agency and confidence

There is a similarity in kind between the negative effects of:

• rape
• slavery
• feeling forced to work on someone else's projects, by a boss, PhD advisor, etc.

All of these are traumatic at least in part because they injure the victim's sense of agency. Of course there is no equality in degree -- rape or slavery are, in general, immeasurably worse than mere intellectual subjugation, in part because they hit at much deeper areas of the psyche. But understanding all three in terms of damage to agency can be a useful lens, despite the significant differences.

Agency is a fiction. It's a model of the world and our place in it. As Daniel Dennett would say, for any given system we might choose to take the "intentional stance" --- modeling the system as an agent with desires and intentions --- or just to see it as a product of natural law and external forces. We say that a company 'wants' something, or a computer 'is trying' to do something; we often refer to systems as simple as plants, or even basic chemical reactions like fire, as having agency. Our minds have well-tuned circuits for thinking about agents, including ourselves---projection is unavoidable---so this is often a useful framing.

In particular, the bounds of our own sense of agency are not fixed. Experiences in which we successfully impose our goals and desires on the world increase our sense of agency. They teach us that it is useful to model ourselves as an agent, as someone who does things rather than someone to whom things happen to. Similarly, experiences in which the goals and desires of others are imposed on you, against your will, teach you that the agent model of yourself is inaccurate---not predictive---and so they reduce the salience of that model.

But thinking of yourself as an agent is crucial to happiness. It's related to confidence---believing that you can do things is a crucial first step to actually doing them. As an agent, you can have goals and think about achieving them. You are a person whose goals matter. There is no good alternative model of human beings---if you are not an agent, you are a lump, and that is a bad model---so rejecting the agency model is pathological. It means that you believe modeling yourself is impossible, or that you are a system not worth modeling. Which makes it impossible to engage in a relationship, because a relationship is all about modeling each other. A relationship is about understanding each other's desires and goals, and taking on some of them for yourself---and that can't happen if there are no desires or goals.I don't think that meditation exactly contradicts any of this? It pulls your agency up into your attention, where you realize that other people can also be modeled as pure beautiful awareness that is continuous with your own. But in doing so it somewhat dissolves the boundaries of the self (the self is a construct).

This connects agency to depression. If you have experiences that force you to discard your goals---because you 'learn' that they are unrealistic or you cannot achieve them---you become depressed; depression is the absence of feasible goals. Experiences like rape can push you to 'learn' that your goals or agency don't matter. This is usually an incorrect conclusion, but it's hard not to learn from experience.

I see a potential flip side of some experiences of subjugation. If you can see the subjugation as external, then that 'explains away' your lack of success. This means you can still maintain the flame of believing in your own potential, and that you can still fulfill that potential if small sparks are allowed to grow.