How Should Who Manage Whom to Do What?

It is an awkward question.

Deliberately so.

How should who manage whom to do what?

Buried inside that slightly tortured sentence are some of the oldest questions human beings have ever tried to answer.

Who should be allowed to tell someone else what to do? Under what circumstances? Toward what end? By what means? With what limitations? And perhaps most importantly, according to whose values?

We tend to reserve questions like these for politics. We debate democracy, authoritarianism, individual rights, regulation, freedom, equality, justice and the proper role of government.

But underneath all of them is a more fundamental problem.

Human beings have to find ways to live with other human beings.

And human beings do not all want the same things.

We don’t share the same values. We don’t agree about what constitutes a good life. We don’t have the same tolerance for risk, uncertainty, inequality, authority, competition, tradition, change or individual responsibility. Even when we use the same words—freedom, fairness, justice, safety—we may mean very different things by them.

So how should who manage whom to do what?

And before we answer that, perhaps there is an even more fundamental question:

How well can we manage ourselves?

The problem of self-government

Every society imposes some degree of external control.

There are things you may not do to other people. There are agreements you are expected to honor. There are boundaries beyond which society will intervene. And ultimately, somewhere behind laws, courts, regulations and institutions is force.

If you refuse every other mechanism of restraint, eventually someone may physically restrain you.

There is nothing particularly shocking about acknowledging this. It is one of the fundamental functions of government.

But it creates an interesting relationship between self-government and external government. To the extent that I can regulate my own behavior—respect your boundaries, manage my impulses, tolerate frustration, honor agreements, take responsibility for consequences—there is less need for someone else to regulate those things for me.

When people cannot do that, something fills the gap. Parents do it for children. Communities do it through norms. Organizations do it through rules. Governments do it through laws.

The problem, of course, is that the people doing the governing are drawn from exactly the same species as the people being governed.

They have desires, fears, ambitions, biases, blind spots and interests of their own.

Who governs the governors?

Much of civilization can be understood as our continuing attempt to solve that problem. We create constitutions, divide powers, establish courts, hold elections, demand transparency and create procedures for challenging authority—not because those entrusted with power have somehow transcended ordinary human limitations, but because they haven’t.

But there is another question hidden inside all this.

When does my conviction about what is good give me the right to decide what is good for you?

When good values become permission

Human beings have a remarkable tendency to believe that what seems obviously important to us should seem equally obvious to everyone else.

And when it doesn’t, our first impulse is often not curiosity.

It is correction.

Throughout history, we have found different ways to justify that correction.

Sometimes the justification is moral certainty. There is a proper order. There are right and wrong ways to live. Society functions when people understand their duties, respect legitimate authority and conform to standards that transcend individual preference.

Sometimes the justification is expertise. Complex problems require knowledgeable people. Evidence matters. Competence matters. Systems can be designed better or worse. If we know that one course of action produces better outcomes than another, why wouldn’t we organize society accordingly?

And sometimes the justification is humanitarian concern. People should not be exploited, excluded or unnecessarily harmed. Society should be fairer, more compassionate and more responsive to human needs. If people are being hurt—even by their own choices—shouldn’t someone do something?

These are not bad values.

That’s what makes the problem interesting.

Moral standards make civilization possible. Expertise has produced extraordinary improvements in human life. Compassion toward the suffering of others is among our better qualities.

But each contains a temptation.

Moral certainty can become authoritarianism. Expertise can become technocracy. Humanitarian concern can become paternalism.

And from inside each worldview, the transition may be almost invisible.

You must, because it is right.

You must, because we know what works.

You must, because it is for your own good.

Different language. Same ancient temptation.

The danger isn’t simply believing that we are right. We have to make judgments about right and wrong constantly.

The more interesting danger begins when our certainty that something is good becomes sufficient justification for imposing it on someone else.

We stop asking whether we should have that authority because the goodness of our intention has already answered the question for us.

Collapse, control, or development?

The psychologist Clare W. Graves spent decades studying how human beings respond to changing conditions of life.

His research led him to propose an emergent, cyclical model in which different systems of values and ways of thinking develop as people encounter new life conditions and existing ways of coping become inadequate. A way of organizing life that solves one set of problems may eventually create or encounter problems it cannot solve, making another form of adaptation possible.

Later in his work, Graves considered a larger question: what might happen if the complexity of the problems confronting humanity began to exceed the capacity of our prevailing ways of thinking to address them?

He contemplated several possibilities.

One was regression through catastrophe. Complex systems could break down, forcing human beings back toward simpler ways of organizing life.

Another was stabilization through control. Instead of collapsing, societies might respond to increasing complexity by constructing increasingly powerful systems for managing human behavior.

And those systems need not look obviously tyrannical.

They could justify themselves through morality.

They could justify themselves through expertise, measurement and efficiency.

They could justify themselves through compassion and the prevention of harm.

They might sound entirely benevolent.

The result could be a society that becomes extraordinarily sophisticated at managing people without becoming equally sophisticated about whether, when, or how people should be managed.

There was another possibility.

Development.

Rather than forcing increasing complexity back into familiar systems of thought, human beings might develop a greater capacity to recognize that different ways of thinking solve different kinds of problems.

Order has a place. Expertise and achievement have a place. Compassion and equality have a place. Individual freedom has a place. Collective responsibility has a place.

The developmental leap is not discovering which one should finally win.

It is becoming capable of drawing upon different ways of thinking without requiring any one of them to become the answer to everything.

Instead of beginning with Which worldview is correct? we can begin with What does this situation actually require?

That distinction may become increasingly important because our technological capacity is becoming extraordinarily good at doing something human beings have always attempted to do:

Manage one another.

We can monitor behavior, predict preferences, shape environments, personalize persuasion and direct attention with a precision that would have been unimaginable through most of human history.

But becoming increasingly sophisticated at managing human beings is not the same thing as becoming increasingly sophisticated human beings.

The more powerful our tools for influencing one another become, the more urgent the original question becomes:

How should who manage whom to do what?

The arrogance of helping

There is an uncomfortable implication here.

The desire to control other people does not always feel like a desire for control.

Sometimes it feels like helping.

If I can see something that you cannot, perhaps I should help you see it. If I know something that would improve your life, perhaps I should tell you. If experience has taught me that a particular choice is likely to hurt you, perhaps I should warn you.

Nothing particularly sinister there.

But somewhere along that continuum is a line.

Advice becomes insistence. Persuasion becomes pressure. Concern becomes paternalism. Eventually helping can become the conviction that because I understand what is best for you, your disagreement is evidence that intervention is necessary.

The more you resist, the more certain I become that intervention is necessary.

It is a remarkably self-sealing proposition.

This can happen between governments and citizens, institutions and populations, parents and children, experts and laypeople, employers and employees—and simply between two people who care about one another.

It can happen in the helping professions as well.

Perhaps especially there.

If another human being comes to us because they want something to change, it is remarkably easy to substitute what I think should change for what they actually want.

And the more experienced we become, the easier that can be. Expertise gives us better ways of recognizing patterns. It can also make us increasingly confident that we already know what we’re looking at.

We can become so enamored with our map that we stop being curious about theirs.

At that point, helping can quietly become something else: an attempt to make another person conform to our representation of who they should be.

Development cannot be forced from the outside.

People can be educated, challenged, exposed to new experiences and invited to consider alternatives. Conditions can be created in which new possibilities become easier to discover. Sometimes boundaries must be enforced because behavior affects other people.

But none of that gives us the ability to install a more complex worldview into another human being by decree.

The attempt itself may reveal the very limitation we imagine we’re correcting.

You need to become more like me.

Democracy requires more than voting

Political systems provide an unusually visible example.

We sometimes talk as though democracy were primarily a piece of institutional machinery.

Hold elections. Write a constitution. Establish a legislature.

Democracy installed.

But institutions depend upon human capacities.

A functioning constitutional republic with democratic principles requires more than voting. It requires some degree of tolerance for disagreement, respect for political opposition, acceptance of limits on power, peaceful transfer of authority, protection of minority rights and willingness to lose without destroying the system.

Those capacities cannot simply be installed by decree.

An election introduced into conditions that do not support those surrounding norms may produce something very different from constitutional self-government. People may elect another strongman. Existing tribal, religious, economic or patronage structures may simply reorganize themselves through the new machinery.

That does not make the people involved inferior.

It means systems have to function within actual human conditions, not the conditions we wish existed.

You cannot force a society to develop by handing it institutions representing your own values any more than you can force an individual to develop by insisting that they see the world as you do.

You can change the rules overnight.

The capacities required to sustain them develop on a different timetable.

Coexistence is harder than conversion

So perhaps one of the more interesting measures of development is not how successfully we persuade everyone to adopt the right values.

It is how capable we become of living alongside people who don’t share ours.

That is harder than it sounds.

Conversion resolves difference. Coexistence requires us to live with it.

It requires us to distinguish between behavior that genuinely infringes upon another person’s freedom and behavior we merely dislike; between boundaries necessary for people to live together and restrictions designed to make other people more acceptable to us.

It asks us to become curious about what another person’s values are accomplishing for them without requiring ourselves to adopt those values.

And when values genuinely conflict, it asks a more creative question than Who wins?

Can we design another arrangement? Can different communities make different choices? Can we decentralize the decision? Can we preserve the boundary without demanding conformity? Can we innovate ways for incompatible preferences to occupy the same world?

That isn’t relativism. Some behaviors cannot coexist with the rights of others. Boundaries remain necessary.

But boundaries and conversion are different things.

Perhaps progress isn’t getting everyone to share the right values.

Perhaps it is becoming sophisticated enough to share a world with people who don’t.

What is governing you?

There is another side to all of this.

Government does not occur only between citizens and states.

Something is governing each of us all the time.

An impulse can govern you. Fear can govern you. The need for approval can govern you. An unquestioned belief can govern you. Your social group can govern you. Your past can govern you.

An algorithm can govern you.

Your attention can be governed by whoever has become most skilled at capturing it.

A person who does whatever impulse occurs is not necessarily free. They may simply be governed by impulse. Someone who cannot tolerate anxiety may be governed by anxiety. Someone who cannot withstand disapproval may be governed by the crowd. Someone who compulsively seeks reassurance may be governed by uncertainty.

And someone whose attention is continually directed by others may experience enormous freedom of choice while rarely noticing how much of the choosing environment has already been constructed for them.

Freedom requires more than freedom from external control. It requires some capacity for self-government.

You cannot meaningfully govern an impulse you don’t recognize as an impulse. You cannot examine an assumption you experience simply as reality. You cannot reconsider an internal representation you don’t recognize yourself as constructing.

And you cannot deliberately direct your attention if you never notice where the flashlight is pointing—or who keeps reaching for it.

This may be the uncomfortable symmetry underneath the entire question.

We are remarkably alert to other people trying to govern us.

We may be considerably less alert to what is already governing us from within.

So, how should who manage whom to do what?

There will probably never be a single answer.

Sometimes we need rules. Sometimes we need expertise. Sometimes we need compassion. Sometimes we need firm boundaries. Sometimes we need cooperation. Sometimes intervention is necessary.

And sometimes we need everyone to leave each other the hell alone.

The difficulty is knowing which situation we’re actually in.

That requires something more demanding than certainty. It requires the ability to recognize legitimate values other than our own without surrendering our own values in the process.

Human development can be encouraged. Supported. Challenged. Invited.

But it cannot ultimately be imposed.

Perhaps one measure of our own development is how little we need to force ours upon somebody else.

What is governing me?

And how much of that am I capable of governing for myself?