"Politics The Mind-Killer" And Other Stories

Twelve years ago, Eliezer Yudkowski introduced a concept that has taken root across the international community of smart people. In a blog post entitled, "Politics is the Mind-Killer," he writes:

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation . . . When, today, you get into an argument about whether “we” ought to raise the minimum wage, you’re executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

Right off the bat, he loses me. The ultimate thrust of his idea, is a good one. He concludes by saying simply, "It’s just better for the spiritual growth of the community to discuss the issue without invoking color politics." In order to arrive at this point, however, Yudkowski makes a terrible error that no one has ever bothered to go back and correct. Yudkowski thinks politics is an evolutionary response. I don't.

The fact that human beings are social is almost certainly an evolutionary fact. All of the great apes and most of the primates are social animals. It would be strikingly odd to discover that one of the most common primates was completely atomistic, in contrast to every other similar species. I think it's also self-evidently true that politics is a form of social interaction. From this, we'd be tempted to follow a chain of logic that goes something like this:

1. Social interaction is an evolved behavior.
2. Politics is a form of social interaction.
3. Therefore, politics is an evolved behavior.

This kind of analysis is so superficial that I'm surprised it could convince anyone. Consider an analogous argument:

1. Social interaction is an evolved behavior.
2. Laser tag is a form of social interaction.
3. Therefore, laser tag is an evolved behavior.

What's the problem here? Human beings evolved to link up with each other and behave cooperatively. Playing a game of laser tag certainly involves linking up with other human beings and cooperating, and thus involves a cognitive response that can be traced back through the millennia, but the specific context of a game of laser tag is completely disconnected from any evolutionary pattern. Laser tag is not a biological fact, but a technological one.

Humans put their evolutionary abilities to use to invent laser tag, just as chimpanzees put their own abilities to use to build nests in the trees. No one would argue that nests are a part of chimp evolution. Chimps evolved to sleep and to prefer comfort to discomfort; thus, over time, they discovered a technology that satisfied their needs. Humans evolved to reason, and to think up games to practice strategy; thus, over time, they developed a laser tag technology that satisfied their needs.

My argument: Politics is merely a kind of social technology*.

When we invoke politics, we're not engaging in something inevitable from out evolved biology, we're choosing a particular kind of social technology designed to facilitate cooperation. Ludwig von Mises would ask, Is the chosen means the best way to achieve the desired end? Well, doesn't that depend on what end one is working toward?

There is an unstated assumption among good people discussing an issue in good faith that we're all looking for the truth, and that if we can debate it and publicly investigate the evidence, eventually we'll all come the same understanding of an issue and agree on what is to be done. We commonly deride others when they "play politics," because on some level we know that politics is antithetical to the search for truth and evidence-based consensus. On some level, we all know that politics is more akin to short-circuiting rational analysis in favor of a cruder emotional response. In light of that, one possible alternate definition for politics is: Appealing to emotions to gain consensus when evidence and logic is insufficient or costly to present.

Consider any political issue about which you feel strongly. Any at all. Consider the things you most typically say about this issue. Does most of what you say consist of formal presentations of the best available empirical evidence, and a clear outline of the underlying logic in defense of a particular policy response? Or, do you mostly say emotional stuff about how the good guys agree with you, the bad guys disagree with you, and that anyone with a modicum of humanity should obviously prefer your policy set? Probably the latter, right? We tend to save our formal, empirical reasoning for our professional lives, mostly because it's hard work (i.e. "costly to present").

We humans are obviously not computers or robots. We evolved both logical and emotional cognitive abilities to handle different kinds of scenarios. Emotional appeals work particularly well in resolving the conflicts of love, for example, while logical appeals work well to get jobs done, put food on the table, solve immediate technological problems, and so on. Love is the glue of social cohesion, and so it's not particularly surprising to see people use emotional responses to attempt to solve problems of social cohesion.

For better or worse, the human species has flourished to the point that some of the things that used to be entirely about social cohesion, such as the distribution of resources within a community, have now become mostly technological problems. When we were hunter-gatherers that acquired resources communally, emotional appeals were probably appropriate means of requesting additional resources in times of need. In the modern world, the economy is so complex that acquiring additional resources can no longer be seen as a matter to be solved through emotional appeals. We now have technologies for the collection and distribution of financing, and many worthy causes that compete against one another for limited resources. The worthiest cause is no longer the one with an important moral claim or a particularly emotional backstory. The worthiest cause is the one that can make the best empirical case that it will put the resources to good use.

You can argue that this technology is cold and unfeeling, but you cannot argue that it isn't fair or that it doesn't distribute resources efficiently. Playing politics thus becomes a way to distract from the best use of our resources and to express emotional vigor over a particularly hard empirical problem to overcome.

Politics isn't a "mind-killer," exactly, but rather a technology best used to resolve individual emotional conflicts, rather than large-scale problems within the state.

__________________

* Here I am using "technology" in the same sense that Mises would have used it.

Emily Ratajkowski's "Feminism" Is Really Just Individualism (And That's A Good Thing)

Even women from the left, who fully supported the purpose of my protest, made comments about my missing bra underneath my white tank and jeans. In their minds, the fact that my body was at all visible had somehow discredited me and my political action. But why? 

I often think about this. Why, as a culture, do we insist on separating smart and serious from sexy?

That is from Emily Ratajkowski's essay on feminism in Harper's Bizarre. Later, she writes:

And there is no right answer, no choice that makes me more or less of a feminist, or even a “bad feminist,” to borrow from Roxane Gay. As long as the decision is my choice, then it’s the right choice. Ultimately, the identity and sexuality of an individual is up to them and no one else.

Ratajkowski makes two principle points in her somewhat short essay. The first is that we shouldn't discredit a woman's message just because she chooses to express herself in a hyper-sexual way. The second is that absolutely any way a woman chooses to be is a valid form of feminism.

I like Emily Ratajkowski. She's intelligent, she has good taste in art, and her Instagram account makes it look like she has a lot of good fun with good people. But on the two points she makes in her essay, I think she is wrong.

*        *        * 

Near the beginning of her essay, Ratajkowski writes, "I’m well aware of the privilege I receive as someone who is heteronormative, and I don’t pretend to act like my identity hasn’t made some things easier for me." This simple sentence, meant to acknowledge her privilege, constitutes the primary error underlying the entire essay.

To wit, in Ratajkowski's telling of it, her privilege comes from the fact that she is "heteronormative," meaning that she is a heterosexual, biological female who considers herself a woman by gender and who has sexual and romantic interest in heterosexual, biological males who consider themselves men by gender. (Phew! What a mouthful!)

Nowhere in her essay does she ever acknowledge the possibility that her privilege comes instead from another important fact about Emily Ratajkowski: that she is an extremely physically attractive and highly paid supermodel. Throughout her essay, she refers to her proclivity for dressing in scanty clothing and putting on makeup as "playing with sexiness" or "playing at being sexy." It doesn't appear to occur to her - and her essay makes no references whatsoever to the fact - that less-attractive women with a different set of physical features do not have access to this kind of "play."

The image accompanying Ratajkowski's essay is a photo of her dressed only in a lace bra and panties, with her arms raised, revealing a thicket of armpit hair. When you're a young and successful model, presenting yourself in a such a way means something remarkably different than it would if you were an old, overweight woman, to say nothing of what it might mean if you were a transsexual with a very non-traditionally attractive body type. Ratajkowski's "play" with armpit hair has roughly the same effect as Kim Basinger's "cross-dressing" scene in 9 1/2 Weeks. When beautiful actresses and models do such things, they're essentially acting as constumed tourists, able to return at any time to the beautiful life.

For the rest of us, ugliness is our permanent state. We don't get to "play at" being supermodels, or rich-and-famous superstars.

This is the true source of Emily Ratajkowski's privilege, not that she is a heteronormative cisgendered woman, but that she is widely considered to be one of the most beautiful people in the world. It doesn't much matter what she does with her arm hair or what she wears to a political protest. People are going to purchase her swimsuit line or pay her for photo shoots regardless of what she chooses to "play at," and for that matter, the sexier she tries to be, the better it is for her financial bottom line.

Normal people do not operate under those circumstances. Emily Ratajkowski has never had her analytical credibility evaluated on her performance in a boardroom in front of an overhead projector. She is free to post sexy photos of herself at political protests on social media or write feminist musings in fashion magazines without suffering any career setbacks for it, because "playing with sexiness" is her brand.

Every other normal woman in America has to make a deliberate effort to ensure that her physical appearance is consistent with the message she intends to convey that day, because if she doesn't, then the one thing detracts from the other. A woman who shows up in the courtroom braless and in a tank top can kiss her intellectual credibility goodbye. A woman who shows up on a first date wearing see-through underwear and displaying patches of body hair can be sure that she will not receive a call for a second date, and that the attention she gets in the meantime will be decidedly negative.

This isn't because society is insufficiently feminist or that women are insufficiently liberated. It's because when you're not a gorgeous supermodel, you're held to the full set of operable social mores. It's because people who have to make money doing things other than looking pretty must present themselves as serious, capable, credible, reliable, and sane.

If Ratajkowski's question is, "Why can't I play at being sexy while people take me seriously as a woman?" then the answer is, "You can, but only because you're a supermodel." If her question is, "Why can't a female data scientist play at being sexy while reporting confidence intervals to the VP of Risk Portfolio?" then the answer is "Because millions of dollars are riding on this decision, and nobody can figure out if she's reporting the facts or trying to get a date."

But why though?

This is a business, for chrissakes!

*        *        *

Ratajkowski's error of judgment regarding exactly where her privilege comes from leads her to an overall highly confused take on feminism: that pretty much anything goes, so long as it's the woman's choice. Were it true, this idea would absolve all women of any responsibility they ever had toward feminism. Anything can be feminism because women can do anything they want.

The problem here is that no real feminist anywhere actually believes this. Feminist theory was developed to articulate a precise theory of women's issues and equality. If the culmination of all this theory boils down to, "Well, as long as you chose what you chose, then it doesn't matter," then society could have skipped feminism entirely from the beginning.

No, the core question underlying feminism is, "What would a world without misogyny look like?" What would women's choices be if they weren't influenced by the corruptive power of the "Patriarchy?" Women can and do make choices that run counter to the objectives of feminists; as long as they make these choices freely, how can the likes of Emily Ratajkowski complain on feminist grounds at all? Ratajkowski is, after all, an outspoken advocate of abortion rights. Is she now saying that, so long as female pro-life advocates make their case by choice, they're still good feminists?

Perhaps this is Ratajkowski's contradiction, or perhaps it is a contradiction inherent to feminism itself. Perhaps the notion of choosing freely was at one time controversial, but is now so pervasive - at least in American culture - that we must now recede into a sort of meta-feminism, in which every outward expression of being a woman makes is a feminist statement, so long as it reflects her free will. 

What Ratajkowski fails to realize is that in making this case, she's no longer talking about feminism. She's talking about self-confidence. Observe:

Two summers ago, while vacationing with my friend and her girlfriend, my friend made an offhand remark about me being “hyper femme.” It kind of threw me because in many ways, probably like anyone would, I felt that her comment was an oversimplification of my identity.

Her friend didn't stop Ratajkowski from expressing herself any way she chooses to. She also didn't "shame" her for being who she is. She simply attached a phrase to it, "hyper femme," that Ratajkowski herself believed to be "an oversimplification of her identity."

I'd be surprised if anyone's identity could be well-encapsulated by a two-word phrase. People have called me lots of two-word phrases from time to time. Sometimes they've attempted to explain me in one word, and other times they've dedicated whole sentences to the task. Even a book is an oversimplification of the human condition. It's impossible to capture a person's identity in words; that's merely a fact of language. Language is a close approximation of meaning, and only the poet and the great writer of literature has ever managed to present adequate language for describing something as complex as identity itself.

It seems odd that Ratajkowski would take offense to or feel ashamed of her friend's quick attempted description of a part of her identity. But feminism isn't the cure for that. Her friend doesn't need a more feminist vocabulary or a better understanding of women's choices. The antidote to this kind of situation is self-confidence.

Ratajkowski needed the self-confidence she reportedly discovered later that night: "The truth is, I thought, I love being feminine." Great. Now if only she had the confidence to accept that one fair descriptor for that disposition is "hyper femme."

So, the reality of it is not that feminism is expressed any time a woman chooses to do anything, so long as it's a choice. The reality of it is that feminism at times interferes with a woman's true expression of self. And, you know what? That's perfectly alright.

Perhaps Emily Ratajkowski is on the precipice of discovery. Perhaps she's nearing the point where she realizes that it's more important to be yourself than to be a feminist. Maybe she's coming to understand that feminism is a set of academic theories, not a pattern of existence or a description of an identity. All she needs is the confidence to own that realization, to know in her whole heart that some people will always find something to criticize, and that critics will use any theory available to them to make their criticism.

When she realizes that, she'll be something better than a feminist. She'll be an individualist.

An Aesthetic Signal

There's a theory out there, presented variously throughout history, but most recently by Robin Hanson, that all or most human behavior is an attempt to achieve "status" through "signaling." So, for example, if get interested in photography, my main objective is to become a good photographer, which people will then perceive and thus award me social status. I only play guitar for the chicks, basically.

Of course, this is a perfectly plausible - perhaps even likely - perhaps even true - explanation of the behavior of some individuals. Because this theory is certainly true for some people and some actions and some situations, folks have a tendency to go all in on it. The problem with the theory is that it is unnecessarily reductive. Just because some of what I do aims at social status doesn't mean all of what I do is. Just because a lot of what I do aims at social status doesn't mean it is the best explanation for human behavior writ large.

There are many specific problems with this view of human behavior, and I couldn't possibly list them all here. But I got to thinking about one particular weakness of the theory over the weekend. That problem is: human social groups play a weaker role in our lives today than at any prior point in human history. Thanks to the highly individualizing social changes instigated by the internet, rampant marketing segmentation, and Western individualism, people are now less likely to engage in close social interaction. There is no big Saturday night party in today's world, as there was for previous generations. Many young people stay home, while many others prefer to spend their time with a small group of close friends, rather than the larger kind of in-group that would dole out social status.

Indeed, to achieve any significant kind of social status in today's world, one practically has to already possess it. No one is interested in artists or musicians who are not already famous, which is why so much of art marketing is designed to convince the public that a new artist is already a star. You probably couldn't mention any rising stars in the athletics world, either, unless you are already deeply invested in that athlete's team. The only businesspeople you could probably mention by name are those who are famous billionaires right at this minute, or those with whom you had the opportunity to work directly. Ethicists, academics, doctors? Forget it. You simply don't know these people by face or by name.

And that's the point: we might all be motivated to pursue social status, but in this day and age, none of us actually gets it. So, it's a poor explanation for human behavior.

What I have noticed that people do is choose, not an in-group, but an aesthetic. I tried to describe this in a recent post. If you consider yourself a "rocker," then you will generally adopt the "rock aesthetic," and likewise if you consider yourself a fitness buff or a bookish person or a scientist.

Many people who choose an aesthetic in this way often express opinions, but only when they are consistent with their chosen aesthetic. For example, you're more likely to hear about the importance of following the heart from someone who has chosen an artistic aesthetic than you are from someone with a rocker aesthetic, even though they both might believe it. You're more likely to hear about the importance of saving for retirement from someone with a "savvy business guy" aesthetic than you are from someone with a "rural farmer" aesthetic, even though they both live accordingly. These opinions are not so much about how people choose to live as they are memes that people express, especially on social media, to curate a chosen aesthetic.

Today, a lot of people are making impassioned statements about abortion. There is a group of people out there who are very invested in this debate, but the vast majority of people you see who express strong opinions on the abortion debate are not so heavily invested in the debate. Instead, they're presenting memes in support of their chosen aesthetic. A very religious person will post a pro-life meme, effectively informing others of their views on religion, not actually abortion. A person heavily invested in presenting themselves as a "liberal" will send out pro-choice memes for the same reason they send out climate change memes or memes about the homeless. It's not about the issues at all, it's about the aesthetic.

Separating the two concepts in their own minds is often quite impossible. Ask the average person if what they're saying is about the issues or about their general vibe, and he will most often say that of course it's about the issue; even if it's not. So, I don't recommend that you out people when they're engaged in aesthetic curation. I also don't recommend that you spend too much time debating the issues with them. After all, they're not interested in the facts. They're interested in what their memes tell others about their aesthetic. In other words, they're interested in presenting their identity, not their thoughts.

It's a lot easier to question someone's thoughts than it is to question their identity. Don't get confused; if someone is sharing their identity with you, it's not an invitation to debate.

Twists & Turns

I spent the morning wondering what I should blog about. I wanted to write, but the words wouldn't come.

One reason for that is I found out that an old family friend of ours is dying. Not only that, she's dying in a way that there are lessons to learn from. I could have written about that, and about those lessons, but my heart just wasn't in it. I'm sad that it came to this, I'm sad for her and her family, and for my family, as well. I keep thinking about her situation, and about my childhood, and then naturally about my own child.

It's strange to watch someone go from being an ordinary child to being an adult, to being an adult with problems. One can't help but wonder when a person's life went from being about getting good grades and fitting in with childhood peer groups to being about heavy adult struggles and the inability to cope.

When I was a certain age, pretty much the most important thing in the whole world was basketball. Any chance I could get to play basketball, I would. I'd call friends over, and we'd play for hours. We'd play at school. We'd play in athletic leagues. We'd play basketball. What ended all this was junior high team tryouts. Some of us made the team, and some of us didn't. Those who did stopped playing with those who didn't so that they could play with the school team. It's kind of a shame that such a thing would separate us, but I suppose it's only fair. With our basketball-playing group thus dismantled, no further getting together was quite as fun. Eventually the whole thing tapered off. We went our separate ways and got involved in other aspects of our lives.

This sort of thing played out in my own childhood many different times. In the early days, we all ran around together. Later, I got heavily involved in competitive running and spent that time by myself instead. Some of us used to get together and listen to music and jam on our guitars. Then some of us formed a band and the larger group dissolved. Those who weren't in the band stopped playing music and went back to what they were doing before - in this case, Dungeons & Dragons - while the bandmates experimented briefly with being cool. (Don't worry, it was short-lived.)

It's rare to experience a lifelong friendship. I don't have any close friends from when I was a little boy. I keep in touch with some people via social media, but we don't regularly interact. The progressive, lifelong process of becoming more specialized has a tendency to limit our interaction with a broader group. A diverse set of friends can come together, but by adulthood they usually need a common excuse to do it: a book club, a work group, a hobby, etc.

So, it's not that friends ever become less important, it's just that the natural progression of existence is to go from being surrounded by a community of friends to being surrounded mostly by your own family. I'm not at all sure that this is a bad thing.

But every now and then news comes in of an old friend passing away or a former neighbor getting into legal or other trouble, and from our own internal perspective, it's jarring. We weren't there to experience the transition, and so for us it comes out of nowhere. The girl who once had a crush on you passed away in a car accident. The neighbor down the street developed a drug problem. The student-body officer had financial trouble, and then a mental breakdown. The city league teammate you had developed cancer.

Thankfully, it sometimes works the other way, too. The cranky loner with a scowl on his face overcame his depression and raised a happy family. The aloof snob discovered her alternative lifestyle after high school and became open and welcoming of all people. The poor kid started his own business and got rich. The shy wallflower became a social worker and helped hundreds of people have better lives.

Well, that's life. We all play one of these roles. A major part of my blog's purpose has been to comment on the various paths that lead to ruin, and how to avoid them. Maintain a long-range cognitive time-horizon; leverage principles of individuality in the face of strong negative influence; learn effective communication strategies; don't willingly maintain any serious illusions about your life or your world; always learn, always grow, always feed your sense of self-improvement. We can make the world a better place by being better people.

Life On The Scene

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much influence our chosen social scenes affect our lives, often times in unexpected ways. For example, it’s well documented that former drug addicts usually have to stop hanging around their old, drug-using friends in order to avoid a relapse. It’s not that those friends deliberately try to sabotage the addict, it’s just that the social environment itself promotes drug use. Similarly, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, people whose friends are interested in eating right and working out tend to exercise more often and eat healthier food than other people. And again, it’s not that fitness enthusiasts pressure everyone else to live a healthy lifestyle, it’s just that the atmosphere they create when they socialize promotes physical fitness and a good diet.

Our malleable human minds seem to adapt to the social conditions we’re living in. What you see, hear, and experience becomes your version of normal. And while “being normal” is an individual choice, it seems as though normalcy itself is environmentally dependent.

Consider also, for example, the fact that everyone in every small town in America listens to country music. Everyone. Every small town. Why? It mostly comes down to the fact that country music is what gets played in small towns. These folks like to camp, and go fishing, and ride horses; it’s not because they’re genetically predisposed to enjoy these activities, but because the prevailing culture places a high value on them. We’re influenced by the people around us.

This is obvious enough at the cultural level, but less obvious at the friendship level. We’ll all readily admit to being influenced by our friends, but I think we tend to understate just how much the prevailing sense of normalcy among a group of friends defines what each individual sees as “normal.” I’ve known people who became drug users only because one or two people in their friends group became so; and soon enough, the entire group was using. It’s not all bad news, of course. I’ve known other groups of friends who all got interested in saving for retirement, and before they knew it, they were all exchanging tips and tricks to save the most possible.

Those are single-activity examples. What I’m really interested in is how choosing a particular social group for one reason influences several other, unanticipated aspects of life. For example, a lot of people get into the heavy metal scene because they love the music. There’s nothing about the music that demands that a person dye her hair or wear a metal-studded bracelet, get tattoos, and ride motorcycles. But, invariably, there’s a social culture surrounding the heavy metal music scene, and as one becomes more active in socializing over heavy metal, one becomes more interested in those other things, too.

Some of those things are fine, like riding motorcycles and dying your hair. Other things are not so good for us, such as staying out late, drinking heavily, smoking, vaping, and so on. 

Again, my interest is in how choosing one kind of scene influences other aspects of your life. Or, more specifically, my life. My social scene, when push comes to shove, is the distance-running scene. I never realized how much I identify with that social scene until much later in life, when I spent some years away from that scene and then entered a race one day. I showed up, and my friends all said, “Look, Ryan. Everyone looks like you!” They were right. Suddenly, I was surrounded by people who looked like me, dressed like me, spoke like me, and acted a bit like me. I was “home.” Weird.

Well, distance-running is a fun sport that promotes good health; those are the good things that come with being part of that scene. What about the other things that go along with distance running, the unanticipated things, perhaps the negative things? 

Well, distance runners actually drink a lot of beer, and that’s not so healthy. They obsess over their sport a lot, are a little bit neurotic, and, because distance running is an individual sport involving a lot of time spent alone, they tend to be a bit self-absorbed. When I spend too much time in the distance running community, I, too, am susceptible to those things.

There is also a sense of style that goes with distance running. Short hair, t-shirts, running shoes on every occasion, hemp bracelets and necklaces, running watches. Truth be told, I love all these things, and the only reason I can make sense of is because that’s the style within my community. Still, it’s not always a positive. Among my non-running friends, I am perhaps the least stylish one. The only people who understand my sense of style at all are those who have seen me among my running community. That’s when it clicks and they realize that I’m not just an unstylish schmo. I’m just a distance runner.

I think it is an illuminating exercise to consider what community you belong to, what positive things come from being a member of that community, and also, what potentially negative things.

A Theory Of Why People Treat Me Differently Now

A while back, I wrote about the fact that people treat me differently now that I have long hair. I don't really know why this is true, but here's a theory.

For almost all of my life, I have been decidedly different from other people. I like different kinds of music, I like different kinds of food. I prefer more individual sports, most of which make for bad television, and thus don't tend to be fodder for water cooler conversation. I like finding my own way of doing things, rather than learning what everyone else is doing and repeating it. I don't obsess over whether I "fit in" at work, and I never did at school. I've always been comfortable doing my own thing, playing alone if I must, resisting unwanted peer pressure, and so on.

For most of my life, this has served me quite well. Avoiding peer pressure kept me entirely out of risky adolescent and young adult situations. I've never had a problem with drugs, and I've never let social norms or pressures dictate my romantic relationships. My preference for individual sports like running eventually lead to many several high school track and cross-country records, a top-ten ranking, a full-ride scholarship to a Division-1A NCAA university, and a varsity letter there. My preference for funny intellectual pursuits lead to some good academic choices that, in turn, lead to a satisfactory and in some ways lucrative career. My insistence on finding my own way gave me above-average creative ability in music, which has provided me with a (so far) lifelong rock music performance hobby with many good friends who are excellent musicians. Despite occasionally rubbing up against people who resent those who are different, my being different has worked out wonderfully for me.

Despite all these differences, however, I've never been particularly individualistic about my physical appearance. For most of my life, I've had short, clean-cut hair. My fashion sense has always gravitated toward classic time-honored articles of clothing like jeans, polo shirts, cargo shorts, and earth tones; at work, I've always preferred classic dress shirts and flat-front slacks, even occasionally wearing ties. I've avoided styles that struck me as being too trendy, such as hair coloration, too-baggy or too-slim-fitting pants and shirts, facial hair, and so on. I've never had a piercing, nor do I have any tattoos.

Now that I think about it, this combination of a rather conservative outward appearance combined with a rather eccentric and highly individualistic mental disposition is a little mismatched. The most stereotypically individualistic people are often artists and bohemians, whose fashion sense tends to match their free spirits. The most stereotypically conservative, pro-social people are often those who dress the most traditionally, in unassuming clothing that fits in pretty much anywhere.

A possible result of this mismatch of mine is that people see me, and expect a highly conservative, pro-social, conformist kind of a person. When they discover that my mental disposition is decidedly individualistic and personally expressive, perhaps some of them have interpreted me as being stubborn, aloof, rude. A man who looks conformist but refuses to conform is possibly a man who conforms to some social group, but not yours. This might trigger thoughts in people's minds: What's wrong with me that he's not going along with my thing? Why does he keep himself out of my business? Why does he think he's so special?

Long hair is, in today's world, one of the more deviant fashion statements a man can make. It is even more uncommon than tattoos and piercings today. It also tends to evoke the pacifist imagery of hippies and free spirits, unless men with long hair go out of their way to dress like goths or metalheads. Especially on a man like me, who today is dressed in khaki slacks and a polo shirt, long hair presents an air of non-comformism, but also one of non-aggression. And if a man with long hair tends to smile a lot, something I've taken upon myself to doing in public whenever I pass by other people, the peaceful non-conformist presentation is all but complete.

So, with my long hair, it's possible that people now expect me to be a little different, perhaps a bit eccentric, individualistic, and so they're not caught off-guard when I do or say something quixotic. It's possible that my outward appearance is now better-matched to my mental disposition, and that because other people now expect me to express the unexpected, they're more receptive to it.

I'm not certain of any of this, of course. It's just a theory.

Interests Versus Failures

A recent article I came across mentioned in passing the horror that some school students used to face when they performed poorly in P.E. class. In the very old days, this would have been failing to climb up to the top of a rope, which was a common P.E. test for people my parents' age.

In my day, P.E. was less objectively humiliating, but still potentially quite embarrassing. The most embarrassing thing I remember seeing was when a fellow student of mine had to swing a softball bat during P.E. class one morning, and it was obvious from his awkward attempt that he had never done such a thing in his whole life. My classmates and I -- being children -- snickered to ourselves as he struck out, although in hindsight it's difficult to understand why. He was a nice kid, and it's not as if he wasn't physically fit; it's just that his experience and interests were in rodeo, whereas ours was in more "traditional" or "ball-related" sports. Big deal.

The article in question suggested axing P.E. class to save children from the embarrassment entirely. I think that getting rid of unnecessary school classes is a great idea, and P.E. strikes me as being one of them. But my opinion has nothing to do with the author's argument. That argument is one I soundly reject. Children should not be spared every opportunity for potential embarrassment. Life is embarrassing, and it's better to grow accustomed to occasional failure than to be insulated from it.

Indeed, we all take our turns at the bottom and the top of the social totem pole from time to time. For every child who embarrasses herself in P.E. class, another proves herself, startling the other kids with an unexpectedly, and perhaps uncharacteristically, excellent performance. Those opportunities for success are important for personal growth, too. Some of us get straight-A's, some of us swing baseball bats well, some of us can climb ropes, some of us can cook… We all have strengths and weaknesses. If anything, kids should be exposed to as many "potentially embarrassing" situations as possible, so that they can as quickly as possible come to understand that he who places last in one competition may prove to finish first in the next. You just never know, especially when you're a kid.

Perhaps I am a bit biased due to my own experience in school. In the time-and-place where I grew up, the popular sports were baseball, football, and wrestling. I was terrible at all of those sports and had no interest in them. Later, I discovered that I was a decent tennis player, a pretty good basketball player, and an excellent distance-runner. My successes never made me socially popular, but I did eventually earn the respect of my classmates, and that's all that really matters. I transitioned from being last-to-be-picked-for-everything to being known-for-other-stuff. I never wanted to be a football star, so it's no skin off my nose that I never was; my being respected for distance-running is more than I ever expected from my classmates. I'm satisfied with that.

So, perhaps it is my bias that leads me to believe that all children should be encouraged to be put to the test in a variety of ways, to discover where they're high performers. I suppose some children may indeed be middling at everything. But being middling doesn't cause ostracism; only being terrible does. I find it highly unlikely that there are children out there who are good at nothing, middling at nothing, and bad at everything. Even if so, they might be kind, and giving them opportunities to demonstrate that kindness will likely help them overcome feelings of embarrassment in other contexts.

The point is, everyone has some comparative advantage. We all need opportunities to demonstrate it, whatever it is. We also all need opportunities to learn humility, and to know well that we will never be the best at everything, no matter how good we think we are at… baseball, rope-climbing, tennis, or whatever else it might be.

Anyway, it is our interests that determine all of this. I was never a good football player -- I will never be a good football player, no matter how long I live, no matter how hard I practice -- because I never had an interest in football. I became an excellent distance-runner precisely because I loved it from the first moment I tried it. I was a bad guitar player until I developed an interest in good guitar-playing; once I did, my perspective shifted, and I gradually became a good player. I won't ever be a good French horn player because I hate the sound of brass and don't want to waste my time making brass sounds.

I belong to a fitness group on Facebook, and almost everyone in that group eats very healthy food. It's not a struggle. It's not even a thing we have to focus on. It's a pleasure. We love to eat healthy, because healthy food happens to be the food we love to eat. Again, this is not because we were born with magic healthy powers, it just comes down to what we're interested in. I'm interested in foods that have a reputation for being healthy; I'm interested in tasting them, in learning how to cook them, in learning what they pair well with when prepared as part of a meal. I'm interested in how they affect my blood sugar and how they fit my nutritional profile. Clearly, anyone with this pronounced an interest in healthy food is going to eat healthy. It comes easy to me, and to the rest of the group.

But, ask us to do something else that might be good for us, and it's a whole other story. I admire people who have a knack for home repairs, for example. I'm terrible around the house, and I wish I weren't. It's not a skill I have. But it's not a skill that I can't have. It's not a skill I failed to be born with. It's just something I don't have a strong interest in. Without that interest driving me, I'll always be at the bottom of the totem pole. Instead, I run fast and play guitar.

To bring this discussion full circle, here's a modest proposition. Maybe if we as individuals shifted our perspective away from "better-versus-worse" to "more-interested-versus-less," we'd have a more useful framework for understanding social situations. We'll never eliminate childhood embarrassment, nor should we ever. But we might help children better-understand their emotions, and we might help them concentrate on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. That would make P.E. class go more smoothly, even if we didn't eliminate it; and it might make us happier and better-adjusted adults, too.

Eastern Enlightenment Versus Western Enlightenment

In general, what Americans try to do when they attempt to pursue "spiritual enlightenment" bears little to no resemblance to what my actual Indian Hindu and Buddhist friends are doing. I can generally map the linguistic terms from one group to the other, but there is a phoniness and a narcissistic aspect to the way Westerners do it.

Ironically, a large part of Buddhism is about denying "the self." However, denying "the self" means something very specific to a South Asian person who was born and raised in a community that stresses the importance of family and legacy. It's a process of reaffirming an ethical commitment to being a good person. Being a good person means caring about your elders, providing for your extended family and community, sacrificing your own needs to the needs of the people around you, so that you can all build a better life together.

By contrast, a Westerner’s pursuit of “spiritual enlightenment” tends to be mostly based on conflating the two distinct definitions of the word “materialism.” Eastern philosophies emphasize the impermanence of material existence; in other words, life is short, so focus on feeding your spiritual needs ahead of your physical needs. But when Westerners talk of the evils of “materialism,” they are most definitely not thinking about their own mortality. Instead, they’re talking about the shallow pursuit of commercial goods. Big difference.

Westerners are born and raised in the most individualistic society the world has ever seen. That’s not a bad thing, but it changes the understanding of what it means to deny “the self.” A spiritual Westerner who “denies the self” doesn’t turn outward to his community and attempt to make it a better place. Instead, he attempts to negate his own needs and desires. He tries to pursue more happiness with fewer material possessions. “I don’t need to buy stuff to be happy, I just need to focus on spiritual enlightenment.” And “focusing on spiritual enlightenment” is, to a Westerner, a goal unto itself. It apparently involves more meditation, more time spent reading books about meditation, more time spent learning about “chakras.” More experimental use of psychedelic drugs. This couldn’t be further from the Easterner’s practice of Eastern religion.

In fact, this is an enormous difference in perspectives. To the Easterner, “spiritual fulfilment” isn’t some mumbo-jumbo that you get in a cedar-plank room with scented candles and new age music. It’s something that you gain from turning your personal misery into someone else’s happiness. Are you feeling sad? Then, get over it and help your brother study for his upcoming math exam. Some girl broke your heart? That sucks – but here, take the garbage out and then go spend the afternoon helping your grandmother shop for a new saree. The point of selflessness in this environment is to heal your misery by focusing on what is “truly important.” And in Eastern society, what is “truly important” is very specific. Be a good spouse; do charity work; engage with your community; spend time with your family; raise some kids; and so on.

When you think about it, this isn’t all that different from the perspective you’d get in a Westerner’s church or synagogue. Traditional Western religions all take a similar view of selflessness. They advise you to get out of your own head when you’re feeling anguished and to “do the work of the Lord,” which generally means community service, kind gestures, charitable giving, etc. It should come as no surprise, then, that most socially liberal Easterners view Buddhist and Hindu practices not as a path to new age enlightenment, but rather as extremely conservative belief systems. At the end of the day, Eastern religion delivers the same advice to Easterners that Western religion delivers to Westerners.

It’s striking to me that hardcore conservatives in South Asian societies are using exactly the same language as hardcore liberals in North American societies, and yet these groups mean entirely different things when they use this terminology. Globalization and the internet have given people a common set of words that everyone uses to describe their experiences, but it hasn’t yet guaranteed that various societies mean the same thing when they say the same words. It appears that our languages have converged, but our meta-language hasn’t done so quite yet.

IRL

Ultimately, an increasingly narcissistic culture will stop being narcissistic all by itself. We should have realized this long ago; after all, the more obsessed we all are with our own image, the less important to us other people’s images become, the less narcissistic supply there is to be given. The narcissists will turn elsewhere for their narcissistic supply, but where will they turn? None of the other narcissists are interested in doling it out, and those that are are paradoxically less narcissistic since they seem to recognize the reciprocal and mutually beneficial nature of giving people respect.

Lately, I have seen small communities pop up that seem to be inhabited by small groups of narcissists. They take turns reaffirming the same set of principles, and thus any compliment they provide to others is, in effect, a way to gain narcissistic supply out of them. “You said what I said previously. This validates me.” “Oh, you said it, too? I knew I was right all along.” But this sort of thing will be short-lived and mostly self-contained. The more we are all interested mainly in ourselves, the less supply there is to go around, the less validating it is to be a narcissist.

This doesn’t suggest, however, that such a society is “out of the woods.” It is beginning to alarm an increasing number of people that human beings are turning inward for things that a social life used to provide. The Atlantic has a very remarkable recent article about that (H/T Tyler Cowen). Ostensibly, the article explores the mystery of why young people are less interested in sex. I think the author is asking the wrong question. Skin-on-skin is the ultimate social interaction. There is arguably no other thing that human beings do together that requires more communication – assuming they are doing it well. The article gives ample evidence, of course, that young people aren’t doing it well. In example after example, the author reports on many young people who find real-world (“meatspace”) personal interaction to be creepy at worst and awkward at best. Meanwhile, in example after example, these same young people engage in occasional romantic encounters only to be choked, jackhammered, genitally injured, and so on. (Yes. And so on.) What the author, and subsequently Tyler Cowen, focus on is the question of why young people are doing it less, but of course they would be doing it less if everyone were collectively getting worse at doing it at all. No one shies away from an encounter with an expert lover with whom they have already united. Toward the end of the article, the author explores how women are decided en masse to avoid painful and injurious intercourse, in favor of pretty much any other way of passing the time, and one can hardly blame them. Still, throughout time immemorial, human beings have always thought that marriage and family is worth it. Today’s young people are increasingly unaware of what they’re fighting for when it comes to romantic relationships, because they don’t know what romance is, they don’t know what the benefits of a healthy and self-affirming intimate relationship are, and they can’t seem to communicate with each other well enough to find anything that even approximates what they should be looking for.

Elsewhere on the web, you can find the blog of a widely read libertarian woman who uses her romantic life as a metaphor for state oppression. I’m not entirely sure if it’s meant to be taken seriously or humorously, but when I occasionally read it, it only makes me sad. Nearly one-hundred years ago, Franz Kafka made a name for himself describing the horrors of mankind’s relationship to the state, which is both impenetrable (The Castle) and suffocatingly omnipresent (The Trial). Bureaucracy, when you must make a request of it, is thoroughly and impossibly inaccessible. When it wants something of you, however, nothing you say or do can stop it. Imagine how a person must feel whose romantic encounters serve as plausible analogues for, not only either of those interactions with the state, but both of them.

A concerned onlooker might conclude that the woman has been hurt, terribly and often. However, another possibility exists. It could simply be that she is no more capable of communicating with a romantic partner than she is with a faceless bureaucracy. That is, the fault might well be hers. I’m not suggesting that it is her fault, because I have no insight into that. I’m merely a reader weighing all the possibilities.

I’ve written before about society’s transition in art, away from being a performance intended for community consumption, and toward and inward-looking expression of self. That is, when musicians take the stage today (and I’m talking about amateurs learning how to create art), they’re mostly focused on playing their parts. To the extent that they’re interested in the audience at all, it’s mostly for attention-getting reasons. They want adulation and applause. Well, performers have always wanted adulation and applause, but in the past it was more participatory. You played to the audience, and you fed off the audience’s energy. You didn’t just want them to think you were neat, you wanted to be the one who was capable of showing them a good time. You might have been in it for the chicks, but being in it for the chicks meant being the guy who was capable of pleasing the chicks. The metric of success was still very much external to the artist: the chicks decided if you were cool or not. You relied on their assessment, and to the extent that you could do so, you attempted to influence their opinion by tailoring your performance to them.

Today, though, you’re a rock star if you feel like one. You can buy Facebook likes and Instagram followers, and you can even leverage that into a world tour. In the end, nobody cares that he was never famous, because he’s famous now. Mission accomplished. He didn’t become famous by showing people a good time, he became famous by tricking people into believing that he was already famous. The metric of success is no longer the audience. The metric of success is your phone. If your phone says you have tens of thousands of fans, then you do. And let’s be clear about it: This is true even if you’re just using bots and AI apps to force your phone into displaying the numbers. The very idea that you would spend years honing your craft in front of a bunch of chicks (or, more generally, music fans who listen to you and provide you with actual “meatspace” feedback) when you can simply hire “The Russians” to boost your Spotify plays seems so old-fashioned.

This is not a narcissism problem. This is not something borne from the fact that we think too highly of ourselves or are too obsessed with presenting a false image of ourselves. This is rather a short-circuit in the basic wiring of human society. Each of us is supposed to be a node in a several-billion-strong network called the human race. We are supposed to be bound to each other by our interactions, by our participation in a common experience. More and more, our society is not bound by a common experience because people do not share experiences in common. We eat lone, make love alone, perform art alone. We are lonely and alone. We are increasingly incapable of having positive social interaction with each other.

Take close note of who it is that is writing this today. I’m the individualist, the guy who claims that being a strong and well-expressed individual is the key to happiness. When I’m the guy telling you that your society is so uninterested in being a society that it’s starting to crack and crumble, you know it might be time to go make some new friends and do something with them. In meatspace. You don’t have to make love to them, but judging by current trends, it might not be a terrible idea. Just make sure to look them in the eyes while you’re doing it.

Beyond Bureaucracy

Spend any amount of time discussing politics on social media, and you'll soon discover that every conversation eventually becomes a race to the bottom of an endless pit of citations. Information is easy to come by these days. Cite-able sources are often just a click away. If you are able to produce an official government document that clearly states a policy, then who is anyone to disagree with what that policy is?

These are the inclinations of a bureaucrat. It might be well worth investigating whether our all having become a bunch of bureaucrats is due to some aspect of social media, the ever-expanding role that government plays in our daily lives, or the fact that the professional services economy in which so many Americans work primarily rewards bureaucrats.

Before I move on to my real point today, let's consider each possibility separately.

1. Social media turns us into bureaucrats. While I think this is a difficult position to argue for effectively, there is a kernel of truth here. X disagrees with Y. Y demands evidence for X's position. X produces some evidence. Y produces some counter-evidence. Now that the ball is rolling, the only way for X and Y to settle their dispute is to come to an agreement about which one has the more perfect evidence. This is no longer a material argument. X and Y aren't discussing the original issue anymore. Instead, they've migrated over to a meta-argument; Whose paper trail ends first?

2. The ever-expanding role of government in our lives turns us into bureaucrats. At first blush, this seems like a sort of unhinged, right-wing spook story. On closer inspection, though, the idea has teeth. We rely on the government for so many different things, and each thing requires its own unique set of policies and documentation. If we don't produce adequate documentation, then the policy says we must go home and try again. If we produce the right documentation, then our lives can go forward as planned. People who excel in producing the correct documentation are keen to offer advice to the rest of us for effectively navigating the labyrinthine policies of government. Sometimes it's not even good enough to comply with the policies. Sometimes it's a question of producing a new kind of documentation that changes the policy-definition of the problem. We experience this when we mail a letter, when we interact with the school systems, when we pay our taxes, when we pay our water bills, when we file insurance claims or fill a prescription. The more we interact with society on a bureaucratic level, the more incentive we ourselves have to become bureaucrats.

3. The professional services economy primarily rewards bureaucrats. Think of all the managers in your office. Are these people the best workers in the building, or are they the ones with the greatest familiarity with the company's policies and procedures. Be honest. Assuming you'd like your career to advance into the managerial level and beyond, what will be your strategy? Will you come up with an innovative job technique, or will you come up with some new bureaucratic policy that provides a paper trail that can be assumed synonymous with efficiency gains? Think about your own little corner of the professional universe. Would you get promoted if you invented a new product? Or, would you get promoted if you built a new ticketing system that enabled managers to more accurately track employee progress?

*        *        *

We've all been there. We receive a bill in the mail -- perhaps it's a telephone bill, or a utility bill -- and we notice a small error. We call customer service to have the matter corrected. Before we know it, we've sunk two hours into making a simple correction to our bill.

The underlying issue here isn't that the problem on our bill can't be fixed. Instead, the underlying issue is that we have to find the person who is bureaucratically assigned to the button that fixes this problem. Once we have that person on the other end of the line, we have to tell that person the right sequence of words. Only then will he or she be able to justify his/her pressing of the button. Only then will our billing issue be corrected. It's frustrating, but it's the way life works, at least in this bureaucratic world of ours.

Here's a piece of practical advice that has worked for me in highly bureaucratic situations. When I run into a bureaucratic dead-end, and the person on the other end of the line insists that there's absolutely nothing more that they can do, I ask them this question: "If you were me, what would you do?" This phrase is like a magic key. It does a number of things. First, it helps crack the bureaucratic veneer a little bit; the person on the other end of the line starts to think of me as a fellow human, not just a policy obstacle or a form to fill out. Second, it changes the nature of the conversation; before, we were talking about what that person had to do because I had called, but now we're talking about all the things I might be willing to do after considering the person's professional advice. Third, it typically uncovers a bureaucratic path forward. Maybe he can't push the button I need pushed, but maybe people in my situation can have a different button pushed by a different person, elsewhere in the system.

Try it. It really works.

Sometimes, when I'm losing patience on the phone, I console myself by thinking about the fact that I'm the one who gets to push the button in some aspect of someone else's life. In some other telephone call in a parallel universe (or on another day of the week), it's the other person who's calling me, and I'm the one tasked to evaluate the credibility of his or her claim to my pushing of the button.

If you want to take a more productive attitude toward bureaucracy in today's world, then apply the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. The bureaucrat who can fix the error on your water bill can assure your destruction today. Tomorrow, you can assure his destruction when he calls your office to get his own button pushed. Knowing this, none of us should have an incentive to give the other person too hard of a time since, after all, we'll need the other person to push our button tomorrow. We can be kind. We can be gracious. We can look for any credible reason to push the button and look for any excuse not to; after all, we'd want the same thing for ourselves when it's time to get our own button pushed. Focus on the people, not the policy. The policy was designed to involve your professional discretion. The policy was designed to create a justifiable paper trail. You don't need a policy justification to push the button, you just need a paper trail. It's the decent thing to do.

*        *        *

I know a guy who moved from Country X to Country Y. No, I'm not going to go into detail here. This is a real human being I'm talking about. I'm not going to disrupt his chi. When he received Country Y citizenship, way back when, he was expected to revoke his citizenship from his other country. I don't know exactly what he did, but he ended up with that Country Y citizenship.

Years later, he had a child. At some point, the man's home country created a temporary policy stating that the foreign-born children of any citizen could apply to gain citizenship. The man filed the application on behalf of his child. He ran into a little trouble when, somewhere within the application process, someone pointed out that he revoked his citizenship.

Now, look, we could all probably dig up some PDFs that validate this point of view. We could all dig up case law showing exactly where things stand. I'm here to tell you that none of this documentation means a darn thing.

Here's why: This man that I know called someone on the telephone and said that his native country could not deny him his birthright citizenship. The person he called agreed with him. Papers were filed, procedures were followed. Some months later, the man's child had dual citizenship.

How did this happen? I mean, in light of all those PDFs and case law citations and everything, how did this happen? The cynic would argue that it was a degradation or corruption of political institutions. But the truth is that the less bureaucratic your mind is, the more open you are to the many possible interpretations of a policy.

The key isn't what the policy states. The key is what the paper trail documents. If you can create a paper trail that says, for example, that a man was born in Country X, moved to Country Y, had a child, and then applied for the child's Country X citizenship, then there is nothing for the bureaucracy to question, because those are the facts, and that's what the paper trail says. If you instead choose to create a paper trail that says a man moved to Country Y and renounced his citizenship and now a foreign national is applying to have his child granted Country X citizenship, then of course that's nonsense.

But the difference isn't in the policy. The difference is in the paperwork.

In the real world, we don't live in policy documents. We live in the flesh. We touch each other, our voices quiver when we're angry, we drink wine, we shed tears, we eat pizza. We're human beings! We're in control of the paper we push around. He who can most accurately cite policy can win an internet argument, but the real winner is the one whose paper trail leads to a happy and comfortable life.

The next time you hear someone say that policy dictates that naturalized citizens of Country Y must renounce their citizenship, remember my friend from Country X. The next time you hear that policy must enforce the law equally, remember this little blog post here. The next time somebody in customer service tells you that you owe an extra $500 and, I'm sorry sir, it can't be helped because the policy dictates that such and such be so and so, remember the time that some pretty girl cried about it and they fixed it for her.

I'm not arguing for anarchy, but we're being dehumanized by bureaucracy. The re-humanization must begin somewhere.

Don't Try To Teach Bears Japanese

Maybe there are people out there who are so in-tune with themselves from the time they are born that they never have to wind through the same kind of endless journey of self-discovery that I have. If you're one of those people, I have two things to say to you.

1. I really, really admire you. Please don't stop being who you are.
2. This blog post is probably not for you.

Embracing my inner weirdo has been something of a calling card of mine. From an early age, I figured out that I am not one of the usual suspects. When you read things about "the average person," or "most people," or "a reasonable person," you are reading about people who are very different from me. I used to jokingly put it this way: I'm the exception to every rule, including this one. 

Thus, I found it rather surprising when I was talking to someone recently, and she suggested that much of my motivation involved conformity. Who, me? Conform? Never! I'm the exception to every rule, including this one! I'm a rugged individualist, a man committed to being exactly who I am, to hell with what peer pressure I might face or what influence other people might seek to have over me.

The (possibly inevitable) catch-22 escaped me for years: Even he who seeks only to be himself craves acceptance on that level. That is, just because a person wants to be individualistic doesn't mean the person has no desire for social acceptance. In the extreme case, such a person could really make himself miserable by always impressing upon people how different he is, and always facing the disappointment of social stigma or rejection. In the milder case, they're simply two separate concepts, being oneself on the one hand, and being socially accepted on the other.

Some people seek social acceptance by changing themselves. That kind of person always played the villain or the victim in the stories I've told myself. How could anyone sell themselves so short with such scant compensation? All the while, the more interesting concept was flying right under my radar. Some people, present company included, seek social acceptance despite refusing on principle to change themselves in order to attain it.

Of the two kinds of people, which do you think is the bigger sucker? Maybe I'm just self-flagellating here, but I'm inclined to think it's the second fellow.

Oh, don't worry. I haven't disavowed my individualism. In fact, I'm more individualistic now than ever before. As I said above, self-discovery (and therefore also self expression) is an endless journey. I'm always growing toward a marginally better individualism. Part of what I needed to learn, and what I did learn recently, was that the need for social acceptance operates on a different axis than the need to express individuality. Two people with equal levels of individuality might have widely different levels of social acceptance. We can all have David Bowie levels of individuality, but you have to actually be David Bowie in order to enjoy that level of social acceptance. C'est la vie.

I obviously possess no greater insight as to gaining social acceptance. Sometimes I think I have it, and sometimes I think I don't. My guess is that most people feel more or less the same. But I do seem to have a greater motivation for it. I have to admit, I don't just want to be me, I want people to be at ease with the fact that I am me. Maybe this is because a lot of people I've known in the past haven't been at ease with my being me. Or maybe it's only because a lot of people I've known in the past haven't been at ease, and I internalized their dissatisfaction all by myself.

Well, that one's my albatross to carry around. What I wanted to share with my readers, and what I believe is far more universal, is this: Some people won't accept you, no matter who you are or what you do. There are people who hate David Bowie, even though he's David-freaking-Bowie. They can't be appeased. You can't be a better version of David Bowie in hopes of making them happy about it. They'll never be happy about it. It's not a problem with you, it's a problem with them. Perhaps it's just a different set of values.

You might instead be able to practice recognizing these people, or these situations, early. Take notice of the ones who won't be happy with you as you are or as you might be. When you find them, just let it go. Let the whole thing go.

You can't teach a bear to speak Japanese. Convincing some people to be happy about who you are is like that. You won't convince them because not only is it a foreign language, it's a foreign language in a different species' vocal cords, owned by someone whose motivations are nowhere in the same neighborhood as yours.

Walk away, go somewhere else, do your thing. Focus on the people who like who you are, and the situations in which you are allowed to be you. 

My Resistance To Identity Politics

There is a lot of identity politics out there. It comes in various forms, and the liberal-tarians are all united on the fact that it is good to be an “ally” to victims of certain difficult lived experiences. But just as I have resisted the inclination to call myself a “feminist” despite believing in equal rights for women, I’m not ready to sign-on to the pleas of the likes of (most recently) Jacob T. Levy. The natural question is, “Why the heck not, Ryan?” and the answer is because the evidence and the philosophy just aren’t there to support the notion of identity politics.

But does it matter? The toothpaste is already out of the tube, as the saying goes. It’s only a matter of time before everyone in the LGBTQ community gets to enjoy the same kind of social respect that we pay to everyone else, and racism and sexism is always and everywhere deplored by everyone who counts for anything. No one takes a bigot seriously anymore, not in today’s world. Despite the lamentations over Trump’s allegedly white-supremacist agenda, society as a whole wants to move on from all this bigotry. In that environment, why shouldn’t I just be simpatico? I mean, why can’t I just be a nice guy and declare myself an ally of women, of LGBTQs, of racial minorities, of religious minorities, etc.? Why hold out? Do I want to make myself look like an asshole?

In other words, why don’t I just follow where the group leads me? What’s the harm in that?

Libertarianism – the belief that people by and large ought to be left alone to pursue their own slice of happiness – deserves a unified theory. It’s almost inevitable. Despite the attempts of many to divorce libertarianism from hardcore individualism, Aristotelianism, first principles, and unfettered market capitalism, libertarianism only makes sense as the fusion of those ideas. If you remove one of those things, then you are no longer left with a consistent, coherent political philosophy. Instead, what we end up with is a contradictory mess of personal whims and wishes; but you don’t need philosophy to just believe whatever the heck you feel like. Philosophy without consistent self-reconciliation is just word salad.

Thus, to wit, I don’t want to just go along with the crowd on identity politics because, doggone it, I’m an individualist. I’m not going to just accept any hackneyed idea just because a bunch of really nice people really really want me to go with it. That kind of blind susceptibility to situational influence is what produces the Lucifer Effect, and I’m not into that. While we’re busy pitting our various political identities against each other, we’re causing a real rift between and among groups. It’s not very hard to imagine the different ways the Lucifer Effect would take hold. It ought to be resisted.

I bring this up because it highlights the importance of individualism as an idea in general, but specifically with respect to libertarianism. Without the general principle that individuals ought to be left alone, we become a teeming mass of identity-factions, each more justifiably angry than the next. The function of individualism is to diffuse the claims of specific factions and to apply broad principles of freedom to all kinds of people, no matter what their demographics happen to be. In other words, the purpose of individualism is to prevent us from getting caught up in bigotry. Inventing a complex “intersectionality” of factious identities will only serve to pit factions against each other.

What we want is to treat all people equally. So long as we’re pounding pulpits over identity politics, we’ll never get there. Separate is inherently unequal. "All collectivist doctrines are harbingers of irreconcilable hatred and war to the death."

Psychological Rejection And The Election

This is a blog post for two of my friends.

The thinkpiece-writing world continues to struggle in vain for viable explanations of the Trump "phenomenon."

My preferred explanation that a popular television personality won an election by telling a lot of people what they wanted to hear. It's not even an American precedent. Remember Ronald Reagan? Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger? Al Frankin? We don't need a more complicated explanation for Trump "ism" than that. People got tired of voting for shysters in suits, even pantsuits, and decided to go for a TV personality instead. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.

But the explanations continue.

One of the more interesting explanations I've read about - from folks like Jeffrey Tucker, for example - is that the voting public rejected a Hillary Clinton presidency, along with everything that represents. The argument is that Clinton was the worst kind of Washington insider: secretive, cronyish, corrupt, and motivated more by her own private financial interests than by a desire to serve the public. She was said to have been cavalier about toppling Middle East dictators and plunging innocent people into failed states. She help the US government sell white phosphorus to Saudi Arabia, which it later weaponized and used in its campaign against Yemeni factions. She was, in short, the worst kind of Washington insider we could ever imagine electing. Or at least, that's how the argument goes.

For the record, given the small margins by which US presidential candidates typically win popular votes, I think this case is grossly over-stated. But it is a compelling story, at least.

In light of this concept, I started thinking about the reactions we've observed from people who worry about a Trump presidency. Yes, there are the protests and the occasional riot, but those are less significant to me than the tears, the candlelight vigils, the deep sorrow and pain that some feel at the prospect of a Trump presidency. There have been many credible reports of people in the transsexual community contemplating suicide. Children of racial minorities have reportedly been in tears, worried that the storm troopers will come for them, or for their parents.

One of the reasons I think we've seen this reaction is that, for many people on the left, rejecting a Trump presidency would have been the same kind of repudiation of a set of ideas that Tucker and others talk about when they say voters rejected Clintonism. Think about it: if your highest ideals involve racial and cultural inclusion, and kind and gentle speech, and a commitment to the idea that "rhetoric matters," then the 2016 election might have represented an important opportunity to reject the kind of racist thuggery that many of us believe has dominated American politics for a long time.

It's understandable, then, that such people would react as they have. Their opportunity for transcendence suffered a total defeat. And it was, make no mistake, a religious belief that they held, dressed up in all the same language and motives.

Well, they wanted a moment of transcendence, and they lost it. I don't think we should revel in their misery. I don't think we should dismiss their concerns or roll our eyes or turn it all into a meme, and the reason I think so is because tomorrow it will happen to us, whoever "us" is.

I'm an individualist, which means nobody agrees with me, and this sort of systemic moral failure happens to me literally every time there's an election. It's old hat to me. The faith some of these left-leaning people have in government has been lost to me for years, decades. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we were all less collectivist, less enthralled by identity politics, less narcissistic, less unkind, more open to hearing new ideas, more receptive to criticism, less inclined to reach for a Big Stick when someone stands athwart of our objectives? Wouldn't the world be terrific if it were a completely different place?

This is the sort of false hope that arises when people lack a true religion, and probably explains why I get along better with social conservatives than I do with social liberals, even though I am more inclined to agree with social liberals. Religious people already accept that humans are sinners and that the only way we'll experience Paradise is if the big man upstairs decides to extend us an invitation. Another way of putting this, in Lacanian language, is that social conservatives are better equipped to deal with lack.

Social liberals, by contrast, tend to be secular people whose only hope of experiencing a better world is to make it happen in the here and now. I sympathize with them, but they're doomed to be disappointed for their whole lives because they've failed to absorb Lacan. They can't deal with lack. When a person like Trump wins an election, it's a terrifying and humiliating defeat, an interruption in the great course of Progress, which they hope will lead them to Paradise.

It is a silly vision. And if you're an atheist like me, you're inclined to disbelieve liberal transcendence for the same reason you disbelieve the Judeo-Christian world-view: It's a nice story, but it ain't gonna happen.

At least the conservatives have their faith, though, and that helps them through the rough times.

Life Is Difficult, Short, And Unfair

Life is difficult, short, and unfair.

Today, that fact is often obscured by how wonderful life is in the developed world. We don't have to struggle so hard to obtain food. Even the poor can afford some version of every basic necessity and most of life's pleasantries - perhaps not the state-of-the-art or must-current brands and designs, but they do have access to some version of pretty much everything. That's astounding. As if that weren't enough, things are getting better all the time.

As a result of all this, it's tempting to develop expectations about what life should be like. It's tempting to forget that life is difficult, short and unfair.

But then tragedy strikes, and we remember. To choose an example "at random," we might be nearing the crest of our marathon-running career and then suddenly develop a broken pancreas and a shorter lifespan. That might render our lives even more difficult, shorter-still, and frankly unfair. But such is life.

Or, we might go to work one day and never come home, leaving our families to grieve and then to struggle on without us. We might go out for a night of fun and get gunned-down or raped. We might take our perpetrators to court and lose the case, or win only to watch the judge hand down a token sentence. We might have set out the best-laid plans, only to have them thwarted by an act of nature or a competitor with stronger ambitions.

We can cry foul, we can call for change, we can draft new laws and invade new countries, we can elect new officials and scream at each other in social media. thump our Bibles or pound our pulpits. We can point accusingly at the world and shout, "You see? This proves everything I've been saying all along! If you had listened to me earlier, things would have been different!"

But that won't change the simple fact that life is difficult, short, and unfair. If you want to know why people shoot each other, rape each other, make bad mistakes, terrorize  each other, and so on, the answer is simply that life is difficult, short, and unfair. Changing the laws, sharpening our battle-axes, putting each other to the guillotine, will not solve anything; it won't even make anything better.

You cannot solve an individual problem by resorting to collective action. Each of us, individually, must assess our shortcomings, find the root of the problems within us, overcome them, and help our children learn from the mistakes we made. They, too, must overcome their own set of mistakes.

We can make the world a better place by being better people; but we have to try. I ask you, please, do not take the lazy way out. Resist the illusion that swift, collective action will somehow make life easy, long, and just - it won't. Let's be grown-ups; grown-ups solve their problems by doing the mental work of change. Let's do that, instead.

Live Life Deeply, Rather Than Broadly

Warning: The above video contains the kind of language and subject matter found in the average comedy club.

The thrust of the above video clip from the inimitable Bill Burr is, "There's too much information in the world, and everybody misses just a little bit." It almost sounds like he was channeling Hayek, but more likely Burr was just taking stock of the fact that nobody knows everything.

I was thinking about this while travelling recently. It seems to me that, unless you really despise a place, no matter where you go, people have figured out a way to live well. I love coffee breaks in Canada, live music in Texas, foreign food in New York City, fine dining in California, the outdoor running community in Colorado, the gym culture in Florida, and so on, and so forth. But as widely as I have traveled so far, I have not yet discovered a place that consistently got everything right.

This concept, accurate at an aggregate level, also sort of applies at an individual level. We all have acquaintances, friends, and family we admire, and they all live good lives, but everyone makes choices somewhat different from what we would do in the same situation. Still, some get it more right than others, and my closest friends tend to get "the most right" out of everyone I know. This shouldn't come as a surprise since friends tend to be people whose values are similar to our own.

Then, every now and then, a close friend makes a decision that calls this narrative into question. A friend might seem to be leading a close parallel life to your own, then suddenly take a 90-degree turn and veer off in a totally different direction. You might be inseparable work colleagues for years, until one of you suddenly decides to go back to school and/or change industries entirely. You might lifelong friends until the day one of you decides to go "find himself/herself," and ends up with a totally new circle of friends with which you have very little in common. Maybe the arrival of a newborn child or a cataclysmic life-change sends your friend off into a previously unconsidered kind of life. Or perhaps you never really knew your friend as well as you thought you did.

If we're doing it right, life is a series of choices that get narrower and more satisfactory as we go. We start out as children with the whole world waiting for us, and then we slowly shape our lives with important decisions, until the array of additional, practical choices available to us is relatively small, but no one choice will completely upend us. Changing your college major from science to business can have consequences as far-reaching as which city you end up living in and what your lifetime income will be. But choosing between accepting a new promotion at work or moving to another nearby firm seldom results in a major lifestyle change. Deciding whether to do soccer or track when you're 13 might very well impact the kinds of activities your prefer for the rest of your life, but deciding whether or not to do that community 5K coming up is largely irrelevant.

Crucially, the more choices we make, the better we should get at making choices. Our goal in life should be to become happier and more satisfied, and large disruptions should only occur if they are acts of nature (as in the case of death, disease, etc.), or if they payoff is so large that it's worth the disruption (as in the case of taking a "dream job" offer and moving across the country or world).

It's not such a good thing if your life is full of twists and turns that result in a lot of false starts, drawing boards, or major catharses. Over time, the volatility should tend to disappear as we transition from major to minor life decisions.

My point here is that if you find yourself leading the kind of life that involves persistent major drama, or constant and drastic change, or hopping from one thing to the next, always reinventing yourself, then you may want to consider your level of knowledge. Most of us are pretty wise, but it's better to have deep knowledge about your own life than it is to have broad knowledge about life-in-general.

So, as you aim for happiness, aim for wisdom, and as you aim for wisdom, aim for depth rather than breadth. Consider large increases in the breadth of your knowledge a sign that you may need to double-down on depth.