3 Top Creeds (say neuroscientists) for 2021

How to Live
Written By Ashby Neterer

Those people became corrupted in camp [Soviet Gulags] who before camp had not been enriched by any morality at all or by any spiritual upbringing.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Codes Count

Moral codes ground suffering people. Despite facing libel, deprivation, forced labor, suppressed speech, hypothermic temperatures, execrable living conditions, and torture, some Soviet-era Russian political prisoners (also known as “Zeks”) kept their heads high and their consciences clear during their imprisonment in Soviet gulags. How did they do it?

In his seminal memoir recounting Soviet gulags, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suggests that those with established moral codes (frequently garnered from previous religious instruction) relied on these codes both for guidance and for hope during extreme duress. Those without such codes were more likely—on the one hand—to steal from, attack, or incriminate fellow Zeks and—on the other hand—to abandon the will to live.

The un-coded followed, in short, the mentality espoused by this Bedouin proverb: “I against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, and my brothers and cousins and I against the world,” wherein other people served as means to the ends of one’s personal and social protection. According to Solzhenitsyn, gulags brought to the surface whatever encoded behaviors lurked underneath. Thus, camps did not make people but revealed them. This article considers the logical necessity of codes (what I call “creeds”), Solzhenitsyn's historical illustration of that necessity, and a suggestion from Psychology of three well-tested creeds to adopt in 2021.

The Creedal Imperative

One definition of “creed” is “a set of beliefs or aims which guide someone's actions.” By this definition, everyone has a creed. Some creeds are explicit, public, and subject to scrutiny; others are improvised, internal, and not open to evaluation. To take the latter kind first, the unwritten creed is, crucially and ironically, not susceptible to comparison with any standard on which it claims to be based, whether a philosophical system, religious text, cultural tradition, or otherwise (Trueman 2012). The former creed fulfills a stronger definition of the word: “a formal statement of principles.” The explicit creed, while ostensibly limiting individual freedom of thought, actually gives a clearer basis upon which to agree or to differ with the given system and with the behaviors it advocates. Thus, creeds and codes facilitate, rather than restrict, free thought.

Take a familiar example distinguishing explicit from implicit creeds. The American Constitutional Framers debated whether to establish an explicit Bill of Rights. In sum, Federalists argued that an explicit system of rights protected the rights of individuals, particularly those of minority representation, from infringement by the majority. (The vote protects the majority’s rights.) James Madison described the problem in Federalist 10: “measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party; but by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority.”

By contrast, Anti-Federalists opposed explicit rights because guarantees omitted from the list could be legally subject to infringement and because they were wary of excessive governmental expansion. The Bill of Rights marks the Federalists victory over the Antifederalists and, significantly, a key historical example wherein an explicit code undergirds a lasting system of complex social, cultural, and legal engagement comprising ever-evolving guarantors (the government) and guarantees (citizens).

Neuroscientists may object to the notion that everyone has a creed, citing split-brain studies that show human’s ability to create post-hoc explanations of behaviors as acts of conscious will, explanations that have no relation to the actual the stimulus for the behavior. For example, in studies conducted by Joseph LeDoux and Michael Gazzaniga, a split-brain subject whose right brain is stimulated to stand, to wave, or to scratch a hand explained his behaviors as stretching, greeting a friend out of the window, or satisfying an itch. “The left hemisphere took these unexpected behaviors in stride and wove these into its stream of thought” (Ledoux 2015).

The left brain effortlessly “fill[ed] in the blanks of an otherwise incomplete mental pattern,” a finding that underlies what Gazzaniga calls the Interpreter Theory of Consciousness. The subject offers a pretense where no evidence for the purported pretense exists and where an explanation with fewer posits easily arises, hence the linguistic brain appears merely to interpret given stimuli to create a coherent narrative. Here, Occam’s razor rears its ugly head, and neuroscience ostensibly casts doubt both on free will and on humans’ capacity to act based on pre-determined notions (such as consciously chosen creeds).

These studies certainly compel further inquiry into human behavior; however, they do not address creeds as such. To use a somewhat harried taxonomy, cognitive studies address nature, creeds nurture. Whether Kantian or Cartesian, Hobbesian or Lockean, Aristotelian or Thomistic, codes of conduct continue to undergird Political and Social Science, Economics, and Ethics: in short, all that is necessary to maintain a free society. At the individual level, probably very few neuroscientists have stopped reading their children The Little Engine That Could as a result of clinical research. If a child lies, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” will suggest itself to researchers as to any other parent. These stories provide moral lessons via memorable templates. Put differently, these stories provide elementary creeds and inculcate proper social behavior, and virtually everyone behaves as though the stories function in this way (even if they doubt the possibility of free will).

The Great Fork: To Creed or not to Creed

To return to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he highlights the differences between Zeks who relied on moral creeds and those who abandoned (or never had) them. He calls the point of decision between the two paths “the great fork.”

This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go to the left—you lose your conscience.

Girgory Ivanovich Grigoriyev went to the right. When recruited to be a “stoolie”—an undercover informant forced to incriminate fellow Zeks—Gregoriyev refused. For this, he was punished, but he kept his conscience. Given the job of “work-checker,” he refused because he would have to falsify documents and broke rocks instead.

When demoted to menial field-labor, he refused even to steal potatoes (an activity that kept many Zeks alive). When offered—as a soil scientist—a position as brigadier over his fellows on an agricultural work party, he chose instead to hoe and scythe “with enthusiasm” (318). Because of his code, he preferred hard labor to lording over innocent people. That price Grigoriyev gladly paid.

By sticking to his creed, Grigoriyev not only kept his moral moorings but also strengthened his will to live. Innocent of political crime, he refused to repent falsely. “No, not only do you not repent, but your clean conscience, like a clear mountain lake, shines in your eyes.” Survival meant vindication, and vindication was worth living for (which fact explains, says Solzhenitsyn, the low level of camp suicides).

In this way, Russian novelists misrepresent the prisoner class. Whereas Dostoyevsky’s hard-labor prisoners saw themselves as “doomed renegades,” actual prisoners were sure of their innocence and ready to fight for freedom. (Speaking to literature’s great sway on the public mind, Solzhenitsyn also attributes the end of Tsarism in part to Tolstoy’s depicting mere contact with police as polluting.) The ideals of justice, fairness, and retribution that underlay Grigoriyev’s Christian creed thus provided hope in his darkest hour.

Starting with Wisdom: Three Creeds to Adopt

In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, first amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt forward three sapiential phrases—three creeds—that they suggest can motivate positive social and emotional outcomes in those who adopt them. They contrast these with the “great untruths” of safetyism.

Three Untruths to Avoid

Lukianoff and Haidt offer immense evidence that these untruths suffuse educational policy, parental folk-wisdom, and social media, effectively inculcating youth with social anxiety, distorted reasoning, and learned helplessness. In 2021, they remain as prevalent as they proved during the book’s 2018 publication. Here are the untruths, followed by their antidotes:

1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Three Creeds for 2021

Lukianoff and Haidt offer three creeds as antidote to these untruths, arguing that philosophy is truly medicine for the soul. The creeds below correspond in number to the untruth which they counter.

1. “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s claim entered popular parlance through song and fiction, but it has lately fallen into disrepute. Lukianoff and Haidt clarify that some events or states—such as early physical or emotional trauma and severe deprivation—can weaken people, particularly if multiple such factors co-occur. But while Nietzche’s saying fails at the margins, it succeeds centrally. People who have faced bereavement, politcal exile, violent traumatic injury, and much more largely report that their experiences strengthened them. In the aftermath of housefires, family’s report renewed closeness. Bereaved parents relate deepened appreciation for life.

Lukianoff and Haidt do not advocate for individuals to seek out such experiences, nor do they rejoice in tragedy. Instead, they recommend a shift in perspective toward life’s inherent tragedies, a perspective which sees them as opportunities for growth and for learning. This perspective enables people to become “antifragile,” in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s coinage, meaning that setbacks make them stronger. Facing life’s inevitable vicissitudes (link suffering article) in fight (approach) rather than in flight or freeze helps one to adapt more readily to change and garner valuable lessons to apply to future situations (Ledoux 2015).

2. “Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.” – Buddha

To counter the untruth of emotional reasoning, Lukianoff and Haidt suggest adopting the above Buddhist creed. Thoughts can serve as enemy or ally, depending on whether they are the ruler or the ruled. Lukianoff and Haidt detail several common cognitive distortions which represent the dangers of “thoughts unguarded,” ranging from emotional reasoning, catastrophizing, and overgeneralization. They advocate practicing the modern psychological techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to inculcate the creed and to overcome cognitive distortions.

As I have noted in a previous article on suffering [link], Haidt addresses the question of controlling one’s thoughts in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. In this book, Haidt reframes the classic horse-and-rider problem that Plato used to describe the rational mind’s attempts to rein in the passions as a problem rather of elephant and rider. His elephant-rider conceptualization demonstrates the near total control that the elephant (emotions) exercises over the rider (reason). How much self-restraint humans have is debatable, But modern psychology offers hope through CBT.

3. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The final creed counters the untruth of “us vs. them.” Solzhenitsyn claims that the world comprises not saints and sinners but sinning saints, people with capacities for good and evil alike. Vitrolic modern political discourse—exacerbated by echo-chamber-inducing solcial media algorithms—typifies the untruth of us vs. them, which cuts the world neatly into the good and bad people. Sometimes, the truth hurts, and the truth is that everyone has the capacity for good and for evil.

This convenient mental shortcut has helped to polarize society. When, for example, political leaders personify entire political parties as evil agents, they foster the untruth. Hilary Clinton’s infamous statement “basket of deplorables” to refer to Trump voters and Donald Trump’s characterization of Democrats as “liars,” “thieves,” and “phonies” typify the distorted thinking of us vs. them. To counter the untruth, Lukianoff and Haidt suggest acknowledging one’s own capacity for evil. Such an acknowledgement has the potential to foster more civil and sympathetic political discourse.

Tying it All Together

As Nietzsche points out in Thus Spake Zarathustra, humans cannot create their own values—they need traditions and creeds. Creeds—whether explicit or implied—underlie human activity. Put differently, beliefs compel behavior. When people make their beliefs explicit, they can evaluate and adapt them, and they can rely on them in troubled times.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn relates the story of Girgory Ivanovich Grigoriyev to offer a case study in creeds. Because he knew what he stood for, Grigoriyev stood up to prison guards, helped fellow prisoners, and refused to mar his conscience. Though difficult, his life was rife with the deep meaning attendant to suffering for a greater cause. What did not kill him made him stronger.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt advocate embracing difficult things, doubting one’s feelings, and acknowledging that both good and evil exist in everyone. By doing these things, one can lower personal anxiety and improve societal discourse. As do many of the greatest ancient sayings, the three phrases highlighted above turn on paradoxes. Pain can strengthen people, feelings can fool them, and evil can rule them.

These truths are counterintuitive; hence, adopting them requires active attention and practice. Applying them in the real world will be an uphill battle, but modern psychological practices, such as CBT, and ancient wisdom, such as the above creeds, make the battle possible. What’s more, the battle to overcome one’s innate cognitive distortions through reason and practice promises to be, now as ever, immanently rewarding and meaningful.

Ashby Neterer
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