a Master Virtue

I was thinking about today something I read in the most profound book I have ever read or has ever been written. The book is Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. I'm going to paraphrase. He said having few virtues is better than having many and one virtue is better yet. The fewer the virtues the less of a knot or something to cling too. The message I took from it that by focusing on a single virtue it is easier to act with integrity. When we act with integrity we increase our self worth. By having many virtues especially ones that conflict with one another, behaving with integrity is more difficult. I also took away that by focusing on developing a single virtue the supporting virtues will naturally follow.

 Is their a master virtue we should focus on above all others?

Since Zarathustra's mission in life is to teach the doctrine of the Superman. That opposed to striving for salvation, pleasure/comfort or popularity we should strive to be more competent to cope with the challenges of life and more importantly to strive to invest in the next generation in a way that makes them even more competent to cope with the challenges of then us. The goal of the doctrine of the Superman is to raise children to surpass our competence in coping with the challenges of life.

So for one of our questions, virtues ought to be useful in navigating the challenges of life. So what are some of the challenges of life in this day and age.

1. Heart Disease, Stroke, Cancer and Diabetes are the biggest causes of preventable death.

2. Getting a job is a challenge for many especially in economic downturns.

3. Many Canadians don't have any money saved for emergencies or their retirement.

4. Substance abuse is another phenomenon that is negatively impacting many people.

5. Being stuck in a poverty trap is an issue that can be very difficult to overcome.

6. Depression and other mental health issues can make life very difficult to handle.

7. A disability is a hard thing to deal with.

8. Abuse and violence can subject people to unbearable chronic fear and anxiety.

9. A criminal lifestyle where you find your self going in and out where on aggregate you are spending a significant portion of your life behind bars.

10. Loneliness and a lack of supporting relationships can decrease peoples quality of life.


A contender for a Master Virtue which I came across when learning about the Stanford marshmallow experiment which was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University. In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards (i.e., a larger later reward) if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. (The reward was sometimes a marshmallow, but often a cookie or a pretzel.) In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores,  educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures.

The ability to delay gratification or Self Control can be regarded as a Master Virtue. Professor C. Nathan DeWall, Ph.D. University of Kentucky in his course Scientific Secrets of Self Control teaches that the ability to delay gratification correlates more with achievement than intelligence. In the book the Will Power Instinct by Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal concurs. That is interesting, I cant help but wonder if the authors of the Bible believed this as well. Satan is after all the tempter, the deceiver and distracter to lead humanity astray. Satan could be regarded as a metaphor for instant gratification, the opposite and enemy of Self Control.

Looking through our list of challenges it doesn't take very long to see that the pursuit of instant gratification is a common theme in some these item identified earlier. For example:

1. Heart Disease, Stroke, Cancer and Diabetes is believed to be primarily caused by being overweight. I myself am pre-diabetic and pre-hypertensive and I'm only 20 lbs over weight. Self control could help you stick to a diet and exercise program or avoid gaining the weight in the first place.

2. Getting a Job. A primary factor in getting a job is having an education and skills that some is will to pay you for using. This requires deliberate practice and study to develop. Self control can definitely help here as well.

3. Lack of emergency/retirement savings is due to people preferring to buy novel things, eat out, and vacation, over sticking to a budget and savings plan. When we are bored  we go for some retail therapy, do some bargain hunting and buy off budget things just because they are on sale. We all do this to some degree, we all know this is due to our preference for instant gratification and we procrastinate on our savings and investments.

4. Substance abuse is also a instant gratification problem and a very difficult one. Alcohol and tobacco, to harder drugs like cocaine. Some self control can help you go to seek help and stick to a treatment program, or better yet it will help you not start in the first place.

5. Getting out of a poverty trap is complex. Best not to get in one. Being a single parent, senior, depressed, unforeseen disaster, substance abuse,  lack of employable skills, or disabled can all land you in a poverty trap. An inability to delay gratification can land you their as well. Self control can help here as well.

6. Mental health issues and depression. Unfortunately Self Control may be one of the casualties of this situation. Improving Self Control may help a person seek treatment.

7. Having a disability is a challenge that a little more self control wouldn't hurt.

8. Abuse and violence is almost by definition outside your self control. Self control can help make your reactions to it more productive, perhaps enough to get yourself out of the situation.

9. People in prison score very low on the self control tests. Simple feats of self control are difficult for them. Their mad they hit, they want something then they steal, and they routinely say things that sabatoge their situation. Its instant gratification city, and they can probably benefit the most from developing some more self control.

10. Relationship trouble romantic or otherwise is most of the time, but not all the result of a lack of relationship skills. Maybe your irritable, maybe you have a temper, maybe you nag. Skills that can be learned and self control can help by preventing us from acting in a way we will regret.  

Maybe self control isn't a Master virtue, but I think there is a strong rationale that we can apply to make it among the most important virtues. Delaying gratification so we can achieve our goals is a very hard thing. It is a necessary thing to do if we are to not sabotage our competence to cope with the challenges of life. We need self control to get good life outcomes. The idiom should go as a ounce of instant gratification today could get you a pound of misery tomorrow. We often sabotage ourselves through instant gratification and giving into and rationalizing temptations. Good intentions are not enough. Sticking to one’s plan is hard work. You should be very proud of yourself when you do. We humans are notoriously poor at following through with our plans. Being able to stick to ones plans is a major contributor to our self efficacy and self confidence.  We tend to be ambivalent about making a change. We want to lose weight, but we also love to eat. We want to stick to a budget, but cant stop rationalizing off budget purchases. People can resist desire (temptation) using the following resistance strategies.  Here are some suggestions from Shahram Heshmat, Ph.D an associate professor of health economics of addiction at the University of Illinois.

1. Avoiding temptation.

Avoiding temptation requires anticipating situations where unwanted desires might emerge and taking proactive steps to ensure that one doesn’t succumb to the problematic desire. For example, avoiding exposure to tempting situations can include making unhealthy foods less visible, such as keeping one’s home free of unhealthy but tempting foods.

2. A can do attitude.

Viewing ourselves as free and responsible for our actions is the foundation for self-discipline. Evidence shows that people function better and are more able to deal with stress when they feel that they are in control. Believing that things are beyond your control and they probably will be.

3. Goals.

One has to have a goal. Goals basically guide our choices. The more specific the goal, the better able people are to reach it. A highly abstract goal may not be actionable (e.g., to get healthy). For example, instead of pursuing the goal of “being healthy”, a person may adopt the goal of “walking at least 30 minutes everyday”, which is more concrete and easier to monitor. Effective goal pursuits follow the SMART criteria: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based.

4. Self–Monitor.
Self-monitoring is a form of feedback. Monitoring progress toward goal attainment helps one to concentrate on goal-relevant activities. Successful dieters count calories and otherwise carefully monitor their food intake, and that the stopping of monitoring often undermines dietary efforts. Self-monitoring helps us to become experts on our behaviors. By doing so, it will make habits much less difficult to change.

5. Motivation.
The more you want the goal, the more likely you are willing to make the efforts and sacrifices required to achieve it. The strength of people’s commitment to something depends on its value to them and the chance that the value will, in fact, occur (Value*Likelihood). The relation between these two factors is multiplicative. This means that there will be no motivation to the goal pursuit if the value of the goal is zero, no matter how high is the likelihood of success. Similarly, there will be no motivation if the expected chance is quite low.

6. Self-confidence.

An important component of motivation is the person’s self-perceived ability to achieve it. People won’t build up much motivation for change if they believe it is impossible for them. In the face of difficulties, people with weak self-confidence beliefs easily develop doubts about their ability to accomplish the task at hand, whereas those with strong beliefs are more likely to continue their efforts to master a task when difficulties arise.

7. Will power.

Willpower represents strength or psychological energy that one uses to resist other temptations in order to work toward one’s goal. Self-control depends on a limited resource that operates like a strength or energy. People consume this resource when they exert self-control. Thus, having only one goal makes self-control more successful than when people have two or more conflicting goals. As Plato’s counseled: “Do one thing and do it well.”

8. The why & how mindsets
“Why” questions encourage long-term thinking, or desirability of pursuing an action. In contrast, “How” questions bring the mind down to the present and consider the goal’s attainability or feasibility. From a distant perspective one sees the forest, but from a near perspective one sees trees. Thus, distance impairs our ability to identify specific details of the choice. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. When we decide on a diet, we do so because of its attractive outcomes to us. However, there are also low-level details associated with this task such as going to gym, avoiding our favorite snack, and so on. The Why questions can benefit people to keep going on maintaining a new habit (e.g., daily exercise or diet). As Nietzsche remarked, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

9. Self-control as a pattern of behavior.
While the physical independence of today and tomorrow is real enough, the fact remains that actions today affect actions tomorrow. Professor Rachlin argues that self-control comes from choosing “patterns” of behavior over time rather than individual “acts.” The decision to stick to a budget is in effect a decision to begin a pattern of behavior. To stick to a budget today is to fail to perceive the connection between todays’s act and the pattern of acts over many tomorrow's. Stick to a budget today makes it easier stick to a budget tomorrow and stick to a budget tomorrow makes it easier stick to a budget the next day, and so on.

10. Automated goals.

Goal pursuits can be enhanced by a simple planning strategy: making If-then plans that connect a certain triggering situation with a concrete behavior. For example, “if I order something for dinner at a restaurant, then I will choose the cheapest meal; “if people mistreat me, then I will take a deep breath and count to 10.” Repeated practices strengthen the association between the specific situational cues and intended response. Forming if-then plans can help to outsource behavioral control to the environment to prevent willpower depletion. And the person is now on automatic pilot- the planned action will be triggered directly by the specified cue. Thus, when people are stressed or distracted, they can fall back on good habits.