The Power of Saying No
Edmonds didn’t have to wonder what the right thing to do was; his chosen constraints made the decisions for him.
Our next program at Mindset Shift U is on C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.
A few months ago, I revisited the gallantry of the late Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds.
This month, I had a chance to tell his story again for the American Institute of Economic Research. What follows is a version of that essay with a look back to Seneca’s Moral Letters and Oliver Burkeman’s advice. You might recall that we worked with Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks at Mindset Shifts U. (See the About Time sessions.)
The newest Medal of Honor recipient, the late Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, was honored because he said no.
So much goodness in our lives, including the defense of liberty, begins with saying no.
It was January 1945, the end of the war was months away, and Edmonds was the highest-ranking soldier among 1,292 American prisoners at a German stalag. The camp commandant announced that all Jewish soldiers (there were around 200) were to fall out the next morning. Those who disobeyed would be shot.
Through a sleepless night, Edmonds instructed his men: “We’re not doing that.” All will fall out, the sick, the infirm; all of us will tell the Germans we are Jewish. There will be no breaks in our ranks.
The next morning, the commandant was enraged when all 1,292 soldiers fell out. With a luger pressed to his head, Edmonds told the commandant, “We are all Jews here.” The commandant backed down. Two hundred lives were saved by a no.
In Edmonds’s case, his inspired courage was rooted in his deeply held Christian beliefs and commitment to the Golden Rule. The natural pull towards self-preservation gave way to a higher moral law.
Cicero instructed, “We are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen.”
In his classic book Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi drew on Cicero’s lesson that “accepting limitations is liberating.” Csikszentmihalyi gave as an example “a monogamous marriage,” in which, “regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns.”
Csikszentmihalyi concludes that the benefit of our saying no to seemingly infinite possibilities is that “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”
Edmonds didn’t have to wonder what the right thing to do was; his chosen constraints made the decisions for him. His job was to show up and be the vehicle for a historic no.
Oliver Burkeman generalizes Csikszentmihalyi’s lesson in his book, Four Thousand Weeks. He encourages us to resist “the seductive temptation to ‘keep your options open,’ … in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments.”
To do so, we have to stand “firm in the face of FOMO, the ‘fear of missing out,’ because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed.”
As Burkeman points out, “’Missing out’ is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.”
Understanding that constraints are necessary on a personal level primes us to become defenders of liberty. The person who has never practiced saying no to himself is poorly equipped to say no to those who would govern him.
A free society requires that we say “no” to would-be masterminds who believe they can (or should) redesign complex social orders.
In his essay “Individualism: True and False,” Hayek warns that we must say no to mistaken beliefs that lead us to rely on the efficacy of designing minds.
Hayek instructs us that a person with a mindset of true individualism has an “acute consciousness of the limitations of the individual mind.” In contrast, people infected with the mind virus of false individualism have an “exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason.”
True individualism leads to “an attitude of humility toward the impersonal and anonymous social processes by which individuals help to create things greater than they know.” In contrast, false individualism leads to “contempt for anything which has not been consciously designed.”
In other words, false individualists don’t say no to the social engineering designs their minds conjure up.
Hayek would also have us reject the myth of a good ruler. He teaches that true individualism is the foundation for “a social system which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they now are.” Because of the limits of “individual knowledge,” a social order that extends human cooperation demands “strict limitation of all coercive or exclusive power.”
While saying no to masterminds, a free people say “yes” to evolved rules, norms, and traditions (such as the Rule of Law) that preserve freedom even when the origins and systemic effects of these traditions cannot be fully grasped. Hayek counsels, “Our submission to general principles is necessary because we cannot be guided in our practical action by full knowledge and evaluation of all the consequences.”
Further, Hayek would have us say no to political expediency couched in claims of “the interests of society.” Why object to deciding each case on its merits? Because in practice, expediency abandons all principles. Hayek might argue that the mistaken belief in pragmatic, case-by-case judgment is most damaging to the future of liberty and therefore demands a robust no from us.
While Hayek identifies mistaken beliefs that destroy freedom, we must ask, why do good-hearted people keep accepting them? We can point to economic and historical illiteracy. But for this essay, I’m going to turn to the Stoic philosophers who often ask a form of this question: Why do we say yes when we should say no?
The Stoics saw that we accept false impressions and, in doing so, surrender the inner freedom that is ours. A false impression is when we misinterpret our experience, leading us further from reality. My manager criticized my work, and I’m going to be fired. That driver cut me off; I have every right to be angry. The political version of the false impression is the most dangerous of all: This emergency, this program, this leader is different; this time, the designing mind can be trusted.
Rarely practicing the mental discipline of withholding assent to their impressions, many people take them at face value. Epictetus urges, “Take up the practice right now of telling every disagreeable impression, ‘You’re an impression, and not at all what you appear to be.’” (Handbook, 1.5)
Entrenched in lax habits, we let our minds run wild, weakening our ability to make mindful decisions. Epictetus elaborates, “Every time you get angry, it’s not just that something bad has happened to you, believe me, but you’ve also strengthened the condition.” (Discourses, 2.18)
Here is his general principle: “Actions won’t just implant habits and capacities which didn’t exist before but will intensify and strengthen those that already exist.”
A false impression does not announce itself as false. The discipline that must be practiced is to pause and ask: Is this what it appears to be?
In Letter 95 of his Letters on Ethics, Seneca argues against those who think general principles are unnecessary. Without foundational doctrines of the mind, judgments are captured by whatever the moment presents most vividly. Seneca wrote, “It is principles that can fortify us, maintain us in safety and tranquility.” He vividly added, “Leaves cannot flourish by themselves; they need to be fixed in a branch from which to draw their sap.”
Because people, as Seneca observed in Letter 20, frequently “don’t know what it is they want, except in the very moment when they want it,” reviewing our daily impulses helps us identify the unexamined desires, fears, and judgments that lead us to succumb to impressions.
That wintry day in the stalag, Edmonds didn’t deliberate. His principles, not impressions, had already made the decision.
That is the question each of us faces, thankfully not in a German stalag, but in the here and now. Will we be the individuals who stand on principles to say no to mistaken beliefs that threaten freedom?
I met Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi back in the early 00s, I think it was. He was brought in as a guest speaker at my university to talk about creativity. Very interesting guy. I had to introduce him for his talk, and it took some practice to say his name correctly :·)
IIRC, ME-high CHICK-szhent-me-high-ee