The Autonomy Mindset: How the Science of Autonomy Transforms and Defines Our Lives

By Jason Xi Yang

Based on cutting-edge research and first-hand interviews, The Autonomy Mindset illustrates that personal autonomy is part of our nature; it is not only essential to our productivity at work, but also directly impacts our physical and mental health. The book reveals how modern plagues such as the fear of missing out, the fear of better o

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637304884

Book preview

The Autonomy Mindset

How the Science of Autonomy Transforms and Defines Our Lives

Jason Xi Yang

new degree press

copyright © 2021 Jason Xi Yang

All rights reserved.

The Autonomy Mindset

How the Science of Autonomy Transforms and Defines Our Lives

ISBN

978-1-63676-745-1 Paperback

978-1-63730-487-7 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-488-4 Digital Ebook

To all my friends: I could not have done it without you.

To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.

Contents

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Prologue

Part 1

How We Got Here

Chapter 1

Paradise Lost

Chapter 2

An Anatomy of the (Lack Of) Autonomy

Chapter 3

The Power of Now

Part 1

Principles of the Autonomy Mindset

Chapter 4

Principle 1 – Confidence

Chapter 5

Principle 2 – Boundary Setting

Chapter 6

Principle 3 – Persistence

Chapter 7

Principle 4 – Embrace Chaos

Chapter 8

Principle 5 – Ownership

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Sic itur ad astra

Prologue

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Think for yourself

Thinking for yourself is a skill in scarcity.

I beg to differ, you might retort.

I have always impressed everybody in the office with my unique and impeccable style and fashion sense.

I am a great master at picking when to order takeout from which restaurant to satisfy my special appetite at a particular time.

Well, I’ve been there, assured of my own independent thinking ability—until the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated ruthlessly how rare the ability to think independently really is, and how our complacency about it has cost us exorbitant financial and life losses.

Since the onset of the pandemic, I have witnessed otherwise highly rational and respected intellectuals latch on to conspiracy theories, social media posts of dubious origin, or even downright fake news.

The coronavirus is a hoax. 

COVID is just a big flu. 

Wearing a face mask does more harm and is no good in preventing the spread of the virus.

Herd immunity will soon be achieved.

I’m sure you’ve heard at least one of these remarks at some point. During the unprecedentedly turbulent year of the pandemic, they have taken turns in dominating our media.

In October 2020, an open letter made big headlines advocating the enforcement of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for a herd immunity approach to COVID-19. Supposedly, it was signed by more than fifteen thousand scientists and medical practitioners from around the world. However, its content proved untenable, and its list of expert signatories included fictional names such as a Dr. Johnny Bananas and a Professor Cominic Dummings. (The Guardian, 2020) Clearly, something beyond fishy was going on; yet it was still in circulation among certain groups, cited as the support from the science community to take a hands-off attitude to the pandemic.

In another instance, people are still sharing articles on social media, touting the Swedish model as a success story against the pandemic—that is, even after the Swedish prime minister has retracted the herd immunity policy and imposed strict lockdowns after seeing intensive care units around Stockholm exceed 100 percent of capacity and hundreds of Swedes dying per week since October 2020. The so-called Swedish model represents the hands-off approach to containing the pandemic. According to the model, people are reassured a face mask or lockdown is not necessary in curbing the spread of the unknown virus. It has the endorsement from the chief epidemiologist and the prime minister of the Scandinavian country. Remember how that model had been lauded across the globe by major press as a justification for laissez-faire policies during the 2020 summer lull of the pandemic? (Erdbrink, 2020)

The scariest thing about them is not their disputed veracity or even utter falsehood, but the fact most of those claims have been made or backed by well-regarded figures: health care officials, virus experts, epidemiologists, or people with authority such as presidents, prime ministers, or kings—in other words, exactly the kind of people whom we would normally look up to for advice, cure, solace, and leadership, especially in dire emergencies like this one.

Have you seen the pattern of the problem yet? It has repeated itself through our history, but the most recent pandemic has managed to become a textbook display of it—figures with alleged authority said it, and yet figures with alleged authority retracted it all the time. On one day, they can say with 100 percent certainty herd immunity is on the path to its ultimate success of saving our souls, but the next day, the same people proclaim with no less conviction herd immunity is an utter failure and could eventually kill us all. And you bet they would shift their positions more than once on it, so frequently and so swiftly even the reality cannot quite catch up to the latest position. If you faithfully subscribe to their pitches and adjust your worldviews accordingly, it would be like you having to faithfully become a Jacobin, a Girondist, then a royalist, a Bonapartist, and finally maybe back to a Jacobin at different times all in the same week. Of course, that is if you are lucky enough to still survive all the havoc.

The moral is: if you delegate thinking to someone else, that someone will start to relay only parts of the story and even blatantly lie to your face for their own interests and agenda, with barely any care for our welfare and interests. Yet many of us easily fall prey to well-decorated lip service and are taken in, paying hefty tolls with our health and lives.

To be fair, social media like Facebook and Twitter are implementing fact-checking mechanisms and marking out blatant fake stories. This often happens, however, after the messages have reached and possibly influenced millions of people. 

Unfortunately, such is human nature that we often knowingly fall to our intrinsic weaknesses. We are too lazy to do fact-checking ourselves. We don’t like being challenged by alternative views. If given the opportunity, we prefer to stay in the echo chamber where we are always validated and approved, and we put on the lens to filter out the inconvenient information and interpret everything as a confirmation of our own prejudices and biases.

In doing all the above, we have chosen to put our much-needed independent thinking ability in quarantine.

But what about the damage that has been done? What about the people who have been disabled or died from falling victim to the irresponsible wrong messages?

More importantly, what about you? Are you able to think for yourself? Or have you expediently quarantined your independent thinking skill too?

A Big Problem

In 1928, Edward Bernays, a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, made the following resounding statement in his book Propaganda:

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. (Bernays, 1928)

About one hundred years later, things have not changed much: we are still grappling with an identical inconvenient truth. There has been a herd mentality lurking among us, which has been governing many of our behaviors and decision-making processes. We keep tuning in to the voices in our heads that constantly remind us things cannot go awry if we just follow the group.

Everyone on Instagram is talking about that restaurant! There must be something to it; let’s try it out.

Oprah spoke highly of that new book. It must be good.

Dr. X said climate change is (un)real. So, it must be the case.

Now, the problem is not about the veracity of each of the statements—which could well be the truth—but our tendency to easily buy into some statements without thinking for ourselves first. We do not really bother to flex our independent thinking muscles when there is apparently an easier path of least resistance—just following some authoritative figure, celebrity, or simply the herd. When it matches what we want to believe, we will not even bother to give it a second thought. Figuratively speaking, we have the human propensity of staying in our own echo chamber. The Cambridge Dictionary describes this phenomenon as a situation in which people only hear opinions of one type, or opinions that are similar to their own. (The Cambridge Dictionary, 2021)

Thus, we have given up a mindset of autonomy and let media, authorities, and Internet influencers dictate to us their regurgitated ideas, often of dubious motivations and without our interests in mind. When we accept regurgitated ideas, we are molded into groupthink on all kinds of issues—from deciding whether we should like or bomb another country to choosing a restaurant on the other side of town or across the street.

The Internet has only helped to push our herd mentality to an extreme. A recent study of online behaviors shows the first person reading an experimental online comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an upvote if it had been already given a fabricated positive score. (Muchnik, Aral, and Taylor, 2013) The significant bias created by prior online ratings and comments is gradually eating away our independent thinking ability and has helped generate a myriad of online "echo chambers’’ where people choose to hear the opinions they prefer and resist all other voices. (Jamieson and Capella, 2010)

Confirmation bias—which occurs when we selectively collect evidence that overvalues or supports our claims or beliefs and minimizes contradictory evidence (SEI, 2015)—and its mirror image, cognitive dissonance—which occurs when new information conflicts with our previously held understandings and causes discomfort—are really the greatest Achilles’ heels of modern men. We would do everything to avoid the discomfort and safeguard the tranquility of our own reality, a reality where everything is its harmonious place. When new information surfaces, it has to go through our lens to get projected perfectly into that reality and fit in without disturbing anything—even if that means bending or spinning the new information away from the truth.

In 1956, the social psychologist Leon Festinger laid down the foundational work for cognitive dissonance when he closely studied a UFO cult called the Seekers, who claimed an apocalypse was imminent and UFOs would come and rescue only the cult members from the calamity. (Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter, 1964) The cult members formed a close community away from the outside world and even cut off relationships with their nonbelieving social networks. When the prophesied disaster failed to arrive, they came up with various elaborate rationalizations to justify the reality and became even more die-hard with the cult than before the failure.

Similar things happened more recently: according to Harold Camping, our world should have been destroyed five times already since 1994. Whenever he again postponed the judgment to a later date, his group would ingeniously rationalize his failed prediction by saying, actually, the judgment or rapture had happened in some way, though it would be hardly perceptible to us profane people. 

Adherents to his teachings can actually still be found today.

Yes, human weaknesses die hard. But modern technology has lifted the game to an unprecedented level by appealing specifically