There never has been, and cannot be, a good life without self-control.
—LEO TOLSTOY
Resist the temptation to resist the temptation.
—ADVERTISEMENT INTHE NEW YORKER
In the modern world, self-control buys a good life indeed. Having self-control to spare is rare enough nowadays that the marketplace lavishes huge rewards on society’s scary new self-control elite, those lords of discipline who not only withstood all that boring stuff in graduate school, but keep themselves thin by carefully regulating what they eat after flogging themselves off to the gym at the crack of dawn.
We all know who these people are; they’re the ones who schedule their children’s perfectly calibrated mix of mental and physical exertions with minute-by-minute precision, plotting little Taylor’s path from preschool to Harvard. It’s easy to make fun of them, but these folks don’t seem to be doing badly to me, at least compared to us weak-willed hoi polloi frantically rolling over our credit card balances and ordering the fried cheesecake whenever we see it on a menu. On the contrary, America’s aristocracy of self-control seems ideally adapted to the world in which we find ourselves, blast their steely backbones. It’s as if they got the news ahead of the rest of us—no doubt by waking up earlier—that self-control may well be the most important personal trait of the twenty-first century.
For the rest of us Americans, a people conditioned by the popular belief that suppressing our innermost desires is the surest path to misery, this may come as a bitter pill. Happiness, after all, is often purported to require loosening the bonds of self-control—letting go, giving in, indulging—rather than remaining fearfully in thrall to those terrible inhibitions by which we thwart our own fun.
Yet many people, including, no doubt, many of these self-regulatory superstars, do in fact need to cut loose, for over-control can be as much of a problem as under-control. Science to the rescue: A number of studies have been published lately about hyperopia, or excessive farsightedness—another name for the problem of over-control. Unfortunates thus afflicted apparently yearn to emulate the witty columnist Don Marquis who, after a month of abstention, finally marches up to the bar, explaining: “I’ve conquered that god-damn willpower of mine. Gimme a double scotch.”
Over-control rarely causes the horrible symptoms (neuroses, regret, Freudian slips) that are popularly attributed to it, but there are costs nonetheless. Perhaps the best way to understand them is to imagine that you’ve received a present of some rare and delicious tea, which you naturally save for a special occasion—and save, and save, until finally it goes stale and ends up in the compost. Your exercise in deferred gratification has left you poorer rather than richer. “Wisdom has its excesses,” Montaigne reminds us, “and has no less need of moderation than does folly.”
So we drink bourbon, smoke marijuana, undergo primal scream therapy, ask our lovers to tie us up, all to free ourselves from . . . ourselves. “We long for a holiday from our frontal lobes, a Dionysiac fiesta of sense and impulse,” writes Oliver Sacks, referring to the part of our brains where self-control is said to reside. “That this is a need of our constrained, civilized, hyperfrontal nature has been recognized in every time and culture.”
Committing to Cutting Loose
As you might expect, much of the vast literature on our internal divisions is concerned with how the deliberative self can enforce its will on its frustratingly impulsive sibling—a problem familiar to all of us who’ve tried to lose weight or stop surfing the Internet and get down to work. But a few economists, perhaps in the spirit of Oscar Wilde (“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it”), have taken the opposite tack, arguing that people often make themselves unhappy as a result of under-indulgence.
Tyler Cowen, who posits a “rule-oriented self” and an “impulsive self,” argues that we tend to give the latter short shrift despite all the wonderful things he can do for us. At the very least, Cowen suggests, the two selves ought to cooperate; for example, stimulating the impulsive self may be rational for the rule-oriented self, which is the more future-oriented of the two. The rule-oriented self may understand the value of novelty and surprise and so may work to cultivate opportunities for his impulsive sibling to engage in spontaneous indulgence.
God knows many of us are all too ready to diagnose under-indulgence in ourselves—what better pretext for another beer?—but some people really are over-controlled, and they sometimes put their rational, planning-oriented selves to work in order to commit to their own impulses. The classic method is having a drink. Alcohol is a tried and true disinhibitor, one often consumed in full knowledge of its effects for this very purpose; people willingly “put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains,” as Cassio says in Othello. Soldiers throughout history have been prepared for killing—and dying—with alcohol. In the Spanish Civil War, men serving on firing squads were given generous portions of brandy despite the early morning hour, and during World War II, the French army was provided with large quantities of wine in the brief period before its collapse.
Imbibing isn’t the only way to influence our choices in the direction of cutting loose. Another good technique is to choose rewards that will promote indulgence. There’s a great example in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, when Eliza Doolittle’s ne’er-do-well father, Alfred (the Doolittle in the following passage), explains it all to Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering.
Higgins: I suppose we must give him a fiver.
Pickering: He’ll make a bad use of it, I’m afraid.
Doolittle: Not me, Governor, so help me I won’t. Don’t you be afraid that I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There won’t be a penny of it left by Monday: I’ll have to go to work same as if I’d never had it. It won’t pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think it’s not been throwed away. You couldn’t spend it better.
Higgins: This is irresistible. Let’s give him ten. [He offers two notes to the dustman.]
Doolittle: No, Governor. She wouldn’t have the heart to spend ten; and perhaps I shouldn’t neither. Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.
Along these lines, it’s not unheard of (or irrational) for the conscientious, when they win a contest, to pick the sports car or expensive vacation as a prize instead of cash precisely because they would never allow themselves such a luxury under any other circumstances. Like Alfred Doolittle, these winners fear that if they took the money, they would save it or use it to pay household bills, never experiencing that dream vacation to Bali. It’s a form of commitment against excessive or unwanted prudence (and yes, it does take prudence to ward off too much prudence).
In 2002, marketing professors Ran Kivetz and Itamar Simonson ran a series of fascinating experiments demonstrating this very thing. In one, 124 female travelers were given a hypothetical choice between $85 in cash or a spa package worth just $80. Easy choice, right? Wrong. Forty of the travelers chose the spa package, even though they could have taken the money, bought the same package, and had $5 left over. All the women were asked to explain their choices in writing, and the vast majority of the spa choosers did so in terms of committing themselves to indulgence. A typical answer: “That way I’d have to pamper myself and not spend the money on something like groceries.”
The need to cut loose, paradoxically enough, may account for the enjoyment some people derive from sexual masochism, the practice of which seems to hold special appeal for society’s most self-controlled individuals. Roy Baumeister has suggested that masochism, like alcohol and spirituality, is a way of escaping self-consciousness, of putting down, however briefly, the immense burden of ego that so many of us bear in the modern world. If you like to be handcuffed and spanked, in this view, well, then maybe Atlas just needs a break.
Bound for Release
Our friend Odysseus bore just such a burden of ego, and the episode of the Sirens can be seen as a dramatization of his desire both to uphold and break free of his enkrateia, or self-command, which was aimed above all else at returning to his wife and throne. Think of that whole business again in light of the need to cut loose: in a flurry of homoerotic solidarity, our hero orders his men to bind him to the vessel’s giant phallus— its mast, of course, but perhaps also his own patriarchal outlook—lest a pack of treacherously irresistible females seduce him away from his own ethos and dissolve his potency in the vast maternal ocean. Like all alpha males, he enjoys this bondage, which was after all voluntary, and when the Sirens flog him with their songs, he is helpless to succumb or withdraw.
In this scene, Odysseus has to give up his powers for a while in order to retain them, and perhaps something similar is at work in garden-variety sexual masochism. The term covers a bunch of risqué practices, but what most of them have in common is that they dramatize the desire to lose control. Getting your lover to tie you up, in particular, implies enacting a certain commitment to cutting loose, since the helpless “victim” can’t very well resist.
But in asking to be constrained against the harmful impulses that lie ahead, those who “submit” to bondage differ from Odysseus in that the unwanted impulses beckon not to some fatal ecstasy but to the dreaded mantle of propriety. For the over-controlled, bondage thus represents a form of freedom, and “slavery” a way of enlisting for the guilty pleasure that is the masochist’s true preference. The notion that bondage could equal freedom sounds Orwellian but makes sense if you bear in mind a single crucial fact: those who want to be subjugated in this way have asked for it. Even the most ardent embracers of sadomasochistic sex emphasize that the practice must be consensual. The masochist, like Odysseus, is bound at his own request by people who are in some sense his subordinates inasmuch as they carry out his wishes.
In the case of Odysseus there is a temporary but genuine transfer of authority—while those Sirens are singing, our hero’s demands for freedom are not to be obeyed. The average masochist, by contrast, hands off only a sham kind of power, remaining in control throughout by means of such measures as a previously agreed on “safeword” whose utterance will bring the proceedings screeching to a halt. Bondage, in other words, is not a truly binding form of commitment; yet like the flimsy-seeming constraints we place on ourselves in other walks of life, it may be just binding enough for the masochist, who remains, as the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin has observed, “the hidden director of the experience.”
The strange dynamic of S and M was dramatized quite vividly nearly three hundred years ago by John Cleland in the novel Fanny Hill, when Fanny’s client Barville pays her to give him a ritualized flogging. First he puts on “some little show of reluctance, for form’s sake,” after which his own garters are used as “ceremonial” bonds to tie him down for a flogging. Fanny describes Barville as “enslaved to such a taste,” which seems to fill him with self-loathing, and, in fact, psychologists consider sexual masochism, like sexual sadism, to be an illness if it causes distress or impairment.
In all likelihood, the recent mainstreaming of S and M will gradually diminish the stigma its adherents have felt. Nowadays S and M themes crop up regularly in popular culture; bondage-wear has influenced fashion, for example, as is obvious from a glance at the expensive leather women’s shoes advertised in the New York Times. In the real world, masochism may be too harmless, too widespread—even too normal—to be considered truly pathological. Research (however dubious) indicates that around 5 to 10 percent of Americans engage in S and M play, and no doubt many more have such fantasies.
What’s interesting, for students of self-control, is who these people are and what it is they like. Most seem to prefer the submissive, or masochist’s, role—which is in keeping with the idea that modern life makes this especially appealing. Successful, individualistic people prefer this role especially, and, in fact, sexual masochism is found mainly in successful, individualistic societies—in other words, in the West. While most sexual practices are as old as, well, sex, masochism apparently emerged only in the period from 1500 to 1800, a time when individuality flourished.
In his Confessions, first published late in the eighteenth century, Rousseau frankly confesses a lifelong desire to be spanked and dominated by women. “To fall on my knees before a masterful mistress, to obey her commands, to have to beg for her forgiveness, have been to me the most delicate of pleasures,” he reports in both embarrassment and relief, explaining, “It is the ridiculous and the shameful, not one’s criminal actions, that it is hardest to confess.”
All this said, it’s perhaps not surprising that men apparently like S and M more than women do, and their prevailing taste for submission, given traditional sex roles and the difference in physical size between men and women, looks a lot like willful gender reversal. For men, it seems, sexual submission is a chance to play at abdicating control over themselves and those around them.
There is also evidence that this is a taste of powerful men—men like Max Mosley, the former British overseer of grand prix motor racing, who, while he was president of the Formula One governing body, made headlines after he was videotaped in a sadomasochistic sex scene. According to the New York Times, Mosley was bound naked and lashed more than twenty times on camera. He might have consoled himself after the scandal with the knowledge that his masochistic tendencies were more embarrassing than rare, especially for men of his social class. Roy Baumeister reports that prostitutes get most of their masochistic requests from rich and powerful men; one study found that call girls in Washington, D.C., were asked for quite a bit of S and M—and that requests for M outnumbered the opposite eight to one. “The bigger the burden of the ego,” Baumeister writes, “the more likely people seem to be to turn to masochism.”
Surely part of its appeal is that the masochist remains, ultimately, in charge, although there are ways for him to commit to his own subjugation for a period longer than he may later prefer. Even mainstream retailers, such as Cartier, for example, sell jewelry that cannot be removed without a tool or key—on the premise, I assume, that the means of release will be given to one’s lover, who will at times be absent or unavailable or even, potentially, uncooperative.
Chastity belts carry this idea further. If the belt makers are to be believed—and their numbers evidently have been increasing—sales of these devices have been on an upward trajectory for the past decade or so, thanks perhaps to the Internet, where anybody can find anything without a lot of embarrassment. The more expensive devices boast of being inescapable without a key, which presumably is never in the wearer’s possession. This suggests something like the temporary (and temporarily irrevocable) transfer of authority carried out by Odysseus when faced with the Sirens. Speaking of sirens, you can now buy serious chastity devices made of high-tech plastic guaranteed not to set off airport security alarms.
“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”
So said Henry James. Unfortunately there are no patients rights organizations for the victims of excessive farsightedness, no fund-raising 5K runs or colored wristbands, or emotionally greedy magazine ads from which the cautious eyes of the excessively prudent stare out at us, pleading mutely for rescue. No, the tragic plight of these quiet victims of virtue is ignored by virtually everyone—everyone except the novelists.
Novelists love the subject. Remember Macon Leary, in The Accidental Tourist, who travels with a flask of sherry in case of a sleepless night? The trouble, for a guy like Leary, is when to use it: “He’s gone on saving it for some occasion even worse than whatever the current one was, something that never quite arrived . . . In fact its metal lid had grown rusty inside, as he discovered when he unscrewed it.” Until the selfless Leary finally makes like a Saint Bernard—he opens the flask for a stranger who is terrified of flying—his hoarding of this emergency hooch looks like an example of what one economist calls “the paradox of the indefinitely postponed splurge.”
Novels weren’t always this concerned with over-control. In the nineteenth century, women such as Hester Prynne, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary paid dearly for their inability to resist temptation— but so did such unfortunate men as R. R. Raskolnikov, whose terrible crime led inexorably to punishment; Michael Henchard, the alcoholic mayor of Casterbridge who was excess personified; and hapless George Hurstwood, the embezzler who came to such a bad end even as Sister Carrie was bound for stardom. Then there was McTeague, in which immoderate temper and greed claim the lives of men and women alike.
Robert Louis Stevenson gives us perhaps the frankest and most sophisticated treatment of this theme in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a wonderfully complex metaphor for the interaction of self-command, addiction, and technology, all in the ethically murky context of Victorian London. The good Dr. Jekyll, eager to taste the forbidden fruit growing on the foggy streets all around him, first needs to invent a potion in order to cut loose. Then he needs a potion to regain control of himself— a potion that grows less and less effective in the face of his habitual indulgence of Mr. Hyde. Jekyll learns to his rue that we can’t separate ourselves from our sins—and, for that matter, that when our planning selves work with our impulsive selves, they can make quite a morally dangerous duo.
At some point, though, the emphasis seems to have shifted from the wages of sin to the high price of suppression. Lambert Strether (in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, published just a few years after Sister Carrie and McTeague) and George Babbitt (the eponymous character in the 1922 novel by Sinclair Lewis) suffered the sharp pain of regret for their inhibitions. And what could be sadder, in a more recent example, than the pathetic butler Stevens, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, who is so repressed that he can’t even tell, until years after the fact, that he’s been in love?
The need for the uptight to cut loose is a stock plot element in Hollywood as well. In The Philadelphia Story (1940), Katharine Hepburn is Tracy Lord, a Main Line heiress whose ex-husband (Cary Grant) is a drunken, wife-abusing lout and whose father jeopardizes the family’s reputation with his scandalous womanizing. Both men naturally assail Lord as an icy and unforgiving prig; her father even seems to blame her for his own transgressions. In fact, she is just the kind of accomplished, self-respecting, independent-minded person anyone ought to admire, except perhaps for her taste in men. But in the film, Lord achieves true personhood only by getting herself stinking drunk. The cutting-loose theme has been especially prevalent in romances and buddy films; Leo Bloom even offers an extenuating version to the judge in his courtroom speech at the end of The Producers (1968) as part of an effort to win leniency for the incorrigible Max Bialystock.
Yet in real life, the costs of repression are often dubious. Who knows what regrets Lambert Strether might have had from leading a more devil-may-care life? Exercising self-restraint can be depleting, yet it can also be ennobling, as it might have been for Newland Archer, who gives up his great love in order to stay with his pregnant wife in The Age of Innocence. Today we see mainly the cost of Archer’s restraint and the sticky power of the social web that held him—without much valuing the benefits of these things to his children, his community, or even to Archer himself.
This brave new emphasis on cutting loose is reflected across the arts in the very shape of new works, which in the twentieth century were constrained by fewer of the formal requirements that once prevailed in, say, poetry and painting. Jon Elster, who wrestles with self-constraint and its advantages in such books as Ulysses Unbound, cites Henri Peyre’s observation that “after a long century of individualism, many of our contemporaries seem to be overweighted by their absolute artistic freedom which has rendered any revolt insipid.”
In the commercial arts, on the other hand, form seems to be everything. Hollywood movies are as formulaic as medieval religious painting, yet those oppressed by the constant exertion of self-control can find vicarious release in what Peter Stearns has called a “fantasy culture of excess.” An example: the garish spectacle of professional football, in which players rage, exult, attack one another, and embrace teammates freely. Other popular compensating outlets might include rap music (for white middle-class boys), or TV shows such as Family Guy or Married with Children, in which people are blatantly awful or lacking in self-control. As one of Aristotle’s dreary temperate men, I always get a kick out of Homer Simpson; when he makes himself his famous moon waffles (caramels, batter, and liquid smoke cooked on a waffle iron, then wrapped around a stick of butter and eaten burrito-style), I know that in some sense he’s eating them for us.
Collective Hyperopia
Not surprisingly, hyperopia can afflict groups as well as individuals. Freud speculated that the Jews might have a hyperactive superego, and the historian Jerry Z. Muller, who is learned in Jewish tradition and intellectual history, once told me that “the Jews are a people of self-restraint.” What better system of precommitment than Jewish law?
But it’s hard to pin hyperopia on this particular tribe, much as Philip Roth has tried. On the contrary, the Jews’ success in the modern world may well be the result of their extraordinary tradition of self-control, a tradition in which Freud (and many of his Jewish patients) fully participated. American Jews drink less, get more education, achieve greater affluence, and engage in less violence than other groups. There is a stereotype—of the New York Jew, for instance—that Jews can be impatient, but if that’s true, it’s only in the service of a longer-range plan. (Perhaps, like the Puritans, they have bigger fish to fry.) Anyway, I suspect that Jewish impatience, like so many stereotypes, is a canard; who on earth is more patient than a people still waiting for the Messiah, after all this time and all this trouble?
China, on the other hand, may be an example of an entire country beset by hyperopia—possibly as the result of national policy. The profitable counterweight to America’s frenzied, present-oriented over-consumption in recent years has been China’s determined delay of gratification, the better to invest in the factories and equipment needed to produce the exports America wanted—and to fund those exports with Chinese loans, in the form of Treasury securities. The Chinese savings rate was so high that, by using their mountains of dollars to bid up Treasuries, the Chinese helped suppress U.S. interest rates, which in turn fueled the bubble that led to the boom that ultimately went pop. Everyone—including the Chinese—probably would have been better off if people over there had saved less and consumed more.
But can we really characterize whole cultures with respect to their ability to defer gratification? Are some societies more future-oriented than others? In the course of a multiyear study of seventeen thousand middle managers in sixty-one societies, business scholar Mansour Javidan tried to find out. He discovered that when it comes to delaying gratification, investing, and planning, cultures differ widely. He found that Singapore was the most future-oriented, followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands, Malaysia, and Austria. Japan also did pretty well. Russia was the biggest loser, followed by Argentina, Poland, Colombia, and Venezuela. The United States did quite well, given that size and diversity were not otherwise correlated with a high score. It was futureoriented all right, but not enough to be described (as Singapore could be) as hyperopic.