How do we define what's 'good'?

An inquiry into the human psyche's convoluted value judgments

I don’t normally start my articles with notes, but I’m excited to welcome a number of new subscribers and want to thank you all for being here. Grateful for each of you — old and new alike!

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Our world is an inherently social one. It’s one made up of marriages and societies and governments and teams and neighborhoods and friendships and the handy fusiform face area in our brain that lets us instantly and effortlessly recognize the faces of those we know.

As I’ve written before, the human mind depends on the minds of others to learn and absorb this complex world, to fill in the gaps that our single brain inevitably faces. We lean on our deeply interconnected nature to make sense of an overwhelming onslaught of raw sensory stimuli.

We each play a role in the continued functioning of the species — not in some quasi-spiritual way, but in the pragmatic, literal way that you, as a unique individual, contribute to the system by passing along information, purchasing goods, reinforcing our shared language. Lest this sound too coldly capitalistic, you also have your own singular knack for bringing joy to others, inspiring creative action, and sharing valuable skills. You, as a brilliantly unique node in our global web, play an integral and irreplaceable role in the human project.

And because all of this is true, the individual, as we know, can only wield so much power. It’s the connections between us that yield powerful arrangements of human capital. A single activist can bring about an impressive amount of change — but they’re no match for an organized movement of connected activists. It’s through collective and strategic social power that decisions are made. Sure, there’s room for individuals to strike a “tipping point” that ignites an unexpectedly large, cascading effect — but the success of such a strike is measured in the number of people the cascade touched.

To clarify, everything from movements to markets to elections depends on the mobilization of large sums of people to thrive and succeed. A business that only a handful of people enjoy will fail. A candidate that only a small segment of the population endorses will lose. A marketing campaign that fails to engage its target audience will run itself into the ground. A piece of writing that misses the mark will lose itself in the ether of media. Such are the demands of a traditionally capitalistic market and a traditionally democratic government. You must win over the people; without them, you are doomed.

This line of thought raises the question:

What does it mean for something to be ‘good’ in an inherently social world?

If we’re trained to seek the approval of the largest crowd and granted the most benefits only once we have it, then is that necessarily the way we must measure something’s value?

In many creative spheres, there’s an initial urge to rush to the metrics to determine what resonates. As has been noted many times over, this rush to resonate often produces flat, predictable material. In an attempt to satisfy the crowd’s desire, we end up over-fulfilling it, offering the same as everyone else, contributing to the tragedy of oversupply.

In response, there’s often a complete rejection of the metrics, as though acknowledging the consumer’s itch were akin to undermining the entire creative process. But then how is quality to be determined? What determines “success” if not the attitudes and reactions of the collective?

Well, plenty of things. Approval from a more streamlined set of experts, rubrics that capture the ostensibly more objective merits of a product or a piece of art or a candidate, the personal sense of satisfaction that emerges only when you truly believe that this is your finest work.

Writer Neil Pasricha outlines the three S’s of success, which cleanly capture this philosophical question in everyday terms:

Sales success — When the masses buy or approve the thing you’re peddling

Social success — When the elites in your field praise and respect you

Self success — When you’ve reached your own, individual goal for yourself

His little triad is designed to prompt introspection: in any given pursuit, which type of success am I truly after? Once addressed, you can rest easier, knowing that the accomplishment of all three is exceedingly rare.

But this just solves the question of how to derive personal satisfaction from your own work. The larger question of what makes something good continues to loom.

You might write this off as an impossibly subjective question: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Something’s goodness can’t be measured — only experienced and personally judged.

And yet, we do it all the time. When we evaluate something — whether a restaurant or a book or a political policy — we’re rarely claiming to announce a personal preference. No, we’re announcing our judgment of the overall merit of something, its intrinsic value as an object of public consciousness. This is why forums like Yelp and Reddit are littered with reviews and hot takes. There’s an eagerness to share and consume this sort of evaluation. As an individual, we don’t have the time or cognitive bandwidth to experience everything. We rely on the impressions and evaluations of others. And the most convincing are those with strong, impassioned stances — word-of-mouth marketing is always the best.

Our opinions are extensions of our beliefs, which are, in turn, extensions of our selves. To reinforce and protect the notoriously fragile fabric of the human self-concept, we must then justify and rationalize the judgments that make up the backbone of it. A simple way to do this is to recruit others to our stance, persuasively making our judgment known and establishing a de facto in-group of followers who share and amplify it.

In this way, our opinions are not merely lifeless judgments that limp along beside us; they are active, powerful things that shape not only our own perception but also the perception of those who come in contact with us. Our judgment is inherently social — a feature of a species that depends on deep interconnectivity. If I trust you, I’ll take your word for it, creating in our wake the potential for a wave of mass activity: that flurried craze of have you tried this? We love it!

This domino chain of obsession is at the heart of mimetic desire, or the theory that our desires are merely reflections of the desires of others. If you know my writing, you know that I think much of what we call agency is likely something else — a stubborn relic of our evolutionary past, a moment of hormonal imbalance, a quirk of our idiosyncratic collection of influences. It’s from this murkiness of the mind that mimetic desire emerges, drawing us into the whirlpool of social approval. We come to realize that no human desire can ever truly be uncontaminated by those of the people around us.

As a result, the value of something is measured by its utility, not to the individual, but to the group. Even in today’s era of an unprecedented proliferation of opinion, it’s the opinions that collectively scale up into a full crescendo that turn into tangible results for a company or an artist or a candidate. When an object of judgment successfully cultivates its own in-group and activates our mimetic desire, it thrives. This fuels a system in which value is measured by big numbers; goodness becomes secondary to the mammoth of collective buy-in. And, in this process, the thing paradoxically begins to appear “good” to larger and larger numbers of people.

Somewhere in our unapologetically social nature, we lose our grasp on quality and goodness, succumbing to our trusting and imitative impulses. And while, like any impulse, these can lead us into trouble, they’re also a testament to the powerful and intimate arrangements of social influence to which we’re all inextricably bound.

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