Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. Her latest book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Rebecca Goldstein discuss why humans have an instinct to matter beyond mere survival, the different approaches people use to feel significant, and whether the desire to matter is a psychological flaw we should overcome or an essential part of human dignity.
We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.
That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.
This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I look forward to talking about some of the broader themes of your considerable work.
But let’s start with your latest, which is about something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. I think it’s hard to think in a systematic way, and you do in the book. It’s about the “mattering instinct.” It’s about the fact that it’s so important to most human beings to matter, to have an impact on the world in some kind of way, and how to think about that. To start with the first question, this is one of those things human beings just like to do. It’s like looking at the sea or looking into the distance, and it just is part of what human life is. So we don’t often question why that is the case. Why is it, do you think, that human beings have, not every single one, but most of us, this deep need to matter? Why aren’t we content just having a good life and having some fun? Enjoying our time on Earth, and who cares about this weird thing called mattering?
Rebecca Goldstein: The way I explain what mattering is begins with the concept itself, which is interesting, and with the fact that, at least in English, we derive it from the noun matter, the stuff of the universe.
There are interesting ideas here in the relationship between the noun and the verb. We have this capacity to step outside of ourselves and interrogate ourselves. That comes from our very large brains and from our capacity for self-reflection. It doesn’t take much self-reflection to realize that we pay a tremendous amount of attention to ourselves. We can’t help it. To pursue our lives, we have to give ourselves a tremendous amount of attention. Neuroscientists call this the “default mode network,” where you’re not paying attention to anything outside, to the environment. What are you thinking about then? Yourself. You’re fantasizing about yourself and thinking about your past and your future.
There is a good reason why we do this. It goes all the way back to the supreme law of physics : the second law of thermodynamics. All living creatures have to put their own thriving and flourishing first, using their energy to push back against entropy. But because we have this capacity for self-reflection, we can step outside and say: if mattering means being deserving of attention, and if we assess how much something matters by how much attention we give it, then we must think that we are the thing that matters most in the universe. Short of lunacy, none of us think this. We realize that we are not the thing that matters most in the universe.
That realization creates a kind of unease, an existential unease, as we try to make the amount of attention we are forced to give ourselves more commensurable with how much we really matter. And so we try to matter.
Mounk: Let’s dive into this distinction between all other animals and humans. It’s obvious why animals want to eat and survive moment to moment. That’s relatively straightforward.
There’s a slightly more complicated explanation for why we tend to prioritize things that let us pass down our genes, but that still has a relatively straightforward explanation in evolutionary biology. Over many generations, every species has been selected to prioritize having offspring that are genetically related to them, because individuals who didn’t have those instincts didn’t pass on their genes and tended to die out over time. That part is straightforward.
What’s interesting about the mattering instinct that human beings tend to have is that it’s often not obvious that it gives us evolutionary advantages. I’m sure some evolutionary biologist will come up with a story about why this has evolutionary roots, but it seems much less obvious. There are many individuals who willingly participate in wars in which they’re likely to die because they think what matters to them is belonging to a nation and fighting for its grandeur. There are people who go on suicide missions because they believe it will allow their names to live on in glory as martyrs after they die.
There are all kinds of behaviors we engage in that are detrimental to our immediate, basic interests, like survival, and that probably make it less likely that we go on to have offspring. Yet some individuals are so driven by this overriding need to make a mark on the world that they engage in these behaviors anyway. That seems like a much bigger puzzle.
Goldstein: It is a big puzzle. I call it the mattering instinct, but it is not really an instinct. As you’ve pointed out, it doesn’t necessarily have adaptive value. Instead, it’s the result of two different instincts, both of which we can explain in terms of adaptive value.
One is self-mattering, which is built into every living thing. Every organism puts its own flourishing and survival before everything else. That is the organizing principle of all instincts. It’s deeper than any particular instinct.
The other is an adaptation that humans alone have developed: the ability to step outside of ourselves, to look at ourselves, and to interrogate ourselves. This grows out of what psychologists call theory of mind, our capacity to understand others, which clearly has adaptive value.
That capacity is especially important for creatures as gregarious and altricial as we are. We are altricial, meaning we are dependent on others for a very long time. Our big brains take decades to fully develop, into our early twenties. As a result, we rely on caretakers and on others for an unusually long period.
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Because of that, we develop a highly sophisticated theory of mind for understanding others. We can then turn that capacity inward, engaging in self-reflection and self-interrogation. We look at how much we matter to ourselves, at the self-mattering built into us as living systems, and we ask whether we are really deserving of that attention.
From there, we try to find ways to justify it. As you’ve noted, some people channel this longing to matter into making an impact on the world, into changing it. Steve Jobs famously said that you should live in a way that makes a dent in the universe. But there are many other ways in which the mattering instinct is addressed.
Mounk: So you have a classification of four kinds of ways. Obviously, there are some that don’t fit neatly into one category, but it’s a helpful classification of four ways in which most humans try to matter, and some people are much more attracted to one of those categories than to the others. What are those four?
Goldstein: I have to say, ever since I started thinking about this more than four decades ago, I’ve been talking to people about it. If you sit next to me on a bus, sooner or later I’m going to start talking to you about your own sense of mattering and how you try to appease it. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t know what I’m talking about or who doesn’t have an answer that fits, one way or another, into these four strategies. Like all empirical hypotheses, it’s open to falsification, but so far, this is what I’ve found.
So the four types are the following. There’s transcendent mattering, social mattering, heroic mattering, and competitive mattering. What I’ve found is that most people have aspects of all of these in themselves, but one tends to predominate in a given individual.
Transcendent mattering is a religious or spiritual response to the longing to matter. It involves a leap of faith in a transcendent presence who the believer believes purposefully created them. That produces a very strong sense of mattering, this transcendent or spiritual notion of mattering. It’s the idea that you were purposefully created by the greatest being that exists and that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. That is a very strong sense of mattering.
Mounk: I want to get into more detail about each of these buckets, and about the pros and cons of each way of trying to matter, and whether there’s an objectively best one. But before I do that, I want to ask a more basic question. Is this whole thing just a mistake?
There are philosophical traditions that try to reconcile us to our objective insignificance. Most human beings are not going to matter, certainly not in the sense that some of these categories aim for, like the total transformation of the world. But perhaps not even in the other senses. The Stoics, for example, want us to play our social roles in the world, but to be indifferent to our standing in it. We are bit players doing our part, and we shouldn’t indulge vain fantasies about how much we matter.
There are also religious traditions that teach us to let go of this individualistic urge to make a mark on the world. Some suggest that this is actually what allows us to become happier. Jonathan Rauch has been on the podcast a number of times, and in one of my favorite conversations with him we talked about his book The Happiness Curve. It shows that people are least happy in middle age. Perhaps that’s when people are most intensely trying to make a mark on the world, desperately trying to have an impact, while starting to realize it’s not going to be the impact they hoped for.
People tend to become happier again in older age, even as they develop health problems and face other difficulties. Reflecting back on that conversation, one possible reason is that this is the stage of life when people reconcile themselves to the fact that they don’t matter to the world as deeply as they imagined at twenty-five, or as they may have desperately clung to at forty-five.
So is the real advice simply to get over this strange quirk in our psychology? Or do you think that mattering, and the desire to matter, is actually a positive thing that, if approached in the right way, we should embrace and hold on to?
Goldstein: I don’t understand it as synonymous with making a mark in the world or with grandiose plans. I think it’s something much broader, and it takes in many different types of people. Not everybody wants to make a mark in the world, but everybody wants to feel that they have somehow earned the attention that they pay to themselves, and that they have to pay to themselves, and their commitment to their own life.
I’ve spoken to people who are severely depressed, and what they say is, I don’t matter. I might as well not have shown up for my existence at all. I am nothing. Nobody wants to feel like that. Most of us are not heroic strivers. That’s one way of trying to appease the longing to matter. But it might be through one’s beliefs, it might be through one’s religious beliefs, it might be through one’s social connections. There are many different ways.
To feel that there is nothing truly worthy about oneself while one is so obsessively and incessantly focused on oneself is unbearable. Even the yogi meditating on top of a mountaintop is committed to his life. He’s trying to get past his ego, and that is what I call his mattering project. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline and rigor. But it’s not going to help him in his life to find out that the next yogi on the other mountaintop has gotten past his ego. It’s our own life that we’re committed to and trying to do something with.
This can go very, very wrong, the mattering instinct. But I also think there’s something quite beautiful about it, and it actually reconciles me to my species, at a time when I often feel the need for reconciliation. We’re engaged in some pretty horrible things right now, many of them motivated by the longing to matter, which can go badly awry.
But when we talk about intrinsic human dignity, I think what we’re gesturing toward, very vaguely, is this need to justify ourselves in our own eyes. It really has to do with being able to live with ourselves, given how obsessed we are with ourselves. It’s what makes us the value-seeking creatures that we are. That can go very wrong. But the mere fact that we want to justify ourselves to ourselves is something rather good. It’s not primarily about justifying ourselves to others. That may come into play, depending on the individual, but that’s not what I mean by the mattering instinct.
Mounk: So let me try to reframe the question, amend it to a perhaps subtler hypothesis. One way of saying this is that perhaps we are consumed by this need to matter. I think this is the way in which some moral traditions put it. And we should just recognize that we don’t matter in any significant way, and that tranquility and a more sensible life plan lie in that.
Another way of putting it is that there are good and bad ways of trying to matter, ways that are well-adjusted and ways that are ill-adjusted. That’s probably true. Clearly, the person who blows themselves up because they love the idea of seeing themselves in the newspaper is ill-adjusted. The person who tries to matter by invading a neighboring country is ill-adjusted. That’s relatively straightforward.
But does that map onto your four categories or not? Is it too simple to say that competitors are inherently trying to matter in the wrong way? That perhaps heroic strivers, of whom we probably know many, given that we’re in the intellectual world and are writers and so on, are inherently trying to accomplish something that is hugely unlikely to work out, and have gotten the wrong end of the stick?
Is it the transcenders and the socializers, the people who want to root their importance in community, in helping others, in family life, or perhaps in being connected to some larger spiritual, religious, or philosophical tradition, who really have it right? Or is that also too simple? Is it instead true that heroic striving is also good, that it’s how we’ve managed to create some of the great achievements of humanity, and that even though it often goes wrong, it’s also how we got Plato and Aristotle and John Stuart Mill and Martin Luther King, and whoever else you want to include?
So how should we think about what counts as a healthy manifestation of the mattering instinct and what counts as an unhealthy manifestation? It doesn’t feel to me as though you think we should cleanly rule out any one of these categories. But it also doesn’t feel purely descriptive. It does seem as though competitive mattering may be more likely to go wrong than transcendent or social mattering. But perhaps I’m misunderstanding that.
Goldstein: All of them can go wrong. Socializers can go wrong. Maybe I should just very quickly state what I mean by these four. All of them can go very wrong.
The transcendent is a religious or spiritual response. It holds that there is some transcendent being, whether you call it God or not, who created the laws of nature. The sense of the transcenders is that they were intentionally created and that they have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. This is a very large sense of mattering, and nothing else can compare to it. That’s not a reason to argue for it or against it.
Then there are heroic strivers. Heroic strivers have some standard of excellence in mind that they want to achieve. They’re not going after fame. I give many examples and tell a lot of stories in the book, because theory is theoretical. Heroic striving can take the form of intellectual, artistic, athletic, or ethical standards.
I tell the story of one ethical heroic striver. He was an atheist, a very strong atheist, but he was a kind of secular saint. His name was Baba Amte. He was born in India, and he truly had a heroic personality. It was never about trying to impress others. He was trying to reconcile himself to himself. He had very high standards, and he set out to conquer leprosy.
Leprosy has traditionally marked the people who mattered the least. To call somebody a leper is to say they are a complete pariah, going back to ancient times, including in the Bible. He heroically devoted himself to this cause. His story is amazing. He even infected himself with the leprosy bacillus. It turned out he had natural immunity, as most of us do. But he did extraordinary work in India.
When people would call him a saint, he would be very annoyed. For him, it was simply that he had chosen to do something truly heroic. It took an ethical form. He did a tremendous amount of good through his heroic striving. Do I wish he had been different? Of course not. So heroic striving can take many different forms, but it’s hard to be a heroic striver.
Mounk: So let’s stick with the heroic strivers for a moment. How would you gloss this? What do you think is a well-adjusted heroic striver, if there is such a thing, and who is an ill-adjusted heroic striver?
Does this partially depend on the luck of the draw, on whether you end up being successful? If you are single-minded about making an artistic mark, an intellectual mark, or some contribution to the world—curing leprosy, or whatever it is—and it turns out that you’re just not that good, what then? Perhaps you have some local success, but fifty years later people completely forget about you. Or you keep thinking, my first few novels weren’t published, but the fourth novel is going to transform the world. There are so many famous writers who weren’t recognized in their lifetimes, and eventually people are going to recognize my brilliance. And sadly, you’re just deluded about this.
So to what extent does whether a heroic striver has a coherent life plan depend on the happenstance of their talent or the success they find in the world? And to what extent is it a deeper question about how they are leading their life, and how they understand what they are doing?
Goldstein: If you actually think about it, because we’re trying to justify ourselves, we’re taking on this extra burden in being human, and that’s what existential crises are all about.
Most of my life was spent as a professor, and it was sometimes my very unpleasant task to tell a graduate student, I don’t think you have it. I don’t think you’re going to make it in this field. I felt it was my responsibility to do that because otherwise they were in for a lot of frustration, disappointment, and hard work that was going to go nowhere. In that role, I was acting as a mattering adjudicator. Professors have to be mattering adjudicators. Editors are mattering adjudicators.
Not every mattering project that someone undertakes has mattering adjudicators, but it’s a sad fact that some do. In my field, I’m subject to mattering adjudicators. Whether my work gets published or not isn’t up to me.
I tell the story of a friend of mine who was a very, very good musician, a classical guitarist. He had a lot of success. He got into a conservatory, which is very hard to do. But he couldn’t make a career as a professional classical guitarist. That world is extremely difficult. There isn’t much written specifically for classical guitar, and orchestras don’t hire you. You either make it on the concert stage or you end up playing weddings.
After a period of deep depression, he gave up that mattering project. He took a job teaching comparative literature and became a writer. He is still a heroic striver. What I’ve noticed is that if you have that kind of temperament, if you want to prove your mattering to yourself through creativity, and one project doesn’t work out, the hardest thing is knowing when to give it up. Sometimes the right move is to switch to something else that is also creative.
There has to be a kind of flexibility. Sometimes there’s a real mismatch. Sometimes parents want their child to be a heroic striver, and their heart just isn’t in it. That’s not who they are.
Mounk: I think the heroic striver bucket is probably the one most likely to lead to disappointment. My mother is a classical musician. She’s a conductor, and I think she’s had a very fulfilling career. But I once saw a study that I find fascinating, which showed that among skilled professionals, orchestra musicians are some of the least happy people.
I think the reason is related to the story of your friend. You grow up with hopes of becoming a soloist. People fawn over you for the incredible skill and talent you display. To become any kind of professional musician, you have to be extraordinary. Then you don’t quite make it as a soloist, and you become part of a collective. If you play beautifully, nobody really notices. If you make one mistake, you get shouted at, it’s audible, and you feel ashamed. Even if you were drawn to music partly out of love for it, you were also drawn by a heroic striver personality. Day to day, you’re treated as an expendable part of a collective that isn’t individual at all. The gap between those two realities helps explain why orchestra musicians tend to be so unhappy.
Let’s move to another bucket, the competitive one, which I think can go wrong in many ways. With heroic striving, I can see how it can go completely wrong, and I can also see how many of the people we most admire probably fall into that bucket. With the competitive one, it’s easy to see how it goes wrong. You can become consumed by undermining a corporate rival, engaging in intrigue to get them fired. You can become obsessed with resentment toward someone who beat you to a fellowship in high school, carrying a chip on your shoulder and trying to outperform them. You can even see it at the level of nations, where people obsess over injustices inflicted by a neighboring country centuries ago.
So where is the positive side? Is it simply that this competitive streak is also how we build a productive economy, sports, and similar domains? It feels harder to see how the competitive instinct can take a genuinely positive form.
Goldstein: One thing I have to keep reiterating is that we don’t have much choice in how we respond to this shared longing. There are personality types, and I bring up a theory of personality, the Murray–McClelland theory of personality, which fits very well in describing how we respond to this shared longing.
It’s very hard to be competitive, and it’s very hard to be around competitive people. When I start talking to them about their mattering, about whether they think they matter, they sometimes become a little self-conscious. The way they hear the question mirrors how others hear it. Transcenders hear the question as, do I matter to the universe? Was I purposefully created? Socializers hear it as, do I matter to others? Heroic strivers hear it as, am I doing something really worth doing? Am I fulfilling my own ambitions for excellence? Competitors hear it as, do I matter more than others? That’s how they hear the question of mattering. They think of mattering in zero-sum terms. For them to matter, others must matter less. They are always in an adversarial position with others. The one frequent exception is family, because family members are often experienced as extensions of oneself, so the sense of competition is muted.
Donald Trump is a perfect example. He is an extreme competitor. He can be on the side of those who are the fruit of his loins, but everyone else is adversarial. You are either praising him or opposing him. This posture is deeply insecure.
Mounk: Right. It’s a particular form of competitor that takes everything to be a zero-sum battle. I’m sure people who are competitors tend to be more likely to think in zero-sum terms, but I think it’s a particular combination of an extreme competitor and someone who has an extremely zero-sum worldview. It’s not just that I’m competitive and I want to win. It’s that I see every situation as a competition, and I have to win every competition.
Goldstein: I make a distinction between individual competitors and group competitors. Group competitors think, I belong to the group that matters the most, and I’m in an adversarial position with people from other groups, especially if I consider them lesser and if I think they’re gaining on me.
One of the people I profiled is an ex–Nazi skinhead. He has, in fact, become what I would call an ethical heroic striver. His whole life is now about doing penance for his earlier acts of violence. He is actually now Jewish.
Mounk: It seems to be going a little too far. I’m glad for every Nazi who stops being a Nazi. I’m not sure they have to convert to Judaism. Having grown up in Germany and being Jewish, I didn’t meet many Nazis who converted to Judaism, but I did meet many children and grandchildren of senior Nazis who tried to expiate perceived historical guilt by converting to Judaism. There was always something slightly creepy about it.
Goldstein: In any case, he was someone who suffered great deprivation in his childhood, a lack of care and nurturing. He came from a terrible situation. When he met Nazi skinheads who told him, of course you matter. You matter so much more than all these people who are trying to rob you of your mattering. Look in the mirror and you will see how much you matter. You are a white, heterosexual American male. You matter.
Mounk: You still owe me a positive example of a competitor.
Goldstein: Ah, yes, this is someone I’m not going to mention by name. He’s a Nobel laureate in science, somebody I know. A mutual friend who also knows him said to me, this person was happy for all of fifteen minutes in his life when he got that call from Stockholm, and then it dawned on him that others have also gotten the Nobel Prize.
Mounk: That’s not a positive example.
Goldstein: He did good work. From the outside, you would think that he was a heroic striver. He used his great talent, his great intelligence, and his scientific ability to do very good work that, in fact, benefits all of us.
Mounk: The good thing about being a competitor is the positive externalities. Perhaps you want to be the biggest supermarket magnate. The way to do that is to lower prices and be ruthlessly efficient. That might have some negative impacts on the world, but it also allows people to have cheap food that they can have nice dinners with.
I have a story about this, which is secondhand, so I’m going to be careful not to make it obvious who this is. This is someone who is a neighbor, in a college town in the United States, of a prominent academic. They are in a long-running property dispute because this acquaintance of mine is doing renovations on the house, and the prominent neighbor is an incredible stickler for the rules. Every tiny municipal rule that the contractors break in any way immediately earns a long, formal email and complaint.
One day, this acquaintance reads in the news in the morning that the neighbor has won a Nobel Prize. They think this might be a nice opportunity to extend an olive branch and say, look, I know we haven’t always gotten along that well, but congratulations, what a wonderful thing. If you’re in the mood to celebrate, we’re around. We have a bottle of champagne in the fridge. Feel free to drop by.
They get an email back within ten minutes saying, thank you very much for your offer, that’s very kind. By the way, yesterday your contractors did X and Y, followed by a long list of other things the contractors did wrong. Within an hour of getting the Nobel Prize, this person was continuing to point out minor infractions of municipal rules.
Goldstein: We have to work with what we have, our temperaments. Some people are hyper-competitive, but that can change.
My friend, the ex-Nazi skinhead, shows that change is possible. Of all the people I’ve spoken to over these many decades of talking to people about this, he stands out. By the way, this is not the kind of philosophy I was trained to do. I’m trained in philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics, technical work. But when I hit on this topic, I found that it opened the door to the most interesting conversations with other people.
What has impressed me over the years is the sheer diversity of ways people try to respond to this longing. One way or another, everybody is responding to it. Socializers, by the way, are not immune to things going wrong. Mattering to others is not always benign. They, too, have pathological forms.
For example, some people try to matter to others by dominating them. That domination can occur within families. I once spoke to the victim of a love bomber. He completely dominated this young woman’s life for years, then moved on to the next person. She later discovered that her intense love affair had been preceded by another woman, and another. This was a serial love bomber. For him, mattering to others meant dominating them.
I love reading advice columns in newspapers. So much of it is about socializers. Their whole sense of mattering is bound up with relationships, sometimes even with complete strangers. For example, there’s the craving for fame, mattering to a large number of strangers who pay attention to you.
I tell this story about Kevin Bacon, the movie star. He’s constantly swamped by people wanting autographs and selfies, and he became curious about what it would be like to be anonymous. So he put on a prosthetic nose and glasses and went to a very busy mall in Los Angeles. He later said it totally sucked. Nobody came over to say how much they loved him. Nobody paid him any attention at all. He said it was horrible.
Studies have shown that among millennials, the desire for fame can be so strong that people are willing to give up close relationships and romantic relationships for it. That, too, is a form of mattering to others, mattering to a large group of strangers.
Mounk: Do you put that in the bucket of socializers?
Goldstein: Yes, I do, because it’s mattering to others. You’re depending on others.
Mounk: Right. Fame is presumably one way this can go wrong. I imagine there are others. One positive aspect is that an achievable way to matter in the world is to matter to your family, your friends, and the people in your community. That’s one reason I love teaching as part of the portfolio of things I do. In a very straightforward way, you walk into a classroom on an off day and you realize that twenty or fifty or a hundred people are bored. You walk into a classroom when you’re on, and it’s a meaningful intellectual experience, people are learning something, and it feels like you’ve made a difference. Some of the mentorship relationships you have with students are meaningful as well. It’s a concrete answer to how you matter in the world, very different from trying to write texts that might be read years from now.
But there are also many ways in which relationships can go wrong. They can go wrong because you want to dominate others, or because you want to be famous in a Paris-Hilton-type way. Some cases are more extreme. I’m thinking of people with Munchausen by proxy syndrome, where mothers invent illnesses for their children because they want to be seen as heroic caretakers, rescuing a sick child, battling cancer, being indispensable. In some cases, they even persuade the child that the child is deeply ill because it makes the child more reliant on them. These are ways in which trying to matter through socializing can go horribly wrong.
So what should we learn from all of this? These are incredibly insightful points about each of these groups. As an analytical lens, it’s very helpful. It’s going to change how I think about the world. But one question I’m left with is how to make sure, in my own life, that I end up on the aligned rather than the misaligned side of this.
Different listeners will see themselves in different buckets. Some will think of themselves as competitors, others as heroic strivers, transcenders, or socializers. Is the advice different depending on the bucket? Or is there an overarching set of advice you can give? What lessons should we draw from this conversation?
Goldstein: I think there are two questions here. One is how well one’s mattering project is serving oneself. That always needs to be evaluated. Are you flourishing? Are you feeling that your life is going well?
The other concerns our connections with others. As gregarious creatures, we all need those connections. These two things, self-flourishing and connection with others, are the cornerstones of our flourishing. Both can go wrong. If you don’t have deep connections with others, you suffer the sadness of loneliness. But there are also bad ways of trying to respond to this longing to matter.
At that point, we have to bring in ethics. Something can feel wonderful and still be wrong. You might think you’ve invaded Poland and it’s going really well. But you ought not to be doing this. That’s the normative dimension.
We also have a tendency to proselytize. We want to show that what we’re doing isn’t just arbitrary. We want to think this matters because of who I am, because this is my talent, because this is what I do. We want to believe there’s something objective about it. But if it really is objective, then shouldn’t everybody be doing it the same way?
Mounk: On a side note, I think part of it is wanting to justify it, and part of it is projection. I’m not a super competitive person, but if you see the world in deeply competitive terms, it’s very hard to imagine that other people don’t. And if they don’t, they seem like suckers within that value scheme.
Goldstein: Yes, there’s a lot of that too. It’s like we have a whole range of examples. We know the transcenders do this. People ground some metaphysical view of reality and think we’re all living in that reality, so we all ought to be whatever fills in the blank, accepting Jesus as our savior, or something like that.
What I’ve found is that this happens all across what I call the mattering map, which lays out these different ways of responding to the longing to matter. I have scientists who say that discovering the laws of nature is the most important thing we can do, and they wonder why everybody isn’t seeking their mattering through understanding the objective laws of nature.
Then there’s the fashion editor Diana Friedland, who says that if you don’t dress well, you’re nothing. I include bodybuilders who say that people who can’t do a deadlift might as well not have been born. All of these are universalizing claims.
Mounk: This is a side note, but I actually think that this is one of the things that helps humans be reconciled to the world. One of the things that makes certain kinds of high school environments so brutal is that there is a single unified scheme of social regard that everybody roughly agrees on, who’s at the top of it and who’s at the bottom of it. There is one set of attributes that are particularly valued. That is brutal, because if you’re toward the bottom of that hierarchy, low status is imposed on you in an extreme way.
One of the great things about liberal societies, and about pluralistic societies more generally, is that there are many different schemes of valuation. Most people tend to gravitate toward the scheme of valuation that they’re relatively good at. It’s because you’re deeply interested in knitting that you place value in the knitting community. If you’re respected in that community, you can say, I’m one of the most respected knitters in my town, people ask me for advice, and that matters to me. You may not be able to bodybuild, but that doesn’t matter.
By contrast, a bodybuilder might say that knitting is ridiculous and that bodybuilding is what matters. People respect them because they have muscles. The fact that we self-select into schemes of valuation in which we are likely better than we would be at a random selection of activities is one of the things that helps us reconcile ourselves to our place in the world within a pluralistic society.
Goldstein: I’m thinking about a party I once went to when I was at Princeton with a bunch of very high-level scientists. They started talking about high school and how they were bullied. These were top people, and they talked about how they could never get any girls, or any men, if that’s what they wanted. There was a real sense of triumph. Look where we are now. That is true, but it’s also something it would be good to be able to see in all of us.
It’s a practice I go through all the time because I’m appalled by many people, both publicly and privately. I’m always asking myself, how are they trying to prove to themselves that they matter? Seeing the humanity in that and sympathizing with what’s going on has helped me in recent years.
You asked how we can tell what is going right and what is going wrong. My answer comes from the second law of thermodynamics. Life is resistance against disorder. That is the direction all living systems move in. Life is counter-entropic. Entropy means disorder, and more precisely, transformation from within. Every closed physical system moves toward disorder, which is the end of that system’s ability to function. For a system to function, it requires a certain level of order. The more complex the system, the more ways it can go wrong.
Living systems are extremely complex. They are ecosystems. We are constantly taking in energy. What do we do with that energy? We resist entropy. Life itself is resistance. That’s what life is. In general, the things we think of as good goals require order and knowledge. In the book, I explain why that is. This principle will never be falsified by experience. It is genuinely objective. So the way to evaluate how you are living your life is first to ask whether it is working for you. Are you flourishing? Does it feel right?
But you also have to ask how you are relating to entropy. Are you creating more disorder in the world, including in other people’s lives? Are you invading a country? Are you harming the people around you and making them miserable? Or are you on the side of life itself, resisting disorder and moving toward greater order in the world? This aligns with the intuitions we already have: beauty is better than ugliness, love is better than hatred, knowledge is better than ignorance, clarity is better than confusion. All of the things we recognize as better are things that require order.
Mounk: My only worry about this, and I mean it partly as a joke and partly seriously, is that it seems to imply that Switzerland is better than Italy. Of course, as any friend of mine knows, Italy is better than Switzerland.
What falls under this concept of order, and what does not? A lot of what is wonderful in life is spontaneity and things like that, which do entail a certain kind of disorder. I assume you’re talking about a different kind of order, but perhaps you can clarify what kind of order you have in mind.
Goldstein: Yeah, exactly. There are many different values that go into it. In some sense, a dictatorship is more ordered than a democracy. I’m thinking of Plato right now, and he very much disliked democracy because it was so disordered. But Plato was wrong. Democracy is better. Why? Because another thing we have to include in the evaluation is that all humans matter to the same extent.
There are many different ways of evaluating what matters here. It’s complicated. It’s just a sort of gross way of thinking.
It’s the way I think about my evaluations of people. There are certain people I look at and think, they’re on the side of entropy. They are entropy on two legs. They are clogging things up. Other people are just the opposite. So that’s a way of assessing things, but it’s complicated.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Rebecca discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on the human conception of mattering, and Rebecca’s experience as a heroic striver. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
