The Quest for Autonomy

Why people who crave autonomy are misfits in contemporary society

Henry Oliver writes

Autonomy is a sign of talent in multiple places. It’s why entrepreneurs are more likely than salaried workers to have engaged in illicit activity as a teenager. It’s why young research scientists who narrowly miss out on funding applications early in their careers often outperform those who did get funding over the following fifteen years. And it’s why when capable school students are allowed to miss some classes and undertake self-directed study, they perform better on exams.

It’s not that entrepreneurs are natural rule-breakers. Rather, like many sorts of creative people, they want self-direction. They aren’t going to take the world at face value. They have to figure it out for themselves. Failure improves those scientists’ prospects because it gives them an increased dose of drive and perseverance. Once the system has rejected you, you are emboldened to be more autonomous. More freedom doesn’t mean capable students bunk off school: it gives them room to focus on their work. 

Think of how many of the early personal computer pioneers got that start as phone phreaks, playing tricks on the phone company to make long distance calls without having to pay long-distance rates.

I found this interesting in light of an experience I had at a camp put on by a venture fund for teenagers with an interest in engineering and entrepreneurship. I still have not written up my thoughts on that camp. But I noticed that I was more likely to see future entrepreneurship in the kids who were rebellious.

Possibly related: Cremieux Recueil writes,

Throughout much of European history, noblemen were at least as likely as the poor to be involved in criminal offending because of their tendency to get into “conflicts over rights and goods

…Most accounts suggest it was a change in values that caused the nobility’s shift away from violence. But what if the violence itself was what caused the change in values? In other words, noble violence led to noble non-violence. How? The mechanism is simple: violent nobles died violently, leaving behind relatively more non-violent nobles.

In the early days of American settlement, the country selected for people who wanted autonomy. You had to come across the ocean and live in a difficult frontier.

Over time, cities became more prominent. Large-scale manufacturing made for more wage-slaves and and relatively fewer independent farmers and tradesmen. The rise of large corporations in retail and finance furthered this trend away from autonomy.

We are now at a stage where corporate conformity has been normalized. We have domesticated ourselves, selecting against the independent thinker, the malcontent, the restless nonconformist. We still have those, but they are not the dominant culture that they were in the 18th century.