Agency

“A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or a class than one that has been able to situate itself in history.” - John Berger

You could theoretically change your life at any moment. Move here, date that person, work on that startup, write that blog, dye your hair, adopt a dog. Should I stay, should I go? I don’t know if this agency is freedom or burden. Perhaps all the best things are both.

The simple individualistic humanist frame treats the person as the seat of agency, the atomic unit of moral responsibility and choice-making.

I want you to see the limits of this model. Agency exists at micro- and macro-scales, the “person” is just one step on the ladder.

exert your taste on the world to live in a reality you’ve consciously created https://t.co/wKR6LMKBRo

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned helpl... See more

You might have independence, and you might be an ambitious person—but if you can’t even begin to fathom creating and playing by your own rules, do you really have agency?

A while ago I got interested in being more agentic. Emmett Shear tweeted that it was teachable. He would train people by prompting them with certain questions. I gathered those questions and put them into a flow chart that I go through to problem-solve: https://t.co/kM0MID8bT5... See more

The opposite to reflexive agency is prompted agency - agency which only becomes available given some prompt to action. “That does seem like a problem. Have you tried solving it?” is my only-half-joking prompt I use with people: It’s something that highlights the failure of agency, in a way that makes people aware that action is an option available

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