The sentiment that is captured by the words “I know what is best for you” might seem innocuous, benign, or even helpful. It is not. The attitude that one person knows what is in another person’s best interests is one of the most insidious and pernicious approaches to social living that exists. It is domination by stealth. These seven simple little words provide people in authority with an unwritten license to act in all manner of ways under the guise of “being helpful” and “acting in your best interests.”
Until we can genuinely and humbly accept that we never, ever legitimately know what is best for another person, we will never crack the nut of contented social living on a widespread and enduring scale. If we sincerely wish to be helpful to others, we need to get much, much better at listening, observing, and following their lead rather than the far more common practices of advising, guiding, and directing them to behave in certain ways. Even brand-new babies have their own preferences for how often and how much they like to feed, how bright they like the lights to be, how loud they like sounds to be, how frequently they like to be cuddled, and so on.
And from babies all the way up the developmental ladder, the legion of preferences only gets more expansive, more prolific. By the time it’s another adult we’re thinking about “helping,” there is a veritable universe of interconnected preferences with which we must contend. Not only is it impossible to know precisely what the right value for any particular preference is for another person, but it is also unfathomable to calculate what the impact will be on other preferences the person has if we nudge the particular preference of the other person that is currently on our radar. Heck! I can’t even get the temperature of the bath water right for my young son unless I check with him.
Simply asking a person what their preferences are won’t always help either. When we ask other people to tell us what they want, the most we can be sure about is that we’ve learned something of their preference for what they want us to know. We can’t ever be certain that we’ve learned anything about their actual desires regarding how they like their world to be.
Perhaps the picture I’m painting seems unnecessarily gloomy, as though there is no way we can ever help or get along with others. Clearly, that’s not the case at all. A brief survey of the landscape reveals that there are many instances of helping that are authentically helpful. Understanding how people work, however, is essential in being able to pinpoint the helpfulness of bona fide help so that we can provide it more regularly and systematically.
We now know that people “work” according to the design of organic, autonomous control systems. That fact isn’t even up for discussion anymore. At least, not from me. So, once we accept that people are controllers, the importance of listening, observing, and following becomes much clearer. Unlike artificial control systems, such as cruise control systems in cars, the appropriate preferences can’t be set from the outside. They are all established internally.
By listening and observing, however, we can get a sense of another person’s preferred states of the world. How do they order their coffee, how is their hair styled, at what speed do they drive their car, what topics of conversation do they discuss with animation and passion, how do they spend their weekends? And if we’re really clever, we can even learn something from the times they object or protest or resist other people’s “help.” Far too often, the help that is offered by other people is more a block than a benefit. If we think about these protestations, however, from the perspective of the protester seeking to protect and stabilize important states of their world, we might begin to understand how to provide help that is experienced as it is helpful.
Sincerely believing that it is possible to know what is best for another has allowed, among other things, governments to introduce oppressive laws for minority groups, managers to impose restrictive policies and practices on employees, health professionals to prescribe procedures and pills that are damaging, and teachers and parents to apply punishments that are more counterproductive than constructive.
Before you get too jittery, this short article is not advocating for a lawless society. In the context of figuring out how help can be helpful, we should not ignore the fact that rules and laws can be very helpful in defining the parameters of the spaces we share. The solution is not to get rid of laws and rules. Rules exist in people’s minds as just another set of preferences long before they are established as accepted norms for a social setting. We don’t need to abolish rules and laws of social living but we do need to approach these limit setters as the means by which environments are established which enable people to achieve important goals without preventing others from doing the same thing.
If we’re ever going to solve some of our most intractable social problems, we need, on a widespread scale, to recognize and appreciate our design as controllers. We need to replace “I know what’s best for you” with the attitude that “I have no idea what’s best for you but I’m interested in finding out and helping you achieve it. I’d also like you to know what’s best for me.” Once we can embrace our ignorance of each other’s worlds we might become more welcome in them.
Helping can only ever be invited. It can’t be imposed. A society with an “invitation-only” approach to social living would be the ideal address for a population of controllers.
