I was honored to have been asked to write a piece for the By Invitation series in The Economist, they couldn’t run all of it, so I thought I’d send the longer version here. Enjoy!

The Statue of liberty was a gift from France to America, commemorating the two nations’ friendship and shared love of freedom. Completed in 1886, it marked one of the world’s first, successful crowdfunding projects. The famous poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, mounted in bronze inside the pedestal (“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”), was written for the campaign. Over $100,000 was raised from more than 120,000 donors, including schoolchildren who collected pennies.

The end result has towered not just over New York Harbour and the millions of immigrants who passed by, but also over Americans’ view of themselves. It is a symbolic representation of the country’s foremost ideal, individual liberty. That value of freedom undergirds every newspaper article, church sermon and street demonstration—and is invoked whenever someone refuses to wear a face mask during a pandemic or accept a vaccine.

And yet what most people don’t know is that around 75 years after the statue was inaugurated, another statue was proposed, its “twin” so to speak, to be erected on the other side of the country in San Francisco Bay. Called the Statue of Responsibility, it was meant to symbolise the flipside of America’s prized virtue, the inherent obligations that come with a free society.

The idea was the brainchild of Viktor Frankl. In 1942 at the age of 37, Frankl, a psychologist, was deported from Vienna to the first of four concentration camps, where his father died of pneumonia, his mother and brother were gassed and his wife died of typhus. He ended up in Auschwitz. Within months of his liberation, over a nine-day period, he wrote the book that became Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he tried to make sense of the evil he experienced and articulated the importance of having a goal to live for.

In 1962, when he revised the book for an American edition and, with the passage of time, had reflected more on the experience, he wrote:

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Since then, his vision has been taken up by two nonprofit groups, The Responsibility Foundation and the Statue Of Responsibility Foundation, both with the blessing of his second wife, Elly Frankl. Among the latter group’s backers was the late Stephen Covey, a business professor and author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Covey commissioned a sculptor, Gary Lee Price, who designed a 300-foot statue of two arms clasping each other by the wrist—a bond among individuals unshakably gripped together.

Several locations have been suggested. One is on Alcatraz Island (which as a former maximum-security prison probably provides the wrong symbolism). A more inspiring choice is Angel Island, which sits around four miles off of San Francisco and served as an immigration-processing centre for more than half a million new residents between 1910 and 1940. So far, both projects have stalled.

Mrs Frankl, at 95 and living in Vienna, notes that her husband’s idea for a statue was meant as a thought experiment. “He was surprised and flattered when he heard of the project. I don’t think he ever expected to be taken literally,” she said in an interview, conducted through Alex Vesely, their grandson and a board director of the Viktor Frankl Institute. “Many people talk for hours and say very little, but he had this gift of speaking the truth with a few simple words. He coined this phrase to make a point,” she said.

What makes Viktor Frankl’s idea so appropriate is that, as he understood, liberty begets responsibility; that with freedom comes the need for self-control and an obligation to think of others, not just oneself. That is what Frankl alluded to when he wrote that freedom is “only part of the story and half of the truth”.

The pandemic—with its ludicrous protests against face masks and vaccines in the name of freedom—has been a painful illustration of the costs to society when people fail to understand liberty’s flipside. Research has found, for instance, that private birthday parties were large drivers of COVID-19 infections and that the irresponsibility was not limited to one side of the political spectrum. People thought that because it happened behind closed doors…it didn’t count.

We don’t have a freedom problem: we have a responsibility problem.

What does it mean to be responsible? Perhaps no better explanation of this duty has been given than by Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, who came to America through Ellis Island as an immigrant in 1906. “Responsibility is a unique concept,” the admiral said in testimony to Congress after decades of tireless service, “it may only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”

Responsibility means understanding yourself as belonging to something larger than yourself: accepting a duty to do right regardless of the cost. To the Stoics, the branch of classical Greek and Roman philosophy that I study, our responsibility was to our character and to the common good—a dual loyalty, much in the way Frankl wanted two statues to commemorate two concomitant values.

Statues are totems to our values. We erect them not just to honour the past but to remind the present. The great Athenian orator Demosthenes once reminded an audience that previous generations did not put up monuments to recognise their own achievements but to spur people to greater deeds in the future. Yet sometimes the past and present collide.

Around the world, people have begun to look uneasily at the statues in their cities, parks and campuses. In Belgium, some monuments to Leo pold II, the coloniser king, have been removed. In Britain a heavy, bronze statue of Edward Colston—merchant, philanthropist, slave trader—was pulled down and pushed into Bristol Harbour. I was in New Orleans when enormous cranes removed the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, which stood near the entrance to the French Quarter. And I spent considerable time and money to remove a loathsome, century-old Confederate monument (celebrating “our noble white souled Southland”) from the lawn of a county courthouse in the small Texas town where I live.

Although many of us can agree that statues of colonisers, murderers and traitors should go, it has long struck me as peculiar that we have little sense of what should be there instead. America in particular has struggled to put up statues of late. It took more than 20 years to plan and erect the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, a set of bronzes in Washington, DC. The Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, in a park next to the National Mall, is not even ten years old—yet plans for it began shortly after his assassination in 1968.

Likewise, when it comes to a Statue of Responsibility, somehow no one is willing to be responsible. It is preposterous: there are more than enough tech entrepreneurs on a single block in downtown San Francisco capable of funding such a project. What is needed is a sense of urgency and the sense of responsibility to do this for future generations—and for this one as well. As the French writer André Malraux is said to have remarked: you can judge a society by the monuments it puts up. What does it say if a society is unable to build anything at all, let alone agree on what should be built? That Frankl’s lovely proposal has stood in the planning phase for seven decades, and one of the richest cities in the world stands impotent to erect anything that represents its aspirations or values? San Francisco apparently has the time and resources to rename schools named after Abraham Lincoln, and a mob can be whipped up to tear down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but when it comes to a Statue of Responsibility? Somehow, no one is willing to be responsible for that.

Reading to my four-year-old the wonderful children’s book about the Statue of Liberty, Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers, I was struck by his insight that Lady Liberty is depicted in motion, taking a step forward. Like him, I had seen the statue hundreds of times, but never noticed that her feet are not stationary but striding. Liberty is on the move—she uses her freedom. There’s no time for standing still, she’s got work to do.

So too the Statue of Responsibility should be active, symbolising what we ought do, individually and collectively, to act cooperatively on the major challenges of our time. “We are humans, given a heart and a brain. This makes us responsible,” says Mrs Frankl. “There are tasks waiting for us.”

Amid covid-19, some people ran away from their responsibilities while others ran toward them—selflessly, courageously. Millions did their duty quietly and without complaint and never ended up in the news. We should celebrate and immortalise the values that create a responsible society. We should bind it to our cultural consciousness as we did liberty. Those who proclaim their freedom but ignore their responsibility aren’t being heroic but self-centred and irresponsible. They are misusing the gift they have been given.

That is what lies behind Viktor Frankl’s observation that “freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” Imagine how different the response to the pandemic might have been if the value that Americans looked up to wasn’t just liberty for themselves but responsibility for each other.

“If I don’t believe in myself, who will?”

It’s a good question.

A seductive one. An empowering but innocuous phrase has been inscribed on a million inspirational quote images, been the subject of countless self-help books and TED Talks. 

Believe in yourself! Fake it until you make it!

The problem is that it’s bullshit.

Great people don’t have to believe in themselves. They don’t have to fake anything. They have evidence.

A few years ago, an interviewer asked Jay Z about his incredible self-assuredness. It’s a good question. He does seem like a person with unending faith in himself. How else could he rap the things that he raps? How else could he have gone from the Marcy Projects to Madison Square? (Great book on this by the way, Empire State of Mind by Zack O’Malley Greenburg) 

I’d argue it wasn’t belief. As Jay Z explained,

People don’t realize I’ve put a lot of my life into what I’m doing right now. I didn’t just have a hit record and get lucky. I put a lot of my life into it so the things that come out of it is not due to bravado and arrogance. I have confidence because of the work that I’ve put in, and I’ve put in so much work.

On a regular basis, I get emails from people who are trying to do big things. They are convinced they have some multi-billion dollar idea, a genius pitch, some brilliant artistic concept. They also have complete certainty that it will be a success (“I just need you for the marketing”). It’s always fascinating to see what this certainty is based on, because it almost always turns out to be, well, nothing. Mostly just wishful thinking, that idea that they can manifest this into being. 

They haven’t put in the work. They haven’t even started the work!

They think their success is written in cursive, when really, success and confidence are carved from effort and results. In gradual relief as the evidence comes in, reassessed at every turn. And while it’s perfectly possible that believers may turn out to be right, it’s the latter type, the evidence-based community, as the saying goes, who will enjoy their success more and find it considerably less precarious and fleeting.

This plays out well on the basketball court. Based on what they’ve done in practice, based on their stats, players have a sense of the probabilities of given shots. When Damian Lillard took that 37-foot shot in Paul George’s face to knock the Thunder out of the playoffs in 2019, it wasn’t about belief. He knew he shot 43% from that spot on the floor. Steph Curry knows he’s in range just about anywhere inside of half court. It’s not arrogant when he takes those shots, it’s based on the numbers…but it took years of play and deliberate practice for those numbers to exist. Like Jay Z, they put in the work. 

The great military strategist B.H. Liddell Hart compared two different types of generals. The first was the Napoleon types—those who believe they are destined for greatness, who have an unswerving faith in their own specialness and importance. The second, someone like William Tecumseh Sherman, he says, is defined by a “slow growth dependent on actual achievement.” Which is happier? Which is better? I won’t make a joke about how the Napoleons and the Pattons of the world inevitably overreach and are often the source of their own disasters. Hart’s analysis makes a better argument:

To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.

When I left what was a very good job to write my first book, I didn’t believe I could do it. That would have been absurd. What would that belief have been based on? I had never done it before. What I did have was evidence of the traits necessary for success. I had put in the training as a research assistant on other books. I had written on a regular basis for many years (every day for six years in fact). I knew I wasn’t a quitter. I knew I had mentors I could go to for advice when I felt in over my head. 

Same goes for when I opened my bookstore. Plenty of people told me it was a bad idea, but, it wasn’t my belief in myself that motivated me to push past this. I listened to them. I listened carefully. I also looked at the numbers, looked at my track record, looked at the traits I knew I was bringing to the table. I had a case—I had evidence that I could do it and I was willing to test that assumption. No more, no less.

Several times now I have tasted that fruit that Hart was talking about—the sweetness of gradual accomplishment. The immense gratification of looking at something you created and thinking, “Where did that come from?” And being able to answer that it came from you. Not because you were born with it, because you are inherently or intrinsically entitled to it, but because you created it from nothing.

This is a feeling that can only be earned. To take it on credit in advance, to steal it, to pretend, is to miss the point. It deprives you of all the pleasure of the actual accomplishment.

The Bible describes faith as “the assurance of what we hope for and the certainty of what we do not see.” Whatever you want to do with your spiritual life is up to you, but that way of thinking is about as dangerous as it gets when it comes to one’s profession. Hope is not a strategy for writing a book or starting a company. It’s not something to bet your career on.

It is a recipe for potentially catastrophic failure. Cheney believed we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Trump believed that being president would be easy. What evidence did they have for these assumptions? Very little. Worse than nothing actually, they had plenty of people telling them how hard it would be, how it would actually go. But they couldn’t listen. They had too much faith, too much belief in themselves, too much certainty in what could not be seen. Instead of tasting the sweet fruit of gradual accomplishment, they drank the bitter brew of abject failure. 

You cannot will evidence into existence. If you think you can fake it until you make it, well…that’s just another way to describe fraud. 

For the Shermans of the world, their rise was more gradual but it was based on what was real. His famous March to the Sea was military genius but hardly some flash of inspiration. It was the slow accumulation of his deep study of the country, of the failures and difficulties he faced in battle, of his insight into the Southern mind, his collaborations with Grant, and then his willingness to test the theory, city by city, town by town across rebel territory, even as the newspapers called him a madman, an idiot, and predicted his failure. It wasn’t faith in himself, it wasn’t belief that he was chosen by God, it was rational, operational, iterative. And it worked and it saved America.

It also saved himself—he knew when to stop the war, he knew how to end it peacefully, and he knew when it was time for him to walk away. (“I have all the rank I want,” he would say). That’s the other part of it. Somebody believes they can jump off a cliff and live—and if they do survive, that doesn’t mean it was a good idea. It just means they’ll keep doing it until, eventually, they don’t.

Is that what you want? Who do you want to listen to? The gamblers? Or the workers? The hustlers who sell hope as a product? Or the doers who don’t traffic in any of that?

As crazy as it sounds, you don’t need to believe in yourself. That’s not what’s holding you back. Whether you think you can do something is so much less important than whether you actually can or can’t do that thing. You need to assemble a case that proves you can. You need to do the work that stands as evidence for what you’re capable of.

So you can walk by sight, not by faith.

That’s how you actually end up achieving the things that other people are too busy believing they can do.

In my book, Ego is the Enemy, I further explore how a delusional belief in oneself poses a threat to one’s goals—whether you’ve achieved some success or hit rock bottom. If you want to be an achiever instead of a believer, I encourage you to check it out. And you can now get copies of Ego over in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get them signed and personalized!

Last week I did a piece for the New York Daily News, they couldn’t run all of it, so I thought I’d send the longer version here. Enjoy! It’s alarming to see how relevant Trust Me I’m Lying has turned out to be, but here we are…

At the first vaccine clinic I worked at here in a small town outside Austin, Texas, the county vaccinated more than 2,000 people in one day. The last clinic I volunteered at, which closed because they no longer put volunteers to use, I checked less than 15 people in for their shots. 

It was actually a good day. The day before, they had done five. 

This was not because there was a shortage of people who needed these miraculous mRNA vaccines. We, like much of the rural South, have barely cracked a 40% vaccination rate for adults. 

How could this be? Bastrop County is the kind of place where people will pull over and change a tire for you. Where we just banded together to pull each other out of the snow during a freak Texas freeze. We’re part of a state where flooding and hurricanes bring out the so-called Cajun Navy to rescue neighbors from danger, often at grave risk. 

What could have happened to make people so indifferent to their own health–let alone to the health of the most vulnerable in our community? People who I know are good people are not only doing a stupid thing by not getting vaccinated, some are actively trying to convince others to follow their lead. What’s gotten between them and their better angels?

Well, the answer to this trick question is of course that nobody thinks that’s what they’re doing. 

What’s happened is that otherwise good people have been grossly deceived, they have been infected with a different kind of virus, one that takes otherwise smart and caring people and turns them against their own interests and the people they love. 

It should be said that this is not a new phenomenon. Two thousand years ago, in the depths of the Antonine Plague, Marcus Aurelius wrote “an infected mind is far more dangerous pestilence than any plague–because one threatens your life, the other destroys your character.” Yet the mentally infected in the Roman Empire were effectively quarantined from each other by time and distance. When I posted a version of this quote on Instagram last week to my one million followers, the comments section was immediately besieged by anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and COVID-deniers who have been empowered and enabled by technology to infect others with their ignorance and conspiracy theories. 

These angry posters are nothing like my politely vaccine-hesitant neighbors, the problem is that the message they are spreading is what has trickled down to the folks I share a fence line with and contributed to a cultural consciousness where a solid quart of the population is declining to protect themselves from a virus that has killed 610,000 of their fellow citizens. Rural America has proven to be particularly fertile ground for the doubt and denial these messages sow, dramatically lagging behind the rest of the country in vaccination rates. Talk to anyone about why they haven’t been vaccinated and they will inevitably lead you back to something they heard about on social media. 

Due to the abysmal failures of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it has fallen on content creators, Nextdoor neighbors and social media users to block and report misinformation in an endless game of whack-a-mole. (Or worse, getting sucked into pointless, circular arguments) Is this efficient? Or fair? I have to either sit idly by as my own audience is targeted by brigands of COVID-deniers or I have to bail out an ocean of untruth with a thimble.

Couldn’t these platforms just, you know, plug the hole in the boat?

Make no mistake, Facebook and Twitter and even Nextdoor–which collectively employ tens of thousands of people–each has the tools to dramatically decrease the spread of misinformation on their platform. There’s a reason one can spend hours on Instagram without seeing a naked breast. Facebook is able, magically, to know whether you’re using your real name for your account. Content on YouTube is instanted vetted against vast databases of copyrights for infringements. Because it is in the financial (or legal) interests of these companies to filter this way, they do. 

There is almost no feature on social media that was not intentionally designed and no piece of content surfaced to the user that is not selected purposefully by their algorithms. The most brilliant designers, behavioral scientists and engineers have spent decades perfecting a system optimized for engagement and virality. It’s not an accident that Facebook’s Newsfeed is the most popular news platform in the world. Literally, the smartest people in the world worked to make it so…and are paid gobsmacking amounts of money to fine tune it.

They can do something about this problem. They haven’t. Why?

It just happens that misinformation, like political polarization, tends to be very good for business. As I wrote about in Trust Me, I’m Lying, outrage is a feature, not a bug of our online world. Infected minds–be they by conspiracies, misinformation or outright malevolence–are active minds that love to post, comment, share…with an almost inhuman intensity. A recent report has shown, the majority of anti-vaccine sentiment can be traced back to twelve individuals, who source and spread bad science, in bad faith or stupidity or most likely a combination of the two. Just like whales and compulsive gamblers are the most profitable customers for casinos, these super spreaders keep engagement high. 

The way to protect the public is obvious: Ban them. Algorithmically-punish accounts which share their content. Quarantine accounts infected until this temporary fit of insanity passes. Artificially boost the information that vulnerable members of society desperately need to hear until they’ve heard it. Political parties on both sides of the aisle use social media data to target prospective voters and corporations use the same tools to turn those people into customers. It’s time to demand these platforms use their own tools to save lives and serve the common good in what is clearly the crisis of our lifetimes. 

Might that be bad for business? Might it upset some culture-warriors?

Perhaps. But Marcus Aurelius, who led brilliantly and selflessly during the Antonine Plague, has a reminder that Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Silicon Valley needs to hear:

Just do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.

There are real consequences to allowing this to continue. Not in the abstract, not statistically, but with your neighbors and loved ones, as we just experienced here in my town where a beloved food truck owner died of COVID.

Where could she have possibly been convinced to reject a life-saving vaccine?

And so another preventable casualty must be laid to rest at the feet of social media…and by no means the last unless we do something. 

If you’re not vaccinated, you’ve never been more vulnerable. If you don’t care about that, think of the millions of children who can’t be vaccinated, the people in nursing homes, cancer wards, etc. 

P.S. If you haven’t read Trust Me I’m Lying, I encourage you to read it. You can pick up a copy at my bookshop, The Painted Porch. You can also get a signed copy here.