21. On self-overcoming part II

We continue our discussion of Nietzschean self-overcoming and explore a range of techniques for changing behaviour that scientific evidence tells us work.

You will descend into the world of Nietzsche’s drives psychology and discover that each of us is inhabited by a rabble of unruly drives all competing for expression. Their jostling causes us confusion about what we really want from life and hinders our attempts to get it. You will discover that the noise created by these battling drives is also the basis of all our thoughts and feelings and it even constitutes what we believe to be our unified sense of self.

You will learn how these drives are managed and organised through the construction of positive choice architecture to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. And you will be introduced to a suite of behaviour change techniques that are proven to be highly effective in improving your self-control—including a couple of lessons from the ancient world. 

Learn to cultivate yourself like a professional and turn that chaotic wasteland into a beautiful, fertile, burgeoning garden. 

🎧 Music: I want to be alone, by Jackson C. Frank

Spotify

Apple

Youtube

Transcript

“But you yourself will always be the worst enemy you can encounter; you yourself lie in wait for yourself in caves and forests” TZ. Of the Way of the Creator

Last week I asked you why won’t you do what you want you to do?

Presumptious, perhaps you always do what you want you to do but anything like

Behaviour change is hard - self control is elusive

We treat our lack of self control as a moral failing. Why is this? Well consider Nietzsche’s note on self-control from his notes of 1880-81, “A feeling is supposed to be subdued by a thought”. So we want to eat the donut though we are trying to be healthy. The craving for the donut is the feeling. The reminding of one’s self of one’s commitment to the healthy regime and the long term benefits that will accrue is the thought which is supposed to subdue the feeling if self-control is achieved.

Now consider, a moral analogy. “A feeling is supposed to be subdued by a thought” and the feeling is, I would like to steal that loaf of bread. The thought that follows will usually be something like, but the powers that be will arrest me and put me In jail. The feeling is suppressed by a thought, and as Nietzsche would have it, it is the thought of fear. Fear of the community. 

This is why the non-human animal is more healthy, as in more psychologically integrated than the human—it follows its whims and does what it feels, if there is nothing in its way preventing it. It respects no laws other than the laws of instinct. Certainly, unlike the human, it feels no guilt and is not ashamed of what it is - I mean, animals run around with no clothes on, right!!

It’s sometimes a little more complicated than that; we can be conditioned just to see theft as a wrong in itself, and we are, of course. But it’s less easy to hold to such a moral conviction, no matter how intensive the programming, if you have no money and your family is starving.

But we will leave the moral mire for another of our excursions.

Last time we explored by the fragmentary nature of our desires - the fact that the belief in a single unified you controlling everything is misleading - instead as Walt whit man put it:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

You unconscious psychology comprises countless drives all vying to express themselves through your choices, behaviour and even your emotions and thoughts - this is Nietzsche’s drives psychology.

Every drive is a will to power, inasmuch as it exists and strives to express itself. And every drive has a history, a genealogy as N calls it, that explains why it exists, and it always exists because at some point in your life, or in the development of your species, it was useful. In some cases, its usefulness may have ended..

Remember all that the relative power of these drives fluctuates too - say, you’re trying to reduce alcohol and you are more motivated after you’ve been to your AA meeting; but then a bad day at work makes your desire for a drink stronger

You always do what you want, but you can want many things at the same time and they can be in direct conflict with each other

The drives can be an unruly rabble

If this sounds bad, remember too that, for Nietzsche, this psychological division, tension, and jostling is what thinking is. Will you study for that exam or will you watch TV? The battle between these drives is experienced as you mulling over what to do - your internal dialogue. In this case, it would be, say, a drive to get some qualifications and get on in the world wrestling with your more immediate desire for comfort, pleasure, to avoid unpleasant effort.

And remember, it is this relentless internal dialogue, an epiphenomenon of the battling drives, that gives you, in N’s view, a sense of having a unified psychological self. Yourself is a dynamic aggregate of your churning drives! This is ironic, because it’s a product of the many selves struggling with each other. When it comes to your conscious self, your ego, there is no you, apart from the community of drives. 

The problem, in a nutshell, is that you think of yourself as a unity; an individual; as a single person with a single will. And our society and our culture does everything it can to reinforce this sense of an integrated, unified, autonomous self. Indeed, its entire survival depends on this mythology. In truth, you are nothing of the sort. You are something much more complicated, diversified, disordered, and marvellous. What you lack is understanding, what is missing is organisation, what you need is some leadership. 

Last week talked about Nietzsche’s formula for eliminating or controlling bad habits too:

1. Avoid 
2. Rationing
3. Overindulgence
4. Negative association
5. Diversion
6. Exhaustion 

As N says, we do not have some objective, detached ability to choose to overcome our bad habits. When we do so successfully, it is because we have another drive that prevails. The drive to overcome, to make the future better than the past.

Now we may all be at the mercy of our drives, but, as you are listening to this podcast, you probably want to make positive changes—you have a drive to self-overcome, to master your unruly drives that undermine your health and your success

The first principle for effective behaviour change is not willpower— this may surprise you as we are dealing with the philosophy of will to power—it is as N says, subtly and self-outwitting. 

“Shrewdness, clarity, severity and logicality as weapons against the ferocity of the drives” (WTP 433)

Sure, there’s always an element of self-discipline, but the more you strategise, the less you need to rely on iron willpower.

You must strategise to make it as easy as possible for you to do the right things and as difficult as possible to do the wrong things. This is about planning ahead of time and creating the choice architecture that will most likely produce the results you want i.e. surround yourself with only the right options. So if you are trying to give up donuts, don’t have them in the house. And if you are trying to stop bringing donuts into the house, eat a substantial meal before you go shopping and you are less likely to pluck them of the supermarket shelves. 

Here, you’ve removed a temptation at home for when the donut chomping drive makes an appearance - a piece of simple choice architecture; and you’ve subdued that same drive by quelling your appetite before you expose yourself to the temptation of buying donuts. Simple and effective. But it requires forethought, planning and organisation. And of course, some commitment. You need to watch out for self-sabotage because the mind is adept at rationalising unhelpful behaviours—you think, ah, I’ll get some donuts in case I have visitors, then you eat them yourself. So watch out for the rationalisations, that’s exactly what your rationalists is for. At times, thinking can be decidedly unhelpful when it comes to self-control.

Nietzsche calls this a war against oneself, but if you don’t like this metaphor, consider an orchestra of virtuoso  musicians but who are all playing their own tune. Chaos. We want to get them to work together, each coming in to play their part only when the symphony requires it, all playing the same score in the same key, and all their instruments in tune with each other. One or two of them may need firing too, of course. Consider the drive for self-overcoming that we’re trying to isolate, as the conductor. Let’s call this drive for self-overcoming, the master drive, because its main function is to master the whole collection of drives.

Now this is a little artificial, because as we’ve said, what you think of as you is just the sum of the activity of your drives, so you probably never experience the unalloyed effects of a single drive making decisions, but you do experience the effects of one or more dominant drives there in the mix at any point in time, because they are the ones that are expressed in your thoughts, choices, and behaviour. We want your master drive to be the dominant drive.

Now N’s drives psychology is sometimes criticised for posting drives as little intelligences, gremlins, or spirits trying to figure out how to get their own way. But that’s not it at all. Though the drives are plastic, in being able to adapt and respond to opportunities for expression, and though they seem to exhibit cleverness, this is not to say they are individually conscious.

One of my favourite…

Discussing their plasticity and responsiveness, he writes…

Such plasticity depends on a capacity to “respond” to circumstances, which requires being able to “sense” them, in some minimal way. But this way can be minimal indeed. On this pared-down notion of drives, even a plant’s phototropism can count as one: it shows a plastic responsiveness to a light source, even though this consists in nothing more than the tendency of the leader to grow more quickly on the shaded side. It’s in terms of such minimal units as these plastic dispositions that Nietzsche means to build his naturalism of drives. It lets him find drives—and thereby values—very widely, in all life, yet without anthropomorphizing them as psychic states. Richardson, John. Nietzsche's New Darwinism 

Cover a plant with a rock and often within a few days, you may see that plant emerging from beneath the rock, finding its way around it to reach the sunlight.

The plant finds its way around obstacles even though it is has no intelligence and no goal. But it looks like it has intelligence - almost as if it knows the obstacle is there and is feeling its way around it, testing and adjusting with its tendrils. And boy does it look like it has a goal - to reach the sunlight. Yet it is just acting mechanically. Its will to power, to take that concept in its broad sense, is written into its physiology. It behaves as it does because that’s been the formula for success in propagating genes in its genetic ancestors. It is not conscious in the way we normally use the word. Our drives are analogous.

The drive in human psychology is itself a metaphor. In fact, N definitely doesn’t believe the drives as things because he doesn’t even believe in things… yes, a more abstruse inquiry for another occasion.

Better to consider your drives as complexes of behaviour that must seek expression. Or another metaphor, think of them as blind currents in a roiling pool. Some are stronger than others and can overwhelm the competition. The boundaries of such a current may not be particularly distinct, but its force and trajectory is unmistakable. We see these effects in our behaviour all the time.

Overview of scientifically evidence-based techniques this week

So firstly, N writes:

"Weakness of Will: this is a fable that can lead astray. For there is no will, consequently neither a strong nor a weak one. The multiplicity and disintegration of the instincts, the want of system in their relationship, constitute what is known as a “weak will”; their co-ordination, under the government of one individual among them, results in a “strong will"—in the first case vacillation and a lack of equilibrium is noticeable: in the second, precision and definite direction."

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, 46 

What does he mean by no will? He means the struggle between your drives determines your will. You will is just what happens to be the dominant drive right now. You might consider the implications of this for that perennial philosophical question of free will. We will get to that in due course.

And he say the government of one individual among the drives constitutes the strong will - that’s what we are calling the Master Drive.