I don’t normally care for science fiction, but the TV show Pluribus holds my attention, which is my number one requirement for a show (as long as it does not make me feel gross).
Michael Brendan Daugherty writes about the protagonist: “Carol has a noble purpose at the beginning. But she lacks the virtues — the sobriety, the emotional fortitude — to endure in it.”
You see this all the time in the Bible with people like the matriarch Sarah, who wants to nobly allow her husband Abraham reproduce with her maid Hagar, but then finds she can’t take it.
When someone has a “noble purpose” but lacks the “constitutive virtues” to hold it—specifically sobriety (steadiness/temperament) and emotional fortitude—the implications are often destructive, both for the individual and the cause they serve.
When someone lacks the emotional fortitude to handle the slow, grinding reality of making change, they often compensate with intensity. I tried this. It didn’t work out so well. I was intensely a Seventh-Day Adventist and wanna be missionary between the ages of 6-8, then my dad assigned me 30-40 pages of Christian apologetics to read every day and it killed my passion for Christianity. So I became a passionate runner in fifth grade, a chaser of healthy highs, and then in 1977 a reader of Americana (as published by Time, Newsweek, Life, Reader’s Digest, Sports Illustrated and related books), then a journalist in eighth grade, then a wanna be economist in 1985, then a burning firebrand for ethical monotheism as embodied by Judaism beginning in late 1989, then a blogger on the porn industry starting in 1997, then a student of the Alexander Technique (beginning in 2008), then a man obsessed with 12-step work (starting in 2010), and then in 2018, I became a regular Youtube livestreamer talking about everything that captured my attention.
There was a common thru-line with my various incarnations — me chasing meaning, purpose, excitement and attention.
I excel in some situations, I am about average in most situations, and I struggle in other situations.
You could call me an intellectual gigolo. I fall in love with every beautiful idea that comes along but ultimately stay loyal to almost none.
I know how the noble purpose becomes a shield for erratic behavior driven by my years of untreated ADHD and related emotional addictions.
Because the goal is righteous, “Carol” may feel justified in bypassing norms, steamrolling people, or acting impulsively. Without the “sobriety” to respect process and reality, the purpose devolves into a crusade where the ends justify the means.
“Sobriety” in a leadership context often refers to a steadiness of temperament—the ability to remain level-headed when things go wrong. A leader without this virtue makes the environment around them chaotic. Every setback is treated as a catastrophe; every criticism is perceived as an attack on the “noble truth.” This creates a “walking on eggshells” culture where the organization acts in service of the leader’s emotional state rather than the actual mission.
Lacking emotional fortitude means one cannot process the pain of leadership healthily. The individual begins to view their lack of endurance not as a personal failing, but as evidence of how “hard” the world is making it for them. They start performing their suffering. The narrative shifts from “I am doing this good thing” to “Look how much I am sacrificing for this good thing.” This alienates allies and centers the ego rather than the outcome.
Noble purposes usually require marathon-level endurance. Lacking the virtues of endurance creates a sprinter’s mindset in a marathon world. This almost always leads to a spectacular crash. The individual will either burn out completely (abandoning the cause) or implode morally (committing a transgression to force a shortcut). We see this often in activist movements or startups: the visionary who starts with high ideals but crashes the organization because they lacked the boring, unsexy virtues of patience and emotional regulation.
Perhaps the most damaging implication is external. When “Carol” inevitably fails due to a lack of character, observers don’t just blame her; they often blame the purpose itself. Her instability becomes associated with the movement. If the messenger is flawed, the message is tainted.
The tragedy is that virtue is the infrastructure of purpose. You can build a skyscraper (a massive noble purpose), but if the foundation (virtue/fortitude) is sand, the higher you build, the more dangerous it becomes.
On the other hand, I don’t believe this. We don’t have virtue banks. We have abilities, including moral ones, that are domain specific.
John M. Doris changed the way I think about these topics. He is a moral philosopher (most famous for his book Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior) who argues that the very way we talk about people like “Carol”—blaming their lack of internal virtue—is scientifically wrong.
His work offers us a way out of the trap where we constantly fail to live up to ideals that human psychology simply cannot support.
Doris argues that we are obsessed with the idea that character is “global.” We think that if Carol has the virtue of “fortitude,” she should have it everywhere—at home, at work, in a crisis, on a Tuesday. But experimental psychology shows this is false. A person might be brave in physical danger but cowardly in social confrontation. They might be honest with their family but deceitful with their taxes.
This realization rescues us from misdiagnosis. When Carol fails, it isn’t necessarily because she is “corrupt” or “weak” to her core (a global failure). It is because she was placed in a specific situation that triggered her specific vulnerabilities. We stop looking for “good people” and start looking at “context.”
If we accept that we don’t have “iron-clad characters” that can withstand any pressure, we stop relying on willpower. Instead of trying to force Carol to develop “emotional fortitude” (which takes decades and might fail), Doris suggests we focus on Situation Management. Don’t build better people; build better environments. If you know you are weak when you are tired, don’t schedule high-stakes meetings at 5 PM.
We rescue our morals by designing our lives to avoid the situations that break us. We don’t rely on “sobriety”; we remove the alcohol. We don’t rely on “honesty”; we implement transparency protocols that make lying difficult.
Under the old model (Virtue Ethics), Carol is a tragedy. She had a noble purpose but was “unworthy” of it.
Under Doris’s model (Situationism), Carol is an engineering failure.
She didn’t need more “virtue.”
She needed a “situation” that compensated for her lack of sobriety.
She needed a Chief of Staff who could veto her impulses.
She needed institutional constraints that prevented her emotional volatility from becoming policy.
Doris rescues us from the burden of heroism. He argues that we shouldn’t try to be heroes who can endure any temptation or pressure. We should be “smart architects” who acknowledge our frailty and build walls, rules, and systems that keep us on the noble path, even when our “virtue” inevitably wavers.
It shifts the focus from internal character (which is hard to change) to external circumstance (which is easier to control).
I love how Doris’s situationism explains why I almost never learn anything from a typical conversation (unless it is with an exceptional person). Most of the time, people just say what the situations prescribes. Conversation is rarely an exchange of data; it is a coordination game. The “situation” of a standard social interaction (dinner, drinks, water cooler) has an implicit goal: maintain social cohesion.
In that situation, if someone says something “expected,” they are winning the game. They are signaling, “I am a normal member of this tribe; I am safe.” If they say something startlingly original or complex, they risk breaking the flow or alienating the group (which is my life story). Therefore, the “situation” selects for clichés.
Here are the rare situations where I get the insights I crave.
Conversation usually has a “Third Object”—the problem you are trying to solve (a romantic difficulty, a medical diagnosis, a broken pipe).
When two people are staring at a Third Object rather than at each other, the situational pressure shifts. The goal is no longer “do you like me?”; the goal is “is this true?” You will learn in conversation when you are collaborating on a difficult task with someone, because reality acts as a constraint that forces people to drop their scripts and speak accurately.
Many people I talk to try to be pundits. They just recite opinions they heard elsewhere (which I have likely already read in my books).
I learn when I find a “Witness.” This is someone reporting on raw phenomenology—direct experience of a reality I do not have access to. A conversation with a recovering addict describing the physical sensation of withdrawal, or a soldier describing the smell of a specific location, or anything female.
Books are often filtered through theory. A “Witness” gives me the messy, unfiltered data point that doesn’t fit my theory. I learn here because the “situation” is testimonial, not theoretical.
Doris would argue that we perform “expected” scripts because we fear social penalty. Therefore, you can only have a truly intellectual conversation in a situation of extreme high trust, where the penalty for being “weird” or “wrong” is zero.
This usually only exists with a very old friend or a partner. In this situation, the participants can turn off the “social safety monitor” and actually process ideas. If you are finding conversations boring, it may be because the “situation” is too polite.
If you are reading 100 books a year like me, you are essentially downloading the “source code” of the culture. Most conversations are just people reading the “user interface” back to you.
Unless I change the situation—by introducing a problem to solve (Third Object), interrogating a direct experience (Witness), or removing social risk (Safe Room)—I am unlikely to find what I need.
