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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.
Good post, and thanks for the shout out.
I'm reminded of Churchill's famous quip. Yes, liberal capitalist democracy is the worst system for enabling people to self-actualise and achieve their full potential – except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
I'm also reminded of one of my favourite bon mots from Christopher Hitchens: "it's true that everyone has a book inside him, but in most cases, that's where it should stay." I'll occasionally encounter communists, socialists etc. bemoaning the fact that they don't have time/energy to create art under a capitalist system, and I can't help but think – maybe if you devoted the time you spend bemoaning this state of affairs to actually, you know, MAKING something, you'd have something to show for it. I can't imagine you'd spend a lot of time creating beautiful music or poetry even in the hypothetical post-revolutionary utopia you believe awaits you.
I saw a post on Instagram recently saying something to the effect of "it's so sad to think of all the great art we're missing out on because people have to work for a living". And my honest reaction was – probably not very much? For the best writers, musicians, artists etc. of the twentieth century, creating art was a compulsion, something they couldn't stop themselves from doing even if they wanted to, and yes, many of them worked full-time jobs and wrote/composed/painted in their spare time until they got something going. If that doesn't describe you, I'd hazard a guess that any art you would hypothetically create probably just isn't very good.
And of course there were people in the comments complaining about being told to paint/write/compose in their spare time, insisting that there's no way they can be expected to produce anything of value when they're exhausted after a long day in work. Again, I can't help but think – skill issue? If, after an eight-hour shift, you can't summon the willpower to pursue your creative ambition, it's hard for me to imagine that this creative ambition would be of interest to anyone besides yourself. It rather sounds like your creative ambition isn't something you need to do (an all-consuming passion) but something you want to do (a hobby). Not saying that the best artists are those for whom art is an all-consuming passion, but the correlation is greater than zero.
I'm also find the entitlement on display kind of contemptible. The Medicis didn't hand out patronages to just anyone, but rather to artists who had already demonstrated technical skill and artistic achievement. The implicit demand that the public purse should subsidise the livelihoods of "artists" who by their own admission have never created anything of value (and may never do so) really rankles.
And on top of that, the people making these demands are privileged to live in an era in which it's never been cheaper, faster or more accessible for people to pursue their artistic passions. I'd be willing to concede that, say, sixty years ago, we were denied a non-negligible amount of legitimately interesting artwork owing to the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to make a movie or record an album. Nowadays, you can write a novel on your phone on the way to work. You can record an album on your laptop in your bedroom. Critically acclaimed award-winning films have been filmed on smartphones and edited on consumer laptops. Two of the top-grossing films of this week were directed by Zoomers who made names for themselves uploading content they produced themselves to YouTube. The barriers to entry have never been lower. Stop making excuses for why you can't make something, and MAKE SOMETHING.
I think this is far too triumphalist. Many great artists did it at least in part for the money, and as any amateur dramatics society could tell you, motivation to produce art has very little correlation to the quality of that art. Look at Anthony Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare! They wrote by the word, or for commission, as did many many others.
Look, I can only speak for myself. When the working day is over, I'm zonked. My work is research and development, and it genuinely uses up all my brainpower. Boo hoo, I'm so special, yadda yadda, but it's true. I wrote several novels back when I had the time and now when the work day ends I just want to crawl home and watch something unchallenging. I know you wrote a novel lately and that's lovely, but others aren't the same.
All of which has to sit alongside the fact that writing is something that one does, hopefully, learn. The extent to which it's teachable is over-rated because people like to dream, but lots of good authors needed some mentoring and some experience to write their really good stuff. And that takes time, and energy, and space.
TL;DR: "If you'd like to try and make beautiful things like you did at university, but you're too tired because your job sucks out all your energy and creativity, then I guess it must suck to suck, loser" seems neither necessary nor fair.
EDIT: Lower heat, what you are observing is a filter that basically removes anyone who doesn't have sufficient time and energy left over to run a side hustle along their main job. Deciding that almost all the stuff that gets filtered out would have been crap seems very much to be a just-world bias. It's equally possible that lots of people who would have made great things or even just pleasant things are getting filtered out, and that it's not economically possible to do much about that now, and that this is sad.
Well, that's the thing under discussion, isn't it? It's one thing for an artist who once exhibited genuine talent and made things of value to complain that they don't have the energy to create after a full shift. I can understand that, and even sympathise.
What gets my back up is when people who by their own admission have never created anything of value and have never displayed any evidence of artistic talent of any kind demanding that the state subsidise their livelihoods in spite of this.
They were beautiful to me. I got shortlisted for a reasonably prestigious prize once, but most of the rest weren’t objectively great. I would really, really like the chance to try and do better someday, but even beyond that, I think that making things is good for its own sake. Maybe my stuff would have improved if I'd had more time to spend on it, maybe it would improve if I could go back to it after a decade in industry.
I don't suggest that we should fund just anyone who asks off the taxes of those who do tiresome, creativity-sucking work. But I do kind of think it's a shame we can't. Lots of the creativity of the 70s came out of super-cheap housing in cities and a dole system that didn't ask too many questions, and I think that the end of that was inevitable and morally just but also killed much of British art, comedy and entrepreneurship (the kind of entrepreneurship that makes genuinely interesting, far-out things rather than just chasing VC funding by jumping on the nearest bandwagon). The system that replaced it, where you only get Arts funding if you're young, black, gay and Marxist doesn't seem like an improvement. The idea that you can tell the Great Artists because they'll crawl over broken glass or because they show amazing talent right out of the box seems similarly suspect.
Some people genuinely never try at all, and maintain the dream that they could have been great by carefully never actually producing anything. Maybe that’s who you’re talking about. But I don't think many/most of the lamenters are like that. Many more like making things but find it hard, and need a bit of space/mentorship - how many people voluntarily pay their hard-earned money for writing courses? Ideally I'd like for them/us to be able to try, and it saddens me that isn't possible.
Maybe you're talking past each other. The other commenter is talking about singularly spectacular artists, whereas what you mention here cultivates "scenes" and creative group endeavors.
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