How our aims shape our actions, and how misdirected aims warp us.
I’ve written about Alfred Adler’s views on the telos of mental health, and Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy. Both authors capture how meaning and context can radically shape perception and behaviour. In this article I want to connect Alasdair MacIntyre’s and Aristotle’s adjacent views on goal-oriented, virtuous living, and tie them into a practical mental health example. Namely to explain how anxiety first develops and why it can be difficult to break free.
By reading this article I hope for you to understand:
- The meaning making, and goal oriented nature of people
- How mental health problems can arise from the very systems meant to serve us – using anxiety as the running example
- How those same systems can keep us stuck and how a revised telos can set us free
Article Summary
- Virtues can only be determined with their context and the goal they are trying to achieve (Their Telos). i.e. What is a virtue in one context could be an excess or a vice in another.
- Anxiety disorders can arise when a telos shift from escaping a threatening situation to avoiding/controlling the fear response itself.
- This shift in the end goal causes an inversion of virtues, where previously functional behaviours now cause harm and keep people stuck.
- A misguided telos can even co-opt psychological interventions to its new aim, rendering them ineffective in this new context.
- To be free, one must not simply adopt new techniques but shift their misaligned goal back to a healthy north star.
Why meaning and stories are the bedrock of correct action: MacIntyre, Adler, and Aristotle
Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue, makes the case that virtues can only be understood within the context of a coherent narrative. Without knowing the “story” they serve, virtues lose their meaning and risk becoming empty forms:
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” — Alasdair MacIntyre
This perspective resonates with Alfred Adler’s view that people are fundamentally goal-oriented. Adler believed that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are organised in the service of some purpose, even if that purpose is unconscious or misguided. As he put it “We cannot think, feel, will, or act without the perception of some goal.”
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics make a similar point; that human action aims at a highest end to eudaimonia (flourishing), pursued within the polis (community). Virtue, within this narrative, is finding the balance between excess and deficiency in service of that end.
For Aristotle, virtue is the balanced mean between two vices, one of deficiency and one of excess. Virtues are inservice of the ultimate telos – eudaimonia, within the life of your polis. What counts as cowardly, rash, or courageous depends on concrete circumstances and roles.
How Anxiety Co-opts this process.
I now want to use the example of anxiety to demonstrate how an incorrect telos can radically change the proper functioning of our mental systems and keep us stuck in place.
The fear system’s proper telos:
The fear system’s rightful telos is simple: Survive/navigate a dangerous situation then stand down
Fear → Survival in threatening situations
Within this narrative there are many virtues – fight, flight, freeze (depending on the situation), watchfulness for threats, emotional regulation for proportional reaction, planning to address threat, alertness and decisive action to remove threat.
The fear system’s misdirected telos:
With fear you have a clear telos, remove an observable direct threat. However anxiety emerges when we are not sure what the threat is or how to deal with it. When this happens, the telos can become to avoid or remove the feeling itself. Within this new framework previous virtues to deal with a threat become excesses, and do harm rather than good.
Anxiety → Avoid/remove fear itself; only then can normal life resume
Like a snake eating its own tail – fear, which was a means to a positive end becomes the end goal itself. Under this new context or all our previous fear-virtues invert into fear-vices. This is what Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke calls parasitic processesing.
Watchfulness: useful for real, time-bound danger, becomes hypervigilance when (without a clear threat) it is turned on the body’s normal, shifting sensations
Emotion regulation: to keep responses proportionate, becomes suppression when it targets removal of the fear itself
Planning: becomes catastrophising and rumination because internal fear states cannot be dealt with in the same way as a real external threat.
Alertness and Decisive action are co-opted to become reactive avoidance when repurposed into escape and safety rituals
Our telos is such a powerful frame that it can even integrate real experiences to further support its narrative and vision of the world. A headache can become health anxiety; ordinary social spaces can start to feel threatening.
Note: I personify this telos loosely above based on Pierre Janet and C. G. Jung’s work on automatisms and complexes. These processes can have a destructive life of their own, flexibly adapting and unconsciously shaping behaviour toward misguided ends. For more reading on this see my article on Jung’s Man and His Symbols.
How People Get Stuck – The Control Agenda:
The ability for a new context and goal to turn a virtue into its excess is what can make mental illness difficult to shake. With no tangible external threat, and no knowledge of how to remove the internal threat of an anxiety state, people can develop and unconscious anxious agenda to control one’s inner state. In such a context even practical skills like, acceptance, patience, and calmness can be co-opted as new control and avoidance techniques rather than the helpful virtues they could be.
As Steven C. Hayes, co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) puts it: “It’s time to change my whole agenda, not just the moves I make inside a control and avoidance agenda.” – Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
This is how people get stuck, they employ techniques while their underlying intention remains. As long as the goal is escape rather than acceptance, the technique will be rendered useless. This can lead people to concept-hop from solution to solution with little more than temporary relief.
A different problem requires a different goal:
A genuine threat requires fear and swift action, however anxiety disorders do not. They require radical acceptance and surrender, a different teleology for a different problem. A new context in which the virtues of patience, strength, willingness, calmness, forbearance, humility, self-compassion all find their proper expression.
Healing → Live life and accept the fear (feel the fear and do it anyway)
“You may accept one set of symptoms yet recoil in horror from another. This is not true acceptance.” – Claire Weekes (author of Hope and Help for Your Nerves)
Conclusion:
Context, agenda, and intention matter. Understanding this can help explain how mental illness can arise, and be difficult to shake.
We have an obsession in the West with what Jacques Ellul called “Technique”, the never-ending drive of optimisation towards an outcome. In business and manufacturing this may be important, but the human soul is no such object, and will always find ways to frustrate us in new and exciting ways. Deeper reflection on one’s intentions and life goals can help us understand not just what we do, but why we do what we do, and the impact it is having on us. I leave you with this quote:
“The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel. Specifically, the new emphasis is on learning to step back from what you are thinking, notice it, and open up to what you are experiencing. These steps keep us from doing the damage to ourselves that efforts to avoid or control our thoughts or feelings inflict, allowing us to focus our energies on taking the positive actions that can alleviate our suffering.” – Steven Hayes, The Liberated Mind
Further reading:
Paul David — At Last a Life
Claire Weekes — Hope and Help for Your Nerves
Steven C. Hayes — A Liberated Mind
General information only. This article discusses concepts and research and is not clinical advice, diagnosis, or a treatment plan. If anxiety is impacting you, speak with your GP or a registered clinical professional.