Fabric is made with two types of thread: warp (the lengthwise threads) and weft (the crosswise threads) that are passed through the warp. Together, the warp and weft are much stronger than their individual parts. The same holds true for families with two parents, who together weave a safety net for their children far stronger than what could be woven by…

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We saw in Chapter 10 how the threads of free markets created a huge variety of products and services that have made people’s lives much easier, and made those products and services more widely available to people than ever. Since America is the world’s center of free market innovation, one might think its people would be the happiest. But as Arthur Broo…

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In the Introduction to this book, a Greek myth was recounted in which two gods, Athena and Poseidon, offered gifts to the Greek capital city, and the gift that the citizens decided had the most value would gain the right to be the city’s patron. Athena gave the gift of the olive tree, which not only produced olives, oil for cooking and lighting, and woo…

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So we’ve seen what happens under socialist and communist regimes when government suppresses free markets and cuts the threads that connect voluntary transactions and create price signals for everyone. What are the results when government lets price signals propagate in a free market?

Not only does the free market sort and thread itself, but its threads s…

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As we saw in the previous chapter, Karl Marx incorrectly assumed that all the wonderful things we have now as a result of a free market economy would still be there forever under a socialist or communist system, just redistributed more fairly. But we know now that’s not true, having seen the results of various tragic experiments with socialism and commu…

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As we saw in the last chapter, free markets allow threads of information to connect individual sellers everywhere to individual buyers everywhere, creating an intricate tapestry of price signals without the need for any master weaver. It happens spontaneously as a result of untold numbers of voluntary decisions. But there’s a different idea of organizin…

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Why do free markets work so well at producing more and better things for people, and at ever-decreasing prices, all without being directed by government officials? They work because the lessons learned by the decisions of entrepreneurs competing to provide the best products and services at the lowest prices are passed along as price signals that indicat…

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We explored in the previous chapter how allowing people to speak freely, even if what they say is incorrect, expands knowledge. But what about allowing people to trade, spend, and produce freely? It turns out that letting people engage in a free market ends up dramatically expanding the economy – including by increasing all the things we can do and enjo…

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There’s an integral connection between the Socratic method and Stoicism and free speech: you can’t dialogue Socratically if you don’t control your own emotions to the extent to which you can accept that others must be able to speak freely when responding to your arguments. Socrates understood that thinking deeply about things necessarily involved intera…

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However tangled our thoughts might get as a result of the pressures of evolutionary psychology and social media, evolution has woven us into weavers ourselves, with the capacity to untangle our own tangled thinking. And, as far as we know, the first people to think deeply about that lived in ancient Greece.

Weaving fine and well-crafted textiles was a de…

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In Greek mythology, Daedalus is a supreme craftsman, inventor, engineer, and problem-solver, but one who often used his skill in ways that were too clever for his own good. His extraordinary intelligence often outpaced his moral judgment. So, for example, Daedalus designed the labyrinth that trapped the Minotaur, and the many children sacrificed to the monster, only to be imprisoned himself in the same labyrinth when he incurred the wrath of King Minos. In many ways, today’s social media amount to the same sort of entrapment by design.

So many Americans now have the world’s knowledge available to them through cell phones and the internet, but they don’t access that knowledge. Instead, they subject themselves to scrolling through endless snippets of social media and responding to a perpetual barrage of instant notifications. As we’ll see in this chapter, beyond fomenting the tribalism we’re already genetically susceptible to, social media has a tendency to both preoccupy our thoughts and displace other thoughts we might have. We check emails, social media, and text messages that are announced by sounds and vibrations jabbing us throughout the day, producing a sort of death by a thousand cuts. To what extent have these myriad pulls on our attention hurt our ability to think clearly, and to think in context?

For hundreds of years, long-form books have conveyed sustained arguments over hundreds of pages, providing the layers of analysis necessary to connect enough concepts such that reading them could be reasonably understood as “expanding knowledge.” But reading books, among both young people and adults, is declining significantly. A 2025 study based on the U.S. government’s Time Use Survey of 236,000 Americans, found that the proportion of people who read for pleasure has fallen dramatically since 2000: on average in 2003, 28 percent of Americans were reading, but by 2023 only 16 percent were. The researchers concluded, “The most concerning disparities were those that increased over time, with widening gaps between Black and White racial groups, levels of education and income …” A 2022 survey found that 52 percent of Americans hadn’t read a book in over a year, and one in 10 hadn’t read a book in over 10 years. Among younger people, baby boomers read more than double the number of books per year than millennials and those in Generation Z. Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said in 2024 that “Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.”

As 2016 study by computer scientists at Columbia University found that 59 percent of people who share a link on social media don’t even read the underlying story, even while that sort of blind peer-to-peer sharing determines what news gets circulated, at the expense of news on everything else. As a reporter at the Washington Post wrote, “So your thoughtless retweets, and those of your friends, are actually shaping our shared political and cultural agendas.” Commenting on the same study, Jayson DeMers said “The circulation of headlines in this way leads to an echo chamber effect. Users are more likely to share headlines that adhere to their pre-existing conceptions, rather than challenging them.”

Considering that most people just read headlines, and not the articles themselves, it should be of concern that news media headlines aren’t even written by journalists; they’re written by separate departments whose job is to get people’s attention. Researchers found that “clickbait” headlines, especially those designed to trigger strong emotions, are widely used and can differ from the informational content of the articles themselves. Competitive online environments incentivize emotionally provocative headlines to drive engagement. Headline writers must capture a reader’s attention in milliseconds, and to do so they sacrifice accuracy for exaggeration, and it’s the exaggeration that ends up framing the article for the reader, if they even read the whole article.

Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, writes that the development of printing, and then the proliferation of printed books, allowed people to relay arguments and facts on an unprecedented scale, in a way that ultimately changed how people debated the issues of the day. Carr wrote:

The arguments in books became longer and clearer, as well as more complex and more challenging, as writers strived self-consciously to refine their ideas and their logic … The advances in book technology changed the personal experience of reading and writing. They also had social consequences … The literary mind, once confined to the cloisters of the monastery and the towers of the university had become the general mind … The words in books didn’t just strengthen people’s ability to think abstractly, they enriched people’s experience of the physical world, the world outside the books.

But today, in the internet age, Carr relays, “Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators and Web designers point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.”

People used to read books not as a chore, but because it brings the sort of pleasure psychologists have come to call “flow,” a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a mental state of complete absorption and energized focus, often called “being in the zone,” a place where a person feels so fully immersed that they lose track of time, enjoying the process itself. Johann Hari, in his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again, writes:

[O]ne of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book— and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience— you dedicate many hours of your life, coolly, calmly, to one topic, and allow it to marinate in your mind. This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past four hundred years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in free fall … When I was at Harvard conducting interviews, one professor told me that he struggled to get his students there to read even quite short books, and he increasingly offered them podcasts and YouTube clips they could watch instead. And that’s Harvard.

Flow involves a deep immersion in a sustained activity. But social media only provides a truncated and disjointed one. Hari cites the example of X, formerly known as Twitter:

I thought first of Twitter. What is that message? First: you shouldn’t focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn. When you tweet, before you say anything else, you are saying that at some level you agree with these three premises.[1]

As Hari explains:

[T]he messages implicit in these mediums— are wrong. Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s most likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right … Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated.

Today, we receive information as small bits of lint that accumulate in our mental pockets but add nothing to the fabric of our being. In fact, social media was purposefully designed to discourage sustained thought, and act like blinders on a horse on a treadmill.

As Hari explains in Stolen Focus, Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer, figured out success was measured by the company in units of “engagement”: the amount of time spent on an app. The more engagement the better. At root, the longer people look at their phones, the more advertising they see, and most social media apps ultimately make their money through selling advertising. As Hari writes:

One day [Harris] would hear an engineer excitedly saying: “Why don’t we make it buzz your phone every time we get an email?” Everyone would be thrilled— and a few weeks later, all over the world, phones began to buzz in pockets, and more people found themselves looking at Gmail more times a day … Aza [Raskin] designed something that distinctly changed how the web works. It’s called “infinite scroll.” Older readers will remember that it used to be that the internet was divided into pages, and when you got to the bottom of one page, you had to decide to click a button to get to the next page. It was an active choice. It gave you a moment to pause and ask: Do I want to carry on looking at this? Aza designed the code that means you don’t have to ask that question anymore … You scroll down through it, flicking your finger— and when you get to the bottom, it will automatically load another chunk for you to flick through … and another, and another, forever … One day, James Williams— the former Google strategist I met— addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: “How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?” There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.

Nobody put up their hand because what had been designed was a labyrinth from which people couldn’t escape. And the Minotaur inside was sapping our strength before eating us alive.

It would be one thing if the twists and turns of the maze were random, but they’re not. They’re actually designed to lead us further and further into the maze, until we can’t see the way out. The algorithms are programmed to direct your attention to specific things that it predicts will keep you hooked to your screen. Hari, returning to his interview with Tristan Harris, writes, “[T]hese sites learn— as Tristan put it— how to ‘frack’ you. These sites get to know what makes you tick, in very specific ways— they learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you, what enrages you. They learn your personal triggers— what, specifically, will distract you.”

Even worse, the algorithms discovered a glitch in the matrix of human nature embedded in our psychology by evolution. As Hari writes:

Imagine two Facebook feeds. One is full of updates, news, and videos that make you feel calm and happy. The other is full of updates, news, and videos that make you feel angry and outraged. Which one does the algorithm select? The algorithm is neutral about the question of whether it wants you to be calm or angry. That’s not its concern. It only cares about one thing: Will you keep scrolling? Unfortunately, there’s a quirk of human behavior. On average, we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm … This has been known about in psychology for years and is based on a broad body of evidence. It’s called “negativity bias.” … If it’s more enraging, it’s more engaging.

As Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey write in Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier:

Mother Nature gave you … negativity bias: a tendency to focus on negative information far more than positive information. The reason is simple: compliments are nice, but nothing happens when we ignore them. But we ignore criticism at our peril. A couple thousand years ago, that could mean being cast out of the tribe. Today it can mean losing your job or strife with a friend. So we naturally focus on negative information.

When these algorithms come to move so many people to anger, they come to move the culture. As Tristan told Hari, it “turns hate into a habit.”

And what happens when more people feel more anxiety? Their bodies enter threat mode, which increases the flow of the stress hormone cortisol, which evolved to block our more logical modes of thinking in favor of triggering a rushed response,[2] like immediately fleeing a hungry lion without wasting time thinking about it. When children feel anxiety, they often cry, and while they’re crying it’s impossible to reason with them, as they’ve temporarily lost the ability to reason. In such situations, parents need to wait a few moments, so a child can calm down and lower their cortisol levels. Only then can logical reasoning resume. Social media is designed to trigger anxiety in adults and, worse, encourage them to respond online at the very moment they’re least capable of calmly reasoning. As Hari writes, “Scientists have been proving in experiments for years that anger itself screws with your ability to pay attention. They have discovered that if I make you angry, you will pay less attention to the quality of arguments around you, and you will show ‘decreased depth of processing’ — that is, you will think in a shallower, less attentive way.” Indeed, researchers have found that anger actually makes people more susceptible to misinformation than people in a more neutral emotional state. The same researchers found that study participants who were angry tended to be more confident in the accuracy of their memories, but among those participants increased confidence was actually associated with decreased accuracy. In contrast, among those in a neutral emotional state (the more Stoic among them), increased confidence was associated with increased accuracy.

When what you thought was a mountain lion along your hiking trail turns out to be another hiker, you at least start to calm down. But social media aggravates the situation because people who post there don’t actually meet face-to-face with anyone. Researchers have found that when people hear a human voice articulating contrary political views, they’re less likely to demonize those articulating them because hearing a voice humanizes a person. But that’s not the social media norm, where people vent at glowing electrons instead of human faces and make political polarization worse.

And the “people” on social media may not exist at all. As Catherine Price writes in her book The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again:

What’s particularly crazy about our obsession with external validation is that many of the people we seek affirmation from online aren’t actually real. There are millions of fake accounts on social media platforms—it’s a constant struggle for social media companies to identify and purge these accounts—so it’s quite possible that some of the “likes” and follows that you’re interrupting your life to earn are actually coming from bots, not people.[3]

And as it turns out, studies show that the use of social media like Facebook -- including status updates, link click counts, and “like” counts -- is negatively associated with mental health.

Indeed, lots of evidence shows users of social media are as unhappy as losing gamblers, which is not surprising considering social media operates like a casino.

As Will Storr writes in The Status Game:

Social media is a slot machine for status. This is what makes it so obsessively compelling … We await replies, likes or upvotes and, just as a gambler never knows how the slot machine will pay out, we don’t know what reward we’ll receive for our contribution. Will we go up? Will we go down? … This variation creates compulsion. We just want to keep playing, again and again, to see what we’ll get.

And it’s not just a row of three thumbs up that we’re looking for in the slot machine. Even the more mundane aspects of communication today have the feel of pulling a lever. As Tristan Harris has said, “When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we have received. When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next. When we ‘Pull to Refresh’ our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what email we got. When we swipe faces on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.”

In 2012, psychologist Larry Rosen described heavy social media users as exhibiting symptoms similar to those displayed in psychiatric conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). And sure enough, entering college students have increasingly reported mental health issues. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2018:

As many as one in four students at some elite U.S. colleges are now classified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues such as depression or anxiety, entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer time to take exams … The rise in disability notes for mental-health issues has led to a surge in the number of students who take their exams in low-distraction testing centers, are allowed to get up and walk around during class or bring a comfort animal to school, among other measures … Among the nation’s most elite institutions, those with the highest percentage of disabled students were Stanford (14%), Brown (12%), Yale (11%) and Columbia University (8%).

By 2025, at Stanford, nearly 40 percent of undergraduates were registered as disabled, as were more than 20 percent at Harvard and Brown, with the increases driven by more students receiving diagnoses for conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression.

And whereas in the past younger people became happier when they became adults, today younger people are becoming less happy when they become adults, as their social media habits follow them into adulthood.

So far, we’ve examined how evolution left us with genetic tendencies to wrap ourselves in the warm blanket of tribal thinking, and to resist the sometimes stingingly cold truths of the wider world. We’ve also seen how the advent of social media wrapped that blanket tighter and, in this chapter, how social media has pulled the blanket over our heads. Is there a way we can train our minds to stop hitting the snooze button and throw off that blanket so we can get out of bed and start facing some uncomfortable things -- and become the more resilient for it? In the next chapter, we’ll follow our threads back to the ancient Greeks, who first developed the techniques of self-control and self-critique.

[NOTE TO READERS: This is the last draft chapter that will be available for free. Starting next week, this Substack will move to subscriber-only, so if you’d like to receive more of these draft book chapters, please consider clicking the “Subscribe” button at the bottom of this page and becoming a paid subscriber.]

Further Reading

Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Johann Hari, in his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again

[1] Hari adds: “How about Facebook? What’s the message in that medium? It seems to be first: your life exists to be displayed to other people, and you should be aiming every day to show your friends edited highlights of your life. Second: what matters is whether people immediately like these edited and carefully selected highlights that you spend your life crafting. Third: somebody is your ‘friend’ if you regularly look at their edited highlight reels, and they look at yours — this is what friendship means.”

[2] As Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve write in Wellbeing: Science and Policy:

The body has a mechanism that responds to stress in a similar way whether the stress is physical or mental. This is sometimes called the “fight or flight” response … [T]he ‘autonomic nervous system’ … is largely outside our conscious control and regulates the workings of all our internal organs. The autonomic system has two main branches: the sympathetic and the para-sympathetic. It is the sympathetic nervous system that initiates the fight or flight response. It immediately instructs the adrenal gland to produce what Britons call adrenaline and Americans call epinephrine. This is a hormone (Greek for messenger) that enters the bloodstream and galvanises the whole body for action. It also mobilises the immune system to produce pro-inflammatory cytokines in case they are needed to handle possible infections … At the same time, a second hormone is produced in another part of the adrenal gland: cortisol. A message goes from the brain’s hypothalamus to the pituitary gland to the adrenal gland, which releases cortisol into the bloodstream, and this then stimulates the muscles by releasing their store of glucose. The stress response is totally functional when the stress is brief. But when the stress is persistent, it can lead to over-activity of the immune system (especially of C-reactive protein and IL6) and to persistent inflammation around the body, which eventually reduces life expectancy.

[3] On the flip-side, Price adds that it’s also likely that some of the social media “influencers” people look up to because of their huge followings have paid for those increases in “followers.” In 2018, The New York Times found it was possible to buy 25,000 Twitter followers from a company for $225, about a penny each. At the time, that company had “more than 200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models.”

In Greek mythology, Clotho, one of the Fates, spins the thread of human life. In reality, that thread is our DNA, woven into the form of a double helix which evolved over time to favor traits that helped our species survive. But our DNA does more than weave our bodies together. Our DNA also weaves patterns in our minds, patterns designed by the same evolutionary pressures that shaped our bodies.

Not surprisingly, our minds as well as our bodies developed certain traits that worked to our advantage for survival during early human development. But what many people may not realize is that those early mental traits, while they worked to improve the survival of humans during the times they lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes, may not work so well to our advantage in the modern world. In fact, some of them work to our disadvantage. In many ways, we are pre-wired to short-circuit, at least when it comes to thinking straight.

The study of how evolution shaped humans’ mental states is called evolutionary psychology, and it aims to help describe our “human nature” in terms of the psychological predispositions and proclivities we’ve inherited from our ancient ancestors.

Understanding human nature has fascinated political theorists for centuries, but a few hundred years ago they didn’t have the advantage of knowing the science of evolutionary psychology as well as we know it today. The Enlightenment French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau believed human beings were born naturally good, with kind instincts, and that if people were bad, it was because the rules of society made them bad. In 1762, he wrote in On Education, “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Rousseau was an intellectual inspiration for the French Revolution, which ended in a Reign of Terror.

Around the same time, across the Atlantic Ocean, the intellectual Founders of the American Revolution were working toward drafting a much longer-lasting Constitution based on a very different view of human nature. In a collection of essays called the Federalist Papers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton set out their arguments for the ratification of the Constitution by the states. As Benjamin Wright explains, “The most striking and possibly most important element in the theory of human nature expressed in The Federalist is that men are not to be trusted with power because they are selfish, passionate, full of whims, caprices, and prejudices.”

In Federalist Paper Number 51, for example, Madison writes that the rules set out in the Constitution are based on a separation of powers among three branches of government because the human nature of the people who would occupy those branches would tend them toward misconduct, not virtue, and so their actions would have to be regularly checked by members of the other branches who would generally resist abuse by the other branches -- motivated less by good will, and more by a selfish instinct to preserve their own power. As Madison wrote:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? … In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself … We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.

Alexander Hamilton added that the powers of government must be limited because “it is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies—ill as well as good propensities. This results from the imperfection of the Institutor, Man.”

So who was right -- as a matter of science, not just theory? Rosseau or the American Founding Fathers? We now have a pretty clear understanding that the American Founders were right: human beings do have a “nature” that pre-exists government and politics, and that nature tends us toward selfish behavior.

But what exactly is the mechanism that produced this “human nature,” and why does it tend us toward selfishness? Steve Stewart-Williams, in his book The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, explains that the answer lies in an understanding of evolutionary psychology. He writes:

[H]uman beings are animals, and like all animals, we’re products of natural selection. This is true of our bodies, but it’s also true of our minds. To see what this means, we can start by looking at our pets: our cats, our dogs – even our pet snakes or tarantulas. As different as we are from these creatures, we also have a lot in common: We eat; we retreat from threats; we mate with members of our own species. Clearly, these are things we evolved to do. Equally clearly, however – at least in the case of the humans, cats, dogs, and snakes – conscious mental states play a crucial role in orchestrating these behaviors. Hunger motivates eating; fear and pain motivate retreat from threats; sexual desire motivates mating. These basic feelings, desires, and drives are just as much a product of natural selection as the behavior they help to generate … At this basic level, no sane psychologist would deny that selection has helped shape the human mind.

Before this insight of evolutionary biology was understood, people tended to share Rousseau’s view that, outside basic aspects of body structure, it was social conditioning, not evolution, that shaped any differences between people and other animals, or between men and women. The idea was that people are “blank slates” capable of being molded into anything depending on how they’re raised or educated. That idea is belied in part, however, by our experience that some feelings are innately within us, from our very beginnings. Pain prods us to protect ourselves, like when the pain we feel from a fire causes us to pull our hands away from the flame, even when we’ve never been taught not to touch a fire. Hunger prods our bodies to obtain the nutrients we need to function. Disgust prods us to avoid infectious substances and toxins, like bodily secretions, rotting materials, and certain animals like rats, flies, and maggots that tend to spread disease. Fear prods us run from danger.

We also know from experience that other things come more naturally to us than others, independent of any cultural conditioning. And it’s these sets of things that we might call “human nature.” For example, people care more for their own children than for the children of others, just as other mammals do, because their own children carry their genes, and we evolved a proclivity to protect and carry on those genes. Otherwise, our genetic line wouldn’t have survived. As a result of this genetic tendency to prioritize our own children, child-rearing experiments based on the proposition that cultural norms trump genetic predispositions tend to go very poorly. As Stewart-Williams writes, “In the last century or so … people experimented with gender-neutral parenting, free love communes, and communal child-rearing arrangements, but none of these experiments had more than limited success, and most were dismal failures.”

Stewart-Williams describes how, if most of our traits evolved during the long period of time in which humans lived as hunter-gatherers, those traits could be “mismatched” to our current, high-tech environment:

It’s only in the last 70,000 years or so that a handful of modern humans ventured out of Africa and began spreading around the globe. And it’s only in the last 10,000 years that some people gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and adopted agriculture instead. As evolutionary psychologists like to say, 10,000 years is a mere blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. So, what do you get when you take a hunter-gatherer and transplant it into the modern world? According to evolutionary psychologists, what you get, more or less, is you and me. This places us in an awkward predicament. Biologically, we’re largely the same animal that roamed the Pleistocene savannah: a pack-hunting African ape. Culturally, though, we’re unrecognizable … But we’re the same species, and although our surroundings have changed, our core nature is largely the same. As a result, we’re mismatched with our current environment … Just as we haven’t evolved any new bodily organs in the last 10,000 years (a spare pair of hands, say), we haven’t evolved any new psychological adaptations, either: a new emotion, for example, or a new cognitive faculty.

Consider kids’ propensity toward play. As Max Bennett writes in A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains, “mammals engage in play much more than other vertebrates. Even the offspring of simple mammals like rats play with each other, play mounting and play fighting. These early acts of play might have served the purpose of refining and training the motor cortex of young mammals so that in higher-stake situations they wouldn’t be learning from scratch.” Young humans, too, evolved a need for play but they live in a world now where educational systems suppress play. As Stewart-Williams writes:

In a nutshell, play is practice for the kinds of tasks that the young animal will engage in as an adult. This is also more or less the function of human schools: They prepare children for the roles they’ll play later in life. Why, then, don’t children enjoy school more? … Why would they rather be playing? Indeed, why isn’t schoolwork viewed as play? You know the answer. We didn’t evolve in the kind of world we now inhabit, and thus the skills we learn in the classroom – math, writing, and the rest – are not the kind of skills we evolved to master. Here, as elsewhere, culture goes against the grain of human nature.

Another example is our evolutionary tendency to want to seek status among our “tribe” in ways that often prioritize fitting in with the group over objective truth. One way our ancestors survived was to boost their status within their group to help fend off rivals and attract mates. This survival mechanism is so dear to us that if we sense we’re losing status, we can get physically ill. As Will Storr writes in The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It, status has a dramatic influence over our physical wellbeing:

Tentative clues as to how this might happen come from the new science of social genomics, which examines how our social worlds affect our genes and the ways they function. The basic idea is that, when we’re not doing well in the game of life, our bodies prepare for crisis by switching our settings so we’re readied for attack. It increases inflammation, which helps the healing of any physical wounds we might be about to suffer. It also saves resources by reducing our antiviral response. But when our inflammation is raised for too long, it can damage us in myriad ways. It increases susceptibility to neurodegenerative disease, promotes the spread of plaque in the arteries and the growth of cancer cells. According to a world leader in this field, Professor Steve Cole, “several studies have related objective indicators of low social status to increased expression of pro-inflammatory genes and/or decreased expression of antiviral genes.”

In order to avoid the negative consequences of low status, we go so far as to offer arguments to others, not to advance truth, but to improve our status in the eyes of others. As cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett writes: “Our skills were honed for taking sides, persuading others in debate, not necessarily getting things right.” As Keith Stanovich puts it in The Bias that Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking, “our reasoning abilities [arise] from our need not to solve problems in the natural world but to persuade others in the social world.”

Because being a member of a tribe gives us a feeling of safety and security, we have an evolutionary tendency to do what we can to avoid offending the tribe with whom we’ve come to identify, including “tribes” far beyond our kin. As Paul Bloom writes in his book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion:

We are constituted to favor our friends and family over strangers, to care more about members of our own group than people from different, perhaps opposing, groups. This fact about human nature is inevitable given our evolutionary history. Any creature that didn’t have special sentiments toward those that shared its genes and helped it in the past would get its ass kicked from a Darwinian perspective; it would falter relative to competitors with more parochial natures. This bias to favor those close to us is general -- it influences who we readily empathize with, but it also influences who we like, who we tend to care for, who we will affiliate with, who we will punish, and so on.

That tendency today causes many of us to cozy up so closely to political tribes that we tend to abandon our capacity for logic in favor of displays of tribal loyalty. Political parties strive to form coalitions that will win elections. Doing so often requires switching positions on a given policy in order to attract the voters necessary to form winning coalitions. But as researchers have found, people loyal to their political party will tend to support whatever their party’s new position is and ignore their reasons for supporting the previous party position. As psychologist Dr Lilliana Mason writes, “more often than not, citizens do not choose which party to support based on policy opinion; they alter their policy opinion according to which party they support.”

We tend to do this because the world has so much going on in it that, without some sort of organizing rules of thumb, we would be lost. Under the surface of our senses, the world is actually colorless, odorless, and completely silent. But we evolved the ability to see colors in the reflection of light, smells by processing chemicals, and sound through pressure differences in the air. Even so, our eyes, noses, and ears can only pick up a small fraction of the whole spectrum of light, many fewer smells than dogs and cats, and sounds within limited frequencies. Still, even with that limited information, our minds have developed ways of making enough sense of it all that we can proceed through life. And when what even our limited senses let in reveals a complex and chaotic world, we further simplify it with mental shortcuts that lead not to anything like complete understanding, but to a much more prosaic sense of self. As neuroscientist Professor Michael Gazzaniga writes, our brains act as an “interpreter module” that composes “the storyline and the narrative” of our life and “generates explanations about our perceptions, memories and actions and the relationships among them. This leads to a personal narrative, the story that ties together all the disparate aspects of our conscious experience into a coherent whole: order from chaos.” Gazzaniga points out that our personal narrative “may be completely wrong,” but because you might be so proud of the narrative you’ve formed for yourself, your mind “denies and rationalizes” any evidence to the contrary. And when individual personal narratives begin swirling in the same direction, they can create cultural movements that leave destruction in their path. Arthur Koestler, who ultimately became a prominent anti-totalitarian author, expressed this dynamic well in 1942, describing his misguided experience joining the Communist Party a decade earlier:

To say that one had “seen the light” is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows (regardless of what faith he has been converted to). [T]he whole universe falls into pattern, like stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by one magic stroke … Nothing henceforth can disturb the convert’s inner peace and serenity – except the occasional fear of losing faith again, losing thereby what alone makes life worth living, and falling back into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.[1]

Studies have shown that once people come to see the world through the lens of a political tribe, they often end up wearing blinders that prevent them from seeing the value of universal principles that redound to the benefit of all, such as providing for the free flow of traffic or maintaining a chain of command. Researchers showed subjects a film of a protest involving clashes with police in which the protesters failed to obey a command to disperse. From the film, it was impossible to tell what the protesters were protesting about. Half the subjects were told that demonstrators were protesting against abortions occurring in a nearby building, and the other half were told that protesters were outside a military recruiting center that was enforcing the military’s then-existing ban on service by people who were openly gay. As it turned out, the description of the reason for the protest made a significant difference in how the two groups of subjects viewed the need to maintain the free flow of traffic. In the abortion scenario, 70 percent of the conservative subjects thought the police had violated the demonstrators’ rights, but only 28 percent of the liberal subjects thought the same. But the pattern was reversed in the scenario involving the ban on gay people in the military, in which 76 percent of the liberal subjects thought the protesters’ rights were being violated, and only 16 percent of the conservative subjects thought the same. Similarly, when researchers told liberal subjects a military general had criticized the president of the United States, they found those subjects were more likely to excuse the behavior of the general when the president was a Republican than when the president was a Democrat. Conservative subjects, on the other hand, were more likely to forgive the general’s behavior when the president was a Democrat rather than a Republican.

Other studies show that in-group bias has cascading effects, such that an initial bias in favor of a particular conclusion can be associated with a biased discounting of all sorts of information that would otherwise caution against the preferred conclusion. Researchers found that the more strongly subjects believed the use of condoms was morally wrong, even if used to prevent pregnancy and the spread of disease, the less likely they were to believe condoms actually did prevent pregnancy and the spread of disease – even though such empirical claims are logically independent of moral claims. And the same researchers found that the more strongly subjects believed the enhanced interrogation of terrorist suspects was morally wrong, even if such interrogations led to intelligence that would prevent future terrorist attacks, the less likely they were to believe enhanced interrogations actually did yield actionable intelligence. Essentially, the subjects tended to resist recognizing any costs to their moral commitments along politically biased lines.

In-group bias results from the fear that a failure to display sufficient loyalty to the tribe will result in being banished from it. As Stanovich puts it, regarding our socialization:

The social domain is one that often makes epistemic accuracy subordinate to instrumental rationality. Group cohesion often necessitates that group members hold beliefs that exhibit considerable inertia. Being a good group member almost by definition requires that the members display considerable myside [in-group] bias when encountering ideas that contradict group beliefs. It is almost always the case, however, that the costs of the inaccuracies introduced into a particular member’s belief network by that myside bias are outweighed by the considerable benefits provided by group membership … Thus group identities are a key source of myside bias.

Just as sports fans often find themselves siding with the referees when they make a call in favor of their favorite team, even when the replay shows the referees clearly got it wrong, we all have a tendency to go along with what our “team tribe” thinks is best, or risk looking like a fair-weather fan. As Stanovich writes:

If we accurately update our beliefs on the basis of [new] evidence, we may subject ourselves to sanctions from a group that defines our identity. Hence we will quite naturally have a myside bias toward the group’s central beliefs — adopting a high threshold for accommodating disconfirming information and a low threshold for assimilating confirming information … Many of our communications are not aimed at conveying information about what is true …Instead, as signals to others and sometimes signals to ourselves, they are functional communications because, when sent to others, they bind us to a group that we value, and, when sent to ourselves, they serve motivational functions.

Hence, the concept of “virtue signaling,” in which the point of saying something is not to express truth, but to show solidarity.

There’s a tendency in all of us to assume that we made conscious judgments in the past about policies we support today and that we consciously concluded those policies served our interests. So of course we defend our preferred policies. But what if we didn’t make conscious judgments about those policies in the past? As Stanovich asks, “What if you don’t own your beliefs, but instead, they own you?” Maybe your preferred policies are yours only because you inherited them from your parents or peers, and that inheritance led you to avoid assessing their origins -- or even avoid assessing their usefulness, since you never really “purchased” your beliefs with any serious reflection on costs and benefits beyond the benefits you instinctively feel come from group membership. And beliefs that have fallen into one’s lap without reflection tend to resist being moved by reflection. Historian Yuval Harari writes that “Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold onto these views due to group loyalty.” Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Nathanial Rabb write that “Reasoning is generally motivated in the service of transmitting beliefs acquired from citizens’ communities of belief.” Yet, as Stanovich says, “Most of us still prefer to think that we have thought our way to our deepest convictions.”

As Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, if our sources of information are curated by members of our cultural or political tribe, our views regarding what’s most important will be influenced accordingly:

Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind … For several weeks after Michael Jackson’s death, for example, it was virtually impossible to find a television channel reporting on another topic. In contrast, there is little coverage of critical but unexciting issues that provide less drama, such as declining educational standards.

In-group bias also creates inconsistences in feelings we might otherwise think are reliably pure, such as empathy. Researchers conducted an experiment in which soccer fans were made to witness a fan of their favorite team or of a rival team experience pain. They were then told they could choose to help the other by enduring physical pain themselves in order to reduce the other’s pain. The researchers found that when the other person was described as a fan of the subject’s team, the subject’s empathic response was strong, but not when the other person was described as a fan of the opposing team. Other research has shown that empathy can lead to such significant associations with the “in-group” that it actually results in aggression against the out-group without any provocation. And researchers have also found that people who score high on the empathy scale are more likely to support efforts by protesters to silence a speaker from the opposing political party and that they are also more likely to be amused by reports that the protesters injured one of the speaker’s supporters. The researchers found that more empathic people “are significantly more likely to want to stop the speech when the speaker is from the opposite party.”

As Bloom writes, when such bias creeps in, we can’t even trust that our feelings of empathy are serving the function of keeping us “moral”:

[I]t can’t be that empathy simply makes us moral. It has to be more complicated than that because whether or not you feel empathy depends on prior decisions about who to worry about, who counts, who matters -- and these are moral choices.

Indeed, a 2025 study found that across all four studies conducted, participants consistently showed lower empathy for political out-group members than for members of an in-group or no group.[2]

Today’s social media magnifies these biases. As Storr recounts:

[W]hen we encounter someone [on the internet] living by a conflicting set of rules and symbols, they’re implying our rules and symbols – our criteria for claiming status – are invalid, and our dream of reality is false. They’re a sentient repudiation of the value we’ve spent our lives earning. They insult us simply by being who they are. It should be no surprise, then, that encountering someone with conflicting beliefs can feel like an attack: status is a resource, and they’re taking it from us. When this happens we’re often compelled to take comfort in the presence of our like-minded kin … It takes the differences between us and our rivals and weaves over them a moral story that says they’re not simply wrong, they’re evil. This permits further vilification … If [others] present counter arguments, we often demand unreasonably high evidence for their claims just as we accept unreasonably low evidence for ours. We like to find any excuse to dismiss their strongest arguments and simply forget those that disturb us most. We adopt harsh double standards, extending them none of the patience, understanding and empathy we lavish on our own.

The much greater information available on the internet today is a wonderful thing, but it also allows the unmindful to simply select from a limitless menu of items drawn solely from the comfort food of their preconceived convictions. As Stanovich writes, “Thus the more evidence there is, of all types — good and bad, on this side and on that — the easier it is to select from it with a myside bias. Both the increasing complexity and the increasing quantity of social exchange that occurs over the Internet make verifying what is actually going on in the world much more difficult.”

While new technology can often be liberating by exposing us to new ideas, it can also give us the tools to further tighten the threads of our tribal blanket. Even the revolutionary technology of the printing press was used at first not to expand our understanding, but to more deeply imprint our inherent tribal tendencies. As historian Niall Ferguson reminds us, “[N]ot everything that is published adds to the sum of human knowledge. Much of what came off the printing presses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was distinctly destructive, like the twenty-nine editions of Malleus Maleficarum [one of the best-selling books for almost two hundred years after the invention of the printing press] that appeared between 1487 and 1669, legitimizing the persecution of witches, a pan-European mania that killed between 12,000 and 45,000 people …” The same tightening of our warm blanket of tribal thinking is happening today under the corkscrew of social media.

And if we should be wary of always trusting the judgment of our tribe, and our tribal selves, we should certainly be wary of “tribal experts” who spend years in graduate schools bolstering their academic credentials, but not necessarily their capacity for truth-finding. Indeed, the more time and energy people put into their beliefs, the more vigorously they tend to rationalize them. In Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson write that:

Once we make a decision, we have all kinds of tools at our disposal to bolster it … The more costly a decision, in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance [of counter-arguments] and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made.

None of the “experts” we see in media are immune from these tendencies. Tavris and Aronson explore how everyone, including so-called “experts,” have a tendency to explain away their investment-backed errors:

Because most people have a reasonably positive self-concept, believing themselves to be competent, moral, and smart, their efforts at reducing dissonance will be designed to preserve their positive self-images … Hundreds of studies have shown that predictions based on an expert’s “personal experience” or “years of training” are rarely better than chance, in contrast to predictions based on actuarial data. But when experts are wrong, the centerpiece of their professional identity is threatened. Therefore, as dissonance theory would predict, the more self-confident and famous they are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.

This problem extends far beyond overconfident “talking heads.” Studies published by government and other “experts” recommending this or that policy or program routinely rely on what overwhelmingly turn out the be unrealistic best-case scenarios, making for terrible predictions on the public benefits of proposed taxpayer-funded projects. As Kahneman writes:

Examples of the planning fallacy abound in the experiences of individuals, governments, and businesses. The list of horror stories is endless. [One] study examined rail projects undertaken worldwide between 1969 and 1998. In more than 90% of the cases, the number of passengers projected to use the system was overestimated. Even though these passenger shortfalls were widely publicized, forecasts did not improve over those thirty years; on average, planners overestimated how many people would use the new rail projects by 106%, and the average cost overrun was 45%. As more evidence accumulated, the experts did not become more reliant on it … The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved — whether by their superiors or by a client — supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times.

It’s important to note that there is evidence that groups of people, collectively, are better at making accurate evaluations – as long as they aren’t behaving like a tribe. The evidence shows that accurate evaluations only happen when each person in a group arrived at their decision independently. Kahneman writes:

[I]magine that a large number of observers are shown glass jars containing pennies and are challenged to estimate the number of pennies in each jar. As James Surowiecki explained in his best-selling The Wisdom of Crowds, this is the kind of task in which individuals do very poorly, but pools of individual judgments do remarkably well. Some individuals greatly overestimate the true number, others underestimate it, but when many judgments are averaged, the average tends to be quite accurate … [T]he errors that individuals make are independent of the errors made by others, and (in the absence of a systematic bias) they tend to average to zero. However, the magic of error reduction works well only when the observations are independent and their errors uncorrelated. If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate. To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence, you should always try to make these sources independent of each other.

So evolution left us with genetic tendencies to wrap ourselves in the warm blanket of tribal thinking, and to resist the sometimes stingingly cold truths of the wider world. And, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the advent of social media has made that blanket even thicker -- and wrapped it over our heads.

Further Reading

Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Keith Stanovich, The Bias that Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking

Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)

[1] Arthur Koesler, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” Horizon (June: 381-391) (1942).

[2] However, the researchers “found a consistent asymmetry in this empathy bias … [C]onservatives showed more empathy for liberals than liberals showed for conservatives.”

Introduction

We all know at some level that everything is connected -- that our families, our communities, our country, and our universe compose a vast tapestry with threads moving in every direction. And however complex that tapestry is, we also know at some level that our minds tend to simplify things significantly, so we can organize our life and tell our story at a manageable, human scale. In doing so, we must mentally smooth over the many knots in the tapestry and other points of tension. But below the surface those knots and tensions remain. No matter how carefully we curate our own narrative, edits are being made by an off-stage director. The result is a story we sense is uneven, but can’t quite figure out why.

What if we could better understand those knots and tensions, so we could see the whole tapestry more clearly and weave our lives and institutions with the threads rather than against them? That’s the focus of this book. We’ll follow threads back to the origins of our universe, through our human evolution, and explore how we evolved not only fingers and toes, but also ways of thinking -- some of which helped us survive in the past, but which today make us hard-wired to short-circuit and not think straight. We’ll explore how the people leading the charge of civilization, including the ancient Greeks, developed ways of thinking that are more relevant today than ever. Those ways of thinking can help us untangle the knots in our minds, and allow us to weave the threads of our thinking between the Scylla and Charybdis of social media and tribal politics. We’ll explore how free speech and due process are the hammer and anvil we need to forge stronger belief systems. We’ll see how the pressures of evolution also apply to the evolution of ideas and markets, which have brought us to historical heights of human productivity and plenty. We’ll examine what science has shown makes us happiest, including family and work, and the sorts of doom-and-gloom thinking we should be careful to avoid and to replace with a worldview of curiosity and wonder. We’ll look at how various institutions foster or hinder human happiness, including school boards, educational institutions, our legal system, and our government. And we’ll examine how well, or poorly, the government gives us the feedback we need to be our best selves, and how well, or poorly, the government takes feedback from its own citizens today.

As wide-ranging as this book is, I will draw and quote from a wide variety of scholars who have written book-length treatments if the issues covered. In that sense, I am serving in the role of a “professional second hand dealer in ideas,” as Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek once described. No matter what you end up doing in life, you should know something like what you’ll find in this book. The material here, of course, doesn’t meet the impossible standard of “absolute truth.” But it does contain information from the angles and perspectives of prominent experts in their fields not often captured in popular media.[1] This book aims to be part “everything you should have learned in college but didn’t” and part “primer for the well-rounded citizen.” A sort of “syllabus for all of us” that avoids politics-of-the-day distractions in favor of a big picture focus that may help readers avoid the well-worn paths down the rabbit holes dug by this or that political tribe. Even if you’re already familiar with some of the subjects covered in these chapters, I think you’ll find something new and interesting about them here.

Most “classical education” models start with ancient Greece because Greek thinkers and writers shaped so much of the philosophy, literature, and political thought that has come to influence the rest of the world ever since. Beyond helping us think straight, the ancient Greeks had a knack for creating myths that embedded life lessons far deeper than the simple stories they told. Some of those myths will help frame the lessons relayed in this book. As America celebrates its 250th anniversary as the longest-surviving democratic republic, it’s especially worth looking back at some of the wisdom that developed in ancient Athens, home to the first democracy.[2]

In Greek mythology, Athena was the goddess of wisdom, and of weaving, which the ancient Greeks considered the apogee of practical wisdom in its combining of threads into useful things. Athena was also said to have been voted the patron goddess of Athens after she gave it the gift of the olive tree, a uniquely useful thing which not only produced olives, oil for cooking and lighting, and wood for tools, but was particularly suited to thrive in Athens’ rocky soil and dry climate. The Athenians judged Athena’s gift superior to that of a rival god because the olive tree fit the environment and human needs, and so the Athenians took her name for their city.

It’s good to appreciate how well a plant thrives in a certain environment, but it’s much more important for us to consider to what extent citizens thrive in the institutions that surround them. In the lore of ancient Greece, that was a question considered by Theseus, the purported political founder of ancient Athens who restricted much of his own authority as king while sharing power with the Athenian people. And it was a question America’s founders considered when drafting our Constitution. It’s a question we return to again and again two and a half centuries later, and it’s the subject of this book.

As the ancient Greek story goes, before Theseus unified Athens, he had been sent as a sacrifice to King Minos and thrown into the supposedly inescapable labyrinth containing the monster Minotaur. But Theseus used a thread to trace his path, and followed it back out of the labyrinth after killing the monster. Today, more and more people are coming to grips with the feeling that a maze of laws, regulations, and overly complex institutions have grown up around them, in ways that impinge on their own flourishing, and that of their families.

How do we find our way out of our modern maze of institutions? By following the thread of human nature toward a place of greater flourishing.

But before we pick up the thread of human nature, and the DNA that wove us together -- and, through us, the tapestry of civilization -- we owe ourselves a proper start, back to the very beginning of the universe that frames everything there is. Doing so will get us in the right mindset before tracing the progress of humankind to this point in time. It will give us a sense of awe.

Chapter 1 – Awe 101

People rarely think of the universe as a whole. Maybe we’re intimidated by its vast scope, such that we think even contemplating it will make us feel even smaller and more obscure. But if you do start to contemplate the universe, you’ll discover that, far from making you feel small, it fills you with a wide and deep sense of curiosity and wonder. And as that curiosity and wonder grows, many of the much less significant things that were bothering you in life fade away, replaced by feelings of gratitude and a deep appreciation for the wider context in which we live. The physical laws of the universe have spun matter around to the point at which, as far as we know, we humans in the universe are uniquely constituted such that we can actually contemplate and appreciate the process that led to our existence, and to everything else.

As Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, writes in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life:

How can we live the good life? One enlivened by joy and community and meaning, that brings us a sense of worth and belonging and strengthens the people and natural environments around us? Now, twenty years into teaching happiness, I have an answer: FIND AWE. Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand … How does awe transform us? By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.

Keltner describes “how much health and well-being we gain by being amazed at things outside ourselves.” He writes:

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world … Vastness can be semantic, or about ideas, most notably when an epiphany integrates scattered beliefs and unknowns into a coherent thesis about the world … [W]hen we experience awe, regions of the brain that are associated with the excesses of the ego, including self-criticism, anxiety, and even depression, quiet down … [A]s the default self fades, the mind opens to intellectual questioning and searching that awe inspires … Laboratory studies have captured how awe leads to more rigorous thought. In one such study, after being led to experience awe by recalling a time of looking out at an expansive view, college students were more discerning between what is a strong argument, grounded in robust scientific evidence, and a weak argument, based on a single individual’s opinions.

Let’s start with the awe one feels when thinking about the sheer size of the universe. Several years ago, when I was a substitute teacher in a sixth-grade science class for a week, and the topic was the origins of the universe, I tried to convey to the students the mind-boggling scales involved. I used a baseball to represent the sun and a speck of chalk to represent the Earth. I put the Earth about 15 feet away from the sun. Then I took an eraser from the end of a pencil and threw it to the far corner of the classroom, about 60 feet away from the “sun.” I said that’s the planet Jupiter. Neptune would be a couple blocks out from there. And the next star close to us would be about the size of an orange, but it would be out in Minneapolis, Minnesota, about 1,000 miles away. And there’s another orange in Sacramento, California, and a grapefruit out in Hawaii, and a couple more oranges in Singapore and Hong Kong. And 100 billion others scattered around at those type of relative distances. We contemplated all this from that little bit of chalk dust (the Earth) in one small corner of a classroom in Alexandria, Virginia.

Then I used a clear plastic baseball display box, about a tenth of a meter (a little over three inches) on each side. I asked the students to imagine a series of steps in which we see this box growing, increasing by a factor of 100 at a time —along its length, width, and height -- meaning each new, bigger box will contain 1 million times the volume of the previous box (because 100 times 100 times 100 equals 1 million). The first larger box is ten meters (33 feet) on each side. That would hold a small two-story building. The second larger box is 100 times larger and would hold a small town. The third larger box is 100 kilometers on each side, which could hold Washington, D.C. and its surrounding suburbs. The fourth increment goes to 10,000 kilometers on a side. It would almost hold the entire Earth. The fifth larger box is 1 million kilometers on a side. It would hold the Earth and the full orbit of the moon.

The sixth box takes us to distances so long that you really have to use the distance light travels as a way to measure it. The speed of light is 187,000 miles per second, which translates to about a billion kilometers an hour. So in the sixth box we have a box 100 million kilometers, or about six light seconds, on a side. This box would hold the Earth and either Mars or Venus on its closest approach to Earth. Now we go to a seventh box, nine light hours on each side. That’s a box 10 billion kilometers on edge. If we put the box around the sun it would encompass almost all the planets in our solar system. The eighth box would be about 40 light days on each side. It would encompass not only the entire solar system, but everything within the gravitational reach of our sun, including all the comets and other objects much more distant, but nothing else. The ninth box is about ten light years on a side, which would include the solar system and the brightest neighboring stars — Sirius and about 100 other stars less bright. The tenth box is a thousand light years on each side and would include a small part of the Milky Way galaxy, with hundreds of thousands of stars. The eleventh box is a hundred thousand light years on a side, and it would include almost the entire Milky Way Galaxy, with 100 billion stars. The next box, the twelfth box, is ten million light years on a side, which contains dozens of galaxies. The next box is a billion light years per side, and holds hundreds of millions of galaxies. And the entire known universe is about 100 times that large, about 93 billion light years across, and contains 100 billion galaxies.

Then I asked the students to consider scale in the other direction. There are about 100 billion neurons in each of our brains, which we use to appreciate all this. And in each and every one of our neurons, there are about 100 billion atoms.

Professor David Christian, in his excellent Great Courses lecture series on Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity, enlarges our context of our own human place and time in the universe, as follows:

We can grasp [our modern time scale, with a Universe just over 13 billion years old] more easily if we shrink it one billion times, so that the whole history of the Universe can fit into just 13 years. On this scale, our Earth would have been formed about 5 years ago. The first multi-celled organisms would have evolved about 7 months ago. After flourishing for several weeks, the dinosaurs would have been wiped out by an asteroid impact about three weeks ago. The first hominines would have appeared about three days ago, and our own species just 53 minutes ago. The first agriculturalists would have flourished about 5 minutes ago, and the first Agrarian civilizations would have appeared just 3 minutes ago. Modern industrial societies would have existed for just six seconds.

At the very beginning, the universe started to expand rapidly in a period of immense heat after the so-called Big Bang. After the first tenth of a second, the universe was already a light year across and all the subatomic particles that will ever exist had formed, to be shuffled and reshuffled among different atoms in the universe for the next 13.8 billions years.[3]

In the beginning, the universe was filled only with very simple atoms, mostly hydrogen atoms, which have just one proton and one electron and no neutrons. These hydrogen atoms are very small, but they do have mass, and so they began to clump together, attracted to each other by the force of gravity. As these clumps of hydrogen got bigger -- and then much, much bigger -- they started to burn, and these burning hydrogen balls are what we call stars.

How does the merging of atoms to create new atoms produce energy, like that from the sun? Albert Einstein explained this with his famous equation e =mc². Energy = mass × the speed of light squared. This means that there’s a certain amount of energy stored in mass itself, and the greater the mass of something, the more energy it has in it. When two atoms combine to make a new atom, the new atom has less mass than the original two atoms added together. That lost mass is released as kinetic energy. At the center of gigantic stars the pressure is so great that their hydrogen atoms fuse with other hydrogen atoms to form new elements, with different numbers of protons and electrons. This process is called nuclear fusion, and the vast amounts of energy it creates is what makes the stars shine. The fusion process continues, creating more complex, heavier atoms, like lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, and nitrogen – all the elements in the periodic table until it gets to iron. Iron is so dense that most stars don’t have enough mass to produce enough pressure to squeeze it into something else, and so most stars eventually become a giant ball of iron. But if a star is large enough, its gravity can compress even iron, releasing so much energy that it explodes in a supernova. This explosion is so powerful it can fuse iron into the heavier elements, like zinc, lead, gold, tungsten, and uranium. Supernova explosions fling these elements across the universe, where they later coalesce into other stars, planets, and asteroids. The fact that these heavier elements are only produced by supernovas is why they are less commonly found, including here on Earth. Stars produce lots of iron and much less gold and silver, making gold and silver much rarer and therefore more valuable to people on Earth.

The universe has been seeded with all these elements from exploding stars over billions of years. And those elemental atoms ebb and flow throughout the universe over vast periods of time. When I was a substitute teacher in that sixth-grade science class I mentioned earlier, I used the following as an example of a typical “life of an atom”: Once in a star; an atom exploded out of it; landed on an asteroid; came to Earth; landed in a pool of water for a billion years; merged with other atoms to form a protein; was eaten by a worm; then eaten by a bird; then pooped out and frozen into a glacier for 400,000 years until it was released when the ice melted; it was absorbed by a tree leaf; made its way to one of the outer rings of the tree trunk; was chopped off by a lumberjack; was eaten by another bird; and when that bird was killed and eaten by a hunter, the hunter burped it out. Indeed, it’s interesting to think that some of the atoms in our body are over 13 billion years old, having traversed immense distances all over space before finding their way to us.

Gravity pulled the stuff of our universe into place. It pulled stars into giant rotating clusters called galaxies. Indeed, many of the things that look like stars in the night sky are really entire galaxies, seen from a vast distance as one point of light. About 5 billion years ago, clumps of stuff near our star, the Sun, were, fortunately, far enough away not to be pulled into the star, but not so far away that they would resist its gravitational pull. This stuff clumped under its own gravitational force, in orbit around the Sun, and formed the planets of our solar system, including our planet Earth some 4.5 billion years ago.

One of the many fortuitous aspects of our existence is the fact that our sun was just the right size to allow for evolution to produce human life. Our sun burns its fuel relatively slowly compared to other stars. A very big star has so much gravitational force that the pressure buildup will cause fusion reactions to happen relatively rapidly. Such a star may only last a few hundred years. Fortunately, our sun is a smaller star, so its fusion process can go on for billions of years, which was great for us because it took almost 4 billion years of the evolution of life on Earth before humans made their first appearance.

And the Earth itself is made up of things that ended up operating together in very special ways that allowed life to form here. First, the elements in the Earth form a protective shield around it, making it uniquely suited for life. The Earth is large enough to maintain a core of moving molten metal, which generates the magnetosphere that helps protect the Earth from the Sun’s otherwise deadly radiation. The moving charges of ions and electrons in the molten metal at the center of the Earth, following the laws of electromagnetism, create a magnetic field, which extends from the core of the Earth out tens of thousands of miles into space.[4] That magnetic field shields the Earth from the Sun’s radiation. The Sun blasts out streams of high-energy charged particles (mostly electrons and protons), known as the solar wind. Fortunately, when these charged particles reach Earth, they run into the magnetosphere, and because charged particles follow magnetic field lines, most of them are deflected around the planet, flowing along the magnetic field lines rather than striking the atmosphere directly. This protective barrier prevents over-heating and helps retain liquid water on the Earth’s surface, which is essential for life. Water is our bodies’ transportation system. It’s through the water in our own bodies that nutrients and our immune system travel from place to place, allowing the machine that is us to function.

Two other factors allow an atmosphere to exist on Earth: the Earth’s mass and its distance from the Sun. In another amazingly fortuitous event, Earth’s gravity is strong enough to keep its atmosphere and all the atoms in it close to the surface. Mars, which has only one-tenth Earth’s mass, has lower gravity, which allows gas atoms on its surface to escape into space. Regarding distance from the Sun, the Earth is fortunately not so close to the Sun that the Sun’s rays heat up the gas molecules on the surface so much that they vibrate too violently and escape Earth’s gravity. In contrast, Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, not only has a much smaller mass, but its close proximity to the Sun means that any atoms in Mercury’s atmosphere absorb so much heat energy that they vibrate right off the planet. Earth is also just the right temperature for life: it’s warm enough for water to be liquid, yet not so warm that the water heats up into vapor and floats away, and not so cold that all water turns to ice.

And that’s not all. We are also very fortunate that long ago the Earth was struck by a giant asteroid, which ripped out a chunk of the Earth, which gravity then pulled into a sphere we call the Moon which began to orbit Earth. The collision mixed a large variety of minerals from the Earth’s solid surface into the oceans, creating a “primordial soup” that mixed things together in ways that resulted in the first form of life. And the moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth stabilized the Earth’s rotation. The initial collision that created the moon knocked the Earth’s axis off center, which was great for us because it allowed the Earth to experience the four seasons and also allowed all parts of the Earth to experience twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness. The presence of the Moon and its gravitational force stabilized that tilt where it is now, and keeps it steady. Without that stability, which brings more stable weather patterns, previously warm spots could freeze over quickly, denying life the fluidity of liquid water necessary for life and significantly reducing the chances life could ever form, even over a long period of time.

About 4 billion years ago, after the Earth’s surface had cooled enough for water to form (about 3.8 billion years ago), evidence of life appears. During the following billion years, the first continents formed. The life on Earth then was very simple and probably just bacteria that survived through photosynthesis, a process that uses the energy from the Sun in ways that allow an organism to reproduce. Photosynthetic bacteria spread around the world, with the photosynthesis producing lots of oxygen into the atmosphere. Without the large amounts of free atmospheric oxygen generated by the bacteria, no later complex life could have evolved, as oxygen bonds easily with carbon, so it can be used to form the complex organic molecules that exist in all carbon-based organisms (like us) -- molecules like lipids, sugars, and proteins. Because oxygen bonds to other molecules easily, we can absorb it simply by breathing it in. Once inside us, the iron in the hemoglobin molecules in our blood bonds with the oxygen and transports it to our other cells.

As Brian Villmoare writes in The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History:

All life on Earth descends from a common ancestor. We know this because all life is related – we all use the same genetic code (DNA), and the other building blocks of life (the amino acids) are identical. In fact, it is possible to determine relatedness between any two living things by just looking at how different their DNA is. So, even though you look nothing alike, you are related to a housefly, a dandelion, a mushroom, and even the bacteria that causes ear infections. All of this life comes from a single, ancient ancestor. Sometime, between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago, life originated, and as far as we know it only happened once. All life after that point is a result of slow changes over time through evolution … The earliest life that became preserved in fossils was a very simple single-celled organism that converted the Sun’s energy into growth using photosynthesis, much as plants and algae do today.

Exactly how life originated remains a mystery to science. About 4 billion years ago, there was hardly any oxygen but large amounts of methane, ammonia and water. Methane and ammonia contain carbon, but also nitrogen and hydrogen, which are also found in all living organisms today. We don’t know exactly how life spontaneously arose from the chemical stew of the early Earth, but in 1952, researchers put ammonia, methane, water, and hydrogen in a flask, heated the flask, and then ran an electrical current through the gas. These conditions approximated those on early Earth, in which a hot surface temperature often created electrical storms, injecting electrical energy into the primordial soup. When the researchers checked the condensed gas the next day, they found amino acids, which compose the bodies of all living things.[5]

Once life exists, it has to struggle to maintain enough energy to prevent itself from falling apart again. A dead animal will pretty quickly decompose and no longer be organized into the structures it was composed of when it was alive. As something decomposes, it goes from an organized state, with cells and organs, to a less organized state in which its components disperse back into the universe. The process by which things go from a highly organized to less organized state is known as entropy. It takes energy to maintain organization and resist this entropy. As Ludwig Boltzmann wrote in 1875, “The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials – these, for organisms, are air, water and soil, all abundantly available – nor for energy which exists in plenty in any body in the form of heat, but a struggle for [negative] entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.” In essence, life is a struggle to capture energy and use it in response to the universal tendency to dissipate energy and prevent that energy from holding things together in an orderly form.

Solar energy provides the primary means of allowing life to grow and thrive. As Villmoare writes:

[P]lants use the stored chemical energy to grow. But when animals eat those plants, they are acquiring that same stored energy, which they then convert to growth, or store as fat. If a predator eats an animal, that same energy is passed down to the predator. So, in effect, when a lion eats an impala it is eating an animal that is stored solar energy, only in chemical form. Humans access this same solar energy when they eat plants or animals, or burn logs for warmth. But what about other forms of energy? When we burn gasoline in our cars, we are using that exact same solar energy. Hundreds of millions to billions of years ago, giant mats of cyanobacteria and other organisms covered the Earth’s oceans. When they died and were buried beneath the ocean floor, over time that plant material decayed and slowly converted into what we call crude oil. A similar process occurs during coal formation, when plant matter is buried and decays over millions of years. In both cases, the product we burn is a stored accumulation of millions of years of solar energy, converted into a chemical form via photosynthesis. The only form of chemical energy on Earth that is not the result of photosynthesis is nuclear energy.

Again, water is vitally important to life because it facilitates order. As Villmoare explains:

Why is water necessary for life? The first part of the answer is that life needs fluid. Chemicals do not combine very well, nor nearly as completely, in their solid form. Think for a minute about two chemical elements that need to combine to make life. How do they find each other? If they are just solid pieces of rock, they probably won’t. They may just sit on the surface of the planet for billions of years. But if they are mixed into a fluid, they will inevitably find each other … But why water and not some other fluid? What is so special about H2O? … [T]he water molecule has polarity: the hydrogen atoms, which are positively charged, are on one side of the molecule, while the negatively charged oxygen atom is on the other. When something is placed in water, the two different electrical charges tug differentially on the different components of whatever substance is in the water, and can literally pull it apart. This ability to dissolve substances means water is excellent for nature to experiment with mixing various chemicals.

That’s also why water is so good at cleaning things: it cleans by pulling both positively and negatively charged things off the things that are being washed.

As Villmoare continues, “[O]nce life has formed, especially complex life, having water in the bodies of living things provides a way for the stable transport of other chemicals to get around the body.” Fortunately, the fundamental building blocks of our bodies, our DNA, are in the shape of a double helix, which allows each strand with our chemical data to pair with its mirror image, creating strong bonds that prevent bonding with other random chemicals that might be floating by, making our DNA stable for accurate replications billions of times over our lives. Once this DNA-based replication method developed, it led to the first successful living organism, algae, which covered the Earth for almost 2 billion years, generating oxygen in the atmosphere through photosynthesis that was necessary for later, more complex, life.

As Villmoare writes:

[H]ow did the appearance of a simple, one-celled organism living in the “primordial soup” lead to all the amazing forms that evolved over the next 3.5 billion years – from sunflowers to jellyfish to grasshoppers to slime mold to humans? The answer is evolution … Evolution by natural selection is a change in genetic frequencies in a population that is not simply random – it is driven by something. Some individuals reproduce, and some don’t, because some are prevented from reproducing. Often, this takes the form of some animals not surviving long enough to reproduce, and their gene combinations are therefore eliminated from the gene pool, which changes the overall population’s genetic frequencies. Sometimes, under some conditions, various elements of organisms give them an advantage in survival.

For example, wolves in colder climates would have a survival advantage if they happened to grow thick fur coats. And wolves in warmer climates would have the same advantage if they grew thinner coats so they wouldn’t overheat. Eventually, these climate-dependent survival advantages would produce two populations so different that they could no longer interbreed, creating two species out of one.

The first great wave of land-based species were the dinosaurs. While today’s amphibians, such as frogs, are smaller than larger vertebrates, when amphibians first crawled out of the oceans around 360 million years ago, there were no bigger animals on land to eat them or compete for food. So they rapidly evolved, and dinosaurs came to dominate the Earth until the Cretaceous–Tertiary Extinction, which occurred about 65 million years ago when a huge meteor struck Earth in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. The meteor caused a large flood in North America, and threw so much dust into the atmosphere that photosynthesis among plants was blocked for about a hundred years, causing the food web to collapse, with the resulting extinction of the larger terrestrial animals.

When the dinosaurs went extinct, there was room for mammals, including humans, to grow, and today we live in the age of mammals.

Meat is dense with calories, fat, protein, and amino acids. Early humans’ discovery of fire allowed them to cook and eat meat more efficiently, super-charging their capacity to grow larger brains. As Richard Wrangham, an evolutionary biologist who studied under Jane Goodall, writes in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human:

Cooked food does many familiar things. It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes, and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut, or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from our food … After our ancestors started eating cooked food every day, natural selection favored those with small guts, because they were able to digest their food well, but at a lower cost than before. The result was increased energetic efficiency.

And the saved energy was diverted to the development of our brains. As Wragham explains, heat turns the toughest part of meat, the main protein in connective tissue called collagen, into jelly. And cooking, by making foods easier to digest, frees up energy our bodies can then use to fuel the electricity that fires our neurons. For most people, every fifth meal is eaten solely to power the brain. Our brains use around 20 percent of our bodies’ energy budget while resting even though our brain makes up just two-and-a-half percent of our body weight.

Cooking and eating meat gave our human ancestors a huge evolutionary advantage over other primates. Primates who can’t cook meat spend huge amounts of time having to chew the raw foods they consume, which prevents them from doing many other things. As Wragham writes:

[It takes a] large amount of time … to eat raw food … Chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, spend more than six hours a day chewing … Because the amount of time spent chewing is related to body size among primates, we can estimate how long humans would be obliged to spend chewing if we lived on the same kind of raw food that great apes do. Conservatively, it would be 42 percent of the day, or just over five hours of chewing in a twelve-hour day … Before our ancestors cooked, then, they had much less free time … Males could not afford to spend all day hunting, because if they failed to get any prey, they would have had to fill their bellies on plant foods instead, which would take a long time just to chew.[6]

And the benefits of fire didn’t end there:

Even our ancestors’ emotions are likely to have been influenced by a cooked diet. Clustering around a fire to eat and sleep would have required our ancestors to stay close to one another. To avoid lost tempers flaring into disruptive fights, the proximity would have demanded considerable tolerance. A process similar to domestication could then have led to an evolutionary advance in ancestral humans’ social skills … If the intense attractions of a cooking fire selected for individuals who were more tolerant of one another, an accompanying result should have been a rise in their ability to stay calm as they looked at one another, so they could better assess, understand, and trust one another … Such changes in social temperament would have contributed to a growing ability to communicate, including the evolution of language.

As Villmoare writes, “And once the brains evolved further, that of course meant that ever more complex problem-solving abilities were available. This became a feedback loop, as more complex behaviors enabled greater acquisition of meat, and the additional meat enabled more brain development.” That’s how evolution led to our larger brains.

So there you have it. A quick summary of how we got to now, with all its awe-inspiring complexity and fortuity.

And it gets more interesting from here.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore how the threads of evolution shaped not just the size of our brains, but its patterns of thinking as well.

Further Reading

David Christian, Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity (Great Courses series)

Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

Brian Villmoare, The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History

Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

[1] Each chapter will also conclude with a short list of suggested “Further Reading,” which will include the books of the main experts cited that cover each chapter topic more comprehensively.

[2] America’s Founding Fathers did the same. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, for example, repeatedly referred to the lessons of ancient Athens when helping chart the way forward for the new United States.

[3] A side-note on this point about my substitute teaching experience. I illustrated how we came to know that the universe was expanding by using a balloon. Back in 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble observed that far-away galaxies looked redder than you would expect. He concluded that the “red shift” of galaxies was directly proportional to the distance of the galaxy from Earth. That meant that things farther away from Earth were moving away faster. In other words, the universe must be expanding, and as parts of the universe move further away from each other at increasing speeds, the expanding space tends to stretch the light waves, making them appear to have longer wavelengths and to consequently look redder to us, as red light has a longer wavelength (a longer distance from wave peak-to-wave peak) than blue light. This effect can be illustrated by drawing a wave on the side of a balloon, blowing up the balloon, and seeing how the stretching of the space along the side of the balloon makes the wavelength of the wave you drew on the balloon stretch out, which is why we see light emanating from far-distant stars as “red-shifted.”

[4] When you use a magnetic compass, the needle points toward the north because that is the orientation of the magnetic field generated by the movement of molten metal in the Earth’s core.

[5] The researchers found a way to generate some of the component parts of life, but they didn’t actually generate life itself.

[6] So the consumption of meat is vitally important in human history. Regarding prospects today for “going vegan,” Vaclav Smil, in How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going, writes:

The quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail. Eating meat has been as significant a component of our evolutionary heritage as our large brains (which evolved partly because of meat eating), bipedalism, and symbolic language. All our hominin ancestors were omnivorous, as are both species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus), the hominins closest to us in their genetic makeup; they supplement their plant diet by hunting (and sharing) small monkeys, wild pigs, and tortoises. Full expression of human growth potential on a population basis can take place only when diets in childhood and adolescence contain sufficient quantities of animal protein, first in milk and later in other dairy products, eggs, and meat … [M]ost people who become vegetarians or vegans do not remain so for the remainder of their lives … Moreover, there are billions of people in Asia and Africa whose meat consumption remains minimal and whose health would benefit from more meaty diets.

Hello all! So, having posted over 400 entries on a large variety of topics over the last four and a half years, my plan now is to organize all those subjects into a book. The book, tentatively titled “Lifeline Lessons: Following the Thread of Human Nature Through a Maze of Institutions,” will be a systematic march through just about all the ideas and concepts explored in previous entries, including new information I’ve come across since the original posts, packaged into a more concise narrative (one topic per chapter — no more “Part 5” or “Part 14”). The book will tell the story of, first, what we know about human nature, including what sorts of things best encourage human flourishing, and, second, the extent to which our institutions today – from school boards to Congress – tend to further or stifle human flourishing.

Going forward, the Substack is being rebranded “Lifeline Lessons,” with a new logo. A draft of a chapter from the book will be posted each week, and the tentative plan is for around 50 chapters. The first few chapters are free, so people can see whether they like where it’s going. But starting with Chapter 4, the chapters will only be available to paid subscribers.

So if you’re already a paid subscriber, many thanks as always, and you’ll be getting the chapters of the book in draft form as it rolls out. If you’re not a paid subscriber, I hope you’ll become one so we can take this new journey together. And of course, paid subscribers will be able to post comments on each chapter, including critiques and advice.

Here’s a little more detail regarding the outline of the book. The first part of the book will examine the evolution of our psychology, how that psychology interacts with modern media, what we know about how free markets work, and how alternative systems work, which systems improve people’s wellbeing the most, and why. It will also examine how the way we frame our view of the world influences whether the script we write for our lives is happy, or not. And it will compare how well what we know about the wonders of the universe and how it works is transmitted through our systems of K-12 and higher education, and through our scientific institutions.

The second part of the book will explore our system of government, from its constitutional “separation of powers” foundation to the cracks we see in that foundation today – in our courts, our Congress, and the executive branch. And it will examine how those cracks may be creating breaks in the lines of political accountability that are supposed to connect citizens to their government. It will examine the incentive structures created by government policies, the extent to which they encourage or deter the best aspects of human nature — and the extent to which those policies themselves are a product of the best or worst aspects of human nature working through bureaucratic structures.

What leads us to develop tendencies toward habits? At a fundamental biological level, we are geared to respond to patterns of activity. As Suri Gaurav and Jay McClelland explain in The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines:

Our brains are vast arrays of cells called neurons, animated by patterns of electrical and chemical activity that rise, fall, and rise again. Our perceptions, thoughts, decisions, and actions— the processes we will call the mind— arise from these patterns of activity. How? How could a mind possibly arise from patterns of activity in a brain? … How do such abstract things as beliefs and desires result from physical processes taking place in our brains, and how can they give rise to physical actions, including moving, acting … [W]hy [do] people frequently … not act according to their beliefs and desires. For example, patients often do not take medications essential to their health, and employees do not start retirement accounts crucial to their financial future. This occurs even though such individuals hold positive beliefs about the efficacy of their medications and desire the security provided by retirement accounts. And yet they fail to act.

In a sense, why do we become lazy in situations in which acting would be better for us?

Brain regions actually specialize based on what stimuli they are responding to. As Suri and McClelland write:

It is indisputable that brain regions show some degree of specialization. The question is, what gives rise to this specialization? … [T]he part of the brain called the visual cortex plays an important role in visual perception because it receives especially strong input from the eyes. This suggests that changing the input coming into a brain region should produce a change in the function performed by that brain region. Indeed, people whose visual cortex receives no visual input because they are blind from birth repurpose this part of the brain for nonvisual tasks, such as processing auditory or tactile inputs, both of which provide some input to this brain region … [T]his brain area does specialize in reading for people who have learned how to read. Why? Reading depends heavily on distinguishing fine-grained visual details like the differences between very similar letters. The visual word form area receives strong input from other neurons in the visual parts of the brain that provide the highest sensitivity to details—and so it becomes recruited in the reading process. In individuals who do not read, this area becomes specialized for other tasks that also depend on distinguishing fine-grained details, such as recognizing different people’s faces. Such findings support our view of specialization in the brain as being shaped by experience and dependent on the inputs and outputs of brain regions rather than having dedicated functions prespecified by evolution.

How does this work? As Suri and McClelland explain:

The neuron is the fundamental building block responsible for processing and transmitting information within the brain and the rest of the nervous system. At a basic level, neurons do some very understandable things: (1) They can become activated—meaning they can generate small bursts of electricity called action potentials; (2) they can transmit signals to other neurons that they are connected with; and (3) they can build or adjust the strength of connections with other neurons … The neural network view suggests that all the mind’s thoughts and actions come about due to the interactions between our neurons. There is nothing else.

The strength of these neural connections is based on experience:

[E]ach neuron may receive signals from many other neurons. At least to a first approximation, neurons add up the activations they receive from other neurons, and the larger the sum of these inputs, the stronger the activation … [N]eurons create and change the strength of their connections as a function of experience. For example, meeting a new person may create connections between neurons representing the person’s face and the neurons representing the person’s name. These connections might strengthen with repeated meetings. A strong connection between two neurons makes them influence each other more robustly … [O]ne of us, Jay McClelland, came across a visual scene that helped him crystallize the various simultaneous operations of a neural network … [W]here other people saw a stream successively falling into various pools, Jay saw a metaphor for these continuous processes in the mind. He conceptualized the various pools as if they corresponded to different thoughts. The amount of water they contained corresponded to their activations. Each pool could receive water from multiple other pools, and the level of water it contained depended on the summation of these various inputs. Some pools were connected to other pools by deep or broad streamlets that carried a lot of water, whereas other pools were connected by streamlets that were little more than a trickle. These connections were evocative of connections of different strengths linking these thoughts to one another. This metaphor, he realized, helped him think about the mind as a neural network …

The actual physical process of neural connections is fascinating. To help get a grip on that subject, Suri and McClelland point to the example of ants:

Interactions between neurons are the engine of the mind … How could any system entirely reliant on neurons—none of which is individually capable of anything like what we perceive to be thought—yield the full spectrum of human cognition? It turns out that a helpful metaphor for our intelligence is provided by the behavior of ants. If you ever come across a train of ants walking from their nest to a food source and back, try the following experiment: Place an obstacle on their path so that there is a short way around the obstacle and a long way around it. So, for example, the ants approaching the obstacle might take a right turn to take the short way or take a left turn to go the long way. Observe what the ants do. It turns out that collectives of ants are highly effective at choosing the more optimal path. In a matter of a few minutes, almost all the ants end up taking the short way around the obstacle. It’s as if knowledge about the shortest path becomes available to the entire colony. How might this be possible? What is the source of the intelligence of a colony of ants? There are two propositions that are generally true about ants. First, they lay trails of chemical substances called pheromones as they make their way from their nests to a food source and back. Second, ants tend to follow pheromone trails laid by other ants. In the case of choosing a particular path, we need only assume that an ant will follow the path with the greatest quantity of pheromones.

Say two ants happen to take different routes around the obstacle. In the following explanation, the authors name the ant that takes the shorter route Tar, and the ant that takes the longer route Tal:

Since Tar is taking the shorter way, it reaches the food first. Tar grabs a little bite and must now carry it back to its nest. But there is a decision to be made: Which path should Tar take on the way back? There is only one path with any pheromone on it, and that is the path Tar took while coming over. So Tar retraces its steps and goes back the way it came. Meantime, Tal, who took the long way around the obstacle, finally reaches the food source. It, too, grabs a little bite and must head back. But which path should Tal take? There are now two options: the shorter path that Tar used twice (coming and going) or the longer path that it, Tal, just used coming over to the food. The shorter path that Tar took has a greater quantity of pheromones because Tar took it twice. Therefore, Tal, on its way back, will take the shorter path. The dynamics that are at work for Tal and Tar are generally applicable to the ants in the colony. Later, ants facing choices about which paths to take to the food and back will find greater quantities of pheromones in greater concentrations along the shorter path. They will, therefore, generally take the shorter path as well. The model suggests that the “taking the shortest way around obstacles” behavior of the ant colony may be an emergent consequence of the pheromone-laying and pheromone-following behaviors leading to the behavior of the population of ants as a whole and need not rely on any individual ant having considered the alternatives and chosen the best path to take.

In the same way, our reactions to things are often derived from our exposure to patterns, not from careful consideration. As Suri and McClelland write:

We similarly conceive the mind to be an emergent consequence of the activity of neurons in the brain. The thinking abilities of our minds need not be dependent on the thinking abilities of individual neurons in isolation. Just as the seemingly goal-directed behavior of an ant colony emerges from the behaviors of ants that are, at the individual level, not following any particular goal, the powerful capabilities of the human mind might likewise emerge from the interactions of neurons that are, at the individual level, not capable of anything like what we perceive to be intelligence. Your brain has on the order of one hundred billion neurons, and there are billions more in the rest of your body. Many of the neurons in the brain are extensively connected with one another. In this sense, your brain is a neural network … Our minds effortlessly know water changes shape to fit a container, whereas a frying pan does not. What enables such knowledge? … Imagine the world you saw as a young infant. There was a plethora of chaotic sights, sounds, and textures around you, and you did not yet have the tools to organize these things in any way at all. One minute, you were lying in a cot staring at a flat surface above you; the next, you were swooped into someone’s arms and carried outside, where the flat surface above you became an unending blue expanse, although you didn’t know the word blue (or know any words at all) … Above you are fluttering things that travel beneath the blue expanse and not on the other surface below you that other creatures seem rooted to. “Sparrow,” someone said, even though the previous sound associated with this thing had been “bird.” Back indoors, someone made the sound “bath,” and you were dipped into something that felt slippery and changed its shape around your body. You moved your arms, and some of this substance bounced upward and landed on your face. A few months later, the world is becoming more familiar. You have often experienced both the indoor and the outdoor world … [I]t turns out there are different kinds of things. From very early on, you hear words and connect them to the things you observe through your senses. These words help you to group different objects into sets that others label with the same word. Now you can talk to others about them. The world is no longer as fragmented and overwhelming as it was.

The neural network process works in our brains through our neurons’ firing bursts of electricity of different strengths. As Suri and McClelland write:

[A] neuron’s action repertoire is somewhat limited. One of the things it does is send small bursts of electricity, called action potentials, or spikes, to other neurons. These can be recorded by electrodes inserted into the brain and then sent to a loudspeaker, where each one sounds like a little pop. In the absence of external inputs, a typical neuron tends to fire at a low rate. We shall refer to this as its baseline firing rate. When it is activated, it sends action potentials above its baseline firing rate. Other times, when it is inhibited, its firing rate will be below baseline. Some neurons can be directly activated by signals from the outside world—these are special sensory receptor neurons. Most neurons get their input from other neurons that are connected to them. These inputs can either excite the neuron (increasing its firing rate) or inhibit the neuron (reducing its firing rate). How could such firings amount to anything? It turns out they amount to a lot. Here, we describe one of the earliest examples of a neural network that can do things that none of its individual neurons can do, from the work of the neurobiologists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who used a network of neurons to explain how we begin to build a picture of the world around us. They based their network on groundbreaking observations from the visual cortex of a cat as they flashed slides in front of it. For their contributions, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1981 … [N]o matter what stimuli they presented to the cat, the neurons they were recording from remained, stubbornly, at baseline. They tried various configurations of dots. No luck. Pictures of things a cat might care about—still nothing. Completely stuck, they even tried dancing around in front of the cat. But no. The neurons they were recording from did not show the slightest interest. Then one day, with yet another neuron, as they were changing the slide in the projector, everything changed. The neuron all of a sudden started to respond wildly: pop, pop, pop, in rapid succession! It was not the content of the slide that the neuron was responding to. Rather, it was the line made by the edge of the slide. A momentous event in the history of science had occurred: Hubel and Wiesel had discovered a neuron that responded to the image of a straight line displayed at a particular angle—the angle that the edge of their slide had happened to project. They ran down the halls, screaming with delight. The question, of course, was how in the world this neuron was able to detect a straight line. It did not respond to a dot, it did not respond to lines at most angles, but, given a line with the orientation it seemed to “prefer,” it responded with abandon. How had this property emerged?

The answer lies in our neurons’ ability to fire in different ways as things move more to our center of attention, creating brain patterns that embody our detection of different features of the world around us. As Suri and McClelland write:

Let’s start by observing that a line can be thought of as a collection of many dots. To simplify things, let’s imagine that four dots labeled A, B, C, and D define a line called l. Let us assume these four dots are at the center of the visual field of four neurons in the retina of one of the cat’s eyes, which we could label Unit A, Unit B, Unit C, and Unit D … [A] dot at the center of the visual field of one of these neurons causes a unit to strongly activate. Now, let’s suppose each of the Units A–D is connected to a Unit E, located in the brain. This means that each of Units A–D, when activated, can, in turn, send activation signals to Unit E. Let’s imagine what our neural network does when the four dots, A, B, C, and D, are seen by the eye. Point A is at the center of the visual field of Unit A, so it busily starts to fire (i.e., it generates many spikes per second). The same happens for the other units because they, too, detect dots at the centers of their visual fields. These four units all send a lot of activation to Unit E so that Unit E will start to fire. What’s remarkable is that Unit E fires very vigorously for the Line l but fires much less for other lines that are (more than marginally) different from Line l. Unit A is robustly firing because Point A is still at the center of its visual field. Point B is slightly off-center, so Unit B is no longer firing as robustly. Unit C is firing below baseline because Point C is in the “off-center” zone. Unit D is also firing at or below baseline. The net effect is that Unit E is not receiving the same level of excitation as it did for Line l, so it will fire much less in response to this input than it did to the original line. None of these Units A–D by themselves can detect the presence of a line, and Unit E is not itself directly responding to the line in the stimulus either. Yet working together—like the ants were working together—the units in this small neural network have created the “intelligence” to detect a line. Emergence has happened … [T]he feature detector of Hubel and Wiesel was a hierarchical network in which the line detection capabilities of a neuron in a higher layer emerged from the concurrent activation of neurons in a lower layer. But the emergence need not stop there. Line detectors firing concurrently can also help with more complex shapes. For example, a square could be detected from the concurrent activation of four line detectors similar to Unit E.

As Suri and McClelland explain:

[W]hat we see is the result of a constructive process relying on neurons with increasingly complex response profiles at different levels. Given the input of a retinal image of a tree, neurons in the lowest layers of the visual cortex detect simple features like lines and colors. Neurons in subsequent layers combine information about features detected at lower levels to detect features related to more complex shapes, features related to depth, and features related to motion. Neurons in the highest layers are able to assemble information from prior layers and have feature detectors that get activated by higher-order aspects of the shape of the entire tree. Notably, there does not appear to be a special “tree detector” neuron or a dedicated set of neurons responsible for our perception of the whole tree. Instead, the pattern of activation across the neurons in the set of visually responsive brain areas seems to be what constitutes our visual representation of the tree … Ants often use pheromones to signal one another. Neurons often use chemicals called neurotransmitters to signal one another. Ants produce different kinds of pheromones. Neurons produce different types of neurotransmitters (you may have heard of some of these—dopamine, serotonin, and glutamate are commonly known neurotransmitters). Ants respond to pheromones they encounter by changing their behavior. Neurons respond to neurotransmitters they receive by changing their internal electric charge or potential. This change in potential determines whether or not the neuron passes on a signal to its neighboring neurons. Overall, neurons communicate with one another via chemical signals across synapses, enabled by electrical changes within neurons … [T]he total input into the neuron combines all the individual inputs it receives. The input at a single synapse produces a very small change—typically not enough to cause an action potential in the receiving neuron. But the typical pyramidal neuron has tens of thousands of synapses—places where it receives inputs from other neurons—on its dendritic tree. To a first approximation, neurons tend to compute a total input, which is the sum of all excitatory inputs minus the sum of the inhibitory inputs. A positive net input tends to increase the firing rate of a neuron, while a negative net input tends to decrease its firing rate.

To see how this neural triggering mechanism leads to human action, Suri and McClelland write:

Let us imagine that a person has a population of neurons that fire when they are thirsty. The thirstier they are, the more they fire. They have another population of neurons that fire when they are hungry. Let us further imagine that this person has a third population of neurons whose activation results in the person going to the refrigerator when they are firing at a high enough rate. In a person, the equivalent of this output might consist of a message to various skeletal muscles to initiate movement toward the refrigerator. Finally, let’s suppose that connections from both the hunger neurons and thirst neurons have excitatory connections that can influence the firing of these Go to Refrigerator neurons Since the Thirst unit influences the activation of the Go to Refrigerator unit, there is a connection between those two units. Similarly, there is a connection between the Hunger unit and the Go to Refrigerator unit. There is no connection between the Thirst unit and the Hunger unit, since we are assuming that being thirsty does not make one hungry, or vice versa. We have emphasized the idea that the firing of the Go to Refrigerator neurons must exceed a certain level for the action of approaching the refrigerator to occur. We capture this in our model by specifying an activation threshold value that we have set to 0.5 in our example. Let us now examine the functioning of this neural network. First, let’s imagine a case in which the Thirst unit has an activation of 0.3, and the Hunger unit is completely inactive. This situation captures the case where a person is a little bit thirsty and not hungry at all. As before, we imagine that the connection between the Thirst unit and the Go to Refrigerator unit transmits the full activation of the Thirst unit to the Go to Refrigerator unit, so that this unit, too, would have an activation of 0.3 units. This is less than its threshold value of 0.5, and the Go to Refrigerator unit will not generate an output signal. If, however, the Thirst unit gets input of 0.6 units (corresponding to a higher level of thirst), the Go to Refrigerator unit will reach an activation of 0.6, which, being greater than the threshold value of 0.5, will cause it to generate an output signal. Similarly, no input into the Thirst unit and 0.6 input into the Hunger unit would also cause the Go to Refrigerator neuron to produce an output. Now, imagine a case of moderate thirst and moderate hunger. Let’s say that both the Thirst unit and the Hunger unit have an activation of 0.3, and both pass this amount of activation on to the Go to Refrigerator unit. Since units sum the signals they receive from other units, the Go to Refrigerator unit will receive a total activation of 0.6. This is above the threshold and will cause the unit to generate output. An action that can be initiated in response to either high levels of thirst or high levels of hunger may also get initiated at moderate levels of thirst and moderate levels of hunger. Sometimes, then, we might undertake an action for a combination of reasons when neither reason alone would be enough. Notice that activation was the only currency of this neural network. If there was enough activation, the Go to Refrigerator unit generated a response; otherwise, it did not. Even activation in the Thirst and Hunger units was not strictly necessary; if one externally stimulated a hypothetical Go to Refrigerator unit—via an external electrical current—the person would go to the refrigerator. Such direct influences of electrical stimulation have been observed in animal experiments. This is a property of all neural networks: Activation is their only currency. We think that a similar statement may apply to all the processes of the mind … [O]ur thoughts are patterns of activation over an ensemble of neurons in our brains.

At a more complex level:

Say you are walking down the street and hear someone call your name. Vibrating air molecules beat on your eardrum and cause a neuronal signal to reach your brain. Neurons in your auditory cortex that are tuned to the properties of the incoming signal are activated. They, in turn, cause other neurons to activate in other parts of the brain. A particular pattern of activation emerges, and you experience hearing your name. You stop and turn around. Another pattern of activation, this time in parts of your visual cortex, arises, and you recognize your friend. It turns out he’s with his dog. Yet another pattern of activation commences. You experience a wave of happiness at seeing your friend, arising from activation in still other parts of your brain.

Suri and McClelland then move on to the next question:

Okay, thoughts are patterns of activation, but what determines the particular activation pattern that corresponds to a particular thought? … [M]emory researchers have suggested that what we store in our brains is some kind of record of the pattern of activation that was present in our minds when we first had the experience. A central feature of our neural network–based approach is to propose instead that what is left behind after the experience is not the pattern of activation itself but rather changes in the strengths of the connections between the neurons that participated in the pattern of activation. Connection strength refers to the degree of influence one neuron (or one unit) exerts on another neuron (or unit). As we discussed above, in the brain, these influences occur at synapses between neurons, which themselves can vary in strength.

And that varying strength, again, is the product of experience:

[W]e had assumed that there was a connection between the Thirst unit and the Go to Refrigerator unit. In real brains, such a connection must be the product of experience, for we are not born with an association between thirst and refrigerators. The knowledge contained in a neural network—the stuff that enables recognizing objects, remembering facts, and bringing previous experiences back to mind—is stored in connections between its units. An important feature of this property is that the relevant connections can create entrenched pathways that guide the flow of activation with repetition, much as moving water carves pathways on the earth’s surface. Some of these pathways, such as the one based on connections between the representation of a new acquaintance’s face and their name, might be weak and short-lived—a bit like a stream that emerges when water flows across a leaf-strewn driveway after a brief rain. Other pathways, such as the one that links activations evoked by getting into a car with activations related to putting on a seat belt, can become strong and lasting—a bit like the Colorado River flowing through the walls of the Grand Canyon. The more the water flows, the deeper the channel; the more the activation flows in the neural network, the stronger the connections … [W]hat remains after the experience is not strictly a record of it but a set of connection changes that can lead to the experience’s approximate reconstruction. New experiences cause new connections to form between collections of neurons, and these new connections provide a means for the activation of some neurons (representing, for example, a friend’s face or the thought of our parked car) to influence the activation of other neurons (representing the pattern for our friend’s name or the location where we parked the car).

To get a sense of how experience can change neural connections, here’s a fun comparison photo of my two kids at the same point of the same roller coaster, first when they experienced it for the first time, and then four years later after they had experienced it many times:

As Suri and McClelland write:

Evidence of the brain’s ability to form new connections in response to new experiences comes from disparate experiments and observations. For example, in one experiment, young adults learned how to juggle and practiced improving their juggling skills for a period of three months. Compared to controls (who did not learn juggling), their brain scans showed increases in gray matter in brain areas that are associated with the processing and storage of complex visual motion. The participants in the study then stopped juggling. After three months, the sizes of these brain areas had reverted back to their original levels. It is known that new neurons do not grow in the brain region being analyzed, so what accounts for the changes in gray matter? Subsequent work confirmed that as participants learned and then unlearned how to juggle, new connections formed and then dissolved in their brains … Similar evidence was provided in a study involving apes. Apes that were trained to use a rake to reach food outside their normal reach showed greater connectivity in certain brain regions compared to apes who had not received such training … In the 1940s, well before such experimental evidence was gathered, the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb … proposed this simple idea: When one neuron activates another nearby neuron, the connection between the two neurons becomes stronger. Specifically, he wrote: When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased. This idea was later summarized and popularized by the easily remembered phrase, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” The core of Hebb’s idea was that if two neurons were frequently active in temporal proximity, then the strength of the (excitatory) connection between them would increase. An important related idea is that if one neuron is often active while another is not, or vice versa, the strength of their mutual connections would decrease. This notion seems to echo in many aspects of our daily lives. The more one practices something, like a musical instrument or speaking a new language—or, if one is an ape in a psychology experiment, reaching for food with a rake—the better one gets at it. These changes happen, per Hebb, because neural assemblies representing a cue get progressively better connected to neural assemblies representing responses. Much like the idiom “Practice makes perfect,” these connections grow to become faster, stronger, and more efficient with repeated co-activation. Habitual responses to cues have strong connections between the representation of the cue and the representation of the launch of the habitual action. Wearing the seat belt upon entering a car is an example of such an action.

And the context in which we are presented with something matter a lot regarding how we interpret it. As Suri and McClelland write:

[W]hat we think depends upon the context in which we think. For example, we shall examine how the same item can be perceived differently depending upon the setting we see it in; we shall examine how our thoughts about a particular attribute of a person depend on our thoughts about their other, possibly unrelated, attributes; and we shall examine how one aspect of our emotional response can influence other aspects of our emotional response related to the same event. Let’s begin with thinking about how we perceive. Imagine that someone asks you to look at the face [pictured above]. You might be able to pick out the man with his round glasses and bald head. But imagine that someone had instead asked you to look at the mouse in the same picture. You may now be able to pick out the animal: What were the round glasses are now the ears, and what was the man’s bald head is now the curved spine. The example illustrates how the context provided by an instruction affects how we may experience a whole image, as well as its various parts.

[The picture immediately above] was a critical element in an experiment where participants saw pictures of farm animals and sea creatures. For half the participants, farm animals were worth positive points, whereas sea creatures were worth negative points. For the other half of the participants, this was reversed. Participants who ended up with positive points would consume a tasty dessert, but participants ending the experiment with negative points would be required to consume a disgusting-looking concoction. So there was something tangible at stake, and participants were motivated. The experiment was designed to proceed so that in the final trial, participants in the farm animal group needed to see a farm animal to end up with positive points, and participants in the sea creature group needed to see a sea creature. Then both sets of participants were shown the figure depicted [above]. What do you think happened? Remarkably, participants in the farm animal condition were more likely to interpret the figure as a horse, and participants in the sea creature condition were more likely to interpret the figure as a seal (they could not simply claim to have seen a farm animal or sea creature, they had to say which animal they had seen—e.g., a horse or a seal). Can you capture both sets of experiences? The horse interpretation requires seeing the figure as a head—with the two pointy ears sticking up; the seal interpretation requires seeing the figure as the whole body of a seal, with the face of the seal at the bottom left—with the tail fins sticking up. The authors considered the possibility that participants saw both animals but only reported seeing the one that, if it had been shown, would mean they would receive the reward. They concluded that this interpretation was not correct because they found that participants who reported seeing the seal made different patterns of eye movements than participants who reported seeing the horse. This finding is best explained, they argued, by the idea that the participants actually saw the figures differently.

As Suri and McClelland point out, “One might dismiss these examples as trifling amusements, but they point to a vital idea about how the mind operates: Our experience and understanding of things that we see depends on the context in which they appear and on how we interpret the context.” Indeed, as we’ve seen previously, an individual’s very sense of well-being throughout life is closely associated with how they see the world generally, with those who see themselves in control of their life, as opposed to other people or other forces’ being in control of their life, being much happier, along with those who approach the world with a sense of curiosity and wonder instead of dread.

Interestingly, as Suri and McClelland note, not all neural connections are formed from experience. We are actually born with many of them “pre-wired.” As they explain:

Some of these connections are present at birth, representing innate “knowledge.” For example, newborn babies appear to “know” to cry with a different pitch and intensity and with different facial expressions, depending on the specific discomfort they are feeling. This knowledge is unlikely to be explicitly accessible to the baby; instead, it is situated in connections between neurons in its young brain. It serves the purpose of communicating information to caregivers … [S]ome connections in a … neural network—or brain—are innately prespecified. For example, it is difficult to imagine that the following types of behaviors rely solely on experience-based learning: web-weaving in spiders (including the well-engineered tubular webs built by Australian funnel-web spiders), elaborate courtship displays (including the ornate circle building of the pufferfish), species-specific birdsongs (some young birds can produce a rudimentary version of their species’ song without having heard it), and the complex burrowing behaviors of rodents (burrows systematically vary in length and complexity across closely related species of deer mice). Humans, too, exhibit behaviors that appear to stem from innate connections. Immediately after birth, for example, a light touch on a baby’s cheek elicits a head turn toward the touch. This can bring a mother’s nipple into the baby’s mouth, producing a sucking reflex. Such behaviors likely depend on connections pre-wired in infant animal brains prior to birth.

More generally, we come to better resemble true “rational actors” the more experiences we gain and the more context we absorb in life, which allows us to choose between multiple things we have actually experienced in the past. But in the meantime, those who have less experience are mostly stuck acting in response to their more limited experiences, which limits their range of decision and action. As Suri and McClelland write:

Our actions, at least at first glance, do not feel terribly mysterious. Ask most people why they did something, and they will tell you they did what was good for them. Either it provided some benefit, often associated with pleasurable experience, or it avoided some cost, associated with an unpleasant feeling such as effort, discomfort, or pain; or perhaps, among available options, it provided the best balance of our experienced costs and benefits … [W]e invite consideration of an alternative view: that our actions result from activation-based processes in our brains and not from feelings of pleasure or displeasure that often accompany those activation patterns. Yes, we often act as if we are maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Even so, we propose, these subjective states are not the real basis of our actions; rather, propagating activation in our brains’ neural networks is what actually propels us to act.

As Suri and McClelland write, habits of association have huge effects on us:

It is true that people often maximize value, and in these cases, it is appropriate to term their actions as being rational; but at the same time, there are many instances in which people act in ways that don’t seem to maximize their value. How should we think about such behavior? Is it best classified as a defect in human machinery, or should we see if it can tell us something about our minds? Let’s take a closer look at some different types of such behaviors to see if any patterns emerge. Laboratory experiments have demonstrated that performing an action even once primes one to repeat it again. A primed action is often specific to a particular body posture and a pattern of prior movements and may be uncorrelated with a—potentially value-related—abstract intention to reach out to a particular object. Priming effects typically remain influential for a short time. Many instances of repeating an action in a given context lead to a habit of performing that action in that context. Habits, as we know from everyday life, can persist well past their usefulness. We conceptualize action readiness as a combination of these short- and long-term effects and define it as the ease with which an individual may initiate a particular action, given the pre‐action‐launch state of the individual. There is broad evidence that the level of one’s action readiness affects behaviors in ways that appear to be unrelated to their valuations. One interesting example concerns a study that examined people’s consumption of popcorn at the movies. The experimenters divided the participants into two groups: those who reported seldom eating popcorn while watching a movie and those who reported frequently eating popcorn while watching a movie. Participants in both groups were then given either fresh popcorn or stale popcorn. Among those who seldom ate popcorn at the movies, the ones who got the stale stuff ate less than the ones who got the fresh popcorn. But among those who frequently ate popcorn at the movies, those who got the stale stuff ate just as much as those who got the fresh popcorn, even though they liked it less. Interestingly, when the study was replicated in a meeting room instead of a movie theater, habitual popcorn eaters ate significantly less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn. This suggests that the frequent popcorn eaters had high action readiness to eat popcorn in the context of movie-watching, but not in other contexts. It also strengthens the view that high levels of action readiness can influence us to behave in ways that cannot be explained by value maximization alone.

Emotional moods, for example, rather than any objective evaluation of value, seem to govern our minds’ framing of things and consequently how we respond to things in a given moment. As Suri and McClelland write, “Moods, such as being gloomy or happy, seem to reliably and profoundly affect our behavior in ways that don’t seem related to any underlying value.”

As Suri and McClelland generalize:

Many patterns of self-destructive behavior, such as overeating, substance abuse, and sexual misconduct, seem divorced from value maximization. In these cases, internal and external cues, often acting in combination, can trigger action tendencies that conflict with what we value … [P]ropagating activation in neural networks can explain both instances of human behavior that are consistent with value maximization and those that deviate from it.

The balance of power in our choices will shift to the choice that is based on the most frequent and intense prior activation:

When choosing between two appealing items, for example, people will pick the one that elicits the strongest activation. As we have repeatedly seen, the propagation of activation in a neural network is determined by its connections. We propose that a select few of these connections are innate, and many others are learned by association. Our tendency to approach something sweet or to avoid something rotten may be enabled by innate connections. Our tendency to approach drinks in red cans may be enabled by learned connections. Learned connections may lead to value maximization in some cases but not in others. In this way, both kinds of influences will be visible in the behavior of the network. It is possible to construct an evolution-based argument that explains how innate connections might arise. Connections that lead to actions that promote survival are more likely to be conserved and become innate. Sweet things are a rich energy source, and the tendency to approach sweet things offers survival advantages. Evolution could, therefore, select for individuals who have innate connections that enable them to approach sweet things. Similarly, avoiding rotting food offers survival advantages, and evolution could select for individuals who have innate connections that enable them to avoid such problematic sources of nourishment.

Our preferences are based on both evolution and our subsequent experience in the world. As Suri and McClelland write:

To get concrete, let’s visualize a network for a specific item—say, a can of Coca-Cola … [L]et’s do the same for Coca-Cola by attaching the characteristics of the drink to a central hub unit for it … [H]earing the name Coca-Cola would put input into the Coca-Cola name unit … [T]his input would cause activation in the central Coca-Cola hub unit, which would, in turn, activate the other characteristic units … Now we introduce a new element … [T]here is a connection between the Sweet unit and an Approach unit. The Approach unit is a unit whose activation, if strong enough to exceed a threshold, initiates the action of approaching an item. One could conceptualize this unit as activating other neurons that initiate actions relating to obtaining an item (in this case, Coca-Cola) … Rising activation in the Sweet unit activates the Approach unit, which commences the action of approaching and obtaining the Coca-Cola. Thus, hearing the name Coca-Cola can produce approach activation even though the Coca-Cola name unit is not directly connected to the Approach unit.

Suri and McClelland recall the famous “Pepsi Challenge” television commercial campaign in which Pepsi touted the preference people have for Pepsi over Coke when subject to a blind taste test:

Let’s imagine the Coke versus Pepsi blind taste test scenario … Since it is a blind taste test, we will assume that the drinks are labeled A and B. Imagine that unknown to the taster, A is actually Coke and B is actually Pepsi. How might such a taste test work? Let’s imagine that a taster is asked to take some sips of Drink A and then the same number of sips of Drink B. While sipping Drink A, the taster is learning its features. They find the drink to be bubbly, vanilla-flavored, and sweet. Similarly, they find Drink B to be bubbly, citrus-flavored, and even sweeter than Drink A. For each drink, we propose that when we encounter it, a central hub unit is assigned to it and that … his unit becomes connected to units for each of the drink’s characteristics. Most of the characteristic units are connected to the two hub nodes with the same connection strength. However, there is a difference in the strengths of the connections of the two hubs to the Sweet unit. Why? We propose that the greater sweetness of B leads to greater activation of the Sweet unit when sipping B and that this, in turn, leads to a stronger connection between the Sweet unit and the hub unit for B. We are setting connection strengths based on Hebb’s learning rule … Informally, Hebb’s rule states, “Neurons that fire together, wire together,” and we and others interpret it to imply that the stronger the firing, the stronger the connection will become. What happens when the taster is asked to make a selection? Let us say they consider each drink one at a time. While the taster is considering Drink A, the name unit for Drink A gets input, which causes activation in the Drink A hub unit. This activation influences the activation in all characteristic units (corresponding to vanilla taste, bubbliness, and sweetness). A similar process occurs when the taster is considering Drink B. However, since the connection between the Drink B hub unit and the Sweet unit is stronger than the connection between the Drink A hub unit and the Sweet unit, greater activation propagates into the Drink B Sweet unit. Since the Sweet unit is more activated, more activation propagates into the Approach unit for Drink B. This greater activation in the Approach unit for Drink B makes it more likely to exceed threshold and be selected … The point here is that we have constructed a network in which greater value—in this case, sweetness—drives the network’s “decision.”

Suri and McClelland don’t go into detail regarding the results of the Pepsi Challenge, but it’s worth doing so in order to understand how politics can shape preferences in ways that don’t reflect people’s long-term well-being.

Regarding the results of the Pepsi Challenge, as Matt Yglesias has written:

Characters in the ads always picked Pepsi, of course, but so did most people who tried it in real life—the sweeter taste was more appealing … Pepsi [even] forced Coke into an infamous business blunder. Faced with eroding market share, Coke began a series of its own internal taste tests aimed at developing a superior product. Thus was born the dread New Coke, a sweeter cola reformulated to best both Pepsi and the classic formulation of Coke in blind taste tests. The backlash was fast and furious, with over 400,000 letters of complaint pouring in to the company. Despite declining market share, Coke was still by far the market leader over Pepsi—and the company’s millions of loyal customers weren’t looking for a new flavor. Pepsi recorded the fastest year-on-year sales growth in the company’s history during New Coke’s first month, while a consortium of Coca-Cola bottlers decided to sue the company for changing the product. But then Coca-Cola’s senior leadership did something tough: They admitted that they were wrong. And they executed a strategic pivot that’s kept them on top of the rivalry ever since. They reintroduced the original formula under the name “Coca-Cola Classic” and sold it in parallel with New Coke for a while. Over time, the “new” Coke was phased out, and Coca-Cola Classic became just, well, Coke once again—a product so culturally iconic that across a significant swath of the United States it serves as a generic term for what decent people call “soda” and Midwesterners call “pop.”

So why did consumers ultimately reject Pepsi in favor of Coke when blind taste tests overwhelming showed people’s preference for Pepsi? As Yglesias writes:

[T]aste tests consist of relatively modest sips, and Americans don’t drink tiny sips of soda. We drink whole cans of soda … And while we want something sweet, we don’t necessarily want that kind of long-term relationship with something too sweet. That’s why New Coke could succeed in a lab but fail in the marketplace.

Essentially, the Pepsi Challenge did show many people preferring Pepsi in sip tests, but the results were misleading and didn’t reflect real-world drinking preferences. People drink entire cans of soda, not single sips. Pepsi has more sugar and a stronger first-sip sweetness, and evolution has left us with a preference for sweeter things. So our initial reaction to a first sip will be to favor sweetness. But when we proceed to drink the whole can of sweeter soda, the taste of the sweetness wears off, and even becomes off-putting. While sweetness is appealing at first, it becomes overwhelming over time. Coke’s flavor is less sweet, and more balanced, and so it makes for better drinking over time.

There’s a political analogy here. As we explored in the previous essay, some politicians have framed their political agendas around encouraging the creation and use of more and more government welfare benefits programs, untethered from any work requirements. That sort of “free stuff” might taste sweet for a while, but it will direct people away from the sort of “earned success” that, over time (and like a full can of Coke) ultimately makes people happier. Yet the greater the reinforcement of welfare dependency becomes, the less likely one will want to strive in ways that not only satisfy the main pillars of happiness as we know them (namely, the feeling of “earned success” through work on behalf of oneself and one’s family), but also tend toward the productive employment that creates all the things that improve our lives in a free market. And the more associations the voting public draws between “good” government and the receipt of welfare benefits by others, the more likely the voting public is to vote for more welfare benefits, to the detriment of the recipients of those benefits.

Adults should also act in ways that create the sort of neural connections within children that channel them toward self-motivation and earned success, creating a gift that keeps on giving to themselves and others throughout life. As Lenore Skenazy says in her popular TED Talk, “We are spending way more time with our kids than our parents spent with us, usually helping them do things that they could do on their own.” In the same way, government today is spending way more money on us than it ever did before, usually helping us do things that we could more profitably do on our own.

As Max Bennett writes in his book A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains:

The simple brain of the nematode offers a window into the first, or at least very early, functions of dopamine and serotonin. In the nematode, dopamine is released when food is detected around the worm, whereas serotonin is released when food is detected inside the worm. If dopamine is the something-good-is-nearby chemical, then serotonin is the something-good-is-actually-happening chemical. Dopamine drives the hunt for food; serotonin drives the enjoyment of it once it is being eaten. While the exact functions of dopamine and serotonin have been elaborated throughout different evolutionary lineages, this basic dichotomy between dopamine and serotonin has been remarkably conserved since the first bilaterians. In species as divergent as nematodes, slugs, fish, rats, and humans, dopamine is released by nearby rewards and triggers the affective state of arousal and pursuit (exploitation); and serotonin is released by the consumption of rewards and triggers a state of low arousal, inhibiting the pursuit of rewards (satiation). What happens when you see something you want, like food when you’re hungry, a sexy mate, the finish line at the end of a race? In all cases, your brain releases a burst of dopamine. What happens when you get something you want, like when you’re orgasming, eating delicious food, or just finishing a task on your to-do list? Your brain releases serotonin … In an[] experiment, [Kent] Berridge destroyed the dopamine neurons of several rats, depleting almost all the dopamine in their brains. These rats would sit next to an abundance of food and starve to death. But this dopamine depletion had no impact on pleasure; if Berridge placed food into the mouths of these hungry rats, they exhibited all the facial expressions suggesting the kind of euphoria one would feel from eating when hungry; they smacked their lips more than ever. Rats experienced pleasure just fine without dopamine—they just didn’t seem motivated to pursue it … Dopamine is not a signal for pleasure itself; it is a signal for the anticipation of future pleasure.

But what happens to society when dopamine drives the hunt for welfare benefits that, over time, end up suppressing people’s desire to engage in the sort of productive interaction with work that we know gives people a greater sense of meaning and wellbeing in life? They increasingly crave the dopamine of welfare benefits, and the serotonin that comes with playing video games in their parents’ basement — but not the serotonin that comes with working to provide for both yourself and your family.

As Suri and McClellan write:

A key observation about Hebbian learning [the process under which “neurons that fire together, wire together”] is that it tends to strengthen the pattern of response that occurs when a particular input is presented. When such responses are desirable—as in learning to associate a name with a face—this increase in connection strengths is welcome. But what if an input produces a response that is not desirable? Hebbian learning could unhelpfully continue to strengthen such an association … Unhelpful associations turn out to be everywhere. The expression You cannot teach an old dog new tricks acknowledges the fact that with time and repetition, many people settle into ossified and potentially self-maintaining patterns of thinking, even if they are untrue and unhelpful.

As Suri and McClellan conclude with a brief discussion of two “superpower” abilities humans have that can help them improve their lives. The first is the ability to tame our own emotions by willing the creating neural channels in our own minds that direct our thoughts in positive rather than negative directions. As Suri and McClellan write:

Related to reframing, consider the following scenario: Imagine you’re stuck in traffic on your way to an important meeting. The cars aren’t moving, your hands grip the steering wheel, and frustration bubbles up. You start thinking: This is a disaster. I’m going to be late. I am such a screwup. I can’t do anything right. The more you dwell on these thoughts, the angrier and more stressed you become. Now, let’s apply the reframing superpower. You take a deep breath and rethink the situation: The traffic is out of my control. Nothing I could have done would have prevented it. Stressing over it won’t change anything. You feel calmer, your mind quiets, and suddenly, the frustration fades. The fact that you’ll be late has not changed, but your attribution has. And by changing your attribution, you’ve altered your emotional response. Instead of being consumed by stress, you’ve replenished yourself. Finally, the realization that the situation is not your fault may make you feel more comfortable calling the people you were meeting with and explaining the situation. You may even be able to conduct some of the business of the meeting over the phone. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus knew about this superpower. In a famous line from Discourses, he observed: “It is not the events themselves that disturb us, but the judgments we make about them.” Epictetus understood that our interpretation of events is up to us. We can choose interpretations to suit our purposes. Researchers working in the field of emotion regulation also know about this superpower. They have conducted experiments over three decades that show that changing one’s appraisal of events causing negative emotions is an effective way to regulate those negative emotions.

The second human “superpower” is our ability to formulate and promote policies that lead to more positive results among society generally. As Suri and McClellan write, “The second superpower extends beyond the individual—it involves our ability to construct processes and design systems that promote ethical behavior and accountability.” As Suri and McClellan remind us, some cultures are more pro-social than others, and the right kind of politics will reinforce a culture of pro-sociality:

How can we support ourselves [and] each other … to live better lives? … Psychologists interested in the influence of culture in shaping action suggested that both the situation-oriented and the personality-oriented perspectives had missed the crucial role of culture in shaping behavior. Culture can be defined as the shared beliefs, values, and practices of a group of people that encompass their way of life. It includes social norms, shared values, and, for many people, a set of religious principles … A stockbroker operating in an environment where aggressive sales tactics are rewarded and oversight is weak may be more likely to engage in unethical behavior—not necessarily because they are inherently evil but because the system encourages it. Rather than instituting character tests, a different way of thinking could have led the lawmaker to institute a system of checks and balances that reduce the possibility of such behavior … [W]e can … construct processes with oversight and safeguards that make prosocial outcomes more likely.

The key as a matter of policy is to incentivize the serotonin pleasure that comes from productive human accomplishment and make that pleasure so familiar to people that it overcomes the desire for any dopamine hits we might get while anticipating government handouts — or any other fool’s gold that accompanies learned dependence.

In a previous essay I explored some reasons why government is only legitimate, and sustainable, if it provides no more than a minimal social safety net reserved solely for those who don’t have any physical or financial means of doing things for themselves. In this essay, I’ll explore a common rhetorical response by those who support an ever-increasing welfare state: namely, “Millions will die!”

A bill was recently enacted into law that makes the following changes to federal benefits programs.

Regarding Medicaid, the One Bill Beautiful Bill imposes work requirements for able-bodied adults in Medicaid expansion states: about 80 hours of work a month. The Congressional Budget Office projects that over 10 million people will lose Medicaid coverage over the next decade because they will choose not to comply with these requirements.

Regarding federal food assistance programs, the new law implements stricter work requirements for SNAP recipients who are not disabled, and who do not have children. The CBO projects that about 3.2 million people will lose federal food assistance benefits over the next ten years because they don’t meet those requirements.

I suspect that if most people realized these benefits cuts are based on reasonable coverage criteria that reserve scarce taxpayer dollars for those whose circumstances more clearly justify those benefits, there would be more support for the legislation than there already is. But many people won’t get past the refrain of opponents of those reforms, such as House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries who said “People will literally die” as a result of those work requirements, and the Center for American Progress, which claims deaths resulting from those work requirements will number in the “tens of thousands of Americans each year.”

Of course, all those predictions of increased deaths assume without evidence that the people who choose not to meet these new requirements, or don’t meet the new requirements, will do nothing within their power to obtain the same or similar benefits through other means that would allow them to pay for those benefits themselves. After all, most people don’t want to die and will adjust their behavior to prevent that from happening. As Hollman Jenkins Jr. writes in the Wall Street Journal, “When a program goes away, after all, people may adapt and find new solutions for themselves. They may choose not to die.”

Betting on the preference not to die, which after all is the central premise of evolution, would seem to be a pretty safe bet. And we have past evidence that people will adapt to survive in such circumstances. As Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early write in their book The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate:

There has been only one significant attempt to reverse this fifty-year trend of reduced work and increasing dependency. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193), or simply the Welfare Reform of 1996, was a bipartisan effort by President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress. It replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children transfer payments with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Both the old and the new programs served only households with children, about 90 percent of which were headed by a single mother. The welfare reform endeavored to wean these families off welfare and build their self-reliance by creating stronger requirements for work or training. It also set more stringent time limits on receiving aid. The 1996 reforms were successful. The number of families receiving payments declined by more than half. Much of the decline was the result of beneficiaries finding employment. As a result, employment among low-income single parents rose. Poverty for single-mother families declined and has continued to remain lower than it was before the reforms. Single-mother poverty also declined relative to poverty for other types of families and has remained lower ever since.

Indeed, the liberal Brookings Institution found at the time that the work requirements in the bill President Clinton signed into law incentivized people to get jobs such that, ten years later, people were better off than they were before the reforms.

As Matt Weidinger writes of the work requirements in the more recent legislation:

[T]he new law also is noteworthy for leaning on key welfare reforms with a proven track record of success. Those policies—namely, applying work requirements and creating a financial interest for states to limit benefit rolls—achieve significant benefit savings now and should be expanded in the future to further boost work and keep federal deficits in check … Several of the biggest savers reprise past policies designed to tame welfare benefits. First, the [legislation] expands work requirements for able-bodied adults receiving Medicaid and food stamps. As Trump administration officials noted in a New York Times opinion, work requirements are widely supported and were a signature feature of the bipartisan welfare reforms Bill Clinton signed in 1996. That historic law ended a New Deal-era program that entitled nonworking parents to limitless welfare checks and replaced it with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which expects adults to work or train as a condition of eligibility. The results were remarkable, with more parents going to work, poverty falling, and caseloads ultimately plummeting 85 percent … The [legislation] also strengthens the work requirement for able-bodied food stamp recipients, adding another $70 billion in savings. These reforms can and should be expanded to expect recipients of public housing and other benefits to similarly prepare for work instead of perpetually depending on taxpayer aid. Driving these large savings is a simple fact: for able-bodied adults, federal taxpayers today support all food stamp and most Medicaid costs. Those federal commitments are open-ended, so states often welcome bigger caseloads that confer more federal funds. That dependency-inducing dynamic has contributed to soaring food stamp and Medicaid caseloads, especially in blue states. It also contrasts sharply with the TANF program, whose fixed federal block grant (which hasn’t been adjusted even for inflation since 1996) and required state match promote smaller caseloads and less spending. Since the mid-1990s, the number of households on food stamps has grown from twice to now over 20 times the number on TANF.

As Matt Weidinger explains, the reduction in dependency we can expect from these added work requirements will largely just amount to bringing dependency levels back to pre-COVID rates:

Welfare expanded rapidly during the pandemic, and significant caseload expansions have continued even after it ended. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program exploded from a pre-pandemic 71 million recipients to 94 million in March 2023, when pandemic-driven policy expansions started to unwind. While down, current caseloads remain over 78 million, still 10 percent above pre-pandemic levels. Food stamp caseloads similarly spiked, rising sharply from 37 million to over 43 million in the first months of the pandemic. Today’s caseload remains just off that peak and still 14 percent above the pre-pandemic level. New reforms are projected to notably reduce both Medicaid and food stamp caseloads, returning them closer to pre-pandemic levels. The biggest reductions are projected to result from expanded work requirements included in Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). Work requirements are widely supported by the public and contributed to remarkable results in the past. For example, Republican welfare reforms signed into law by Bill Clinton featured work requirements for welfare checks that contributed to more parents working, poverty falling, and cash welfare caseloads plummeting 85 percent. The OBBB dusts off that playbook by applying similar “community engagement requirements” to able-bodied adults on Medicaid, expecting them to perform 80 hours of work, education, or community service in at least two months per year. Nondisabled childless adults on Medicaid spend an average of 125 hours per month watching TV or playing video games, so most should have ample time. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this part-time, part-year requirement will save taxpayers $325 billion over the next decade while removing 4.8 million able-bodied adults from the Medicaid rolls. The new law similarly strengthens work requirements for food stamps, saving another $70 billion while reducing that caseload by three million able-bodied adults. Other recent changes focus on specific groups, such as the Trump administration’s July 10 regulations ending illegal alien access to Head Start and postsecondary education subsidies. Additional changes in the OBBB will end child tax credit payments to households headed solely by illegal aliens.

As Kevin Corinth writes, work requirements also help the children of recipients of government aid by increasing the resources available to families:

There is indeed a substantial body of evidence that more income is good for kids—it can improve their academic performance in the short run and their outcomes as adults in the long run. But there is an important caveat: Whether there are strings attached to the income makes a difference. Income assistance that requires work, in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), has shown the strongest evidence of boosting kids’ development. The evidence for support not tied to work is generally weaker or relies on evidence from over half a century ago through the rollout of Food Stamps and other programs when baseline material wellbeing was far lower. The importance of conditioning assistance on work has previously been recognized. In a widely cited 2016 volume for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Austin Nichols and Jesse Rothstein conclude, “there is robust evidence of quite large effects of the EITC on children’s academic achievement and attainment,” compared to “relatively small estimates of effects of family income on student outcomes that come from non-EITC settings.” Likewise, a 2014 article published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics posits that housing assistance does little to improve child outcomes compared to the EITC because the EITC promotes work …

Remember that all the Congressional Budget Office predicted was how many people might lose their federal benefits under new work requirements, not how many people would die as a result of those requirements. When CBO projects that in 2034, 11.8 million fewer people will have health coverage because of the new Medicaid rules, that doesn’t mean those people won’t make decisions and take actions that get them health insurance coverage elsewhere.

The ”Millions will die!” absurdity is not only based on the assumption that people will not take minimal efforts to save their own lives, but it implicitly posits that any government action or inaction that incentivizes personal responsibility will result in people dying because people will refuse to do things for themselves if the government won’t do those things for them. As Hollman Jenkins Jr. writes, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has been a fiery proponent of ‘people will die’ opposition to spending cuts. But people will die no less from Ms. Warren’s failure to push through new programs or expand existing benefits to new classes of Americans.”

Studies have shown that when the IRS mailed letters to uninsured individuals simply pointing out that they could apply for coverage, more people signed up for and received the health insurance. As the researchers report:

We evaluate a randomized pilot study in which the IRS sent informational letters to 3.9 million taxpayers who paid a tax penalty for lacking health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Drawing on administrative data, we study the effect of the intervention on taxpayers’ subsequent health insurance enrollment and mortality. We find the intervention led to increased coverage in the two years following treatment and that this additional coverage reduced mortality among middle-aged adults over the same time period.

So when people are reminded they can do something on their own, more people do things on their own. Under the “millions will die” understanding, then, deaths result every day the federal government fails to remind people of a whole bunch of things they could do to help themselves. Indeed, perhaps “millions will die” because people come to believe the false “millions will die” rhetoric and incorrectly assume they can’t do anything to provide health insurance for themselves. Clearly, there comes a point at which people simply have to be expected to exercise their capacity to help themselves, or they will exercise that capacity less and less.

People act on false or dramatically exaggerated claims all the time, and always will. For example, people who believe the false or dramatically exaggerated predictions of the dire consequences of climate change, such as former Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee, David Hogg, are even choosing to never have kids as a result.

Of course, fewer children today will inevitably lead to fewer working adults tomorrow, while there will be more and more non-working seniors relying on government benefits, which can only make all government welfare programs less fiscally sustainable in the future -- in which case the familiar false logic leads to David Hogg himself helping cause “Millions to die!”

And Hogg relayed his message over smartphones and social media, which, as entertainment crutches, are likely contributing to the significant decrease in self-reliance reported among young people today. The Financial Times published an analysis of American personality changes using data from the Understanding America Study. Over a decade, conscientiousness — the trait most closely linked to responsibility, follow-through, and self-control — dropped among young adults. Older adults remain essentially unchanged, suggesting the use of smartphones for entertainment may be at play here.

American law doesn’t allow people to sue Congress for negligently drafting legislation, but if it did, should Congress be considered legally responsible for causing harm by adding work requirements to the receipt of welfare benefits? Lawyers who think about the “Millions will die!” line of argument may be reminded of some relevant common-sense legal concepts, like “but for” and “proximate” cause.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines “but for” cause as “The cause without which the event could not have occurred.” In Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media, the Supreme Court stated that “Few legal principles are better established than the rule requiring a plaintiff to establish causation [of injury]” and that “In the law of torts, this usually means a plaintiff must first plead and then prove that its injury would not have occurred ‘but for’ the defendant’s unlawful conduct.” Of course, in the case of “Millions will die!” there are several “but for” causes that may be relevant. For example, someone might die because of an ailment they didn’t have treated when it would have been treated “but for” the lack of health insurance. But such person might also have gotten health insurance “but for” their failure to fulfill the minimal work requirements attached to a health insurance benefit. Because there can be multiple “but for” causes for any particular bad result, American law has added another concept called “proximate cause” that must be found before liability for harm can result.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines “proximate cause” as “A cause that is legally sufficient to result in liability; an act or omission that is considered in law to result in a consequence, so that liability can be imposed on the actor.” To succeed with a personal injury claim based on negligence, one has to show both “but for” and “proximate” causation. But proximate cause is a policy matter. As the authors of a leading legal treatise write, “As a practical matter, legal responsibility must be limited to those causes which are so closely connected with the result and of such significance that the law is justified in imposing liability. Some boundary must be set to liability for the consequences of any act, upon the basis of some social idea of justice or policy.”

One such policy that has developed in the law, and which should be applied more generally to government policy, is that of putting responsibility for something on “the least cost avoider,” including individual people who are capable of helping themselves, and as such can avoid injury to themselves.

What’s a “least cost avoider?” As Ward Farnsworth describes the concept of the least cost avoider in The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law:

[W]hen there’s an expense, just send the bill to whoever could have avoided it most cheaply, either by taking precautions or by switching to some activity less likely to create such expenses. The expenses might arise from an accident, or a misunderstanding, or an agreement that fell through. All those events can be costly, and all might be handled the same way: figure out who was in the best position to prevent it—we will call this person the least (or cheapest) cost avoider—and make him pay for the result. Sometimes we might hope he will act differently next time, but not necessarily; the point might be just to force him to compare the cost of paying the bills with the cost of taking more precautions, and do whichever is cheaper. The beauty of this approach is that the law doesn’t have to figure out how a single owner would have handled the problem. It tells the least cost avoider to figure it out. Maybe he will decide to let the bad things happen and keep paying the bills, or maybe he will find less expensive ways to prevent them. In either case he will feel the full cost of his decisions and so will make them carefully.

As Farnsworth writes, “one of the great advantages of throwing legal responsibility for harm onto whoever can avoid the harm most cheaply” is that “It’s easy” because “[all] you might need to know [is] what precautions each party could have taken, how much trouble the precautions would have been, and how much they would have reduced the chances of the disaster.”

For example:

Liability for blasting [with dynamite] is strict, but that doesn’t mean it’s absolute; the blaster can still get off the hook in certain cases, as when the injured plaintiff assumed the risk of injury. Perhaps he knowingly drew near to the dynamiting operation out of irrepressible curiosity. One way to think of such a case is that the victim then became the least cost avoider after all. He knew what he was getting into and should have stayed away. That is why the law makes an exception here to the usual rule that holds the blaster liable. This business of the victim’s own role in the accident is important … Throwing all the liability onto the least cost avoider of some bad thing tends to make sense when there is just one party whose behavior we want the law to influence, usually because that one party has all the control over whether the bad thing happens … [T]he least cost avoider is the person who can avoid the disaster most easily, where “easily” is read to include not only the power to take precautions but the power to foresee the need for them, figure out what the options are … The general idea of placing liability on the least cost avoider is powerful and makes a lot of legal problems easier to understand. To stay with tort law for a moment, think of cases where one person is sued for failing to rescue another who was drowning. The usual rule is that the defendant wins; there is no duty to rescue strangers from trouble. Again, one way to think about the rule is that the victim is usually the least cost avoider of the disaster; it’s easier for victims to avoid getting themselves into trouble than it is for rescuers to get them out of it. So in effect the victim is held liable for his own fix, which is to say that he can’t sue anyone else who might have helped him afterwards but didn’t.

And so it is with people who decide not to satisfy minimal work requirements to obtain health insurance: they are the least cost avoiders. The government, with all its cumbersome and expensive ways of doing things, need not always come to the rescue when people can help themselves.

To get more technical, federal judge Learned Hand came up for a basic mathematical formula for determining who was the least cost avoider in a given situation. In the interesting 1947 case of U.S. v. Carroll Towing Company, the mooring lines of the ship The Anna C were loosened or came undone, causing the barge to drift away from the pier and strike a tanker, which lost its cargo. There was no one on board the barge at the time of the incident, and the question was whether the barge owner was liable for the accident. In his opinion, Judge Hand wrote:

[T]he owner’s duty, as in other similar situations, to provide against resulting injuries is a function of three variables: (1) The probability that she [the ship] will break away; (2) the gravity of the resulting injury, if she does; (3) the burden of adequate precautions. Possibly it serves to bring this notion into relief to state it in algebraic terms: if the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by P: i.e., whether B less than PL.

As Richard Posner writes in An Economic Analysis of Law (Fifth ed. 1998):

The Hand Formula in its correct marginal form is presented graphically in Figure 6.1 [below]. The horizontal axis represents units of care, the vertical axis (as usual) dollars. The curve marked PL depicts the marginal change in expected accident costs as a function of care and is shown declining on the assumption that care has a diminishing effect in preventing accidents. The curve marked B is the marginal cost of care and is shown rising on the assumption that inputs of care are scarce and therefore their price rises as more and more are bought. The intersection of the two curves, c*, represents due care … To the left of c* the injurer is negligent; B is smaller than PL. To the right, where the costs of care are greater than the benefits in reducing expected accident costs, the injurer is not negligent …

So where the burden of adequate precaution (B) is low (like having to comply with some minimal work requirements to get health care coverage) and the probability of loss (PL) for failing to do so is high (like where failing to comply with minimal work requirements may leave one without any health insurance at all), someone who fails to comply with the work requirements is going to be considered the least cost avoider.

Hand’s Formula also provides a good template for public policy. As Stephen Gilles writes:

A cheapest cost-avoider rule requires the court (or legislature) to make a general judgment concerning the cheapest means of avoiding a particular category of accident risks (and the person identified with those precautions). An optimal care rule requires the court (or legislature) to make a general judgment concerning the optimal level of care with regard to some identifiable category of accident risks -- that is, to decide whether the cheapest means of avoiding those risks should in fact be employed … [T]he better-and more general-formulation of the cheapest cost-avoider criterion simply asks which party could, at lowest overall cost, have avoided the accident.

Government largess in the delivery of welfare benefits, of course, also leads to fraud and the provision of services people don’t end up using. As the Wall Street Journal writes:

[T]he Paragon Institute reports that taxpayers are subsidizing insurance for nearly 12 million people who never use their coverage … Democrats in 2021 sweetened subsidies for buying insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges. Enrollment has since doubled while taxpayer costs rose by 150%. Spending on ObamaCare subsidies has increased faster than Medicaid or Medicare since 2020, if you can believe it. Democrats tout this blowout of government-subsidized healthcare as a triumph. Here’s the wild part: More than a third of all enrollees generated no medical claims last year, according to Paragon’s analysis. That includes 40% of those in plans that are fully subsidized. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of enrollees who didn’t use their health coverage more than tripled to 11.7 million from 3.5 million. As Paragon explains, tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for these 11.7 million enrollees “went to insurers and middlemen without funding a single medical service.” … Paragon estimates that about 6.4 million people this year were improperly enrolled in exchange plans. The Justice Department has charged several brokers with enrolling consumers in ObamaCare plans for which they weren’t eligible in order to obtain commissions. This is why Republicans in their tax bill strengthened income verifications for ObamaCare plans. Democrats claim such measures will cause millions of people to lose coverage. But many of them don’t need or use their insurance. Some are enrolled in employer plans or Medicaid. The subsidies pad the profits of insurers.

Further, and perversely, expanding government benefits often leads not to less initiative on the part of benefit recipients, but to increased initiative in figuring out ways to maximize their receipt of government benefits. Some interesting historical perspective is provided in a 1940 book titled The Unemployed Worker: A Study of the Task of Making a Living Without a Job, by economist E. Wight Bakke at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University. The book is based on surveys of unemployed workers during the Great Depression “undertaken for the purpose of discovering the readjustment problems faced by unemployed American workers and their families.”

Bakke writes:

When one's income from wages becomes insufficient for maintenance of habitual standard of living, one may call on additional resources not strictly the result of independent effort in the following order of the departure from the normal circumstances of self-support:

1. Accrued benefit rights [that is, pension benefits, accumulated vacation time, or other benefits that accumulate under employment contracts as an individual continues their employment].

2. Commercial credit.

3. Savings of others than head of the family.

4. New working members of family not normally expected to earn.

5. Borrowing on property.

6. Clan aid -- loans to gifts.

7. Friends loans to gifts.

8. Government work relief.

9. Associations in which individual has membership.

10. Community assistance cash to commodity.

Note that, at the time, “government work relief” is very low on the list. As Bakke writes in a subsection titled “The Attempt to Keep Off Relief”:

In 1933 a sample study involving 2,000 representative New Haven families revealed 988 individuals to be unemployed. In 1935, two years later, these 988 were revisited to learn how many had sought relief. Less than one fourth (24%) had done so, the majority of these asking for only partial support. Half of this 24% had had contacts with relief agencies prior to this period of unemployment. How long did the other half wait after the layoff before crossing the threshold of the relief office for the first time? Ten per cent applied in less than three months, 17% in less than six months, 30% in less than one year after unemployment. Even after two years of unemployment 40% of this applying-for-the-first-time group were "getting by" somehow without public assistance … These facts, although they give no explanation of the refusal of men to apply for public assistance, do indicate a combination of resources, resourcefulness, and tenacity in holding to social standards of independence over considerable periods during which normal income was greatly reduced or completely lacking.

Bakke continues:

One fact … cannot be denied. Those who had no personal contact with such [government relief] agencies wished to steer clear of them. Such phrases as "rather be dead and buried," "would hide my face in the ground and pound the earth" were common … The struggles to maintain independence recorded in our case histories are a vivid reminder that the fight was no sham battle for the sake of appearances, but an honest struggle into which went every device and power at the disposal of the worker and his family … [And] [t]he socially “proper” thing for a relief client is to get off relief as quickly as possible and back into private employment.

But interestingly, Bakke also explores the sort of inverse “self-reliance” that tended to develop over time among those who took government relief, namely ingenuity in “milking the system.” As Bakke writes:

The evidences are too clear for any observer to miss that "self-reliance" is not dead, that relief clients do study and learn the techniques by which to increase the level of their subsistence in the way indicated by their accusers. An investigator for the D.P.C. [Department of Public Charities] reported some interesting experiences in this connection. She is Italian but is light-skinned and fair-haired and decidedly un-Italian looking. Her main work has been the investigation of Italian families on the F.E.R.A. [Federal Emergency Relief Administration]. The fact that she did not look Italian has caused her to overhear conversations in Italian, indicating the attitude of the clients toward relief. For example, while sitting in the front room talking to the wife, the wife will call out to a child to come and see the investigator, but she will warn the child to put on his old shoes first. Or she will hear the mother or father tell someone in the back of the house to put away the wine or the food before the investigator comes into the house. Her method is not to tell them she knows Italian but to cut the budget in accordance with the conversations she has overheard. Her opinion is that you have to be hard-boiled and ruthless in dealing with the people on relief or they will "run away with the place." … Most social workers could tell stories about clients who were able to withhold information about their resources … Mr. Crandall learned that the D.P.C. often will pay rent if the landlord evicts the family. Therefore, he and his landlord made it up together that he was to send Mr. Crandall eviction papers. In return Mr. Crandall agreed to pay him the $10 which the D.P.C. is supposed to pay when eviction papers are given. They hope that the D.P.C. will continue to pay the $10 a month. The landlord has promised to paper the kitchen for them if they get this money … [Another] observer asked, "It doesn't pay to give them a straight story, does it?" "Oh, Christ! You'll never get anything if you tell the truth. You gotta be wise, give them a good story." Such evidences of what nonrelief citizens call "chiseling" are as good examples of initiative in learning the techniques of increasing the security from relief … [Another relief recipient noted] “There was [a] family downstairs and they always seemed to have nice clothes even though they were getting a charity order and not working at all. Then reading the papers I found out we could get more, so what did I do? I called up the Charities Department and told them that if we didn't get some milk and other things we were going to steal them. I kept the kids home from school two days and called up the principal and told him the kids weren't coming to school until they had clothes enough to keep them warm. The next day the social worker came up and they sent clothes and blankets and shoes so that they covered the whole floor here. It was more than we needed. Then the city gave us a $3 order and sent milk … If I had known all along what I found out the last year, we could have been living wonderful for the last four years. What you got to do is use up what you got and make a big holler for more. Then they give you what you ought to have.”

Regarding a relatively rare counterexample, Bakke recounts that

The investigator who came to the Curleys was amazed at the cheap rent which they had. Mrs. Curley was pleased. She said she told the investigator that she was able to manage on the $12 a week even though she had a very large family. But the way she managed was to be content to live in a cheap rent and to walk around from store to store to find the cheapest food. She said the investigator thought she was very clever, and told her that many people wanted more money, but few were willing to walk around and try to manage on what they did have.

As Bakke summarizes his thoughts on the issue:

"Practice makes perfect." We have seen that relief recipients are inevitably stimulated to learn and practice the techniques of "getting all they can." Concentration on such an endeavor assumes a larger proportion of their conscious efforts. Men become what they practice. If the source of self-maintenance is a relief agency they become persons who try to get the maximum in satisfaction of their needs from that agency. In the absence of other sources, this effort dominates their attention and becomes necessarily their chief interest. The longer they are on relief, the more practice they get. The more agencies they visit, the greater variety of techniques they are forced to learn. The more the giving of relief depends upon making out a bad picture of their situation and their own helplessness, the more they will "talk poor mouth" to use an old New England phrase.

Perhaps “Millions will die!” is the new “talk poor mouth” among many in the modern political class.

This essay explores the problem that occurs when federal spending that funds welfare benefit programs flows so far down the levels of government – to the state and local level – that both public accountability and personal responsibility become harder to achieve.

Accountability at the Governmental and Electoral Level

As the former historian of the House of Representatives, Robert V. Remini, has written in his book The House: The History of the House of Representatives:

The Framers of the Constitution were absolutely committed to the belief that a representative body, accountable to its constituents, was the surest means of protecting liberty and individual rights. So anxious were they to affirm legislative supremacy in the new government that they failed to flesh out the executive and judicial departments [in the Constitution], leaving that task to Congress, and thereby assuring that the legislature would retain control of the structure and authority of both those branches.

As such, according to James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 39, “The House of Representatives will derive its powers from the people of America.” And in Federalist Paper No. 52, Madison wrote, “As it is essential to liberty that the government in general should have a common interest with the people, so it is particularly essential that the [House] should have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people. Frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which this dependence and sympathy can be effectually secured.” And again, in Federalist No. 57, wrote Madison:

If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the … manly spirit which actuates the people of America.

Madison, summarizing the sessions at the Constitutional Convention, reflected: “The responsibility of all to the will of the community seemed to be generally admitted as the true basis of a well constructed government.”

In his introduction to the seminal edition of The Federalist Papers, editor Clinton Rossiter and Charles R. Kesler write the following regarding how James Madison and Alexander Hamilton pioneered the use of the term “responsibility” in government and placed the concept, uniquely to that point in world history, at the center of the government created by the Constitution:

“Responsibility” is a new word that received its classic definition in the ratification debate and, especially, in the pages of The Federalist. Although the term had appeared sporadically in eighteenth-century British politics, it was in America in the 1780s that it achieved its lasting political prominence. “Responsibility” is the noun form of a much older adjective, “responsible,” itself related to the verb “respond,” meaning to answer; its Latin ancestor is respondeo, whose root (spondeo) means to promise sacredly or to vow. To be responsible thus means to be answerable to someone else, implying the possibility of punishment; but it also means to be the cause of something, to be equal to a challenge or obligation, to live up to a vow or solemn promise. If republican government is to be responsible, it must be responsive to the people and answerable to their will. But if it is to be responsible in the more positive sense, it must go beyond mere responsiveness and be able to serve the people’s true interests or their reasonable will, even if this course of conduct is not immediately popular.

The Constitution was drafted to create two distinct levels or government, each with their own powers. The powers of the federal government are set out in the Constitution, and policies promulgated under those powers are, according to the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, “the supreme Law of the Land,” overriding any contrary state or local laws. But whatever governmental powers are not spelled out in the Constitution are, under the Tenth Amendment, “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” These two levels of government (federal and state) were envisioned to have distinct powers and authorities, such that if any particular policy became unpopular with the voters, the voters would know which level of government was responsible for the unpopular policy and the voters could vote against the politicians at either the federal or state (or local) level in the next election in the hopes of reversing that unpopular policy.

However, elected officials can only be held accountable to the voters if the voters know who is accountable for which governmental policies.

Congress’ Federal Spending Power

The glitch in this accountability matrix is the Spending Clause of the Constitution.

The federal government has the constitutional authority to appropriate federal tax dollars for use by states and localities, and part of that authority is the power to condition states’ and localities’ receipt of federal funds on following federal rules. As Joseph Hoffman writes:

Regarding the taxing and spending clause [of the Constitution], Article I, Section 8 states: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States …” … The taxing and spending clause provides that federal tax money can be spent for the “general welfare of the United States.” Today, that has become one of the broadest— and most important—sources of federal authority in the entire Constitution … The lead case on the subject is South Dakota v. Dole, which was decided in 1987. The case involved a constitutional challenge to the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. South Dakota sued Elizabeth Dole, the secretary of transportation. The state argued that the federal statute was a thinly disguised attempt by the federal government to mandate a national drinking age. South Dakota stated that the law exceeded the enumerated powers of the federal government and was incompatible with the broad power of the states to regulate alcohol under the Twenty-First Amendment. In response, the feds argued that although the Twenty First Amendment authorized state regulation of alcohol, it didn’t explicitly prohibit Congress from enacting additional regulations. In Dole, the US Supreme Court decided that there was no need to resolve difficult questions about the scope and meaning of the Twenty-First Amendment. Instead, the court held that Congress had the authority to enact the challenged statute because it was a legitimate exercise of the taxing and spending power. Citing the Butler decision from 1936, the court explained that the taxing and spending power is not limited to the list of federal powers otherwise enumerated in the Constitution. Simultaneously, the court articulated four restrictions on the federal government’s taxing and spending power: The power must be exercised by Congress for the “general welfare”; the federal statute must clearly define the choice presented to the states so that they can decide whether they want to accept the conditions placed on the federal funding; the federal government must act in pursuit of a federal interest in a national project or program; and the federal statute can’t violate any specific prohibitions contained in the Constitution. The court found that all four of these requirements were satisfied by the challenged federal statute in Dole.

As Joseph Tainter described in his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, governmental bureaucracy has become so vast that it’s draining the energy from its citizenry. And it’s also draining energy from local government. In fact, the federal government has grown so large that it’s become routine for local governments to look to and rely on the federal government to solve local problems, leading local government to be so focused on federal largess that they neglect local issues themselves.

The federal government can condition receipt of its funding to states and localities on various rules those states or localities must agree to follow in order to take the money and, as Tainter writes, “a governing body that provides goods or services has coercive authority therein. The threat of withholding benefits can be a powerful inducement to compliance.” Offering benefits can also induce acquiescence to that governing body. And the federal government has in recent times provided vastly more money to localities in the form of grants-in-aid, as the chart below shows (in billions of dollars per year).

As a result, there’s been a dramatic growth in the number of state, and especially local, government employees, who have increasingly come to administer federal programs by proxy in cooperation with federal government employees. As this graph from the St. Louise Federal Reserve shows, the growth in the number of local government employees has far surpassed that of state and federal employees.

While the federal government is the nation's single largest employer, it employs only about 14% of all government employees, compared to 23% of governmental employees employed at the state level and 63% of government employees employed at the local level.

As of 2019 (before the massive COVID-related influx of federal dollars to the state and local level), state government received about 35% of their revenues from the federal government, and local governments in turn received about 35% of their revenues from the state or federal government.

Where I live, the 2022 approved budget for the City of Alexandria, Virginia, consisted of over 11% federal funds and about 8% state funds.

The Congressional Research Service on the Growth of Federal Funding of States and Localities

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a useful report in June, 2025, that explains the historic growth of federal funding to states and localities. That funding to states and localities is increasingly dedicated to individual welfare benefits, not infrastructure projects like building highways. The CRS report states in summary:

In FY2024, the federal government provided an estimated $1.1 trillion to state and local governments in federal grants, funding a wide range of public policy initiatives such as health care, transportation, income security, education, job training, social services, community development, and environmental protection. Outlays for grants to state and local governments were also estimated to represent 16% of total federal outlays and 3.9% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). Federal funds (the vast majority of which are comprised of grants) account for a little over one-third of total state government revenue, and more than half of state government funding for health care and social assistance programs … Over the long-term, outlays for federal grants to state and local governments have broadly increased in nominal terms and as a share of total federal outlays and of U.S. GDP. For example, federal outlays for grants to state and local governments accounted for 0.9% of U.S. GDP in FY1940 (approximately $872 million) and 4.0% of U.S. GDP in FY2023 (approximately $1.083 trillion). This increase may present certain challenges to Congress and executive agencies in their ability to administer and oversee such funds … More broadly, as a share of federal outlays, the composition of federal grants to state and local governments has shifted from being fairly comparable between payments for individuals (on things like health and education) and for capital investment [for things like highway construction], to favoring payments for individuals.

Getting into more detail, the CRS report states:

In FY2024, federal funds comprised more than half of state government funding for health care and public assistance … The federal government also sent $146.3 billion directly to local governments in FY2022, or 6.2% of total local government revenue. That fiscal year, states provided $662.3 billion to local governments—8.2% of total local government revenue. (Some of this was federal funding passed through states to local governments.) …

Going forward, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that state and local governments will receive at least $1 trillion in federal grants annually through FY2029 … Federal grants to state and local governments as a share of federal spending in the last few years is also greater than it was during the mid-20th century. Outlays for federal grants to state and local governments represented 17.7% of total federal outlays in FY2023; in FY1940, that figure was 9.2%. Figure 3 presents outlays for federal grants to state and local governments as a percentage of total federal outlays.

Federal grants represent a notable share of state and local government resources. In FY2022, revenue from the federal government comprised 36.1% of total state government revenue. While revenue from the federal government comprised 6.2% of total local government revenue in FY2022, revenue from state governments to local governments (much of which passes through from federal funds) accounted for 28.2% of total local government revenue that fiscal year. Federal funds were estimated to represent 34.2% of total state expenditures in FY2024 (the vast majority of such funds are grants) … Figure 4 shows these and other funding sources for state expenditures, and it shows that over the past several decades, federal funds have grown as a share of total state expenditures.

Shown as a percentage of states revenues (rather than expenditures), state and local government reliance on federal grants is also seen to be increasing.

Regarding the changing uses of federal funds among states and localities, the CRS report states:

Federal grants to state and local governments are used for a variety of purposes. The primary categories of federal grants to state and local governments, as determined by OMB, are health, income security, education, transportation, and community and regional development. Of these categories, grants for health—driven primarily by Medicaid—comprise by a large margin the majority of dollars for federal grants to state and local governments. In FY2023, the federal government had $615.772 billion in outlays for Medicaid grants. That represented 56.8% of total outlays for federal grants to state and local governments that fiscal year. In FY2024, Medicaid comprised at least 50% of the dollar amount of federal grants to every state except Wyoming … Table 1 presents the 10 largest individual federal grant outlays to state and local governments in FY2023.

[Note that the items I’ve underlined in red are individual government benefits programs.]

Due largely to Medicaid, health represents the largest category of federal grants to state and local governments by dollar amounts (see Figure 6.) However, this has not always been the case. For example, in FY2000, outlays for Medicaid grants to state and local governments accounted for 41.2% of total outlays for federal grants to state and local governments. In FY1990, the figure was 30.4%; in FY1980, 15.3%; and in FY1970, 11.3%.

[Note that I’ve inserted a diagonal red line moving along the growth in federal funding to states and localities for health and income security programs (the dark blue and pink segments of the graph).]

The composition of federal grants to state and local governments has also shifted. For example, in FY2023, outlays for federal grants to state and local governments used for payments to individuals (including uses such as health, income security, and education) represented 13.3% of total federal outlays. This share has increased over time: in FY2000, it was 10.4%; in FY1980, 5.6%; in FY1960, 2.8%; and in FY1940, 3.1%. By comparison, outlays for federal grants to state and local governments used for capital investment represented 1.8% of total federal outlays in FY2023. This share has stayed relatively stable over time: in FY2000, it was 2.7%; in FY1980, 3.8%; in FY1960, 3.6%; and in FY1940, 4.7% … Table 2 shows federal funds as a percentage of total state expenditures for specific functions in FY2024.

[Note how “Medicaid” and “Public assistance” now dwarfs the more clearly federal role of funding interstate highway “Transportation.”]

The CRS report also notes the increase in the number of federal grants:

In the past, the now-defunct U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) occasionally estimated the number of federal grant programs for state and local governments. ACIR periodically published these results from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. ACIR included in its counts all:

• direct cash grant programs for state or local governmental units, other public bodies established under state or local law, or their designee;

• payments for grants-in-kind, such as purchases of commodities distributed to state or local governmental institutions;

• payments to nongovernmental entities when such payments result in cash or in kind services or products that are passed on to state or local governments;

• payments to state and local governments for research and development that is an integral part of their provision of services; and

• payments to regional commissions and organizations that are redistributed at the state or local level to provide public services.

ACIR estimated that in FY1902 there were five funded federal grant programs for state and local governments. By FY1940, that number had increased to 31, and by FY1960, it had grown to 132. In FY1975, ACIR estimated that there were 448 funded federal grant programs to state and local governments, and that in FY1995, there were 633. No authoritative count of funded federal grant programs for state and local governments is known to have been issued in recent years. However, it is possible to search the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA, now called Assistance Listings) to roughly determine the number of federal grant programs to state and local governments. Assistance Listings are “detailed public descriptions of federal programs that provide grants, loans, scholarships, insurance, and other types of assistance awards.” A search of CFDA/Assistance Listings indicated that state governments, local governments, U.S. territories, and federally recognized tribal governments were eligible to apply for 1,183 funded federal grant programs (defined as authorized project grants, formula grants, cooperative agreements, direct payments for specified uses, and direct payments for unrestricted uses) in FY2025.

CRS cites as “Considerations for Congress” the following:

Over the long term, outlays for federal grants to state and local governments have broadly increased in absolute terms (in both nominal and, at least until FY2021, constant dollars) and as a share of total federal outlays and of U.S. GDP. Although OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] has projected those figures to decrease somewhat in coming years (after peaking during the pandemic), they still are (and under OMB’s projections would be) generally higher than throughout most of the 20th century.

The CRS report also contains a short summary of the political history of the growth of federal funding to states and localities, highlights of which state:

[Regarding the period between the years 1776 and 1860:] Given the prevailing views concerning the limited nature of the federal government’s role in domestic affairs, Congress typically authorized federal land grants to states instead of authorizing direct cash assistance to states for internal improvements. In 1841, nine states (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Michigan) ̶ and, with three exceptions, all subsequent newly admitted states ̶ were designated land grant states and guaranteed at least 500,000 acres of federal land to be auctioned to support transportation projects, including roads, railroads, bridges, canals, and improvement of water courses, that expedited the transportation of United States mail, military personnel, and military munitions. By 1900, over 3.2 million acres of federal land were donated to these states to support wagon road construction. In addition, states were provided 37.8 million acres for railroad improvements and 64 million acres for flood control. States were provided wide latitude in project selection, and federal oversight and administrative regulations were minimal … Although land grants were prevalent throughout the 1800s, given prevailing views concerning states’ rights, land grants, as well as cash grants, were subject to opposition on constitutional grounds. Overall, domestic policy in the United States prior to the Civil War was dominated by states … [Regarding the period between the years 1860 and 1932:] The first on-going, federal cash grant to states, other than for the support of the National Guard, was not adopted until 1879. P.L. 45-186, the Federal Act to Promote the Education of the Blind, appropriated $250,000 to create a perpetual source of income for the purchase of teaching materials for the blind. It marked the beginning of the modern federal grants system. By 1902, there were five federal grant programs to states and local governments (in addition to funding for the National Guard): teaching materials for the blind, agricultural experiment stations, the care of disabled veterans, resident instruction in the land grant colleges, and funding to the District of Columbia. Outlays for these grants were about $7 million in FY1902, or about 1% of total federal outlays … The Sixteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1913 provided Congress the authority to lay and collect taxes on income. Although the federal income tax initially generated only modest amounts, it provided Congress an opportunity to shift from land grants to cash grants … [Regarding the period between the years 1932 to 1960:] Faced with unprecedented national unemployment and economic hardship, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated a dramatic expansion of the federal government’s role in domestic affairs during his presidency, including an expansion of federal grant programs as a means to help state and local governments combat poverty and create jobs. Congress approved 16 new, continuing federal grants to state and local governments from 1933 to 1938, and increased funding for federal grants to states and local governments from $214 million in FY1932 to $790 million in FY1938 … Federal expenditures through grant programs during the New Deal were made in several functional areas, including some, such as social welfare, that were traditionally viewed as state responsibilities … [Regarding the period between the years 1960 and 1980:] In concert with President Johnson’s Great Society initiatives, Congress nearly tripled the number of federal grants to state and local governments during the 1960s, from 132 in 1960 to 387 in 1968. In 1965 alone, 109 federal grants to state and local governments were adopted, including Medicaid. Outlays for federal grants to state and local governments also increased, from $7 billion in FY1960 to $20 billion in FY1969. Functionally, federal grants for health care increased from $214 million in FY1960 to $3.8 billion in FY1970, for income security from $2.6 billion to $5.7 billion … The new grants had a number of innovative features that distinguished them from their predecessors. Previously, most federal grants to state and local governments supplemented existing state efforts and, generally, did not intrude on state and local government prerogatives. Most of the federal grants created during the 1960s, on the other hand, were designed purposely by Congress to encourage state and local governments to move into new policy areas … [Regarding the period between the years 1980 and 2000:] [Under President Reagan] The number of federal grants to state and local governments was reduced and outlays for federal grants to state and local governments fell for the first time since World War II, from $94.7 billion in FY1981 to $88.1 billion in FY1982 … Evidence of a coming devolution revolution proved elusive as the upward trend in outlays for federal grants to state and local programs resumed in FY1983, although at a somewhat lower rate of increase than during the previous two decades. Outlays for federal grants to state and local governments increased from $91.4 billion in FY1980 to $135.3 billion in FY1990 and $285.9 billion in FY2000. Medicaid accounted for much of that revenue growth, increasing from $13.9 billion in FY1980 to $41.1 billion in FY1990 and $117.9 billion in FY2000. Functionally, outlays for federal grants to state and local governments for health care increased from $15.8 billion in FY1980 to $124.8 billion in FY2000. Also, outlays for federal grants to state and local governments for income security increased from $18.5 billion in FY1980 to $68.7 billion in FY2000 … [And regarding the years 1980 to today:] The expansion and centralization of the federal grants system continued under President Barack Obama and continued, albeit counter to his recommendations, under President Donald Trump. Outlays for federal grants to state and local governments increase in this period (from $660.8 billion in FY2016 to $674.7 billion in FY2017), largely due to increased outlays for Medicaid. However, outlays for federal grants to state and local governments increased in other policy areas as well. The number of federal grants to state and local governments also increased, from 664 in 1998, to 953 in 2009, 996 in 2012, 1,188 in 2015, and 1,274 in 2018 …

The Lines of Federal, State, and Local Accountability Have Blurred Under the Waterfall of Federal Funding

With that background, it’s easy to see how the lines between funded programs and those who “enacted” them have become blurred. Are federal legislators responsible for these increasingly large government benefits programs funded by the federal government? Or are the state and local legislators who want to use the money in their states and localities responsible? Of course it’s a mixture of both, but on the state and local side, while no state or local legislator may have actually voted for the appropriation of those federal funds, they all will tend to support the continuation of such programs because it constitutes the delivery of services to their own state and local citizens with money provided by federal taxpayers. And when federal legislators are fingered for voting for these increasingly large federal funding programs, they can just point to the state and local legislators who support the funding and happily distribute it to their own constituents. In the meantime, these programs grow ever larger, and play ever larger roles in promoting dependence while diluting people’s sense of self-reliance and personal responsibility – and even freezing them into dependence at the edge of what’s become known as a welfare or benefits “cliff” – to the detriment of their mental health.

Besides encouraging individuals to become dependent on government benefits programs, the proliferation of such programs funded by the federal government (but implemented by states and localities) leads to a uniformity of policy that can only limit the ability of state and local elected officials to direct their own state and local policies. And when state and local officials are no longer in charge of these programs (because they’re funded by the federal government), they will tend to lose any sense of fiscal responsibility for how efficiently they are run. As I wrote in a previous essay:

When local municipalities become beholden to federal funding, and the federal strings attached to that funding, they devote fewer resources to addressing unique local problems, with potentially calamitous results. The New England Complex Systems Institute, in its article “An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and Its Applications,” makes the following analogy: “One danger of interdependencies is that they may make systems appear more stable in the short term by reducing the extent of small-scale fluctuations, while actually increasing the probability of catastrophic failure … As a thought experiment, imagine 100 ladders, each with a 1/10 probability of falling. If the ladders are independent from one another, the probability that all of them fall is astronomically low (literally so: there is about a 10 [to the 20th power] times higher chance of randomly selecting a particular atom out of all of the atoms in the known universe). If we tie all the ladders together, we will have made them safer, in the sense that the probability of any individual ladder falling will be much smaller, but we will have also created a nonnegligible chance that all of the ladders might fall down together.” The strings attached to federal funding streams are the ropes tying those ladders together. And as the researchers at the Institute point out, in a “system with a high degree of complexity, the potential positive impact of a change is generally much smaller than its potential negative impact … This phenomenon is a consequence of the fact that, by definition, a high degree of complexity implies that there are many system configurations that will not work for every one configuration that will … A tightly controlled (top-heavy) hierarchy is not well suited to environments in which there is a lot of variation in the systems with which the lower levels of the hierarchy must interact … For example, centralizing too much power within the US governance system at the federal (as opposed to the local or state) level would not allow for sufficient smaller-scale complexity to match the variation among locales.” Today, the federal government is the most top-down of all the top-down entities in America, and now it largely controls even local-level decision-making through its funding streams, creating an exponentially large mismatch between local needs and federal policy.

Further, states today have little incentive to monitor for and prevent fraud, since state politicians may hope that if they look the other way and let fraud continue, the fraudsters will vote for them in the future. As Matt Weidinger writes:

The biggest losses during the pandemic involved federal unemployment benefits, which states administered but had little financial stake in protecting. That has to change. If states are granted more control over the administrative financing of the system, that authority must be accompanied by assurances that federal benefit dollars will be better protected. No more paying benefits before the claimant’s identity and prior work history is confirmed. And claims must be matched against prisoner rosters, death data, and claims filed in other states. All are common-sense measures needed to ensure benefits are not paid to identity thieves. If states don’t agree to those protections, they shouldn’t get more control over administrative funding or future temporary federal benefit dollars, either.

Some Progress

Some progress on this front has come in the form of what President Trump calls (and what is officially named) the “One Big Beautiful Bill” enacted by Congress and signed into law last year. As Ramesh Ponnuru points out:

The new Republican law cuts Medicaid in two main ways. It cuts eligibility by requiring able-bodied recipients to work, train for a job, attend school or volunteer. And it limits states’ use of “provider taxes”— a tactic that the states use to receive additional Medicaid funding from the federal government. The states tax hospitals and recycle the proceeds back to them; the federal government then rewards the states for spending more on health care. As Joe Biden reportedly said when he was vice president, “It’s a scam.” It’s also a symptom of a pathology in Medicaid that helps to explain why drastic cuts are unlikely to materialize. The federal government largely funds the program but states largely run it. The states have an incentive to game the system to get more money from the federal government. If they don’t take advantage of this setup, they ensure that other states come out ahead at their taxpayers’ expense. That’s why federal efforts to crack down on provider taxes, which started in the early 1990s and have often had bipartisan support, have failed to keep them from growing. While state governments can often be inefficient, they are creative and agile in finding loopholes through which to siphon federal money.

And as Matt Weidinger writes:

For the first time, the new law expects states to contribute to food stamp benefit costs, which were previously fully federally funded. The initial state share is small—between five and 15 percent, keyed to state improper payment rates. But even this modest change will save federal taxpayers $40 billion over a decade while focusing states on reducing food stamp caseloads, which at over 42 million recipients today include a staggering one in eight US residents. The small state share can and should grow in the future, and similar cost-sharing efforts should apply to other federally-funded programs. Uncle Sam has proven he can’t afford his benefit promises, and states can and should assist with programs benefiting their residents.

Such reforms are needed now more than ever, as some of today’s state elected officials have lost their ability to distinguish “federal funding” from “state authority.”

As the Atlantic reported:

This coming weekend’s summer meeting of the National Governors Association has been planned as a postcard-perfect celebration of bipartisan policy making … [But] [s]ome Democratic members of the group have privately been fuming in recent months … They complain that the group did not respond forcefully enough when Trump’s Office of Management and Budget briefly ordered a disruptive pause on the disbursement of all federal funds in January.”

And as Fox News reported:

Chair of the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas will stop paying NGA dues starting next month, a source familiar with the governor's thinking confirmed to Fox News Digital. The Atlantic reported that former DGA chair and failed vice presidential candidate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, is also considering stepping away from the NGA. … A source familiar with Kelly's thinking said the Kansas governor won't renew her dues at the NGA this year because the organization hasn't been upholding its mission statement to advance and protect states' rights … However, if the NGA were to demonstrate that “they are willing to stand up for states' rights in this moment and show that it's worth the use of taxpayer dollars [that is, federal taxpayer dollars],” then Kelly would be interested in reassessing Kansas' membership, according to the source familiar with the governor's thinking.

So we’ve gotten the point at which state Governors are now demanding the right of state governments to receive federal funding. That demand should sound as strange as private companies’ demanding a right to federal funding. But today, the oddity of such demands is drowned out when spoken behind the roaring waterfall of federal funding.

In the last essay we explored the history of “golden rule” reasoning (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and how it serves to focus our views on justice by at least holding us to a consistent application of our own views on fairness and the proper treatment of others. In this essay, we’ll go further and explore ways of seeing how fair rules for governing might be derived. It’s not often that most people think of these things, but it’s necessary if one is ever going to escape the confines of politically tribal “myside” thinking and judge policies by more objective standards.

When I studied that subject in college by taking classes in political philosophy, the book that was always referenced by people who supported a large welfare state was John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (which, ironically, is priced new at over a whopping $28 on Amazon for the paperback, with the hardback version clocking in at $167). Anyway, when I was a law student, I was a teaching assistant for an excellent professor named Michael Sandel, who taught the book as part of his class on “Justice.” Sandel succinctly describes Rawls’ theory of justice (which is set out as a sort of mind experiment) in his own book, also titled Justice:

[C]onsider a thought experiment [proposed by Rawls]: Suppose that when we gather to choose the principles [that would govern a just society], we don't know where we will wind up in society. Imagine that we choose behind a "veil of ignorance" that temporarily prevents us from knowing anything about who in particular we are. We don't know our class or gender, our race or ethnicity, our political opinions or religious convictions. Nor do we know our advantages and disadvantages --whether we are healthy or frail, highly educated or a high-school dropout, born to a supportive family or a broken one. If no one knew any of these things, we would choose, in effect, from an original position of equality. Since no one would have a superior bargaining position, the principles we would agree to would be just.

As Sandel explains:

Rawls believes that two principles of justice would emerge from the hypothetical contract. The first provides equal basic liberties for all citizens, such as freedom of speech and religion. This principle takes priority over considerations of social utility and the general welfare. The second principle concerns social and economic equality. Although it does not require an equal distribution of income and wealth, it permits only those social and economic inequalities that work to the advantage of the least well off members of society.

It’s that last part that’s often used to justify a large welfare state: that is, the idea that people in the “original position” would be worried they might find themselves in a situation in which they couldn’t take care of themselves to one extent or another, and consequently they would support a large welfare state, with any income inequalities being justified only if those income inequalities helped the least-well-off in society. Sandel continues:

What principle would we choose to govern social and economic inequalities? To guard against the risk of finding ourselves in crushing poverty, we might at first thought favor an equal distribution of income and wealth. But then it would occur to us that we could do better, even for those on the bottom. Suppose that by permitting certain inequalities, such as higher pay for doctors than for bus drivers, we could improve the situation of those who have the least -- by increasing access to health care for the poor. Allowing for this possibility, we would adopt what Rawls calls “the difference principle”: only those social and economic inequalities are permitted that work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

Even back in college, it seemed to me that the problem with creating an overly-generous welfare state is that it would actually encourage poverty, or at least incentivize people to do less for themselves, since the government would be providing more. That was the main takeaway from Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground, first published in 1984, which showed that the ambitious welfare policies of the 1960’s and 1970’s actually resulted in incentivizing the least-well-off away from work and toward more dependence on government. As explored in a previous essay series, welfare programs tend to create poverty or near-poverty, as people come to forego the work ethic in order to benefit from the “free” income provided by government programs. And if the government provides people with “free” things when they have the capacity to earn those same things, the government deprives them of the happiness that comes with “earned success,” something I explored in another previous essay. Given that being incentivized to achieve is much more likely to make one happier, as well as to lead to benefits for society at large in the form of increased productivity, wouldn’t you prefer to be incentivized to do so, even under the conditions of Rawls’ imagined “original position”? Isn’t disincentivizing people to disengage from productive contributions to society what’s hurting them the most? For the same reason, wouldn’t you prefer that students in school be challenged rather than coddled as well?

Also, too often, welfare state supporters assume that just because something is good, the government needs to provide it for people. But of course that’s not true whenever someone could provide those things for themselves with the proper incentives. Just because food, education, or health are important doesn’t mean government coercion is the best – or even a legitimate -- way to provide them. Better means include self-reliance and charity, for example.

The book I read back in college that disabused me of the allure of Rawls’ theory was Loren Lomasky’s Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community, in which he makes the following critique of Rawls. Lomasky writes:

According to Rawls: “Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances.” … The Rawlsian argument for the moral permissibility of distributing economic goods according to a socially derived criterion, the difference principle, does not rest on a claim that there is some characteristic peculiar to property such that it and it alone falls under the public aegis; rather, the entire realm of the morally arbitrary is subject to collective determination. That, however, includes everything that individuates one person from another: physical attributes, character, intelligence, and relations to property. Indeed, even the ends that persons have will be regarded as arbitrary. Thạt [person] A comes to devote himself to [project] E1 and [person] B to [project] E2 will be the product of a myriad of causal factors that have, on the Rawlsian account, no inherent moral significance … [T]he implications of Rawl’s informal argument extend far beyond property, as commonly conceived. Everything that in fact individuates one person from another becomes common property [now quoting Ralws]: “We see then that the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset.”

So even beyond the problem in which overly-generous welfare programs tend to create more poverty and less willingness to exert effort, Rawls’ approach assumes that every aspect of an individual that might come to distinguish them from others – be it someone’s work ethic, sense of humor, or anything else – is morally arbitrary and therefore the results of those qualities are all subject to redistribution by the government.

Now, there is some truth of course to the notion that we come to many of our personality traits through randomness (which we explored in a previous essay series). But if people can’t expect that the very essence of their individual identity is free from government meddling, then the very concept of “individual rights” would be lost. As Lomasky explains:

Rawls does not explicitly list personal conceptions of the good as also being common assets. But that is the clear implication of his argument. If A's virtuosity as a pianist is a talent that does not, in a morally privileged sense, belong to A, if it can properly be harnessed for the good of everyone, then A's commitment to pursue a life in music is equally a social asset. That end is A's only in the restricted sense that it happens to characterize A's volitional makeup, but not in the sense that A has a claim to moral space within which he is free to act in the pursuit of that end … In pursuit of the elimination of that which is morally arbitrary, Rawls has, unfortunately, undercut the supporting structures on which a viable liberalism [that is, a regime of individual rights] must rest. It is arbitrary that A has the abilities, character, and projects that he does, and thus it is arbitrary that A has reason to pursue those ends which are his rather than those ends which are B's. Rawls would preclude A from demanding a liberty to serve those ends which are distinctively his own because Rawls will not grant that contingent facts carry moral weight that is prior to and determinative of justice in social arrangements … [According to Rawls] A has no ends that rightfully are his, and A deserves no liberty, until the social unit [the government] adjudicates what those ends and liberties shall be.

As Lomasky elaborates:

Rawls has failed to show that social control over property is in any way more justifiable than social control over personality. That failure is not surprising. His argument that property is a social asset is explicitly based on the proposition that natural talents -- and all else that is morally arbitrary -- are a social asset. It follows directly that there is no domain within which an individual enjoys a privileged moral position such that he and he alone is entitled to control anything -- including his own activities. Everything pertaining to persons except their [abstract] personhood, whatever that could be when abstracted from ends, character, abilities, and relations to material possessions, is thoroughly socialized. Moral space has shrunk to zero. Any liberty rights that persons enjoy are theirs not in virtue of their existence as project pursuers with their own lives to lead, but because the social decision process has created and bestowed those rights. The conclusion is thoroughly illiberal. Individuals, insofar as they are recognized as more than bare egos, are the creation of society rather than its creators … Where does Rawls go wrong? Most critically, in his insistence that that which is morally arbitrary is infinitely open to social melioration. A robust liberalism must instead maintain that contingencies become imbued with moral weight once they are intimately attached to the lives that persons actually live. If an end, a talent, a material object happens through a chain of circumstance to become mine, then I have a personal stake in it that I have unique reason to protect. Successful civility requires that others acknowledge and respect these personal attachments reciprocally with my like recognition of the individuality of others.

Incidentally, Lomasky adds, Rawls’ theory, if somehow implemented, would also require the creation of one world government:

That societies have the members that they do and not some others, that national boundaries mark off a particular allotment of natural resources, that the GNP of the United States will allow for lots of redistribution and the GNP of Chad for little – these facts are all morally arbitrary. They do, however, give rise to considerable inequality among persons in different societies. If inequalities that do not better the condition of the least well off are arbitrary and thus unjustifiable, then the existence of separate sovereign polities cannot be justified.

So if we think Rawls is wrong, how can individual rights be justified as a matter of logic and morality? As Lomasky explains, the key is understanding that individual rights cannot make sense without respecting people as distinct individuals, and people cannot be respected as distinct individuals if society is supposed to value some abstract value – such as “equality of income,” “utility” or “happiness,” or some other “common good” – over all else:

The first step toward making sense of rights is to understand how they can be possible. If some moral commodity -- happiness, liberty, equality, or whatever -- is valuable, then isn't more of it necessarily better than less? If so, then that moral commodity (or perhaps an appropriately weighted average of several) should, it might appear, be maximized. Maximization is the keystone of utilitarian ethics and its modern counterpart, cost-benefit analysis. These theories take as evident the “more is better than less” dictum … Can rights be more than this? That is, can it be rational deliberately to eschew maximization of an overall good? … [A]ffirmations of basic rights spring from a commitment to the value of the individual and in turn reflect that commitment into the moral arena. Much more needs to be said to flesh out the nature of that value … but the core of this notion is that each person possesses a kind of sovereignty over his own life and that such sovereignty entails that he be accorded a zone of protected activity within which he is to be free from encroachment by others … [C]onsider the claim by [person] B that he has a right to free speech that must be respected by [person] C. This right can indeed be explained by citing moral considerations which provide reasons showing that C ought not impede B's exercise of free speech. But among those considerations -- and very likely the one of greatest force – is that B is the type of being whose moral status makes mandatory that he have control over his own utterances. If that is the case, our moral principles of greatest weight are already "infected" by the individualism that the language of rights expresses.

As Lomasky points out, the problem with moral theories that require maximizing one metric (be it happiness, income equality, or something else) is that they ultimately require sacrificing individual people’s projects, and hence their individuality itself, to the service of that metric:

According to moral theories that acknowledge a supreme impersonal standard of value, we are all summarily enrolled in a common cause. It is the ceaseless and perpetual endeavor to maximize utility or whatever other good is sovereign. Each being is a soldier on the line, and though each stands in a different position and wields different armaments. everyone's cause is the same. While individuals may fall by the wayside, the enterprise goes on. However, it then becomes utterly mysterious why there should be anything suspect about sacrificing one of the troops for another just so long as more impersonal value is thereby attained … [But] [t]here can be as many enterprises as there are agents, and each agent acts rationally to apply a personal standard of value to those states of affairs that are within his power to promote or impede. Therefore, there is no single standard of value in terms of which all ends are commensurable. From what perspective could one justify the claim that [person] A and all of A's ends ought to be sacrificed for the considerably greater charm of [person] B and B's ends? Certainly not from the perspective of A; and even if this result would conveniently follow from B's appraisal of value, that result is in no way rationally binding on A.

A person who insists on a moral theory that requires maximizing one special thing in all circumstances is a sort of moral neat freak who doesn’t like having to recognize that other people have separate lives.

Another problem with moral theories that require maximizing one particular thing or other (be it happiness, or income equality, or anything else) is that such theories will reduce the mission of every organization to maximizing that one special thing. So, for example, universities will have to prioritize maximizing that one special thing over the mission of educating students (hence politicized universities that prioritize racial categories over individual merit), banks will have to deny loans to entities seen as somehow in opposition to that one special thing, and courts will have to ignore the law in order to maximize that one special thing.

One reason society needs to respect individual projects over impersonal metrics is that it would seem impossible for arguments for the priority of any particular impersonal metric to be proved to most people’s satisfaction. And without that, we can’t have anything close to consensus on a social contract. As Lomasky writes:

It may be felt that this is insufficient, that what is required is an argument that will obliterate the arrogance and prejudice of those who refuse to acknowledge the claim of equal rights for all project pursuers. This, though, is to misconstrue the efficacy of philosophical activity. Robert Nozick writes: “The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premises you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief. Though philosophy is carried on as a coercive activity, the penalty philosophers wield is, after all, rather weak. If the other person is willing to bear the label of ‘irrational’ or ‘having the worse arguments,’ he can skip away happily maintaining his previous belief.”

If you doubt the practical impossibility of getting people to agree on the priority of any one moral metric over all other values, try “debating” the issue on social media. No single metric of “good” will ever win the day, so much better, as a society, to simply respect people as individual project pursuers and all that entails. While people will perennially disagree about what moral metrics to elevate over others, they are much more likely to agree on the need to respect individuals as individuals, regardless of whatever moral metrics they choose to guide them in their own decisions. As Lomasky explains:

We would not be inclined to recognize rights were it not for the conviction that individuals genuinely are owed some measure of sovereignty over their own lives, that a person’s life is deficient unless it is directed by its own will … [O]ne component of a person’s identity over time is constituted by his commitment to projects … [A]ny account of morality that explicitly or implicitly denies that project pursuers have reason to be partial to their own abiding commitments is thereby disqualified as an adequate moral theory for beings like us … Just as project pursuit lends clarity to the rejection of [impersonal theories of value], so too does it help sharpen the distinction between regarding persons as ends in themselves versus regarding them merely as means. If an impersonal standard of value reigns, then lives possess instrumental value insofar as they are productive of whatever this standard takes to be of intrinsic worth. However, it is hard to see how lives can be of more than instrumental value, how they can be other than servants to the standard … A [person] regards himself as a member of a Kingdom of Ends when he both respects the unique individuality that is his own and recognizes that all other project pursuers are themselves unique individuals, each with his own life to live, and each possessing reason to reject overreaching impositions from others. In a Kingdom of Ends, each project pursuer is accorded moral space within which he can independently attempt to realize a connected conception of the good life for him. Rights are just this entitlement to moral space. By establishing boundaries that others must not transgress, they accord to each rights holder a measure of sovereignty over his own life … Project pursuers, whatever their projects may be, value the ability to be a pursuer of projects. That means that they value having moral space. Because rights demarcate moral space, every project pursuer has reason to desire to be accorded the status of a rights holder. Individuals therefore are to be understood as project pursuers. That status is not to be assigned to units more encompassing than individual persons such as tribes, nations, economic classes, or all of humanity … Persons require noninterference from others, metaphorically described as “moral space,” to be able to pursue their own designs. Therefore, it is initially plausible to insist that basic rights be understood as negative or liberty rights that forbid coercive encroachment.

The behaviorist B.F. Skinner, in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, wrote that “Perhaps the most important feature of the utopian [culture] design … is that the survival of a community can be made important to its members.” Without great opportunities to exercise freedom, the survival of a community won’t be important to its members.

Steven Pinker echoes this reasoning, writing:

All of us claim a basic right to our own well-being. If we were not alive, healthy, nourished, educated, and embedded in a community, we could not deliberate about morality (or anything else) in the first place. And because we are embedded in a community, where people can affect each other’s well-being, we can’t stop at this basic claim. None of us can coherently demand these conditions for ourselves without granting them to others. I can’t say “I’m allowed to hurt you, but you’re not allowed to hurt me, because I’m me and you’re not,” and expect to be taken seriously.

And respecting people’s different projects has the added benefit of allowing people to test out for themselves different ways of doing things – and of allowing others to observe and learn from other individuals’ experiences. As Lomasky writes:

J.S. Mill celebrates openness to endless possibility in On Liberty, where he writes: “As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments in living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others, and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself.”

Lomasky then explains why a very limited policy of “welfare rights” should be accorded to individuals under a theory that respects individuals as project pursuers:

However, it is also the case that individuals need more than liberty in order to carve out for themselves satisfactory lives. Conditions of minimal well-being are also needed, and these typically depend on having means of access to economic goods … [P]roject pursuers have reason to value both the liberty to promote their own ends and the material means to secure those ends … There is a moral case to be made for equality in basic rights, and every disadvantaged individual has reason to advance that case vis-à-vis the advantaged. He can argue: “I am every bit as much a project pursuer as you are. Just as you demand moral space within which you are able to advance your projects free of encroachment from me, I too need moral space within which I can create a life according to my lights. Yet you are unwilling to grant to me the same measure of freedom from interference you claim for yourself. You may be able to force me to accede to this inequality through your superior strength, but you are unable to justify it to me. There neither is nor could be some interpersonal standard of value which I have reason to accept that ranks your ability to pursue your projects above my ability to pursue my projects. To the contrary: what is maximally important to me is my ability to construct a meaningful life for myself through my own ability to commit myself to directive ends. Therefore, you can never provide me with adequate reason to accept your claim that you are entitled to a fuller measure of rights than am I.” … What, then, are the basic rights that project pursuers possess? It has been argued that they amount to minimal demands on the forbearance of others; but is it exclusively forbearance that individuals can demand from one another as a matter of basic right or should claims to recipience of goods be acknowledged as well? A familiar way to phrase this distinction is as a contrast between “liberty” rights and “welfare” rights. Alternatively, rights are spoken of as “negative”' (entailing noninterference with an activity) or “positive” (entailing the provision by some individual or institution of a valued item). Liberalism has bifurcated into two distinctive variants in its response to the question of whether persons possess positive or welfare rights along with negative or liberty rights. Classical liberalism, a modern form of which is libertarianism, maintains that all rights individuals possess (or: a vastly preponderant share of the rights that individuals possess) are negative in character. Welfare liberalism maintains that individuals possess extensive positive claims on others, and that these positive claims are on a par with negative claims not only with respect to their prominence on the moral landscape but also with respect to their justification. That is, whatever reasons we have to acknowledge that individuals may not be interfered with are also reasons for holding that individuals are entitled to aid from others. If it is need that validates claims to noninterference, then it is also need that confers a right to be provided the requisites for a satisfactory life.

But Lomasky rejects the extreme position of those who support overly-generous welfare rights. He defines that extreme position as follows:

Welfare liberalism … maintains that all needs possess moral weight in virtue of their being needs, and therefor they create rights. It is not only liberty that is generally valuable but also health care, housing, employment, education, recreation, and so on. If there are liberty rights, then there are also rights to these welfare goods … Welfare liberalism [argues that] [l]iberties that are unaccompanied by the ability to make effective use of the liberty are of negligible value. What should be of preeminent moral concern is not how many or how few conditions necessary for the securing of [certain goods] are satisfied, but whether in fact the need for [those goods] will be met.

That extreme welfare rights position has many fundamental flaws. As Lomasky writes: (first emphasis added)

[P]ersons require motivational energy to propel themselves actively to realize that which they hold valuable. They require sufficient fixity of purpose to hold to plans of activity over extended periods of time such that they are not subject to diversion by every passing whim or caprice if their lives are to exhibit coherence and fixed identity. Persons also require flexibility of response so that previously held conceptions of value worthy of pursuit can be modified in the light of new information and evolving structures of attachment. All of these can justifiably be regarded as basic needs of human beings, yet they are not moral commodities that those who are well supplied can be asked to donate to those whose stock is low.

That is, if some people have very little to no motivation to pursue life projects beyond, say, merely their own amusement, then it’s not as though government can take some motivation from those who have it and give it to those who don’t. Further, as Lomasky writes:

[Another] defect [with arguments that people’s needs must be met] is that it takes into account only the magnitude of the need a potential recipient has for a good without giving corresponding attention to the magnitude of sacrifice that must be exacted from others in order to provide that good. In other words. it is entirely oriented toward demand and ignores factors concerning supply.

That is, if government policies take too much from those who are motivated to produce through their various life projects in order to give to those without such motivation, those government policies will end up disincentivizing motivation by penalizing it and discouraging those who had it from applying it as they would have otherwise. Why spend time and resources pursuing my own projects when the government is just going to take the products of my time and my resources and give them to others? In that way, government policies can end up limiting the supply of personal effort in the aggregate, and they can end up doing that even when private charity is already filling most, if not all, of the material needs of the least well-off. Indeed, the government especially risks encouraging dependence and discouraging motivation when its welfare programs are overly generous in today’s world — a world in which technology has made entertainment over the internet so cheaply available that record numbers of young people are dropping out of the workforce to play video games in their parents’ basement. Research from 2025 has even shown that young male college graduates now have about the same unemployment rate as nongraduates, rising from less than 5 percent in 2024 to 7 percent in 2025. At the same time, today just about everyone has access to all the world’s knowledge in the palm of their hand in the form of their smartphone, making it so much easier to be productive and to seek the means for doing so, if only we make the effort.

If a person has any ability to act on their own initiative, but they refuse to do so, that person can’t be said to be without the means of self-help, and therefore such a person’s refusal to exert effort cannot be justifiably endowed with a veto power that leads to restrictions on other people’s liberty through overly-generous government welfare policies and the raising of taxes from others to pay for them. Allowing such a “moocher’s veto” would only weaken initiative, encourage dependence, and thereby increase the burden on everyone else. As Lomasky writes:

[I]ndividuals who command resources that can predictably be transformed into or exchanged for desired goods and services [should be expected to] provide those goods and services for themselves. As it were, the social levers are already there waiting to be pulled. In contrast, a person who commands no appreciable stock of resources may yet receive valued items, but the levers then must be pulled by others. The distinction is between the ability to purchase or secure an item through one’s labor and securing that item as a gift or through coercive extraction [by government] … The conditions necessary for an agent to lead a successful life may be divided into … mutually exclusive categories. In the first are those items which only the agent himself can generate. These include motivational energy and self-respect. If they are lacking, then no one else can provide them. In Category 2 are goods of which the agent may avail himself through his own efforts or which may be provided to him by others [through charity]. Food, clothing. shelter, and most other economic goods fall within this classification.

In other words, encouraging self-help should be the government’s priority, and the government certainly should not impose any policies that discourage self-help.

Interestingly, the English Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 drew a distinction between the “deserving poor” (that is, those willing to work but unable to find work) and the “undeserving poor” (that is, those who were unwilling to work at all) by providing that government welfare would no longer be given in the form of money or food to people in their homes, except in emergencies. Rather, anyone seeking government welfare had to enter a government workhouse, where conditions included monotonous work, strict discipline, and unappetizing food, such that if a person really wanted to work but could not find employment, they would endure the workhouse as a last resort. I’m not advocating that particular approach, as a matter of policy, but it’s worth noting a comment in the Report accompanying the enactment of the law, which stated, “The first and most essential of all conditions, a principle which we find universally admitted … is, that [the welfare recipient’s] situation on the whole [under the law] shall not be made really or apparently so eligible [that is, tolerable] as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class.”

In a previous essay, we explored the field of evolutionary psychology, which helps explains how the process of natural selection that led to human beings affects our psychological tendencies, through Steve Stewart-Williams’ book The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve. In that book, Stewart-Williams also discusses how evolution led us to become, in part, cooperative beings, willing to share resources with others for a common good. But as he additionally explains, we also evolved in ways that place limits on that generosity in order to avoid incentivizing people to take undue advantage of the generosity of others. As he writes:

Imagine that I have two portions of meat but that you have none. Imagine also that eating the first portion will give me two units of fitness, whereas eating the second will give me only one – I’ll already be full, after all, and thus I’ll get diminishing returns from stuffing my face any further. You, on the other hand, haven’t eaten, so if I give you my second portion, you’ll get two units of fitness from it. That’s slightly worse for me – I’ll get two units in total instead of three – but it’s better for you and it’s better overall: Between us, we’ll get four units of fitness from the meat, rather than the three we’d get if I gorged myself and let you starve. Next imagine that, at a later date, you have two portions of meat and I have none. If you now eat one portion and give me the other, we’ll again get two units of fitness each, rather than three for you and none for me. That’s slightly worse for you, but it’s better for me and again it’s better overall: We’ll squeeze four units of fitness out of the meat instead of just three. But there’s something else to notice at this point. Although sharing is worse for the sharer at the time, by swapping sharing duties, both of us will do better in the end than we would have if neither of us had shared. Specifically, both of us will get a total of four units of fitness from trading favors, whereas we’d both get only three if we’d horded our windfalls. In other words, by taking turns at being generous, we’ll both be better off. And of course this doesn’t apply only to meat. Reciprocity works its magic whenever just two conditions are met: first, that the benefits of helping to the recipient are greater than the costs to the altruist, and second, that recipient and altruist trade places from time to time. It sounds like a foolproof plan: Reciprocators do better than non-reciprocators, and thus reciprocators should fill the world with their progeny. Unlike cooperation, however, reciprocity is as rare among the animals as snowballs in summer. If it’s such a great idea, why aren’t polar bears, grasshoppers, and ladybugs routinely trading favors? The reason is that there’s a major roadblock to the evolution of reciprocity, which biologists call the problem of cheating. Recall that, in the meat example, when you and I take turns sharing, we’re both better off than we would be if neither of us did; each of us gets four units of fitness instead of three. But there is a way that one of us could be better off still: We could rip the other one off. I, for example, could take the meat you offer me when I have none, but then just eat both my portions when you come home empty-handed. Sure, the second portion would do me less good than it would do you. But it would still do me some good. I’d get three units of fitness from eating both my portions, as well as the additional two units from eating the meat you so kindly gave me. That would give me five units of fitness in total, instead of the four I’d get if I reciprocated your generosity like a chump. Meanwhile, you’d get only two units of fitness – less than the three you’d get if you just ate all your meat when you had it and didn’t risk sharing. The upshot is that individuals who exploit others’ generosity – free riders – do better than would-be reciprocators. If there were ever a population of reciprocators, they’d be vulnerable to invasion by free riders. Like suicidal lemmings, the reciprocators would get less and less common until one day, eventually, the free riders would inherit the Earth. If that were the last word on reciprocity, no one would ever reciprocate. People do reciprocate, however, which tells us that – if reciprocity has an evolutionary origin – natural selection must have equipped us with some kind of defense against getting cheated. According to [Robert] Trivers, that’s exactly what happened. Human beings, he argues, have a set of emotions and preferences that lead us to establish mutually profitable reciprocal relationships, all the while avoiding getting too severely short-changed by the free riders of the world. First and foremost, we dislike it when people take more than they give. We get angry with them. This probably isn’t just something we’ve learned to do; it seems unlikely that people could just as easily learn to cherish being cheated as to despise it. Instead, argues Trivers, the reaction is part and parcel of human nature. Just as disgust motivates us to avoid spoiled food, anger at a person who cheated us motivates us to avoid getting cheated again. We might refuse to help the cheater next time; we might cut our social ties with them; or we might punish them in some way to dissuade them from cheating us in the future. Such actions limit the damage done by free riders and cheats. Other familiar emotions also help make us natural reciprocators. When someone does something good for us, we feel gratitude. This motivates us to return the favor later, thereby continuing the mutually beneficial cycle of reciprocal exchange. If, for some reason, we fail to return a favor, we feel guilt or shame. These emotions motivate us to mend our ways before we activate other people’s anti-free-rider adaptations – that is, before they get mad at us – or, if they’re already mad at us, the emotions motivate us to make amends. Why, though, do we care? From the standpoint of reciprocal altruism theory, it’s because caring helped our ancestors to establish profitable relationships of reciprocal exchange, without any advanced planning and without any awareness that that’s what they were even doing.

So evolution helps explain the self-preservational basis of the feelings that cause us to feel upset when people “abuse the system.” As Stewart-Williams writes, “some of the most basic human emotions, and some of our most cherished moral impulses, have their origin in the economic logic of mutually beneficial trade.”

Our evolved concern with moochers on the system is also justified based on modern computer simulations that show that strategies that tend to encourage excessive free riding by those who would abuse systems are sub-optimal, and even self-destructive. As Stewart-Williams writes:

Trivers’ theory sounds reasonable enough, but how can we be sure it’s not just a plausible-sounding just-so story? … [I]n various ways, the theory of reciprocal altruism has been tested and challenged, prodded and poked, and so far it’s passed with flying colors. At the very least, it’s a theory we need to take seriously. To begin with, the underlying logic of the theory has been tested with computer simulations. The basic idea is that researchers set up colonies of reciprocators and non-reciprocators inside virtual worlds, push the go button, and then see how well each strategy fares. The political scientist Robert Axelrod got the ball rolling on this line of research. Axelrod invited academics from all over the world to submit computer programs which would play against other computer programs in a round-robin tournament. The programs, he explained, would repeatedly encounter one another, and with each encounter, would have to choose to either cooperate or defect. Cooperation (or helping) would be the equivalent of sharing your meat; defection would be the equivalent of hording it. Once both programs had made their choices, they’d be awarded points as follows. ​​ Receiving help but not helping in return (i.e., free riding): five points. ​​ Mutual helping: three points. ​​ Mutual defection: one point. Helping but not receiving help in return (the so-called sucker’s payoff): zero points. The winner, said Axelrod, would be the program that accumulated the most points by the end of the tournament. Given this set up, what should a virtual animal do? For a single interaction, the answer is clear: Defect. Don’t share. This is the best option no matter what the other player does. If the other player defects as well, you’ll get one point instead of zero. If the other player cooperates, you’ll get five points instead of three. Thus, in a “one-shot game,” the best move for both players is always to defect, and cooperation could never get off the ground. The tragedy is that both players would do better if they both cooperated: They’d get three points each instead of the one point they end up with when they both defect. Ironically, then, in a one-shot game, the rational pursuit of self-interest makes both parties worse off. This is a hypothetical example of a real-world phenomenon – a phenomenon the ecologist Garrett Hardin called the tragedy of the commons. But what if the virtual animals get to encounter each other again and again, like real animals often do? In that case, the best course of action is no longer quite so obvious. And that’s why we need the computer simulations. Back to the main story. After issuing his invitation for programs to compete in his tournament, Axelrod soon had a diverse collection of contestants, each reflecting its creator’s best guess about which strategy would rack up the most points. Some were very simple, others highly complex. Among the simple ones was a program called Always Cooperate. This program was a regular Mr. Nice Guy; no matter what the other player did the last time they met, Always Cooperate … always cooperated. Some call this strategy Doormat. Another simple program was called Always Defect. This was Doormat’s evil twin; no matter what the other player did last time, this program always defected. Alongside the simple programs were various more complex ones – programs that tried to predict what other players would do based on their past behavior, and then use that information to calculate the most profitable course of action for each encounter. On top of all that was a program called Tit-for-Tat. Tit-for-Tat was one of the simpler strategies; all it did was cooperate on its first encounter with any other player, and thereafter simply match that player’s last move. If the other player cooperated on the last move, Tit-for-Tat cooperated now. If the other player defected, Tit-for-Tat defected right back. As Trivers observed, Tit-for-Tat acted on a variant of the Golden Rule: “First, do unto others as you wish them to do unto you, but then do unto them as they have just done unto you.” In this way, the program did roughly what Trivers argued that humans evolved to do: It established reciprocally altruistic partnerships where possible, but defended itself against cheats by refusing to cooperate with them further. Axelrod ran several versions of the computer tournament. In each, Tit-for-Tat emerged as the undisputed champion. It beat Always Cooperate; it beat Always Defect; it even beat the complex predictive strategies. This was a major shot in the arm for Trivers’ theory. It showed in a rigorous way that reciprocal altruism really could work … [M]aking Tit-for-Tat a success story was that, although it was nice, it wasn’t too nice. Unlike Always Cooperate, Tit-for-Tat had a way of limiting the damage done by cheats: It simply stopped cooperating with them. Nasty programs like Always Defect got one big payoff from Tit-for-Tat, but then they were out in the cold. And though Tit-for-Tat took a one-time hit when interacting with these programs, it quickly racked up more points than them.

Indeed, our emotions evolved as well to prod humans toward enforcing a “Tit-for-Tat” anti-mooching strategy when altruistic systems are in place:

[A]lhough social norms presumably augment our reciprocal tendencies, it seems unlikely that they explain them in their entirety. In everyday life, reciprocity is propped up not by abstract normative principles, but by emotions such as gratitude, guilt, sympathy, and anger. All neurologically normal human beings possess these emotions, and it seems highly unlikely that the emotions are inventions of culture – that culture somehow dragged them “into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness,” to borrow a line from Nietzsche. More plausibly, the emotions undergirding reciprocity are birth rights of the human animal …

Stewart-Williams also points out that while reciprocal altruism isn’t common in the rest of the animal kingdom, where it does appear, its practitioners behave in “Tit-for-Tat” ways that reduce free riding:

Although reciprocal exchange isn’t nearly as widespread among the animals as kin altruism, it’s not just a human specialty. The most persuasive research on nonhuman reciprocity has focused on vampire bats. These spooky flying mammals make their living by venturing out at night and siphoning blood from other animals, including occasionally humans. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they don’t. But when they don’t, they’re at risk of starving. And that’s when things take an interesting turn. The vampire “haves”– those that succeed in finding blood on a given night – often regurgitate some of their bounty into the mouths of the vampire “have-nots,” even when the have-nots are unrelated to them. As the biologists Gerald Wilkinson and Gerald Carter have convincingly demonstrated, the vampire haves are most likely to share blood with individuals who’ve shared with them in the past. Meanwhile, free-rider bats – bats that don’t reciprocate – get frozen out of the game. Bizarre though it might seem, vampire bats seem to be playing their own real-world version of the Tit-for-Tat strategy. Other animals seem to be doing the same. There’s evidence, for instance, of reciprocal exchange in various nonhuman primates, including macaques, baboons, and chimps. There’s also evidence of reciprocal exchange in animals as diminutive as rats and mice, and as distantly related to us as birds and perhaps even fish. And not only do other animals reciprocate, the adaptive contours of animal reciprocity are similar to those in humans. First, wherever we find reciprocity, we find defenses against cheating. Ravens, for example, refuse to cooperate with other ravens who failed to cooperate with them in the past. Second, in at least some species, reciprocity is more important when dealing with non-relatives than it is when dealing with kin. Thus, when vervet monkeys interact with non-relatives, they’re more likely to help those who groomed them in the recent past; when they interact with relatives, on the other hand, the likelihood of helping is unrelated to the recency of grooming. This is strikingly similar to what we see in human beings.

Interestingly, some of the perverse incentives created by the provision of benefits have also manifested themselves in the evolution of the large variety of dog breeds we have today. Wolves, from whom all dogs are descended, carefully attend to their offspring because they don’t have human owners who will care for their offspring for them. Male dogs today, however, have come to depend on their human owners not just for food, but also for the care of their own puppies. As Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending write in The 10,000 Year Explosion:

Domesticated animals and plants often look and act very different from their wild ancestors, and in every such case, the changes took place in far less than 100,000 years. For example, dogs were domesticated from wolves around 15,000 years ago; they now come in more varied shapes and sizes than any other mammal … Their behavior has changed as well: … Male wolves pair-bond with females and put a lot of effort into helping raise their pups, but male dogs— well, call them irresponsible … Male wolves help care for their offspring, but male dogs do not. Any adaptation, whether physical or behavioral, that loses its utility in a new environment can be lost rapidly, especially if it has any noticeable cost.

Sadly, as explored in a previous essay, there is evidence that overly-generous welfare benefits discourage marriage to some extent by allowing government benefits to take the place of a productive human spouse. But for the most part, evolution has led humans to create mechanisms to incentivize productive work. As Stewart-Williams writes:

[L]arge-scale cooperation is often explicitly motivated by considerations of self-interest. When people work together en masse to build pyramids or fight wars, it’s generally not because they have a desire to sacrifice their time or their lives for the sake of the group. Most often, it’s because someone is either forcing them to do it or paying them a wage. In other words, they’re acting on immediate self-interest, not on some conception of what’s good for the group as a whole. Our group-interested behavior often has to be incentivized.

Of course, free market economies, without adequate competition, can lead to power imbalances between employers and workers. As Brian Villmoare writes in The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History:

Under some circumstances, the incentive to accept a job may mean the difference between eating and starving. Under those circumstances, unless there are as many acceptable jobs as there are employees to fill them, the incentive favors the employer, who can then offer employment terms favorable to the employer’s priorities; this might mean very low wages and dangerous working conditions.

But as Villmoare writes, the development of overly generous government welfare benefits systems to counteract such dynamics can themselves result in far more harm than good:

[I]f there is a strong social welfare system, people may not be incentivized to work at all. If you can get as much money from welfare as you would in a job, there is no incentive to take a job, even if there are sufficient jobs for full employment.

Today, we in the United States are now back to Depression-Era levels of men not working and not looking for work.

And over the last fifty years, the percentage of men who are not in the labor force has moved steadily upward.

That being said, there remains a reasonable right to welfare benefits by those who truly do not have the mental or physical means to pursue their own projects by earning resources by working for others, or when unique circumstances warrant government coercion. As Lomasky describes one such unique circumstance:

Persons who lack the means to purchase antibiotics will suffer from diseases that are easily curable. Thousands of impoverished individuals will live longer and happier lives if the rest of us are taxed a few pennies each, the proceeds to go toward supplying needed drugs. Do the indigent have a right to medical relief that is inexpensive and easily tendered, yet which has great therapeutic benefits?

The answer in the very narrow circumstances described would seem to be yes. But generally, as Lomasky writes, “[B]ecause persons are separate beings individuated in part by virtue of the particular projects to which they commit themselves, they are rationally entitled to insist [absent extreme circumstances like the antibiotics example] that they be let alone to pursue their own designs, and not to be enlisted as adjuncts to the projects of others.

Lomasky further explains that some minimal government compromises regarding property rights, made for the sake of providing minimal welfare rights, may be justified where compromises regarding rights to free speech or freedom of religion would not be:

A liberal order adequate to the interest individuals have in being able to live as project pursuers places a moral premium on noninterference. Traditional civil liberties descend as a corollary of this postulate. Freedom of speech and assembly, in conjunction with an unconstrained press, is conducive to individuals' articulation of their conceptions of the good, for attempts to enlist the cooperation of others in ends which are rendered attainable or enhanced through joint efforts, to secure access to information that bears instrumentally on one's pursuit of designs, and to secure entry into a forum through which one's conception of a good can be modified in the open air of unconstrained conversation. Freedom of religion directly attaches to one major area within which individuals seek to construct meaningful lives through commitment to regulative ends. Freedom from arbitrary search and seizure physically represents and gives force to the individualistic notion of “moral space.” From within a liberal perspective it is virtually uncontroversial that these liberties and others of similar provenance must be afforded wide play by any rights-respecting polity. However, controversy seems endemic to the corresponding determination of what claims over property a society based on rights should acknowledge … The allocation of property within a liberal order undoubtedly is a salient theoretical issue. It bears quite directly on the “uncontroversial” rights referred to above. The “speech” of which individuals are free to avail themselves will reach listeners to the extent that one has access to property through which one's words are disseminated; a still, small voice is notably amplified by a megaphone, a printing press, or a network of several hundred television stations. What will count as search and seizure will be determined, beyond the boundaries of one's epidermis, by what one has. Moreover, one's command of economic goods directly affects the projects one can pursue and the likelihood of success one enjoys … For many of the familiar civil liberties [however] it is the case that one person's enjoying the liberty does not exclude another person from enjoying the same liberty. For example, freedom of religion is a right that everyone can have, and have in the same degree. It is not the case that there is only so much freedom of religion to go around, and my having more necessarily means that you have less. One who acknowledges another's liberty thereby pledges not to interfere with that liberty, but he does not relinquish his own claim to that liberty. It appears to be quite otherwise with property rights. If one person has a property right to the full enjoyment of item I, then no one else can have a similar right to I. If I may use, transform, sell. destroy, or bequeath I, then you may not. Liberties to treat I as one's property are fundamentally exclusionary in a way that other familiar liberties are not.

Still, Lomasky points out that:

Of course, the quantity of property is not fixed in the long term. Persons’ productive activities result in the creation of new goods that add to the total stock.

All the more reason to provide maximum liberty to those who would create smartphones, computers, air conditioning, and coffee machines: such creators significantly add to the aggregate amount of property in the world that people actually want to buy because such things dramatically improve their lives. That phenomenon, following the Industrial Revolution, has overwhelmingly improved people’s lives around the world. People who manage productive companies increase the supply (and reduce the price) of the sum total of useful property available, and so simply letting productive companies invest more of their money in product improvement and production makes people better off by increasing supplies of useful things that would not exist otherwise.

As Lomasky summarizes the case for maximum individual freedom but also for a minimal social safety net (emphasis added):

It was argued [earlier] that liberty rights are preeminent, but care was taken to leave an escape clause such that some recognition of welfare rights may be compatible with the existence of a liberal order. A policy of studied noninterference was endorsed as the general rule, but a place was left for rights to provision as an exception to that rule. When will that exception take effect? In a word, rarely. In all cases in which it is open to persons to act so as to secure for themselves holdings in property sufficient to enable them to live as project pursuers, the responsibility to provide is theirs. The responsibility that devolves on others is that of noninterference with such efforts. In a regime in which individuals have full liberty to act to meet their own needs, it will usually be the case that they are able to do so. No minimum wage or occupational licensure laws will restrict access to employment; zoning ordinances and building codes will not restrict access to housing; agricultural price supports will not restrict access to food … Nor would an ethos of welfarism spawn an army of bureaucrats whose livelihood rests on the perpetuation of generational cycles of dependency within a welfare class. It is not unreasonable to suggest, then, that persons within a liberal order would generally find themselves able to secure what they urgently need, even if not all that they would like to have … [Yet] [i]f a person is [wholly] unable to secure that which is necessary for his ability to live as a project pursuer, then he has a rightful claim [in that instance only] to provision by others who have a surplus beyond what they require to live as project pursuers. In that strictly limited but crucial respect, basic rights extend beyond liberty rights to welfare rights.

Lomasky also reminds us that if the government comes to grant “rights” to things other than freedom beyond a minimal social safety net, people will come to see government not as a protector of rights, but as a creator of rights that will tend to foster the coercion of people by government rather than the protection of people by government:

To say that things like education or health care are “rights” is to water down the concept of rights such that rights become an excuse for the government to coerce people rather than defenses against government coercion.

So how now does all this fit into John Rawls’ Theory of Justice? Lomasky summarizes Rawls’ theory this way:

In this century autonomy has been apotheosized by numerous thinkers, including John Rawls in A Theory of Justice. Rawls' contractors, whose deliberations are to issue in the fundamental framework of a just society, are placed behind a veil of ignorance that shields them from any awareness of the particularities of their own lives. The veil is explicitly designed to filter out the distorting effects of bias and strategic bargaining. It thereby renders the contractors perfectly pure specimens of autonomy. None can be deflected from rational reflection by the force of any untoward inclination, because behind the veil one does not know what one's inclinations are. Choice cannot be bent to concern for one's own or to that which one has antecedently come to regard as fitting and proper, because these too are unknown. All one can do -- one must do -- is legislate absolutely de novo. In the Rawlsian original position one's autonomy is safeguarded not only from the encroachments of others but also from one's own preconceptions.

It seems to me that even under the conditions of Rawls’ mind experiment, all things considered, the best system to agree on is a free market system with the very limited exception of minimal welfare programs focused solely on people who have no other means of supporting themselves, and that don’t involve disincentivizing self-motivation or exercising personal responsibility.

What welfare programs we get in the real world, however, is, unfortunately, another thing. As Angela Richidi writes regarding “the structural flaws embedded in safety net programs”:

These programs successfully redistribute income to low- and even middle-income families and alleviate short-term material hardship. But the way they are designed often undermines long-term advancement by discouraging work and marriage, the key drivers of upward mobility. In other words, current U.S. programs can leave American families feeling trapped—risking abrupt reductions in their benefits if they work more hours or earn higher wages, and facing financial penalties if they marry, since they could then lose their eligibility … Despite unprecedented levels of federal and state spending, many current safety-net programs actively discourage work and penalize marriage—two pathways most associated with higher household incomes, whether through increased individual earnings or dual-earner arrangements … Economic theory and empirical evidence both show that the availability of government assistance makes employment less critical; such assistance can affect individual decisions about how much to work and whether to work at all. The generosity of benefits and the rules governing how they phase out as income rises can also affect both decisions. When safety-net benefits are not conditioned on employment, individuals sometimes choose not to work, jeopardizing their long-term economic progress. A second problem arises when benefit rules are structured so that if a household increases its earnings, it may face an abrupt reduction in benefits—a situation often called a “benefit cliff.” In the most extreme cases, an individual could even lose more in benefits than they gain in earnings. Such arrangements lead many low-income households to rationally choose to work fewer hours or turn down pay raises … A similar dynamic exists with marriage. Marriage tends to increase household income, since, in many families, both spouses work. Because means-tested benefits are typically calculated at the household level, however, two adults who marry may see their combined household income push them above eligibility thresholds—which means they lose their benefits. Such rules effectively penalize those who chose to get married, and in some ways encourage unmarried cohabitation—even though marriage is one of the strongest predictors of long-term economic stability and child well-being. Although the precise effect of safety net programs on marriage rates remains poorly understood, research by the Sutherland Institute in Utah suggests that program rules that penalize marriage do negatively affect participants’ decisions about whether to wed.

One of the reasons for this situation is described by Lomasky and Geoffrey Brennan in their book Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, in which they explain that voters’ support for large welfare programs is generally not based on considered judgments regarding the results of those programs in the real world, but are rather based on aspirations voters express through voting. Reflecting what may be many people’s personal experiences, Lomasky and Brennan posit the concept of expressive voting, through which voters don’t carefully consider the costs and benefits of the policies they’re voting for; rather, voters simply derive symbolic satisfaction from supporting candidates or causes aligned with their identities or values—making voting for a candidate more akin to cheering for your team at a sporting event. As a result, for many if not most people, voting is simply virtue-signaling, with most attention paid to moral expression, not real-world results. That’s because the psychological or virtue-signaling rewards of voting are certain, while the outcome of an election is uncertain and the probability of casting a decisive vote is astronomically low. And so people spend more time virtue-signaling than attempting to determine whether or not certain policies would actually achieve the results claimed.

America’s Founders certainly considered the possibility to illogical action when drafting the Constitution. For one thing, they designed a system of “separation of powers” to moderate abuses of the powers granted to each branch. Our system of government was designed by real people during the course of a Constitutional Convention in 1787, not by the disembodied contactors in Rawls’ mind experiment, but still the Founders employed a process similar to Rawls’ “original position” in that their aim was to temper the most significant biases in the system.

First, as Michael Lucchese writes, James Madison (writing under the pseudonym Publius in the Federalist Papers that advocated for the ratification of the Constitution), predicted that the inevitable problem of people’s dividing into overly-emotional factions would be at least partially addressed when the country grew in size, such that the factions would multiply to the point at which no one faction would come to dominate — and some factions would have to work with others to achieve a majority:

Federalist #10 provides a particularly good example of how Publius thinks the Constitution can teach the people this highest political virtue [the virtue of prudence]. The subject of the essay is the problem of faction—an issue with which we are surely familiar in such divided times as our own. According to Publius, a faction is any group of citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest,” seeking to subvert the rights of others or undermine the public good. Factions, he writes, are particularly troublesome in popular governments in which the will of the majority prevails. How does the Constitution solve this problem? According to Publius, by “extending the sphere.” The sheer size of the Union mitigates faction by making it difficult for any single one to gain control of all the levers of power. “In the extent and proper structure of” the federal government, he concludes, “we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”

Second, while Rawls’ mind experiment sought to eliminate the influence of bias based on personal circumstances, the Founders’ separation of powers system sought to use the natural ambitions of political actors (which they saw as inevitable) against one another, such that excesses by each branch would tend to be countered by checks within the powers of the other branches. In James Madison’s words in Federalist Paper No. 51:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Of course, the whole point of creating a system in which the government “controlled itself” was to give maximum berth to the absence of government, a huge swath of free space within which individuals could live and be protected by the sort of “negative rights” discussed earlier, namely rights entailing noninterference with an activity. This free space for Americans was to exist in all areas in which the Constitution forbids the government to act such that the mission statements of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution could be fulfilled:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence (1776)

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution.” – Constitution (1787)

The genius of the separation of powers system in the Constitution has been well described by Congressman Tom McClintock in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, in which he stated in part:

[T]he central architecture of the Constitution is the separation of powers. It is really just mother’s rules, writ large. One slice of pie; two hungry brothers. How does mother slice the pie so both brothers are happy? Pretty simple. One slices; the other chooses. The powers given to one brother cannot be abused because of the powers given to the other. That is the brilliance of our Constitution. One brother makes law but cannot enforce it; the other brother enforces law but cannot make it. Article I is the first and longest article in the Constitution. It begins with the words: ‘‘All legislative powers herein granted are vested in a Congress of the United States.’’ When a law was to be made, the Founders wanted a great big rowdy food fight. They wanted every voice expressed through their Representatives. They wanted the decision held up to every light. They created two Houses with decidedly different perspectives so that the Congress would even argue with itself. They wanted it hard to make laws so the Nation wouldn’t be smothered by them, and they wanted those who make those laws directly answerable to the people. But once made, they didn’t want laws to be carried out by hundreds of squabbling prima donnas. That’s why we have Article II: ‘‘The executive powers shall be vested in a President of the United States.’’ One official, independent of the Congress but also accountable to the people, was to carry out those laws; not make them, but to take care that they are ‘‘faithfully executed.’’ Then in Article III, mother, the Supreme Court, independent of both brothers, is there to resolve disputes.

The Constitution is also designed to allow the “cake” to be sliced not just horizontally, but vertically as well — that is, by dividing government not only within the federal system, but also by dividing its powers between a federal government and the various state governments below (the system of federalism). However, that federalist system can break down when federal spending so pervades state government that political accountability becomes obscured, especially in the absence of incentives for personal accountability among individual citizens. And that will be the subject of my next essay.

I introduced my last essay with a quote from my local school’s dubiously political “mission statement,” which reads in part: “To engage and equip all [students] to embrace anti-racism as a mindset and in practice.” As explained in a previous essay, the term “anti-racism” was popularized by author Ibram X Kendi, whose book How to Be an Antiracist described the practiced of anti-racism this way: “The only remedy to past [racial] discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

That sounds more like group vengeance than social justice. My previous essay on mission statements got me thinking about mission statements for life generally, which led me to Jeffrey Wattles’ book The Golden Rule.

As Wattles writes, the widely recognized “Golden Rule” (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) was a direct counter to the mindset of group vengeance embodied by Kendi’s advice that present and future discrimination based on race be used to somehow settle group scores over time:

Wars between Greek city-states were frequent, as were clashes between individuals within a given city-state. “A long-standing feud, year after year of provocation and retaliation, is a conspicuous phenomenon of … upper-class society. … It was not the Athenian custom to disguise hatred.” Edward Westermarck’s encyclopedic study of planetary evolutionary ideas of morality associates primitive retaliation with nonmoral resentment, personal hatred, and revenge … [T]he repayment principle is inconsistent with the principles of cosmic justice and prudence, since doing harm to others provokes a spiral of never-ending vengeance.

As Wattles points out:

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus dismisses the principle of retaliation. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

But as Wattles describes, Jesus was not the first to reject the principle of retaliation. That rejection came with the early formulations of the Golden Rule.

Wattles writes:

What could be easier to grasp intuitively than the golden rule? It has such an immediate intelligibility that it serves as a ladder that anyone can step onto without a great stretch. I know how I like to be treated; and that is how I am to treat others. The study of the rule, however, leads beyond conventional interpretation, and the practice of the rule leads beyond conventional morality … The rule is widely regarded as obvious and self-evident. Nearly everyone is familiar with it in some formulation or other. An angry parent uses it as a weapon: “Is that how you want others to treat you?” A defense attorney invites the members of the jury to put themselves in the shoes of his or her client.

Thinking just a bit more deeply about the Golden Rule makes clear that it’s really just a starting point for a sound moral foundation. As Wattles writes, “My own thesis is that the rule’s unity is best comprehended not in terms of a single meaning but as a symbol of a process of growth on emotional, intellectual, and spiritual levels.” Says Wattle:

“Eureka!” they seem to say. “There is a supreme principle of living! It can be expressed in a single statement!” By contrast, theologian Paul Tillich found the rule an inferior principle … The problem with the rule is that it “does not tell us what we should wish.” … Most professional ethicists rely instead on other principles, since the rule seems vulnerable to counterexamples, such as the current favorite, “What if a sadomasochist goes forth to treat others as he wants to be treated?” Technically, the golden rule can defend itself from objections, since it contains within itself the seed of its own self-correction. Any easily abused interpretation may be challenged: “Would you want to be treated according to a rule construed in this way?” The recursive use of the rule—applying it to the results of its own earlier application—is a lever that extricates it from many tangles. The counterexample does not refute the golden rule, properly understood; rather, it serves to clarify the interpretation of the rule—that the golden rule functions appropriately in a growing personality; indeed, the practice of the rule itself promotes the required growth. Since the rule is such a compressed statement of morality, it takes for granted at least a minimum sincerity that refuses to manipulate the rule sophistically to “justify” patently immoral conduct.

In essence, using the Socratic method to think through the many angles of the Golden Rule is one relatively easy way to start thinking through moral issues.

But as Wattles describes, there are many potential criticisms of the Golden Rule:

It has been objected that the golden rule assumes that human beings are basically alike and thereby fails to do justice to the differences between people … The golden rule may also seem to imply that what we want for ourselves is good for ourselves and that what is good for ourselves is good for others. The positive formulation, in particular, is accused of harboring the potential for presumption; thus, the rule is suited for immediate application only among those whose beliefs and needs are similar. In fact, however, the rule calls for due consideration for any relevant difference between persons—just as the agent would want such consideration from others … Another criticism is that the golden rule sets too low a standard because it makes ordinary wants and desires the criterion of morality. On one interpretation, the rule asks individuals to do whatever they imagine they might wish to have done to them in a given situation; thus a judge would be obliged by the golden rule to sentence a convicted criminal with extreme leniency. As a mere principle of sympathy, therefore, it is argued, the rule is incapable of guiding judgment in cases where the necessary action is unwelcome to its immediate recipient.

But one benefit of the Golden Rule is that it at least requires moral consistency on the part of the rule’s adherent. As Wattles writes, “The rule merely requires consistency of moral judgment: one must apply the same standards to one’s treatment of others that one applies to others’ treatment of oneself.” In that sense, it’s akin to the Socratic method. Ward Farnsworth, in his book “The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook,” introduces the Socratic method as follows:

It is natural to imagine that a philosopher—a Socrates—would try to talk you into accepting his beliefs as your own. But that isn’t the Socratic method. Or if Socrates wants to show that you’re wrong, you might expect that he would attack what you’ve said as inconsistent with the facts or as morally repellent. That isn’t quite the Socratic method, either. The Socratic method, in its classic form, consists of internal critique. It tests whether you’re being consistent with yourself and believe all that you think you do. Socrates doesn’t tell you that you’re wrong; he shows you that you think you’re wrong.

The basic idea of the Golden Rule has popped up many places around the world going back thousands of years. But, as Wattles writes:

Despite the fact that the golden rule has been expressed, in some form, in most or all of the world’s religions, only in the Confucian and Judeo-Christian traditions did the rule become a prominent theme for sustained reflection. The emergence of the golden rule in some traditions is incomplete: a phrase is all that may be found, such as “If your neighbor’s jackal escapes into your garden, you should return the animal to its owner; this is how you would want your neighbor to treat you” [Bush Tribes of Tropical Africa]; “Great Spirit, grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.” [Indians of the Northern Plains] … Hinduism: “Let no man do to another that which would be repugnant to himself.” [Mahabharata, book 5, chapter 49, verse 57] … Islam: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” [from the Hadith, a lesser authority than the Koran] … Some Hindus interpret the injunction to treat others as oneself as an invitation to identify with the divine spirit within each person. Some Muslims take the golden rule to apply primarily to the brotherhood of Islam.

Even back in ancient Greece:

No author used a golden rule maxim as a hub around which to gather great themes. None proposed the rule as the leading principle of morality. Even at the close of this period (prior to the Christian invasion of the Mediterranean world) golden rule thinking functioned primarily through specific maxims, for example, about the treatment of slaves … [But] [t]he golden rule thinking coming to birth in various expressions and maxims includes an idea, a recommendation, and a command: Those affected by your actions are comparable to you. Imagine yourself in the other person’s position as an aid to discovering how to apply to yourself the same high moral standard that you apply to others. Do not treat others as you do not want to be treated … The rule evolved unconsciously as a by-product of deliberate effort on two issues: How is the maxim of helping friends and harming enemies [the vengeance or retaliatory approach] to be judged? And should we extend beneficence only to those who are dear to us or to all humankind?

Interestingly, the earliest Greek expression of “golden rule thinking” appears in Homer’s Odyssey, from the eighth century B.C. As Wattles writes:

Calypso is the goddess who has kept Odysseus as her love prisoner, and she has just received a message from Zeus that she must release her beloved and speed him homeward on pain of (un)godly retribution. Odysseus, who does not love Calypso, distrusts her offer to let him go. He demands that she promise not to harm him covertly, and Calypso reassures him: “Now then: I swear by heaven above and by earth beneath and the pouring force of Styx—that is the most awful oath of the blessed gods: I will work no secret mischief against you. No, I mean what I say; I will be as careful for you as I should be for myself in the same need. I know what is fair and right, my heart is not made of iron, and I am really sorry for you.”

Subsequent Greek writers took up the broader principle:

Thales, according to Diogenes Laertius, is reputed to have said that men might live most virtuously and justly, “if we never do ourselves what we blame in others.” … According to Diogenes Laertius, when asked how to behave toward friends, Aristotle replied, “As we should wish our friends to behave to us.” … Another general formulation occurs in Herodotus (ca. 484–424) where he recounts the story of King Maeandrius of Samos in the days just prior to the Persian invasion of that island. Meandrius made a radical attempt to inaugurate a just political order in place of the former kingship. His proposal, soon to be frustrated by the suspicion and treachery of his associates, begins thus: “You know, friends, that the sceptre of Polycrates, and all his power, has passed into my hands, and if I choose I may rule over you. But what I condemn in another I will, if I may, avoid myself. I never approved the ambition of Polycrates to lord it over men as good as himself, nor looked with favour on any of those who have done the like. Now therefore, since he has fulfilled his destiny, I lay down my office, and proclaim equal rights.” … The association of the golden rule with equal rights was radical; Maeandrius’ gesture of fairness made him vulnerable in an environment where the prevailing ethic was, as we are about to see, very different … Ancient Greece was awash with the practice of doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies—cardinal virtues of the age.

But eventually, processes like jury trials and legislative deliberations encouraged lawyers of the day to suggest golden rule thinking, such as the Sophist Isocrates:

At the close of a speech to the jury that will decide a lawsuit he has brought, Isocrates exhorts the jurors to “give a just verdict, and prove yourselves to be for me such judges as you would want to have for yourselves.” … In the Laws Plato considers in detail the legislation appropriate to a well-ordered state. Regarding business transactions, the Athenian, using a piece of reasoning clearly akin to the golden rule, proposes a “simple general rule”: “I would have no one touch my property, if I can help it, or disturb it in the slightest way without some kind of consent on my part; if I am a man of reason, I must treat the property of others in the same way.”

Adherents to the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism led the way in broadening the application of golden rule reasoning:

The universal scope of the golden rule in Stoicism was based on the affirmation that human beings are the offspring of God (Zeus), the universal logos (principle, reason) governing the entire cosmos … Golden rule thinking appears a few times in the writings of Seneca (4 b.c.e.–65 c.e.), the Stoic philosopher and assistant to the emperor Nero. Seneca’s On Anger rehearses at length the cruelties and follies of anger, its deceptive rationalizations, its causes, and strategies for its cure. One’s tranquility of soul is too valuable to be squandered in anger. The text is full of the wisdom of psychological and social and historic experience. It is in the context of this perspective of seasoned reason that Seneca advocates imaginative perspective taking: “Let us put ourselves in the place of the man with whom we are angry; as it is, an unwarranted opinion of self makes us prone to anger, and we are unwilling to bear what we ourselves would have been willing to inflict.” Seneca applies interpersonal moral comparison to the question of the treatment of slaves: “I do not wish to involve myself in too large a question, and to discuss the treatment of slaves, towards whom we Romans are excessively haughty, cruel and insulting. But this is the kernel of my advice: Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.” … Epictetus, the freed Roman slave [who became a Stoic] [said] “What you avoid suffering, do not attempt to make others suffer. You avoid slavery: take care that others are not your slaves.”

Judaism contains references to golden rule reasoning:

[I]t happened that a certain heathen came before Shammai [the leader of the school competing with that of Hillel] and said to him, “Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Thereupon he [Shammai] repulsed him with the builder’s square which was in his hand. When he went before Hillel, he said to him, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary thereon; go and learn it.” … Some scholars hesitate to ascribe the golden rule to Jesus, since the rule was already part of popular Jewish and Hellenistic culture and could have been inserted into the texts from sources other than the teachings of Jesus.

But the teaching of Jesus probably did the most to spread golden rule reasoning:

Matthew 7.12 reads, “panta oun hosa ean thelete hina poiousin humin hoi anthropoi, houtos kai humeis poieite autois; houtos gar estin ho nomos kai oi prophetai.” All things [panta hosa] therefore [oun] which you want/wish/will [ean thelete] that [hina] people [hoi anthropoi] do [poiousin] to you [humin], do [poiete] thus [houtos kai] to them [autois] for [gar] this [houtos] is [estin] the law [ho nomos] and [kai] the prophets [ho prophetai]. The plural “you” in the third line suggests that the golden rule is given not only to the individual but also to the community … The Matthean context of the golden rule, however, introduces another level of meaning. The rule is given immediately after the remark about the good gifts that the Father in heaven gives to those who ask … Placing the golden rule in the context of fatherly love (Matt. 7.7–11) gains for it a new level of meaning … To love in this context means to love as the Father loves, and that means doing the Father’s will. That Matthew then refers to the golden rule as “the law and the prophets” attributes a special status to the rule and suggests a link between the golden rule and Jesus’ mission: Jesus will demonstrate a new fulfillment of the golden rule. “The law and the prophets” was a twofold designation of the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures … The golden rule governs relations with all people (anthropoi), not just relations within the fellowship of believers … [T]here are reasons in favor of a positive formulation: it calls the one who would follow the golden rule to be morally active; it is psychologically more effective to command the good than to prohibit evil; and positive expressions, such as the law of love, are more directly expressive of the values that are presupposed by prohibitions … In sum, though the golden rule was not part of the written Torah, it may be said to be fulfilled in Jesus’ life and teachings. The traditional golden rule is preserved, adjusted from a negative to a positive formulation, deepened in context, and associated with the overturning of the principle of retaliation.

As explored in a previous essay series using Larry Seidentop’s Inventing the Individual, principles of Christianity went on to significantly develop the Western tradition of respecting individual rights. And as Wattles writes:

In a 1530 sermon, Luther returns to Matthew 7.12 … Luther’s sermon gives assurance that it is no longer necessary for a person to rely on legal books and moral experts to know what Jesus requires, since the hearer’s sense of how he or she wants to be treated serves as a continuous fountain of teaching and preaching: “I am convinced … that [the rule] would be influential and productive of fruit if we only got into the habit of remembering it and were not so lazy and inattentive. I do not regard anyone as so coarse or so evil that he would shirk this or be offended at it if he really kept it in mind. It was certainly clever of Christ to state it this way. The only example He sets up is ourselves, and He makes this as intimate as possible by applying it to our heart, our body and life, and all our members. No one has to travel far to get it, or devote much trouble or expense to it. The book is laid into your own bosom, and it is so clear that you do not need glasses to understand Moses and the Law. Thus you are your own Bible, your own teacher, your own theologian, and your own preacher.”

Wattles also notes that Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the English author of The Leviathan “used the golden rule as a basic principle of a peaceful society”:

For Hobbes, human motivation is predominantly egoistic, and in a “state of nature” (prior to the establishment of government), which is a war of all against all, each person has a right to defend himself by any means whatsoever. But there is also an obligation to seek peace, to enter a “civil society,” in which peace is secured and contracts enforced by a sovereign power with a monopoly on the use of force. In giving up unlimited individual sovereignty, what rights should the individual seek to retain in the social contract establishing the new order? One should “be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself,” a principle that Hobbes equated with the golden rule.

John Locke (1632-1704), who helped inspire the American Revolution, also pointed to the Golden Rule:

Regarding ethics, he claimed, “… Should that most unshaken rule of morality and foundation of all social virtue, ‘That one should do as he would be done unto,’ be proposed to one who never heard of it before, but yet is of capacity to understand its meaning; might he not without any absurdity ask a reason why? And were not he that proposed it bound to make out the truth and reasonableness of it to him? [I]f it were [innate] it could neither want nor receive any proof … [T]he truth of all these moral rules plainly depends upon some other antecedent to them, and from which they must be deduced.”

As did Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the co-inventor of calculus:

Leibniz … offers his interpretation of the true meaning of the rule: “One would wish for too much, if one were the master; do we therefore owe too much to others? Someone will reply to me that the rule assumes [s’entend] a just will. But then the rule, far from being sufficient to serve as a standard [mesure], will need a standard. The veritable sense of the rule is that by putting oneself in the place of the other one gains the true point of view for judging equitably.” Leibniz thus finally brings into focus the question of whether the rule furnishes or presupposes a standard for right conduct … [I]t becomes clear that proposing the golden rule as a supreme moral principle presupposes that the agent’s desires are acceptable.

John Stuart Mill, the founder of the philosophy of utilitarianism -- according to which society should aim to maximize the happiness of the people generally – embraced golden rule reasoning. As Wattles writes:

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) defined right action in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number of those affected by the action; he further defined good in terms of happiness and happiness in terms of pleasure. Since the golden rule speaks of what the agent wants, it was easy for Mill to embrace: “As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.”

The influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) also drew from the appeal of golden rule reasoning, but made several criticisms of the Golden Rule itself:

[Kant] set forth morality as primarily an affair of rationally chosen universal principles, not desires, not even well-regulated or benevolent desires. He proposed three rational principles as formulations of one supreme moral principle, “the categorical imperative” (unconditional command). The first principle is that one should act only on principles that one can rationally will for everyone to act on (“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”). The second principle affirms a certain respect for humanity: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” The third principle invites the agent to imagine himself as a citizen of and legislator for a conceivable advanced civilization, a worldwide, even a universal community of truly moral agents; this principle voices “the idea of the will of every rational being as a will that legislates universal laws,” that is, laws for a union (“kingdom”) of all rational beings … Kant’s categorical imperative differs from the golden rule in at least three ways. First, the categorical imperative focuses on principles of the will rather than on actions we want to have done to us or on how we want to be treated. Next, it focuses explicitly on the logical generality of our decisions, on maxims or rules for action. Third, it focuses on a rational criterion for judging those rules. Not what you want, but what you rationally judge to be an appropriate universal law is the standard of duty … How can we tell which maxims stand up under rational scrutiny? Kant’s leading criterion is whether the agent can consistently will for everyone to act on the same maxim. We sometimes initiate critical reflection by asking, “What if everyone did that?” As a first approximation, that question unlocks the door to Kant’s idea of moral rationality; but the categorical imperative does not merely appeal to the desirability of the consequences of making a given maxim into a rule for everyone. He notices that in some cases it would be logically incoherent for a person to will that his maxim be universal law. To make a deceptive promise to borrow money, for example, involves a maxim that, if made universal law, would render impossible the very practice of borrowing and lending in which the deceptive person is engaging. In contemporary terms, the universalizability test shows that such an immoral maxim cannot be universalized, cannot be coherently willed as a principle for everyone to act on. Regarding duties of love to others, as quoted above, Kant says that a man initially willing to universalize his maxim about not benefiting others must reflect that he will one day stand in need of others’ help, and so recognize that to universalize his maxim would bring him into contradiction with his own desire for help … Each rational being is to think for himself or herself and to exercise self-determination—not to let external authorities or emotions determine one’s decisions and actions. The point is not that one is forbidden to get ideas from others, or that emotions are evil, but that one must not act on such ideas or motives unthinkingly … In the course of his discussion of respect for persons in the Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant attached a notorious footnote criticizing the golden rule. He gives several reasons why the conventionally formulated rule cannot be the supreme principle of morality: “Let it not be thought that the trivial Quod tibi non vis fieri, etc. [what you do not will to be done to you] can here serve as a standard or principle. For it is merely derived from our principle, although with several limitations. It cannot be a universal law, for it contains the ground neither of duties to oneself nor of duties of love toward others (for many a man would gladly consent that others should not benefit him, if only he might be excused from benefiting them). Nor, finally, does it contain the ground of strict duties toward others, for the criminal would on this ground be able to dispute with the judges who punish him; and so on.” … Kant … implied that if a judge were to follow the golden rule in sentencing criminals, it would lead to unjust leniency. If the golden rule makes morality depend upon what the agent imagines he would want if he were in the other’s situation, Kant insisted that morality depends rather on what the agent rationally does judge to be right (e.g., to punish the criminal). The very concept of moral duty, which all recognize, implies that duty is distinct from what one feels like doing, or from what one wants others to do to oneself. Not desire, but principled thinking determines what is right … According to Kant, the golden rule cannot be a supreme moral principle, first, because … [t]he categorical imperative pertains to laws of how everyone should treat everyone (including themselves), whereas the golden rule apparently pertains only to the way agents should treat their recipients … The simplest of Kant’s objections is that the golden rule does not cover the category of duties to oneself, for example, the duty to cultivate one’s potentials toward perfection or to respect oneself in one’s actions.

Crucially, Wattles writes, “Kant was not altogether content with simply affirming human dignity as an axiom, and his proof of human dignity may be challenged … [T]he fact that I respect myself and the fact that you respect yourself do not, taken together, prove that I should respect you.”

So under what circumstances should people’s individual actions and larger life projects be respected? And how should the answer to that question affect government powers and policy? That will be the subject of my next essay.

I was reading Daniel Coupland’s useful little book for teachers called Tried & True: A Primer on Sound Pedagogy, the first chapter of which is titled “Follow the School’s Mission.” Coupland writes:

If the mission [of the school] is not clearly labeled, you should be able to recognize it by its language. Mission statements [of schools] will include words related to knowing things (e.g., knowledge, understanding, and wisdom). They will often refer to the skills that students will acquire (e.g., “learning how to learn” or “a lifetime of learning”) … Ask yourself what the words mean and look up their formal definitions.

I was curious as to what our local public high school’s mission statement said, so I looked it up and found this (note that the term “Titans” refers here to students):

The first thing I noticed was that this mission statement did not contain any of the concepts mentioned by Coupland -- knowledge, understanding, and wisdom -- that are central to most other schools’ mission statements. Those concepts are also central to what we know about the science of learning, a topic ably explored by Daniel Willingham in his book Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom.

Willingham writes about the primary role background knowledge plays in the ability of students to remember things so they can learn even more:

This final effect of background knowledge – that having factual knowledge in long-term memory makes it easier to acquire still more factual knowledge – is worth contemplating for a moment. It means that the amount of information you retain depends on what you already have. So, if you have more than I do, you retain more than I do, which means you gain more than me. To make the idea concrete (but the numbers manageable), suppose you have ten thousand facts in your memory but I have only nine thousand. Let's say we each remember a percentage of new stuff, and that percentage is based on what's already in our memories. You remember 10% of the new facts you hear, but because I have less knowledge in long-term memory, I remember only 9% of new facts. Table 2.1 shows how many facts each of us has in long-term memory over the course of 10 months, assuming we're each exposed to five hundred new facts each month. By the end of 10 months, the gap between us has widened from 1000 facts to 1043 facts. Because people who have more in long-term memory learn more easily, the gap is only going to get wider. The only way I could catch up is to make sure I am exposed to more facts than you are. In a school context, I have some catching up to do, but it's very difficult because you are pulling away from me at an ever-increasing speed.

I have of course made up all of the numbers in the foregoing example, but we know that the basics are correct – the rich get richer.

Willingham adds that:

Knowledge is [even] more important, because it's a prerequisite for imagination, or at least for the sort of imagination that leads to problem solving, decision making, and creativity … [T]he cognitive processes that are most esteemed – logical thinking, problem solving, and the like – are intertwined with knowledge. It is certainly true that facts without the skills to use them are of little value. It is equally true that one cannot deploy thinking skills effectively without factual knowledge … [T]hinking well relies on knowledge. Knowledge allows you to bridge the gaps writers leave in prose and guides your interpretation when sentences are ambiguous. Knowledge is essential for chunking, the process that saves room in working memory, and so facilitates reasoning. Sometimes knowledge substitutes for reasoning, when you simply recall a previous problem solution, and other times, knowledge is required to deploy a thinking skill, as when a scientist judges that an experimental result is anomalous. Rather than thinking of knowledge as data that might be plugged into thinking processes, it's better to think of knowledge and thinking as intertwined … If factual knowledge makes cognitive processes work better, the obvious implication is that we must help children learn background knowledge.

Our local high school’s mission statement also fails to refer to concepts like perseverance or grit, skills schools have to teach if students are going to have much hope of thriving in the real world. Yet our local school board proposed prohibiting teachers from giving students a zero grade for work not turned in. That potential dumpster fire was ultimately squelched by a blanket of common sense was thrown over it. That common sense is also backed by science, which shows that actually doing the work is directly associated with success. As Willingham writes:

A number of researchers have tried to understand expertise by examining the lives of experts and comparing them to what we might call near-experts. For example, one group of researchers asked violin players to estimate the number of hours they had practiced the violin at different ages. Some of the subjects (professionals) were already associated with internationally known symphony orchestras. The others were music students in their early twenties. Some of the students (the best violinists) had been nominated by their professors as having the potential for careers as international soloists; others (the “good” violinists) were studying with the same goal, but their professors thought they had less potential. Subjects in the fourth group were studying to be music teachers, not professional performers. Figure 6.5 shows the average cumulative number of hours that each of the four groups of violinists practiced between the ages of 5 and 20. Even though the good violinists and the best violinists were all studying at the same music academy, there was a significant difference in the amount of practice since childhood reported by the two groups. Other research shows the importance of practice to a wide range of skills, from sports to games like chess and Scrabble.

Other studies have taken a more detailed biographical approach. Over the last 50 years there have been a few instances in which a researcher has gained access to a good number (10 or more) of prominent scientists, who have agreed to be interviewed at length, take personality and intelligence tests, and so forth. The researcher has then looked for similarities in the backgrounds, interests, and abilities of these great men and women of science. The results of these studies are fairly consistent in one surprising finding. The great minds of science were not distinguished as being exceptionally brilliant, as measured by standard IQ tests; they were very smart, to be sure, but not the standouts that their stature in their fields might suggest. What was singular was their capacity for sustained work. Great scientists are almost always workaholics. Each of us knows his or her limit; at some point we need to stop working and watch a stupid television program, hop on Facebook, or something similar. Great scientists have incredible persistence, and their threshold for mental exhaustion is very high.

Angela Duckworth examined this quality not just in scientists, but in musicians, West Point cadets, spelling bee competitors, and others. Just as the most successful scientists are not necessarily those with the highest IQ, so too researchers had a hard time identifying characteristics of very successful people in other fields, other than “they've put more work into it than others.” Duckworth identified two essential personality components – persistence and passion for a long-term goal – and called the combination “grit.”

Reprinted here is Willingham’s useful chart summarizing these and several other fundamental conclusions of the science of learning:

If our local high school’s mission statement were to incorporate the science of learning, it would read something like: “Our mission is to foster academic excellence by instilling students with the background knowledge necessary for continued learning, encouraging critical thinking through use of the Socratic method, and developing the personal responsibility and the grit necessary to see projects through.”

Instead, our local high school’s mission statement contains none of these concepts that are the heart of what we know about the science of learning. Besides having a misplaced comma after “civically engaged,” the school’s mission statement contains lots of politically activist buzzwords like equity, anti-racism, and “restorative framework,” the false premises of which have been explored in some detail in previous essays. But at root, proponents of “anti-racism,” as popularized by the now largely discredited author Ibram X Kendi, make the false assumption that, as Kendi says “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Of course, there are many explanations for disparities among people grouped by race that have nothing to do with racism. As Robert Pondiscio writes:

A recent report from the University of Virginia—Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids—confirms what many of us know instinctively but rarely see, or avoid altogether, in education debates: The presence and engagement of a child’s father has a powerful effect on their academic and emotional well-being. It’s the kind of data that should stop us in our tracks—and redirect our attention away from educational fads and toward the foundational structures that shape student success long before a child ever sets foot in a classroom. The research … co-authored by a diverse team … finds that children in Virginia with actively involved fathers are more likely to earn good grades, less likely to have behavior problems in school, and dramatically less likely to suffer from depression. Specifically, children with disengaged fathers are 68% less likely to get mostly good grades and nearly four times more likely to be diagnosed with depression. These are not trivial effects. They are seismic. Most striking is the report’s finding that there is no meaningful difference in school grades among demographically diverse children raised in intact families. Black and white students living with their fathers get mostly A’s at roughly equal rates—more than 85%—and are equally unlikely to experience school behavior problems. The achievement gap, in other words, appears to be less about race and more about the structure and stability of the family.

Now, I doubt any teachers at the school had much if anything to do with the wording of the school’s mission statement. Rather, it reads like it was written by school administrators steeped in the far-left ideologies common in education schools, as if to say “Our mission is to allow detached administrators to express their self-importance though virtue-signaling aimed at the political tribe that secures their funding.”

Ultimately, I doubt this particular mission statement drives anything other than the virtue-signaling egos of the school’s administrators. In my experience, the large majority of teachers simply want to teach, and follow the best practices that will allow their students to learn. As a result, our local high school’s mission statement says much more about the bureaucrats who hover over the school than it does about those inside them. (Indeed, our local system’s administrators occupy a wholly separate building unconnected to any building where teaching occurs. Teachers derisively refer to the building as “Central.”)

But if a school is going to have a mission statement at all, it should at least follow the basic principles set down by Peter Drucker, who first popularized the mission statement in his book The Practice of Management, in 1954, in which he states that defining an organization's purpose is a central task of management because it sets the direction, coherence, and justification for everything the organization does, creating a shared sense of purpose to motivate employees, help them understand their role, and foster unity across departments. But instead of setting a direction, our local high school’s mission statement triggers an eye roll.

That mission statement seems so far afield from the realm of education that it brings to mind the metaphor of the “self-licking ice cream cone,” which refers to a situation in which an organization loses sight of its proper mission to serve others and becomes single-mindedly focused on perpetuating the norms of its own bureaucracy. S. Pete Worden, former Deputy of Technology at the Defense Department, was one of the first to popularize the phrase back in 1992.

Worden understood that, over time, organizations move away from their original missions and come to exist solely to preserve themselves, such that the organization operates in ways it imagines will ensure next year’s budgets and bonuses.

Like the NASA programs that lost sight of their mission to create innovative designs in favor of designing their programs to maximize their funding, our local public school system has a habit of falling for administrator-driven programs without asking tough questions. One example is the craze of “social and emotional learning” routines that teachers and students find useless and ineffective. Another is the “restorative practices” program, which relaxes school discipline in favor of coddling disruptive students by inviting them to “talk through” their issues instead of removing them from the classroom so all the other students can learn.

Imagine you’re a teacher faced with a disruptive student who defies repeated attempts to get them to correct their behavior so all the other students can learn. Instead of sending the student to the principal’s office, under the “restorative practices” program imposed by administrators you’d have to somehow work through the steps in this flowchart (it’s sadly real):

It makes one wonder, “If we could put a man on the moon, why can’t we solve the problem of removing disruptive students from the classroom?”

And speaking of putting a man on the moon, it’s worth reminding ourselves how well our nation performed in accomplishing that mission, which was set out in statutory text in Section 102(c) of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958:

The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives: (1) The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space; (2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles; (3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space; (4) The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes; (5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere; (6) The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency; (7) Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof; (8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment.

This plain and direct statement of intent led to following, as described by Charles Fishman in his excellent book One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon:

[W]hen President John Kennedy declared in 1961 that the United States would go to the Moon, he was committing the nation to do something we couldn’t do. We didn’t have the tools, the equipment—we didn’t have the rockets or the launchpads, the spacesuits or the computers or the zero-gravity food—to go to the Moon. And it isn’t just that we didn’t have what we would need; we didn’t even know what we would need. We didn’t have a list; no one in the world had a list. Indeed, our unpreparedness for the task goes a level deeper: we didn’t even know how to fly to the Moon. We didn’t know what course to fly to get there from here. And, as the small example of lunar dirt shows, we didn’t know what we would find when we got there. Physicians worried that people wouldn’t be able to think in zero gravity. Mathematicians worried that we wouldn’t be able to work out the math to rendezvous two spacecraft in orbit—to bring them together in space, docking them in flight both perfectly and safely. And that serious planetary scientist from Cornell worried that the lunar module would land on the Moon and sink up to its landing struts in powdery lunar dirt, trapping the space travelers. Every one of those challenges was tackled and mastered between May 1961 and July 1969. The astronauts, the nation, flew to the Moon because hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers, managers and factory workers unraveled a series of puzzles, a series of mysteries, often without knowing whether the puzzle had a good solution. In retrospect, the results are both bold and bemusing. The Apollo spacecraft ended up with what was, for its time, the smallest, fastest, and most nimble and most reliable computer in a single package anywhere in the world. That computer navigated through space and helped the astronauts operate the ship. But the astronauts also traveled to the Moon with paper star charts so they could use a sextant to take star sightings—like the explorers of the 1700s from the deck of a ship—and cross-check their computer’s navigation. The guts of the computer were stitched together by women using wire instead of thread. In fact, an arresting amount of work across Apollo was done by hand: the heat shield was applied to the spaceship by hand with a fancy caulking gun; the parachutes were sewn by hand, and also folded by hand. The only three staff members in the country who were trained and licensed to fold and pack the Apollo parachutes were considered so indispensable that NASA officials forbade them to ever ride in the same car, to avoid their all being injured in a single accident … Apollo also accomplished [the] mission which John F. Kennedy first set for it: it powered America into the leading role in space. It took most of the decade, in fact, but it turned out that democratic capitalism could not be overmatched, even in space … it was not, in fact, simply two nations racing for the Moon. The Soviets had made it “a test of the system,” as Kennedy put it. Which system had the resources and the skill and the grit to get to the Moon— communism or democracy? The landing of the Eagle on the Moon, the moments when Armstrong and Aldrin stepped off the ladder onto the gray lunar ground— those represented a soaring accomplishment of human ingenuity. The moment when they unfurled the American flag, for all the complexity of America’s role in the world, that underscored that it was also an achievement of human freedom. The American flag meant something very different from the Soviet flag. Instead of the triumph of tyranny, it was just the opposite: going to the Moon is forever the symbol of what freedom can accomplish, of how far human aspiration can take you.

The following is a great illustration of the “all hands on deck” vibe of the time:

For the first Moon walk ever, Sonny Reihm was inside NASA’s Mission Control building, watching every move on the big screen. Reihm was a supervisor for the most important Moon technology after the lunar module itself: the spacesuits, the helmets, the Moon walk boots. And as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got comfortable bouncing around on the Moon and got to work, Reihm got more and more uncomfortable. The spacesuits themselves were fine. They were the work of Playtex, the folks who brought America the “Cross Your Heart Bra” in the mid-1960s. Playtex had sold the skill of its industrial division to NASA in part with the cheeky observation that the company had a lot of expertise developing clothing that had to be flexible and also form-fitting … Reihm should have been having the most glorious moment of his career. He had joined the industrial division of Playtex, ILC Dover, in 1960 at age twenty-two, and by the time of the Moon landing, before he turned thirty, he had become the Apollo project manager. His team’s blazing white suits were taking men on their first walk on another world. They were a triumph of technology and imagination, not to mention politics and persistence. The spacesuits were completely self-contained spacecraft, with room for just one. They had been tested and tweaked and custom-tailored. But what happened on Earth really didn’t matter, did it—that’s what Reihm was thinking. There was only one test that mattered, and Aldrin was conducting it right there, right now, in full view of the whole world, on the airless Moon, with unabashed enthusiasm. If Aldrin should trip and land hard on a Moon rock, well, a tear in the suit wouldn’t be a seamstress’s problem. It would be a disaster. The suit would deflate instantly, catastrophically, and the astronaut would die, on TV, in front of the world. That’s what Reihm was thinking about … Reihm knew, of course, that the astronauts were just out there “euphorically enjoying what they were doing.” If the world was excited about the Moon landing, imagine being the two guys who got to do it. In fact, according to the flight plan, right after the landing, Armstrong and Aldrin were scheduled for a five-hour nap. They told Mission Control they wanted to ditch the nap, suit up, and get outside. They hadn’t flown all the way to the Moon in order to sleep. And there really wasn’t anything to worry about. There was nothing delicate about the spacesuits. Just the opposite. They were marvels: 21 layers of nested fabric, strong enough to stop a micrometeorite, but still flexible enough for Aldrin’s kangaroo hops and quick cuts. Aldrin and Armstrong moved across the Moon with enviable light-footedness … Reihm’s anxiety, in fact, is a kind of time machine. We know how the story ended: every Moon mission was a success. Even Apollo 13, which was a catastrophe, was a triumph. Every spacesuit worked perfectly. Astronauts did trip and fall—they skipped, bunny-hopped, skidded to their knees, did pushups to stand upright, jumped too high, and fell over backward. As crews got more experience and more confidence, they would trot at high speed across the Moon’s surface—carefree—in that distinctive one-sixth-gravity locomotion. Once we got to the Moon, nothing much went wrong, not with the spacesuits or anything else.

The fantastic accomplishments of the moon mission occurred so long ago, but the phrase “If we can put a man on the Moon … ” still resonates. As Fishman writes:

We still use the phrase in 2018 for the same reason we did in 1968: going to the Moon remains one of the most amazing things ever accomplished … Seventy percent of Americans today weren’t born, or were younger than five, when we first went to the Moon—which is to say, for 70 percent of Americans, the Moon landings are something to find on YouTube or in books. By the end of 2018, eight of the twelve men who walked on the Moon had died. Most of those who led the effort have died, as have most of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who worked to make it possible. But the appeal of the accomplishment—which 50 years later is often separated from both the politics that inspired it and what it cost—retains powerful allure.

And on the Apollo 12 mission they had fun doing it, too, even if the fun was politically incorrect:

The [moon mission] checklists were typical NASA technical documents: cryptic acronyms, brief instructions, the occasional diagram. But on about half the pages someone has sketched lighthearted cartoons of astronauts going about their tasks on the Moon— setting up a radio antenna, using a hammer to pound the flagpole into the lunar surface, photographing each other. For Conrad and Bean, the cuff checklists contained a cheekier surprise. Each one has pictures of two Playboy playmates, the photos taken directly from the magazine, photocopied down in size, put on the special paper, laminated, and secretly bound into the checklists after they had been reviewed by the astronauts. Bean was apparently the first to find one of the playmates in his checklist; she’s about nine pages in, smiling and wearing a Santa hat and nothing else, the caption supplied by Bean’s NASA colleagues: “Don’t forget— describe the protuberances.” “It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity,” said Bean. “I flipped the page over and there she was. I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his.” There’s not a whisper of the discovery on the radio exchanges between Apollo 12 and Mission Control. “We didn’t say anything on the air,” Bean said. “We thought some people back on Earth might become upset if they found out we had Playboy playmates in our checklists. They would have said, ‘This is where our tax money is going?’ ” But the astronauts appreciated the prank. “We giggled and laughed so much,” said Conrad, “that people accused us of being drunk or having ‘space rapture.’” Word about the Playboy playmates reaching the Moon apparently never reached reporters, during Apollo 12’ s flight or after. The first story about it appeared in Playboy itself, in December 1994, on the 25th anniversary of the flight. But there is inadvertent photographic evidence of the prank right from the surface of the Moon. One of the classic photos from Apollo 12 is a close-up portrait of Commander Pete Conrad, in his spacesuit, facing the camera and holding another camera. The lunar module is visible in the distance over his left shoulder. Alan Bean, taking the picture, is reflected in the visor of Conrad’s spacesuit helmet. And on Conrad’s left arm his cuff checklist is open, and it just happens to be open to the page where a playmate is reclining on a hay bale (caption: “preferred tether partner”). In the photo, the image is too grainy to make out if you don’t know it’s there, but if you zoom in on the photo, you can just make her out. Conrad had that photo framed in his home but didn’t notice for years that on his wrist was Reagan Wilson, October 1967 Playmate of the Month. A Playboy playmate not only flew to the Moon; she was photographed there.

Government bureaucracy didn’t stop pictures of Playmates from going to the moon, but even President John F. Kennedy had feared bureaucracies and labor unions would gum up the moon missions. As Fishman writes:

Kennedy worried that bureaucracy or labor issues would somehow hobble an effort that wasn’t even under way yet. Without realizing it, he imagined the culture that NASA would go on to create, a culture that owed much to Kennedy’s call itself—something those who worked on Apollo also mention. Kennedy said in that first speech, “Every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor and civil servant [must] give his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom in the exciting adventure of space.”

And just like tribal progressive politics can hamstring sound educational policy, it threatened to derail the moon missions – but NASA, at the time, resisted. Many people don’t remember, but large-scale political protests went alongside the moon missions. As Fishman recounts:

The day before the launch of Apollo 11, NASA administrator Thomas Paine met with the protesters at Cape Kennedy who were led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. As Paine recounted the meeting, Abernathy told him that one-fifth of Americans lacked adequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. “The money for the space program, [Abernathy] stated, should be spent to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, and house the shelterless.” Paine told the protesters, “If we could solve the problems of poverty in the United States by not pushing the button to launch men to the Moon tomorrow then we would not push that button.” It was a common critique in the 1960s, and it still is today: that somehow, by devoting time, money, and energy to space travel, we must of necessity neglect other things. If we go to space, we can’t have good schools or accessible health care or clean water or a strong spirit of community. It’s like saying art museums cause poverty.

Of course, there are always opportunity costs in the sense that every dollar spent on one thing can’t be spent on another. But innovation-based missions are usually more worthy of government funding than overly-generous programs that perpetuate dependence. One of the most memorable speeches describing the original moon missions’ collective instilling of “grit” among Americans is President John F. Kennedy’s speech of November 21, 1963, in which he said:

Frank O’Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try, and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall— and then they had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it.

Fishman describes how a NASA administrator explained the importance of the moon mission to the leader of the protesters:

In that meeting between the anti- poverty protesters, led by Reverend Abernathy, and NASA administrator Paine the day before the launch of Apollo 11, Paine went on to tell Abernathy and the group that “the great technological advances of NASA were child’s play compared to the tremendously difficult human problems with which he and his people were concerned. I said that [Abernathy] should regard the space program, however, as an encouraging demonstration of what the American people could accomplish when they had vision, leadership and adequate resources of competent people and money to overcome obstacles. I said I hoped that he would hitch his wagons to our rocket, using the space program as a spur to the nation to tackle problems boldly in other areas.” Paine’s detailed recollection comes from a memo he wrote for his files two days later, as Apollo 11 raced for the Moon, a memo tracked down by the historian Roger Launius. At the end of the meeting that afternoon, Paine asked Abernathy and his fellow protesters to include the Apollo 11 astronauts in their prayers when they held a prayer service later in the day. Abernathy, wrote Paine, “responded with emotion that they would certainly pray for the safety and success of the astronauts, and that as Americans they were as proud of our space achievements as anybody in the country.”

As Fishman writes:

The problems of inadequate schools, of poverty, of hunger, of health care, aren’t susceptible to a “Moon race” fix because they are part of the whole social, cultural, and economic system in which we live. Even students attending the very same school have very different experiences, because they are different children with different teachers … [T]he leap to the Moon is not the perfect model for solving the problems of poverty or any of the other problems of American society on Earth. But it does contain a wider truth: with inspired leadership, with resources, and, most important, with clarity of purpose, with an explanation of the need, Americans will solve the hardest problems they are asked to tackle. But we have to be asked … The hard part is the human part: motivation, giving people a role and a goal.

Fishman is optimistic for America going forward:

What has become of the America that planted a flag on the Moon? We used to do things like that. Why don’t we anymore? That spirit of America is just fine. It’s alive and well. In the halo after Apollo, it created Microsoft and Intel, Apple and Google. Have you noticed that all of human knowledge is accessible from a device that fits in your hand? Did not creating that world—the world we have so quickly come to take for granted—require spirit and determination, vision and daring? Of course it did. It didn’t always require physical courage, but it required intellectual courage and relentless determination and boldness of imagination. Americans created the internet. Americans decoded the genome. American spaceships leap the solar system to unlock the mysteries of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and all kinds of quirky asteroids and comets and moons.

The mission statements of the companies Fishman mentions focus directly on the proper goals of their respective organizations:

Microsoft: “Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Intel: “We create world-changing technology that improves the life of every person on the planet … Our customers’ success is our obsession. We promise to deliver the technology leadership and reliable, top-quality products they need and expect.”

Apple (under Steve Jobs): “To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.”

Google: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Those mission statements — which directly address the purpose of their enterprises — are a far cry from the off-point platitudes of the mission statement of our local high school.

Which got me thinking more broadly, “What’s a good mission statement for living life?” A good place to start is with the Golden Rule, an interesting history of which by Jeffrey Wattles will be the subject of my next essay.