The Dangerous Decline of Personal Agency

At some point, journalist Rachel Cohen began to realize that her generation’s focus on collective action is making them unhappy and eroding their ability to take individual action.

Writing at Vox, Rachel Cohen recounted a reader confessing that she didn’t know what she could do to fight homelessness.

“I often feel helpless to enact change,” the reader wrote to Cohen, a policy correspondent who covers social policy for Vox.

Cohen had written about homelessness for years, and she knew organizations had been working for decades to address the problem, albeit with little success. She began to wonder what the best solutions to poverty really were; her mind gravitated toward electing better candidates and passing better policies.

Yet to her surprise, when she reached out to experts for their thoughts she received different responses. 

“…their suggestions were ones I had admittedly not entertained,” wrote Cohen, “passing out socks or hand-warmers, donating items like sleeping bags to local shelters, or giving office supplies and bus passes to nonprofits serving unhoused people.”

The answers left Cohen “uneasy,” she writes, in no small part because they challenged everything she’d come to believe about meaningful actions to change the world.  

Despair, Cynicism, and Nihilism

I noticed Cohen’s article — “Why I changed my mind about volunteering” — when I saw it atop Vox’s “Most Read” list. It seemed strange that an article on volunteering would be so popular; but after reading the piece, I understood. 

Cohen is wrestling through an idea, and she comes to doubt something she’d come to believe as a left-wing college student: that real social progress could only be attained through “systematic policy shifts, comprehensive legislation, and political power.”

At some point Cohen had come to spurn the idea that individual actions matter, something she attributes to her generation’s fight against climate change.

Whether one is a climate change skeptic, a climate change alarmist, or somewhere in between, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Cohen had begun to see that the environmental, political messaging her generation was bombarded with came at a cost.

“At their best, these collectivist messages inspired hope, agency, and empathy — spelling out a concrete playbook for a more just planet,” she wrote. “At their worst, though, they fueled despair, cynicism, and nihilism, promising a better world only if near-impossible political changes were made, and fast.

The “climate anxiety” many young people are experiencing today as a result of this messaging has been written about ad nauseam; there’s even a new book out. Far less attention has been paid to the phenomenon Cohen describes: a collapse in belief in the power of individual action.

Cohen recalled that as a child, selling lemonade for people in Darfur had made sense. Cleaning up parks and stuffing bags of food for pantries seemed like it was helping. But at some point, these individual efforts began to feel childish, counterproductive even. 

“Volunteering, donating, and modifying one’s personal behavior were, at best, unproductive; at worst, they were harmful distractions from the change we really need,” Cohen writes. “Real social change would come only from mass protest and collective pressure on governments and corporations.”

‘I Wanted to Change the World’

Cohen is coming to grips with a troubling phenomenon many young people are encountering: they feel systemic change is the only solution to social problems, but they’ve also come to doubt their ability to bring about systemic change. 

She points to a recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll, which found that most young people don’t believe their vote matters and an overwhelming percentage say “special interests” have more power over elections than voters.

There’s a certain logic to the cynicism, but this is a generation that has been taught that political action is the solution to the world’s problems. As a result, Cohen says, young people aren’t just afraid of the future; they also feel powerless to do anything about it. The combination has resulted in a kind of malaise among young people, who feel deeply about issues but doubt their own ability to change things. For example, surveys show that Gen Z is more concerned about poverty than any generation. Yet the Harvard poll found that just 28 percent of 18-29 year olds volunteer their own time in their community.

The idea that political change is the only way (or even the most effective) to bring about meaningful social change is dubious, but it’s particularly damaging to people who believe their raison d’etre is to fix a broken world. As Aldous Huxley observed shortly before his death, this is not as easy as it sounds. 

“I wanted to change the world,” Huxley observed. “But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”

Huxley wasn’t being cynical; he was pointing out a reality. While we all want to make the world a better place and change it for the better, most individuals, even powerful ones, have very little control over the world.

We do, however, have a great deal of control over our selves. This is the place where we can have the most impact, and through our individual choices and actions, we can improve ourselves and, ultimately, the world around us. A thinker no less than Plato said the key to social harmony stemmed from the individual who “sets his own house in good order and rules himself.”

The Stoics would later expand on this idea, noting that the good life is found by focusing our greatest attention on the things in our life we can actually control, such as our own minds, habits, and individual actions.

“There is only one way to happiness,” wrote the philosopher Epictetus, “and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

‘The Only Way to Happiness’

The philosophy of Plato and Epictetus runs counter to that of a famous modern thinker: Karl Marx. 

Marx’s entire philosophy is built on the idea of changing the world. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx made it perfectly clear that he despised the world, which he saw as unjust, exploitative, and unfair. To realize the communist utopia he envisioned, each of its foundations had to go: private property, religion, the family, and the traditional conception of morality. 

Marx didn’t stop there. In The German Ideology (1845), he noted that “for the success of the cause, it is necessary man himself should suffer a massive change.” In other words, for Marx revolutionizing the economic and social structures of civilization was not enough. Human nature itself must change. 

Because he was so obsessed with “improving” the world, Marx spent very little time “setting his own house in good order” or ruling himself. There was no room for gratitude in his life or charity or even remorse. When his collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote to Marx informing him that his girlfriend had died, Marx responded by asking Engels for more money, an act that prompted a hurt response from his writing partner.

“All my friends, including bourgeois acquaintances, have shown me on this occasion, which was bound to touch me very closely, more friendship and sympathy than I could expect,” Engels wrote. “You found the moment well chosen to advertise the superiority of your cold philosophy; so be it.”   

Marx’s “cold philosophy” is a recipe to a miserable, unhappy life — which is precisely what Marx lived. 

He was a sloven, lecherous, drunk who impregnated his housekeeper and failed to provide for his own family, all of whom suffered mightily as a result of his failings. When Marx died in relative obscurity in 1883, he was virtually broke and his funeral was attended by only a dozen people. Two of his daughters, Laura and Eleanor, would later take their own lives. 

‘Only the Individual Acts’ 

Sadly, Marx’s philosophy did not die with him. His dream of revolutionizing a broken world through violence was embraced by a young radical named Vladmir Lenin, who seized power in the bloody October Revolution, and would later be adopted by countless political leaders and intellectuals.

Though many believed Marxism was defeated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this was hardly the case. Marxism merely evolved, and today it is the ascendent philosophy in universities. Today many young people today speak the language of Marxism, whether they believe it or not, and like Marx, many are trapped in a permanent revolution — against capitalism, corporatism, CO₂, economic growth, or human nature itself.

I have no idea if Cohen sees herself as a disciple of Marx in any way. What’s clear is that at some point she began to realize that her generation’s focus on collective action as the primary or even sole solution to solving social problems isn’t just making them unhappy. It’s also eroding their sense of personal agency.

“It’s not that people today are choosing to protest instead of recycling,” Cohen writes; “it’s that in our current environment, many people are doing neither.”

The decline of individual agency is a serious problem, because as the economist Ludwig von Mises once observed, individual action is what truly moves the world. What Mises understood that all action begins as individual action. 

“Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons,” Mises wrote in Human Action. “Only the individual acts.”

The thing is, individual action doesn’t just shape the world; it also shapes our selves. When we give to the poor, walk against cancer, or volunteer at the local soup kitchen, we’re not just helping those in need. We’re getting something in return, as almost anyone who volunteers will tell you. 

Cohen seems to recognize this, though she notes it’s considered by many to be impolite to discuss the personal benefits of individual charitable acts. (She observes this refrain seldom applies to the humanitarian efforts of wealthy philanthropists, who tend to be quite open about how good their work makes them feel.) 

This is a mistake. The fact that giving our time and resources makes us feel good, inspired, and empowered doesn’t lessen its value. 

We shouldn’t hesitate to recognize that voluntarily helping others isn’t just good for them, but also good for us. Our charitable actions don’t just make us feel good; they also give us agency, meaning, and purpose. 

These last two elements are especially important in today’s world. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, noted that above all else, human existence is made unbearable by “a lack of meaning and purpose.” 

A lack of meaning is precisely what many young people today are experiencing, with more than 60 percent saying they routinely feel a lack of “meaning or purpose” in their existence. This feeling stems from the fact that many no longer recognize the power of individual action because they’ve been taught the world is shaped by one thing: politics. 

Actions vs Words 

Economists are fond of pointing out that actions speak much louder than words. Saying you care about poor people, or voting for a candidate who talks about policies designed to help the poor, is not the same thing as actually doing something to help those in need.

Yet Cohen — who cites research from Arthur Brooks’s popular book Who Really Cares? — points out that in many instances people see their political opinions as a kind of substitute for personal charity.

“It’s not my job to help the poor,” thinks Jane Doe. “I support Medicare and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and all kinds of government spending programs.” 

Few seem to realize just how ineffective many of these programs are. Whether this is from a lack of accountability, bad incentives, or flawed knowledge is something economists can and do debate. The point is, it’s a mistake to believe we can simply outsource human charity to the government without consequence. 

Cohen, who examines her own pullback from volunteer work with an enviable honesty, seems to grasp this. She touches on the rationalizations we often use to not help others. It won’t make any difference. I’ll give more when I have more. I just don’t have the time. I’ll vote for others who will address the problem. It’s a waste of time.

The last item was one Cohen admits had crept into her own mind. 

“When did I become someone who placed such exhausting value on optimizing my time, anyway?” she asked. “It suddenly felt much more arrogant than altruistic. Convenient, and uncaring.”

The truth is, one can always find an excuse to not give or to not volunteer. After all, what will serving at the local soup kitchen do to stop world hunger? But for those who think the solution to human problems is to simply collectivize harder and continue to ignore the power of individual action, Cohen asks two questions. 

“[Has] distancing ourselves from charity and service made the world a better place?” she writes. And  “[h]as it made my own life better?”

The questions are rhetorical, but Cohen, who began to donate blood for the first time following a New Year’s Resolution to give back more, seems to offer an answer.  
“Naaseh v’nishma,” she concludes. “I signed up to donate blood again.”

This article originally appeared on The Daily Economy in 2024.