The Republic of Selves

I spent thirty years in a folding chair, in rooms that smelled of burnt coffee, watching several thousand people fight the same war. It was always, underneath its thousand disguises, the same war: a person had made a promise to himself, in a clear and honest moment, and then some later version of him had broken it. Not because he was weak, though he always thought that was the reason. Because the man who made the promise and the man who broke it were not, in any way that mattered, the same man — and no one had ever told either of them that.

That is what this book is about, and it is why I think it matters more than the shelf of books next to it. Almost everything written about willpower, discipline, and self-control rests on a hidden assumption so obvious no one states it: that there is one of you. One continuous self who wakes up every morning, who wanted the good thing last night and betrayed it this afternoon, and who therefore must be, on the evidence, either weak or hypocritical. Every diet book, every productivity system, every stern lecture about grit is addressed to that single self and asks him to try harder. And it fails, over and over, for a reason none of them will name: the self who reads the book at nine in the morning is not the self who has to keep its promises at eleven at night. You are not one person failing to be consistent. You are many people, spread across time, and no one taught you how to govern them.

So here is the gap I wrote this book to fill. The honest thing — that you are several selves, not one — has been said before, by philosophers and poets who mostly meant it as a melancholy fact or a metaphysical puzzle. And the practical thing — how to actually change your behavior — has been said a thousand times, always on the false premise of the single self. What almost no one has done is put the two together: to take seriously that you are many, and then ask the practical question that follows from it. Not how do I become one consistent person — you will not, ever, and the trying is most of your exhaustion. The real question is this: how do the many people I am learn to keep faith with one another across time? That is a question of government, not of willpower, and government is a solved problem. We have known for centuries how a collection of different people, who do not agree and cannot be trusted to always behave, can nonetheless live together in a stable and even a decent order. The answer is a republic — a constitution, laws that bind, representation, fairness among the citizens. This book takes that answer, which humanity worked out for nations, and turns it inward, onto the nation you are.