Signals for what’s next – and what matters
Health ⎪ Innovation ⎪ Society
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Hey Reader,
In an age of collapse, people either seethe or shrug.
I wrote previously of the outrage economy but it’s equally corrosive counterpart is resignation.
A better term is learned helplessness – a sense of abject powerlessness born of trauma in the era of failed institutions.
Stagnation. Apathy. Fatigue. These are the hallmarks of learned helplessness. It’s fundamentally a defensive posture.
And it is a short distance from helpless to hopeless and even despair.
People see institutions compromised by profits, politics or passivity and become paralyzed themselves.
We must resuscitate our social institutions that has sacrificed innovation for inertia if we are to renew our sense of hope.
Children of a Lesser God
During my long days and even longer years in residency and fellowship, I would trudge back to my car in the early hours of the morning.
Replaying the day’s events and bitter with exhaustion, I sometimes cast judgement on the organizations I worked within. They paraded patient care, but I saw nothing full of shortcomings and excuses.
If they only worked as hard as me….I’ve been up for 36 hours straight.
The fundamental mistake in my thinking was that laziness was at the heart of institutional failure.
It’s not, it’s futility.
Resignation has become cultural. We have internalized impotency.
And it is no longer a private, singular phenomenon of individuals.
It has infected whole professions (healthcare) and entire nations (USA), which demonstrate collective learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness is really institutional trauma in disguise.
Martin Seligman, the seminal psychologist on this topic, wrote
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“When people feel they have no control over their situation, they begin to behave in a helpless manner. This helplessness can lead to depression, decreased motivation, and an inability to to learn or escape from negative situations – even when opportunities to change exist (1975)
The implications for our modern social discourse is striking
- no control → regulatory capture, bloated bureaucracies, and misaligned policies
- helpless manner → workplace burnout, voter apathy, and civic disengagement
- even when opportunities exist → but are ignored because people no longer trust them. This creates structural helplessness of our foundational institutions (healthcare, education, government, media)
But if learned helplessness is the outcome – what’s the mechanism?
Broken Incentives, Broken Hearts
The public choice theory of government posits political stakeholders are self-interested agents acting in response to incentives. Politicians seek re-election, special interests have disproportionate power, and bureaucrats want budget maximization.
The result ? Institutions that prioritize self-preservation over service.
We see the regulatory bloat of the ‘administrative state’ in multiple domains:
Education :
Healthcare:
To use a biomedical metaphor – the connective tissue has overtaken the parenchyma of our socio-political organs. The result is a sort of systemic sclerosis of our body politic.
Learned helplessness the only natural response to misaligned institutional design. The macroeconomic logic of institutions is teaching the micro-psychology of despair.
- We are not just demoralized — we are correctly modeling that power protects itself.
- We are not just burnt out — we are responding to rational impossibility.
- We are not just apathetic — we are trained to disbelieve in feedback loops.
This is incentive driven decay.
In short, public choice broke our hearts. Learned helplessness broke our faith.
A Path Forward?
The sad irony is that it comes at a time of maximal institutional failure is when we need government the most. The Trump movement has weaponized legitimate concerns about governmental efficiency into a blunt, all too destructive
As Michael Lewis recently discussed, the government takes on a “portfolio of risk” the private sector cannot handle:
Now the only real reform is one that restores consequence and contact to power.
The central premise of our new institutions should be: If you act in good faith, the system will not punish you.
The second premise should be: hire the smartest people you can and ask them – “what should we be doing?” – not the other way around.
Postscript
Martin Gurri (author of The Revolt of the Public) argued “Institutions no longer produce knowledge or stability. They produce noise and risk.”
The current moment asks us to reckon with the institutional failures that have surrounded us and imprisoned good, smart civil servants within them.
Trying to return to the ways things were is a fool’s errand – and would misunderstand the assignment.
We don’t need restoration. We need re-imagination.
Some institutions deserve to die. Their failures are transparent and merit genuine outrage. And we must grieve them as we build something new.
Let’s not rebuild the machine.
Let’s rebuild the covenant.
But first we must relinquish surrender.
Tomorrow Can’t Wait,
