Courage.
The word itself is derived from the French coeur and the Latin cor, meaning heart. Today, we’ll be talking about this figurative heart; though, it is not the soft and mushy heart we typically think of (we'll get to that in the our next post on humanity), but the steadfast heart that firmly trudges forward in the face of fear and uncertainty. Like the literal heart, the figurative heart can be developed like a muscle: the more we exercise it, the stronger it gets.
The main theme of this post will be that the stronger the heart, the brighter it burns, illuminating the path ahead of us. First, we’ll lay some foundations to help us understand what guides our behaviors in the first place, which will serve us not only throughout this post, but the Cultivating Character series as whole.
We’ll then investigate courage by breaking it down into its many forms, of which include bravery: acting despite fear; perseverance: continuing to act despite difficulty; and integrity and authenticity: being true to oneself and others. We’ll examine the benefits of engaging with each form of courage and the consequences of a lack thereof. We’ll then conclude with why nurturing courage naturally nurtures vitality: having an enthusiasm for life.
Courage
Courage at its core represents the behavior necessary to endure discomfort for the overall well-being of oneself or others. Like any other behavior, courage is deeply entrenched into our cognitive framework. It is an adaptive mechanism meant to balance out another adaptive mechanism: fear. These two antagonistic behaviors are biological essentials, for reasons similar to why conservatism and progressivism are biological essentials, which I touched on in a previous post.
Fear naturally attempts to protect us from threats to survival and reproductive fitness. Physical injury leads to functional disadvantages; socioeconomic injury risks one’s livelihood and social stability. These injuries not only hinder survival, but also the attraction of friends and mates, and social security for our species meant security for us and our genetic relatives.
In many cases, fear does a good job at protecting us (thank you fear). Without it we’d expose ourselves to much undue risk, leaving us excessively battered and bruised. But what if some battering and bruising isn’t so bad? What if fear inadvertently subjects us to other insidious injuries?
The Cognitive Framework
To answer these questions, it first helps to understand a bit about the neurological system that produces behavior in the first place. A nice model to ease into understanding our cognitive framework is that of the triune brain, developed by Paul D. Maclean. It separates the brain into three parts, with each part fulfilling particular functions based on when each part arose in the evolutionary timeline. Something to keep in mind is that this model attempts to divide a complex, interconnected organ produced by a continuous process, so it has its limitations. Nevertheless, the triune model provides an accessible high-level overview that can help us build some intuition of how we behave and think.
The cognitive parts relevant to today’s discussion are the limbic system and the neocortex. The instinctive and emotional limbic system, whose inception dates to about 150 million years ago, had a significant evolutionary head start over the logical and inquisitive neo-cortex, whose rapid expansion in the Homo genus began about 2-3 million years ago. This discrepancy in experience leads to a relationship where logical thought tends to be of service to instinctive emotional thought, which has led to a host of metaphors such as Jon Haidt’s the elephant and the rider and Daniel Kahneman’s fast System 1 and slow System 2.
When our brains process sensory information, data generally flows first through the limbic system, which integrates incoming streams of external and internal stimuli, before settling into our neo-cortex. Trying my hand at a metaphor, the limbic system acts like a painter whose palette contains dollops of emotions, and as information flows past they paint broad emotional strokes to give the information color, which is then used to inform behavioral responses. Our neo-cortex, where conscious awareness is thought to be generated, acts like an observer who is presented with a prepared colorful canvas. The observer can refine the painting, but their brush is fine tipped, so their influence is generally limited to small touchups; any major revisions demand a considerable load of cognitive effort.
We are just as much the painter as we are the observer, but we feel more like the observer since our consciousness sees through the observer’s lens—our consciousness is the observer. But the observer is primarily in service to the painter. This can be quite the source of confusion and internal conflict, especially since most painting occurs under the hood and provokes behavioral responses unbeknownst to the observer; the observer is presented only one canvas at a time. Think of the puzzled frustration that ensues when you (instinctively) crawl back to those bad habits you (logically) want to do away with.
Creativity
Any object in our conscious awareness is a creative reconstruction, whose fidelity varies with emotional relevance of the stimulus. Let’s clarify with an example. Hold out your hand in front of you and observe it. Your hand doesn’t provoke much of an emotional response; it yields limited emotional brush strokes. The ordinary emotionless nature of the hand in your field of vision results in a high-fidelity reconstruction. Now consider the words that you’re reading right now. Each string of words you read is coated with emotional color depending on whether those words resonate or frustrate or saturate. These emotion-provoking words in your field of vision are naturally a lower fidelity reconstruction, drifting you away from the physical (pixels on a monitor) into the metaphysical (the ideas that the pixels represent).
Emotional coatings help explain why we sometimes see people with differing interpretations of the exact same information; pre-existing conditions influence what our painter paints (how emotional we get about a subject) and hence what we are aware of, enveloping us all in our own unique colorscapes. There’s a good chance two people see the same uninteresting hand, but do they see the same thing when reading a politicized issue?
Okay, but aren’t we talking about courage today? What does all of this have to do with courage?
What I wanted to highlight is that, even in real time with instantaneous perceptions, our painter can misrepresent things. But being courageous involves forecasting and acting despite a frightening, uncomfortable, or boring forecast. So, what happens when we start forecasting? What does our painter do?
Paintings of paintings
When we forecast, our painter has limited direct perceptions to work with. They're provided only some initial conditions, courtesy of the five physical senses, which are used to lay out a preliminary sketch. Then the forecasting begins. Given the conditions gathered from the here and now, a gallery of relevant paintings (memories) is assembled to help fill in the blanks and construct a predicted outcome.
And this is where things can get weird. Our prediction of a future scenario is a painting based upon a gallery of prior paintings. The further we forecast, the more our stack of paintings piles up. And as creative reconstructions compound, our painter is washed away from the shores of reality by waves of colorful canvases.
When fictions compound, our projections get more fictional. If the emotions associated with the projection are pleasant, the painter can bring us into blissful utopia. Think of the honeymoon phase of relationships that leave us drooling over the mirage of an eternity in romantic paradise. But unpleasant emotions can just as easily lead us into apocalyptic dystopias. Think of when an unforeseen obstacle brings the honeymoon phase to a screeching halt. Disenchanted, we hastily question the structural integrity of our entire relationship, jumping to the conclusion that “this could never work out”.
When we find ourselves in situations with uncertain outcomes, the assembled gallery is full of incomplete paintings. Incomplete regions have dark, foreboding blotches whose intensities increase with uncertainty and perceived threat. As we project further into the future, the dark blotches bleed outwards as uncertainties compound. So, when faced with an unfamiliar situation, steeped in uncertainty, our painter rolls up her sleeves and gets to work, when she attempts to capture the gallery together in a single representative painting, she can't help but see a lot of dark incomplete regions.
What does our painter end up painting in these situations? Well, she presents us a horrifying canvas full of frightening forms, altogether screaming at us: DO NOT ENTER. This happens when we imagine the future of our relationship after a disagreement with our partner; when we imagine exercising after not having done so for ages; or when we imagine striking up a conversation with a stranger. This same proclivity permeates into a society’s aggregate imagination, as can be found in the never-ending chaotic news cycle, the pessimistic popular culture, and the seeming permanence of millenarianism: apocalyptic prophecies of cataclysm and destruction followed by utopia for a select few.
Inevitable societal and environmental changes lead creative imaginations into doomscapes, fearing for the worst as life is imagined for future generations. Humans, as with any biological organism, are certainty maximizers first and foremost, not truth maximizers. Therefore, we indulge in these doomscapes because, paradoxically, we'd rather accept certain doom than accept messy uncertainty. With the former, at least we (think we) know what will happen!
Life in cowardice leads to a gallery of incomplete, overdramatized paintings. Cowardice limits experience, which has the effect of providing a painter with but a flickering flame to work with—the less we can see, the more we become subject to filling in the blanks with exaggerations, and the world correspondingly becomes more threatening.
Cowardice leads to regressive stress and despair. Anxiety, the overwhelming discomfort caused by the engrossment of uncertainty, occurs when we’re forced to feel our way through the darkness. Depression, the feeling of hopelessness and defeat, occurs when we jump to the conclusion that the darkness is filled with certain doom, which unsurprisingly paralyzes us as we surrender to the fictions produced by fear.
All of this begs the question: how can we foster a life that is rich in color instead of drenched in dread? A hint lies within the question of why we see color at all. The sun, steadfastly blazing as the nucleus of our solar system, provides the white light required to see the full color spectrum. And if we dig deeper, we find that the sun provides the energetic lifeforce for every living being inhabiting our planet. To come alive, see clearly, and fulfill our potential, we literally need to become more like the sun. We need to burn bright. We need to set our hearts ablaze.
Ignite
Bravery: Burning bright
As the fire in our heart awakens, our galleries illuminate and come to life. Suddenly, we're confronted with the unnerving, incomplete regions of the paintings that we once avoided. But the warm glow from our flame bestows upon us an alternative perspective: we can finally see what we've been afraid of. The unbearable thought of that discussion with your boss you've been putting off turns out to be a challenging but constructive conversation; the impossibility of a jog around the block turns out to be a strenuous but satisfying experience; and the horror of admitting a mistake to your partner gently damages your ego but strengthens your bond.
The point here is not that the foreboding regions—our fears—disappear once we confront them. The fears remain, but our relationship with them becomes more familiar. What changes with experience is our knowledge that we can actually do what we need to do. Courage pierces through the deceptive cloak of fear, revealing the truth lying beneath. Exaggerated imaginations evolve into realistic expectations; doom devolves into challenge.
The benefits of a blazing brave-heart are bountiful. Brave individuals enjoy an increased tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, a natural consequence of increased exposure to experiences with uncertain and scary outcomes. Their relationship with uncertainty becomes more familiar, less antagonistic, which leads to a greater ability to delay gratification. We tend to struggle with delaying gratification because we can't bear wading in the chilling uncertainty and discomfort that precede eventual gratification. A blazing heart warms the chilling basins of uncertainty, allowing us to endure their chill a little longer and benefit from greater future rewards. Bravery also leads to lower arousal under stress, as stress gradually becomes associated with challenges and triumphs rather than doom and darkness, allowing one to stay levelheaded in challenging circumstances.
Another lovely thing about bravery is that it’s contagious. Internally, exposure to new experiences begets less resistance to new experiences; the flame feeds itself. The flame dances between people too. When we view someone doing something courageous, we then know it can be done—we can use the experiences of others to help uncover and fill in our blind spots.
Encouragement is another courageous contagion. Recalling the etymological origins of the word courage—cor (heart)—encouragement essentially means to give heart. As you embrace the heart of somebody, your flame flows into theirs. Proper encouragement fans the flame of the encouraged. One must, of course, be mindful not to fan too hard as to extinguish it, as excessive extrinsic motivation drains drive and leads to burnout. We'll return to this later when we discuss authenticity.
Regardless of whether the nurturing comes from within or without, self-encouraged or externally encouraged, a sustained feeding of the flame is the key to abundance, which brings us to the topic of persistence.
Nurture
Persistence: Feeding the flame
Persistence is arguably the most important form of courage. This is because persistence, or perseverance, is sustained bravery: the nurturing that keeps our heart aflame. Our painter can only benefit so much from spontaneous bursts of light; he works best with a sustained glow.
Nurturing the flame requires effort, however. We therefore need to be persuaded about why we should be sustaining it, and that persuasion tends to correspond with how much we value what we're working towards. Knowing what to value, however, is multi-faceted. We'll unravel the other values throughout this series, but for now one major value we've been discussing is courage itself, which suggests that exerting effort to overcome hurdles brings meaningful benefits.
What discourages us from persisting tends to be our relationship with hardship. If we adopt a narrow view on an unpleasant experience, seeing it only as a negative experience, we naturally avoid it. It’s like we’re presented with a large scene, and right in front of us is a mound of dirt. Naturally, we find the dirt unattractive. “Yuck, I don't want to deal with that,” we mutter to ourselves.
But if we were to take a step back, we’d find that atop the dirt is a garden full of flowers. The dirt by itself will always be unattractive, tempting withdrawal. It’s the flourishing life the dirt gives rise to that we find beautiful and fulfilling. Promoting persistence thus requires the reframing of our relationship with progressive struggle. Instead of just seeing dirty experiences, we must transcend from the here and now to see them as dirty experiences that precede growth.
Though, we also need to be mindful of where our persistence takes us. We live our lives persisting in anticipation of rewards, and those rewards can be illusive if we aren’t careful. The flowers are beautiful, it’s easy to get attached to them. But they eventually wilt away. The systemic relationship between soil and flower, the struggle of channeling material and energy into the production of life, is the real reward.
“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” - Neale Donald Walsch
Within reason, try your best to start seeing dirt as an invitation to grow rather than a reason to recoil. Remember: our fears are often exaggerated and misleading. Personally, I try to use feelings of aversion as a cue to investigate rather than ignorantly avoid. If honest investigation reveals cowardice, I lean in rather than pull away.
While perseverance doesn’t guarantee success, success is generally unattainable without it; achievement of any sort requires withstanding setbacks. However, persistence is not enough. Persistence without adaptation (wisdom) and self-restraint (temperance) can lead to wasteful exertion; without love or justice it can lead to harmful and sinister exploitation—selfish persistence can cause our flame to burn others. Persistence gets us moving; wisdom gives us direction. Persistence provides life; love shares it.
If we persist towards something, but never wake up to the fact that we’re being led into a lonely dead end or that we're taking a needlessly difficult path, we’ll be left behind. To give an example, stupid persistence is encouraged by slot machines, which display “near” wins and use intermittent reinforcement to encourage mindless engagement. Social media platforms work equivalently, employing adaptive algorithms that are tasked with inhibiting cognitive adaptation amongst their users to make behavior simple and predictable—which makes users more exploitable. This goes for any addictive product. Addictive products feed us the illusion that fulfillment can be found alone and with little effort, which unsurprisingly reinforces loneliness and laziness.
Returning to the paint gallery metaphor, low-effort and extrinsically motivated persistence provides us but a flickering flame as we hunch in the corner of the dark gallery entranced by banality. What’s even worse is that in these situations, where our actions are externally motivated, we lose touch with ourselves. We lose sight of our flame. And as that flame drifts further and further away, we are left shivering and confused in its cold, dark wake.
Unity
Integrity and Authenticity: Keeping it close
The final form of courage relates to the three closely related concepts of honesty, integrity, and authenticity. These virtues ensure that our flame stays close, keeping us warm and preventing us from losing sight of ourselves and those we love.
Honesty
Honesty, which underpins both integrity and authenticity, is necessary to navigate the real world and develop real relationships. Our galleries are full of reconstructions; honesty therefore ensures that our reconstructions represent something as close to reality as possible. When we lie, we populate our gallery with more fiction. When questioned, a liar must fumble through a pile of bogus paintings and frantically try to cobble together a coherent story; conversely, one who tells the truth doesn’t have to waste effort trying to remember what they have said. Lying makes life chaotic, cramped, and exhausting; honesty makes life ordered, spacious, and peaceful.
Lying in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Everyone does it. Any fictional production is a lie, and, as we saw earlier, our representation of the world is always fictional to varying extents. The lovely thing about fiction, however, is that it can envelop kernels of truth in easy to digest beauty, acting as a sort of trojan horse for truth. Art is the lie that helps us digest the truth. It is what all religions try to do with epic and mystical stories, and it is what I've been trying to do with all these metaphors.
But lying can go awry when taken too seriously. Self-interested dishonesty generates dissonance, because the gallery of a dishonest individual is less likely to overlap with those around them. Even collective gallery agreement doesn’t necessarily require truth, it just requires people to agree on the same thing—a collective faith. But like with self-interested dishonesty, group-interested dishonesty runs into problems when groups with conflicting galleries inevitably encounter one another. Disagreements provoked by conflicting fictions often provoke tribal conflict.
Integrity
To have integrity (derived from the Latin word integritas meaning wholeness) means to have an honest relationship with one’s moral convictions—a personal sense of right and wrong—and to act in accordance with those convictions regardless of their popularity. Moral convictions are bred by the relationship between oneself and one’s social environment, and are therefore subject to cultural variation. To act with integrity is to act with the best interest of humanity in mind, and what exactly constitutes humanity is where these cultural variations come into play. Nevertheless, integrity harmonizes our flame with our neighbors, unifying the individual with the whole and creating a flourishing field of fire.
Acting with integrity means recognizing that the easy thing to do is not necessarily the right thing to do. It is easy to be sincere when there is no cost to telling the truth and to be insincere when there is. A social environment that expects uncritical social conformity thus hinders the development of integrity, as it disincentivizes self-reflection, self-acceptance, and having self-directed values. Excessive constraints stifle the flames of the individuals that constitute the whole; the bright, flourishing field can quickly become a weak, whimpering wasteland.
Authenticity
While integrity is related to the relationship between the self and the external environment, authenticity is related to the relationship between the self and one’s internal environment. Developing psychological depth, self-understanding, and emotional genuineness foster authenticity. Authenticity requires having an honest relationship with oneself and representing oneself honestly to others.
Authenticity keeps the flame close. Like a puzzle piece falling into place, acting authentically clicks the flaming heart into our torso. When we keep the flame close, we can see ourselves more clearly, which has the benefit of reducing stress and autonomic activation. Underlying physical and emotional responses become more transparent; we can self-regulate based on more accurate assessments of personal needs. The flame also brings to light detrimental activities we normally drone through, giving us the chance to honestly reflect on their value.
The gravitational pull of authenticity not only attracts fire, it attracts people too. Authentic people are more trustworthy and thus tend to be well liked, inviting more opportunities to participate in adaptive cooperative alliances. When we sacrifice authenticity to preserve a rigid self-image or deceive or manipulate, we therefore discard potential personal and social growth. We lose the light and are left alone in the dark.
Equally disorienting is when our behavior is overwhelmingly extrinsically motivated. Think back to the social media example, in which corporations dangle a flickering flame ahead of us as we ignorantly stumble towards it. In general, consumer culture inadvertently promotes inauthentic behavior, attempting to convince consumers that they are valuable only if they have the right look, job, or possessions. The goals of advertisers are often at odds with consumer well-being, because if consumers truly needed less products to find fulfillment it would mean less profit for the producers. So, consumers are constantly lured into the delusion that they need more to find fulfillment. Tragically, individuals who lose themselves in consumer culture can end up having much more difficulty finding richer sources of meaning in their lives, despite accumulating rich collections of material goods.
Authentic people, on the other hand, see more clearly; they are better positioned to engage fully in the process of becoming. Their goals are more self-concordant, which leads to enduring effort investment and thus goal attainment. The flame illuminates their upwards path, poising them to ride the upward spirals of positive change.
But authenticity is allusive, it’s hard to pin down. A guilty criminal knows they are lying, but individuals may not know they are behaving inauthentically. It can thus be helpful to self-reflect. Ask yourself: “What do I value?” and “Does my behavior align with what I value?” and “Am I willing to do whatever is necessary to align closer to my values?” Consider asking others to provide their input on these questions as well, it can provide additional insight and help mitigate self-serving biases.
Surge
Vitality: Thriving
Vitality is a natural product of courage. Invigorating and infectious, vitality energizes those we encounter. We develop an enthusiasm for life and all its challenges, and experience fulfillment through flow-states brought about by virtue-congruent activity.
Extrinsically motivated behaviors like smoking, poor diet, lack of physical activity, and high social media use are all associated with lower subjective vitality1. As we have seen, these behaviors reinforce cowardice, which extinguishes our flame and saps us of energy.
They also pull us away from our natural states. We were shaped by biological evolution to breathe fresh air, eat whole foods, exert ourselves physically to gather resources, and build face-to-face social relationships. Even immersion within natural rather than artificial contexts boost subjective vitality2. When our behavior harmonizes with our biological needs, we feel more biological—we feel more alive.
A flame that burns bright, turning the colorless into the colorful. A sustained flame, enabling upwards progression. A flame that stays close, helping us navigate and act in accordance with the interests of ourselves and those we love. When courage is fostered, a blazing heart clicks into place and a surge of sweltering life pulses through our veins. We come alive. We become vital.
With the accumulation of experience, the galleries of the courageous grow more beautiful and elaborate, and as a consequence we see courageous people as more elaborate and beautiful—they become works of art. Think of anyone you admire and you will find that a big piece of that admiration rests upon courage.
So, take that step into the unknown and lean into life. You’d be amazed at where it could take you.
This marks the end of our discussion on the first consilient virtue: courage. This virtue gives our tasty stew of character its strength and heartiness. In the next post of the Cultivating Character series, we will look into the ingredient that gives the stew its inviting warmth—the loving embrace of humanity.
Ryan, R. M., & Frederick, C. (1997). On energy, personality, and health: Subjective vitality as a dynamic reflection of well-being. Journal of Personality, 65. pp. 529–565.
Ryan, R. M. and Weinstein, Netta and Bernstein, Jessey and Brown, Kirk Warren and Mistretta, Louis and Gagné, Marylène (2010) Vitalizing effects of being outdoors and in nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30 (2). pp. 159-168.
Humanity next? aw man (hahah not my favourite but I'm sure it'll be great)
This one is excellent, and so is the paint gallery metaphor.
Courage is one of the traits I value the most and hold close to my heart. Especially these days as I'm constantly in a battle with my own emotions. Pushing through anxiety, uncertainty, and harsh self-criticism on my way to build something I'm proud of (or going down with the ship trying).
I particularly liked when you showed the compounding of optimism vs. pessimism. I saw the image and took a minute to visualize what it meant. I pictured something like a probability tree and it really helped me understand the idea.
Now I know why I frequently get lost in utopian visions of my future...
"Authentic people, on the other hand, see more clearly; they are better positioned to engage fully in the process of becoming. Their goals are more self-concordant, which leads to enduring effort investment and thus goal attainment."
This is tightly aligned with Carl Rogers' advice on being authentic and open to experience. He argued that this type of behaviour, when adopted, was extremely helpful to those going through therapy. Interestingly though, he stipulated that adopting this behaviour would encourage others around us to do the same. This comes to your point about inauthenticity and dissonance. The more inauthentic we are, the less meaningful our connections will be with others. However, the more authentic we are, the more meaningful our connections will be.
Fantastic article.