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Notes -
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:
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:
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.
You don't have to go into Marxism to protect your True Self. You can also go into crackpot science.
I know a certain person. Reasonably smart, has a PhD. He's always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but the years have not been kind. He sees people much smarter meet with professional success and status while not seeing a path to it himself. But he knows that while he may not be "quantitatively" as smart as the people at the top, he's much better at "making connections" (aka schizo daydreaming). He knows that all of academia is fake, a charade where people blindly parrot whatever the boss believes which is why a free thinker such as himself could never get ahead. But he knows that he deserves to get ahead, that he deserves to be on top and to have everyone (including, of course, Father) admit that they were wrong and he was right.
His current project is a new model for fundamental physics. You see, the reason he can't conceptualize quantum mechanics or whatever isn't because he doesn't have the chops but because it's bullshit and the lemmings in academia just eat it up. He's getting close. He's got a small following, mostly senile boomers and lumpenproles, but it's growing. His true self is coming into being. Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the academy.
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.
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