The Unreasonable Man Effect
The tragic stance on the other hand, brings about deep change in a roundabout way. If you stubbornly stick to the idea that humans cannot change, then improving your life means changing your environment. As Shaw noted, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
The best illustration of this “Unreasonable Man” effect is William Whyte’s portrait of the sociopath-executive who refuses to conform to the Organization Man mold. I have quoted this passage elsewhere before:
Of all organization men, the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that characterizes him, it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip he wants to dominate, not be dominated...
But consider what happens if you behave like this: you trigger deep processes of creative destruction in the environment that turn around and transform you. Unwittingly, you end up being transformed by attempting to transform the world. Unlike the conformist adaptations of the idealists, tragedian change involves real self-destruction in the sense of Nietzsche, before resurrection can happen. You know this if you’ve ever taken on a major, challenging project. Finishing it doesn’t just create the output you had planned on, it transforms you.
Among the major pop-psychology/self-improvement classics, the only one that hints at this process is Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, which has at its core a gem of an idea: that seeking the philosopher’s stone to transform base metals into gold ends up transforming you. The protagonist of the book isn’t an angsty, tortured soul looking for personal growth, he is on a mundane quest for literal treasure, like your average entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. The transformation is a side effect.
Resolving the Paradox
So can human beings change or not? I like to think about this question in terms of Lego blocks. We are, each of us, particular accidental constructions made up of a set of blocks. The whole thing can be torn down and rebuilt into a different design, but you can’t really do anything to change the building blocks. The building blocks of personality are abstract consequences of the more literal building blocks at the biological level, genes. They constrain, but do not define, who we are or can be.
So yes and no. We can change, and we cannot. The Idealist-Tragedian dichotomy has the same contours as the Nurture-Nature dichotomy. Both are false, both can be dissolved through reframing in terms of constrained design spaces, building blocks and path-dependent expression of the possibilities of that space.
So why do I consider Tragedian change to be deeper? To continue the Lego metaphor. I often find that Idealists are reluctant to tear themselves down. They prefer to only build up. Which means growth must build on what already exists.
Idealists trap themselves into these cul-de-sacs of incremental change partly through life choices and partly through a metaphysical own-goal.
The life choice is simply the act of focusing directly on change rather than challenging external projects. The idealist goes off on a Zen retreat looking directly for change. The tragedian starts a business or writes a book and then resists and ultimately accepts the change as an inevitable consequence. Good or bad, it is a rebirth. That is why you cannot call it “self-improvement.” Tragedian patterns of deeper creative-destructive change are fundamentally risky. A successful book or business may end up sending you into a spiral of drugs and depression, while utter failure may end up getting you to a moment of enlightenment far faster than the earnestly meditating Zen students.
The metaphysical own-goal is much simpler: idealists often elaborate the idea of perfectability into a doctrine of continuously evolving perfection, which declares that you are perfect as you are, at every point on your path. You can only become more perfect (it is revealing that the words “more perfect” occur in the American constitution). This has the effect of making it impossible for you to backtrack from a given path or admit that something was a “deep” mistake capable of causing real regret, damage or death.
In fact the concept of “mistake” is rendered toothless in idealism through conflation with safe learning in the sense of schooling. “It’s a learning process” is a fine way to view mistakes until a mistake bankrupts, kills or psychologically destroys you.
The Importance of the Tragedian/Unreasonable Man Stance
Adopting the tragedian stance has several consequences (many of them rather harsh). I’ll explore some of these in future issues. But just to get you started on your own, here are a couple of such ideas to mull:
Idealists revere non-zero-sum “win win” thinking over zero-sum “win-lose” thinking. Tragedians are neutral and objective about both, and pick the framing the suits the situation.
Idealists revere long-term thinking over short-term. Tragedians focus on the appropriate time horizon for a given situation.
Idealists seek “sustainability” or worse, “sustainable growth.” Tragedians believe both concepts to be fundamentally vacuous.
Idealists often seek to be kind and end up being unwittingly cruel. Tragedians are often low-empathy sociopaths, but paradoxically end up doing good without meaning to.
Shadowboxing with Evil Twins
Let’s tackle a question of the existential “what am I doing with my life?” variety. We’ll examine the case of a ribbonfarm reader named Lee.
The background, in brief, is as follows (bold highlights mine):
Lee grew up as a middle child, with an elder and younger sibling, in a high-achieving immigrant Tiger Parent Asian family. Somewhere halfway through college at an Ivy League institution, he decided to rebel. He dropped out and became a social worker in the developing world for a decade, doing very rewarding and fulfilling work and making a real impact on people’s lives. At some point, however, he realized he wanted a path with more personal growth and financial stability, so he returned to the US, got himself a master’s degree, and switched careers. He now does HR work at a big company. As he approaches his mid-career years, Lee frames his life challenges as follows:
How to avoid (manageable) fits of anxiety related to my career/financial expectations.
How to find the appropriate balance between the professional aggressiveness inspired by my goals/abilities/etc. and the patience I need in order to get along at work.
How to determine the appropriate balance between conventional work activities and alternative ’life-hacking’ pursuits outside of the workplace.
This is a surprisingly common life-and-career pattern these days, as is the reverse pattern of suddenly quitting a traditional career mid-stream to do something that feels more meaningful, like social work. In fact, the reverse pattern describes my own life pretty well.
There are two ways to read such stories. Both are important, but neither is sufficient by itself.
The Pragmatic Reading
The pragmatic reading makes such scripts seem banal and cliched to the point that it is tempting to laugh at them. They seem like formulas for bad TV movies. Yet, if you’re actually in such a story, it feels anything but banal, and not just because it happens to be your life. There is genuinely more drama in each such story than the superficial appearance might suggest. Many people process such stories purely at the banal level, comparing their stories to others’ stories, swapping notes, occasionally stumbling upon an insight or two after the third drink on Boxing Day (see, I knew I could work in a seasonal reference). You can find many such stories in Dan McAdams’ excellent book, The Redemptive Self. The narratives in the book are primarily useful as data though. They did not strike me as representing particularly insightful or self-aware processing by the people experiencing them.
We naturally default to the pragmatic framing because it feels non-threatening inside our heads, and is also easy to communicate to others. Within the pragmatic
version of the narrative, situational details and problems loom large as is clear from Lee’s concerns: managing career and financial expectations, goal setting, getting ahead vs. getting along, work-life balance, and so forth.
But in my experience, fixes developed entirely within such situation-specific readings of your narrative tend to be temporary band-aids. You might, for instance, take up a hobby to achieve better work-life balance, and look to local opportunities and friends’ recommendations to pick a hobby. You might decide to start a food blog and build an Arduino-based robot simply because that’s what others in superficially similar situations seem to be doing. Or move to Bali to do Internet Marketing. Again because that’s what a lot of people are doing.
The problem is that such situational readings don’t really get at the individual psychology of what is going on, so you get trapped into imitative life scripts that may not work for you. After all two people might experience roughly the same situational narrative and yet end up with entirely different perceived quality assessments of their lives. Your journey from hell to heaven might be the very definition of a fall from heaven to hell for me.
This brings us to what I call the Shadow reading of your life story: a way to make such thoughts more precise.
The Shadow Reading
Before I can explain how to create a shadow reading of your own life and how to work with that reading to get to interesting insights and decisions, I’ll need to cover some background.
Thanks to some very interesting recent reading and conversations (with fellow blogger Gregory Rader of On the Spiral in particular), I recently learned to think in terms of the Jungian concept of a shadow. Looking back, without realizing it, I’ve been thinking in terms of “engage your Jungian shadow” for a very long time, but now that I have learned a precise vocabulary for talking about it, I find that I can think much more clearly about certain problems, and express certain ideas in very succinct ways. For instance, this whole “slightly evil” part of my writing life, which started with my Gervais Principleand Evil Twins posts, is simply about me sparring with my own shadow. I’ll explain in a minute what that means.
Now I am an amateur at this stuff, and I am sure others can explain it much better, but here’s the basic idea. Your personality can be understood as comprising two parts: a self and a shadow. The self represents the parts of yourself that you accept, and are attached to. You see those parts primarily as strengths. The shadow represents the parts of yourself that you reject as weaknesses, and have developed an aversion to. It is, for the most part, subconscious or unconscious. You can generally only see your shadow by projecting it onto external realities. Especially other people. These people are, at a first approximation, the ones who feel like your evil twins: what is in your shadow is in their conscious self, and vice-versa. Your shadow persona manifests itself in your own behavior only under conditions of either extreme stress, or extreme relaxation.
Your self and shadow are not independent, but overlap. The intersection consists of those parts of yourself where you have engaged your shadow consciously. These are the parts that you understand neither as strengths, nor weaknesses, but simply elements of your true nature. So they actually represent your freedoms. The parts outside the intersection are addictions and aversions respectively, which enslave you to greater or lesser degrees. Here’s a Venn diagram representation.
In this very simple model, your life journey can be described in a very succinct way: it is about integrating self and shadow, and getting the overlap zone to grow and cover your whole personality. If you want to figure out a crude map of your own self and shadow make-up, go to the Wikipedia article for your Myers-Briggs personality type and scroll down to the part that says “cognitive functions.” The first four functions represent your self, and the last four four are your shadow functions. Within the Myers-Briggs model of Jungian archetypes, everybody is just a particular ordering of these eight functions (with some constraints, so you only get 16 types rather than 8-factorial types).
Check out your list before you proceed. I am willing to bet you’ll recognize how you frame the first four in positive ways as strengths. If you’re past 30, chances are you’ll also have some insight into how you relate to your shadow functions.
The shadow reading of stories like Lee’s is very simple: sudden and dramatic career switches are often a case of moving from self-work to shadow-work or vice-versa. You either get so stressed out by working with your shadow personality (recall that it takes stress or relaxation to bring out shadow traits, and usually it is stress) that you flee towards self-expression. Or you find that purely indulging your self has costs that require you to muster up courage and tackle your shadow. That’s why the phrases self-expression and going over to the dark side are so often used to describe such career transitions.
So what can we do with this crude model? We can shadow-box. Instead of big, sudden career shifts, we can work with self and shadow in more fine-grained, and less drastic ways, continuously.
Shadow Boxing with Your Evil Twins
What do I mean by shadow boxing?
As a simple example, I am a Myers-Briggs INTP. The Jungian cognitive function known as extroverted feeling is fourth on the list for me, so it is on the cusp between self and shadow, and an Achilles heel that I am aware of. It manifests as conflict avoidance and harmony-seeking in social situations. I don’t like parties or scenes or any situation where shared emotions run high, be they positive or negative. I rationalize this trait to myself as a strength, “I am good at peace-making.” But really, what I do is calm down group situations that upset me, even when it might be productive to let a “scene” unfold.
I recognized this about 12 years ago unconsciously, and deliberately started to resist the “peacemaking” temptation. I taught myself to gradually get more comfortable in situations of overt conflict, with people yelling and screaming. This made me less susceptible to being manipulated by people who rely on creating scenes for leverage. I wouldn’t say I am entirely comfortable with my shadow in this department yet. I still can’t yell and scream and create a scene myself. I still don’t like raucous dance parties or nightclubs. But I can now ride out storms created by others, without attempting to pour oil on the troubled waters. I can also get aggressive on occasion, in controlled ways. For short periods, I can even get on an ideological high horse and browbeat people the way Bill O’Reilly does (an American right-wing talk show host known for bullying people he interviews). It feels so toxic though, that I have to quit very quickly.
Where is the “evil” bit here?
Chances are, in your personal processing approach, shadow behaviors that you recognize in others appear almost as the definition of evil to you. I do perceive people who behave in uncivil ways, or create disharmony through inconsiderate behavior, as being morally objectionable, not just a practical nuisance to deal with.
On the other hand, my evil twins are typically people who are very comfortable with overt conflict and morally object to something I am good at: managing perceptions and realities on separate tracks (which they view as the moral sin of lacking “authenticity”). The trait they prize as a strength (“authenticity”) can of course, equally well be viewed as naivete and incompetence at a certain class of useful behaviors (deception of all varieties, from telling a kid Santa Claus is real, to telling a sick person things that will make them feel better even if untrue, to pulling a fast one on adversaries).
So to truly explore your shadow, yes, you need to tiptoe into behavioral territories that feel slightly evil to you . This is dangerous business.
One good safety belt you can wear is to actually engage real evil twins rather than an abstract understanding of your own shadow. If you can find people who seem like evil twins in terms of the values they model through their behaviors, but are generally viewed by a broader population as valuable people, engaging them helps you understand your shadow, and limits the dangers. For me, one such evil twin is the author Nicholas Nassim
Taleb. Reading his new book Antifragile is almost physically painful for me. I have to deliberately put on what I call my evil twin filter to get value out of the book (which certainly does contain some good ideas and insights).
But I don’t think I could stand a face-to-face meeting with the guy. He probably couldn’t stand me either: I am practically the definition of everything he appears to hate, even though we think about very similar things and reach very similar conclusions (that’s the “twin” part). I suspect if the opportunity arose, I’d simply shake hands, exchange a couple of civil pleasantries, and walk away.
Face-to-face interpersonal interactions with evil twins can be pretty stressful, so if you decide to try that, you need to choose people who are only “slightly evil twins,” so to speak. A substantive encounter with a full-blown evil twin can be so toxic that it takes years to get over it. Worse, if you fail to get over it, the encounter can grow into a deeply resentful “us vs. them” philosophy of life, built entirely on top of one encounter.
I’ve almost been down that road. Twice. Each time, thankfully, I stopped myself in time, retreated, and went down healthier paths.
But slightly evil twins are good for you. In fact, this realization helped me understand my consulting practice in a whole new light. Often what I do is simply serve as a slightly evil sparring partner for somebody who is processing a business problem that requires grappling with shadow traits. I cannot do this for everybody obviously, only with people who are in my own slightly evil zone. But the more the intersection on my self-shadow Venn diagram grows, the more people I find I can help.
Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1) Page 4