The Hedgehog's Dilemma

Arthur Schopenhauer (1851/2014) may not have been the first, but he was a most astute observer of the tension between the need for personal autonomy and the need for social connection. Schopenhauer, who was a famous misanthrope and loner, recognized that as mammals, humans yearn for a conspecific's warm body—much like the hedgehog or the porcupine—and is eventually repelled by its prickliness. The result is a continual dance of approach and retreat, along with a dim sense that there ought to be a better way.As I read William “Bill” von Hippel's The Social Paradox, some literary references came to mind, reinforcing my sense that the autonomy–connection dilemma runs deep in the human psyche (Krueger et al., 2022). Who would Don Quijote be without Sancho Panza, Robinson Crusoe without his Man Friday, the Lone Ranger without Tonto? We can go further. Homer's heroes personified the Greek ideal of personal excellence (areté), but they could achieve their ideal only in a context of social support, companionship, and love. Achilles’ fate was intertwined with the fate of Patroclus, and Odysseus overcame the challenges the gods laid in his path to reunite with Penelope.Gilgamesh, the most ancient of the mythical heroes of Mesopotamia, went on a hyperautonomic quest for immortality, only to be thrown back upon the limitations of his human condition. This, in time, made him wise, and he became a good king to his people (Mitchell, 2004). Autonomy, Gilgamesh teaches us, can be purified and sublimated into the service of the more ancient need for human connection. In my reading, this is also von Hippel's message.Paradox is a good book. It's a useful introduction to the issue, but it tries to do too much. Paradox touches on a great number of psychosocial problems, presents a mess of data, offers some answers, but often leaves the reader wondering how the many storylines hang together.Paradox's two anchoring premises are the theoretical framework of evolutionary psychology and the assumption that autonomy and connection are the two poles of one spectrum. Their relationship is thought to be hydraulic: One can rise up only if the other is lowered down. These premises make the book's overall argument relatable, but they come at the cost of anomalies, contradictions, and open questions.Take evolutionary psychology. Although the theory can tolerate some exceptions, the axiomatic assumption is that a species’ characteristics are the result of selective pressures. What we see now must be adaptive, or at least must have been adaptive until a few generations ago. The tremendous geographic and temporal diversity of contemporary human characteristics are the evolutionist's headache. Specifically, the rapid pace of cultural and technological change has led many scholars, including von Hippel, to see a misalignment of evolved characteristics with contemporary needs and requirements. The conventional treatment is to imagine the Pleistocene as a long-lasting golden age where human beings lived true to their nature. They enjoyed the physical and psychological benefits of tight social connection while delighting in the occasional luxuries of autonomy. The primeval gratification of the need for autonomy was the consumption of the choicest piece of meat when no one was looking. The reader is free to interpret the word “meat” in culinary or sexual terms.If a preponderance of connection over autonomy was the Pleistocenic balance, why did a need for autonomy emerge at all? Von Hippel does not drill down to a clear answer beyond suggesting that humans have innate needs for mastery and competence. This raises the question of how those needs arose. A better candidate is the need to dominate rivals and competitors, especially among men, which is a need that predates the presumably egalitarian world of the Pleistocene (Chen Zeng et al., 2022). The corollary of the need to dominate others is the need to not be dominated by others (Galinsky et al., 2008). This negative need to be left alone, to have one's privacy respected, lies close to the core of what is meant by “autonomy.”Von Hippel thinks Pleistocene hominids had little use for privacy. Living in caves, he imagines, they fornicated in plain view, and no one was bothered by it. Cave living may have been de rigueur at the frigid fringes of the human habitat, but most Pleistocene humans lived in the open savanna, where caves are few and shelters are made of perishable materials, such as the ones found among contemporary hunter–gatherers. Then as now, it may have been normal to sneak away for a tryst (Leclerc-Madlala, 2019). The need to best rivals and to be alone with a lover may be the deepest roots of our needs for autonomy and connection. The latter experience, by the way, satisfies both needs.The need for autonomy is not exclusively competitive. Von Hippel (p. 8) suggests that if properly developed and deployed, the need for “autonomy allows us to increase our usefulness to others.” This is an important observation, and it reveals the insufficiency of the unidimensional hydraulic view of autonomy and connections.The dynamic interplay of autonomy and connection is difficult to model. We can adduce examples of distinguished individuals, such as the good king Gilgamesh, who use their competence and autonomous wisdom to raise up the group they lead. Conversely, we can imagine how the struggle for autonomy is tethered to the presence of social connection. On one hand, human self-consciousness requires its reflection in the other in order to be fully formed (Buber, 1923/2000), but once formed, the need to have one's autonomy validated by others whom one has outdone takes on the aspect of the absurd. In The Rebel, Albert Camus (1956/1991, p. 139) observed that “fundamental human relations are thus relations of pure prestige, a perpetual struggle, to the death, for recognition of one human being by another.”To go beyond Paradox's unidimensional scheme, let us consider autonomy and connection as conceptually independent, so that any individual can score high or low on either dimension. Whereas Paradox focuses on the high-autonomy–low-connection and the low-autonomy–high-connection intersections, an individual high in both needs is probably the most troubled (Camus) but also the most interesting (Gilgamesh). Individuals low in both needs can float down the river of existence without much incident, it seems. The high–low individuals are the modern alienated urbanites von Hippel as well as Abbey and Allen, our epigraphers, are worried about. The low–high individuals are the creatures of the herd. Perhaps they are happy, in a bovine sort of way, but one suspects them to be boring.Having discussed the two premises of Paradox, the Pleistocene ground of evolution and the unidimensional hydraulics of competing needs, let us now turn to a few points of puzzlement.First, most of the data reviewed in Paradox come from the Global Social Survey, that is, they speak to macro trends, such as differences in the average happiness of men and women, Catholics and atheists, Libertarians and the rest of us. The problem, as articulated by Schopenhauer and implicitly endorsed in Paradox, is intrapsychic, however; it is the tension between the need for autonomy and the need for connection as experienced at some level by most sentient humans.As the implications of macro trends and group averages for intrapsychic tension are left to the reader to infer, they open the trapdoor of the ecological fallacy. What is true for the group may not be true for the group member. In a formal exposition of the fallacy, Piantadosi et al. (1988) reached back to Émile Durkheim, who noted that suicide rates across Prussian provinces were correlated with the number of Protestants. “However,” Piantadosi et al. (p. 893) note, “it could as well have been the Catholics who were committing suicide in largely Protestant provinces.” Unfortunately, this type of validity threat pervades the chapters of Paradox.Second, even at the macro level, the stories emerging for groupings of sex, religion, and nation are messy, leaving uneven patterns of alignment with the main thrust of the argument. The short, and stereotypical, story is that men prioritize the need for autonomy, whereas women prioritize the need for connection. Yet women suffer more depression and anxiety, and their tight social networks cannot be generic models for men to emulate.An equally short, stereotypical story is that religion promotes connection by encouraging reflection (prayer) and congregation (service). At the same time, von Hippel suggests that religion, and Protestant Christianity in particular, promotes a sense of autonomy through its emphasis on free-will morality. As to God, von Hippel asserts that “Christians understand that his [sic] decision to reveal himself [sic again] publicly in all his [sic] glory is intended [italics in the original] to give them a choice [italics in the original] of whether to believe and follow him” (pp. 111–112). This is moralistic pablum. It would be too easy to rebut it by pointing to the Christian emphasis on submission and obedience. As an institution of power, organized religion is not designed to promote any sort of social harmony reminiscent of the Pleistocene ideal imagined by the evolutionists.Paradox treats an inflated need for autonomy as a disease of craving too much of a thing that is beneficent only when enjoyed in small doses (miswanting). By this logic, countries with the most inflated culture of autonomy should be the least happy. Yet the industrialized Western nations show higher average levels of happiness than collectivist societies in sub-Saharan Africa or the Indian subcontinent (Helliwell et al., 2025). Surely, many mediator and moderator variables are in play, but the simple story of greater autonomy, attained at the expense of social connection and happiness, does not appear to hold.Third, there are few who grimly gainsay the benefits of education (see Caplan, 2018, for a spirited attack). A simple reading of Paradox suggests that education nudges a person toward greater autonomy and away from social connection. Highly educated people are wealthier and happier than the undereducated and the poor. Yet many of the rich become entitled, selfish, and socially ruthless. Poor people, von Hippel reports, are nicer and more cheerful. It is hard to see how anyone would seriously recommend sacrificing education or income so that greater social connection can be achieved through a reduction of autonomy. What is the reader asked to conclude? As in the cases of Sex, God, and Country, there are too many additional variables to be considered before action can be taken.Fourth, the chapter on the digital revolution is comparatively eye-opening. Here, the yin and the yang are clear. E-connection comes with risks, especially for heavy social media users, risks that are by now quite well understood. At the same time, cheap and effective video and audio apps provide opportunities to sustain vital social relations with loved ones far away that were unthinkable half a generation ago. Paradox is at its best when describing the many subtle differences between face-to-face and digital encounters.Fifth, Paradox ends on a note of self-help. What are we to do in our personal micro-worlds given the mass of conflicting data from the macro-world? As evolution, for reasons poorly understood, has left us in a place where we miswant and misfeel, a place where evolution itself seems obsolete, we ask, “Now what?” After everything von Hippel has claimed, he must, in order to remain coherent, ask us to forsake some autonomy for the benefit of greater social connection. The limitations of this hydraulic view become again evident. Throughout the book, there are hints of ideas that go beyond the hydraulic model, but there are not vigorously developed.Going back to the 2 × 2 scheme shown in Figure 1, von Hippel's call for greater social connection would move us to the upper right cell, where autonomy is low. This is a place where Durkheim thought suicides take place. If we abandon the shackles of hydraulic thinking, we can envision a move toward the upper left cell, where the experience of psychological tension is a tolerable price to pay for being a fully functioning, connected, and creative individual.At the ground floor of actionability, it seems to me that research by Epley et al. (2022; not cited in Paradox) is promising. People falsely believe that strangers do not want to be approached for casual conversation. Yet the outcomes of such approaches are almost always pleasant. Importantly, they are pleasant for everyone, including the individual who shows the autonomy of initiative. We can build on this.As Bill freely talks about personal memories to enliven Paradox, so I will share a joke from the old days in West Germany, a joke that gives a gentle nod to Schopenhauer. “How,” the teacher asks little Fritz, “do the hedgehogs reproduce?” “Very gingerly, Sir,” little Fritz intones, “very gingerly.”