A society without government regulation is not an unregulated society.

It sounds paradoxical, but I am talking about self-regulation, or self-control, or that stuffy old Victorian concept, willpower.

Roy Baumeister and John Tierney’s 2011 book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, covers research showing that willpower is not just a mythical 19th century concept the Victorians invented to resist succumbing to their vices.

Psychologists, Baumeister among them, over the last 20 years or so, have discovered that people are prone to losses in self-control when their mental energy, fuelled by glucose, is depleted. Along with intelligence, self-control or willpower is the personal trait most predictive of a good life.

The book cites a multitude of studies to show just how powerful willpower can be. The “strongest evidence” the authors say, comes from our own shores. The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Study has been tracking a cohort of 1,000 people from birth. Those who had better self-regulation as children, even when factoring in the effects of socio-economic status, ethnicity, and intelligence, are now doing better on a myriad of indicators – health status, education levels, criminal activity, and so on.

The concept of willpower rose to prominence in the 19th century, driven by two societal changes. First, farmers flocked to the cities. Second, the enlightenment cast doubt on dogmatic religion. “As Victorians fretted over moral decay and the social pathologies concentrated in cities, they looked for something more tangible than divine grace, some internal strength that could protect even an atheist.”

But from the early 20th century onwards, willpower lost its force. Today, say the authors “most social scientists look for causes of misbehaviour outside the individual: poverty, relative deprivation, oppression, or other failures of the environment or the economic and political systems”.

Indeed the left winces at willpower, or other phrases and ideas in the same class of thinking, like personal responsibility, and self-control.

I can understand this.

Someone who grew up in the 1950s explained to me recently that his family did not have a car until he was in high school. They had little growing up. By today’s standards, they would be poor. Yes, poor income-wise, but he and his siblings have all done well. So why can’t people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?

There are many families today who do not have much money, yet will their way towards a better life, but there are others facing life stresses associated with poverty that deplete mental energy. For these people, stress can lead to poor life decisions, which can become a downward spiral.

Fortunately, willpower can be developed. Dr Dione Healey from the University of Otago, for example, has developed a programme that helps pre-school children at risk of developing ADHD to better self-regulate.

Helping people to help themselves is always a more empowering way. The goal should be to work towards a society that is regulated not by government, but by people powering and willing their own way forward.