True But Useless

We're learning more and more about the world, but it isn't helping

Read enough historical works of science and philosophy, and you may come to the realization that our modern-day intellectual life is far less creative. The rise of social science in the 19th and 20th century and the cold lens of statistical methodologies and the unsympathetic eye of peer review have wrung much of the fancifulness out of our writing about the human condition. Hippocrates could not have written about the poetic fantasy of humorism if he had Google, the scientific method, or peer reviewers.

This transformation has not happened without fits and starts. Much of the research done in the social sciences now is fanciful in its own way. But our desire to turn up causes, to figure out why humans do the things they do, has taught us much already. Of course, knowing more about the hidden mechanisms of human society has downsides, too. For one, it has emboldened the "well, actually" crowd to be not only more insufferable, but to be so with statistics. More seriously, there is a counterintuitive disadvantage to knowing as much as we do about causes, about why things happen: knowing more about causes can make it harder for us to overcome effects.

But we like to understand!

This phenomenon is especially pernicious because we need to understand psychological, behavioral, environmental, and mental mechanisms. We are all curious to unmask the hidden movers in the world. And we do so often because we want to help: we see the deleterious effects of addiction, or poverty, or war, and like good fixers, chase those effects back as close as we can to the source. Turn it off at the source, and you can do real social good.

But in so doing, we find a pitfall remarkably like the 'knowledge of good and evil' trap into which Adam and Eve fell in Eden. Making causes known can often be the same as making them insurmountable. Revealing the hidden ways of the world can make them more powerful. Recently, I wrote about Murray Bookchin's critiques of technology and the city. I want to repurpose something he said about the impersonal scale of the modern city to analogize this concept:

The faceless geometric architecture of soaring skyscrapers and immense complexes of high-rise dwellings bespeaks a monumentalism that reflects the authority not of superhuman persons but of suprahuman bureaucratic institutions. No natural or human forms adorn these structures, forms on which the imagination can fasten in awe or defiance. Their cold geometry and functional design instill a sense of powerlessness in the urban dweller that precludes the presence of human meaning, for these structures appear no longer as the works of man but of institutions. They even tend to bear the names of the corporations that erected them. Before such gigantic, undefinable, bureaucratic entities, the urban dweller feels psychically as well as physically dwarfed. Unlike the monumental structures of the Baroque city, whose ornamentation was evidence of personified power, the institutional monumentalism of the megalopolis becomes a source of bewilderment and disorientation. Confronted every day by this architectural nullity, the urban dweller finds no monarch against whom she or he can rebel, no gods to defy, no priests and courtiers to overthrow. There is nothing, in fact, but an interminable bureaucratic nexus that traps the individual in an impersonal skein of agencies and corporations. (Toward An Ecological Society, 146)

Think of a family in the United States trapped in grinding poverty. How would you explain to them exactly what impersonal, supra-human mechanisms have contributed to their lot in life? There are any number of factors. You could point out the decline of living-wage, union-protected manufacturing jobs in the United States owing to complex interactions between globalization, international trade, shifting business practices, and changing consumption patterns. You could note that the historical legacy of land use regulations have constricted the supply of new homes so that housing costs are an impoverisher in their own right. You could note that this impediment is generational; that their parents and grandparents battled chronic illness they suffered from working in Cancer Alley, labored under repressive Jim Crow laws, felt the invisible burden of environmental pollutants, or suffered with endemic parasites whose historic impact on entire regions was enormous. You could explain that the hidden psychological pressures of poverty itself limits their cognitive abilities, making long-range thinking and planning difficult or impossible.

All of these are true enough mechanisms which do or did make things worse for those facing structural barriers. They are not one thing: they are social, environmental, psychological, historical, bureaucratic, economic. They are not the responsibility of one person; they belong to Bookchin's 'impersonal skein of agencies and corporations', a net that snares with depressing regularity.

But I'm not questioning whether any of these observations are true. I'm wondering whether they are useful. Of course they are helpful background to the task of policymaking, for the designers of welfare and industrial and health policy, for educators, mayors, charitable organizations, medical organizations, and clergy. But our fascination with mechanism has led us to incorporate this 'knowledge of good and evil' into our personal therapeutic outreach as well. Is it useful to emphasize the large, immovable, mysterious forces that are building these invisible obstacles?

In this context, I judge usefulness by whether or not it helps someone overcome an obstacle. If it is true that these impersonal mechanisms make trauma and obstacles harder to overcome, and if it is true that, on a personal level, we really can't do anything to make either the causes or effects go away, why talk about them? Does it make the task of overcoming them any easier? Consulting (ironically) yet more social science and psychology research, it appears not.

It’s only trauma if you treat it that way

In a seminal essay for The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova summarized the research of developmental psychologist Emmy Werner, who undertook a long-term study on a group of almost seven hundred children as they grew and matured. Werner observed that among at-risk children, two groups began to diverge from each other. The larger group, about two thirds, developed one or more of the negative social markers more common among at-risk children: substance abuse, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school, or getting in trouble with the law. But the other third had remarkably different outcomes, which was predicted in part by something unique in their psychological makeup:

Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

To put it another way, these kids either did not know or did not care about the ways in which the deck was stacked against them. They had substituted environmental for personal responsibility. And it had fundamentally changed how they processed inputs, most notably trauma. George Bonanno, one clinical psychologist Konnikova cited, preferred to refer to trauma instead as a 'potentially traumatic event'. He emphasized in his interview that stressful and traumatic events only have negative outcomes when they are experienced as traumatic. Konnikova wrote: "One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic…””

This does help uncover the mechanism: a resilient individual, with an internal locus of control, is more likely to conceive of some negative event as neutral or even positive: as an opportunity to learn and grow, rather than as a truly traumatic event. And this perception actually has a material effect on whether trauma develops from that event at all. Thankfully, this power of perception is not fixed, but seems to be teachable. Once again, Konnikova, citing yet another psychologist: "Seligman found that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression."

Do we actually do harm by emphasizing causes?

What does this tell us about whether it is useful to dwell upon the causes of hidden impediments? Emphasizing someone's helplessness in the face of large, faceless, inchoate environmental obstacles might reasonably make it harder to overcome them. By giving them more power to explain suffering, we may also give them so much credit that we let them intimidate us. Earlier I claimed that as we try to help people over obstacles or through trauma, we can lean too hard on these environmental explanations. Does this really happen? Yes, in both indirect and direct ways.

Generally, we simply have a much greater median level of awareness about these structural and environmental factors now than we ever have before. Not only have the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences become practiced much more often as a science, but their research makes its way to a lay audience through news, social media, education, and word of mouth. And why not? We are fascinated by mechanisms, by hidden truths, by unseen levers. But indirectly, the cumulative weight of these observations leaves behind a hazy psychological cloud of indistinct oppression, an oppression which can suppress any attempt to overcome it.

And in direct ways, we often use these findings in our therapeutic approaches to those struggling with these obstacles. I mean therapeutic here in a broad sense: of course, in a clinical therapy setting these findings may be discussed. But they also come out in the form of everyday empathy. We may take pains to reassure someone that they are not wholly to blame for bad outcomes in their life. We may try to redirect their frustration away from some discrete impediment and to the systems and faraway persons to blame for them. But these attempts, if we are to believe the literature about resilience, are counterproductive. In other words, they are true observations, but making them is not useful to the individual struggling to overcome an obstacle.

What about ignorance?

Is ignorance the answer? Probably not. For one, most people already know all-too-well what the causes of their trauma and ill-fortune are. The cat is decidedly out of the bag. Eve has already tasted of the knowledge of good and evil. And, even if someone doesn't yet know about some hidden force standing in their way, their realization of the causes are apt to feel like either a betrayal or to be a realization so psychologically unsettling that it plunges a person into a despair about their situation. In other words, learned helplessness can arise from true statements about causes and effects.

Reading and thinking about how to develop an internal locus of control is weird. It smacks of an out-of-touch paternalism to suggest to someone, in the throes of a struggle with some invisible obstacle, that they should focus instead on what they can learn from their struggle, or that they should conceptualize this traumatic event as a potentially positive force in their life. But perhaps that very attitude is paternalistic and out-of-touch? If an approach to suffering yields better results for the sufferer, and has durable long-term benefits, then shying away from it because of some personal psychological discomfort is a betrayal of the person one ostensibly wants to help.

To do so effectively, we have to take an accepting attitude toward suffering. It is possible, and indeed necessary, to hold three truths simultaneously:

1. Suffering is not good

2. But some suffering is inevitable

3. Developing techniques to make the best of suffering is therefore necessary

The best world is one without suffering. The next-best world is one in which what suffering there is is transformed and redeemed for our benefit. The worst world is one where we are crushed by suffering.

If your friend encounters an obstacle or has a traumatic experience, there is nothing you can do to make that disappear. On their own time, you can and should advocate for macro-level policy shifts, for social justice, for trauma and poverty-alleviating actions. But in that moment, on an individual level, the emotionally difficult, but effective strategy to actually accomplish some material benefit for your friend is to encourage them to turn that situation on its head and make it work for their benefit.

Communities can be resilient, too

We have spoken directly about the individual here, and obliquely about resilience. But I want to also speak directly about the power of a resilient community to effect deeper and more lasting change in the face of individual trauma and difficulty. Turning again to the social science literature, the effectiveness of an individual's response to trauma is more directly correlated with the markers of resilience found in their community than in them, themselves. Strong social and community bonds and institutions can make up for individual shortcomings and help those in need to adapt and overcome those challenges. Sebastian Junger, writing about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers returning from war, said:

Recent studies of something called "social resilience" have identified resource sharing and egalitarian wealth distribution as major components of a society's ability to recover from hardship. And societies that rank high on social resilience—such as kibbutz settlements in Israel—provide soldiers with a significantly stronger buffer against PTSD than low-resilience societies. In fact, social resilience is an even better predictor of trauma recovery than the level of resilience of the person himself. (Tribe, 102-103)

Notice here how the social resilience described is neither a material nor a psychological quality alone: instead, it is a combination of a highly cohesive society and one which meets the physical needs of its 'potentially traumatized' members with its own pooled resources. The ‘internal locus of control’ approach to trauma is therefore an individually necessary, but not sufficient, element in an someone’s ability to overcome hardship. Their wider community, and the resources and solidarity it commands, can blunt the effects of trauma and help them overcome obstacles.

Useful but untrue maxims for leadership

This concept of internal locus of control has been extended to the practice of leadership. Jocko Willink, the Navy SEAL turned business guru, emphasizes, as his book title suggests, that leaders take 'extreme ownership' over decisions and outcomes within their oeuvre. Naturally, a leader is not literally responsible for every action someone under him takes. But a attitude of extreme ownership would have a leader say that they have the ultimate responsibility for something that happens under their watch, whether that attribution is just or not. That assumption of responsibility, that illusion of control, is just that—an illusion. We might say that it is untrue but useful; useful for providing clarity and certainty to the team he is leading, useful for galvanizing him to better and more effective forms of leadership in the future, and useful for providing certainty and confidence to those who have to work with his team about where the buck stops.

Elsewhere, Willink describes this as 'giving subordinates large latitude to make decisions for themselves, and underwriting their mistakes when they inevitably happen.' What this does, he argues, is instill confidence in those subordinates to take responsibility themselves: to keep trying and innovating. That kind of leadership provides a sandbox for subordinates to learn and grow themselves, making them more capable (and less likely to require their leader to take the fall on their behalf).

Beyond significant external pressures, real trauma, and the hard task of leadership, fooling yourself that every experience is redeemable can transform mundane encounters, too. The everyday trials of living, parenting, relationships, the cracks and seams in our broken world, are opportunities to grow and learn, and it is up to us to position ourselves to learn from them. Is that always true? I don’t know, but it is certainly useful.