The Agency Mandate: An Overview
When I first immersed myself in the study of philosophy as a teenager, I believed that philosophy should be used only for good, to oppose bad things like injustice and tyranny. I quickly learned that the biggest challenge of philosophy was in using it for anything at all. Twenty years and about 200,000 words later (don’t be alarmed, I capped the overview at 4,500) I’ve composed an applied philosophy, which I call the Agency Mandate. It is designed for practical applications that can have an impact on our day to day life while fighting the good fight and serving the virtues that are fundamental to a free and functioning society. Ideas were the foundation of Democracy and they can be its salvation once again.
One of the biggest conflicts we face is balancing our ambition for being part of something bigger than ourselves with our ambition for individualism. The Agency Mandate is designed to help us find a healthy balance by categorizing three main aspects of our life into separate but related aspects, or arenas, of our personal philosophy: your personal individuality, your interpersonal relationships, and your role in society at large. In addition to the three arenas I’ll introduce the principal philosophies that inspired the Agency Mandate, the three core tenets and the three key concepts that constitute the bulk of the Agency Mandate as an applied philosophy, and finally I’ll introduce three primary techniques that we can use to put it into practice.
I chose the term “agency mandate” to reference the idea that we have the freedom and responsibility to define ourselves. We are ultimately defined by our choices. We are defined by our agency. “Mandate” refers to the fact that we are responsible for defining ourselves. We have the freedom to make our own choices, but we cannot decouple ourselves from the consequences of our actions. Agency is the freedom to make our own choices. But when it comes to agency itself, we have no choice in the matter. Agency is mandated.
I constructed the Agency Mandate as an “open source” philosophy because a fundamental aspect of agency is to empower individuals to define themselves on their own terms rather than prescribe a single doctrine or rubric for everyone to follow. The mission of the Agency Mandate is to explore the art of self-reflection with three primary goals in mind: finding balance in how we perceive and interpret the conceptual world, creating conceptual constructs, and finding ways to bridge different constructs together. With the right ideas and the right work, we can restore balance to ourselves and to our societies.
The Three Arenas of the Agency Mandate
The three arenas are aspects of our life that govern our identity as an individual. Each requires a different approach in how we apply the Agency Mandate to our daily lives. One of the biggest existential questions we face is how to balance our desire for individuality with our desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves. The Agency Mandate sets up three different approaches, or arenas, to help us deal with this question: individual, interpersonal, and social. Our identity is more than just who we decide to be. We are also defined by our relationships with other people and by our role in society. Each arena is separate, but the work we do in one arena affects how we operate in other arenas. Balancing all three aspects of yourself is challenging, but rewarding and healthy.
Individual
“Philosophy” capital-P is a discipline. More specifically, it’s a class that you sign up for to get better at arguing with strangers and annoying other people with strong opinions. As a common term (“philosophy” little-p) it’s something personal that belongs to you. It’s your unique way of thinking, your worldview, your personal beliefs, and value structure. There may or may not be some aphorisms and truisms involved. And that’s okay. You be you. (See? I use them too.)
According to existentialism we are not bound by a singular essential nature. We decide for ourselves who we are and what we want to be. Obviously, there are limits. If you want to be an astronaut, you have your work cut out for you. It’ll require hard work and good life choices, as well as a lot of luck and some natural talents. If you want to be a fire-breathing dragon, you’ll just have to work on managing your expectations.
The Agency Mandate recognizes that we have free will but also that free will has limits. It seeks to explore the extent of our agency within those limitations and perhaps expand our boundaries. The best we can do is make choices with the information we have within the limits of our capacity. Defining your true self is always a work in progress. There always seems to be more “work” than “progress,” but don’t let that dampen your sense of accomplishment.
Interpersonal
One limitation on free will is how we are defined by our relationships. We choose our relationships which involves agency. But part of the vulnerability of a relationship is letting another person define a part of ourselves. Cultivating a healthy relationship requires balance and compromise. We relinquish a degree of agency in exchange for being part of someone else’s life.
Understanding our personal philosophy in terms of how it affects other people is important in a pragmatic sense, because our interactions with other people are “where the rubber meets the road” as an individual. But it’s also a fundamental aspect of our moral code. The most essential component of morality is empathy. Our attitudes and choices, especially to the extent that they affect other people, determine our capacity for empathy.
Beyond being our point of contact with society as well as our basis for morality, relating to others is how we access different perspectives of ourselves. We need feedback and influence from others to reflect and adjust ourselves. Relationships share the same existential paradox as agency: we can choose our relationships, but we cannot choose not to have relationships.
Social
Our interpersonal relationships help to define us. We are also defined through our roles in society. When you first introduce yourself to someone you may first define yourself through your personal relationships, or your roles in society such as your profession, faith, politics, or any number of groups or organizations we support and belong to. This represents the third arena of our personal philosophy. Our personal character is influenced by how other people see us and by our contributions to society.
We want to have an impact on our communities. We want to matter. It’s human nature to want to be a valuable part of the world. We strive to contribute something to society. Those roles define us. But like the other arenas we have a limited degree of control over our societal roles. Our personal philosophy is affected by that balance of influence, intention, and reaction.
The Principal Philosophies of the Agency Mandate
Before we get into the concepts and practices that make up the lion’s share of the Agency Mandate, I think it’s appropriate to introduce the philosophical disciplines that inspired it. The three philosophies that I draw from directly are existentialism, pragmatism, and perspectivism. I found that combining these philosophies in new ways generates concepts, tenets and practices that can help us in our goals of finding balance in how we perceive and interpret the conceptual world, creating conceptual constructs, and finding new ways to bridge different constructs together. I’ll touch on them as briefly as I can to keep this an overview rather than a geek session, but if you want to get a better idea or a deeper background on any of the disciplines I recommend checking out their Wikipedia pages.
Perspectivism
Perspectivism is the idea that our perception and experience change according to our relative perspective and interpretation. We all share the same objective reality, but our personal reality is different than the material universe in the sense that our experiences, thoughts, feelings etc. are real to us and therefore an important part of what we consider reality.
For anyone familiar with perspectivism (even if just from the above paragraph, so everyone I guess) I hasten to qualify it by saying that The Agency Mandate takes it loosely. Perspectivism is often taken to mean that there is no objective reality or objective truth. That’s not how I use it. We all live in the same universe. We all share one objective world. The Agency Mandate makes the important distinction between the conceptual world (concepts like love, family, justice, freedom etc. affect our lives and are real to us) and the material world, but it recognizes both.
It’s important to take some ownership of how we allow our biases and interpretations to affect our personal reality. How well we relate to and work with others in the context of interpersonal relationships and social constructs depends on how well we account for our biases and interpretations. Perspectivism gives us a lot of liberty to create our own personal realities, and existentialism gives us liberty to define things and assign meaning as we see fit, which is all well and good in the personal arena. But taking too many liberties and not enough accountability can create conflicts in the interpersonal and social arenas.
Existentialism
We are the sole arbiters of how we define ourselves and how we value ourselves. The cool thing is we get to decide who we are. The flip side is that we have to decide who we are. It’s liberating, but it can also be nerve-wracking or just plain exhausting.
Existentialism is an expansive idea. It’s become its own discipline of philosophy. So we’re only going to use part of it for now, and we’ll use it in the more colloquial sense. When we think of an “existential crisis” we think of trying to find yourself or trying to figure out who you really are (like, who you really are). We are defined by the sum of our experiences. Experiences are technically things that happen to us, but they are also the product of the consequences of our choices.
Pragmatism
The basic point of pragmatism is that we value things not just for what we like about them, but how they have a real effect on us. We can want to be a novelist all we want, but without producing a novel we won’t become one. Pragmatism is where the rubber meets the road, where rubber is our concepts and ideals, and the road is us navigating our life, our reality.
Ideas have a lot of value. Just think of all the ideas that have contributed to the things you value in life. How anyone came up with the idea of fermenting barley and hops into beer is beyond me but I’m glad they did. Whoever that was, cheers. Pragmatism is the art and practice of bringing our ideas to fruition through our actions. It provides a balance between theory and practice. Our actions only provide value to the extent that they serve our ideas, and our ideas only have value to the extent that they can be realized (in the sense that they are made real) through our actions.
The Core Tenets of the Agency Mandate
The Agency Mandate is based heavily in relativism (within reason, as previously mentioned). It tries to be as descriptive as possible and avoids anything that’s too prescriptive or authoritative. I try to stay away from any form of doctrine or dogma. The term “tenet” is associated with doctrine, but I believe we can take it loosely for our purposes. The core tenets of The Agency Mandate are principles or beliefs that are generally held to be true. Like any set of guidelines there will be situations that warrant exceptions, but we’ll save those for the more advanced modes of the Agency Mandate. We’ll stay in “overview mode” for now.
Intentional
A good philosophy should be intentional. There’s nothing wrong with backing into a good system by accident. Many great inventions were discovered by accident. But the problem with a happy accident is that you can’t replicate what you did until you figured out what happened. If you didn’t know what you were doing last time, you won’t know what you are doing next time. Getting lucky is great, but it’s no replacement for knowing what you’re doing and making your own luck.
Intentionality is important for maintaining a stable process but it’s also a fundamental component of agency. Ethicists will be quick to tell you that doing good things by accident doesn’t make you a good person. What makes us good or bad has a lot to do with the intention we put into a decision. Doing good things is important. But being good requires both intentionality and execution. Intention is the half of the equation that we control.
Your personal philosophy should be an extension of your agency. It should come from you and represent you. The more intentional you are with your character, the more control you have over who you are. Accidents should only be things that happen despite your best efforts, not because of them.
Complex
One of the gripes of philosophy is that it likes to complicate things just to make things more complicated. Which is true. Philosophy geeks tend to think that complicated = fun, forgetting that the general population (i.e. “normal people”) may feel differently. I agree 100% that we should avoid complexity for its own sake. But a good philosophy needs to be as complicated as people because people are complicated. The human condition is complicated. Oversimplifying things can be worse than overcomplicating them. Just like a good video game we should make things complicated enough to be respectably challenging. Overgeneralizing leads to binary thinking and inhibits our imagination.
Being recognized as a complex person is a sign of respect. The more complexity we demonstrate in our personal character the more representation and utility we get from our personal philosophy. Most people resent being pigeonholed into tiny boxes with vague labels. If people judge us based on our entire person, with a full understanding of our story and who we are, it’s easier for us to accept fair judgment. I’d rather hear feedback that’s honest and specific than flattering and inaccurate. Owning the complexity of our character helps us represent our full selves outwardly to the world at large.
Flexible
A good philosophy should be flexible. Things change. Change leads to growth, provided that we react and adapt to our everchanging environment. What works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow. Some degree of rigidity provides structure to a foundation but balancing that structure with flexibility allows you to bend without breaking. It provides greater functionality, adaptability and utility.
Flexibility also means understanding the process rather than relying on rote memory. If you want to pass a single math quiz, memorizing the answers to the questions you think will be on the quiz may be enough. But passing a series of exams to learn the discipline requires understanding the processes enough to solve unfamiliar problems. Flexibility and adaptation are major elements of the concept of pragmatism as it applies to the Agency Mandate. The focus is not on taking shortcuts to get quick results, but the establishment and development of processes that will produce consistent results over longer periods of time.
The Key Concepts of the Agency Mandate
Applied philosophy is based on (you guessed it) the application of a philosophy to our daily lives. Whereas a personal philosophy refers to your basic beliefs, concepts and attitudes as an individual (thank you Merriam Webster, the official Dictionary of The Agency Mandate) an applied philosophy includes the day to day practices, choices and actions that manifest or implement our philosophy.
The three goals I referenced in the introduction were each based on one of the key concepts. Balance is eponymous in the goal of finding balance in how we perceive and interpret the conceptual world. Dimensionality helps us create conceptual constructs. And relativity is requisite to finding ways to bridge different constructs together.
Balance
Balance is hard. It’s much easier it is to be on either side of the fence than it is to balance on top of it. Going to extremes is easy because all you ever have to do is “more.” Which sounds like a lot of challenging work, but it takes the decision making out of it. It takes the logic and agency out of it.
The Agency Mandate was largely based on the question of how we can assert ourselves as unique individuals and still play a valuable role in society. It requires balance. If you’re looking to abandon your concept of self, you won’t be as valuable to society. If you’re looking to abandon the idea of serving society, you’re not going to be your best self. You already know this. So why am I telling you? The Agency Mandate explores different ideas and techniques for finding balance in various aspects of your life (such as balancing the three arenas). That’s the fun part. (By fun I also mean challenging, just a heads up.) But it doesn’t fit in the overview. So for now the important thing is to commit to the concept of balance. The nice thing about balance is that if you do it right you can’t do too much of it.
Dimensionality
Binary thinking is simplistic thinking that relies on overgeneralizations to reduce our choices and make things easier. When it comes to deciding whether to cross the street or how to tie or shoes this is adequate. But for making life choices, asserting ourselves as individuals, participating in civics, and forming new ideas and concepts to advance society, binary thinking is restrictive at best and destructive at worst. People who hate making choices love binary thinking. If you overcommit to it, you begin to compromise your agency. Complex ideas require complex thinking. Dimensionality is the practice of pushing ourselves beyond binary thinking and asserting ourselves as complex individuals.
We often use the term “depth” when we talk about adding complexity. We use this term when we want to add another dimension to our understanding of something to get a better idea for what it is and how it affects us. If you’re buying a new sofa, measuring its width and height lets you know how it’ll look against your wall, but you have to measure depth to know how much room it’ll take. Agency is the same way. Two-dimensional people think about how they appear. That’s why we call them “shallow.” If you want to think about how you affect other people (the space you take up), you have to think about a third dimension, or depth. Dimensionality allows us to add complexity to our thinking and add depth to our personal character.
Relativity
Relativity is the most difficult concept for me to summarize, not just because it’s the most important concept of the Agency Mandate, but also because it’s my favorite part, so I geek out on it the most. And brevity is hard when you geek out on something. The short short version is that truth can be relative and objective at the same time.
The Agency Mandate incorporates several types of truth and avoids binary thinking. Instead of basing truth simply on true/false, right/wrong, either/or thinking, it applies truth to scale and prefers to involve a grid rather than a line. The Agency Mandate still sees facts at true, but it splits the idea of “right” and “wrong” into subcategories. “Right” is a general term that can mean different things, so we can get more precise meaning by being more specific. The Agency Mandate breaks down the concept of truth into subcategories like correct, valid, specific, or appropriate. An argument can be logically valid, but completely incorrect. Some facts are technically true but lack specificity. And as we all know from personal experience, many facts can be valid and accurate yet entirely inappropriate.
The bottom line is (before we run into the long short version) that facts can be objectively true and still have some complexity to them. The Agency Mandate looks at the different ways that things can be true in order to give us a deeper and more complex understanding of reality. This is how we restore meaning to truth.
The Primary Techniques of the Agency Mandate
Philosophy is great but I’ve always felt that if you can’t use it for anything it doesn’t have real value. Hence my interest in pragmatism. It’s important to have practice to go with theory, to have techniques to go with the abstracts. I’ve written the techniques to coordinate with the key concepts to emphasize the relationship between theory and practice.
The three practices are modality, conceptual deconstruction, and threshold scaling. The practice of modality employs our concept of balance, which helps us find balance in how we perceive and interpret the conceptual world. The practice of conceptual deconstruction employs our concept of dimensionality, which helps us create conceptual constructs. The practice of threshold scaling employs our concept of relativity, which helps us bridge different constructs. Each technique is a way we can employ the core tenets and key concepts of the Agency Mandate so that our applied philosophy can have practical value in our day to day lives.
Modality
Modality is a fancy way of saying there are two (or more, depending on how ambitious you are) different ways of doing things. There are many right ways to do things, and some methods are more appropriate or more valid than others depending on the context. Our work-life balance is a good example of how we already employ modality. I have “dad-mode” at home and “work-mode” at the office. Each mode serves a different role. Modality is recognizing that different situations call for different approaches. It also allows us to use alternating forms of logic to form complex logic chains. (I’m still in “overview mode” so I’ll save that for the advanced applications and move on.)
Balancing two modes is a constant challenge and an ongoing process. The better our ability to read different situations and draw the right boundaries the better we understand ourselves and the better we operate in our day to day lives. Modality allows us to employ different “versions” of ourselves without being a fraud or hypocrite. Anytime you feel like a fraud or a hypocrite in life, modality is the aspect of the Agency Mandate you would want to study.
Conceptual Deconstruction
If I were trying to sell you a particular system or working on my “brand” I would tell you that conceptual deconstruction is way different than what we colloquially refer to as “unpacking.” It’s not. It’s basically the same thing. You take a complex idea, break it down into smaller components, study each of them and make sure they’re clearly defined, and then put them back together, all to gain a deeper understanding of the concept. When people say “that’s a lot of unpack” or “lets unpack” concepts like toxic masculinity or systemic racism, that’s what they’re doing.
“Unpacking” often means coming to understand emotionally complicated experiences, which is a form of conceptual deconstruction. The Agency Mandate uses it to help us define and understand the abstract concepts that have the biggest impact on our society and our daily life (liberty, justice, freedom, democracy, love, etc.). An important element of conceptual deconstruction is that we are careful to take something apart so that we can understand each of the pieces (figure out what they do and how they fit) so that we can put them back together again. If we are careless it’s more like destructionism. So let’s avoid that.
Threshold Scaling
Threshold scaling sounds like a pretty technical term. This technique does get pretty technical. [For fellow data analysts it has to do with converting continuous data to discrete data to set actionable thresholds.] I’ll keep it simple for the overview. The main functions of the Agency Mandate help us move away binary thinking like good/bad, right/wrong, etc. But a lot of decisions we make, no matter how complex the logic involved, boil down to a thumbs up or down situation. Threshold scaling lets us make those decisions without being too reductive.
There are three things that threshold scaling lets us do in the context of the Agency Mandate. First, it lets us set our own standard. We decide what we think is good or bad, and we set our own standards for what’s acceptable. Second, it allows us to use a sliding scale based on context. Sometimes we change our mind about we want. That doesn’t necessarily make us hypocrites. Threshold scaling provides that flexibility, but also sets up the proper logic so we know when we’re veering into hypocrisy. Third, it allows us to set multiple thresholds for any given scale. That way a scale of good or bad can be expanded to bad, good enough, good, and great. Overall, threshold scaling provides valid logic to our judgments, and lets us be as simple or complex as we want to be or need to be.
Conclusion (sort of)
I had it in mind to write a conclusion to this piece, but it seems silly to write a “conclusion” to an overview designed to scratch the surface. If this is all you read of the Agency Mandate, I hope you found a few ideas that got you thinking more about your own personal philosophy. If you would like to explore more of The Agency Mandate, follow me on Medium or subscribe to the mailing list (see below) so you can get the non-paywall links. If you would prefer to dispense with the surface scratching and dive in headfirst click the link below and ask for the full tour when you subscribe.
I’d also appreciate your help in writing The Agency Mandate. I’d like to make this as much of dialogue as possible, so I invite everyone (especially those who read this far, even if you skipped to the end) to participate by sending feedback. I am especially interested in questions, challenges, problems, counterpoints, topics and other ideas for forthcoming essays and chapters. I can’t say that I know the way out of the mess we’re in but I believe that getting out of it is going to take a lot of critical thinking, a lot of dialogue, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of work. With the right ideas we can bring people together.
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