The Virtue in Inconsistency
“Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there” — Seneca
Look around, we are besieged by narratives seeking to influence our lives:
Buy a house in the suburbs then retire at 65.
Be sure to invest in the stock market.
Give a shit about what other people think so you’re always “employable”.
Take pain killers.
Pay attention to the news to be informed.
Get an MBA so you can work at a “prestigious” company.
Hire MBA grads so you appear to be a “prestigious” company.
Buy a new car and have a corner office to signal your success.
Do well on useless tests designed by nerds to show other nerds how smart they are.
Don’t hire people if they don’t interview well.
Sit still in class to go to a good school to get a good job.
Spend your life specializing in one thing and one thing only.
Don’t lift weights if you have back pain.
Narratives such as these beg for suckers to fall for them, someone who acts conditionally and uncritically on the external. In not toeing the line on these sucker-traps — instead acting unconditionally in accordance with their values — the virtuous can appear inconsistent.
People increasingly find the property of inconsistency admirable since it tends to signal authenticity as the societal narratives with which they deviate emphasize the superficial, particular and transient over the deep, general and timeless.
Here’s a short list of things which have an odor owing to consistency with some narrative, and note that they all hold true in the opposite order:
Lifting weights without reading books
Theoretical knowledge without practical experience
Consumption without creation
Success without failure
Higher education without manual labor
Book smarts without street smarts
Beauty without depth
Achievement without skin in the game
Scholarship without intellectual curiosity
Love without sacrifice
Upside gain without downside risk
On that last point, consider that the most reprehensible people of the 21st century (so far) are the bankers who collected fat bonuses while their irresponsibly constructed funds were making money yet did not lose a dime once their time bombs finally detonated and brought the whole system to its knees. Never trust a pilot who is not on the plane with you.
On the other hand, people exhibiting inconsistencies are interesting because their qualities don’t fit a narrative so cannot be interpreted by a pre-existing mental model. Wittiness is an attractive quality precisely because it signals both sharp intellect and a lack of nerdiness, two things which don’t tend to be conjoined.
The ancients were also familiar with the virtues of inconsistency — they studied enough mathematics to give form to literature and philosophy but enough literature and philosophy to give meaning to mathematics. Seneca, philosopher and guiding hand of the early Roman Empire, was the wealthiest man of his day yet chose to live periods in poverty. Not something typical of the wealthy.
Consider also how Jesus tells his followers to be poor in spirit, an idea inconsistent with the typical narrative of accumulation. Jonas Ellison points out that being poor in spirit means to walk around with an empty cup; to remain open to the unfoldment of your own soul rather than depending on an outside checklist.
In other words, the poor in spirit have an insatiable hunger for more understanding rather than the epistemic arrogance of the mediocre. What could be a better example of virtue than this?
Once you begin looking outside yourself for any part of yourself you have forfeited your freedom.
Let us, therefore, find and celebrate our inconsistencies.
