What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [8]
Question 4 taps your belief in the power of choice and willpower. The top quarter of Americans score 21; above 19 is in the top half; 16 or below is in the quarter that least believes in the power of choice. People who score high are more socially and economically conservative, less depressed, and older.
Question 5 is about how sweeping you think change can be. A score of 20 or above puts you in the top quarter; 16 or above in the top half; and a score of 10 or below puts you in the bottom quarter. People who score high are socially liberal and more in favor of welfare, affirmative action, and foreign aid.
Question 6 taps your belief in change. If you scored 11 or above, you are in the top quarter of those who believe that things naturally change a lot; 8 or above is the top half; 3 marks the quarter of those who most believe things stay the same. People with high scores believe more in foreign aid, welfare, and affirmative action, and are more socially and economically liberal. People with low scores believe more in the death penalty, military intervention, and abortion.
IN THE DOMAIN of human personality, what are the facts? That, of course, is what this book is about. I want to provide an understanding of what you can and what you can’t change about yourself so that you can concentrate your limited time and energy on what is possible. So much time has been wasted. So much needless frustration has been endured. So much of therapy, so much of child rearing, so much of self-improving, and even some of the great social movements in our century have come to nothing because they tried to change the unchangeable. Too often we have wrongly thought we were weak-willed failures, when the changes we wanted to make in ourselves were just not possible. But all this effort was necessary: Because there have been so many failures, we are now able to see the boundaries of the unchangeable; this in turn allows us to see clearly for the first time the boundaries of what is changeable.
The knowledge of the difference between what we can change and what we must accept in ourselves is the beginning of real change. With this knowledge, we can use our precious time to make the many rewarding changes that are possible. We can live with less self-reproach and less remorse. We can live with greater confidence. This knowledge is a new understanding of who we are and where we are going.
2
Booters and Bootstrappers:
The Age of Self-Improvement
and Psychotherapy
“The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and the secret motion of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire for the affecting of all things possible.”
Inscription over the door of the
House of Solomon—Francis Bacon,
The New Atlantis, 1626
WHAT AMERICANS believe people can change is—in historical perspective—truly astonishing.
We are told from childhood that we can improve ourselves in almost every way. This is what our schools are supposed to help us accomplish. Our children are not just to be filled up with facts but taught to read, to be good citizens, to be lovingly sexual, to exercise, to have high self-esteem, to enjoy literature, to be tolerant of people who are different, to play baseball, to sing on key, to be competitive as well as cooperative, to lead and to follow, to have good health habits, to be ambitious, to use condoms, to obey the law.
The reality may fall short, but that is the mission of American schools.
Improving is absolutely central to American ideology. It is tantamount in importance to freedom in our national identity; indeed, advancement is probably the end for which Americans believe freedom is the means. Every boy and, at last,