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The ancient Greek concept of sophrosyne, which is similar in some regards to the Chinese Confucianist concept of zhōngyōng and the Indian Hindu concept of sattva, refers to an aspirational way of being that results in a way of perceiving the world that was considered to be ideal.
This definition of “ideal” leaned heavily on the assumption that a person can be perfectly or near-perfectly balanced in their approach to knowledge, self, and other people. Buddhists might call this way of living “walking the Middle Path,” though the Greeks defined it in terms of how one comports oneself in public, how one moderates one’s base desires, and how one develops oneself over time.
This concept of being a balanced, optimized version of oneself is not limited to just one culture or just one time period, then, nor is it a concept that’s limited to the individual.
In the book Seeing Like a State, author James C. Scott describes how governmental and other infrastructural entities build systems that are dependent on what he calls “legibility.”
In this context, legibility refers to the state’s ability to accurately perceive and quantify something: so individuals become citizens with an easy-to-parse-on-scale collection of attributes, rather than fully realized, complex, imperfect and imperfectly measurable human beings.
The same is true of how these entities perceive things like the environment, other governments, and even more nebulous concepts like expression, art, and philosophy. If it can’t be reduced to a hard-set, concrete, consistently measurable quantity, it doesn’t register with any accuracy for these entities. And that’s an issue if you live under the auspices of such an entity, as essentially everyone on the planet does in the modern world.
The connection between a state seeing only what it can measure and human beings aiming to become optimal version of themselves is that both require metrics by which to make decisions and measure progress, alongside concrete understandings of what “more ideal” looks like in the first place.
What is balance, in the sense of becoming a more balanced human being, anyway? How much alcohol should one consume if one wants to have just enough, but not too much? How much work should one do each day if one wants to live a balanced life in the sense of being professionally successful, but also successful in one’s relationships, collection of experiences, and so on?
These are fuzzy terms that we nonetheless must solidify into something less fuzzy-seeming if we’re to pursue such purported perfection. And in doing so, we crystallize certain assumptions into law, into ideology, and into practice and habit.
It’s not just possible, then, but in fact likely, that as we aspire to live more balanced and ideal lifestyles, we’ll unknowingly lock in certain ideas about who we are, what we want, and how the world works—alongside value-judgements about essentially everything.
Governments and similar entities must make the same sorts of judgements about goodness and badness, idealness and non-idealness, if they’re to make laws, create systems to manage those laws, and introduce policies that allow for the implementation of those laws.
The takeaway is that even perfect, seemingly rational systems are predicated on irrational assumptions made from incomplete data.
This is true at every scale and in all currently known permutations of the concept.
It’s also almost certainly unavoidable. All we can do is work this knowledge into our personal and collective calculus as we aspire and act to optimize aspects of ourselves and the societies of which we’re a part.
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