“Warren Buffett famously
commented that when the tide goes out, we can finally see who has been swimming
naked. By the same token, when a pandemic arrives, we are confronted with a
vivid display of just what kind of society we’ve really had all along:
“We see the implications
of having lacked a robust public health system or
national health care. We truly understand the impact of extreme economic
inequality: Even many in the middle-class have been skating close to the edge,
just a paycheck or two away from penury. And we get a really good look at our
culture’s belief systems: the virtually theological devotion to the free market
and abhorrence of the public sector, the tendency to worship individual
‘liberty’ and slight the common good.
“From a worldwide
perspective, the United States is an outlier in its fixation on
self-sufficiency. Our ethical code seems to begin and end with noninterference
and personal choice. Our suspicion of collective enterprises was apparent to
Tocqueville nearly two hundred years ago. Our popular entertainments celebrate
heroes acting independently rather than interdependently.
“In contrast even with
other Western societies, America is defined by an absence of commitment to
shared values and to the value of what is shared. We are divided from each
other, cast back upon ourselves to the point that it is profoundly unsettling
to acknowledge our alienation. Yet we insist this is not a predicament but a
choice, evidence not of crisis but of an advanced set of values.
“This is the context in
which to make sense of today’s protesters who angrily demand the right to shop
and socialize as they please — even as thousands of people continue to die from
a spreading virus. Most people tell pollsters they understand the importance of
maintaining social distance until it’s safe to resume our lives. But the
protesters are a reflection, albeit the sort glimpsed in a fun-house mirror, of
our society’s entrenched individualism — much as Donald Trump’s desperate need
to triumph over other people represents an exaggerated version of the American
worship of winning.
“What matters most in
this country is each person’s freedom to do whatever he wants whenever he
wants; this tends to trump community and concern for the welfare of others.
As one commentator recently observed, our
insistence on ‘freedom from,’ rather than ‘freedom to,’ makes Americans look
preposterous and pathological to people around the globe.
“What is not preposterous
or pathological, however, is a desire to experience ourselves as
self-determining agents who have a meaningful impact on the things that affect
us. In fact, that’s what psychologists affiliated with self-determination
theory, a framework for understanding motivation,1 identify
as ‘autonomy,’ one of three fundamental human needs. (The others are
relatedness [connection to others] and competence [a sense of efficacy as we
find or create answers to personally significant questions].)
“When, as one early
researcher put it, we feel like ‘pawns’ rather than ‘origins’ in our lives, our
psychological — and even physical — health is likely to suffer. Thus, the
anxiety and depression that many people are reporting these days result not
only from financial insecurity, fear of illness, and isolation, but also from
our powerlessness over the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And if
we’re parents, that powerlessness can affect how we treat our children.2
“Autonomous people
experience their actions as authentic, integrated, willingly enacted. But that
doesn’t mean they see themselves as separate from others or in opposition to
the larger culture. This critical but often-overlooked distinction helps us to
make sense of the finding that a need for autonomy is
experienced even by people in collectivist societies.3 Selfish
individualism, by contrast, is not an ineluctable feature of ‘human nature.’
Rather, it represents a corruption of our need to have some say over what
happens to us.
“In fact, when people
are raised without support for their autonomy — overcontrolled by parents and
teachers — two things may happen. They may, upon growing up and finding
themselves in positions of authority, try to deny others their autonomy.4 And
they may insist on a warped version of self-determination that looks more like
selfishness.
“If they have grown up
feeling powerless, they might come to rage against any person who tells them
no. They might see any restriction on their personal freedom, even to benefit a
larger community, as tantamount to ‘tyranny.’ They might insist that their
convenience takes precedence over other people’s immune-compromised
vulnerability.5 ‘The hell with their safety; I want
to go bowling and get a haircut right now!’
“And, sadly, they won’t
be alone. Elsewhere, their behavior would likely be condemned as infantile and
depraved. But it may attract likes and views and retweets in a country with a
history of privileging libertarian self-interest and individual financial gain
over social connection and collective well-being. Hence a recent Onion headline:
‘Dr. Fauci Warns of Needless Suffering and Death If America Allowed to
Continue.’
*
“If our first challenge
is to distinguish between autonomy and selfish individualism, our second is to
figure out how to negotiate a depressing situation where we feel powerless for
good reason. As I write this, in May 2020, more than a third of a million
deaths6 have been officially attributed to Covid-19, and
experts tell us the actual number is far higher. This creates a temptation to
displace our anxiety by blaming the officials and scientists who are trying to
protect us.
“More generally, during
prolonged crises, psychiatrist Sim King says people ‘feel torn between
wanting to resist their new reality [and adapting] to it. They may torment
themselves trying to preserve normalcy [and] counting down the days to its
return — as many are now.’
“Or, alternatively, they
may come to accept their lack of control, make plans only provisionally
(resigned to the possibility that expectations will be shattered), and just
live in the moment. The latter posture — making one’s peace with what seems to
be beyond one’s control — sounds adaptive and wise. But it also calls to mind
the reaction that Martin Seligman famously called ‘learned helplessness’: Once
we conclude that nothing we do matters, we give up and lapse into
self-defeating depression.
“Remember Sisyphus,
condemned for all eternity to muscle his rock up the mountain only to have it
slip from his grasp and roll back down so he must begin again? In Camus’
reimagining of that myth, Sisyphus’s challenge — and his triumph — consists of
facing the absurd futility of his plight rather than clinging to the hope that
either his endless futile labor would end at some point or that it wasn’t
actually futile after all. He understood that it contained no hidden meaning
and would yield no satisfying resolution. And in this sense, the ‘absence of
hope… has nothing to do with despair,’ Camus argued; rather, it bespeaks ‘alert
awareness’ and a refusal to lie to oneself.
“Camus’s essay focused
on what he called metaphysical rebellion. It wasn’t about taking a stand
against a political foe or an oppressive institution where success was possible.
The Sisyphean situation he had in mind was the human condition itself: the
finality of death and the awful truth that all meanings and values are humanly
created and therefore fallible, much as we might want to believe otherwise (out
of desperation, not evidence). Still, Camus’s point also pertains to certain
realities within our lives: the importance of seeing clearly and rejecting
facile invocations of ‘hope.’
“Think about it this
way: The word accept has two very different meanings. It can
refer either to acknowledging that something is true or to endorsing it as
desirable. Camus is reminding us that we need to ‘accept’ unpleasant realities
in the first sense (resisting the urge to wish them away) but not in the second
sense (because we should never stop being outraged by what is outrageous).7
“During this devastating
pandemic, we need to somehow steer a course between denial, on the one hand,
and passivity, on the other — or at least figure out how to make sure that a
sense of helplessness doesn’t spill into other parts of our lives. That starts
with a commitment to Camus’s ‘alert awareness’: doing our best to accurately
understand where things stand and what can be reasonably expected rather than
allowing our vision to be distorted by despair…. or by hope.8
“And perhaps we then
move on to collective effort — political activism — in response to avoidable
deaths. To do so is to follow the evolution of Camus’s own thinking, from the
lone rebel of The Myth of Sisyphus to what he later described
(in The Plague and his lengthy nonfiction essay The
Rebel) as participation in a community, taking action with and for others
against an implacable foe.
“Freedom is about
empowering us, fulfilling our (not just my) need
for autonomy. To be sure, it is clearly an uphill struggle to feel a sense of
control at a time like this. But at least we can take care not to confuse that
concept with either selfishness or self-deception.”
NOTES
1. Even as you read
this, SDT is serving as the basis for new
research to help make sense of how people function in a
pandemic.
2. SDT-affiliated
researchers have shown (in a 2019 Belgian study) that when parents feel “pressured,
inadequate, and isolated,” they have less energy for their child and are more
likely to “impose their own agenda on their child” rather than supporting his
or her autonomy. And a 2020 Canadian study demonstrated that “when parents
perceive threats in their children’s current and future environment, they can
feel pressured to become involved with their children in a more controlling
way,” which “can negatively affect children’s motivation.”
3. A 2018 review of three dozen studies confirmed
that the correlation between autonomy and happiness is just as strong in the
East as in the West; earlier research, meanwhile, showed that being
pressured or controlled “frustrates individuals’ universal need for volitional
functioning” — and that was no less true in non-Western societies.
4. Researchers have
discovered that “individuals who are unsure of their own power, when placed in
a position of nominal authority, are the ones who are most likely to rely on
coercive control tactics” (Daphne Blunt Bugental et al., “Who’s the Boss?”, Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 72 [1997], p. 1298).
5. I don’t mean to
suggest that this is all that’s going on now. Protests against
shutdowns and social-distancing orders are motivated by more than an
individualism and selfishness. On the one hand, there are strong currents of
understandable fear and financial desperation. On the other hand, these public
demonstrations also have ugly crosscurrents of racism, demands for unrestricted access to
guns, and far-right conspiratorial fantasies. Featuring overwhelmingly white
crowds, they began right around the time that it became clear those succumbing
to the virus are disproportionately people of color.
6. I think it’s
important to keep our attention focused on the worldwide impact
of the pandemic; to habitually cite U.S.-specific statistics may imply that the
loss of an American life is more of a tragedy than the loss of a life
elsewhere.
7. In his later
novel, The Plague (translated by Stuart Gilbert, Vintage
Books, 1947/1972), Camus tells us that the pestilence killing people is “an
absurd situation, but…we’ve got to accept it as it is” (p. 79) — meaning see it
clearly — rather than taking refuge in unjustified hope, faith (which is, by
definition, belief without evidence), or magical thinking. (News is not “fake”
just because you don’t like it; reports of contagion risk and mortality are not
“fear-mongering” just because they’re upsetting.) But that doesn’t mean we
should “accept” the situation in the other sense of the word: “A fight must be
put up” (p. 122) and even the fact that “victories will never be lasting” is
“no reason for giving up the struggle” (p. 118). Incidentally, when Camus talks
about metaphysical rebellion, he is not proposing that we rage impotently and
consign ourselves to lifelong negativity. Rather, he urges us to embrace life —
to love, create, affirm, “give the void its colors” — but to do so as a kind of
revolt, in defiance of the ultimate meaninglessness of our condition.
8. Elsewhere,
I’ve argued for a similar reality-based response as an alternative not only to
chronic negativity but also to an unjustified posture of indiscriminate
gratitude.
