I think this is one of the big painful points in our culture. There seems to be a positive correlation between agency and crime (and generally things that are in the same direction as crime, but with smaller magnitude, so we don’t call them crime), and people kinda notice that, which kinda makes the lack of agency a virtue signal.
The reason is that as a criminal, you have to be agenty. No one is going to steal money for you; that is, in the way that would land the money in your pockets. (Technically, there are also some non-agenty people involved in crime, I don’t know what is the English idiom for them; I mean the kind of stupid or desperate person that you just tell “move this object from place A to place B” or “sign this legal document” and they do it for a few bucks without asking questions, and when shit hits the fan, they end up in jail instead of you.)
And this is quite unfortunate, because it seems to me that many people notice the connection, and start treating agency with suspicion. And not without good reason! For example, if a random person approaches you out of the blue, most likely it is some kind of scammer.
As a consequence, agenty people have to overcome not just their natural inertia, but also this mistrust.
This probably depends a lot on specific culture and subculture. In ex-socialist countries, people are probably more suspicious of agency, because during socialism agency was borderline illegal (you are supposed to do what the system tells you to do, not introduce chaos). If you hang out with entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs, agency is probably valued highly (but I would also suspect scams to be more frequent).
I think this is one of the big painful points in our culture. There seems to be a positive correlation between agency and crime (and generally things that are in the same direction as crime, but with smaller magnitude, so we don’t call them crime), and people kinda notice that, which kinda makes the lack of agency a virtue signal.
The reason is that as a criminal, you have to be agenty. No one is going to steal money for you; that is, in the way that would land the money in your pockets. (Technically, there are also some non-agenty people involved in crime, I don’t know what is the English idiom for them; I mean the kind of stupid or desperate person that you just tell “move this object from place A to place B” or “sign this legal document” and they do it for a few bucks without asking questions, and when shit hits the fan, they end up in jail instead of you.)
And this is quite unfortunate, because it seems to me that many people notice the connection, and start treating agency with suspicion. And not without good reason! For example, if a random person approaches you out of the blue, most likely it is some kind of scammer.
As a consequence, agenty people have to overcome not just their natural inertia, but also this mistrust.
This probably depends a lot on specific culture and subculture. In ex-socialist countries, people are probably more suspicious of agency, because during socialism agency was borderline illegal (you are supposed to do what the system tells you to do, not introduce chaos). If you hang out with entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs, agency is probably valued highly (but I would also suspect scams to be more frequent).