The Enemy Within: Self Control in an Age of Excess

A drunk, ultra-Orthodox Jewish man leans over a rubbish container after a Jewish celebration. Because people engage in certain behaviour it doesn't mean that they are their preferred behaviours, says author Daniel Akst. (Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

I can resist anything but temptation.
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892, Act I

While much of human history has been devoted to dealing with scarcity, the 21st century is posing quite a different challenge—how to deal with plenty.

According to Daniel Akst, author of We Have Met the Enemy: Self Control in an Age of Excess, we have evolved to live in an environment of scarcity, but our environment has changed. The industrial world can provide everything and anything, often instantly with new technology, but we have not adapted.

Speaking at the Avid Reader Bookshop in Brisbane earlier this year, Mr Akst said temptation is becoming one of our greatest challenges and a lack of self control one of our greatest problems.

“The topic is really moderation in the face of freedom and affluence,” he says.

He noted that while there are already great demands on “appetite regulation” in modern societies, the evidence illustrates that we are killing ourselves with excess.

He pointed to the growing numbers of deaths as a result of lack of self control, noting that over 400,000 people die in America each year from smoking related diseases and about as many die from obesity, and other related illnesses.

“Of the 2.5 million deaths, close to half could be prevented with healthier lives,” he told the audience.

What Can Be Done

But what can be done? Civil libertarians would say the issue involves freedom of choice – shouldn’t we be allowed to choose whether we smoke, drink or eat too much?

Mr Akst believes that that argument only works if an individual is accordingly left to take full responsibility for their choices. In the industrialised world, however, the whole community shares the burden of an individual’s self abuse through socialised medicine and welfare.

“When we socialise [society] the costs mean [that] I am now invested in your choices, so your bad choices become my problem,” he said. “If we are willing to let people die in the streets as a result of their poor choices then we don’t have that problem, but we are not.”

The global financial crisis was a similar case he said: “We socialised a lot of that cost in America. We were fantastically successful at dealing with the crisis that we were fantastically successful in creating.”

Pre-Commitment

Mr Akst said addressing self control was not a new issue. He referred to the Greek philosophers who, he says, understood the challenges involved in controlling desires, but who addressed those challenges as a point of mastery and skill.

“These guys were obsessed with this and they had a terror of slavery and being enslaved to your own desires was just as bad as being a slave to some other person,” he said.

As our ability to manage self control seems to have changed little since that time, the Greeks have valuable lessons to teach a modern world, he said, referring to the tale of Odysseus, from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey.

In the tale, Odysseus is on his way home from the Trojan War when he realises his ship is approaching the Sirens whose seductive song is known to lure crews to their deaths. Acknowledging his desire to hear the Sirens, Odysseus instructs his crew to tie him to the mast and ignore any instruction he might give while he is under the influence of the songs.

“That’s the first known episode of what we call pre-commitment, of binding yourself, constraining your future choices in order to live up to the preferred desires you have today,” Mr Akst said.

Controlling behaviour, however, is not about becoming zealous and suppressing all desires as they are a fundamental part of human nature. He says: “This gives us our personhood and in turn what separates us from beasts.”

Self control, he believes, is “the ability to turn our backs on an impulse and go in a different direction and live up to some of the other preferences that we have”.

He notes that we have a range of desires and behaviours, but says: “Because people engage in certain behavior, it doesn’t mean that they are their preferred behaviours.”

Continued on the next page ... Anticipation

Anticipation

Pre-commitment has proved successful on many levels in managing detrimental desires and it is worth noting that it is presently one of the strategies under consideration to deal with gambling addiction in Australia.

However, an important aspect of the success of pre-commitment is anticipation, as Odysseus showed, the ability to predict or recognise the likelihood of a bad choice.

Mr Akst says people are using that awareness to create a range of strategies based on incentives, particularly financial, that can also involve friends, families and the broader community.

He described two friends that had made a contract to lose weight. If either of them broke the deal they had to give the other $15,000.

In a further acknowledgement of the growing awareness of the problem, he described a successful website, stikk.com, where individuals can take contracts out on themselves.

“You can sign up to, say write a novel, and give them $500 on your credit card, and if you fail they can give that money to an anti charity or some charity you hate. You lose that money,” he explained.

Delayed Gratification

Fundamental to the problem is that in the modern world the emphasis is on short term rewards, disproportionately over long term goals.

“That means that if you have a goal to write a novel for example, every day you might prefer to play video games because they’re more immediately pleasurable and after all what’s one more day against the long task of writing a book,” he said. “The problem is after a while you have nothing.”

He referred to the issue of climate change as a modern example of short term benefits over long term rewards.

“The long term reward is a planet not cooked to a cinder and the short term is to continue an energy intensive life,” he said.

Mr Akst said a major contributor to a diminished view of long term reward is the speed with which we can now affect action.

“Technology has helped collapse the time between impulse and gratification,” he says noting, however, that research continues to highlight the benefits of delayed gratification.

Children that successfully waited for a longer term reward scored significantly higher on parameters of success than those taking instant rewards.

The latter scored lower and were often linked to alcohol or drug dependency, he said.

The children that delayed gratification pre-occupied themselves with other things.

“The more intelligent you are the more self control you have.”

A transcript of Mr Akst’s talk at Avid Reader is available on Big Ideas: the ABC

We Have Met the Enemy: Self Control in an Age of Excess is published by Scribe Publications