Do your professed values vary between one sphere of your life and another? Would people who know you well in one recognise you if they were to meet you in another?
If you looked closely, would you recognise yourself?
To ask such questions is to step directly into an ancient philosophical tradition. In this famous passage from the Apology, Plato quotes his teacher Socrates’ famous claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living”:
“[38a] and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.” (Plato, Apology, 38a)
This claim, under the name of self-awareness, finds echoes in modern management literature and I suspect that Socrates would have felt an affinity with Eurich’s “loving critics”:
“Leaders who focus on building both internal and external self-awareness, who seek honest feedback from loving critics, and who ask what instead of why can learn to see themselves more clearly – and reap the many rewards that increased self-knowledge delivers.” (Eurich, 2018)
While highly beneficial on many levels, self-examination can be uncomfortable. It may help you become a better leader and a better person, but there is no guarantee that it will make you a happy person. Paradoxically, it may lead you to be both less happy and more fulfilled. But more on that later.
To understand why self-examination can become so uncomfortable, consider how effortlessly we adopt different moral codes in different areas of our lives.
Imagine that you’re part of a sports team. You’ve learned things like “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team’” and you actually believe it. This is a community league – none of you are aiming for the world championships. You’re there to keep in shape and to have some fun. You’re all friends and you would never wish ill on any of your teammates. In fact, it’s the same for all other teams in your league. You’ve all known each other for a long time and when you play, you play hard but you kind of hold back a bit, too, because you would feel really bad if you seriously injured anyone (bumps, scrapes, and other minor injuries are just part of the game and that’s entirely fine).
In your league, you’re known as a certain kind of person. You’re friendly, you’re fair, you’re trustworthy and you’re kind. You’re the kind of person who truly cares about others and you consider yourself as a good person.
Now let’s imagine that there’s another part of your life where the way you are expected to look at others is quite different. In that part, it’s better to maintain some distance from others because you never know when you might be called upon to make decisions that will cause them a lot of distress. In fact, it’s best to just not think about these things too much and depersonalise things as much as possible. This is not play, after all. You’ve got a job to do and you’ve been taught (or you’ve learned through experience) to not give too much thought to the impact that your actions have on others. It’s just business.
We’ve all heard stories of people who professed certain standards only to be discovered to be very different people out of the public eye – a failure of their own avowed standards. But what I’m talking about here is different.
What I’m describing here is situations where someone is quite literally living different parts of their lives according to different sets of rules and values, neither seemingly problematic at all in their respective contexts. The difficulty only becomes apparent when we place the two alongside one another: conduct that seems entirely normal and meets with approval in one sphere may be almost incomprehensible when viewed from the standpoint of the other.
To take a practical example, I’ve known some very nice people who don’t bat an eyelash at cutting hundreds of jobs, if not thousands. It’s business and you just get on with it. I’ve also known some people who suffer great distress at having to do the same thing. I know because I was one of them and when you start voicing your misgivings, others have a way of coming out of the woodwork about their own struggles.
While some people manage to compartmentalise, others suffer greatly from what Alasdair MacIntyre has described as “the fracture” (some would say the moral dissonance) that one experiences when he or she realises that the values they hold in one part of their life are at odds with the values that underpin their actions in another. (MacIntyre, 2016, p. 167)
I experienced this fracture myself during my corporate career and the stress it caused me played a major role in my decision to start an entirely new career in my fifties. That decision was not made overnight. It was the culmination of years of wrestling with the conflicts of values in my life, where the person I thought I was and aspired to be was more and more at odds with the ends and means that I was expected to espouse as a senior executive.
This journey, in my case, partly played itself out publicly, through the 124,517 words of the 138 essays I published here on this blog over the course of the past 15 years (and counting), in which I examined those tensions and contradictions from a broad variety of angles.
Looking back on such a process of introspection, and reading through words such as “struggle”, “fracture”, “contradiction” and “distress”, you might rightly wonder if all of this is actually healthy. Is it not better to simply ignore the contradictions in our lives? Should one not wisely push down such things for the sake of peace of mind?
No doubt that some would say this. But ignoring such things (sometimes to the point of willful blindness) is not necessarily the path to a good and fulfilled life. It is the paradox that I mentioned earlier: that making yourself vulnerable to internal and external self-awareness may lead you to be both less happy and more fulfilled:
“If Aristotle was right about how happiness is to be understood, then unhappiness is often appropriate. To care about someone or something is to make oneself vulnerable to loss, to the unhappiness of grief. To be invulnerable to grief would be to be incapable of friendship. To make choices under conditions of uncertainty is always to be vulnerable to future regret, to the unhappiness of learning that one’s choice has resulted in harm or loss to oneself or others. But to make oneself invulnerable to such regret would be to live without creative and courageous risk taking. […] The good life, the fulfilled life, may often be unhappy by the standards of happiness studies.” (MacIntyre, 2016, p. 202)
So, do we question and examine ourselves, or do we retreat into comfortable compartmentalization? The unexamined life may spare us the discomfort of moral fracture, but it also deprives us of the chance to live a life that is truly whole and intelligible – to others and to ourselves.
References
Eurich, Tasha. 2018. “What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It).” Harvard Business Review, January 4, 2018.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 322 pages.
Plato. Apology, 38a. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Perseus Digital Library.
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