Powerlessness
Work hard, lose anyways
Freedom
I’m a fan of Libertarianism. I don’t identify with the label, mind you, but I’m a big fan of the ideas. Freedom from authority is how we thrive. Freedom from coercion and violence. Do what we want as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else, and leave us to choose our own destiny. Make it so that personal responsibility, and our own drives and strengths, are all that matter. Ideals to strive for. Things, I suspect, most of the folks in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran would love to be talking about.
Of course, they’re busy just trying to stay alive. Libertarianism is the belief that success should simply be a personal triumph and the world is extraneous to that. That success is a result of good old hard work, and seizing opportunities and assistance as they come along. Enlightened self-interest that leads to a utopia for those that choose to put in the work. I have always sort of thought that it was the most idealistic way of viewing the world I had ever encountered.
Like I said, I’m a fan. Looking at my personal results for the political compass you can see exactly that.
I encourage you to take the test, it is a very valuable use of a couple minutes and will help frame what’s to come…
The methodology for the test is interesting. As best I can tell, it takes propositions/vibes and then asks you to force-rank them as strongly disagree/agree or moderately disagree/agree. And then it moves that little red dot up or down, or left/right, a certain amount based on what you chose. The more “strong” your choices than the more extreme and the farther distance the red dot jumps. It would be very interesting to watch the dot move around the quadrants with each answer of an additional. It is also interesting to compare one’s test results to their placement of, for example, the 2024 Presidential candidates.
I am so far away from the candidates, especially on the Authoritarian/Libertarian index. I suspect that most of the people I associate with are also pretty far away from the candidates. Squirt’s results are far away as well…
In fact, his results are very representative of all the friends I’ve lightly polled about this very subject. At most there is some movement on the Left/Right axis but we’re all pretty Libertarian to one extent or another.
We all just want freedom to make our own choices.
But the nature of civilization is that we very rarely actually have this freedom. The nature of civilization is that we are frequently powerless. Sad, but true.
Civilization
It is not fair.
Injustices of every size spring up all over the place. The nepo baby gets the promotion over you. The suck-up gets handpicked for the big project over the superior employee. Extroversion and symmetrical faces are a demonstrable advantage out in the world. Different rules for the rich and the powerful. The Karens of the world largely face positive outcomes when throwing temper tantrums and being a Karen actually gives them strength. Squeaky wheels, right?
To rely so heavily on personal responsibility is to create an illusion of agency. That with the right approaches, stuff like “justice” and “fairness” are givens and being a strong individual leads to controlling your own life. This factored into my long explanation for why Squirt has to go to school even if School Sucks — but the gist is that civilization moves forward while trending towards mediocrity and there is little you can do but operate within that mediocrity.
This Sucks
Squirt remembers Covid but not like most folks reading this will. He didn’t really grok living in civilization before the pandemic. (Thanks Musk for fucking up what was a fantastic neologism from a good book). The world since Covid is wobbly and, I think, it’s because we all had to come face to face with powerlessness in a way that couldn’t be avoided anymore. For the modern developed world, it was a novel experience. Finding yourself in a warzone is another one of those unavoidable experiences where your powerlessness is smashed into your face over and over again. My meditation, such as it was, on the war in Iran is at least in part an appeal to realize that American hard power is an attempt for America to own our destiny in the face of any other nation’s power.
But things like this only ever move the needle a little bit. At an individual level there is very little power over our own lives specifically because we live in a society that is collective. A couple bad weeks from complete chaos. Unable to grow our food or build our own shelters. Few of us really grasp how to defend ourselves from violence, and of those that do we almost invariably overestimate our abilities. This is what specialization is. My ability to be a nerd is very valuable as long as there’s enough food to go around and no missiles flying and the plumbing works. From a market perspective, the mean income level of a software engineer is quite a bit higher than the mean income of a soldier or a farmer or a plumber.
At least until AI eats all my value, right?
I think that perspective is interesting. Before Covid, we could more easily convince ourselves we had power. While not in a war we can convince ourselves of the same. Until the looming specter of AI, the answer was always “learn how to code.” But even closer to everyone’s lives we know that life ain’t fair. We cannot control the world, only the way we respond to it.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Responding
Really, this is where I wanted to get to. Because I’ve been feeling particularly powerless recently and facing scenarios where I have no agency. Squirt has heard his entire life — you cannot control the world, only your response to it. But despite me constantly saying it, it’s an understanding that I myself struggle to remember and respond to. So it’s a work in progress with both of us.
How do you accept being powerless? What do you do when you are powerless?
Recognition, I think that’s the beginning. Start understanding the problem space — the boundaries, the rules, the goals. What is possible, what’s impossible, and what are the probabilities. We need to recognize the entirety of the problem because having no agency at all is pretty rare.
Resiliency, that comes next. You’re going to lose sometimes. You can let it ruin you or you can keep on moving. This is something Haidt and Lukianoff talk about in The Coddling of the American Mind. Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.
Adaptation, that’s the proper response. You can always learn something. A different approach, a different angle on the problem for next time. If you walk away from a disappointment but you’re smarter for next time then you have a victory.
Acceptance, which is perhaps the hardest part. Take the disappointment, understand what happened, what you learned from it, but then move on. It’s easy to let it fester but there’s no advantage. It’s feeding the caveman instead of the astronaut.
Sometimes life sucks, and that’s worth recognizing. But handling that is important, as is learning from it, and in the end it’s just one more valley in your life so it’s time to focus on getting to the next peak.
Squirt Says…
I like how you use the phrase it's not fair because it isn't. People who waste others' time complaining get what they want. Now I'm saying that arguing is a bad thing. Only when productive can it be reasonable. A Karen complaining that their coffee is too cold is not going to do much. Politely asking for a new one makes a person's day brighter and a little easier.