Last week we discussed that most important of French words, anomie. An acceptable synonym for anomie is confusion, and the reality is life in the western world is very confusing.
A core cause of anomie is freedom and a proximal cause is bullshit. In the western world, in the world of freedom, most people are full of shit most of the time.
So, what are we to do? Probably a good starting point is to ask the question, what do people actually need? Fortunately that question has been the subject of research for a very long time, and researchers have made strong headway.
I, for one, am firmly in alignment with the school of Self-Determination Theory, or SDT for short. SDT is the brain child of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester in New York.
You can think of it this way. We know life has biological necessities, but does it have psychological necessities? Most people know the biological necessities of life, they are: air, water, and food. But, very few people know life's psychological necessities. Deci and Ryan to the rescue.
According to SDT there are three irreducible, human psychological needs and they happen to form the acronym CAR. Let us consider them in reverse order.
R stands for Relatedness and as a place holder you can think of the word Relationship. More accurately, relatedness is the desire to love and be loved, to care and be cared for.
A stands for Autonomy and as a place holder you can think of the word Freedom. More accurately, autonomy means the desire to be the captain of your own ship.
Let us pause for a second to scream Uh-Oh! Because, if you are paying attention, you can already see a paradox. Remember from last week what a paradox is? A simple definition of paradox is "a true contradiction."
Follow me here. One psychological need is relationship which creates constraints, and another is freedom which removes constraints. So, am I telling you we simultaneously wish to be free and constrained? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. As Stephen Covey would say, it isn't logical it is psychological.
Paradox is something I will return to often because, try as we may, there is simply no way for humans to truly avoid paradox. So, what are we to do? Well, fortunately, I haven't told you the third psychological necessity.
C stands for competence and it doesn't require much explanation. Competence is a belief and a feeling that we are effective in the world. To be candid, I hadn't learn about SDT when I titled this blog "On Effectiveness and Entrepreneurship." I simply listen to the yearnings of my soul, and I have long recognized a deep desire to be effective aka competent.
As mentioned, one of the things we need to become competent in is resolving paradoxes. Notice how I didn't say we need to be experts. I am not suggesting we become philosophy professors who aim to master paradox. Mastery isn't required. Good old competence will do.
We also yearn to be competent at our jobs, and our hobbies and anything else we do. So, while relatedness and autonomy will always be something of a balancing act, there is zero evidence of an upper limit to competence. In other words, the more the merrier.
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