Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs. [Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene," 1976]

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By the 1780s the high-water mark of Enlightenment rationalism had already broken: the culture pivoted from celebrating abstract reason to exploring the world of sensation and emotion that would soon flower into full-blown Romanticism. Moral philosophers—above all Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, still widely reprinted)—argued that ethical life rests on “sympathy,” the capacity to enter imaginatively into another’s feelings. “Sensibility,” a physical quickness of nerve and tear-duct, was treated as the outward sign of inward virtue; the man or woman who could weep at a novel or shudder at a beggar’s sores was judged morally reliable.

Periodicals fed this new sensibility to a widening public. Weeklies and monthlies such as the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Lady’s Magazine, and dozens of provincial miscellanies printed essays inviting readers to monitor their own pulses of pity, indignation or embarrassment and to compare them with the printed norm. Columns on “politeness,” “the art of pleasing,” or “the conduct of the passions” turned self-scrutiny into a polite recreation; to be “self-centered” was beginning to sound not merely solitary but morally obtuse, a failure of the sympathetic imagination that the age now prized.

The trap of looking for validation from outside yourself

Self-preservation: The self-pres instinct turns validation into a thermostat for safety—if the pantry is stocked, the rent is paid, and the body is judged fit, the world is deemed okay. When approval is sought from outside, it quietly shifts the goal-posts: savings targets rise, calorie counts tighten, the acceptable savings-account balance inflates with every compliment or critique. The trap is that no amount of external reassurance can quiet a meter whose needle is driven by imagined scarcity; the person keeps hustling for one more “good job,” one more discount, one more health metric, until rest itself feels unsafe.

Sexual: Here, the currency of validation is charge—being seen as the one who magnetises attention, who can tilt the room by walking in. The instinct scans for the spark of fascination in another’s eyes and, once found, wonders if it can be repeated with someone still harder to impress. Each conquest or compliment becomes proof that the current is still live inside them. The trap is that intensity is fleeting; when the gaze moves on, the person doubts their own voltage and escalates—sharper style, riskier flirtation, more exclusive partners—mistaking the adrenaline of pursuit for the steadiness of being wanted.

Social: For the social instinct, legitimacy comes from position within the hive—knowing the unspoken rules, holding the right opinions, being the friend people text when politics or pop-culture shifts. Validation is sought through inclusion markers: invitations, retweets, committee seats, the nod across the meeting table. The trap is that the reference group expands faster than status can rise; every new circle introduces finer hierarchies, subtler codes. The person keeps editing themselves to stay readable to the group, until the private inner compass is replaced by a weather-vane that swings with each fresh consensus, and authentic voice becomes a souvenir from an earlier, smaller tribe.

SELF-VALIDATING

validate(v.)

"confirm, make valid, give legal force to," 1640s, from Medieval Latin validatus, past participle of validare "to make valid," from validus (see valid). Related: Validated; validating.

valid(adj.)

1570s, "having force in law, legally binding," from French valide (16c.), from Latin validus "strong, effective, powerful, active," from valere "be strong" (from PIE root *wal- "to be strong"). The meaning "sufficiently supported by facts or authority, well-grounded" is attested by 1640s. Formerly also in the classical sense, "strong, powerful, efficient" (1650s), but this is obsolete or archaic.

validation(n.)

"act of giving validity; a strengthening or confirming," 1650s, noun of action from validate.

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Sixteenth-century France was a patchwork of Roman-law provinces south of the Loire and regional coutumes north of it. For the Valois kings this fragmentation was not an academic curiosity; it was a standing threat to their claim that sovereignty—the final, undivided right to command—rested in the crown alone. The Ordinance of Blois (1499) therefore ordered every local custom to be written down and formally “reformed,” while the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) went further: every legal act, royal or customary, had to be drafted in French and registered by the regional Parlements before it could be pronounced valide—legally binding. By forcing clerical, feudal and provincial charters to pass through this single linguistic and procedural sieve, the monarchy reclaimed sovereignty in practice: it positioned the king, not Rome, the nobility or local memory, as the ultimate source of enforceable law. The term valide thus became the legal signature of that reclaimed sovereignty; a contract, will or royal edict was pleaded only after the notary or judge could certify that it had cleared the crown’s centralising filter.

The English Reformation made “valid” indispensable. After the 1558 Act of Supremacy re-established the Church of England as a jurisdiction separate from Rome, every royal statute, ecclesiastical licence or property conveyance had to be demonstrably “binding in law” to stand against papal or foreign challenge. The common-law courts therefore borrowed the ready-made French term valide—already current in the Norman-influenced legal French they still spoke in court—to certify that an act, will or patent carried royal force. By the 1570s the word had slipped into English pleadings as the shortest way to claim enforceability in a kingdom whose sovereignty now rested on its own, not Roman, authority.

We now stand at the brink of claiming our own sovereignty from kings and presidents. We are learning to say no to our governments and no to our banks. Becoming self-validating means we carve our own stamp of validity out of the natural laws of the universe.