How The Study of Timeless Ideas Can Prevent the Worst

It's easy to criticize what we dislike, yet we struggle to articulate the factors that promote individual well-being and societal flourishing.

In January, we launched Mindset Shifts U. At the six-month point, we have covered Meditations and Mans Search for Meaning. We are currently working with Bonds That Make Us Free. In September, we will begin our study of The Road to Serfdom, with more to come in 2025.

In the morning, we might experience a sense of emptiness or unease. Without hesitation, we instinctively relieve our existential discomfort. We might grab our phone. Some part of our mind feels content when given something to react to. On average, we check our phones 44 times a day.

By studying Man's Search for Meaning, we discovered the reasons for our existential void and ways to create more meaning in life. 

Still, the world is in a state of turmoil. It is possible, and even probable, that we will experience a financial collapse in the next few years. The danger of a world war, potentially destroying civilization as we know it, is a graver threat.

It's easy to criticize what we dislike, yet we struggle to articulate the factors that promote individual well-being and societal flourishing. There is a tendency to think we understand, but we are confronted with the illusion of knowledge when we try to explain our ideas.

We clamor to elect our favored politicians who are likely to blame others for problems and implement counterproductive authoritarian policies that will, in turn, exasperate our problems.

Not only do we not understand the conditions for humanity to flourish, but we also don’t understand the conditions that increase our chances of making meaning in our lives and experiencing happiness.

So, at Mindset Shifts U, we read the ideas of great thinkers. It’s time to get serious about doing our part to prevent the worst that may engulf us all.

In 1867, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In that address, “Progress of Culture,” Emerson explained, "Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.”

Do thoughts rule the world?

Is Emerson engaging in magical thinking? Do I sound naïve in believing we can play a part in mitigating strengthening illiberal forces?

The real magical thinking, Marcus Aurelius would tell us, is pretending we are mindless and have no power of choice. Magical thinking tells us that a few powerful men and women determine history, and we are merely puppets. Magical thinking convinces us that other people and circumstances determine what we feel. The “news” feeds magical thinking every day, shaping our thoughts, keeping us passive, fearful, and angry. People under the spell of magical thinking are easily manipulated.

Many of us feel our country is in for challenging times, upsetting life as we know it. We expect events to drive the social mood and cause societal change. This outside-in perspective keeps us passive and focused on the external. The libertarian financial analyst Robert Prechter Jr. proposed an inside-out perspective that challenges the conventional view of cause and effect.

In his book The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and the New Science of Socionomics, Prechter explores the hypothesis that endogenous mass psychology—the prevailing social mood—governs events. Prechter theorizes that “the character of social action, including the economic, political and cultural” is determined by prevailing “trends and extent” of social moods.

Don’t underestimate, Prechter advises, “the [power of the] sum of people’s shared impulses,” to overwhelm “the power of logical yet often conflicting entreaties from various individuals.”

Writing in 1992, Prechter contrasted widely held societal beliefs during bull and bear stock markets.  Bull markets are associated with societal beliefs characterized by “a perceived brotherhood of men and nations…at a peak, it’s all ‘we’; everyone is a potential friend.”

It follows that in bull markets, we see others as individuals whose humanity is as real as our own; a mindset that, in the words of C. Terry Warner, respects others’ “hopes and needs as we do our own.”

Contrast that with the social mood associated with major bear markets. Prechter observed that, especially near a stock market bottom, the societal belief is that “everyone is a potential enemy.”

Prechter pointed out, “Major bear markets are accompanied by a reduction in the size of people’s unit of allegiance, the group that they considered to be like themselves…When times are bad, intolerance for differences grows, and people build walls and fences to shut out those perceived to be different.”

Already in the 1990s, Prechter warned, “The coming trend of negative social psychology will be characterized primarily by polarization between and among various perceived groups, whether political, ideological, religious, geographical, racial or economic.”  He added,

The result will be a net trend towards anger, fear, intolerance, disagreement and exclusion, as opposed to the bull market years, whose net trend has been towards benevolence, confidence, tolerance, agreement and inclusion. Such a sentiment change typically brings conflict in many forms, and evidence of it will be visible in all types of social organizations.

How bad might things get? At the bottom of the next great bear market, the possibilities Prechter anticipated thirty years ago included even the dissolution of the United States. Today’s conflicts will seem almost benign in comparison.

Prechter puts it this way: “In a crowd, the balanced consideration that is the hallmark of reason is abandoned to a selective focus that reflects the dictates of the mass emotional imperative.”

But humans also have the power to change their minds. Waves of endogenous mass psychology can never stomp out our innate power of choice.

Of course, in Bonds That Make Us Free, Warner rightfully says nothing about bull and bear markets. He observes our power of agency to see our common humanity with others.

Warner cautions that when we are blind to our common humanity, we see our fellow human beings as "objects existing primarily for our use," and thus, our caring for others diminishes.

When care for others diminishes, Viktor Frankl warned in Man’s Search For Meaning, we undermine a valuable source for making meaning in our own lives. Without meaning in our lives, we are more likely to conform and march to the beat of tyrants.

The thoughts we choose to live by shape our experience and the experiences of people around us.

We can never lose the power of choice to live by, in Warner’s terminology, an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” mindset.

In his earlier 1841 essay “Circles,” Emerson was already looking to the primacy of thought: “The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”

The founder of the Foundation of Economic Education, Leonard Read was heavily influenced by Emerson. In his book, The Coming Aristocracy, Read wrote we are powerless to reform others:

When we concern ourselves with the plight of humanity, particularly with the shortcomings of others that bear unfavorably on our own opportunities to live and advance, it behooves us to find out what we can and cannot do about enlightening them. It is agreed, I hope, that we are powerless to reform them, to make them over in our images. Once we recognize this limitation, we can, if we so will it, begin to realize our potentialities.

Like Emerson, Read saw that we can change ourselves:   

And what, pray tell, is the single tactic within our power? We can increase our own light which, if bright enough, will, on occasion, attract another to it. For it is light that brings forth the eye, that whets the spirit of inquiry, that stimulates the desire to know, that draws forth, arouses latent capacity.

Yes, mighty illiberal trends are ascending.

Yes, humans herd and create collective waves of social behavior.

Only with hubris would we claim to be unaffected by negative waves of human psychology. If caught up in the herd, we may behave as badly as others.

Holly MathNerd

put it this way in a recent essay:

The most dangerous of all fools is the one who can tell himself, in advance, that he is different. He is uniquely capable of controlling both his animal instincts and the consequences of giving in to them. He is capable of serving as judge, jury, and punisher, and this hubris will never rebound and cost him anything. And certainly not everything!

Sweet Summer Children

Spending hours being manipulated is a way to avoid responsibility. Still, we can use our time to increase the likelihood of making moral choices consistent with liberty when confronted with difficulties.

So, at Mindset Shifts U, we work with perennial wisdom—to help us make choices that enable ourselves, our families, our institutions, and thus humanity to flourish.

We can train our minds to resist the call of the tribal herd. Our families and communities depend on us.

In September, we will begin our work with F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. If you say we are almost at metaphorical serfdom, I won’t disagree. But nearly there is not the same as being there. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom as a warning to help prevent the worst.

In his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” Emerson wrote, “We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.”

There is truth waiting to be learned. If enough of us open a passage to its beams, we can prevent the worst.

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The content in these essays and at Mindset Shift U can change how you experience life. While others descend into mindless rage, you can be a force for goodness.

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