Om

What are the second-order consequences of massive deregulation? Religion might be one.

What is bureaucratic regulation and enforcement but the exercise of control by the state or the enterprise or the HR department or some external force? It is a combination of rules and sanctions for failure to comply. When it comes to the policies and procedures the firm imposes on its workers, we use the word compliance.

The pliant individual bends and conforms to their system. Almost no two individuals are the same in terms of the various rules and norms imposed upon them. Two people may work for the same company, but they leave work at the appointed hour to return to different families, in different locations with different communities. The context of a wealthy town in Long Island differs from one on the Upper East Side.

A man is the product of his choices, his selected path through his individual decision tree of life.

With self-control, we would expect this individual to tread a sensible journey, leading to socially productive (or at least inoffensive) outcomes for himself and those exposed to him. On the other hand, we can imagine a profligate man bouncing around a serially correlated set of frustrating or hurtful situations.

Self-control is everything.

As the Buddha said:

“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.”

This is surprising to some, I suspect. After all, we live in a secular age.

Here’s the New York Times interviewing the author of a study showing that authentically religious people had more self-control.

‘“We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control,” Dr. McCullough. “For a long time it wasn’t cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.”’

It doesn’t seem to matter what brand of religion to which the individual subscribes.

‘“Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,” he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.”’

There is a moral fitness that comes from the drills religions ask us to perform and the cultural norms they proselytize. We develop cultural muscles, but only if our conduct comes from a place of authentic, specific belief. One cannot fake it. There is no benefit from hand-waving or posing.

‘“Thinking about the oneness of humanity and the unity of nature doesn’t seem to be related to self-control,” Dr. McCullough said. “The self-control effect seems to come from being engaged in religious institutions and behaviors.”

‘Does this mean that nonbelievers like me should start going to church? Even if you don’t believe in a supernatural god, you could try improving your self-control by at least going along with the rituals of organized religion.

‘But that probably wouldn’t work either, Dr. McCullough told me, because personality studies have identified a difference between true believers and others who attend services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress people or make social connections. The intrinsically religious people have higher self-control, but the extrinsically religious do not.’

Some of us internalize a religion’s values and incorporate them into our personal code of conduct.

‘Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.’

We don’t need to be religious to benefit from this, but it’s much easier if we are. It’s a system.

‘“Sacred values come prefabricated for religious believers,” Dr. McCullough said. “The belief that God has preferences for how you behave and the goals you set for yourself has to be the granddaddy of all psychological devices for encouraging people to follow through with their goals. That may help to explain why belief in God has been so persistent through the ages.”’

Yet, for all its benefits, religion is like a vestigial artifact of the past, at least in the West.

Western civilization has replaced religion with the state.

Regulation has become the opiate of the masses.

Is it a coincidence that the rise of Wilsonian progressive institutions filled with experts have taken over from our cathedrals with their bishops and priests?

Bureaucratic external control appears to have crowded out the individual’s sense of self-control.

Perhaps the decline of organized religion was necessary. The two regimes could not co-exist. They compete. After all, a nation of people who acted in a socially responsible manner wouldn’t need more than a light touch. There would be nothing for the secular Brahmins to do. Government would be limited to a handful of pure public goods such as national defense, border control, and policing.

A secular society requires taming.

Perhaps, competition is the wrong way to think about things. Maybe the rise of an external governor mechanism reduced the need for self-control, permitting the individual to indulge themselves in activities that religion proscribed such as substance abuse or sexual promiscuity. If it feels good, do it. It became a self-reinforcing mechanism. It was libertinism masquerading as libertarianism. The sybaritic monkeys were everywhere.

At what point do people recognize that the ultimate freedom stems from self-control?

We live in a moment of deregulation. It started in Argentina but it’s spreading.

Will systemic deregulation create in the individual a thirst for self-control? Will frustration with the system’s performance over years of crisis including war, depression, and pandemic lead people back to the Church?

Maybe it has already started.

“The number of Americans who identify as Christian has declined steadily for years, but that drop shows signs of slowing, according to a new survey Wednesday from the Pew Research Center.”

These are no more than green shoots. It’s not clear that it’s sustainable. Perhaps it’s just a pause.

Wouldn’t that be something if we ran the movie in reverse?