Agency

you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally.

Stephen Cave formalized “Freedom Quotient” as an additional dimension to evaluate human competencies beyond IQs (intelligent quotient) and EQ (emotional quotient). Cave defined FQ as a measure of natural free will, and he argues that smoothing out inequalities in FQ – and to raise the FQ of everyone – should be a goal of schools and of social

... See more

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.

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?