rules: that we’re endangered by our willpower as well as by our im- pulses. For instance, modern writers wring their hands both about the average citizen’s rising body mass index and about the prevalence of dieting in the young, without noting the implication that the enemy is now approaching from two opposite directions.19
In the interpersonal realm the dangers of rules are much better known. The English long ago established courts of equity to correct dis- tortions that arose from laws, and the great social rule-maker Jeremy Bentham cautioned that rules shouldn’t be fully binding. A recent re- view by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein makes it clear that social control by rules creates side effects analogous to my problems 1, 3, and 4: The need to preserve precedents makes rules too rigid; this rigidity “drives discretion underground” into transactions that aren’t a matter of record; and the need to use available bright lines between what is and isn’t per- missible both forbids innocuous activities and licenses cleverly defined harmful ones.20This last side effect is by no means confined to the realm of law: Quality assurance programs that focus doctors’ motivation in- creasingly on measurable indicators of quality are reducing their clinical intuitiveness.21Problem 2 also is evident in the interpersonal sphere. For instance, some potential drug addicts may be protected by legal de- terrence, but many who are not deterred become identified criminals who are worse off than they would be if drugs weren’t illegal.
Within the individual, these four problems with personal rules sharpen the basic conflict of successive motivational states and raise its stakes. Rules we create in our long-range interest may or may not wind up advancing this interest against shorter-range ones. After the need for clarity has taken its toll on subtlety, and overcaution has reduced flex- ibility, and misplaced caution with its consequent lapses has eroded
resolve and corrupted self-observation – in short, after the makeshift nature of our attempt at deciding according to principle has caught up with us – our wills may wind up getting in the way of our longest-range interests.
The robustness of suboptimal rules may sometimes make addictions more attractive. Better to be fat, someone might think, than anorectic. Your will may become so confining that a pattern of regular lapses actually makes you better off in the long run. The lore of addictionology often attributes binging to a patient’s inhibitedness in the other areas of her life; her general overcontrol is said to set up periodic episodes of breaking loose. The model of intertemporal bargaining predicted by hy- perbolic discount curves provides a specific rationale for this pattern: Rules that eliminate any large source of emotional reward will create a proportional motive for you to bypass or break the rules. If these rules have, in James’s phrase, “grown too narrow for the actual case,” even your long-range interest will lie in partially escaping from them. Thus personal rules that serve compulsion range interests can create alliances between long- and short-range interests. The person’s occasional binge comes to serve as a corrective to the comparative sterility of such rules, a means of providing richer experiences, while its transient nature still limits the damage it does. The longest-range interest of an alcoholic who is too rigid when sober may be to tacitly foster the cycle of drunkenness and sobriety rather than be continuously imprisoned by her rules.
Alcoholics are sometimes described who become nicer, or more gen- uinely creative, or more fully human when drunk. Furthermore, some addicts plan binges in advance. Such people may believe that their binges are undesirable – indeed, rationality will almost certainly dictate such a belief – but the therapists they hire find them mysteriously un- responsive to treatment. The patient who arranges to drink several days in advance – goes off the disulfiram that commits her to sickness if she drinks, for instance, or brings bottles to her rehabilitation program for later use – can’t simply be yielding to a short-range impulse. This is behavioral evidence that she experiences a rational plan like giving up drinking as a compulsion that, even at a distance, appears to need hedg- ing, although she may be unable to report any such thing.
This phenomenon suggests why a simplistic policy of “the more will- power, the better” contradicts the experience of many addicts. To them, more willpower just means less of the human qualities they value most in themselves. They’re able to listen to reason only when reason, repre-
sented by personal rules, stops starving their own longest-range pros- pects for emotional satisfaction.
Modern culture may be part of the problem. That is, it may be offer- ing more pervasive incentives for personal rules than it used to. Over- blown personal rules can arise in response not only to extraordinary temptation or ineptness in dealing with temptation, but also to an en- vironment’s extraordinary demands for systematic decision making. An argument can be made that as society develops a complex, interdepen- dent economy, it generates both better means for individuals to maximize their efficiency and more pressure to do so. Not that you have to be more obedient or otherwise narrow your choices; on the contrary, the range of choosable behaviors has grown enormously. But if you choose on a basis that ignores what the common wisdom accepts as your eco- nomic advantage, it’s harder and harder not to notice the cost.
Even as modern parents and rulers have less control, the logic of an increasingly comprehensive marketplace has more. The implications of our choices come to extend beyond particular contexts within which generalization is natural – from our choices involving one friend, or lover, or customer to others in the same category – to most of our choices over long periods of time. To list three of the many manifestations of this progression: (1) Cash prices and wages, which make disparate de- cisions comparable, have penetrated choice-making ever more minutely, so that goods and services that used to be bartered informally as part of relationships are increasingly paid for. It’s telling that the smallest unit of money in use was half a day’s wages in medieval times but is now barely worth picking up from the floor (ironically, the penny in both cases).22(2) Similarly, the long-term records that result from your be- havior, which once consisted (beyond a few major documentations like births, marriages, and deeds) of neighbors’ memories, are now auto- mated, quantified, and increasingly collated. The consequence is greater comparability of past and current choices; a job report, credit rating, or traffic ticket that was issued a decade ago is increasingly available and is used to predict your behavior. (3) Formal acculturation by schooling is increasingly lengthy and increasingly audited according to standards. Your performance in one subject or at one time can be compared to your performance elsewhere, or to another person’s, with increasing preci- sion, and these comparisons are apt to determine your career choice, your advancement, or at least the self-estimates that govern your morale. In these and many other ways, each of your choices is made comparable
to, and thus predictive of, a range of other choices. Attention to this aspect of choice is rewarded by greater efficiency in any systemizable endeavor; but, as we’ve just discussed, it may lead to less productive occasioning of reward in the long run because of the compulsiveness it engenders. We’ll see even more problems with systemization in the next two chapters.
The vogue for quantifying and comparing doesn’t feel forced upon us by alien interests. On the contrary, these are means to the ends we ourselves have defined, means that are increasingly selected for effi- ciency by the competition of the marketplace. We freely adapt our per- sonal rules to be compatible with them, but these rules may nevertheless serve compulsion range interests.
Extensive reliance on personal rules is probably necessary in cosmo- politan societies. Granted, there have been non-Western societies that didn’t show signs of using them. The Indians of the Great Plains, for instance, are said to have had no word for will or willpower, but expe- rienced motivation as a force of nature. The same may have been true of the Bushmen of South Africa.23But people in these societies have cultivated an openness to social influence that causes motives to be averaged not over time but across persons. One member may take up a drug of abuse or surrender to a passionate rage, but her neighbors will have much more influence over her decision. This arrangement is ob- viously volatile, since crowd psychology can lead a group of hyperbolic discounters to agree in unison on decisions that are in none of their long-range interests. However, the rasher heads are at least mixed with wiser ones, so that individuals get some protection against individual impulses.24
Reliance on a community for personal self-control was evident in medieval times even in Europe, where the law held small groups to be responsible for the behavior of each member; but since then, people have shown a consistent taste for escaping the intrusiveness of intimate groups. The history of Western society has been a relentless march to- ward individual autonomy and privacy, and away from collective ac- tion at the neighborhood level. Milestones include individual beds in individual bedrooms, detached houses, farms that stand alone rather than being interlaced around a village, the popularity of reading as enter- tainment followed by personal television sets and Walkmen with head- sets and the current development of individualizing the plots of video games and even movies to suit individual viewers.25Early in this pro-
gression the individual became the unit of accountability. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, English society realized that spontaneous emotionality weakened a person’s bargaining stance with others,26and the resulting race toward stiffness of the upper lip further eroded people’s skill in listening to their neighbors.27
In the resulting society, you impair your competitiveness by leaving yourself open to social influence. Even altruism comes to be regulated by a process that shields you from social pressure. In Western philosophy the highest moral thinking has been held to comprise solitary feats like Kant’s categorical imperative – that you should always choose as if your choice set the precedent for a universal rule. Even though the highest ethical goal is to advance the welfare of the people around you, you aren’t supposed to do this by staying open to pressure from those people them- selves: The most demanding charity may not be the most deserving, and a beggar may spend your money on drugs. The philanthropist who’s most praised is autonomous, a dispassionate judge of how her choices serve her principles.
During most of his career studying moral thinking, Lawrence Kohl- berg placed the categorical imperative at the top of a child’s progression toward ethics, his sixth stage of development, while responsiveness to social influence was only the second stage. Responders to his work pointed out that a taste for absolute autonomy in decision making was a particularly male trait – his girls seemed to “arrest” at a lower stage than his boys – and that this taste didn’t necessarily lead to the best self-control.28Nevertheless, men have actually held a competitive edge in Western economies. Indeed, men have conventionally specialized in having iron wills, which, besides giving them a competitive edge, pro- tected wives while the latter cultivated the social arts requiring vul- nerability; wives in turn were expected to assuage the side effects of motivational autonomy that their men incurred – rigidity, social inhi- bition, emotional isolation29– an arguably symbiotic specialization of self-control styles. However, many people now see systemization as granting such an overwhelming advantage that they tell women either to cultivate it or to work toward its cultural devaluation – “pod” and “difference” feminists, respectively.30
Attuned as we are to modern efficiency in the developed world, we don’t recognize the oppressiveness of an environment so rationalized that much of our natural idiosyncrasy has been anticipated and either harnessed or selected out. But newcomers accustomed to more backward
economies find our relationships superficial; and our own fictional heroes are increasingly those who rage against systems. The costs of basing decisions only on countable outcomes never appear in cost/benefit analyses; indeed, they are recognized only obliquely, as anomie or other imponderable morale problems, part of the “X-inefficiency” of workers that somehow limits their responsiveness to monetary incentives.31 Only in the last two decades has there been retrenchment where sys- temization is most advanced – in large corporations – in the form of decentralization, quality circles, self-directed work teams, and other re- treats from the conventional approach of time/motion efficiency.32Any large retreat may be motivationally impossible. Even the Bushmen, who seem so much less happy after they join the fringes of civilization, show no tendency to return to the simplicity of their former lives.33
9.3 SUMMARY
Seeing your current choice as a precedent predicting similar future choices can reduce your tendency to form temporary preferences; but you can expect it to produce four serious side effects that make your be- havior more compulsive.
• When an option is worth more as a precedent than as an event in its own right, you’re less able to experience it in the here-and-now and your choice-making becomes rigid.
• A lapse that you see as a precedent reduces your hope for self- control in similar situations in the future, a reduction that recur- sively reduces your power of self-control in those situations. • The incentive not to recognize a lapse may lead to gaps in your
awareness of your own behavior.
• Explicit criteria for defining lapses will tend to replace subtle ones, making your choice-making overly concrete. The increasing sys- temization of society both encourages and reflects a shift of em- phasis from social controls to personal rules as people’s predominant self-control strategy.