teleoplexy
8d ago
I'm not saying you don't and I'm not asking you to refer to him more. I'm saying that I know you refer to his ideas at length, but what are we going to do about the narcissism except pointing out all of the things that it causes?
teleoplexy
8d ago
But have we actually tried anything? Is this really a lost cause when most people aren’t even aware of the problem? I think awareness and mindshare matter which is why we should write about this more and explicitly, but as for more concrete ways of creating meaning and agency:
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People like parenting books. Maybe we should write one? Even if it’s only targeted at our shared rat/post-rat spaces? Or target it at the red tribe, for example, and pitch it as “how to raise an agentic child.” I got a parenting book as a gift a while ago. It’s about developing the baby’s right hemisphere of the brain - my mom regrets that I never got into math - and there’s a set of exercises in there, and I swear I’m not bullshitting you, aimed at developing precognition and a “sixth sense,” because the right hemisphere is responsible for that sort of magic, I guess. The author is also extremely incredulous about skepticism: “If you don’t think this is true, you are a SCIENCE DENIER.” He even offers a sort of Pascal’s wager for the exercises: “Even if you don’t believe it, what’s the harm? Best case: it’s true and your child is Lisan al-Gaib. Worst case: it’s a fun exercise with your baby.” Maybe the author read too much Dune. My point is: even bullshit like this sells. Why wouldn’t a book about agency sell?
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Mormons seem to have adapted to modernity quite well. Maybe the Mormons should win the culture war? How do we help them? Maybe we should borrow some of their tenets and start a cult?
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Maybe if we think phones and the internet are a big problem, we can incorporate that into our cult too.
Those ideas are a drop in the ocean, and they’re probably stupid, and I’m also being flippant to an extent. But in the whole diagnosis-sphere we don’t even have this. We have the diagnosis, and then what? Let Moloch win? Put all our hopes into AI? I mean, we could do that and in reality a lot of people have decided to do that. But maybe we should also take the problem seriously and at least try to imagine some solutions because I don't think that even benevolent AI would save us. Like the other response to your comment is civil service - we haven't talked about that before. That's better than dooming, no?
teleoplexy
8d ago
First things first: I broadly agree with what you say about people who complain about a lack of time to create art, claiming that their jobs weigh them down. That doesn't apply to everyone, but it fits well with my understanding of narcissism. Hear me out, though: if you liked the first part of my post, hear me out.
I read your articles, and I regularly read your comments here. You have said that trans issues are your hobby horse, and you are generally fond of cultural commentary. Yours is incisive, and I think it is directionally right. You have a sharp blade, finely honed, but to be quite frank, I think your target is utterly defeated. The commentary you do is most likely worth it for you - and please correct me if I'm wrong - because it is simply satisfying to speak the truth about those issues, be they trans issues or Henry Nowak's senseless murder. But it's also probably very easy to slice through those issues, because we've seen so many of them that we - or at least I - know how every story goes, beat by beat. I'm not telling you to stop writing your observations, but why not pick a harder target?
Because as it stands, you are contributing to the catalogue of our grievances with the left and its absurdities. You are participating in compiling this big book of grudges, but why stop at that if we know that merely cataloguing grievances won't do anything? If you agree with TLP's or Lasch's thesis that narcissism is what happens to a rotting culture, why not take a crack at the root of the problem? At its solution maybe? If that wouldn't be as fun as commentary, I think it might be more satisfying. I think you have the chops for that, and I know you are familiar with TLP, so maybe my challenge is to go deeper. I'd like to see your piece on where the culture went wrong, for example. Go deeper into the root causes of the malaise, and go after the solutions to it.
teleoplexy
8d ago
Marxism, wokeness are just a couple of examples of the ways to protect your identity. They are by no means the only ones, of course, it's whatever belief allows for the easiest and the most convenient existence.
My True Life
In my early twenties I was a Marxist, which now in retrospect I realize was not very cool of me. Ironically, what helped me to snap out of it was reading none other than Das Kapital, but not for the reasons you might think - not because of its shabby economics, a field that mystifies me to this day really. What helped me to snap out of it was his account of Victorian England, the industrialization, which, if there's any truth to that account, was a truly awful time and place to be a human. The sources Marx drew on seem legitimate to me to this day and in general it seems like the restructuring of the system chewed through people, wrung them dry, and treated children as disposable material. Marx is at his best as a sociologist, not as an economist; the picture he painted is vivid; it stayed with me and throughout the years this part specifically finally let the cognitive dissonance chew a hole in my worldview: my life is nowhere near as hard as it was during Victorian era. It's actually pretty good. So I started questioning whether I really wanted a violent revolution. Destroy the current social order for what purpose exactly?
Tracing that train of thought backward, I realized over time that I became a leftist during a pretty hard time in my life. My wife and I moved to Canada and suddenly I was separated from my family and friends. I was looking for a job as a self-taught junior software engineer with a bachelor's in a very unrelated and non-technical field, with little experience under my belt - needless to say, I was getting rejected a lot. I also realized that culturally we were pretty different from Canadians and that my language skills, while passable, weren't really all that stellar. I always enjoyed making my friends laugh and now my particular style of humour wasn't landing that well. They say that moving countries is perhaps the hardest thing one can do and I took that warning for granted - my mental health cratered, fell of a cliff. I became a leftist during that time in my life and with hindsight it's of course trivial to conclude that I was unwittingly looking for the cause of my misery and decided capitalism was to blame, not the surrounding circumstances, (or me, *wink wink*). The system was preventing me from living my true life.
Well, even during those years, even though I was subjectively not feeling very good, my life wasn't that bad. I found a job eventually, we became part of a new social circle. I learned how to make people laugh in Canada too (you need to add "I'm joking", completely dry poker face doesn't work). As I restored my mental health, the belief that a revolution is necessary withered away and with it I realized that nothing was really preventing me from living the way I wanted. My true life was the life that I was living then and there. But let's look closer: what did I think my true life entail? What did I think I would be able to do in a shiny new system that I couldn’t do then? I don't think I had a coherent vision: I was playing video games, reading philosophy, watching movies, and learning to play guitar (sounds familiar?), but it felt tremendously important to me to live my true life. I told my wife that when she becomes a professor I want a year off from my job to at least have a taste of this true life. So maybe it just meant do the things above, but without the anxiety of holding down a job at a company where I witnessed some truly ruthless layoffs? Do the things I wanted and not feel depressed? A hilarious detail: I was never delusional about communism requiring people to work more and have less choice. I just thought that communism would provide us all with some sort of meaning in a better way than capitalism can provide now.
I don’t think I was alone in feeling that having a job - and the precarity that comes with it - is something that happens to you. A lot of normies believe that a job is an unavoidable tax on your finite time on Earth and the job ultimately keeps you from whoever you really are. Think about the following archetypes: the software engineer who calls himself a musician, the accountant who's true calling is travelling the world and absorbing other cultures. "I was born in the wrong era" - you heard this one, haven't you? They are all expressing the same underlying conviction: my true life is somewhere else, and all of this isn't it. "My job isn't me. The system is built in a way to steal my time from me."
Circling back, for me, what came first, before any ideology, before any hardships and demanding, unusual circumstances, was crashing full speed into life with the pedal to the metal. I imagined myself as destined for great things even though I hadn't achieved anything special in or outside of school. Despite that, I still thought I was special. Everyone - parents, teachers, friends - told me I was smart, and naturally, what logically follows from being smart is only success and no hardship at all. I learned that I deserve something for being smart. First good grades (plausible in middle and high school, if you know how to appear smart), then a good job (out of this world fantasy). In reality, I mistook appearing smart for being smart, mastered the former, and thought it was a substitute for the latter.
It turned out that real life is hard work, paying the bills, boredom, groceries, job searching, compromise, family obligations, limited time, limited talent. What stung most was that life punished all those years I spent fucking around instead of learning how to study - or even learning how to do things in general. I blew off school and never learned how to learn until after I finished school because I'm "naturally smart," as everybody I'd fooled told me. Then, in this sorry state, I stumbled onto a realization: I hadn’t failed by grinding League of Legends and never challenging myself. No - I'm oppressed by the cruel system that is capitalism.[^1] And thus I was saved from discovering that I was nothing special. My new comfortable reality was that I just wasn't living my true life due to circumstances entirely outside my control.
The ideology came later, and it came as relief. "I deserve something better than drudgery and job precarity." The explanations involving capitalism and oppression were entirely post-hoc - in exactly the same way that, as @FtttG argues, climate change is a post-hoc rationalization for not wanting kids, for one reason or another.
I've collected several attempts to explain why people become woke or leftist, and none of them ring true to my experience:
- Paul Graham says wokies are just prigs turbocharged by social media. I didn't feel particularly morally outraged. I performed the sneering rituals with my online peers, but priggishness didn't come first, and I don't think it's something natural. For me, the belief that the current system doesn't allow humans to live to their fullest potential came first.
- Haidt says strong care/fairness intuitions come first and then get turbocharged by a culture where harm, trauma, and identity are central moral facts, as Haidt puts it. I'm partial to culture explanations, but I don't think care/fairness intuitions played a role in my life, and I wasn't taught about feelings as central moral facts as a student in Russia. The reason I was attracted to Marxism is that I unconsciously stumbled onto an explanation for why I was personally feeling miserable. Or rather, I stumbled onto a leftist pipeline for disaffected young men during hard times.
- I don't think Mottizens talk much about why the woke become woke or why people choose communism - only about the culture war with them. The closest I found was this post by @RenOS, pointing out that for some people being nice is very important. But "meaning well" is saying something about how a person feels about the world outside them, which is pretty close to Haidt's "natural intuitions". In my case, communism was about me not being able to live my true life. It was less about feeling something for other people, more about looking for reasons why I personally wasn't feeling good.
These frameworks aren't necessarily wrong for everyone. Let me be clear: I do think earnest leftists exist. I can say with 100% certainty that there's a guy who's into Marxism because he really thinks it's the best economic system anyone ever devised - but that's a sort of special interest for odd people. And there are people who are woke because they have strong care/fairness intuitions, the way Haidt describes. But there's a reason your average anarchist talks first about the injustice of the system, not about the logistics of a post-revolutionary anarchist society. They perceive themselves to have been personally wronged by the system, which is why we need to tear it down. This shift in focus is a perfect defence mechanism against confronting your own failure to flourish. None of the frameworks above capture the main psychological movement. They capture the contents of their beliefs, they describe the behaviour but they completely fail to address the mechanism behind the beliefs.
The Last Psychiatrist (TLP) and Lasch already described all of this (more precisely than I can put in a comment here) and they are much closer than any of the frameworks above, in addition to being hardly unknown in the rationalist circles. I believe they are much closer to generalizing the modern condition, so it's sort of baffling for me that the main societal-level idea of narcissism isn't taken more seriously here - or at least, I'm not seeing its impact. To summarize for those who are skeptical or unfamiliar: TLP's concept of narcissism isn't vanity - counterintuitively, he doesn't use the word in the colloquial sense. In his parlance, it's the protection of a self-image that was never tested against reality. The ideology - whether Marxism, wokeness, or just a vague "the system is broken" sentiment - functions as what TLP would call a defence against change. It's not that these people hold wrong beliefs you need to argue them out of. The beliefs are are better understood as load-bearing walls protecting them from a conclusion: that they are ordinary, that they wasted time, that the life they have might be the life they built through inaction.
My own snapping-out-it wasn't a fully conscious decision. Having kids turned out to be one of my major sources of meaning - just as it was for @gog. But it was really a series of events that made it impossible for me to avoid the conclusion that my life is basically a normal life, and the "true life" I was yearning for doesn't need to be provided by a third party. I must create it myself.
If TLP's and Lasch's diagnosis is right and I think it basically is, then the culture war as it is typically waged - arguing with people about their beliefs, debunking their claims - is largely beside the point. You're not going to argue a narcissist out of a defence mechanism - it's tantamount to trying to convince someone that they are not a good person, because those beliefs are essentially what makes them a good person. So, narcissists' beliefs aren't the disease - they're the symptom and that means the leverage points are the conditions that produce the narcissism in the first place.
So, TLP rarely talks about those conditions directly, but extracting from his posts and my own observations, I'd point to four factors:
- How we parent kids. "You're so smart/special/talented" rather than "You did a good job." The latter praises action, the former constructs an identity that will require constant defence for the rest of the child's life.
- The absence of a life script. "Choose a career your heart is drawn to." So you have to wander until you figure out what job or life decision actually corresponds to your inner desires. This figuring-out part never has to end. Having kids is optional, entirely dependent on whether you "feel ready". It's fine to never know when you are ready.
- Consumption as identity construction. Modern media, and especially social media, lets you build an identity by consuming. Media gives you all of the emotional texture of being a particular kind of person without requiring you to do anything. You feel like a musician without knowing how to hold an instrument, a rebel without risking anything. Social media then turbocharges this by letting you perform the identity publicly - curate it (see /r/PoliticalCompassMemes), receive validation for it (see any liberal subreddit) - which further decouples identity from action. TLP thinks this is partly the economic model: the system benefits from consumers who are permanently dissatisfied but who address that dissatisfaction through consumption and identity performance rather than through action that might change something.
- The collapse of obligation-based identity. Religion, community organizations, extended family structures, even labour unions - these gave people roles defined by obligation to others rather than self-expression. You were a member of a parish, a member of a lodge, someone's uncle who shows up every Sunday. These roles were constraining, but they anchored identity in what you do for others rather than who you feel yourself to be internally. As these institutions withered, people were left constructing meaning entirely from the inside - a task most people aren't equipped for, and one that nudges you toward narcissism almost by default. If no external structure tells you who you are through your obligations, then who you are becomes a purely internal question, which means it becomes a purely defensive one.
If there's a key to winning the culture war, it's not separation from the left - not civil war - as some propose. The key lies in addressing these four conditions, whatever that entails - that is a much more fruitful field for discussion than endlessly pointing out exactly how the leftists/wokies are weird and incorrect and willing to lie and don't get me wrong, they are all of those things and they do lie, but so what? The rationalist and the subsequent The Motte / culture-war milieu established that thousands of times over and we are no better off for it. Clearly defining the cause (or, at least, one of the most important causes) of the culture war is cultural narcissism as defined by TLP and Lasch at least makes it possible to move forward with imagining solutions. Acting on this part specifically will lead to the complete victory even if narcissism is but a one of the overall causes of the social splitting. I'd like to believe that the causes have to be addressable, even if some believe they aren't really. Maybe we don't even know what's missing in our analysis?. Maybe I don't even know what the hell I am talking about when I bring up the collapse of obligation-based identity? But if it's a hard problem (perhaps the hardest) doesn't it deserve more of your attention than endlessly filling the book of grudges?
P.S. This generalizes beyond wokeness or communism. It's more of a "our culture is shaped like this through and through", which is why I'm sort of obsessed with trying to understand how to foster agency in myself and in my kids.
teleoplexy
9d ago
I’m YOLOing a small sum at IPO, around $2k. Entirely vibe based, aiming to sell before all of the employee unlocks start happening
teleoplexy
30d ago
They also aren't liberal, so they're allowed to take measures that will ensure the cohesion of Russian culture, and the culture of it's constituting provinces, or will promote some reasonable ethnogenesis.
I think Russians would disagree that this is the case. The majority of immigrants doesn’t settle in Muslim majority regions, they go for places that have jobs - big cities. And there certainly isn’t any [successful] ethnogenesis going on.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Fun exercise - shuffle the CSV and get entirely different outputs! Not a bad thing per se, just abusing the Lost in the Middle problem to get more different songs you might like.
teleoplexy
1mo ago
If I tell a Christian that their belief in sky-fathers is ridiculous while they're hosting an unrelated activity
That’s not a fair comparison. I preferred the comparison to a Black person among white people, although that one isn’t perfect either. In my experience, Christians and Black people generally don’t test others to see whether they hold haram beliefs, whereas trans people and trans-friendly communities routinely test whether you agree with them. For example, I once felt tested through a joke, where my reaction seemed to be examined to see whether I laughed along. Another time, I was asked directly about JKR and Harry Potter. I’ve never had similar experiences with Black people or Christians, despite knowing far more of them than trans people.
Yes! It's your hobby-horse, as you put it yourself, so I think it's pretty much your only set of opinions that I can coherently judge
teleoplexy
1mo ago
I personally know many people that share my views, that I think are more liberal than yours
teleoplexy
1mo ago
It may not apply to literally everyone in the community - people differ and hold different views - but effectively, there is an atmosphere of fear around being ostracized for questioning anything. Many people share my views in private (which are much more liberal than FtttG, for example), but are afraid to dissent, because if they do, they cease to be a good person in the eyes of their peers and colleagues.
when it seems easy to ignore
Not the OP, but five or six years ago, I was on the side of supporting transition and never criticizing it. After that, I became interested in the issue because of several factors that came together.
- An FTM person in my family desisted while she was a teenager. At the time, I was supporting her, if not encouraging her, but then she fell out with her queer friend group and later moved to a different school. After that, her suicidal ideation and desire to be a man seemingly disappeared completely. Partly, I credit her parents, who refused to let her visit a gender clinic, which otherwise might have put her on an irreversible path. She now has a long-term cis male partner. This episode shattered my conviction that being trans is based solely on an internal, innate, hardwired feeling of gender.
- The school hid the fact that this person had socially transitioned for a full year. I put myself in her parents' position, and I think it would be unacceptable to me if someone else decided that I couldn’t help - or rather, that I wasn’t allowed to help - my child.
- Speaking of the feeling of gender, neither I nor anyone I have talked to about it has that feeling, so naturally, I can’t relate.
- The episode with my family member was interesting because mentioning it was taboo in trans-friendly circles. I never felt animosity toward trans people, yet by the standards of the leftist community, bringing up desistance or detransition is itself transphobic. So there was no way for me to square my real-life experience with the community consensus. I researched the topic myself and found that there are other liberal opinions on it, some of which reflect my real-life experience much more closely than unquestioningly accepting the idea of a gender journey.
So, if the school or state is silently aiding a child in transitioning - and, for the sake of a thought experiment, let’s say it’s my child - does that really look like an issue I can ignore? I don’t think the people who push this policy in schools are ignoring me; they are putting me in a position where I have to take some sort of stance.
teleoplexy
2mo ago
Man I even made the rice cooker pancake due to this trend. It was okay, not the best thing I've ever eaten.
teleoplexy
2mo ago
teleoplexy
3mo ago
Another vote for This Is Going To Hurt
teleoplexy
3mo ago
Sam Kriss is an amazing writer, a true jester
teleoplexy
4mo ago
DO NOT MAKE THIS BAKED ZITI RECIPE IF YOU WANT TO MAINTAIN YOUR DIET
I REPEAT DO NOT
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/281646/the-best-baked-ziti/
teleoplexy
5mo ago
It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.
What happened to "be charitable"? She's just a libbed out body who got scared when she saw the people she was reading about online in real life. The people who will disappear her, deport her to El Salvador, put her in a cattle wagon straight to an Auschwitz equivalent located in Texas. Then she panicked and tried to flee without thinking too hard how her actions are going to be interpreted by a hostile party. Why instantly jump to accusing her trying to kill someone?
teleoplexy
5mo ago
Mainstream media
Who do you mean by this?
Might as well include the whole population of the world in this category.
various politicians
This one would be the simplest to prove, so if you don't respond to other ones, I'd like to see your response to this - who incited the assassination?
teleoplexy
6mo ago
I kind of hate private group chats. I have a private group chat with friends to shoot the shit and it makes sense if I just want to keep in touch and make each other laugh, but Discord style real-time model just doesn't fit my mental model of deeper discussion:
- If you don't have a lot of time to constantly check on it, it's hard to understand where an ongoing conversation started.
- It's hard to follow the discussion because multiple groups of people can talk about multiple things at the same time. Thread model captures my mental model of discussion much better.
- I don't have time to read it to an extent where I keep up with everything going on.
- It's unsearchable - sometimes I want to find an old conversation. On Reddit, here and on forums, the conversation about a topic will be organized into a nice thread. On discord it's interspersed with some random conversation without start and end.
If it's a smaller group chat like Signal or Telegram or whatever, those problems are less prevalent but I just don't have an understanding how to join one with an anonymous group of people I don't know.
teleoplexy
6mo ago
I mean they already consume shit like tiktok too, but there’s for example us, here on the Motte talking to each other. The Motte IMO is going to be affected by the coming avalanche sooner or later, so in my head the question is - where would I go? I came up with “a paid forum”, but I think touching grass OSS an acceptable outcome too
teleoplexy
6mo ago
It would be funny is the main political divide in the future is “grass touchers vs slop eaters”?
teleoplexy
6mo ago
Maybe we won't want to talk to each other online anymore in the future, but I think the problem will become a real pain point very soon. If I'm forced to make a bet: will we stop talking to each other online or will people pay for the service somehow, I'm betting on the former.
Have you read this piece by Lou Keep? Or After Virtue by MacIntyre? If not I highly recommend both, especially if you like TLP.
If you'd have to pick the primary root of all problems in the West, what would your guess be?
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