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I think in a lot of cases, it’s a set of cultural norms that drive all three.
First of all, most high achievement societies tend to have a culture of hard work and value their high achieving people. When society promotes things like learning science and maths and building things and creating new businesses and so on obviously everyone seeks status and they want to learn, invent and build as well. When high status people like good art, then artists arise to create it. And even in behavior, when high status people choose to not associate with vulgar ideas, fashions, music and art, it becomes unfashionable to like that stuff as well.
Second, most high achievement societies tend to not mollycoddle failure as much as we do. If you aren’t trying to make it, the rest of us aren’t going to do it for you. If you want it you work for it. Modern society just doesn’t do this anymore, in fact quite the opposite— we pay quite handsomely for lack of effort and doing horrifically self destructive things and making terrible life decisions. A guy who does drugs and plays video games all day won’t miss a meal. If you have six different baby-daddies, you still get lots of help from the rest of us to live life.
Third, there’s a lot more effort put into keeping the marketplace of ideas free from promoting bad memes. Up until the 1990s, TV and movies were much more reluctant to make positive role models of people doing stupid things. You wouldn’t find heroines who had sex with random men. You wouldn’t see heroes doing drugs.
This was true during the Hays Code era. Not sure it was really true in the 90s. You already had things like heroines cheating on their fiances with random bums (Titanic), heroes marrying single mom strippers (Independence Day), heroes marrying girls who friendzoned them for decades until they were rich and famous (Forrest Gump), etc. Those are all pretty stupid decisions.
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I think you’re hitting the nail pretty much on the head.
Interestingly, just today I was writing some notes on the importance of pressure in making us humans get things done and become better people.
As context, I’m currently doing a STEM PhD. I’m one of the people who has always been smart enough to have my intelligence make up for poor work habits. That is, right up until now when the demands of my program have become challenging enough that I need to develop my work habits at a much higher level to keep afloat.
Meanwhile I’m advising a bunch of undergraduates on their big year long final project. Maybe 5% of them have good work habits, usually the more anxious and detail oriented types. The rest don’t get started on time, miss important meetings, don’t tend to read simple instructions, etc.
I’m chatting with the professor today, and he’s laughing, telling us about the methods he uses to make the students feel “pain”, get “nervous”, put them under “pressure”. He tells us his catchphrase is “you’re never early when doing a project like this. You’re always late. You need to catch up!” And his demeanor really got me thinking.
Personally, I had a realization that in order to execute my longer term projects I needed to place pressure on myself from the get go. Positive motivations are nice, but they don’t get you out of bed in the same way as pressure does. The panic monster needs to be on my shoulder, and be there, at least in a small way, from the get go. I’m a very relaxed person, I was raised in a very lenient household, and I grew up thinking this kind of pressure was bad. But I increasingly think I’ve been wrong.. in moderation, this pressure is truly good, it’s formative. And that golden mean of moderation in pressure may be much further to the harsher side than our culture currently appreciates.
Our culture has really devalued using pressure to shape people. We look at the Chinese kids being forced to study and exercise for all their waking hours and say.. not us!
But perhaps if not fully to that extreme, we’d do better to go further in that direction.
I’ve come to think of a human being as a system which is shaped by pressures. Long ago this system was shaped… by hunger, by social pressures… into hunters, and farmers, and blacksmiths, and soldiers. But modern society has seen the removal of a great number pressures. And like a body without the influence of gravity, I believe that the system suffers without these.
And going back to your point about status and what society values… if we in the society do not have pressure placed upon us to become better, to do hard things, to face larger and larger challenges, we end up mostly content to just exist. Without an upward force society stagnates. Because in the end, solving problems in the real world tends to be highly challenging and requires hard won expertise.
I agree with this. I’ve long suspected that “pressure” as you call it is necessary in the right doses to bring about what we call maturity. In other words, if you took a child and remove all negative feedback from his life (which were often doing in the name of “mental health”) you short circuit the feedback mechanisms that teach kids to handle adversity in healthy ways, and furthermore, you stunt their ability to mature. What you’d end up with is a human with a mature body but a mind that’s much less mature. I would probably estimate that the median 18 year old kid would be about as mature as a 19th century 12 year old. A 24 year old adult often thinks and acts with the maturity of a 16 or 18 year old.
I’m also fairly convinced that social pressure can and does move society in positive directions. And in that regard shame is a perfectly legitimate thing to use to enforce good behavior and punish bad behavior in the wider culture. At the same time acclaiming the people who are doing great things can often inspire other people to try. I want my kids to build the future, so obviously one way to go about that is to praise great scientific minds, great inventions, and try to make kids want to build and invent. Our heroes are celebrities. There are lots of books about Taylor Swift but not many about Richard Feynman or Elon Musk or the like.
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If all our pressure is of the negative kind, then it results in stress, hopelessness, depression, poor sleep, etc. Ideally, we find competition to be both fun and rewarding. Human beings are largely "anti-fragile", but some of us are more anti-fragile than others. I'm extremely harsh with myself, but I have a friend that I'm helping pass university, and I simply cannot help her by applying pressure, it only makes her weak, doubtful of herself, and prone to giving up.
You can cultivate anti-fragility in people, but it's hard to tell what it's made of exactly. Core beliefs, past successes, pride, hormones, masochism, strong drives? What kind of people play video games on hard mode and enjoy it, and how can we make sure that we get more of this type than of the victim-mentality type?
I know some people who broke because of stress, and it's unlikely they will ever be able to work again. Meanwhile, I'd put myself in danger if I did not push myself.
"I'm extremely harsh with myself, but I have a friend that I'm helping pass university, and I simply cannot help her by applying pressure, it only makes her weak, doubtful of herself, and prone to giving up."
Are you trying to sleep with this friend?
I have a girlfriend already, I still like helping people. I don't want to see people procrastinate so much that it fucks up their future, so seeing a better outcome unfold is enough reward for me. It's like cleaning your house so that you can endure looking at it, except you're removing bad futures/possibilities, rather than trash
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