Healthy habits are more important for one’s future life than the mere acquisition of knowledge and skills. This principle should guide educational reform and government policy more broadly.
But how do the necessary habits emerge and take root in society? We are accustomed to thinking of them as something that develops spontaneously, beyond the influence of government. That leaves us with personal example, which we know in advance will not work. For it to have any effect, thousands of people would have to set such an example. So all that remains is to complain about the state of society and the deplorable morals of everyone except ourselves.
There is, however, a body of social psychological literature examining how habits and customs are formed and, more importantly, how they acquire the status of institutions (which are essentially deeply entrenched and complex patterns of habitual behavior). Three conditions are necessary:
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It must be advantageous to behave in a particular way in a given situation.
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A sufficiently large group of people must possess the necessary abilities.
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The behavior must be conspicuously celebrated as desirable, moral, and right.
As I wrote some time ago, this is not a matter of worldly wisdom. It is a matter of creating the right conditions.
Of course, there are many customs involving behavior that occurs relatively frequently but remains more or less concealed, such as cheating at school or having affairs with one’s superiors. But that is a different matter. Here I am concerned with public customs, even if they are unofficial.
In the 1990s, for example, it became a generally accepted practice for managers in the Czech Republic to embezzle assets from state-owned or newly privatized enterprises. It was profitable, a sufficiently large group of people knew how to do it, and these swindlers were publicly held up as model citizens. As far as I know, the only highly successful businessman who openly pointed out that many others had built their fortunes on stolen assets, and that there was a fundamental difference between them, was the concrete magnate Tomáš Březina. But one man in the concrete business cannot transform the prevailing social climate.
Later, the whole phenomenon was blamed on some supposed Czech tradition. But make no mistake: no tradition of privatization through theft had existed in this country before then.
The American sociologist Peter L. Berger argues that an institution (the highest stage in the development of a custom) is fully established when it is passed seamlessly to the next generation. Yet in most cases, we do not even manage to get that far.
If we do not wish to follow the French path, we would do well to celebrate as celebrities those young people who organize school work brigades that actually build something. This would be a welcome departure from today’s practice, in which the celebrity is some obnoxious brat who makes a political statement in front of a camera.
But this brings us back to the question of what pays off for young people. What opens the door to an attractive career is generally decided by corporate bureaucrats. Until Czech institutions and businesses are capable of offering an equally good life, patterns of behavior that are hardly conducive to a good life will continue to emerge and grow stronger.