Part 2: Responses to surrogation

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at surrogation—our unfortunate tendency to confuse symbols for their substance across all areas of our lives. In a future post, we’re going to look at an especially dangerous type of surrogation. But here it’s fitting to go over the proper response to surrogation: how do we alleviate the “unnecessary complication, inefficiency, and hardship” that it causes?

A) Return to the substance

It’s obvious that one positive way to respond to surrogation is to disregard the symbol and pursue the substance more directly: Instead of buying a sportscar in your pursuit of wealth, figure out how to invest your money to obtain some actual wealth. Instead of eating “salads” every day to lose weight, learn exactly how your diet affects your weight (calories, macronutrients etc.) and adjust it accordingly. Instead of using big words to sound smart, study a subject deeply so you can actually be smart and offer valuable knowledge to other people.

B) Use the symbols as symbols

Here things get a little more complicated. In Part 1, I named Lance Armstrong’s cheating as one example of surrogation—he sought a title, “winner,” and to get it he compromised the very thing the title was meant to represent. And we can see that all forms of cheating seem to follow this pattern: A perfect test score symbolizes mastery of a subject, but there are easier ways to get a perfect test score.

“But wait,” you might say, “What if I actually only want the symbol? What if the symbol, like a great SAT score, can improve my life all by itself?” This is morally questionable, but in theory it looks like it would work. If you cheat and get away with it, we don’t necessarily see “unnecessary complication, inefficiency, and hardship” coming your way. That’s because in a situation like that, you’re not committing surrogation—someone else is.

Audience surrogation

Suppose you know of a company that’s great to work at, and it places a lot of value on SAT scores in its hiring process. So you find a way to cheat on your SATs, and then they hire you. Now you have a great job, but the company has most likely hired an under-qualified employee. In this case, they’re the ones surrogating—prizing the symbol over the substance—and they’re the ones paying for it. You, on the other hand, were actually aiming for something substantial all along—an enjoyable job experience. You’ve violated a clear moral code of society, but you haven’t committed surrogation.

And, to some extent, this same dynamic applies to many of the examples in Part 1:

• Cheating didn’t make Lance Armstrong feel like a winner, but the rest of the world treated him like a winner, and that probably felt pretty good.
• The Photoshopped pictures didn’t make those organizations diverse, but their audiences might’ve formed positive judgments anyway. If the organizations hadn’t gotten publicly called out for it, they probably would’ve benefited from this. Maybe other organizations already have.
• Stressing out over social media posts wasn’t very fun for Jane Popular-Girl, but her online friends think she’s always having fun. And that might make them want to contact her or invite her out more, and that is actually pretty fun.
• The sportscar didn’t make Joe Middle-Class feel wealthy, but it makes his neighbors/friends/family think he’s wealthy, and that actually feels pretty good.

“So wait,” you say, “Those people weren’t committing surrogation? It was their friends all along?” Maybe. It just depends on what you’re focusing on and what you’re expecting to get out of it.

• You might be hopelessly fixated on the symbol, but there’s probably at least a handful of other people who are similarly fixated, and when they see you in possession of that symbol, they’ll treat you as if you had the substance. “Tall blonde girlfriend? Oh you’re a champ dude!” But is this worthwhile? Probably not.
• On the other hand, if you’ve made up your mind to consciously use the symbol to sway your audience, this could work out to give you exactly what you want. But that means you’re hiding information; you’re faking, to some degree, and that’s risky.

In another post, I’ll write a bit more about this art of manipulating symbols. For now, we can at least see that it’s possible and could be beneficial in some situations.

C) Abandon the symbol and the substance

Finally, we can’t rule out the rare case where you abandon both the symbol and the substance. This happens when you’ve been pursuing the symbol, you realize it’s not really what you want, and you also realize that the substance of what you want requires more time/effort than you’re willing to spend. This covers those situations where you say in the end, “It’s not as easy as it looks,” and you move on.

When I was little, I really wanted to be a skater. I thought skateboarding was the coolest thing you could possibly do. I got a nice skateboard for Christmas, I knew the names of all the tricks, and I even dressed like an early-2000s skater, with the baggy pants and the long-sleeve shirts underneath T-shirts. I practiced skateboarding in my driveway and made a little progress, but I think my interest started to wane after my dad took me to an actual skate park. For the first time I was at a park with the big ramps, a real half-pipe, rails—everything you’d need to do something amazing, or at least practice something amazing. And… skateboarding is really hard.

See, that was the substance: being good at skateboarding. The gear, the jargon, and the clothes were all symbols of being good at skateboarding. And, critically, being good at skateboarding was the only thing that was actually, essentially cool. The symbols only felt cool because of their relationship to it. Skateboarding is aesthetic, it’s risky, and it’s a show of extreme coordination—the things that make it cool are the very same things that make it difficult. There are no shortcuts to the substance. That was the lesson I’d internalized, in some basic unconscious way, when I soon lost interest in skateboarding.

I wanted to be a skater, but I didn’t want it that bad. And that’s okay. We have limited time and energy, and when a course of action demands more than we’re willing to put in, we abandon it so we can move on to something else.

Summary: the nuanced response to surrogation

The bottom line is that you should stop committing surrogation whenever and wherever you notice it, but there’s more than one way to do this.

• Change your actions so you’re pursuing the substance more directly.
  • “I’ll pursue romantic partners whom I feel attracted to, regardless of whether they have this or that specific trait.”
• Make a conscious choice to use the symbol as a symbol, for the indirect benefits you’ll get from others.
  • “I’ll wear nice clothes to this interview, so that my interviewer thinks I’m successful.”
• Conclude that the symbol wasn’t really what you wanted, and the substance isn’t worth the work to obtain it.
  • “My high-end tennis racket didn’t make me any better at tennis, and now I see that I really don’t have time to get good at tennis.”

Remember that each of these options is better for your health and happiness than chasing after the symbol and expecting to receive the substance.

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