However, the set of possible activities is not determined only by knowledge. Personality is not reduced to cognitive functions or technologies. The principle of least action is not about minimizing technology, but about minimizing effort in general. The least technological action can result in social and psychological losses and costs that more than outweigh any saving in material effort—this applies, for example, to morality, reputation and criminal law (cf. Polanyi 2001, p. 49). Many actions are not based on knowledge, but on unfounded and false ideas, on creative impulses, prejudices and affects. “Our moral/aesthetic frameworks are complicated constructions that combine broad cultural inheritances with dense mixtures of abstract reasoning and the immediacies of concrete experience” (Frisina 2002, p. 14). Moral/aesthetic frameworks influence consciousness and personality no less than cognitive ones.
The activities of an individual form an active power within him, namely his personality and identity. If personality sets individuals apart, then identity embeds them in a society by specifying how they should behave depending on their position within the social context (cf. Akerlof and Cranton 2010, p. 10). George Akerlof and Rachel Cranton identify three parts of identity: 1) social categories, 2) norms and ideals, 3) gains and losses (identity utility). People choose their identity in both the long and short term; this choice is not necessarily conscious. Social categories are social roles and groups with which individuals identify; norms and ideals define right and wrong; gains and losses are the ability to conform to norms and ideals (a particular social role/position) and the resulting benefits or harms to the individual (Akerlof and Cranton 2011, pp. 17-9).
However, when economists try to extend the theory of utility to a real person and his active power, the limitations of neoclassical theory become clear. Akerlof and Cranton themselves show that identity cannot be reduced to “gains and losses in utility.” In his life, a person is driven not only by the needs of existence, ordered by utilitarian preferences. A person is also driven by norms and ideals, by needs for communication and self-expression. Utility, norms and ideals are not ordered among themselves—they often conflict. The principle of least action implies that, along with the requirements of utility, a person also takes into account the norms of justice and the ideals of freedom. Freedom is the ability of a person to choose between activities. The meaning of life consists of those meanings that a person has chosen for himself from culture-society. In his activity, a person is guided not by the function of utility, but by the