The Week magazine (Jan. 20) has an interesting article on why people fail with their New Year’s resolutions (80% of them by February). Why do we fail to maintain our own self-promises?

Naturally, the Week magazine asks psychologists who typically respond: “For most people, resolutions represent the fantasy of perfection— perfect body, perfect life, perfect feelings without any of the reality.” But people who resolve to do something new in the beginning of each year do not generally set their sights on something unattainably “perfect.” The research article goes on to list what kind of goals people set. Most commonly, they are health related, wanting to exercise more and eat better; the next most desired item is managing their financial life better. These two items make up about 90% of the annual resolutions. For most people, their goals are modest and within what they can actually achieve.

So, why do we fail? Psychologists think our habits are just too strong: “Habits are, by definition deeply ingrained (says a typical answer), so even the best of intentions aren’t enough to turn an idealized future into reality.” Of course, these psychologists forget one cardinal rule of understanding human behavior: Habits, like all other repeated patterns of behavior, are formed and maintained by society and its institutions — not by individuals. There is nothing in our reality that is determined by just our individual choice or decision. We must seek the causes of failure in our society and its organized patterns, not in our individual psychology.

Why do most people even bother to make resolutions at the beginning of each year, knowing full well that they are going to be unable to keep them? The answer is quite simple: We want to be “better” human beings than we are. Given that we struggle with weight from poor eating and suffer financial hardships from unwise spending, the choice of these two common resolutions is quite understandable.

Now, we need to re-think the question of why we fail more than succeed with our annual resolutions that are eminently attainable with a modicum of discipline and regimen, especially when we strongly want to become better human beings? After all, more careful dieting, more regular exercising and more financial discipline are all doable for ordinary Americans. It’s not like training to summit Mount Everest, or to play for the NFL or qualify for the Olympics. Why, then, do we utterly fail in obtaining two such reasonably simple goals?

To answer this question, let’s remind ourselves of the role of our society upon our behavior, which clarifies our answer: We fail because our own society is against it. It doesn’t want us to succeed with our resolutions and become better human beings and citizens. How can you win your struggle to lose weight or stay financially solvent when your society glorifies overeating and overspending day and night, using the nation’s smartest people with their cleverest techniques to brainwash us against our own success? American society wants its citizens to remain unconscious about their health and undisciplined with their financial management. Our annual resolution is nothing but our feeble defiance against America’s consumer capitalism — to be easily squashed by the system. Very simply, America’s economy would crash if half of American citizens stopped being indiscriminate eaters and over-spending consumers. American society does everything — advertising, propagandizing, classroom teaching — to make sure that we overeat and overspend.

With so many food commercials and free-spending advertisements, keeping them eating and spending, eating and spending, unconsciously and without discipline, who else would keep America’s consumer economy going and keep the super-rich getting richer? (Fortunately for the food industry, 95% of weight-losers soon regain their lost weight). To maintain a successful national economy, we must fail in our individual self-promises to become better human beings. The “best and brightest” in America, in their corporate jobs, figure out all the angles so that we, the common consumers, never succeed.

Generations past, there were different Americans and let’s meet Pete Barnes (his real name), one such average Joe. Pete never had a new-year resolution in his long life because he always lived intelligently and rationally all year round; he didn’t need yearly self-renewal pledges. Born in Petersham in 1924, Pete married his sweetheart Annie when he was 22 and she 16, and died in Greenfield in 2012 (Annie, at 93, is still active). Pete was a remarkable man in that he was so unremarkable. He served in the Navy during WWII and worked on many jobs thereafter, including the Alaska pipelines, but mostly as a licensed plumber, to support his family, a wife and five children. Always frugal and sensible, he stayed away from alcohol, tobacco and churches, so he never wasted his time, money, health or mind. Characteristically, he avoided all types of commercial entertainment and, in particular, never watched ballgames on TV or in person because he thought it quite dumb to support millionaire athletes with your hard-earned wages. He was as honest as the day is long and, as a friend and as a neighbor, kind to a fault, and believed in hard work and justice for all (he was a registered Democrat). As a quintessential “American,” he was a strong-minded, independent New England libertarian that the Founding Fathers had in mind for the new nation.

Here is our parting thought: What if American consumer society were populated by people like Pete Barnes who has no vice, and is impervious to seductive advertisement, someone, in spite of his own country’s national plot, who never wastes his money?

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and professor emeritus, lives in Greenfield, only a few miles away from where Pete used to live.

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