually satisfied.

I insist therefore that we must scrutinize any belief system (whether it be religious or political) that generates this kind of boiling-over malice. The conservative belief that choice is by far the dominant component in a person’s behavior, while it may have pushed some to extraordinarily high success levels, is as I see it, quite destructive to most others. Since we can’t yet quantify the degree that free choice plays in one’s selection of behaviors to exhibit, I contend that we’d all be better off if we would compassionately err on the nature side of the argument when judging others.  We therefore should not expect that people can achieve   absolutely anything   they want, but rather, they can achieve what their skills, gifts, and desires allow of them. If they achieve less than we expect, perhaps we should judge them less harshly than is currently done. 

For more discussion along these lines, see my   Rising Above One’s Raising   piece. 

Tom Hesley

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