There are a few pillars which I’d make central to my work and personal culture. And I should keep a list of them to return to.
One is Pyrrhonean Skepticism & Buddhist agnosticism, of course, but while it’s hugely influential in my day-to-day work, I’m not sure I can describe it very well—this idea that though you may solve something, or master something, or fix something, and that improves life in one way, something else will assuredly intrude on your awareness to remind you of its unpleasantness. In other words, suffering.
But something that has been written down by someone else that I make central to my approach is Dacher Keltner’s research on power, e.g., The Power Paradox post (also a book). It’s not so much a paradox as an ironic regression:
Power is given to those individuals, groups, or nations who advance the interests of the greater good in socially-intelligent fashion. Yet unfortunately, having power renders many individuals as impulsive and poorly attuned to others… making them prone to act abusively and lose the esteem of their peers. [emphasis mine]
We’re aware that we like people with social intelligence: we give weight to their advice, we are more forgiving of their foibles, and more willing to help them. That’s “power”.
Then, having gotten it, people whom we liked and empowered begin to show rude and graceless behavior. In Keltner’s experimental terms, they stop advancing the greater good and start harming it.
This many people (including myself) are less familiar with, as it requires knowing someone for a long period of time and remembering the good old days. It’s not clear why this happens—it may be a cultural problem. But I am not particularly interested in this as a theoretical problem. Being aware of this paradox, I’d like to live and work in environments where it is part of our vocabulary and something that one can allude to as a response to certain behaviors.