Agency is for sociopaths

But it doesn't have to be

I’ve never understood bodybuilders. They combine the worst aspects of preening cartoon femininity with the chest-beating of macho culture. I’d hate to be mistaken for someone like that. That’s why I’ve chosen to remain physically weak. In fact, I don’t like to be seen publicly lifting anything more than 5lbs. I wouldn’t want to lend support to our might-makes-right culture, in which people cultivate physical vigor without caring what it’s for.

I don’t think there’s a substantial difference between the above paragraph and the recent guest essay in the New York Times, “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be ‘High-Agency’.” The op-ed criticizes the current vogue of agency as an aspirational virtue. Its main thrust is that agency isn’t worth celebrating or seeking because many identifiable bad people have it.

To be clear: Yes, many bad people are high in agency, and a lot of the people most obsessed with agency kind of suck. In fact, stop for a moment and call to mind the worst person you can think of. Odds are, they’re the kind of person liable to embrace the mantra “you can just do things.”

This correlation makes sense if, like me, you think of agency as the capacity to see and act on options that others overlook. It’s a combination of inventiveness and courage that most people lack, very often due to social conformity. Bad people don’t feel social conformity as strongly, given that they don’t view the welfare or opinions of others as important. This frees them to indulge in vicious creativity.

It would be a mistake, however, to draw from this a conclusion that agency itself is the problem. It’s more accurate to think of agency as a general-purpose, morally neutral tool, like physical strength or intelligence. And it’s a tool we should be very wary of warning people off of developing, just because there’s some population-level correlation between agency and Dark Triad traits.

A taste for violence might naturally predispose someone to learn martial arts, but that only makes it more important to encourage people who are motivated by self- and other-defense to take them up. If the good-hearted, prosocial people of the world took on 10 percent of the courage of ruthless antisocial powermaxxers, we would all be better off.

From the article: “You can just do things, sure, but what will you do? … To valorize agency without also emphasizing its purpose allows us to ignore harder questions like: How do I live a good life? And what about the collective good?” I’m sorry, but the average New York Times reader is not primarily lacking in concern about the collective good. If you ask any educated liberal about all the problems they might theoretically devote themselves to, you’ll find dozens. What you’ll find less of is a willingness to actually take action in ways that aren’t completely standard and completely ineffective, like retweeting a meme or donating to an incompetent non-profit.

This is why my book is dedicated to “the best who lack conviction” — as in, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” — and filled with stories of people making real improvements to their world, large and small, with increases in personal agency.

If there’s a real concern behind the NYT essay, it’s that we risk leading people into moral turpitude if we valorize the style of tech billionaires, who do seem to be the people most frequently calling on “agency” lately. But I think this has it exactly backwards. Ruthless, power-hungry people have always existed — in societies that lack free markets, they comprise the local mafia. This phenotype doesn’t need encouraging, but it’s also immune to browbeating: Such people are, for better and worse, independent. No self-help book or blog is going to affect them one way or the other.

When I’m preaching the truth that agency is a learnable skill, it’s directed at the good-hearted bystander who can be influenced. This person cares; they want good things for others; they long to participate in the great collective improvement project of humanity. If you put a gun to their head and demanded they give you ten ideas for how to make their zip code or their country better, they would prove inventive. But they are constantly subject to the tidal forces generated by social media, which say “staying informed” is a virtue, and doing something means reposting. I hope all the much-maligned agency discourse can induce at least a few such people to wake up and just do something.

You Can Just Do Things, my guide to cultivating personal agency for non-sociopaths, comes out July 21.