Institutional Creed, Con, and Making Choices for Life

-- By KevinChang - 27 Feb 2009

People are not truly making decisions

People would generally think that they enjoy freedom and make their own choices with free will. What freedom and choices means here, of course, is that “within the boundaries,” such as morale, law, or any other social values.

• Why only within those boundaries? People certainly believe they can choose to act immorally or to violate the law, whether it concerns crossing the street against the light, driving faster than the speed limit, having sex outside marital relationships, or stealing, to take a few obvious examples.

For instance, we believe, generally, that it is we who choose which college to attend, which courses to take, what should be our major, whom we marry, and what career we are dedicate to through our lifetime. However, it is common that when we are making all these choices, some options or possibilities, although we are well aware of their existence, never come into our mind.

• Just don't happen to occur to us? Aren't people effectively prohibited by class status, familial dysfunction, early life deprivation and hundreds of other causes from ever having a meaningful way to pursue options that are utterly visible and completely obvious?

People tends to be confined by social creed or roles assigned to them

• Two linguistic errors here should be differentiated. The first, in which the subject does not agree in number with the verb, is identified by the native speaker as wrong, and there will be an immediate unconscious tendency to think you are less intelligent than you are because you wrote illiterately. The second error, the omission of "the" before "social creed" would be identified by a native speaker as "foreign." The use of the definite and indefinite articles "a" and "the" in English is entirely idiomatic, and has no immediate cognate in any languages except those nearest to English in the Teutonic family, like Dutch or the Scandinavians. So native English speakers find that almost anyone who isn't a native speaker of English or a near neighboring language doesn't use the articles "right," and this is thought of unconsciously as "foreign" rather than "wrong." So although the two mistakes are both slight and the first one is only one letter long, the consequences are quite different. Although your English is in general excellent, you should still ask a native speaker to read your writing and go through it with you as often as possible.

Are those options or possibilities not one of our choices? Or is it because our minds are limited by some invisible boundaries that we feel urged to ignore those possibilities? Maybe just like T. Arnold said in The Folklore of Capitalism, that “[b]ecause words and ceremonies are our only methods of communication, everywhere we find that the creed is regarded as the cornerstone of social institutions.”

• It is not clear to me what the quotation has to do with the preceding sentence.

Since people are social animals, we need to be in communication with other people and thus are “forced,” though we might not be aware of it, to become one of the believers of the creed, and limit ourselves within the creed.

• Are you sure? This society in which we are presently both living operates somewhat differently than that, as many do. Only some societies are even marginally effective at achieving anything like that degree of regimentation of experience. To say that this follows naturally from biological sociality seems almost certainly wrong. Human sociality clearly antedates articulate speech, to mention merely one objection

In the choices we have made, from what to have for lunch to what career goals should be our life-long pursuit, common considerations such as values, resources, and expectations are what is really controlling.

• That list seems too heterogeneous to make sense to me. In the choices we make, it seems to say, something influences our choices.

Moreover, since we need to be one of “us” rather than being one of “them,” we somehow never challenge those boundaries or even try to figure out the nature and purpose of those boundaries.

• Are you sure? It seems to me there are few such boundaries that people don't challenge both intellectually, by thinking around, and directly, by marrying or copulating across.

It is because, just like what Arnold said, “when someone attempts to describe how such an institution works, he is called a “realist” or a “cynic “because he makes believers uncomfortable. Thus to describe how the law . . . actually works is to appear attack these symbols.” We simply do not want to be a member of the “heresy” so we confine ourselves in the creed of social institutions when making choices.

• Sure. And it happens all the time. Because the culture, like most cultures, doesn't actually exclude the formation or practice of heresy. This one is freer than most about institutionalizing rather than marginalizing heresy, so our experience here constantly provides plentiful examples of both, but the same is true pretty much everywhere else in the family of man, with some admittedly accessible and fascinating exceptions.

Then the question arises: Are we really making choices as free men? Arnold would say that people follow the institutional habits that every member in the social institutional should learn and abide by except the American Businessman. If we believe in Leff’s theories of cons, we might also think that people are just carefully playing their roles in the script of a gigantic con with the conmen being those with knowledge, wealth, and the power that comes with it. In the former theory, we are controlled by our human nature—the need to be recognized by and connected to other people. In the latter theory, we are manipulated collectively to satisfy the greed and needs of conmen who are the real writers and the directors of the script. In either way, we are made to feel like we are making choices and given the sense of participation so that the real players, or the conmen, could calm us and make us serve them.

• Both of these references seem to me confusing rather than clarifying. Each seems to be making claims concerning the meaning of others' writing that I don't entirely recognize, and I find myself distracted from what your argument ought to be about. I think you would be better off without the references, making clear what your idea really is for yourself. Conformism is real, and the pressure of surrounding influence. Granted. And the question arises, so are there such things as choices? Of course there are such things as choices. The issue isn't whether there is choice, it's whether that choice somehow "means" autonomy and liberty. You choose meaninglessly in consumer capitalism among identical soap under twenty different brands. Meaningful choices that would be more transformative of society are ruthlessly foreclosed. Is there choice? Of course. Is it free choice? That depends on what free means, and you're not telling us.

People are controlled because of their weakness

However, is it their evil to manipulate people? Or is it people’s own fault that causes the manipulation? Alternatively, is it because most people actually need being manipulated so that they would not get lost in their lives? That is to say, are the conmen under Leff actually shepherds for people because people, though need to feel like they are making decision, are in fact not able to decide for themselves?

• *Is this actually a question? Might people not, in your personal judgment, be "able" to decide for themselves?

Controlling benefits two kinds of people

Take making career choices for example. Some people do not know what their aspirations are or do not even want to know or have an career aspiration. They live day after day without specific goal or plan and do their job only because they have to make aliving. Once that need is satisfied, they are not further motivated to think what is a meaningful career, or even a meaningful life for them.

• Are you sure? Might it be that people are so beaten down by the struggle to earn a living that they behave as you describe, sometimes? Do you think if you were able to listen to the inner voices of those people, you wouldn't find that they too understand what it would mean to be enabled to bring about a meaningful life for oneself by being prepared, supported, and assisted as we were?

For these people, having someone set up a stage for them and give them a role to play might actually be helping them and benefitting social stability. Some other people, although do not have specific goals in mind either, are willing to make the most of themselves. They get into a profession, though somehow by accident, learn as much as they can, and finally become outstanding professionals. For this type of people, giving them the script to play is helping them maximize their ability and succeed in the profession that best suits them.

One type of people that is truly free

The last type of people, so few that they may count only one out of millions, are strong and wise enough to be the real thinking man for himself. They know exactly what they want to do with their lives. They possess high ideals, set goals that seems impossible to normal people, and take steps to achieve those goals with passion. It is the combination of clear goals, strong will, passion, and wisdom that enables them to fulfill their work of life even though reaching their ideals sounds like squeezing water out of rocks. This kind of people are great leaders, philanthropists, thinkers, entrepreneurs, creators, and pioneers in human history, and no one, even the most brilliant conman, can fool them with scripts.

• Why are you so sure that we are divided this way into the alphas, betas and gammas? Human equality is a contingent fact, but it is a fact. So is the radical inequality of human circumstances. In order to counter the apparent probability that it is the nature of people's social circumstances rather than their "kind" that tends overwhelmingly to determine their level of intellectual development and social achievement, shouldn't you have something more than mere assertion to offer?

Think and fight, and we shall be free

It may be true, for the vast majority of people, that no matter how hard they try their destiny is dominated by the accidents determined by their role in the system. It may also be true that most people are just playing their roles in a great con set up by those in power. However, let us not forget that if we think and fight hard enough, we shall be free.

• Let us not forget something that we haven't been given any reason for concluding? It may be true that X, but let us never forget that if we think hard enough it will become true that not X? Fighting can make us free? These do not seem like promising propositions. How does this represent the conclusion of the preceding argument? What is the thesis of the paper on which we are concluding, and if we put it in the introduction would the essay make any sense?

• Last time, I said:
  • I don't think the way to edit this piece is to remove some words. I think it would be more useful to return to an early step, where you consider what it means for human beings to be social animals. Are our choices affected only to the extent that many options are silently excluded? Isn't it more that our options are in fact rather stringently limited?

• I still think this suggestion is worthy of your consideration. I have tried to make clearer what I meant by increasing engagement with your shortened text. But the point I was making before still seems to me the most important one.