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Adam Omary: I’m Adam Omary, a research fellow at HumanProgress.org. I’m honored to be joined by Dr. Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Seligman is widely credited with founding the modern positive psychology movement and has been called by my graduate advisor, Steven Pinker, “perhaps the world’s greatest living psychologist.” He’s the author of many books, including, most recently, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, which we’ll be speaking about today.

I’m also joined by my colleague, Johan Norberg, a senior fellow in the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute and a historian of human progress.

Being a psychologist myself, I plan to discuss agency with Dr. Seligman from the psychological perspective, and Johan will discuss human progress from the historical perspective. Before we start our panel, Dr. Seligman, I’d love to hear an overview of the book from you.

I’m trying to found a new field, Adam, the field that Isaac Asimov called psychohistory. And it has two aims: to show that psychological states profoundly influence historical events, and then to use what we know about history to try to predict the future. And the psychological state I deal with in this book is agency.

Agency for me has three components. The first is efficacy, the belief that you can accomplish your goal. Optimism, the belief that you can do this into the distant future. And imagination, the range of goals that you can possibly achieve. And the historical hypothesis is that progress and innovation occur when civilizations believe in human agency, and when that belief is absent, we see stagnation and regression. The book culminates with AI. Is AI going to destroy us, or is it the most technologically important aid to human agency of my lifetime? I believe the latter.

Adam Omary: I’m excited to get to AI, but I want to begin with conceptions of progress. As you describe in Agency, and as we outline with data on HumanProgress.org, we’re living in the most extraordinary time of human history. We’re wealthier and freer. Lifespan is longer than ever. Disease and mortality rates are falling. And yet, despite these improvements, so many people seem pessimistic about the future. Why is that?

I think there are at least two answers. One is ideological. It’s become beneficial politically to argue that we’re in one crisis after another, and that only I, the political candidate, can solve that crisis. And the other is journalism. A hundred years ago, if you were a farmer in Nebraska, you might find out a month later that the Titanic went down. Right now, if you watch CNN all day long, you’re going to hear about one horrible thing after another. If it bleeds, it leads. So I think that political ideology and journalism are two of the factors that lead people to believe that progress is a myth.

Johan Norberg: I thank you for this incredibly important book. I recommend it to everyone. I think you’ve documented the rise and fall in the belief in human agency throughout history very well. But societies with a widespread belief in human agency, such as ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic, Britain after the Glorious Revolution, and the American Experiment, also had other things in common. They were, compared to other contemporary civilizations, relatively free and open, and had relatively limited governments. And I have yet to find one example of a very despotic, regimented society with high levels of agency.

So, is agency really the independent variable, or might it be that agency is what we observe when people are more or less liberated and have the incentives to create, adapt, and change?

Great question.

I want to speculate about the relationship between freedom and agency. Freedom is a fact about the world, and agency is a belief about oneself. Now, when we live in a relatively free world, technology advances, science advances, literature gets better, quality of life gets better, more progress occurs, and that impacts agency itself. That is, it makes you believe you can do more, and if you believe you can do more, that produces more freedom in the world. So I think the relationship is reciprocal. Agency increases freedom, and freedom increases agency.

Adam Omary: Dr. Seligman, you’re famous for your work on learned helplessness, which is essentially the opposite of agency. Again, paradoxically, despite living in the freest and most prosperous time in history, we see a lot of this learned helplessness, especially among young people and especially on social media. Do you worry that certain cultural trends are reducing our sense of agency?

Victimology really gets in the way of agency. So learned helplessness is the belief that nothing I do matters. And quite a lot of ideology about why suffering occurs in the world, why inequality occurs in the world, very easily leads to the belief that you’re a victim of a malign environment or a malign system. Under that assumption, when things go wrong and when we suffer, it’s not because of our character or our decisions or actions; it’s because we’re victims.

Adam Omary: From an evolutionary perspective, it seems strange that people could even have learned helplessness. Could it be what social psychologist Rob Henderson calls a luxury belief? In other words, only in a society that is prosperous enough for one to get away with learned helplessness can we see that type of mindset evolve?

No, I wouldn’t go that far. Learned helplessness is not only quite real in the laboratory and in real life, but over the last 25 years, my colleague Steve Maier, who died recently, was able to trace out the brain circuitry for learned helplessness. And to simplify it, there is a structure in the human brain called the dorsal raphe nucleus. And when it fires, that’s when you see passivity and giving up. That seems to be the default response to bad events. However, when we learn hope and mastery, that triggers a set of circuits in the forebrain which inhibit the dorsal raphe nucleus. So helplessness is a very real phenomenon, and if it’s not inhibited by hope, it leads to profound passivity, cognitive deficits, poor health, and premature death.

Johan Norberg: Why is that? What’s the evolutionary benefit of giving up?

Well, if you’re a reptile or a bird and a predator jumps on top of you, you don’t have a lot of cognitive mechanisms to deal with it. And by curling into a ball and giving up, you conserve energy. As mammals, we’ve inherited underneath our frontal cortex a set of biological mechanisms that incline us to give up. And it requires a belief in agency, a belief in hope, an experience of mastery and coping to turn off that reptilian tendency.

Johan Norberg: You also have a wonderful way of explaining our negativity bias. You write that we inherited a bad weather brain. Our ancestors who were anxiously looking towards the horizon for bad weather or predators probably survived and passed their stressed-out genes to us, so we pay more attention to what’s bad than what’s good. On the other hand, you also document that political candidates who are more hopeful and optimistic about the future usually win.

Why is it that we want bad news but hopeful politicians?

Another good question. Let’s see if we can make sense of it.

So first, there is a negativity bias, and it comes from our ancestors in the Ice Ages. Pessimism comes naturally to us. And we are attracted to optimism, empirically. I could run an experiment where I give you a speech to deliver on the telephone, either in a highly depressive cadence or in a very chirpy cadence. Just wait to see how long it takes for people to hang up on you during your depressed speech. Misery loves company, but company does not like misery. We’re attracted to optimistic people. I’m not sure I can say more deeply why.

Politically, this also seems to be the case, at least in American elections. We’ve looked at the last 120 years of elections, and for the most part, the more optimistic candidate wins. We looked deeply at that in the Trump-Harris election. You might think that Trump was the more pessimistic candidate. He was the darker candidate. He cites four times as many bad events as Harris. But we decided to look at how he explains those bad events versus Harris, and we tracked this throughout the campaign. During the first debate, Trump and Harris are equally pessimistic, and Trump cites more bad events. But right through October 31st, Trump gets more and more optimistic. And by the end, he’s massively more optimistic than Harris. And we put our prediction about the election in a sealed envelope, and we sent it to our reporter friends, and we predicted a Trump victory. So humans like optimists, and we want to be led by them.

Adam Omary: How do you distinguish agency from ambition? What does high agency look like in an individual who chooses to live a quiet life centered on family?

Good question. I’ve never been asked this before, so I’m winging it.

So the first component of agency is that you believe that your actions will produce results. Well, to be ambitious, you’d have to have that. To be agentic, you also have to believe that you can succeed at your goals in the far future. And again, to be ambitious, you have to believe that as well. And thirdly, to be agentic, you have to entertain a large range of possible goals. And being ambitious, merely desiring fame and fortune, by no means guarantees imagination. So that’s the difference. Ambition is shallow.

Johan Norberg: One thing that keeps me awake at night is the problem that you write about: pessimism and despair seem to be self-fulfilling. If you think that there’s nothing to be gained from trying, you don’t try. Similarly, if people don’t understand that objective indicators of living standards are improving, that could undermine progress.

Can you talk to us about the importance of understanding past progress for agency and for human flourishing?

It’s crucial to believe in human progress. I’m in a constant struggle with my English department and my history department at the University of Pennsylvania, both of which are pervaded by the belief that human progress is a myth. And the cost of not believing in human progress is not trying. The cost of alarmist pessimism, for example, about the climate, is not trying to do something about the climate.

For me, this has to do with education. We have to teach history differently. Human history is not just the history of victims and suffering; it’s the history of the rise from illiteracy, poverty, and death to literacy, wealth, and long lives. There’s been a huge increase in human well-being, measured by any objective measure of human well-being I know. And the measures that defy that trend are measures of depression and pessimism. And that’s one way of naming, Johan, the problem with misteaching the history of the world.

Adam Omary: Dr. Seligman, you began this conversation by pointing towards artificial intelligence as the next major step of human progress. Artificial intelligence increasingly allows us to delegate decisions and tasks that once required our own knowledge and effort. When does that delegation expand our freedom, and when does it weaken our confidence or ability to act for ourselves?

I am delighted to address that question. I deal with Claude and ChatGPT roughly six hours a day. In fact, I’m so excited by them, I feel like I’m 21 again. Let me give you two examples from my life in which AI hugely expands my own agency.

AI has produced more love in my life, contrary to those who say it’s dehumanizing. I have two four-year-old grandsons, Denny and Max. I’m 80 years older than they are, and I noticed, starting at around age two, that I was becoming invisible to them. They walk faster than I can run. I can’t throw a football around with them. So I went to Claude and to Chat, and I said, “Help me write stories in which Max and Denny are the guardians of the world and the heroes.” And now I’m on volume six, chapter 24: Max and Denny tour the solar system. Well, I’m visible to them now. I have more love in my life.

Number two, and much more importantly, AI has increased my own creativity. Let me just give you one example of a discovery that I made with Claude that no human being could have made. This is the paradox of the Axial Age. Across the globe, around 1000 BCE, Greece, Israel, Persia, India, and China were backwaters: villages, illiteracy, minimal technology, etc. Five hundred years later, all of those cultures are thriving. What happened during those 500 years across the globe?

Well, I had a hypothesis, and that was that they invented new words. They conceived, for the first time in human history, words about human agency, as opposed to divine agency. Well, interesting hypothesis, but I knew no human being could test it. There’s no human being who knows ancient Sanskrit, ancient Persian, ancient Chinese, ancient Hebrew, and ancient Greek. But Claude and ChatGPT do. So I gave them a hypothesis. We worked for a day together, and sure enough, the words don’t exist or barely exist in the five cultures in 1000 BCE, but by 500 BCE, they’ve invented the words.

So, for example, in Hebrew, the word teshuva is invented. It’s not in the Torah. It’s invented later on. Teshuva means repentance. It means you can actually do things to change your life. And once you have new words, new things can occur. Take sexual harassment, for example. People were harassed sexually in the office for generations, but there was no word for it until about 1970. Once there was a word for it, it opened up lawsuits, mandatory training, and ways of counteracting it. So when we have new words, we invent new things. And that’s an example in which AI made a discovery that could not have been made by human beings.

Adam Omary: There is some concern that, if we are having agents think for us, particularly for young students, it will harm our own ability to think. Do you think of agency like a muscle? Certainly it can be developed, but is it also a matter of ‘use it or lose it’?

That is one doomsayer hypothetical I agree with. They call it de-skilling. Let’s take writing. So I’ve been writing for 70 years. I’ve made hundreds of thousands of decisions between “perhaps” and “maybe.” And so at age 84, I’ve got the skill of writing, and I’m delighted to have Claude, who writes better than I do, help me along and edit. It’s not de-skilling me. But if, starting at age six, I have my writing done by the machines, I’m never going to learn how to write.

Adam Omary: Another audience question. How do different philosophical ideas, such as religious versus secular worldviews and individualist versus collectivist ethics, drive the cultural adoption or rejection of agency?

Let me give two examples.

I’ll start with the obvious Marxist one. Believing that history unfolds as a result of historical forces that are beyond our control is a recipe for passivity. And it suggests that Marxism is an ideology that leads to passivity, a sense of victimhood, and a lack of progress.

In terms of religion, I spent a lot of the book documenting different religious views. Let’s take early Catholicism and early Christianity before Augustine. So early Christianity after Jesus, up to about 300 AD, is very optimistic. You can become holy, and in fact, your encounter with God after you die is about, “Did you do the things that would make you acceptable for salvation?” Under that kind of belief, you get agentic action. Then Augustine comes along and says, “Hold it, that’s Pelagianism.” Pelagius believes that you can contribute to your own grace. Augustine says that’s nonsense. Any time you do something good, it’s only by the grace of God.

That’s the opening gate for the stagnation of the Middle Ages. Then, after the Renaissance, Catholicism once again becomes highly agentic. Erasmus argues that we’re like toddlers. When we fall down, God lifts us up, but we have to have motive power of our own to be so lifted. Luther says that’s nonsense, and in his retort to Erasmus on the bondage of the will, he tells us about predestination, about the lack of human will, and Calvin even goes further. With the Restoration and the influence of Arminian Protestantism, which believes you have to assent to grace, progress gets resuscitated.

So, that’s a long-winded way of saying that your ideology and religious faith modulate your agency, and most importantly, the achievement of entire cultures.