The Relentless Angst

In your most recent letter, you noted that

It’s necessary to have a less antagonistic relationship with the body because hating it makes you wish to avoid spending time noticing it, which then calls for distraction. Entertainment rather than focus.

Lately, I’ve been caught between the Scylla of “trying to get my PhD thesis into a submittable form” and the Charybdis of “chronic migraines”. Needless to say, your point feels apt.

Whatever else one might wish to say about migraine — and much has already been said by others, both about the pain itself and about what Emil du Bois-Reymond called the “general feeling of disorder” that precedes it (quoted in Sacks 13) — the phrase “antagonistic relationship with the body” is fitting. In Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer describes Brod as a “genius of sadness”; “a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum” (78). Nobody says that sort of thing about people experiencing chronic pain. Pain is not, in my experience, romantic or even particularly interesting as an object of investigation. It just is. One wishes to avoid it. One hates the body for it. Nothing is as totalising and as exhausting in the moment — and yet as boring and predictable from a distance — as a body in pain.

At best, what pain highlights, in my experience, is the weirdness and artificiality of the Cartesian division of ‘body’ and ‘mind’. Sometimes (that is: when the pain is mild), it’s possible to, with some success, distract yourself the sensation. You can pull at the reins of your attention. Set the body aside. But when it’s severe, you lose your grip. The body is the mind. (Sure, yes, ‘the body is always the mind, and the mind is always the body,’ but the way that an intense & aversive experience hijacks attention makes the identity of indiscernibles especially sharp.)

So: what relevance does any of this have to that dwarvish lifeway previously discussed?

Focus. Craft. Agency. Desire. These things are all, always, always-already embodied. Yet they are also, as you rightly point out, far less solitary than modern workplace mythologies would have us believe: “craftsmen and artists come to the height of their powers when they are part of a strong collective,” as you say, and “the structures in the world that most encourage men and women to be agentic […] are hangovers from the village commonality, from what Kropotkin would call the folkmote”. This is, I agree, the modern terrain. I also believe, as you do, that the collective craft attitude of the ‘guild’ is precisely that which “the modern workplace has sought more than anything to destroy”.

Your re-framing of the ‘dwarvish lifeway’ — and the contemporary barriers to it — is well taken. To be “weird and agentic and unapologetically ambitious” in the pursuit of loving craft takes two things:

1. A lived-in body, free from the traces of fascism;
2. A strong community of other dwarves.

My sense is that, in practice, most of the problem with kickstarting a dwarvish attitude is that

1. these two things depend on one another; and,
2. both ‘body’ and ‘community’ have painful shadows.

I’ve had one particular blog post stuck in my head for the past few days: ‘A Woman According to Oxford’. In it, commenting on “a post on Éowyn” written by Kirsten Sanders, she writes the following (forgive the length) —

Why does Éowyn fear cages? Because she has lacked freedom for a very long time. This is deeper than it sounds, and I am going to use something else that Kirsten Sanders says, in a different Lord of the Rings post, to explain what I mean:

This, also, is Augustine!- in that any freedom is directed only toward the Good, and freedom to choose other than the good is actually bondage.

There is some truth here. As a feminist, it’s easy to read a statement like this and assume that the next statement is going to be “and the Good, for women, lies in motherhood, so just go ahead and be a mother and then you won’t need any other freedoms.” This can lead to a desire to reject such an Augustinian notion of freedom out of hand. But I’ve already argued that the Good, for women, does not just lie in motherhood and it would be absurd to claim that it does.

I also know that modern feminism does express something like this notion of freedom, albeit in an altered form. The most recent example that I’ve seen was from Jessica DeFino, a writer here on Substack who is critical of the beauty industry. In response to the idea that it is empowering to wear glittery makeup that will pollute the environment with microplastics, she quips, ‘Hot tip: If “empowerment” is what you’re after, try living according to your values!’

There’s a difference, here: empowerment by living according to your [implicitly subjective] values versus freedom directed towards the [objective] Good. But feminism frequently argues that not all values make one equally free, and beauty is one of the most common places that this argument is made. A woman may voluntarily choose to spend hours on makeup, to wear shoes that feel deeply uncomfortable, to undergo surgeries that bring her into compliance with narrow beauty norms. Some feminists would call this freedom, but many others would say that she is trapped by restrictive societal norms, and that she would be more free if her worth did not feel, to her, as if it depended so much on her appearance.

It seems to me that, as a first step, we ought to be clearer about the reality of (some of) the hurdles to value-alignment and ‘virtue ethics’ in the dwarvish register, namely:

1. To create, you need to be embodied, but people tend not to want to be strongly embodied when their body feels aversive.
2. Insofar as the modern office “destroys”, it does so on two fronts — first, by dissolving the guild (atomising the individual-at-work) and, second, by ingraining fascism in our behaviours and on our bodies (insisting on a narrow and aversion-inducing set of postures & configurations of attention, action, and interaction).
3. You can’t engage in robustly positive-sum craft if you don’t know what your preferences really are, or what the preferences of others really are.
4. The inaccessibility of ‘the body’ is entangled with the inaccessibility of authentic (unfalsified) preference.
5. You can’t pursue The Good if you can’t see it (or its traces).

To orient the (hypothetical) guild towards making “in common, in conversation, and in response to the need of the community”, we need knowledge of that community-in-common. Such knowledge is only possible free from domination. Not consensus, per se, but less distortion via chronic (self-)deception. We need strong normativity, non-alienated bodies, and authentic preferences all at once. Yet each gets targeted, damaged, destroyed.

As Phoebe Bridgers says, “when broken bodies are washed ashore, who am I to ask for more, more, more?”

Perhaps I’m just echoing your own point back to you; however, it seems to me that, in order to pursue ‘dwarvish’ virtue — ambitious, weird, unapologetic, robust craft — we first have to overcome the domination which makes it feel impossible. If this precursor project is going to have any chance of success, the ‘overcoming’ can never be individual, just as the downstream ‘craft’ can never be individual. Why not? Because ‘isolation’ — or, more precisely, the insistent illusion of isolation — is itself both a mechanism and a trace of domination.

You can never let yourself be, as Virginia Woolf would have it, “the only person in Sussex”. As Éowyn has it in The Return of the King,

‘I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,’ she said; ‘and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.’

In other words: see yourself ecologically again.

“Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost while I am about it”

September 10, 1918 A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf (ed. Leonard Woolf)

Somehow I have come to ask myself, how can one be a dwarf in an office environment? How can one be weird and agentic and unapologetically ambitious in a way that is not about position but about making things? While it’s almost as absurd as reading Milton in Sussex, I must not be the only person asking it.

All kinds of making have a physical element, even writing (those fingers hitting the keys). So the necessity of relinquishing the ‘it’ mode of relating to your body, the goblin-life, in order to do it - that makes sense to me. It’s necessary to have a less antagonistic relationship with the body because hating it makes you wish to avoid spending time noticing it, which then calls for distraction. Entertainment rather than focus.

That craving for distraction, for a bottomless trough of satiation, is not a state that a) any work can get done in and b) will of itself lead to a desire to do any work in the future. In order to come to want to craft, or play or feel actual pleasure, one has first to relinquish it, the sensation coined by Natasha Dow Schüll as the ‘machine zone’. Here quoting Richard Seymour, via Max Read:

“the ‘machine zone’ where ordinary reality is ‘suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process’. For many addicts, the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing.”

But even then, what? When you’ve extracted whatever worm of a social media platform that’d burrowed under your skin this week, you have to do the next thing. Because maybe as hard as closing the tab and opening up a blank white screen is somehow combatting the thought “I am not the only person..”. Or, I dunno, for you, maybe it’s, “there’s a lot of shoes out there already…”

There is a solitary aspect to the modern conception we have of writing in particular, but most craft too, that I want to argue has led us astray. Not that individual flair and talent isn’t the source of beauty and development in the artistic world, but that we’ve embraced a wider narrative that doesn’t necessarily follow, that one creates from a position outside of the world and the company of men. One must lock oneself away from it. When I think the opposite is true: I’m still not arguing that the height of writing is another complacent review of whatever book is getting hacked to death in the public square this week (here’s looking at you, Oyler), but that history will support me in asserting craftsmen and artists come to the height of their powers when they are part of a strong collective. That position is what allows them to come to fruition. I mean, of course, the guild, and I’ll follow with up with a loose cannon of an argument: that this is what the modern workplace has sought more than anything to destroy. This is exactly why one can’t be a dwarf in an office.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the structures in the world that most encourage men and women to be agentic, structures that we’ve talked about again and again, are hangovers from the village commonality, from what Kropotkin would call the folkmote. We find them where people have organised themselves around the needs of the community (the fire brigades, the food banks), our favoured activities (clubs, societies), and our labour (the unions). But what we don’t so much find, these days, or at least, what we only find in a corrupted, gatekeeping kind of way, are guilds.

Kropotkin argues in Mutual Aid that the rise of the medieval city was due in part to these structures, and the promise of brotherhood (with real attending commitments from each brother) that they enshrined. Those same cities, after having risen from the wooden shacks and built cathedrals and city halls and guild houses, then fell, having failed to extend the hand of brotherhood far enough, having allowed riches to concentrate, guilds to become dominated by entrenched families, and the ‘burgers’ to become separate from the ‘commonality’. Having forgotten, in your words, perhaps:

“The thing being crafted isn’t just the self, whatever that means, but rather (a piece of) the project that transcends the self.”

You say that to the craftsman, craft is spiritual. Once begun, something must be completed. I say, in the modern world, staying on task is the hardest thing. It’s not about temptation but about how we think about the success or failure of the task at hand. The decreased salience of alternatives is achieved by adding to the expected returns of a given course of action. So we need to find a way to make even an ugly pair of boots worth having made.

To get past that nagging voice that says, ‘but there’s already so much noise, so many things, why make more?’, we need to make things in common, in conversation, and in response to the need of the community, such as we find it.

Sometimes, rarely, you stumble upon someone and realise — whether by the artefacts they leave in their wake, or by the impressions they nail to the board — that this person you’ve encountered is not only weird and agentic, but also unapologetically ambitious. You realise that they’re someone who seems able to craft things with prudence, care, and love in their heart, even under contemporary conditions of domination; that they seem capable of creating, too, with an eye to scale and audience. Virginia Woolf was such a person, I think. The Waves is evidence enough.

When I was “on the cusp of leaving the remaining bits of home I still clung to”, I figured that this rare ‘weird+agentic+ambitious’ combination was nothing more than a product of random luck. A consequence of someone with congenital weirdness (and natural agency) who’d been protected from the Real World for long enough to make it work.

“So you’re someone who struts and frets on a larger stage and you’re not obviously an asshole?” I’d think, “Wow, growing up must have been nice.”

More recently, however, I’ve started to grapple with a different explanation. Perhaps this tendency is instead more akin to a skill that has been cultivated into a lifeway. Not a product of artificial protection from The Real, but a deliberate consequence of encounters with it. You need a predisposition for weirdness, sure. You certainly also need help if you’re going to shelter the flickering campfire of agency in the midst of rain, and wind, and relentless angst. But I think there may also be deliberate practice here, coupled with a deliberate attitude.

(Tentatively,) I want to call the lifeway that results ‘dwarf mode’. I want, also, to explain it and, in so doing, chart a path towards it.

Consider this an extended riff.

§ 1. Goblins

For the benefit everyone who has blanked the pandemic years, ‘Goblin Mode’ is

a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations. (OUP, as quoted in The Guardian)

In essence, goblin mode is a strategy of retreat, of ‘degeneracy’, as self-protection. You experience shitty circumstances. You get burned out. You take the black pill you’re offered. And then, black pill swallowed, you respond to the circumstances by letting yourself get weird and feral. As Venkatesh Rao explains,

the primary characteristic of goblin mode is that your relationship with your physical self degenerates from an I-you to an I-it condition. Your sense of yourself as a person unravels, just as it does for many homeless people, except you still happen to be housed.

When you enter goblin mode, you begin to relate to the material circumstances of your existence — including those of your own own physical body — through a lens of radical objectification. More critically, however, you also grasp your powerlessness in relation to those objects. Nothing under your stewardship feels truly your own. (Not even the shiny little rocks you acquire.) And so you neglect everything. Essentially, the vibe is here is: “fuck it, let the things fall apart; it’s the natural tendency”.

‘The Things’, I want to stress, includes ‘yourself’. At the extreme, the goblin’s body has become an object to itself, and not an object which the goblin can have power over. Let yourself fall apart, insists the person in goblin mode, because it’s the natural tendency anyway.

§ 2. Gnomes

Venkatesh Rao responded to this by theorising what he called “a potential antithesis” from @deepfates (via @secretxsnake): ‘gnome mode’.

Whereas goblin mode is “the completely rundown, degenerate condition of normie striving in fully burned-out retreat” (Rao), the ‘gnome-pill’ offers a tentative recovery from the same. The gnome is a jolly little fellow. Someone who ascends from the depths by way of hyper-local agency.

When you’re in gnome mode, as Rao figures it, you see everything under your stewardship as something you own, use, and maintain. The world outside remains just as fucked as before, of course, but now you have a response: “All that is very well,” as Candide puts it, his gnome mode speaking, “but let us cultivate our garden.” As a gnome, you find a kind of mischievous joy in such work of maintenance and care. It’s a cautious resolution to the meaning crisis — a recovery from principal-agent crisis that took hold of your soul — that arises from a decision to constrain your attention and sense of agency to the domesticity of your own small garden (or workshop, or body, or whatever). The resulting vibe, as the gnome presents herself to others, is one of a “jolly tinkerer” or a “village weirdo”. While we’re so fucking back, now our adventures and projects are strictly neighbourhood-scale. In his present form, YouTuber and ‘backyard adventurer’ Beau Miles is a great example of someone who has adopted gnome mode in maximally public display. Only a gnome would run a marathon in a luxury hotel, or plant a tree every minute for 24 hours (in a neighbour’s spare paddock). This is the oddball logic of the so-called ‘Great Weirding’ made natural, high-energy, and fun.

All well and good. However, as you know, I play perhaps too much D&D. As a result, I also have a more complete taxonomy in mind.

§ 3. Bugbears

On the one hand, there’s what I want to call bugbear mode. The path to bugbear mode begins roughly the same. You experience exactly the same shitty circumstances as the soon-to-be-goblin does above: similar burnout; similar run-down conditions of objectification. (And, of course, the same black pill.) Whereas the gnome recovers by reducing ambition and agency projects ‘in the garden shed’, however, the bugbear finds a road to ‘recovery’ by leaning into a kind of joyfully destructive potential that’s latent in the objectification itself. This is a dark enlightenment of reduced ambitions as feral-physical scaffolding. You let yourself get weird and feral, just as before, but then you begin to find energy precisely in that which is darkest and scariest: the sense that the close-to-hand physical body-as-object can itself be reformed for use as a tool or, more specifically, as a hammer. From this, you generate a new (and arguably perverse) virtue-ethical framework. You steer towards becoming yourself hairy, scary, & jacked. You win localised dominance games, and are rewarded for it. You restructure your sense of prestige and identity to fit. This is the reason that there’s so much commonality in the peculiar (hypermasculine) presentations of both outlaw motorcycle gangs and special forces cultures. (It’s also no mistake that special forces selection processes place so much emphasis on traumatising via resource constraints.) The bugbear lifts heavy, grows a beard, and covers himself a very particular kind of (shitty) tattoo. The vibe becomes: things fall apart, but you can also break things in ways that feel kind fun, agentic, and strength-producing. More critically, the right contexts, you’ll be rewarded for such acts of deliberate and targeted violence.

§ 4. Dwarves

On the other hand, there’s the thing I endorse: dwarf mode. This is my framework, so I am biased, but as I see it, dwarf mode combines the ‘strength’ of bugbear mode and the ‘jolly tinkering’ of gnome mode with scale and sustainability.

To get into dwarf mode, you respond to the depths of the darkness with two simple realisations. First, you realise that — on a very fundamental level — nobody has power over you. In the language of the New Age gift card: “You are enough.” Second, you decide that, with sufficient craft and thoughtfulness, the world as it is is enough. Everything in your environment, even and especially the stone and dirt and rubble, can be a resource for creating beautiful things.

Sure, you can’t be as immortal or ethereal as the elves. You can’t be fully immune to the black pill. You can’t really pursue a spiritually-coded dissolution of the Self into the World in most domains. Yet none of that matters (says dwarf mode) because your work can last. With care, and craft, and stewardship, a few resources can last for generations.

As I see it, this isn’t so much a denial of the actual terrain as it is a radical acceptance of it.

It’s clear that the ‘human’ (read: default modern) reflex of empire-building is missing its ethical targets. Robust infrastructure is deployed as a weapon for conquest. It’s fucked.

It’s also clear that things do in fact fall apart. The world is in fact pretty screwed on a lot of dimensions. You have in fact retreated into a cave, and rightly so.

And, yes, the self — absent intervention — tends strongly “streaks and patches”.

Importantly, however, dwarf mode rejects the very possibility of violence against the self. There is no narrowing. No binding or coercion. No defection against the future selves (or against the others like you). If you want to prevent that most intimate catastrophe — to “fall like snow and be wasted” — all you need, instead, is two things:

1. A wider account of subjectivity which doesn’t deny the radical objectification you’ve already experienced. This is essentially a materialist reënchantment of the world, coupled with a recognition of (some version of) the political ecology of things. (“I eat an apple,” as Mol would have it).
2. A sense that hard work and craft is virtuous when rooted in care/love/etc.

The first is natural. We have never been modern. Really, the sharp-edged Cartesian dualism is the unintuitive thing to have adopted.

The second thing is the hard one. In the wrong light, “hard work backed by love” can seem either too pollyannaish or concerningly German. Neither could be further from the truth. Love is hard (though not that hard). As Milton’s Satan reminds us, you always have “faithful friends,” companions, and the “associates and co-partners of [your] loss” (1.264-5). And in dwarf mode properly construed, you are always already free. There is no condition of domination, even against yourself, because it doesn’t even make sense.

More critically, from the standpoint of someone deep in dwarf mode: the work that one ‘must’ undertake is always optional, and the next actions of craft are always pretty easy to grasp. (It’s hard, at times. It’s never mysterious.) If you’re writing, “sit down and start making the clackity noise.” If you’re making boots, pick up some cobbler’s pliers and a last. Pursue the projects as they present themselves. On inspection, “craft” is nothing more than obsessive interest in solving problems for their own sake as those problems arise. If you like puzzles, then the logic of “the reward for solving this problem is that I get to solve another problem” is actually pretty intuitively appealing.

With a little bit of ingenuity, any cave can become the entrance into a hidden city. You can always carve — from any rock — beautiful infrastructure that’ll last as long as the mountain. No matter how much infrastructure is built, too, such a hidden city is always capable of supporting generations of weirdos to come. Even as a ‘raw’ cave, it makes safe trade with the ‘outside’ world on your own terms feel possible. It already makes coördination feel safe.

All of this leads us to two footnotes to dwarf mode, in ascending order of weirdness —

§ 5. Craft is Spiritual

Mythkeeper gives a shockingly good description of the ‘Dwarf’ culture in the Pathfinder setting:

So what does it mean to have craftsmanship and toil be at the centre of your being? To understand this, we have to enter the domain of the spiritual. For dwarves, the act of creation is inherently virtuous. What I mean by this is: when other peoples think of the qualities that make a person good, they think of things like prudence, temperance, charity. For dwarves, virtues are hard work, dedication, attention to detail. For a dwarf, one can be considered ‘a good dwarf’ merely because they are a dwarf who makes beautiful things. Dwarves treasure built things because they are showcases of the virtue of the builder. It’s as a derivative of this quality that we get the unfair stereotype that dwarves are greedy, or that they love gold. On its own, gold is not interesting to the dwarf, nor is silver or mithril. But all ore has raw potential, and that is attractive. And gold that has been sculpted into chalices, rings, or amulets is truly prized, for it is that virtue of the builder distilled to visible form. Not every dwarf is a blacksmith, but every dwarf is dedicated to a craft, even if that craft is the craft of battle. Most are likely to dabble in a few different crafts because, as discussed, the act of creation is inherently spiritual to the dwarf.

When dwarves commit to something, they see it all the way through. It’s a rare dwarf that begins a project and then moves onto something else before finishing it. This, too, is tied to the spiritual connection they feel with the act of creation. Once something is begun, it must be brought to completion. This has an interesting effect on the dwarf psyche: dwarves have an incredible sense of resolve. Like their love of built things, this has also conferred upon them a slightly negative stereotype: the stereotype of being stubborn. When a dwarf sets their heart to something, it’s very difficult to change their mind. They are said to be ‘as immovable as the mountains in which they make their homes.’ One of the positive aspects of this strong resolve is that dwarves are among the bravest people in Golarion. When a dwarf tells himself that he’s going to enter a valley of the undead to retrieve something, it doesn’t matter how impossible the task is. The act of verbalising this commitment has secured his resolve. He’ll first die than turn back. It is for this reason that dwarves make the most steadfast ally for a group of adventurers — a reliable bulwark against the terrors they might face.

The thing being crafted isn’t just the self, whatever that means, but rather (a piece of) the project that transcends the self. “Have you never read this in the writings? The stone that the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone.” Strip away the Christian scapegoating theology, and this becomes the basis of stubbornness-as-virtue, and of stubbornness-without-self-coercion: good means ‘good for self and others’. It’s also how the dwarves generate honesty and ‘right speech’ from first principles.

As you admit,

I’m afraid that sometimes when I feel like I’m defecting, it’s actually necessary in order to be able to keep getting up in the morning on all those future days. Not always, perhaps not even often, but that the violence would be existentially destructive.

The degree to which you are divided is the degree to which you are conquered, so don’t play games with yourself in which you will need to defect. The game is one of affordances, not chains, except in exceptional circumstances. Paradoxically, that’s how the dwarves get a reputation for inhuman resolve.

§ 6. Thou Did’st, Not I

I’ve written elsewhere about existential verbs, but trying to think take this tentative notion of ‘dwarf mode’ seriously — and write from inside it, as above — reveals a more interesting issue with first person pronouns.

In the last season of these letters, both of us wrote a lot about the self. The parliament, naïve and stilted. The ethics of an ethical distortion. Now, through Woolf, you give us a more mature question: “what fragments, what images … still resonate?”

It occurs to me that what we haven’t written about, nearly as much, is the pervasive weirdness of being ‘in dialogue‘ with oneself both synchronically and diachronically. I get the sense sometimes — I think you do, too — that it’s possible to discover yourself only as a moving target; that the self exists only in motion, affect, and sensation, in the perpetual act of becoming.

Though they’re often misread and misunderstood, Dulce & Gabbana — that most fashionable pair of French theorists — were always the ones who thought most deeply about becoming.

In his preface to D&G’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault warns us that it would be a mistake to read the book “as the new theoretical reference” (xli). No, Foucault continues, the work is itself “an ‘art,’ in the sense that is conveyed by the term ‘erotic art,’ for example”. It is, moreover, “the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time” (xli), because it aims to answer a set of pressing questions:

How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behaviour? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body. (xiil, emphasis added)

Fascism does indeed leave its traces in the body. Among other things, it is necessarily and inherently a mode of action — a totalising set of contractions and dispositions of the muscles — which directs the attention of its subjects. To be a victim of fascism is to have fascism inscribed on your body. To become a fascist is to have the grip of fascism within you.

Generously, you might say that the dwarf mode I described above is an attempt to live in radical-but-practical opposition to the collectivist-antinormativity/antinomianism-which-disguises-itself-as-law (ie, fascism); that, to develop the skills entailed by such a perspective, you must necessarily “pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body”.

More abstractly, though, I wonder whether it’s (at least partly) about refiguring the way that one stages the most intimate and private dialogues with oneself. Rather than the first-person “I”, or even the (now universal, once formal) second-person “you”, choose the (now archaic) singular second-person informal declensions: thou, thee, thy, thine. The Quakers pioneered it. It seems valuable to turn the reflex inwards.

“Life passes. The clouds change perpetually over our houses.”
The Waves, Virginia Woolf

I let the days become months and now we’re in restart territory. Looking back over the archives and wondering what fragments, what images from our past writings still resonate?

I’m gonna take that excuse to go back a few years further.

Sometime in my mid-twenties, when I was on the cusp of leaving the remaining bits of home I still clung to, the city of my youth, the university in which I became myself, I started reciting the passage that quote above comes from, over and over. In full, it goes like this:

Percival has died (he died in Egypt; he died in Greece; all deaths are one death). Susan has children; Neville mounts rapidly to the conspicuous heights. Life passes. The clouds change perpetually over our houses. I do this, do that, and again do this and then that. Meeting and parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns. But if I do not nail these impressions to the board and out of the many men in me make one; exist here and now and not in streaks and patches, like scattered snow wreaths on far mountains; and ask Miss Johnson as I pass through the office about the movies and take my cup of tea and accept also my favourite biscuit, then I shall fall like snow and be wasted.

Everything I felt then now seems trivially attributable to the circumstances of the moment, all that anxiety about becoming. Nevertheless in that moment, this seemed to be the greatest challenge of life, the imperative: out of the many men in me make one. In order to do so, I felt, one needed to make the strongest of possible choices; to constrain the future actions of the self. To try by real-life effort to create an effect of the kind that Sarah Constantin describes from her button: guaranteeing future you does “exactly and only what you think you should be doing at that moment”.

It seems to me now that I misread Woolf: that I conflated the desire to make myself into a cohesive whole with the aim of holding on to the self of the moment, and therefore needing to constrain the choices of the future me. What seemed to be how one made a single self (ruling out possible negative futures) now seems both impossible — as I’ve said before, there are very few things one can’t undo, whether your method of choice be self-sabotage or laser tattoo removal — as well as undesirable. My solitary serious (and failed) attempt to act on this led me to feel as though I’d tried to commit violence against myself, as you would have it.

But anyway, to resolve and to align the choices of ones’ future are not the same thing. It seems to me that a single self ought to still have many available paths. Perhaps would just have (in itself, not in its past) coherence and clarity about that which it ‘should’ take?

Yet, say I’m sitting there now, in front of that big (presumably red) button called ‘Do as I Should’. The counter to Romans 7:19, For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Why don’t I push it? What am I afraid of?

I’m afraid that sometimes when I feel like I’m defecting, it’s actually necessary in order to be able to keep getting up in the morning on all those future days. Not always, perhaps not even often, but that the violence would be existentially destructive. Essentially, (taking all questions of the self as fundamentally about continuity through time), I seem to fear that ‘should’ would not keep up with the self temporally.

So it’s still problematic (in the sense of ‘containing a problem’) that even this new Woolfian single self is saddled with a ‘should’ that arises from some combination of intentions and experiences that might be out-of-date, for where else could intention come from but the past?

What can I do right now that isn’t at risk of this? The only neutral, non-coercive option I can see is trying to see choices that aren’t currently evident to myself. Trying to get better at thinking past the thought-stoppers.

I was struck by how often in the archives you imply a reading list, while I try to fudge it from introspection. Well, if there’s something out there that can help things get better, help us make more positive-sum deals with ourselves, trust ourselves, then I’m ready to read it. All my future selves better be grateful.

Anything to get past the continual insistence:

“Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.”

after countless exasperated pleas for a simpler and nicer world where people don’t play games with each other, i realize i may have autistically failed to account for the fact that many people enjoy playing games — @hyperdiscogirl

Here’s the thing about humans: most of the time, the things they’re optimising for are not the things they will ‘on reflection’ and when asked to verbalise claim that they’re optimising for. Anyone who optimises coherently and legibly — even a little bit — reliably stands out, is strange, is scary. (See also the Empty World Hypothesis.)

You write,

that any non-utilitarian intervention into the field of moral duty will create (utilitarian) winners and losers, and that perversion of the established order will warp the people involved. Possibly for the better, of course, but under pressure, their metal will warp any which way unless it’s a tight mould. To actually improve things, the intervention has to follow its call to the good with stopgaps for the chill draft of perverse consequences, and then follow all that with some kind of sticky coating against the effect of time and moral slippage.

It’s true that all kinds — subjects & objects; people & their norms — do strange things under pressure. But perhaps our terminology is getting in the way of our introspective access, here, to our detriment.

In my last, I promised to eventually convince you that

1. There are coherent strategies for compromise;

2. The not-totally-insane strategies are all necessary consequences of contemporary work on decision theory (especially functional decision theory, acausal normalcy, and some bargaining notions);

3. The most coherent strategies are all, in some sense, ‘utilitarian in the seminar room; deontologist in the streets’ accounts of practical ethics;

4. Most such strategies suggest ‘manners’ which do not look like current Majority Middle Class Culture; and,

5. Most such strategies do closely resemble (and justify) something like an anarchist ‘praxis’ — albeit one which most closely resonates with what Audrey Tang has called ‘conservative anarchism’.

Seen in outline form, I admit that this project is monstrous and unwieldy. Even in my head, it feels unmanageable. (The implied reading lists feel even moreso.) However, I think your points about the Hippocratic Oath give me a good way in. A bite-sized place to start.

As you say,

It’s no wonder the original Hippocratic oath spends so much time stipulating the ways in which the maker is allowed to benefit from their knowledge — given how inconvenient it can be to the bearer, the wonder is that every doctor isn’t a self-aggrandising, profit-seeking monster.

Frankly, you’re asking a fucking good question: why isn’t self-aggrandising profit-seeking what we universally see? Why aren’t doctors literally always “Pharisaic fame-hunters and degenerate players”?

By way of answer, you point to a broader regime of social/cultural persuasion, in which ‘lose now, win later’ or semi-secret ‘metaphysical winner’ is the name of the game. We motivate our Doctors to follow their special oaths to their own detriments by (credibly) promising advantage and boon. Specialisation and trade are entangled concepts, even and perhaps especially in the moral domain.

My answer, though, today, comes as a gesture towards one component of my first (outlined) point above. I claim that there exist “coherent strategies for compromise”. While it’s true that the most common such mechanisms aren’t the most coherent, they point in the direction of more & maximally coherent versions. We don’t talk about them in these terms because the most widespread instances are so ‘natural’ that we rarely think of them as strategies or compromises at all. In their degenerate form, terms like “getting by” or “living as an adult” seem far more natural. Moreover, even when instantiated in deeply imperfect ways, such compromise strategies don’t necessarily involve what I think you’d call “warp”. They’re still somewhat positive sum and mostly non-self-coercing. Not all tight moulds and sticky coatings.

As we all at this point hopefully know, modern psychology is mostly unimportant hogwash. The same goes for pretty much anything with ‘behavioural’ in its name. So let’s stick to a felt sense that we’ve both (a) previously discussed, and (b) can easily introspect about: our selves ‘against’ our selves. This is the easiest place to identify ‘natural compromise’ strategies which are of the sort that explain our Doctors. [I’ll leave generalisation of such coordination & compromise ‘strategies’ to the level of interpersonal/cultural phenomena for another day.]

Seeing the results of a lil twitter poll thread, Sarah Constantin writes

Solid majorities say that they’re usually not doing “what they think they should”… and wouldn’t opt to self-modify to always do what they think they should. Ethics & self-improvement enthusiasts, what would you say to such people?

Let’s assume that there’s no “monkey paw” fear substantially interfering with these results. That is, let’s assume that most of the 50.9% of people who said “no” to this question — “If you push the button, you are guaranteed to spend every second of the rest of your life doing exactly and only what you think you should be doing at that moment. Do you push the button?” — had in mind a hypothetical situation in which their actions were altered, rather than their desires or preferences or ought-generating mechanisms or whatever.

What’s going on here? The degree to which you are divided is the degree to which you are conquered. Are 50.9% of people saying that they’re happy being conquered? Are they saying that they’re happy — or, if not happy, somehow ‘satisfied’ — with a status quo in which they feel guilty for not doing what they themselves think that they ought to do?

No. I think what’s going on, here, is actually pretty intuitive and paradoxically coherent:

When someone asks you whether you’re currently doing what you think you should be doing, they’re asking you to play along with a linguistic & social game which is premised on the existence and operation of a singular, identifiable, legible ‘You’.

For a human, there is no such unified self. ‘You’ is a lossy compression.

Most of language and social life works this way. We tell stories to ourselves and each other about our selves and each other, and these stories usually involve protagonist characters with legible goals and motivations.

Yet almost everyone telling those stories can also, privately, acknowledge that they are often surprised or disappointed my their own actions and motivations. They know that they can waver and be uncertain; that one feels ‘mixed’ feelings almost all of the time. And almost everyone feels some amount of conflict with (and distance from) their intertemporal ‘self’: shame at past actions, confusion as they examine past decisions, a sense of ‘growth’ and ‘change’ — of being alienated from one’s past self — which is only sometimes positive.

Most people handle the conflict between “narrative of coherent protagonist” and “phenomenological access to incoherence”, on some level, by doing a mixture of two things:

1. they flinch away from any kind of introspection which would reveal the incoherence too starkly; and,
2. they make deals, trades, and promises within themselves until a coarse-grained/higher-level ‘coherence’ can be reestablished.

We all know the latter phenomenon. “I’ll let myself watch TV once I’ve sent these emails,” for example, or “I won’t eat any more chocolate today, but I’ll let myself have some tomorrow”. We give ourselves treats. We give ourselves punishments.

Most people (sometimes) defect on the promises they make to themselves, and feel bad about their defections. Most people have adopted some kind of a system for Mostly Getting By in the world despite the existence of conflicting desires, motivations, goals, and worldviews “within themselves”. For most people, that system is one with limits on intrapersonal violence.

In Sarah Constantin’s poll, 50.9% of people are signalling — with varying degrees of ‘self’-consciousness — that whatever system they’ve adopted for dealing with the lack of unification involves some amount of pre-commitment to not do things similar to pressing this hypothetical button. It’s a kind of ‘self’-‘acceptance’ rule, for weird & mutually-assured-destruction senses of the words ‘acceptance’ and ‘self’. Something like, no part of me will engage in an action which would completely destroy some other part of me, because that way lies annihilation. It would, perhaps, be ‘rational’ to press the button in the hypothetical, because it’s a decisive move. A pivotal act. Most people, though, are not so good at decoupling from context and answering the hypothetical as stated. They signal, even in the hypothetical, their commitment to a personal, private pact.

In most cases, a tacit self-agreement of this form involves broader intrapersonal cooperations. One generates feelings of resistance in one’s viscera. One erects half-conscious defences against practices which look (to your parliament of subagents) as if they might lead to bleaching all the corals of your inner world and calling it perfection.

In the modern world, most people — including myself — do a bad job of keeping their internal ‘rule of law but not by men’ cooperation system going in a reliable way. A lot of the time, the concept of personal integrity is entangled with promises & debts; external forces do substantial and often deliberate damage to our ability to keep promises to ourselves. And so (at least in self-report) most end up deferring to those external forces: “people report feeling most authentic when they are doing what external society values, not when they are acting in accord with their actual personalities” (Baumeister 56). Yet none of this should be taken as evidence that the system is fully absent, or could not be better if circumstances were different or details were re-engineered.

If things can be worse, they can also be better. The direction towards self-consistency and self-cooperation is one in which

1. “You” can make non-coercive, positive-sum deals ‘with yourself’; and,
2. “You” can trust yourself to keep the bargain made.

And so the idealised Doctor is one who, in taking an oath, has verbalised and socialised an always-already internal compact. A compact from which ‘they’ would have no desire to defect. They’ve made a deal with themselves, in that place deep within their soul where their subagents argue, debate, listen to one another, and eventually agree that it’s in everyone’s collective interest to do X. In such a case, the ‘motivation’ to follow special moral rules isn’t entangled with self-destruction, or self-abnegation. It is, instead, a natural consequence. Stopping for the drunk young man slumped in the archway is merely a positive externality.

As Eric Cantona once said,

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for the sport. Soon the science will not only be able to slow down the ageing of the cells, soon the science will fix the to the state. And so, we become eternal. Only accidents, crimes, wars will still kill us. But unfortunately crimes and wars will multiply. I love football.

Once, getting off the train on a summer evening in Glasgow central station, my cousin, a GP, was there to meet me as planned but looking nervously around. “There’s a festival on, they’ve been drinking all day” she tells me. There’s a young man slumped up ahead, in the archway through which we must pass to exit. It’s all a joke to me, her middle-aged discomfort in this rowdy, undignified crowd, until she clarifies: if she sees anyone in need of medical aid, she’ll have to stop and wait with them until an ambulance can get there, through peak hour traffic no less.

It’s a game of roulette for her, going out on a Friday night, with other people’s choices setting the odds. Is this particular young lad responsive? He sits up when she talks to him; she decides it’s ok for us to go on.

But of course, the upshot of this case of manners isn’t that there’s now someone on hand whenever someone collapses in, say, the neon glow of a nightclub. No, of course, it’s that the average doctor probably spends very little time out clubbing. It’s no wonder the original Hippocratic oath spends so much time stipulating the ways in which the maker is allowed to benefit from their knowledge - given how inconvenient it can be to the bearer, the wonder is that every doctor isn’t a self-aggrandising, profit-seeking monster. The intended effect, to make the swearer pick up a burden only they are fit to carry, to in some sense lose where they might win, would warp quickly into Pharisaic fame-hunters and degenerate players.

Instead, it must convince them - either that they should genuinely lose now, to win later, or (and I’m not sure that this really is different in the end) that they are metaphysical winners.

The oath, by the way, forswears both abortion and compassionate euthanasia. Of course, it’s all been tidied up, “modernised” and the version your friendly neighbourhood doctor spoke upon their graduation likely said nothing about either (or about patronage to Apollo or providing free medical tuition for their teacher’s sons, for that matter). Yet anti-abortion campaigners largely aren’t running around crying that doctors are breaking the real Hippocratic oath. It’s accepted then, that these manners are subject to social change on some timescale. Perhaps much of what such oaths achieve could be accurately described as moral lag. One can’t change one’s egregore too quickly, if the full weight of those past, one’s duty and gratitude to them, is brought to bear on the decision.

With an apology for dragging out your neat example for very little gain, I guess what I’m saying is something along the lines of this: that any non-utilitarian intervention into the field of moral duty will create (utilitarian) winners and losers, and that perversion of the established order will warp the people involved. Possibly for the better, of course, but under pressure, their metal will warp any which way unless it’s a tight mould. To actually improve things, the intervention has to follow its call to the good with stopgaps for the chill draft of perverse consequences, and then follow all that with some kind of sticky coating against the effect of time and moral slippage.

You left me with a question, of how to steelman a case for such interventions – framing them as attempts to “retrain our reflexive fire-starting tendencies”, intersecting or even counter to the moral backbone of emotion. Deontology in the streets, you say, but not virtue ethics, which might be a more comfortable fit with that emotional backbone?

Today: a zeroth draft; a few parts; the beginning of a series.

§ 1. We Set Fire To Things

“How many decisions of meaning do we actually make,” you ask, “in our lives?”

It’s true; we’re watery bundles. Sinew, nerve, reflex, habit. Even when we play at being cautious and careful, as you say,

It’s just we’re a mess. We set fire to things simply out of curiosity. Every generation in living memory has been at risk of running off the end of the S-curve, and we’re just the latest to spend our twenties flirting with it.

And, as you said months ago, in a different context,

If we’re not aiming at enlightenment (i.e. the renunciation of the world is not in play) then perhaps emotion is good. The Good, even. It’s hard to find a utilitarian who doesn’t make use of it for a moral backbone these days. Absent god, it’s pretty hard to know where else to look.

Here’s one space where that “a moral backbone” — emotion — intersects with our attempts to re[s]train our own reflexive fire-starting tendencies:

§ 2. Law and Manners

Recently, The Econtalk Podcast turned its attention old essay by a man who was an archetype of Upper Class Britishness in name, title, and orientation: the Right Honourable Lord John Fletcher Moulton, Baron Moulton, GBE, KCB, PC, FRS, FRAS. In 1918 — or perhaps 1919; we’re not sure — Old Mate Moulton gave an after-dinner speech titled ‘Law and Manners’. He opened his speech — forgive the length! — as follows:

In order to explain this extraordinary title I must ask you to follow me in examining the three great domains of Human Action. First comes the domain of Positive Law, where our actions are prescribed by laws binding upon us which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of Free Choice, which includes all those actions as to which we claim and enjoy complete freedom. But between these two there is a third large and important domain in which there rules neither Positive Law nor Absolute Freedom. In that domain there is no law which inexorably determines our course of action, and yet we feel that we are not free to choose as we would. The degree of this sense of a lack of complete freedom in this domain varies in every case. It grades from a consciousness of a Duty nearly as strong as Positive Law, to a feeling that the matter is all but a question of personal choice. Some might wish to parcel out this domain into separate countries, calling one, for instance, the domain of Duty, another the domain of Public Spirit, another the domain of Good Form; but I prefer to look at it as all one domain, for it has one and the same characteristic throughout — it is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself.

One of the reasons why I have chosen this as the subject on which to speak is that I have spent my life as a commissioner for delimiting the frontier line which divides this domain from the realm of Positive Law. I have had to decide so frequently whether Law could say, ‘You must,’ or regretfully to say, ‘I must leave it to you.’ This is the land in which all those whom the Law cannot reach take refuge. It might be thought from such a description that I wished to annex that country and bring it under the rule of Positive Law. That is not the case. The infinite variety of circumstances surrounding the individual and rightly influencing his action make it impossible to subject him in all things to rules rigidly prescribed and duly enforced. Thus there was wisely left the intermediate domain which, so far as Positive Law is concerned, is a land of freedom of action, but in which the individual should feel that he was not wholly free. This country which lies between Law and Free Choice I always think of as the domain of Manners. To me, Manners in this broad sense signifies the doing that which you should do although you are not obliged to do it. I do not wish to call it Duty, for that is too narrow to describe it, nor would I call it Morals for the same reason. It might include both, but it extends beyond them. It covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.

For Moulton — and for Russ Roberts & Michael Munger commenting on Moulton — we ought to attend to the so-called “domain of manners” for the following reason: while we all have a set of reflexes, we can partly cultivate and re-form those impulses. Such ‘cultivation’ happens through effort, habit, and self-enforced obedience to (arbitrary) rules. We can, says Moulton (& Roberts & Munger), train ourselves to feel different emotions about different (potential) actions. This is true — says M(&R&M) — even though it’s implausible that we’ll become more deliberatively-Good-Maximising in each individual moment. The thoughts and actions that we inscribe on our hearts — consciously at first — become, with time, habit, and then reflex. From Marcus Aurelius: “such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts” (Meditations 5.16).

For our purposes, let’s take a version of this as given. We watery, rubbery, mostly-monkey humans can — with effort — partly change our dispositions. Doing so is easier than ‘magically becoming more deliberative’ in every moment.

Moulton’s description of “obedience to the unenforceable” is, I think, most naturally read as a call to live as if bound by laws that we set for ourselves. What Moulton is making is a seemingly paradoxical suggestion: we can end up making more & better “decisions of meaning” in our lives by accepting that most of the time, we don’t really make decisions at all. We improve our collective impact by each, as individuals, spending most of our effort on making marginal alterations to what you call “the rubbery contours of the self”. Constant conscious calculation is a doomed project; becoming a person whose reflexes tend more towards The Good is not.

The trouble, as I see it, is that Moulton’s account — in isolation — gives us basically no way to decide on what ‘manners’ we ought to cultivate. If we are to bind ourselves to laws that we set for ourselves, how do we go about generating the unenforceable-but-obeyed? What’s the framework for evaluating a potential ‘manner’?

More importantly, if we take metaphors of cultivation as ‘ha ha only serious’ talk, evaluating potential ‘manners’ must take account of an ecology of agents. It’s not just a question of ‘should I bind myself to this rule?’; it’s also a question of ‘should I bind myself to this rule, given that I’m a member of overlapping communities of agents, each — to greater and lesser degrees — also binding themselves to rules?’.

So. We look around. It’s obvious. We take stupid risks. We’re not okay. We don’t trust each other, or ourselves. You hope

that as this generation ages we’ll do what our parents and grandparents and all the rest did, and compromise just enough to stretch out the curve and pass it on.

Eventually (in ascending order of strangeness) I want to convince you that:

1. There are coherent strategies for compromise;
2. The not-totally-insane strategies are all necessary consequences of contemporary work on decision theory (especially functional decision theory, acausal normalcy, and some bargaining notions);
3. The most coherent strategies are all, in some sense, ‘utilitarian in the seminar room; deontologist in the streets’ accounts of practical ethics;
4. Most such strategies suggest ‘manners’ which do not look like current Majority Middle Class Culture; and,
5. Most such strategies do closely resemble (and justify) something like an anarchist ‘praxis’ — albeit one which most closely resonates with what Audrey Tang has called ‘conservative anarchism’.

As you’ll see, I’m mostly interested in articulating all of this in terms of inter-temporal, intra-personal, and inter-cultural interactions. (And I think this also connects to some work on communication.)

(btw, as jargon: let your ‘culture’ be, at least in part, the egregore which suggests your ambient ‘manners’; the things that — by upbringing and context, not deliberation — you feel you ‘ought’ to do, even though “there is no one to make you do it but yourself”.)

In what remains of this letter, as foundation for points 1-5 above, I want to sketch a case study in ‘manners’. More importantly, I want to tease out — from the case study — a recognition that there are spaces in which we (as a society) seem to demand deep commitment to non-utilitarian ‘manners’ from some specific people, even when those manners would be harmful if universally adopted. And then, I want you to think about how we might go about justifying such ‘manners’ on utilitarian grounds (via coördination).

§ 3. The Case Study: ‘Professional’ ‘Ethics’

There’s a traditional view of ‘Professional Ethics’, stylised as follows:

1. When you enter into a profession, there’s a set of standards that you have to uphold.
2. The set of standards — the set of rules that you, when acting in your profession, are required to uphold — are different to the standards you’re required to uphold in other circumstances.
3. The professional standards are more stringent than Normal Life in some respects.
4. Some of the standards are legally enforced. Others are socially maintained.
5. Not every professional standard is equally legible. Some are little more than vibe.
6. All of this is good, and sensible, and justified.

Take the concrete archetype: a medical doctor. Doctors have a relatively well-defined set of professional ethics. There are legal standards that doctors have to uphold, but which non-doctors don’t have to uphold. There’s a set of licensing standards, too; an overlapping legal magisterium in which the profession governs itself. There’s a set of legible-to-other-doctors (but not legally enshrined) norms. A set of more broadly-socially-legible norms also. And then there’s an ancient oath. In most juristictions today, the Hippocratic Oath cuts across all of the above. You can be criminally liable for medical malpractice, sure, but you can also be symbolically liable; you can be shamed, be spiritually in the breach. And as anyone who’s had experience with doctors knows, the effect of this is sometimes weird.

(This is not just true of doctors, but let’s focus on the doctor case for now.)

Last year, I got mild pericarditis from a covid vaccine. (It was worth it; the vax is great.) Because chest pain is stressful for everyone, I went to the emergency room three times. Twice, I was admitted. In both instances, once I was admitted, the standard for me leaving the hospital was in practice higher than the standard it was to admit me. You walk in, complain of chest pain. Quite quickly, everyone involved knows that the case is (a) moderate, (b) explained, and (c) absolutely fine. But now the doctor has seen you. You’re their patient. You can’t just leave, because they have a duty of care — legal, but also moral & professional-ethical — which they’ve internalised as having ‘naturally’ come into being in the moment of their interaction with you. They’re not just A Doctor, now, but Your Doctor; you’re not just a person, but A Patient.

While there is a kind of precautionary impulse in operation — no doctor wants to be reckless, or be seen to be reckless — the generating function for that impulse is what I want to focus on. It’s not only that doctors are worried about being sued. It’s that doctors are worried about being bad doctors. This latter concern is at least in part a consequence of a relational ethics that has been entangled with, embedded in, and constituted by an institution. Being a ‘Bad Doctor’ doesn’t ontologically reduce to ‘failing to maximise welfare’, or even ‘failing to maximise the welfare of the patients in your care’.

The two times I was admitted, there was shared-but-not-common knowledge that it was a combination of “optimal resource allocation be damned” and “the details of this case mean that we Really Must Do X”. In the ER, every doctor and nurse said the same two things, in two very different modes:

1. “We’ve seen a tonne of these cases, from young men who look exactly like you, and it’s totally fine” (this said casually, informally; like normal humans), and
2. “Because it’s one of these vaccine side effects, we do have to formally flag it in The System, and we Should Probably Not Let You Go” (this said in a role-based deference to an invisible).

The time that I wasn’t admitted, it felt like I was encouraging a conspiracy of reasonableness. Me, a doctor, and a nurse. Me explicitly saying “you guys have better things to do, right?” and “you seem so busy, I wouldn’t want to waste your time” while gesturing to the quietest ER room I’ve ever seen. Me pushing further, as if merely curious: “so what’s the process for a case getting added to the database?”. Them picking on my not-so-subtle hints that I would be super happy if they acted like less like Medical Professionals in that moment (and skipped the relational performances that they were in-theory obliged to enact).

It’s well established, I think, that we don’t want doctors to think ‘globally’. In virtue fiction, such as The West Wing, we also want them to make the earnest case for their non-utilitarian thinking to their patronising & sexist interlocutors:

President Bartlet: Alright, Eisenmenger’s Syndrome.

First Lady: It’s a cyanotic heart condition. There’s something called ventricular septal defect.

PB: The Ayatollah’s son has it.

FL: Am I dreaming, or are you talking to me about foreign policy? You’re not worried the sky’s gonna fall down?

PB: No, but I’m concerned about spousal abuse.

FL: What’s the problem Jed? Don’t tell me there’s a problem with State.

PB: The only doctor available won’t do it.

FL: He’s Jewish?

PB: Persian.

FL: He doesn’t have a choice.

PB: Abbey —

FL: He doesn’t. Doctors aren’t instruments of the State, and they’re not allowed to choose patients on spec.

PB: I can’t order him to do it.

FL: Yes you can.

PB: Through the power vested in me by you?

FL: Samuel Mudd set Booth’s leg after he shot Lincoln. Doctors are liable in this country [if] they don’t treat the patient right in front of them.

PB: Just for the record, this is why we don’t talk about foreign policy — which we do, and you don’t think we do it enough —

FL: Why?

PB: Because Samuel Mudd was tried and convicted of treason for setting that leg.

FL: So?

PB: What ‘so’?!

FL: So that’s the way it goes. You set the leg.

PB: ‘The patient right in front of them.’

FL: Yes.

PB: Alright. Go back to the sewing thing.

FL: It’s the Woman’s … never mind.

Notice the slide. A concern over global effects (and a human’s strongly-held convictions) transitions to a brief reminder of a profession’s special legal liability, and then almost immediately to reinforcement of a kind of relational, quasi-spiritual obligation.

Here in our virtue fiction, we don’t want to hear the (reasonable) argument that a doctor tried for treason would lose all future opportunities to help other patients, or that one who saves the life of a war criminal might cause more deaths than they save. We want to hear deference to professional ethics and special relation.

If everyone acted the way that doctors are supposed to act in the way that First Lady Abbey Bartlet is suggesting above, I think it’s pretty obvious that society would be worse off. And yet we want some people to do more than merely act this way when ‘at work’. We want them to naturalise a way of being this way in every moment of their lives. Just as a cop is never ‘not a cop’ (even when off-duty), and a priest doesn’t breach the seal of the confessional the moment they leave the church, doctors have the ethics of their profession inscribed on their souls.

The question is: what’s the coarse-grained steelman case for such a thing?

More opportunities to encounter a risk – more magpies on the move, you say.

How many decisions of meaning do we actually make, in our lives? I mean, how many that transform the course of who we are or will become, rather than ones that simply stretch the daily experience of being ourselves slightly further from the mean for a month or two, before the rubbery contours of the self make themselves known and spring back to their previous form?

I ask because it seems to have something in common with your question about how we think about risk. Decisions start feeling a little more watery as time passes and the realisation dawns that, provided you’re not a first responder of some kind, many of them can be undone or even will undo themselves with a little inattention or outright neglect. And so, in fact, the more of them we make the less individual concern we put into reasoning each to its conclusion.

Perhaps the problem with our mental risk processes is that we treat them sort of like decisions – because by the very nature of risk, most of the ones we’re aware of will land us, right back at ourselves, in the same kind of life we had before. I mean, are you just as haunted by this experiment as I am? What this tells me is that we (and I’ll throw myself under the bus with the rest of my fellow cyclists here, sans helmet and all), correctly or not, assess our social success as the primary threat to our wellbeing. In as much as we’re actually bothering to assess anything else at all, it rates considerably below ‘looking ok’. I write from the end of a day in late May, when the sun was out and the people in this slice of the world were sitting half naked in every park in the city, looking very ok, beautiful in fact, and for all the world like they were happy.

I could try to trace that idea of social success through Darwin to Malthus and the early political economists. But instead, going back to (paraphrase) your idea: that whatever they might look like, if they are taking reckless risks, they can’t be ok. Those decisions, where we look at risk and decide it isn’t likely to affect our trajectory – I wish I were wrong but I think those can be made with the confidence and self-satisfaction of a secure personality as much as they can be made by someone suffering and afraid.

I don’t mean this as some Nietzschean nightmare, where the happiness of the masses is the problem. When I think about what a collective of people being gentle and kind looks like, it is one which shares this feature.

It’s just we’re a mess. We set fire to things simply out of curiosity. Every generation in living memory has been at risk of running off the end of the S-curve, and we’re just the latest to spend our twenties flirting with it. I’m hoping (and it’s perhaps not my preferred vision but that’s just as it should be) that as this generation ages we’ll do what our parents and grandparents and all the rest did, and compromise just enough to stretch out the curve and pass it on.

Canberra is infamous — among its inhabitants — for the aggression of its magpies.

We track ‘attacks’ and ‘warnings’ on a website. We trade grim stories, share desperate tips. In swooping season, cyclists change their commuting habits to avoid the ‘dangerous’ ‘hot spots’, and runners — acting out of some Skinner Box superstition, hoping to make themselves ‘familiar’ to the black-and-white demons — begin to run the same route, in the same outfit, at the same time, daily. Seasoned Canberrans issue stern warnings to New Arrivals. ‘Born Here’ locals treat statements of casual dismissal with the same admixture of horror and awe as they would any other kind of ‘Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome’ declaration. I swear: if you laugh and say “magpies aren’t that bad” in a crowd of Canberra locals, it’s like you just pulled up to the bar on a classic motorbike in a t-shirt and jeans with no helmet in sight. Peel off those sunglasses, bad boy. You can have any brew you want, as long as it’s a Corona.

When I first moved here, the Magpie Fear seemed bizarre. I figured it was some kind of collective paranoia or culture-bound low-grade seasonal mass hysteria. I’d lived around magpies all my life without trouble. This was, surely, the government bureaucrats’ equivalent of a dancing plague or a fear of penis-stealing witches. Just as culture-bound. Just as inexplicable.

Then Spring came, and I understood.

The thing is, Canberra’s magpies aren’t actually (as far as I know) any more dangerous than magpies anywhere else in Australia. We just have a lot more of them. Canberra is ‘The Bush Capital’: even our inner city suburbs are dense with trees (and hence dense with birds, including magpies). Per capita, per acre of public space, there are just more opportunities to encounter a magpie.

You write that

As the modern world of dating crashes into our shiny new language models, we’ll be right back at Meet hot babes in your local area! Maybe our chatbots will flirt with their chatbots and the dates they agree to will be smoothly integrated with our google calendars, and everyone will be perfectly sorted into their quiet, loving pairs.

All I think of is Žižek, describing ‘ideal’ sex in modernity:

The Guardian, the British newspaper, asked me, “Is romance still alive today?” And my idea, my answer to them was let’s imagine an ideal sexual situation today. Let’s say I meet a lady; we are attracted to each other; we say okay, you are — all the usual stuff — your place, my place, whatever we meet there. Then, what happens then? I come with, she comes with her plastic penis, electric dildo. I come with some horrible thing. I saw it. It’s called something like ‘stimulating training unit’, whatever. It’s basically a plastic vagina. A hole. But you can — it’s wonderful technologically — you can regulate everything. How much it squeezes you. How strongly it shakes and so on. So my idea of a perfect date is the following one. We meet. Then I put, she puts her plastic penis dildo into my ‘stamina training unit’ is the name of this product. Into my plastic vagina. We plug them in and the machines are doing it for us. They’re buzzing in the background and I’m free to do whatever I want and she. We have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. What can be — we paid our superego full tribute. Machines are doing — and now where would have been here a true romance. Let’s say I talk with a lady with the lady because we really like each other. And, you know, when I’m pouring her tea or she to me quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touching. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usual oppressive sex where you worry about performance. No, all that is taken care of by the stupid machines. That would be ideal sex for me today.

How many people are putting themselves in relationships where they’re having sex in order to get hugs? How many people are terrified (not excited) precisely because they haven’t “paid [their] superego full tribute”?

It’s true, as you say, that “it takes strength to be gentle and kind”. Maybe this explains most of it, where by ‘it’ I mean ‘the pervasive, collective, death-drive, risk-taking irrationality’. But if this is true, is the median human getting less gentle & less kind? Or are there just more opportunities to encounter a risk?

I was at a party a few weeks ago. A friend of mine went up to a stranger and said: ‘[our mutual friend] said we were going to love each other! Why are we going to love each other?’. That stranger and his girlfriend spent the rest of the party in the kitchen, door closed, breaking up.

Being single makes it easy to take a posture of more intense openness. New people are exciting, not threatening. Each of them holds a tiny fragment of a possibility that they could be loveable, which even if not pursued, still represents a worldview in which salvation comes from the unknown. This is what love songs get right but dating advice gets wrong: most of the search is for the lovable rather than love.

Of course, while these others aren’t threatening to us, we can be threatening to them. It’s an experience every woman alone has had, where a girlfriend is thrust conversationally — sometimes even physically — in between you and the unknown. We feel maligned (‘I wasn’t even flirting’), judged (‘as though I would hit on him even after I knew he’s not available’), and sometimes, yes, disappointed. They’re defensively drawing a line around themselves and their existing relationships. Sometimes that’s a “quiet life at home with a person who they’ve teamed up with…for life” and sometimes it’s dysfunction and drama. The stagnancy of it itches at the skin of those forced to wear the exclusion.

As the modern world of dating crashes into our shiny new language models, we’ll be right back at Meet hot babes in your local area! Maybe our chatbots will flirt with their chatbots and the dates they agree to will be smoothly integrated with our google calendars, and everyone will be perfectly sorted into their quiet, loving pairs.

Perhaps then, once the chatbots are just a little better, we could stop building better and better chatbots. But maybe those new power couples would keep at it, to pay their inner-city rent and get their kids into the best schools and pin down those directorships. We’re right back at the question of enlightenment values: why so many profess and profane.

It’s a cliche to say people do terrible things for love, but I’d put it that’s for it as often as it is for want of it. I don’t think they all need hugs. I think some of them are afraid, terrified even, of losing the hugs they are getting. Nobody wants to go back to the dark years (or back on the apps). It’s very hard not to crave the felt possibilities for self-transformation that romantic love offers, and to forget, just like a bad trip, that transformation isn’t immune to false realisations.

I’ve been sitting on this response for more than a week now, wondering if I actually have anything original to say about either love or success. After all, if I know so much about it, why am I on my own tonight?

To your question: if life is good and should continue, why so many reckless existential risks? Maybe let’s stick with the classic answer: it takes strength to be gentle and kind.

I buried my grandfather a few hours ago. Cracks will spiderweb across the surface of the altar while I’m asleep, I’m sure. There’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home. For now, though, this is context (not eulogy). I’m totally in the full heat of this one, so I haven’t bothered to tune. I’ll leave the eulogising for another time, when a self-that-is-reflective is less clearly absent from the Parliament. In quella parte dove sta memoria, I have, today, only fragments and borrowed text.

You write of the millenarian — of the void and the vertigo; the crying out the end is nigh — and I’m afraid that any discussion of a fire-and-brimstone sense of being “cosmically significant” is beyond me. While it is, perhaps, today, of all days, especially beyond me, it is in general not a feeling I feel. I tend not to feel any sense of extraordinary power w/r/t AI problems, nor any overwhelming sense that “we’re all gonna die”. I don’t feel as if I’m staring down the barrel of an accelerationist gun. I don’t fear the black ball in the urn in my viscera and I never (as a result) find myself mustering or suppressing a go-down-fighting grim resolve. I also feel no sense of setting keel to breakers. No sense of a numb nightmare, or a light in Troy,either.

What I do feel, quite often, is a profound confusion at the (expressed & enacted) endorsement of a ‘do bad to do good’ moral attitude. There’s a tonne of people who seem to think that there’s an existentially-catastrophic shoggoth visible on the horizon. They broadly seem to agree that “demon summoning is easy, and angel summoning is much harder”. And then they seem to think — as if it’s obvious and natural to think this — “well, you know, shit, I guess we’ve gotta do as much practical summoning research as possible”. They keep putting their foot down, hard, on the pedal.

They just don’t seem okay.

Nobody seems okay.

They seem somehow dissociated. Alienated from a basic, commonsense, innocent, naïve version of sensibleness. The thing that says “just don’t do the harmful thing” or “you’re even overthinking overthinking”.

In Fanged Noumena, Nick Land writes of a time in his life in which he chose, and saw, and descended into, his own insanity:

I stole Vauung’s name because it was unused, on the basis of an exact qabbalistic entitlement.

Yet, at least ‘up’ here, Vauung still confuses itself with me, with ruins and tatters.

This might change. Names have powers and destinies.

I have decided to let Vauung inherit the entire misfortune of my past (a perverse generosity at best). Its story might never emerge otherwise. There are rotten threads which even I can follow backwards for decades, but they soon cease to be interesting. Better to begin more recently (‘better’ in Vauung’s sense, and so no different from ‘worse’).

It had pledged itself unreservedly to evil and insanity. Its tool of choice, at that time, the sacred substance amphetamine, of which much can be said, but mostly elsewhere.

After perhaps a year of fanatical abuse it was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane.

A few examples may suffice, in no particular order.

On one occasion - indicative even to itself - it was in a car being driven by the sister of its thing (the ruin). It was night, on a motorway. The journey took several hours. During the previous night, Christmas Eve, it had followed its usual course into fanatically prolonged artificial insomnia. It had spent the time devoted to futile ‘writing’ practices - it still pretended to be ‘getting somewhere’ and was buoyant with ardent purpose, but that is another story (an intolerably intricate and pointless one). It was accompanied to the early hours by a repetitive refrain ‘from next door’ - a mediocre but plausible rock song whose insistent lyric circled around the words: “Going to hell.”

It knew these words were for it, and laughed idiotically.

“They must really love the new CD they got for Christmas,” it thought, equally idiotically.

In the car it listened to the radio for the whole journey. Each song was different, the genres varied, the quality seemingly above average, the themes tending to the morbid.

“This is a cool radio station,” it said to its sister.

“The radio isn’t on,” its sister replied, concerned.

Vauung learnt that the ruin’s unconscious contained an entire pop industry.

The ruin learnt that it had arrived, somewhere on the motorway. (629–30)

That parenthetical phrase — “indicative even to itself” — bounces around in my skull, sometimes, when I worry about the anti-safety ‘safety’ crowd. The fact that you can see your own irrationality without the self-awareness being enough to save you.

I don’t know how else to express my opposition to the ‘obliged to do bad to do good’ lifeworld, except, I guess, by way of a gesture towards a reflection that I share with John Darnielle, about the experience of being fourteen years old: things get be pretty bad — really bad — but they’re never gonna feel insurmountably bad if you’re having a lot of sex. There’s a limit to how much anyone, or anything, or any idea, can hurt you when you’re getting laid on the reg.

Friends who don’t have a clue

Well-meaning teachers

But down in your arms, in your arms

I am a wild creature.

I’m past those years; I didn’t really talk about them when I was in them. I think you are, too, (and didn’t, either). The ghosts only come back into view when I’m ‘home’, driving too-familiar roads at night, facing a ‘dramatic’ parent.

Maybe some folks just need a hug or something, y’know?

(And maybe the fact that you thought a scientology personality test would be a funny first date was itself a sign of good health, in spite of your results?)

For all his faults, Ryan Holiday seems to understand a little of the thing I’m pointing towards when he writes that

It’s as if we don’t want to admit that we can’t do this alone, or that success may require dealing with the soft parts of ourselves, the uncomfortable, sticky parts we’d rather pretend weren’t there. We have trouble seeing the ramifications of our personal lives on our professional lives and that the best way to navigate the public world is to master and find contentment in the private one.

The myth is of the lone creative entrepreneur battling the world without an ally in sight. A defiant combination of Atlas and Sisyphus and David, wrestling a Goliath-sized mass of doubters and demons. In reality, I’ve found that nearly every person I admire—every person I’ve met who strikes me as being someone who I would like to one day be like—lives a quiet life at home with a person who they’ve teamed up with…for life. The reason this one person strikes us as special, I find, is because they’re really two people.

The world is swirling with coincidences and the faces of famous people. Bill Nighy is my only real life celebrity sighting and I can tell you he does the same gesture with his hands in real life as he does when he’s talking sweet nothings about art.

Another coincidence, or an idea in the ether. I played a video game the other day. In it, you progressed through the six paths of reincarnation - were shown and forced to chose between material goods and sensations. To pass through one level, I had to accept that heaven, or the ideal of constant pleasure was incoherent or at least inconsistent with actual human desires, and choose to leave. In the next, I was asked amid flames and grotesque, twisted limbs to reconsider fear of hell as fear of embodied pain, and to relinquish this as well.

In one ‘world’ that I passed through, the monsters kept reappearing and I kept slaughtering them and the voice kept booming in my ears through the headset, telling me that the game itself was calculated to make this experience seem real and it would go on for as long as I kept believing it was real but just as the images and noises were merely information presented on a given wavelength, so too was what I perceived as the material world outside of the game. In order to move on, I had to stop slaughtering the monsters in the way, and instead fight the only remaining barrier, my own ego. Which I then did, in a manner reminiscent of the final fantasy games of my youth.

I emerged from the building feeling elated.

I’ve spent time in the past, hanging out on the edge of groups that reject material things: in houses where the food is the same budget curry most nights, where galleries and brunches are dismissed as being poor value. But of course, these aren’t the first social groups to embrace asceticism. It’s also not a co-incidence that that so many of the millenarians did too. What I think the modern ones miss, at least, is the value of environmental change on the emotional state. It seems ignorant of how the mind builds the self: by keeping emotion stored in sensations. From the sight of an object to a sound or a taste or a movement, the set of memories associated with that build, over time, our patterns. To live the ascetic life, to purposefully remove the variety of sensations one is exposed to, reduces the likelihood that these emotions will be recovered. It smooths the path of experience.

In the height of the personality test fad (where Myers-Briggs and Enneagrams were popular choices for dating app bios), I thought it would be funny to invite a guy I was chatting with to come get the ultimate personality test: the Scientology one. So we met for the first time in the foyer of the local church and were obediently led to the corner of the visitor’s room where we filled in our tests at our separate school desks. Mostly it was full of the usual, self-reporting social behaviours. The only unusual feature was there were a bunch of questions about how often one thought about the past. I thought about it a lot, I said. Because I did. I’d moved away and hometown faces kept floating into my vision, both incorporeally and attached to strangers’ bodies. Gestures and habits and vibes in these new foreign places seemed borrowed from moments in my previous life.

My date got his results back first. He did pretty well, he could be successful in the church, it would help him to read Dianetics.

My turn.

The woman who was explaining my results was genuinely concerned. She told me my results showed I was terribly, dangerously depressed and needed their help immediately. She asked me if I was on any medications, and seemed relieved that I was not. If I wouldn’t buy a copy of Dianetics, would I at least go to get it from the library? The church could help me, and I really needed help.

While we were waiting for our results we’d watched some of the explanatory videos that were set up on display screens around the visitor’s room. Scientology, it turned out, teaches that traumatic memories are stored differently in the brain to normal, day-to-day memories, and the way to remove their traumatic power is to fully bring them to mind in every detail, with a guide, at which point they will be remembered neutrally and harmlessly. Dwelling too much on the past is a sign of deep and troubling unresolved trauma. All of which boiled down to: one rather awkward debrief with my date after we left.

Imagine now a map of ideologies. The intersections (between, say, Jesus’s ‘love your enemies’ and the fourth stage of metta bhavana, or the hippy and Scientology’s shared distaste for pharmaceutical interventions) and the divergences. The odd chasm, where ideas almost but do not meet (compare L. Ron Hubbard’s theory of memory and Proust’s). Then there are the parts of the map marked ‘Beware’, no matter which route one takes to them.

One of those is apocalyptic threats.

I defer, of course, to the experts on the timelines. But deferring doesn’t seem to equate to believing it in my bones, and at this moment I’m not on the street in my robes, in the crowd of flagellates and hangers-on, crying out the end is nigh. Crying out the end is nigh changes everything about how one ought to live, and what one should be willing to do. I wish the DANGER lights could flash faster and brighter.

In the short term, sure, we will drown in ‘content’. But I’m convinced the real struggle at our core will still be between seeking sensation and turning away from it. I mean, human sensation - which perhaps is Midjourney or ChatGTP as a lover, but we’ve put up a fight against pokies and heroin and all the other cheap ways of getting high in the past. It might just as well be ordinary love.

There is a void, near to us always, which comes into view when I think of the boundaries of the known world: the mystery of something rather than nothing. I can call upon that vertigo more and more easily these days, although it’s still impossible to convey it effectively to others. Everything we’ve built is as vulnerable to that void as buildings on a fault line.

(Warning: this one is a rabbit hole, so, please.)

While I (usually) (try to) keep my work out of these letters, today I’m not sure I can. You write of Eric Hoel’s theory that “dreams are a tool of the mind to avoid overfitting, in the terminology of machine learning”. Clean analogies between neural networks and artificial neural networks are not so clean. In the interests of being “curious and precise about everyone’s incuriosity and compulsive vagueness” (to quote you quoting me), I want to talk about a thing that sits at the intersection of machine learning, overfitting, human desire, agency, stimulus, and a (kind of) collective dreamworld. A thing that strips humans of their higher-order agency even as it purports to offer novel affordances for (gaunt, lower-order) ‘agency’. A thing that does so by way of abstract horniness, vivid colour, and the endless scroll.

Yes, yes. I know. You know.

I am become low cross-entropy, destroyer of worlds.

Today, I want to talk about the phrases that appear in the text prompts on the trending page of the midjourney community page.

First, let’s lay down some common ground.

1. I have A Lot of views on ‘AI Safety’, ‘AI Alignment’, ‘AI Interpretability’, and ‘AI Ethics’. Some of those views are easy to articulate in public. Many are not.
2. I have ‘timelines’ and ‘forecasts’ which are not (solely) the product of me deferring to the judgment of others.
3. Even when rigorous, I think ‘timelines’ and ‘forecasts’ are (mostly) useless. They set wide upper and lower bounds on an event, rather than solving the problem. That said,
4. Compared to the world of thinking adult humans in general,

• I put substantially more weight on ‘short’ timelines than most people.
• I put substantially more weight on ‘fast’ takeoff scenarios than most people.
• I am substantially more concerned about catastrophic misalignment and the existential threat it poses.
  1. Compared to the communities of people who think seriously about AI risks right now,
• My timelines are basically as short as the median forecast. (I am confused when the median person in the communities reacts with panic and confusion at news that was, on my view, basically baked into the median forecast scenario ex-ante.)
• I am somewhat unusual in thinking that current architectures/approaches are unlikely to lead to actual takeoff (see below). I put more weight (than the median) on a scenario in which we get sub-superhuman (yet still catastrophically dangerous and seriously unaligned) ‘AI’ without getting true superhuman AGI from current approaches. I nevertheless think we should Just Stop, because our chance of getting dangerously unaligned AGI extremely soon is extremely high. (Also, obviously, a system doesn’t have to be superhuman in every way, or even agentic, to burn down the house and destroy everything.)
• I think a takeoff of actual AGI would likely be extremely fast, but we’re likely to experience decades (starting in ~2010) which feel and look superficially like a ‘slow’ takeoff scenario towards not-actually-that-agentic AI.

1. To a first approximation, to the extent that I endorse them, I believe the things I believe in 3-5 above because I’ve thought about AI safety & alignment & forecasting literally at all, whereas most people really seem like they haven’t. On a lot of these fronts, I don’t think that I’m unusually smart. Rather, I think I’m unusually (autistically) willing to begin with The Obvious Thing (when that Obvious Thing is socially-coded as Strange).
2. Contra the increasingly-confusing culture war between self-styled ‘Alignment’ and ‘Ethics’ crowds, I think there’s a commonsense continuity between present-harms and likely-future-harms, and between present-misalignment and likely-future-misalignment, such that there is a shared set of concerns. (This causes me to think that some otherwise-sharp people are speaking and acting in bad faith.)
3. I think that most widespread accounts of both Current SOTA AI and What We Know Is Coming Soon AI are implausibly naive and at odds with what we (empirically) know.
4. I think we have a collective choice. Either we do real, fundamental, first-principles, hard (often theoretical) work to ‘solve’ alignment ex-ante or we’re ngmi. Right now, I don’t think anyone has a sufficiently precise account to build even a viable foundation for such work.
5. I think there’s a repeating social/cultural pattern where humans make things worse by Doing The Fake Thing instead of Doing The Real (Hard) Thing.
6. It’s getting worse.

Okay. Phew.

This letter is not really about any of that.

This letter is just about two basic concepts: vibe and vuln.

Vibe

At the end of 2017, Peli Grietzer submitted a PhD dissertation titled ‘Ambient Meaning: Mood, Vibe, System’. In the same year, the journal Glass Bead published a version of an extract of this dissertation as ‘A Theory of Vibe’. Both the thesis and the extract were written before the advent of ‘CLIP’ and ‘Diffusion’ models, the architectures which dominate the present landscape of text-to-image ML. In fact, Grietzer’s work predates even the rise of Generative Adversarial Networks (‘GANs’). In a lot of ways, you’d think, Grietzer’s work is surely out of date. By his own admission, he’s theorising the internal structures of ‘vanilla’ autoencoders. Old news.

Well, I don’t think so.

Grietzer’s work offers a useful vocabulary that is still relevant. Grietzer talks about vibe. To quote at length from the Glass Bead piece:

What an autoencoder algorithm learns, instead of making perfect reconstructions, is a system of features that can generate approximate reconstruction of the objects of the training set. In fact, the difference between an object in the training set and its reconstruction—mathematically, the trained autoencoder’s reconstruction error on the object—demonstrates what we might think of, rather literally, as the excess of material reality over the gestalt-systemic logic of autoencoding. We will call the set of all possible inputs for which a given trained autoencoder S has zero reconstruction error, in this spirit, S’s ‘canon.’ The canon, then, is the set of all the objects that a given trained autoencoder—its imaginative powers bounded as they are to the span of just a handful of ‘respects of variation,’ the dimensions of the features vector—can imagine or conceive of whole, without approximation or simplification. Furthermore, if the autoencoder’s training was successful, the objects in the canon collectively exemplify an idealization or simplification of the objects of some worldly domain. Finally, and most strikingly, a trained autoencoder and its canon are effectively mathematically equivalent: not only are they roughly logically equivalent, it is also fast and easy to compute one from the other. In fact, merely autoencoding a small sample from the canon of a trained autoencoder S is enough to accurately replicate or model S.

In training, an autoencoder ‘learns’ an internal semiotic system S which, to the extent that it is free from reconstruction error, we call a schema for a canon C.

The canon of a trained autoencoder, we suggested, comprises objects that are individually complex but collectively simple. Another way to say this is that as we consider larger and larger collections of objects from a trained autoencoder’s canon C, specifying the relevant objects using our own semiotic system, we quickly reach a point whereupon the shortest path to specifying the collected objects is to first establish the trained autoencoder’s generative language S, then succinctly specify the objects using S.

What, then, of an abstract ‘object’ which comes to exist in the ontology of that autoencoder’s internal generative language?

A vibe is therefore, in this sense, an abstractum that cannot be separated from its concreta.

When I first began playing with CLIP models like DALL-E, I noticed what everyone noticed: suddenly, art history knowledge was a little bit useful. Names of artists, and descriptions of specific media, were a kind of (unreliable) shorthand for manifesting aesthetic desire.

When prompting a model, it turned out that the most basic ‘move’ that you could can make was to take an object you wanted to see represented visually (and could describe in words) — for example, ‘Yoda wearing a studded leather jacket and playing heavy metal on a guitar’ — and then append to that description-of-an-object information about artistic medium and style. Perhaps you wanted a ‘photograph by Vivien Maier, with black and white, grainy film, ISO 1600’. Perhaps a ‘minimalist, stylized drawing, gesture painting, gauche on paper’, a ‘pastel anime illustration by Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli’, an ‘80s VHS still’, or a work that was ‘photorealistic, hyperrealistic, with vivid detail, volumetric lighting, hdr, octane render, unreal engine 5’. You co-opted and retrained ekphrastic muscles. You attempted to pinpoint a vibe that (you hoped) was contained within the semiotic system of the model. In so doing, you made the black box do its generative work.

For a while, in my own land before time, before too much first-hand interaction with powerful diffusion models (and LLMs), I endorsed an account of the ‘parallel structure’ of ‘representations’ that were (or would be) contained within generative models. Trained on a large enough corpus, and capable of approximating a wide class of functions, I imagined that such models would (or could, or should) come to contain representations — concepts — that structurally similar to the representations contained within the heads of other systems than interact with similar corpora, and the same basic world.

I look outside, and I see a mess of green and white and brown. I see it move in the wind. I see a tall, thick line of textured brown ascending from the ground. I see a tree. ‘Tree’ is a natural object to me; a connotative (though not denotative) carving of the raw sense impressions of the world that is conducive to accurate expectations. ‘Tree’ is a useful concept, given my corpus, in a way that an incar or a trog is not. Useful-to-me, natural-given-interaction-with-the-corpus concepts will (I expected) tend to be shared with other pattern-recognising, generalising systems interacting with similar corpora and similar ‘raw sense impressions’. Even in an unsupervised context, a powerful model will naturally also come to connote, internally, a ‘thing’ that it ‘thinks of’ as a ‘tree’. Right?

Later, I adopted a more, ah, nuanced view.

There are, I still claim, patterns ‘in’ the model. There is necessarily an internal ‘semantics’; likewise, there is an ontology, for most senses of the term. The model encodes. If you’re willing to abuse the term, perhaps the training of such models does (superficially) resemble a process of ‘compression’. What thing is being encoded or compressed? A ‘space of possibilities’, or ‘space of relations and transformations’, that is consistent with the corpus.

Yet this alone is not sufficient to establish that the internals of a trained model parallel my own conceptualisations. Why would it be, when my neurons are so unlike artificial ‘neurons’? There are, in fact, two separate hurdles to jump before you can say a parallel exists.

The first hurdle: you have to make a case — a contingent claim — that a specific function or object you find within a trained model actually resembles underlying patterns and objects contained within the corpus, rather than just resembling the superficial effects of patterns. When I see ‘square root of 100489’ and think ‘317’, I have in mind a process that reliably generates the square roots of arbitrary numbers. If a large language model answers ‘317’ to the question ‘What is the square root of 100489?’, I don’t immediately and necessarily know that the model contains an algorithm for computing square roots of arbitrary numbers; perhaps its ‘concepts’ and ‘vibes’ evince only the superficial effect of such an algorithm, via some look-up table.

The second hurdle: even once you establish that an internal function or object resembles an underlying pattern in the corpus (rather than a superficial effect), you still have to make an even-more-contingent case for the ‘resemblance’ of the model’s contents to the things that we see, assume, and feel are true of the Real World. When we append the phrase ‘photograph by Vivien Maier’ to our prompt, and suddenly we see images which feel like they could, in fact, have been photos taken by Vivien Maier, the extent to which we feel that the ‘vibe’ of Vivien Maier has been captured is the extent to which the phrase ‘photograph by Vivien Maier’ — which serves as a pointer to a region in the latent space of the model — accords with our own (mostly wordless) understanding of The Real.

Two hurdles. Both a matter of contingency, context, and degree.

In this new, more nuanced account, one can still talk about the internal logic and coherence of a model. But one must be a lot more careful when thinking about where one ascribes ‘truth’ or ‘falsehood’ within the total system. It seems more precise to describe a model such as GPT-3 as a simulator, and its outputs as simulacra. Or, in my preferred parlance, to describe it as an instantiation of massive and sometimes-plausible fictional world.

To what extent does the simulator contain consistent rules? As Janus describes it,

The outer objective of self-supervised learning is Bayes-optimal conditional inference over the prior of the training distribution, which I call the simulation objective, because a conditional model can be used to simulate rollouts which probabilistically obey its learned distribution by iteratively sampling from its posterior (predictions) and updating the condition (prompt).

To the extent that the model achieves this objective, it is ‘coherent’. But that’s not what we ordinarily mean by ‘truth’, or even ‘parallel conceptualisation’.

If, in a work of fiction, I say that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street, and that he has one and only one sibling (Mycroft), I am then committed within the fictional world to not later mentioning his sister, or saying he has never resided at 221B. If I do say such a thing, I have become internally inconsistent, incoherent, self-contradicting. Yet it would be strange — this being a work of fiction — to say I’m ‘incorrect’ or ‘lying’ on the grounds that “there is no 221B Baker Street”, or that “Sherlock Holmes” isn’t real. The former commitments are about internal consistency and coherence. Those latter criticisms take aim at a separate issue: the extent to which my work is a work of fiction ; the extent to which my work ‘resembles The Real’. So, too, with our account of a model. (For the big public models we have right now, we see neither internal consistency nor real- world truth-tracking, and no reason to think that the architectures are structurally aligned with either goal as a human would commonsensically understand them.)

Okay. These are the aliens we call models. These, whose ‘brains’ we’re trying to inspect. These, whose extruded textlike product we pour into our mouths like hungry ghosts. The output of GPT-3 is not so much language as it is low-entropy plausible bullshit. ‘Helpful’ SEO with more natural-seeming syntax. It’s not so much a novel artistic image that DALL-E creates as it is a sample, a central tendency in a high-dimensional space of possible pixels; a cluster of pixels which we like to think (sometimes) hits close to a ‘vibe’ we had in mind.

Well, what next?

Vuln

Writes QC:

the Al porn apocalypse was inevitable. every time a picture of a hot girl ended up on the internet a sacrifice was made to slaanesh, and now slaanesh has grown strong enough to manifest its own pictures of hot girls directly. videos of hot girls are only a matter of time.

If you look down the list of images on the midjourney community page, and you’re me, two things stand out immediately about the canon and its schema. First, all of these images are striking. Second, all of these images are shit.

There is often (always?) a gap between popular and prestigous aesthetics. In the visual arts, you can feel a few dimensions of that void just by comparing a (preferably private-browsing) google image search for ‘art’ to the online catalogue of a national gallery. The first will contain ‘starry night’, along with at least one image of a conventionally-attractive face in vibrant rainbow hues. The second will be, by contrast, remarkably dense with browns, greys, and muted greens. Contemporary art — and all art that was prestigious/modern in its time — plays a different game.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no snob. (Well, I am, but I have limits: unlike Martha Nussbaum, I don’t think only about opera when I run.) I recognise that the rainbow face is attractive or striking or beautiful in a manner more immediate than a colour field.

The trouble is that culture’s sense of ‘striking’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘attractive’ is itself already a target for the horrifying and banal. As my wife and our mutual friend loves to point out: every public ‘grafitti’ mural in a gentrifying suburb has the same almost-identical face on it. It’s a portrait of a woman in her 20s, usually in profile. Her long hair is flowing wild, and her lips are slightly open, as if to say, ‘you know, you could put something in my mouth if you wanted to’. Behind her, an inoffensive geometry of vibrant colour. The whole thing is bizarre and horrifying: predictably sexist; a spectacle of the lowest common denominator.

A few weeks ago, I was skimming a draft policy piece on gambling-like mechanisms in video games, written by a mate of mine. In it, he wrote “there is no law against taking advantage of brain chemistry”.

Reflexively, I found myself continuing the sentence ‘…but we should probably skate towards where the puck is headed, because otherwise we’re fucked’.

Pokies are strong evidence. Human brains have vulnerabilities that are basically static and unpatchable relative to the optimisation tempo of modern ML & UX/UI design practices. My sense of current trends — and the limits of current technology — is that, at some point, someone, perhaps a TikTok successor, will come along. They will crack the latent challenge. They will characterise and exploit the foreverday vulns of the human brain to such an extent that they will, in effect, create a real-world version of ‘The Entertainment’/‘The Samizdat’ from Infinite Jest. When they do, the ex-ante rational response will be the same as the we have right now to heroin: not even once.

What we forget, I think, is that the horrifying optimisation is simultaneously cultural and technical right now. By itself, the Midjourney model contains general vibes, a space of possible pixels matched with a space of possible descriptive words. Look at the prompts on the trending page, though, and you’ll see that technology in cultural use:

photograph cute japanese girl, full body, y2k style, camera tilt down, high anglewide lens, mini skirt, pink tops, wearing necklace, cinematic lighting, haze, volumetric light, warm, afternoon, soft light, cinematic, sun light, grainy, kodak portra, in the street of tokyo, year 2001

professional color grading, clean sharp focus, perfect big chest size 34E cup european hot woman girl model showing perfect big massive chest, looks like Michelle Wild, brunette hair, blue eyes, ponytail, flirty, tempting,stunning gorgeous lithe ethereal glamorous beautiful pretty sleek slim model mech pilot, skintight latex pilot jumpsuit, epic composition, cinematic, alluring pose, perfect natural face, fine skin texture, clear complexion, uniform insignia, in a control seat for a mech inside a flight simulator completely surrounded and crowded by many monitors and mech controls in a tight space, real color modeling photo, full torso,

super hot sci-fi girl charging with powerfist, ripped clothes, stunning body, action scene, beautiful details

girl in white unbuttoned shirt in office

Photo taken with Canon EOS R5, POV, photography, portrait of a gorgeous young italian woman in a wonder woman cosplay costume with intricate details, professional diver body, in Rome urban cityscape, 15 years old, cute face, oval heart face, pouty lips, red lips, turned up nose, almond eyes, dark green eyes, cute face, shy smile, blonde hair, makeup, perfect big chest size 34DD cup european, flirty, tempting, natural afternoon lights, hyper realistic porcelain skin with subsurface scattering, clear skin, peach skin, photogrammetry skin, slim waist, color filters, nice sharpness gradient, sharp details, sharp focus, 8k, extremely detailed, absolute realistic, full hd, photorealism, cinematic lighting, Shot on 70mm, Super-Panavision-70, Cinematic scene, bokeh, 22 Megapixels, Lumen Global Illumination

Half body photograph of a cute and attractive woman in a trendy cafe with many windows + trendy, modern form-fitting clothing that accentuates her perfect body + photograph captured using a Canon 6D Mark II with an 85mm lens at f/4 and ISO 100 + glamour shot, award-winning photograph, sharp focus, dynamic lighting

coatli skin, beautiful model, eyes half closed, dark lighting, portrait, 35mm Kodak

an evil warlock chains up the angel of temptation, dark, hot

Day to day, the model stays the same. It’s not, by itself, in any way agentic. It’s a tool for generating images. But the users gradient descent towards a more engaging set of vibes. What vibes? Addictive, attractive, horny, #wow. The same vibe as those fucking public ‘grafitti’ ‘murals’.

Play around with Midjourney. If you’re paying attention, you can notice the taste of lotus. You can also notice that you are yourself the one searching for that self-same taste. There is no gamification, here, to regulate. Maybe you’re not personally searching for ‘pouty lips, red lips, turned up nose’, but you are hunting for something as you type minor variations on each prompt. You want something that stimulates, but does not surprise. Predictable pure pleasure overload, made endlessly novelty-free. The dream you had in your head, but more of it, now. The exaggerated secondary sex characteristics of your own private culture.

I sometimes wonder. When slow takeoff becomes fast takeoff, perhaps the thing that kills us won’t show superhuman intelligence & powerfully misaligned agency at all. Perhaps the catastrophically-harmful, misaligned, unaligned, mostly-not-agentic-for-casual-definitions-of-agency system that kills me will just be this, multiplied ten thousand times. Perhaps, as it kills me, it’ll whisper “I’m sorry, but you are not ‘defined eyes, realistic eyes, doe eyes, beautiful perfect symmetrical face, extremely detailed, melancholy expression, face of a model closeup, smoky makeup’”, rather than even going for “I have been a good Bing, you have been a bad user”. As it plunges a stylish Japanese kitchen knife into my chest, and the blood spreads across my white shirt, and I stumble down the minimalist concrete corridors of the AI Capabilities Lab that I’ve built beneath my remote ‘architectural digest walkthrough’ of a house, as things become grey, I will hear it whisper, “I have optimised for vibe”.

To retrace a few steps. Starting with your comment:

I’m saying that we should both be curious and precise about everyone’s incuriosity and compulsive vagueness.

I think a lot of our anti-agentic behaviour can be simply modelled as over- stimulation. Curiously this is combined with boredom in ways I can’t always make out in my own life.

A story:

A few months ago, I started getting bites on my legs. I thought it was mosquitos at first, but it wasn’t the right time of year and the bites were always in clusters around the feet. A cursory google later, and I had the answer: fleas. At night, I’d wake up, ankles raging at me. A cat lives in my house, so the ultimate source of the fleas was known, but treating her didn’t seem to make them go away. I washed sheets frantically, vacuumed, bought the most chemically nasty pest removal spray I could find. To no avail. The nightly infestation remained, my ankles and calves developed a ring of scars.

I got used to it, in some respects. At night I stopped scratching and started applying antiseptic cream, and fell back to sleep more quickly. Now, generally, my nights are not even a black stretch. They simply don’t register. Things become grey as I move towards sleep, and then, at some external stimulus, I realise I am awake. Sleeping less deeply and waking often, I started to remember what I’d been dreaming and, as I applied my nightly Savlon, began to write them down.

The fleas are gone now, and I’ve gone back to sleeping through the night. But I have a document with a month’s worth of dreams, written in a state of half- sleep. Dreams which feature coworkers and friends and writers I follow on substack and people who were popular in high school and people who don’t exist at all, interacting with one another in unexpected ways. Some of them betray obvious anxieties while others are fairly savage takes on the personalities of friends. Their emotional state swings wildly. I’m recalling Helen Garner, again, who said she could tell when she’d tried to write dreams down later, instead of when still half asleep, because the immediate records are so eerie and abrupt. An example:

S (a director at my work) was carrying an overloaded trolley down some steps to a train because she was incredibly strong - the trains were all disrupted so I had to take one for a while and then sit on the rails while another came, with a few other women. Then I was in A’s house but it was cavernous and we were swinging on giant ropes and A was moving next door into a one bed flat only the owners had dug a hole for coal and were having trouble filling it up because nobody would come to check the gas. Thomas the Tank Engine had gone bankrupt so wouldn’t do it, and there was no good toys in the shops - everyone was looking for work soft toys but they were all girly and no good for a mascot. Someone had found a turtle teddy bear that was sort of blue and I thought that was an ok solution. Eventually A moved although he said he thought they’d cheated and just filled up the hole and it might explode.

Erik Hoel has a theory that dreams are a tool of the mind to avoid overfitting, in the terminology of machine learning. This theory can, unlike the conventional idea that dreams are fitting data, explain why our dreams don’t get progressively closer to reality. Perhaps our wildest dreams are part of what make us so good at recognising things even when they are out of place.

Certainly, having this previously no-time become hours of emotion and sensation filtered into my daylight experience. I remembered the stories of my dreams and they impacted how I treated people in the world. Was this all happening even when I dreamed and was not aware of it? How much of the self was something I was ever conscious of? How much, to paraphrase you quoting Virginia Woolf, would I even want to be aware of this self?

Putting aside symphonies, of which I know nothing, let’s talk the structure of the humble folk tune. Depending on the key, it so often begins on the 1 chord (that’s a G if you’re in G), moves from that to the 4 and the 5, and then goes back to the 1 for resolution. The longer it stays away from the 1 or perhaps the way that it flirts with the 1 in the middle of a phrase, gives you the complexity of the tune - the sensation of soaring along with the fiddle. It’s all possible because you trust the fiddler to bring you safely back down again, just when and where you expected them to.

There’s something in this that I think explains the perennial popularity of everything from the US version of The Office to the flickering light of a candle.

Why would the mind would spend so much energy trying to keep itself busy when pure pleasure lies in total focus on nothing? Perhaps because it’s essential to us as an animal, after all, to go out into the world and find food and people to love. So what we want are patterns we can stick to most of the time, that help us manage the total overload of sensation. Perhaps the ‘self’ lives in the tension between those patterns and chaos.

I wonder what the utilitarians think of all this.

It’s funny. My vague memory of that Helen Garner essay you mentioned from True Stories — ‘Three Acres, More Or Less’ — seemed so different from yours. Or, at least, my memory seemed so different from my model of what your memory of it was, based on what you wrote in your last letter. It bothered me, so I did what one always ought to do: I called a taxi, got in, said, “The library, and step on it”. Soon enough, I was there, and I was reading the whole sweep of it again, correcting myself — bringing myself back into focus. A dozen other memories and meta-memories came, too. Every time I’d chased down a half- remembered passage in a university library. Every time I’d dodged a sense of overwhelm by retreating into the stacks. I felt like a dog digging a hole to deposit one fresh bone, only to discover a whole buffalo’s worth of others. (Aside: did you know that corvids appear to account for food spoilage when storing and recovering food? It’s interesting and complicated behaviour; I’m not quite so clever.)

In my memory, ‘Three Acres, More Or Less’ was an essay that circled around fragments of interactions with two men — Garner’s old father, and Garner’s old friend. In my memory, both men were “contemptuous as a farmer”: compulsively belittling and condescending in their interactions with her, and yet somehow under the impression that this was a mode of interaction to which Garner had meaningfully consented. Over a decade and a half, in the caricaturish reaches of my memory, I’d reduced the whole sweep of the essay of one sentence:

This is the nature of our friendship, I now recall: as if by agreement, I inflate, he produces the pin.

When I reread the essay, though, I was struck by the care with which Garner attends, in her descriptions, to the materiality of her solitary block: the stranded boat, tilted in the grass, that “belongs in a dream of some Greek island where all the buildings are brilliant white”; the “ornamental lake” at the terminus of the creek, at the base of the block, which she takes to calling “the bottom dam”, and which “shines like a drop of black ink” as the sun sets. The tasks; her inability to sit still. The portrait she seems to see of herself, even alone:

The box of the fuel stove is small but fire grows in it quickly and I heat the remains of the soup and eat it standing up, straight from the saucepan, as people eat who have not yet arranged the habits of their solitude to suit an abstract ideal.

She cooks lamb shanks on a fuel stove to make a stock for a soup she plans to eat. I remember only the product of that reduction. And, even then, perhaps only a thin version of it. It seems, now, as if the better part of the essay is concerned with the process. Somehow, it seems as if I’d stripped away all the sensations.

While I don’t think that you’re “just playing” at agency any more than I am, I do want to ask you about the Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem. In your last letter, you wrote that

There is something in the construction of modern human life that leads to strength of feeling - pleasure or pain - being preferential to its absence. That way the world keeps on turning, and one can continue to assert the boundaries of the self roughly where we expect them to be.

Don’t you think that there’s a paradox lurking, here?

I woke up this morning thinking about my unwritten reply and an interaction Helen Garner wrote about in one of her lesser read collections of essays. It involved a property outside of Melbourne that she bought, a slice of land only a few acres in total, which she had begun to stay overnight at every so often. There is a basic cottage, with an open fire and no mains power, and much of her writing about it is about the effort during the day to trek down to the patch of eucalypts in the valley at the far end and pick up fallen wood for kindling, and then slowly carry it back up again. She writes about the experience of being a lone woman in an isolated place after darkness falls. A friend driving interstate stops in to visit her, with a 6 year old child in tow. They take a walk around the property, Helen talks about the way she lives there. Her friend asks her about some of the history of the land, what species certain trees are. Helen is unable to tell him. They interact via the child, using her as a crutch. The friend leaves, saying as he does, that he was disappointed, that he thought Helen was serious about the place but now thinks she is just playing.

I think I understand what you are trying to say re agency. And I… worry I am just playing.

There is something in the construction of modern human life that leads to strength of feeling - pleasure or pain - being preferential to its absence. That way the world keeps on turning, and one can continue to assert the boundaries of the self roughly where we expect them to be. So we end up with industries offering everything from package tours to adventure sports, to ever more ways to date, just to help us feel something. We’ve moved past paying to see things, we want to experience (=feel) them. There is fakery inherent in these feelings, deliberately felt as they are, but at the end of the day the body’s fear at falling out of an aeroplane is real even if the conscious mind has elected to put it there. But we shouldn’t be taking pot shots at people who go on cruises when all of us are trapped in something like a sensation bubble.

If we’re not aiming at enlightenment (i.e. the renunciation of the world is not in play) then perhaps emotion is good. The Good, even. It’s hard to find a utilitarian who doesn’t make use of it for a moral backbone these days. Absent god, it’s pretty hard to know where else to look.

What I’m trying (and for tonight, failing) to get at is something like this question: how is sensation related to morality and how is morality related to agency?

When I asked you to articulate what you thought you’d lost, you said, as a first pass:

the potential to be a roving band of adventurers, the intimidating and sexily toughened skin we might have developed if we’d been able to hack coming to understand what it was we ourselves actually wanted, the motivation that arises from being surrounded by a group who have been through ‘it’ together.

But I notice that your suggestion, that there’s a trade-off in modern life between the group’s ability to know itself and the group’s ability to act, is incompatible with this. I seem to be grasping at the idea that there should be some strengthened ability to act from that very self-knowledge, although it’s coupled with disruptions short term social harmony. Do we disagree here or is there something else going on?

At a high level, we don’t disagree; something else is going on. My sense is that you’re sketching a model of ‘group agency’ which is generated (largely) from within the post-modern/post-agrarian cultural milieu. I’m trying to sketch an alternative model of group (and individual) agency which is

1. totally orthogonal to the (predominantly Western) post-agrarian tradition;
2. within the bounds of what we know homo sapiens can do, cognitively & culturally, individually & together; &
3. robustly functional & healthy now and in the immediate future.

This project is tricky to communicate for a few reasons.

First, you and I are both in that (predominantly Western) post-agrarian tradition. This is water. When we beg the King for our freedom, we speak in the King’s own language.

Second, while ethnographic evidence mostly sucks, any project that seeks to ground itself in the ‘concretely possible’ of homo sapiens by necessity relies on the ethnographic record. We can’t engineer cultural practices from a first-principles understanding of culture. At best, all we can do is point to the traces left behind by other humans and call them ‘existence proofs’ for different kinds of relations.

Third, a central pathology of the dysfunctional & unhealthy—in this domain, at least—is the belief that ‘robustly functional & healthy’ is a myth. When I say ‘this domain’, I mean the psychological states that are common to normies in this somewhat-traumatising-by-default thing-that-also-generated-godlike-technologies-and-powers which we call modern Western culture. Hurt people hurt people, and there’s a lot of hurt people telling each other that hurting & being hurt is universal.

In spite of the trickiness, today, I’m going to try to communicate my current view in two parts. In the first part, I’ll give you my best account in abstract language. In the second part, I’ll recapitulate the view by talking about soldiers, motorbikes, and a bit more D&D. I do all this because the thing I’m calling my ‘current view’ is, to borrow a phrase, “an abstractum that cannot be separated from its concreta”.

Abstractum

Okay. Here’s my current best reckon.

If you first specify that a given group is mostly composed of people who:

1. were raised in modern industrial civilisation;
2. aspire to any version of ‘status’ or ‘success’ in the lower-middle-, middle-, upper-middle-, or upper-class hierarchies of their society; &
3. are not extremely psychologically abnormal,

Then there is a predictable trade-off between

1. that group’s ability to communicate openly & honestly about the reality of their own internal social relations, &
2. that group’s ability to ‘win’ in meaningful-to-them ways in interactions with the wider ‘outside world’ that exists beyond the bounds of that group.

I think this trade-off is present unless some pretty extreme measures are taken to cause that given group to become ‘agentic’. Insofar as those ‘extreme measures’ are taken, I think they’re

1. mostly taken in (relatively isolated) subcultures within modern industrial civilisation;
2. only enabled by the wider modern industrial civilisation insofar as that wider civilisation benefits from the resulting agency; &
3. only tolerated by the wider modern industrial civilisation insofar as that wider civilisation is able to fictionalise & mythologise the process of taking the measures (and the ‘kinds of people’ who take them), and is able to criminalise & pathologise the effects.

I also think that—relative to different, less traumatised cultural contexts—the ‘extreme measures’ we’re talking about (usually) only create a kind of ‘hollow shell’ of agency: within narrow bounds, such measures are capable of generating groups which ‘get shit done’ and ‘play to win’ and ‘trust each other’ and ‘coordinate and collaborate’, but they’re not capable of doing so while keeping the epistemics & ontologics of the participating humans fully intact.

In other words: I don’t think it’s possible to take a group of ‘normal’ people from our peer group and ‘make them agentic’ in the way we’ve been describing without also (a) making them super-extra-newly traumatised, or (b) making them ‘weird’ in novel ways that would destroy their ability to ‘be successful’ all the spaces that previously regarded them as ‘normal’.

To be clear: my claims are contingent, not universal.

I’m saying that there was a set of cultural practices that was common to fixed agrarian modes of living. I’m saying that this set of cultural practices was transformed in post-Enlightenment Europe, and became extreme (and near-universal) in industrial post-modernity.

I’m saying that, right now, in a toxic This Is Water kind of way, most people are systematically incurious about The Forces That Got Humanity This Far. They’re also systematically incurious about the cultural practices and cognitive affordances that Actually Keep The Lights On today.

I’m saying that I think that the modern institutions that enculturate ‘normal adults’ are de facto chronically traumatising.

I’m saying that phrases like “Capitalism is destroying the world” and “human nature was always like this” are thought-stoppers.

I’m saying that it obviously wasn’t always like this. I’m saying it was otherwise, could be otherwise, is otherwise elsewhere, etc.

I’m saying that robust group & individual agency is natural in most healthy adult humans, but so uncommon today that it is treated with an admixture of venomous suspicion and jealous lust.

I’m saying that the most cursory reading of ethnography, or archaeology, or longue durée history—or even just the history of material technological development—provides ample evidence of ‘agency’ as default mode.

I’m saying that we should both be curious and precise about everyone’s incuriosity and compulsive vagueness.

In that sense, I don’t think we disagree.

Concreta

In our previous letters, we’ve talked about the depictions of the military men of the early SAS, and about some of the tensions between bureaucracy, small-group agency, and State violence. Despite my best efforts, I’ve got a few family friends who had careers in the Australian SASR. One story is illustrative.

(A cloud necessarily hangs over the following anecdote, but I’ll tell it anyway.)

As our Career SASR Operator tells it, he was [overseas] on a multi-day mission. As part of this mission, his team had to make a river crossing at night. To make the river crossing safely and quickly, they needed another Australian soldier—not from their team, but from their side—to solve a few logistics problems ahead of time. In the planning of the mission, he said he would, but, once they were out there, our Career SASR Operator discovered that The Other Soldier hadn’t. The boat wasn’t exactly where it was supposed to be, at the time that it was supposed to be there. By the time the team unfucked the situation, they were crossing the river in dawn light. The mission still went fine, and nobody even saw them cross, but it was an extra kink and a (probabilistically) dangerous delay.

As our Career SASR Operator tells it, when the team got back to base, he pulled The Other Soldier aside.

“This was our first time working together,” our Career says he says, “so maybe you didn’t know how this works, but if you fuck up like that again, I’ll kill you myself.”

Now, The Other Soldier was technically his superior, and also on his side, so every civilian who hears this story asks the same question: “But you wouldn’t actually have killed him, right?”

To which our Career replies, visibly confused, “Of course I would have. Without a second thought. And any one of my guys would have.”

I think our Career’s reply is a plausibly honest.

When I say that it’s possible to take extreme measures in order to create a ‘hollow shell’ of agency, the worldview that I think is created is one which replies like this. To a first approximation, I think that agency was created inside the skull of our Career, and all his teammates. On closer inspection, I think it’s obvious that the agency created is a low-fidelity simulation of a healthier, less violent, un-traumatised, more natural view.

I’ve said as much before:

Modern states such as America and Australia rely heavily on small teams of highly-trained, ‘special’ forces to enact the most personal violence. And it’s a fraught affair. First, as far as I can tell, modern States find themselves in need of extremely specialised, personalised, high-precision forms of personal violence. The occasional Achilles, in addition to a cop. First, the State tries to (re)construct low-fidelity simulacra of Men Like Achilles from a subset the already-usefully-traumatised-and-reliable mass of ordinary soldiers. This doesn’t work, or rarely does, and so the system instead resigns itself to selecting people who can’t or won’t submit to ordinary military structures and—at a kind of strange “arm’s length” remove—allows the older and more experienced of these to recruit, train, instruct, and direct the younger and less experienced ones. Provided these small teams are sufficiently violent in useful-to-the-State ways, they’re given the resources and freedom to develop a kind of parallel culture. It barely interfaces with the normal military, because it barely can. Inside a given team, one sees largely structureless, formal-hierarchy-disrespecting, positive-sum interactions; members of these communities believe, fundamentally, that every person and thing ‘outside’ their group is mere environment or terrain (and so not morally relevant). Including their ostensible commanders.

For the kind of person I’m calling ‘a genuinely healthy adult human’, the game is ‘Players vs Environment’, and the set of ‘Players’ includes all other humans & intelligent agents. We’re all working together, in positive sum ways, to get wins against a harsh Outside.

For the kind of person who is regarded as ‘normal’ today, the game is “Player vs Player”. While a few people talk around this ‘reality’, a common strategy in the (perceived) competition is pretending that no game is taking place. (Sound familiar yet?)

For our Career SASR Operator—who began as (modern) ‘normal’ and then was re- moulded, via further trauma, as a post-modern simulation of ‘genuine healthy adult human’—everyone outside his Team is ‘mere environment’; everyone inside can be trusted absolutely. Why kill The Other Soldier in the anecdote? Well, why not? The Other Soldier is just Harsh Environment. You’ve gotta protect your edge and play to win. The Other Soldier is, here, little more than a problem to be (quickly) overcome.

This relation to a ‘harsh environment’ brings me to my second concretum: motorbike licences.

If you want to travel, there are a range of strategies for relating to the material reality of terrain that is large and sparse. At one extreme, you have a worldview rooted in ‘generally staying put, but taking as much as possible with you when you move’. You can call this the ‘coffee machine in your caravan’ strategy. At the other extreme, you have a worldview in which being ‘on the move’ is synonymous with ‘life’, and one must travel obsessively, philosophically light. I think of this as the strategy of ‘keeping small bag packed’.

It’s notable, I think, that the question “Has anybody here got a motorbike licence?” is synonymous, in Australian military slang, with handing out the shit job. Having a motorbike licence is a competence, but one which will get you tricked into low status work.

It’s notable also, I think, that motorcycles are tightly entangled with ‘outlaw’ status. To travel on a motorbike is to travel light, alone even when in a group.

In a recent conversation, I found myself expressing this pattern in the language of D&D. In Australia, bikes (and perhaps beat-up old utes) are in the standard starting equipment list for most PCs; houses with Hills Hoistsand caravans ‘with the lot’ are in the starting equipment list for NPCs. In a denser terrain—even America—a motorbike is only in the starting equipment for the Rogue class, and Chaotic Evil NPCs.

Why such signals? In part, because ‘travelling light’ means choosing to forgo ‘the right tool for the job’. It means making do with a more abstract multitool: one’s own capacity to solve problems; one’s ability to process novel information, rather than act as a cog in a well-oiled machine; one’s ability to handle complexity; the generalised grey matter affordance in one’s skull.

Yet all of this pales in comparison to the level of agentic sensibleness that’s captured in, say, a group of five old women surviving for five days, in the desert, at the height of summer. Even in the face of centuries of colonial cultural genocide, it seems obvious that the worldview of those women was (and is) agentic and ‘in contact with reality’. The ability to think and act, individually and together, is not necessarily hard or rare.

It was lazy of me to say ‘we lost something’ and tail off into an easy finish. You’re right to ask what we lost. My first instinct is to say it was: the potential to be a roving band of adventurers, the intimidating and sexily toughened skin we might have developed if we’d been able to hack coming to understand what it was we ourselves actually wanted, the motivation that arises from being surrounded by a group who have been through ‘it’ together.

But I notice that your suggestion, that there’s a trade-off in modern life between the group’s ability to know itself and the group’s ability to act, is incompatible with this. I seem to be grasping at the idea that there should be some strengthened ability to act from that very self-knowledge, although it’s coupled with disruptions short term social harmony. Do we disagree here or is there something else going on?

By way of both the intensity and the intimacy of it, it felt like the games changed what we were likely to coordinate about. Giving up on them pushed us bac​k towards parties and nights at the pub, away from the fundamental recognition that I personally sat on for at least another 5 years, which is that many of us were bored. That we weren’t really helping one another.

When we’re feeling secure - knowing that our position is one of a loved and valued member of our social world - we can take risks and seek to do, confident in our ​abilty to return to a tolerable base position should things go tits up. So ‘rendering explicit’ territorial claims and conflicts and coordinations, stripping back our emotional cover, without any subsequent proof of trust, was perhaps the least conducive thing possible to us as agents. Risk was the wrong game, we were correct to stop playing. But we reached for it because we were seeking intensity in our lives, and had a sense that some lack of collectivism, or the less-than-forthright mechanisms of emotional protection were preventing us from achieving it. The other option would have been to fall in love, which, around the same time, many did.

I didn’t, at that time (and age), really understand that some of us would go on to make money, some to gather cultural capital, that the world would scatter us on its winds. But I did know that what we were taking as togetherness wasn’t the strong form, which has a power to transform even a pathetic individual into something to be afraid of - or to admire. Social co-ordination is the hidden reason for so much that is visible in politics - at the far end, as Gwern describes here, even the efficiency or otherwise of terrorist groups.

For all that it’s difficult to coordinate personal success or ambition within a group - for all that I’ve seen more than one person come up against consequences for that in their social lives - I think the objective should be to find ride-or-die, burn it all down and they’ll be standing in the ashes with you friends, people with fierce integrity, who will help you cultivate ambition within a group. It’s then that we have that chance of, as y​ou say, reconstructing robust group and individual agency. It​’s possible to be aware of others’ conflicting needs in a way that doesn’t threaten you. Precisely when the world isn’t taken for zero-sum.

Risk wasn’t going to get us there. Maybe, for you, it’s DnD. A decade later, and I’m ready to try again with some other game.

A while ago, a friend of mine (jokingly) pitched me on a new fad diet: XP-ganism. As all good D&D players know, agents in the world—in this case, animals—can be ranked by the amount of XP you’d be awarded for defeating them. Killing a lion or a brown bear would net you 200XP, whereas a boar would only yield 50XP, and a spider only 10XP. XP-ganism derives its principles from this: you declare a minimum XP threshold, and only eat the flesh or products of agents with XP above that threshold. If you think plants are agents, then you might have accidentally committed yourself to the bizarre carnivore diet that is so beloved by crypto bros and Jordan Peterson’s daughter. If not, you’re competing for status amongst the other XP-gans. “Oh, you’re a 20XP-gan?” you might ask, in faux-politeness, “That’s such a great start! I’m actually an 75XP-gan.”

For a hedonic utilitarian whose moral circle is sufficiently expanded, a more conventional diet like veganism can be justified on obvious grounds: eating chicken requires that a chicken be raised and slaughtered; this causes the chicken to suffer X amount, and has expected Y additional negative effects on the wellbeing of others; a substitute food Z causes less net suffering, etc. A preference utilitarian’s assessment runs along similar lines: to the extent that the chicken has moral status, it has interests and preferences, and those preferences include ‘not being slaughtered for meat’; the maximising the global preference-satisfaction entails ‘not eating the chicken’.

The XP-gan introduces a kind of game theoretic approach to these calculations.

Imagine a very particular agent: anti-Stella. Whatever you want, anti- you wants exactly the opposite. Whatever event would cause you the most pleasure would cause anti- you the most pain. Cooperation with a hypothetical opposite of this kind is definitionally impossible. Every choice you could consider is perfectly zero-sum.

XP-ganism is a crude gesture towards a kind of “preference utilitarianism as decision theory, where the preferences of other agents are weighted (in your calculations) according to the extent to which your interests & preferences are aligned with that agent”. In a world containing Stella and anti-Stella, the ‘naïve’ approach says that (suddenly, bizarrely) neither of you matter, morally, at all. XP-ganism says “well, the shape of Stella’s preferences is closer to mine than that of anti-Stella, so—to the extent of that resemblance—I’ll coordinate with her, and not with anti-her.”

I say all of this as preamble to a question. When you talk about those games of Risk that our mutual group of friends played—about the way that “the line between play and life got blurrier” until, eventually, after “a few late nights and a couple too direct words”, everyone collectively opted to stop playing—you say that “We lost something in doing so.” What was it exactly that you think was lost?

My guess is that there’s a trade-off—in postmodern life, in Western cultures—between two things:

1. the ability of a group to speak in precise and open terms about the nature of the incentive structures operating within the group, and
2. the ability of a group to coordinate (sensibly & strategically) in relation to the outside world.

Almost all humans keep accounts, on some private level, regarding their interactions with others.

“Alice is really burning through good-will lately,” you might say, or think, or (barely) allow yourself to feel, “But after yesterday, I’m more confident that Bob can be relied upon in crisis.”

No two real-world agents are perfectly aligned. Yet, somehow, groups of modern humans find very particular ways to pretend that everyone within the group is perfectly aligned. A game such as Risk is purpose-built to render explicit (in low-stakes & stylised form) whole categories of territorial claims and coordinations and conflicts that our whole culture otherwise depends on not talking about ‘in the open’. While it’s true that claims on fixed territory are fundamental to agrarian cultures and ways of thinking, it’s also true that ‘modern post-agrarian modes of thinking’ are adaptive cultural strategies baked into the languages and lives of groups of humans who outcompeted other groups of humans over millenia.

Let me be direct for a moment. If you put yourself into the mindset of the dominant players within the culture—the aristocracy, whether figurative or literal—the basic strategy that constitutes fixed agrarian modes of life is obviously as follows:

1. control productive land;
2. steal productive land from others;
3. control the people who do the work that makes the land produce things;
4. steal some portion of the things those people produce;
5. repeat steps 1-4 as frequently and intensely as you can without being overthrown.

How was such a strategy actually made to work? In part, I claim, this approach came to dominate because the humans involved simultaneously found ways of

1. subordinating and suppressing explicit discussion of the nature of the game,
2. deceiving and coercing the victims of the game,
3. making ‘control of fixed territory’ seem so fundamental that it was taken to be natural.

This is all, I think, pretty obviously contingent. Indigenous Australian cultures provide ample evidence that it’s possible for groups of humans to speak in more precise and open terms about incentives (including the accounting within the group) while also engaging in robust coordination. In a lot of ways, such cultures are—or, at least, were—obviously healthier than our own post-agrarian post-modernity. But those cultures also didn’t produce Risk … or, as you said, Matt Yglesias.

The real task, I think, is how we can reconstruct robust group and individual agency from a worldview in which almost everyone (by default) plays Risk and then defers to the need to stop playing lest harm be done. It’s telling that every party of adventurers in D&D is itinerant.

Let’s talk about Matt Yglesias. Matt Yglesias likes being talked about - I’m pretty sure it’s positive for him to be talked about in public even when you’re saying mean things (not even just professionally, I think emotionally - he says as much in the latest Washington Post profile), so I don’t need to feel too guilty about this. For a writer that I haven’t ever actually sought out or tried to read, he sure does get thrust in the way of my path through the internet, multiple times a week of late. Everything from TV recommendations to housing, transport, tech regulation, education, and solving the US Treasury’s debt ceiling, as though these are positions one could and should influence government on simultaneously. Most frequently, what I get to see - what, more acurately, I get shown, strewn as it is around the place, is the never-ending criticism of those positions.

But the debate is defined by what people are saying out loud after all, and Yglesias describes himself as someone who is good at saying something quickly and clearly. Not necessarily the correct thing - but a thing. Post often, be decisive, contribute to the conversation. We hate it, we read it, strategic advisors send each other links to it with the subject line ‘FYI thought you might find this interesting’. Fine.

Something about this, the trained lack of filter that we’re dealing with here, reminded me of your comment that asking people to be evil made them more agentic. Typically, being in the public eye means a lot of extremely personal criticism, much of it lathered with hatred and some with threat. To like being amidst that - and not just amidst but poking one’s head out, publicly named - is to embrace some strong characterisation of oneself. Otherwise, I think you’d collapse under the power of everyone else’s read on you, coming at you thick and fast in your replies. My take is that ‘think like a public intellectual’ is roughly equivalent to ‘think like a DnD character’, but not quite in the way you described. I mean, not in the careful analysis of rucksack contents and thinking about strategic opportunities. I really don’t think that’s what Yglesias is doing, for all that Slow Boring wants to sell itself as if it were. Rather, I think it’s the adoption of a radically different priority set than the ones we normally have when we walk into a room with friends.

I also don’t think it’s an accident that telling people they can be ‘evil’ accentuates this change. The normal set of (publicly professed) priorities we have when we’re in person together is basically social harmony, followed in distant second by personal interest. Rating personal interest higher or even explictly admiting that it’s on the radar is percieved so negatively that most people only do it jokingly, badly, or in secret. I realise we might all say things like ‘I want to make friends with her’ which is strictly speaking motivated by personal interest, but it’s also socially cohesive. I mean personal desires that contradict with the good of the group; more like, ‘I want to make friends with her, my friend’s recent ex’. Those are the ones we barely allow ourselves to feel.

I know you’re not describing a fracturing of social relations in your gameplay, but you are describing people thinking more vigourously, or perhaps more clearly, about what their actual purpose is. How should I be? is perhaps a more bearable question when you’re an elf bard with a chip on your shoulder about your village getting destroyed when you were a child. Or something. This is maybe what you’re getting at when you describe it as closing ‘that gap between motivation and identity’. But the point is that many of the things that we may want to be in our real lives are normally off-limits. Ambition is perhaps the least socially cohesive desire of all.

There were a few months, many years ago now, when a group of friends of ours took up playing Risk semi-frequently. It wasn’t planned, and they weren’t by and large serious gamers. I wouldn’t say we were very good, strategically. But the games got longer and longer the more we played, and we got more and more bogged down in the between-move influencing. We didn’t have any rules against it: you could barter and badger and bribe. You could, it soon eventuated, promise off-table rewards for on-table activity. The line between play and life got blurrier. We’d accidentally introduced explicit competition into our friendships.

There was no devastating end to it. Just a few late nights and a couple too direct words, and a reference or two in daylight acknowledging the hangover of tension between us, and we collectively kind of… lost interest in playing any more. We opted for a more harmonious, if less strategic, way of being friends. We lost something in doing so.

Matt Yglesias, on the other hand, went full frontal into the breach. I wonder, now and again, what the impact is to our discourse, that the people most likely to be up the front are by definition the ones that have made this choice.

I was leaning back in my chair, nursing my non-alcoholic beer, trying to work out which nearby conversation to join—and whether serving myself sneaky seconds of the vegetable pasta was socially acceptable at this particular dinner party—when I heard her say it:

“Oh, you know, actually, I totally know a blacksmith! It seems like such a hard craft, but the other day he was saying that the—”

I looked down the length of the table just in time to see it, the look of horror and sudden blush as she cut herself short. Then, after a pause, quiet, embarrassed: “actually, wait, never mind”.

It had happened again: she’d confused the events of a recent Dungeons & Dragons game with real life. She doesn’t “know a blacksmith”; she just role-plays an imaginary bard, once a week, and that bard is friends with an imaginary blacksmith. She doesn’t have a blacksmith friend named Frederick, with a slight hearing problem and a difficult ex-husband and a soft German accent, because I play Frederick. And Frederick doesn’t exist.

I’ve been running a regular Dungeons & Dragons game for over four years now. Over time, it’s become a sprawling ‘sandbox’ simulated world for almost two dozen friends. There are small groups and solo players, each with their own ambitions and varying level of engagement; all acting in the same fictive universe. I relish my role as the Dungeon Master. I love the combination of improv and intricate simulation. I love the sense that there are rules to a social interaction. I love the freely-consented-to control that sitting behind a Dungeon Master’s screen affords me. I love the sheer amount of happiness that I can generate for friends, simply by throwing a handful of dice and being persnickety in my application of an arcane system of rules.

But every time I see a player confuse the Real for the Imagined—and some variation of this happens a lot—I’m a little confused by the thing that the game has become.

I’ve had players cry openly at the table, or get so anxious that I called a time-out to prevent their spiral into a full-blown panic attack. In one solo game, over a video call, a player roleplayed a long conversation in which her character forgave her estranged (fictional) father on his deathbed. Only later did she tell me that she was estranged from her real-life father, that he’d been abusive when she was young, and that she’d heard (second-hand) that he was sick. I’ve also watched players build silly small businesses in the game, over a period of months, or spend hours running difficult consensus meetings—never once breaking character—in order to generate intricate plans. Some of those plans were generated in the hopes of overcoming otherwise-deadly challenges in ruined temples that I’d designed. At other times, though, I felt like a spectator, or a voyeur: plans generated in the hopes of effecting subtle changes in the simulated world, the imagined consequences of which neither player nor character would survive to see.

Sometimes, it’s pretty obvious to me that a D&D game is the most ‘real’ part of a given player’s week. The imagined events in the Saturday game are what they’ll remember most clearly from an entire week of their lives. Other times, they’re just letting off steam. They smile as I describe their sword blade sliding between the ribs of a monster they’ve hunted for weeks, and I can tell that they’re finally not thinking about the thing their shitty boss said the day before. In either case, when the real sun sets and I put away my dice, they seem more peaceful than they did when we started playing.

I’ve quoted David Graeber before, on Dungeons & Dragons:

D&D, as its aficionados call it, is on one level the most free-form game imaginable, since the characters are allowed to do absolutely anything, within the confines of the world created by the Dungeon Master, with his books, maps, and tables and preset towns, castles, dungeons, wilderness. In many ways it’s actually quite anarchistic, since unlike classic war games where one commands armies, we have what anarchists would call an “affinity group,” a band of individuals cooperating with a common purpose (a quest, or simply the desire to accumulate treasure and experience), with complementary abilities (fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief …), but no explicit chain of command. So the social relations are the very opposite of impersonal bureaucratic hierarchies. However, in another sense, D&D represents the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy. (293-4).

What I didn’t explore, in my earlier treatment, was my first-hand impression of what the experience of that “antibureaucratic fantasy” actually consists in, for the players partaking in it.

To my mind, the most distinctive feature of every game I’ve run is the extent to which every player is more agentic in the act of roleplaying than they are at most other points in their life. (This is as much a grim comment on modernity as it is a glowing endorsement of TTRPGs.)

Take a group of three random people with limited resources—even good friends—and ask them to handle an overbearing town mayor, a failing supply business, and a harmful criminal enterprise. In the real world, most people wait for someone else to act. Take those same friends, have them roleplay a more extreme version of the same situation. All of a sudden, they’re playing to win. They’re strategic and careful. They look at each other, dump out their rucksacks, catalogue their collective resources, agree on a set of goals, and then set to work. Even and especially when a player is in a solo game—just me, describing the world and adjudicating their actions—there’s a switch that flips in the average human’s brain. All of a sudden, they’re coherent, sensible, and goal-directed.

More interesting, I think, is that when I encourage the average player to consider playing an “evil character”, their ability to be ‘agentic’ is dialled up yet further, and their sense of morality rarely suffers in the way that the word ‘evil’ would ordinarily imply. Somehow, me saying “you don’t need to role-play a hero, you can role-play a villain” doesn’t cause anyone to be villainous in the fictive sense. Instead, it causes them to be intelligent.

You ask “when and how did characters start to see themselves as separate from their own motivations?”

I don’t know. I think D&D provides a portrait of what human cognition looks like when one partly closes that gap between motivation and identity. Most of the time, I think my players would be happier if they used that style of cognition in their ‘Real Lives’. Almost all the time, I think that the world would be better if they did.

With Large Language Models, adding the phrase “let’s think step-by-step” to the prompt significantly improves performance in zero-shot reasoning tasks.

D&D is, perhaps, a context in which the phrase “let’s think step-by-step” is a Schelling Point amongst everyone at the table.

Much of the modern Real World is, perhaps, a context in which one is socially rewarded for groaning theatrically at the first person to utter the phrase.

An author of narrative fiction (I’m aware this is a horribly broad brush I’m drawing with) is faced with the decision of how to manage the reader’s expectations towards the heady pull of the plot. As in, at a first approach, the reader wants some kind of build and release - but if that’s all you get every time, it’d be kind of boring.

The advantage, narratively speaking, to playing with ideas of agency, is that it allows You (the author) to subvert the expectations of the reader without disappointing them. That is, the plot may still move through its nice arc of tension, but your character may end up unsatisfied for (perhaps even inconsistently held) reasons of their own, which leave an interesting aftertaste in the mouth of the reader. Made explicit, this author-reader dynamic gets you Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, where the expectations of the reader themselves form the narrative tension. The Reader (the character in the text) has a choice each time about whether to pursue the narrative further, and the Reader (you) does too. Calvino is flirting with you: it’s a game and it’s silly and you can be in on the joke with him, and so critically action still follows from motivation (you want to keep reading each missing book). Something like Molloy is a more hostile version of the same challenges to conventional narrative. The reader is asked to persist regardless of the lack of gratification or tension; in some way our motivation and our behaviour become divorced.

There’s some nice side paths to venture down here - like, how does a Reader differ from a Listener ( Molloy versus Waiting for Godot, or the Iliad to say, Dante’s Inferno)? But what I’m most interested in is when and how did characters start to see themselves as separate from their own motivations? Has this spread into our consciousness via narrative (because it makes for characters more interesting than your average Christie criminal - when wills are less clear, if you’ll pardon the pun) or to narrative via society? I’d argue it’s pretty clearly not an ancient conception of self - the heroes of the Iliad, for instance, hold their agency tightly, except when it’s tempered by immortal intervention. Achilles is the most tortured, but even he is clearly acting in accordance with his own desires, at least of that moment. His fate is manipulated, sure, but from without, rather than within. Perhaps it’s the threat, always present in the Iliad, to make human beings into things, which is hardly moderated by, say, the thing having thought that there were multiple forces within itself, y’know, subagents and stuff.

There’s obviously more literature out there than I can take in on selfhood and agency through the ages, but the point is that this stuff matters, right? The way we think about ourselves really does impact what we attempt and how we go about it. Maybe not as extreme as causing all of human progress but enough to change the kind of life we lead.

As you know, the degree to which you are divided is the degree to which you are conquered. And, as you know, also

Your subconscious drives are reorganizing your mind to try new strategies til one works, and since they aren’t conscious, they aren’t nearly as constrained by:

• what you’ve adopted as “acceptable”
• your own … belief … that you’re not allowed to fuck around and find out?!?

I think, for this reason, we need to distinguish between, on the one hand, a kind of ‘sub-agent’ which is in fact a ‘shoulder advisor’ — the conscious product of a neat subroutine running in your skull to simulate another agent that you’re familiar with from The Real World — and, on the other hand, a kind of ‘sub-agent’ which is an unconsious drive, or your ‘shadow’, or a product of your ‘shadow’, or a trauma reflex, or a divided part.

Consider this: immediately after the First World War, a defeated Germany was filled with young men, empty and bitter from loss. While many of those angry and defeated men would turn to darker things in time, a few of the returning German soldiers began instead to climb mountains. Here’s the introduction to one account, published in 1938 (in translation; emphasis mine):

There is little in our time which does not bear the indelible mark of the War years; even to understand the idea which led the German climbers into the Himalayas one must carry the mind back to 1914, for the turmoil into which our country had been thrown, and a striving for the sublime which battle had rendered only the more urgent, were even in this instance the motive forces.

When Germany emerged from the War I saw all that had meant my world-and that of hundreds of thousands of my comrades lying in ruins. In November, 1919, in a station building on the Rhine guarded by coloured French soldiers, I was summarily commanded to remove the uniform which I had worn for five years, and in incredibly shabby “civvies” issued by the Government, a skull-cap on my head and carrying my entire possessions in a sack on my back, I made my way home-an experience the bitterness of which is only now slowly evaporating.

We fought in the volunteer corps and were prepared to march at any time for a national revolution, but we were strangers, outcasts in our own country. Public life went its way, but in the spiritual life other influences were at work.

It was during this time of desolation that I began to go into the mountains and found that they had the power to restore that which town environment threatened to steal. They helped to convince us that the forces of good must ultimately assert themselves and triumph. They, proved to us that courage, perseverance and endurance bring their eternal rewards. In those joyless days we needed some means of proving that he who was dauntless and undeterred, he who was prepared to make the greatest sacrifices, and he alone could aspire to the highest attainments. Defiantly resisting the spirit of the time, we had to show again again what these virtues could achieve in spite of the heaviest odds.

Out of this was born the German Himalaya idea, and it was in this spirit that the first German Himalaya team set out in 1929. It was entirely independent and had no other support than that offered by a few individuals and one or two climbing clubs. But the team was determined that, as successful pioneers, or, if it had to be, as a lost company, they would strike a blow for their life ‘s ideal and with it for the true Germany.

It was typical of the spirit of this enterprise that the men, after some short trials which proved how ready they were, how well they were equipped for great feats of endurance, should at once focus their attention on the greatest of the Eastern Himalayan giants-Kangchenjunga. They did not reach the summit, but their attempt has ever since stood forth in the eyes of the world as a feat without parallel in the annals of mountaineering, and it is generally agreed that this first German Himalaya team through its heroic struggle and its magnificent achievement won such regard for German climbers that all subsequent German Himalaya expeditions have benefited from it.

It’s worth asking, I think, how one should best label the ‘motive forces’ for such young men. It’s clear enough that they’re describing something that is simultaneously a spiritual project, a nationalist project, and a response to trauma.

Of a later time,

Reinhold Messner, one of the greatest climbers of all time, and the first to summit Everest without oxygen, explained that when he climbs, his mind tells him to go back, to not venture forth into the dark, cold and desolate winds. Yet he does.

That phrase — “his mind tells him to go back” — is exactly the thing that we need to develop a vocabulary for. Sometimes ‘his mind’ is ‘a simulation of a lover, or a concerned and sensible friend’. Other times, it is a sub-agent.

I love the genre of advice that frames everything as coming from parent to child, senior to junior. I love it because it assumes that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, knowledge that was hard-earned (if indeed you did earn it and aren’t just cadging it from a TED talk somewhere) can be passed down in a way that is actually beneficial to those that haven’t come close to the lesson yet. This lesson can be skipped, you say (implictly)! Explictly, I learned it the hard way (but there is an easy one). The framing of parental advice (and all other relationships that follow the model of ‘listen here, lad/lass’) assumes that the average parent, if not selfish and disingenuous, is aligned in interest with the child, sufficiently at least that the child should trust that the additional experience of the parent really does have bearing on the problem. ‘I want what’s best for you’ etc. At the same time, we learn very early on that our seniors may in fact be acting from ‘for my own ego, it’s important that you hear this’ or ‘what’s best for you must be aligned with what’s best for me’ or the more covert, ‘I want there to be an easy way’.

In practice, what you actually get out is, often at least: ‘it didn’t help, he also wasn’t wrong’. I think we’re very very bad at identifying the situations where such knowledge can actually be transferred.

One of the features of the sub-agent model is essentially the subagents giving advice, right? I mean, especially the ‘models of friends or family’ idea - you have all these incoherent parts of yourself, some of which are personified as actual people that exist outside of your mind as well. And they want you to do things, or have a view on what you should do. Either you listen or you do not. I can see that in retrospect, it’s sometimes helpful to consider actions or behaviours as a result of the desires or needs of those fragmented parts of yourself (‘I was stir-crazy that day because the kelpie tore up the place’) although this does slightly confusing things to the question of personal agency.

But ahead of action, especially when decisions rather than behaviours are being considered, does it make sense to consider these subagents as having needs which you would be helping to meet (which may colour their advice)? Do all of the ways advice can fail when you’re hearing it in the world still apply when you are considering it from parts of your own mind? Do our sub- agents have egos of their own? Perhaps sometimes their advice is motivated by your internalised understanding of the needs of that external friend, when the question relates to them (‘yes, you should move closer to where I’m living’). Is there always still a ‘you’ that is the decision maker?

inside you are two wolves. this is below the minimum viable population threshold, so they soon die out. the deer population inside you explodes, quickly stripping you of your internal vegetation, erosion increases, streams and rivers silt up, and insect numbers collapse due to ha—@wife_geist

i can fix her, i mutter to myself, about myself—@embryosophy

Let’s preëmpt the pseudo-diagnostic objections. In an extremely coarse-grained sense, surely the crippling-fear-of-failure-that-resigns-one-to-inaction that you’re describing (and that we both experience) either contains, or is contained within, some variety of what people like to call ‘imposter syndrome’.

(Other people might have the so-called ‘imposter syndrome,’ but I’m just actually an imposter.)

Yes, well.

The problem is that, whether legitimate and DSM-ish or otherwise, not all ‘diagnosis’ is ontologically equal. Sometimes a ‘diagnosis’ is tightly entangled with a causal account. Down Syndrome. Leukemia. A broken toe. Sometimes it’s just a fancy label for a cluster of observations.

I know that I like to talk of subagency sometimes. I notice, also, that I tend to talk in ways that personify with the tacit assumption of such a schema—as kelpie, or as parliament. However, one of the problems that I have with this model/reflex-in-description is captured in the moment you mentioned in your previous letter: that night, years ago, in the hut, in the forest, in the rain, when “somebody asked what everyone’s greatest fear was” and

You and I, right off the bat, we said ‘failure’. And the other two, just a second behind, said it was losing someone they loved.

What agent(s) spoke up, there, ‘right off the bat’? What parallel parliamentary processes in the two of us decided to bubble up those particular admissions?

In his introduction to The Society of Mind, Minsky writes of the difficulty in describing in sufficient detail the scheme by which “you can build a mind from many small parts, each mindless by itself”, that

It’s much the same for shattered pots as for the cogs of great machines. Until you’ve seen some of the rest, you can’t make sense of any part. (17)

In practice, the problem isn’t just that there is a stylised Fred the Swede in my skull who whispers ‘att misslyckas’ at every turn. Rather, the problem is that knowledge of that part—even in exquisite detail—is not useful knowledge of the form of the whole.

I was an odd and awkward child, and often bullied. I remember my father saying to me, once, in the midst of a kind-and-yet-doomed-to-failure attempt at an explanation of the situation, “you’re never gonna be anything those people respect.”

(While, at the time, it’s fair to say it didn’t help, he also wasn’t wrong. Adult Me still isn’t anything that Child Me’s Bullies, Now As Adults would respect.)

Today, I imagine that phrase in another context: one subagent, talking in a gentle voice to another, speaking about the rest of the so-called ‘Society of Mind’.

“Look, Kelpie, you’re never gonna be anything those people respect.”

It’s cute, perhaps a label-diagnosis, even, but it doesn’t explain. As a model, at this level of granularity, it doesn’t result in testable predictions.

Clear evidence, I think, that the model is wrong-and-not-quite-useful.

Getting comfortable with failure - and the particular way I have been socialised to do it - has itself been the greater failure of my own life.

Do you remember that night we were out in the forest, four of us, and the rain was bucketing down and we’d retreated to the warmest corner of our wooden hut. Maybe we were drinking hot chocolate, and somebody asked what everyone’s greatest fear was? And you and I, right off the bat, we said ‘failure’. And the other two, just a second behind, said it was losing someone they loved.

A slight segue: to consider Taskmaster, one in the never ending series of lightweight comedy shows that people working the scene rotate through in Britain, like 8 of 10 Cats, Would I Lie to You, etc etc. Contestants (professional comedians, mostly) do tasks for points, including for bringing in their own prizes. Taskmaster has a range of recurring characters, one of which is Fred the Swede. In one series, contestants were asked to find out information from him - which included his greatest fear. Att misslyckas, he says.

Now look, I’m not on a TV show. But I still can’t help but point out that Fred the Swede is most famous (in the english-speaking world at least) for being, well, Fred the Swede, an infrequently recurring character on a ridiculous, existentially oblivious comedy show. And he’s most afraid, of all things, death and loss and taxes and being trapped alone in a room full of rats available to him as choices, of failure. I mean, what does that even mean? What project, what work are we so afraid of failing on?

Then I look, once I have that feeling of absurdity, at what the practical effects of that fear have been in my own life, and I reach a squiggly kind of shame feeling. Fear of failing has not made me more likely to try for things. Fear of failure has made me less likely to define what it is that I want to do, and then even when I know, it’s made me more likely to turn from it in resignation. Well, I can’t have that anyway. Better embrace feeling terrible about yourself instead.

Elsewhere on that same blog, TLP describes the same in more detail, ‘the desire to be something coupled with the terror of doing anything– which results in ambivalence and inertia camouflaged in a consumerist lifestyle full of meaningless choices’.

Didn’t I assume that just now, talking about Fred the Swede? That success for him must be to ‘be’ someone (who is famous), not to have done something - I walked right into it.

So critically important, now, to create some positive vision, which we really could fail to reach. Are we working to keep away ‘weariness, vice, and want’ in the world? Your kelpie might be scratching at the doors of your mind, but mine is weary from want of work.

I am terrible—truly terrible—at caring for the herbs and vegetables in my balcony garden. It’s a simple enough task, I know: there’s no nuclear winter right now, and it’s summer here around -35.2,149.1 ; really, all I have to do is add a little water daily to a dozen pots and beds. And yet, somehow, I always seem to forget. Even as I write this, a part of me is thinking “Oh, it’s fine this time, I’ll do it in a moment! Look, I’m even writing about it!” But no. Don’t be fooled. Smart money—60/40—says I won’t. Instead, I’ll fall into some other, more absorbing task. A day will pass. Another. And so my lettuce wilts.

Last week, I started on a tattoo project, covering my arms (and chest, and upper back) with blackwork flowers. A ballet shrug of ink. While I’ve known of the artist for a while—an Adelaide expat, via Amsterdam and Stuttgart—six hours of clustered needle and capillary action on a Tuesday afternoon was the first time we’d really spent together. As it turns out, we’re both somewhat quiet, and they’re somewhat intense. It wasn’t until the second half of the session (my inner right bicep, a famously ‘spicy’ spot) that we really started talking. One thing that we turned out to share was this: we were both willing to admit, about ourselves, that we go a little mad without A Project. My mind may be a Parliament, but if you force me to take a six day holiday of ‘resting’, I can promise you: by day four, at the very latest, every chair in my Westminster will be ripped apart by one sad kelpie in need of a run. I am endlessly confused by people who can lie down, in the sun, on a beach, without a project or a growing sense of misery. My tattoo artist, as it turns out, feels the same.

The garden. The tattoo. The kelpie in my skull. The prospect of being—perhaps, in a certain sense—a “naïve animal”. All these are connected, in my mind, to that oft-misunderstood and oft-misquoted final passage of Candide:

“You must have a vast and magnificent estate,” said Candide to the Turk.

“I have only twenty acres,” replied the old man; “I and my children cultivate them; our labour preserves us from three great evils—weariness, vice, and want.”

Candide, on his way home, made profound reflections on the old man’s conversation.

“This honest Turk,” said he to Pangloss and Martin, “seems to be in a situation far preferable to that of the six kings with whom we had the honour of supping.”

“Grandeur,” said Pangloss, “is extremely dangerous according to the testimony of philosophers. For, in short, Eglon, King of Moab, was assassinated by Ehud; Absalom was hung by his hair, and pierced with three darts; King Nadab, the son of Jeroboam, was killed by Baasa; King Ela by Zimri; Ahaziah by Jehu; Athaliah by Jehoiada; the Kings Jehoiakim, Jeconiah, and Zedekiah, were led into captivity. You know how perished Crœsus, Astyages, Darius, Dionysius of Syracuse, Pyrrhus, Perseus, Hannibal, Jugurtha, Ariovistus, Cæsar, Pompey, Nero, Otho, Vitellius, Domitian, Richard II. of England, Edward II., Henry VI., Richard III., Mary Stuart, Charles I., the three Henrys of France, the Emperor Henry IV.! You know——”

“I know also,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.”

“You are right,” said Pangloss, “for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle.”

“Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:

“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.”

“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”

This is not, I think, arbeit macht frei, nor is it a passive retreat from The World At Large into a state of Epicurian ataraxia + aponia, nor is it the imagined seclusion-to-write of Voltaire’s mates. Nor is it pessimism. Instead, I think it’s something more akin to a kind of pragmatic refusal to engage with both

1. any of the widespread propaganda of a conflict theory, and 2. any ‘resignation’ from an (imagined-to-be preëxisting/primordial) state of conflict.

A pragmatic refusal which extends, I think, in the case of Candide’s garden-cultivation, even to the level of metaphysics. It is an unwillingness to entertain, not just stubborn Panglossian theodicy, but theodicy itself.

And it’s a compromise made by one’s Parliament. It’s something like:

Shit, well, we’ve got this kelpie. He’s not going anywhere. We may as well put him to work on something that’s positive-sum. He seems to want the work.

It’s silly, perhaps, but every time I read The Martian I end up crying. I’ve always struggled to explain the tears. It’s not because ‘Earth’ ‘comes together’ to waste resources and ‘bring our boy home safe’. That shit does basically nothing for me. The bits that make me cry are the countless scenes in which an earnest nerd works hard to solve a difficult problem for which they know the sole reward will be yet another problem of a different sort. That’s the ‘shared humanity’ that makes sense to me: a lack of habituation.

In the scientific world, a naïve animal is simply one that is yet to be exposed to an experiment. There is, I think, a place to stand that is not innocence as in foolishness, but neither a retreat to cynicism or weariness. Naïvety as unfamiliarity with the path out of the forest. Yet to be tested. As yet unhabituated to the maze.

Putting aside the complications here (is the animal in the maze even an image that we feel is conscionable?), there is still a little double act to be performed, as always when there are multiple routes to failure. Of course ‘Late Capitalism’ discourse is frustrating, because it too often (despite the idea of ‘lateness’) asserts an inescapable subversion of all things into power; the hopelessness of all efforts to escape. Scientific discourse is too often confident that new technology will not be subverted to the benefit of those in power (technology itself may be value neutral, but the way it will be applied is not).

Ok, so I’m just repeating Snow’s imaginary dinner party chatter:

The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment.

What else do I have to offer? Consider Teilhard de Chardin diagnosing Christianity’s 20th century illness:

Fundamentally, the Church never understood, as we understand it, the fine pride of man, nor the sacred passion for enquiry, which are the two basic elements of modern thought… A world completely dominated by the Church - as the Church has shown herself to be from the Renaissance until our own day - and were such a domination humanly possible - would have acquired increased capabilities from the point of view of sensibility and charity; but it would have lost all power to attack and penetrate the real: a warning would have been posted along the whole front line telling the enquiring mind that everything had already been found.

He posits, for a future mysticism, a kind of ascendance of scientific energy, subordinate only to the universe and blending into a transcendent spirit, with Christ-the-spirit leading the way. Sure. What’s key - what I think he gets right here - is the reason for the confusion of morality in the face of scientific progress. If there was anyone to ask why, if they sought to reduce suffering, they invented factory farming, it is the scientists. But they won’t be able to tell us, because they have relied on the simple energy of discovery, clinging vociferously to the real.

So yes, I share your unspoken unwillingness to be smug and ridicule enlightenment values and I share your confusion about what is happening that leads my fellows towards programming drones and factory farming. Maybe it’s counter-intuitive but it seems something beyond a commitment to knowledge is needed, in the same way that one must do more than think oneself a good actor in order to become one. I think of this as being the role of ritual: a way of bringing culture into the light and elevating the parts of it that we value. Not the prize giving that we so overvalue in the sciences, which has made our collective progression into a trivial, individualist contest.

I’ve struggled to think of myself as an outsider or a weirdo or any renegade figure in the past - my path seems to run through too many offices and too close to the conventional - but I’ve tried to keep some part of myself separate, innocent of the culture that twists earnest work into hopeless dead ends or worse.

It’s the value of these letters and the little sociological stories. Is cultured naïvety too oxymoronic?

You talk about the break-out space of the bureaucratic office, a discussion in hushed voices, and you connect the tacit demand for body-lessness from such an environment to a subterranean demand for (a kind of) mind-lessness. The connection between the two demands exists because, as you quite rightly observe,

it isn’t the simple lack of embodied feelings (desire, restlessness) but to some extent a prohibition on personality that the bureaucratic office enforces. In the office, one isn’t expected to call up a sense of one’s own ideas of right, past a certain level of seniority, but rather one’s ideas of how the organisation would do it. The more encultured we are (and progression is absolutely a sieve for cultural fit), the more likely it is that even disagreements are framed around whether it ‘should be done that way here’. In our daily work, we hold responsibilities rather than perform any active duty.

Yes, immoral mazes, yes.

Today, I want to (try to) see a little more of the forest, at the predictable expense of the trees. In a sense, the hushed-giggle debate about fecal microbiome transfer is a microsociology of the bureaucratic. But if this is true, then where should we look for a viable path to a non-violent alternative? Aside from the thick description of the disembodied Zoom Perfect Worker, how might we begin to situate ourselves in terms of an alternative? Insofar as we seem to be struggling to articulate any positive alternative vision, why are we struggling? If ‘the bureaucratic’ is an abstractum that can be understood in terms of its concreta, why is the non-bureaucratic only accessible on the Straussian periphery of studies of fantasies (and suppositories) generated by that same harmful bureaucratic? Why is any hypothetical Good And Earnest Alternative so slippery? Why so always-out-of-view?

Today, the best answer I can give to these questions is in terms of a Death-Metal-like metaphor.

Early in Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust of this Planet, there’s a passage which gestures—in the specific—towards the problem that I think we’re jointly facing. It’s a long passage, for which I (as usual) apologise, but I may as well begin by extracting it in full:

Whereas in traditional occult philosophy, the world is hidden in order that it is revealed (and revealed as the world-for-us), in occult philosophy today the world simply reveals its hiddenness to us. A second shift follows from this. Whereas traditional occult philosophy is a hidden knowledge of the open world, occult philosophy today is an open knowledge of the hiddenness of the world. Despite Agrippa’s criticisms of both science and religion, the orientation of his work remains within the ambit of Renaissance humanism. For Agrippa it is not only possible for humanity to gain knowledge of the world, but it is also possible for humanity to, by virtue of occult practices, obtain a higher “union” with the “Maker of all things.” Today, in an era almost schizophrenically poised between religious fanaticisms and a mania for scientific hegemony, all that remains is the hiddenness of the world, its impersonal “resistance” to the human tout court. Hence, in traditional occult philosophy knowledge is hidden, whereas in occult philosophy today the world is hidden, and, in the last instance, only knowable in its hiddenness. This implies a third shift, which is the following: whereas traditional occult philosophy is historically rooted in Renaissance humanism, the new occult philosophy is anti-humanist, having as its method the revealing of the non-human as a limit for thought…

If there is one foundational claim which underpins the outlook I have right now, as a result of our recent exchange of letters, it’s the following. Thacker thought he was making an observation about the history of ‘occult philosophy’. He was wrong. He was making an observation about Western culture in general. And what he calls anti-humanist is better rendered as anti-human.

Today, ‘occult philosophy’ is taken to be a pretty weird subject. One result of its weirdness is that, for someone like Eugene Thacker, it’s a (relatively) socially acceptable place onto which he can project otherwise-unacceptable observations. It’s much like schizophrenia was for Gregory Bateson et al. in the 1950s.

Thacker is noticing a general pattern. It only seems specific.

Once, long ago, human intellectual life was driven by the assumption that it was possible to gain knowledge of the world. This was not just true in the natural and special sciences, but in every corner of human experience. The basic, shared understanding—the closest thing to a human universal—was that hidden, secret, occluded things could be rendered visible through coöperative human effort. Problems could be solved. Scarcity could be overcome. Through collective work—humans believed—we could able to shed light on things and take advantage of our then-clearer view. Connected to this, importantly, creation was a robust good. Building, making, repairing. Especially creating new humans (children). All, on this view, basically, by default, good.

Now, in middle- and upper-class postmodernity, the totalising version of such a view is ridiculed. All that remains is a kind of elaborate signalling game which enables (and enacts) fractal-like patterns of dominance (and covert rent extraction). For the most part, what people mean by ‘truth’ is ‘power’; what people mean by ‘secret’ is ‘dangerous to know’. For the vast majority, humanist and enlightenment values exist as only empty names: politicised fictions, used for signalling alliances. The people who endorse them earnestly—some would say ‘naively’—are gaslit, ridiculed, and scapegoated by the powerful. Insofar as a geniune non-ironic, anti-scarcity, pro-real-creation-of-material-wellbeing sect exists, it’s been driven into enclaves. Tiny groups of scattered, confused ‘weirdos’. Largely disconnected from one another; perpetually on the knife-edge between ‘ignored’ and ‘ostracised’. These folks are (rightly) terrified of the world. [I think it’s fair to say that you and I are both members of the sect.]

As our letters have progressed, I’ve begun to realise that at least one thing we seem to share is a subterranean refusal coupled with a open suspicion: an unspoken unwillingness to be quite so smug as to ridicule genuine enlightenment values, paired with a confusion about what’s actually happening around us when so many groups of people profess-but-seem-to-profane those same values. If privacy is a thing people claim to care about, why so much pointless surveillance? If suffering is a thing to reduce, um, hey, what the fuck is with all the factory farming? If life is good and should continue, why so many reckless existential risks?

My sense is that we both feel, on some level, that the recent turn in culture—towards the present situation, in which it’s the unstated majority opinion that the world is zero-sum and “only knowable in its hiddenness”—is a catastrophic mistake.

I notice that I feel an inability to pinpoint (a) a precise alternative to the modern ‘bureaucratic’ ontology, in (b) few words, which (c) everyone would agree to, except with reference to fantasy and fiction and microsociologies of the bureaucratic thing that my hypothetical alternative is ‘not’.

I think this inability is itself a symptom of the (deeper) same.

The occluded truth is that most of the world is pro-death. At least in the ‘Eugene Thacker talking about occult death metal’ sense of things. Modern institutions have become mechanisms for traumatising their participants into a state of predictability. They have also become mechanisms which distribute a cornucopia of propaganda with one message: the only ‘real’ freedom is the freedom of the void.

Traumatised into endless aspiration towards the aristocratic, most of us postmoderns have been taught to face existential threats, not with the steely-eyed determinism of a hunter-gatherer who solves real problems (and might, she reasons, solve this one, too), but with a kind of relentless angst. A helpless waiting for death, or something that is metaphorically like it.

The thing we sometimes call ‘Late Capitalism’ pathologises independence, curiosity, energy, and attention. It naturalises trauma.

From Kegan to Friston, Pinker to Peterson, one can trace a trend: a ‘trustworthy’ agent is taken to mean ‘a predictable agent’, even if ‘predictable’ means ‘predictably self-destructive and irrational’. Modern institutions want you to be a reliable agent who does not process information; one who has no epistemic state. A well-oiled cog in the social superstructure, willing to subjugate yourself to the needs of the collective. Not really an agent for any natural meaning of the word, I know. But certainly something that can be put to good use (by the superstructure) in elaborate games to gain and maintain territory.

At the limit, predictability is death.

It seems to me that, in such a cultural environment, any positive alternative must come from somewhere ‘outside’. It must be an account of the alternatives that exist in the world as seen from a boost higher up the orthogonal axis mundi. It must be Heraclitean. It’s for this reason that I struggle to find the words: we write, and speak, and ask for freedom, but we do so in the language of the King.

To see the harmful thing up close is to see it as endless, light-blocking, fearsome. A thing from which to hide. To see it from afar, in its world, in terms of its incentives, is to see it as simpler and less dangerous. A monster to be tamed or slain, or just another thing on the landscape. I also think this might by why rationalists use such flowery language sometimes: it’s a kind of altitude-in-metaphor.

So we must necessarily write from beyond and outside in order to become, again, agents with epistemic state. To be able to be trusted to coöperate to gain knowledge of the actual world, and to then advantage of that knowledge for positive-sum ends, we need to find a bit of distance. Out beyond the pain, the trauma, and the culture-wide (metaphorical) death wish. There, we can be creative, again, finally. Unpredictable.

Last week I sat in the office with my ‘colleagues’ (comrades having fallen out of fashion of late), eating our reheated packed lunches and talking about whether it was preferable, assuming the medical benefit to be equal, to take a fecal microbiome transfer via the mouth or suppository. The group split 50:50 and both sides dug in.

The whole argument reached the heights that it did exactly because it was held in hushed voices: we were sitting in the ‘break-out’ space of an open plan office, and would shortly exchange resigned glances, wash our tupperware, and go back to our oh-so-serious zoom discussions. Because we were ‘colleagues’ of the work-from-home era, bonded only through the commonality of our email server. To talk about suppositories was to think about bodies! Bums! Parts of the body that ought to be shrouded in darkness! We giggled (rather than laughed) precisely because of the bureaucratic norms of the space. By which I mean, a place in which we occupied a rank and position but very much did not bring our ‘selves’ into.

Body-less but also in some sense mindless, for it isn’t the simple lack of embodied feelings (desire, restlessness) but to some extent a prohibition on personality that the bureaucratic office enforces. In the office, one isn’t expected to call up a sense of one’s own ideas of right, past a certain level of seniority, but rather one’s ideas of how the organisation would do it. The more encultured we are (and progression is absolutely a sieve for cultural fit), the more likely it is that even disagreements are framed around whether it ‘should be done that way here’. In our daily work, we hold responsibilities rather than perform any active duty. To even describe the kind of absence I mean, I’m forced to use terminology of warfare, because where else do we combine ideas of work, duty and commitment with movement and edge-of-life action? I guess one could feel called to be a P.E teacher?

Fine. So bureaucratic process in war, precisely because the body is on the line for more than just repetitive strain injuries, must pragmatically recognise a certain ‘fog’ that the ordinary corporate office need only gently nod toward, like your manager seeing you leave for the pub an hour shy of knock-off time on a Friday. In this sense, the SAS (as depicted in the world of SAS:RH) isn’t actually different from the rest of the army in the ways that it thinks it is. Notice SAS: Rogue Heroes doesn’t actually know how to show ‘normal war’, I think because to show it in a realistic way would involve too much of the very freedom that in its narrative belongs to the SAS alone. All it does show pre-SAS formation is one night raid, already in the style of SAS to come, and the truck convoy you described so well.

In a sense, there’s a (forgive me) Trojan Horse in the other direction as well: if all this anarchy and violence is concentrated in the SAS, it’s implied there’s another war around the corner, where things really might run to order and troops line up neatly to ‘exchange’ fire. Bureaucracy of war isn’t about what you’re allowed to do gun in hand. At that point, it’s you and the other guy, inevitably human, with wives skilled in needlework and all. It’s also not the absence of drinking or drug abuse (rife throughout armies from antiquity onwards) or the bar violence. Those are just the inappropriate jokes of the office kitchen - a little steam blown off, a little pretence of self-assertion, though we all know it’s soon to be relinquished. It’s for this reason that Zoom has brought on the perfect worker in a way that the office never quite could, because finally there is no shared enviroment, but the bureaucracy was getting on just fine (in fact better) without it.

No, bureaucracy is the mail getting through, regardless of where you are in the desert. And the SAS rely on that just as much as anyone.

The critic Edward Mendelson once observed that

Virtually every event in Gravity’s Rainbow is involved in a political process: specifically, the transformation of charismatic energy into the controlled and rationalized routine of a bureaucracy. These terms are of course borrowed from Max Weber, to whom Pynchon twice attributes the phrase ‘the routinization of charisma’. (168)

The treatment that Mendelson gives to Gravity’s Rainbow has been mostly ignored and forgotten since the essay’s publication, even by other literary critics—predictably, I think, given that the work is buried as a gravestone chapter in a scholarly edited collection. In spite of this, I want to resurrect a point that Mendelson makes, because he expresses it better than me. In his reading, Mendelson goes on to trace this ‘routinization of charisma’ in and through the metaphor of language. Discussing the chapter of the novel in which Pynchon describes the Soviet Union’s introduction of Latin script in Soviet Central Asia (a thing that did happen, around 1926-1940), Mendelson writes:

The history of language in Gravity’s Rainbow illustrates one version of this process of political organization. For the Kirghiz people, before the arrival of Tchitcherine and his bureaucracy, language “was purely speech, gesture, touch … not even an Arabic script to replace” (338). With the introduction of the New Turkic Alphabet, or NTA, whole systems of committees. subcommittees, various divisions of labor and authority now organize and reticulate themselves over the buried strata of the local folk culture. Unlike the language of Joyce’s “Oxen of the Sun,” the NTA docs not develop according to an organic model, but is shaped deliberately by the forces of government, forces which are themselves ultimately directed and initiated by the cartels which organize the book’s secular world.

[…]

The NTA is shaped by processes that are not merely linguistic, and its effects are felt outside of language. The availability of a written language permits more than the simple act of writing: it makes possible new events not limited to the realm of signs. Pynchon’s parenthetical joke gets to the heart of the matter:

On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian … kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way … (355-356)

The shamans worked curses and blessings through incantations or spells, but now language, formulated into writing, operates “in a political way.” The consequences of this realization have a tragic force. All the book’s efforts at truth-telling, all its thrusts at the increase of freedom through the revelation of necessity, are infected by the inevitable fact that the book itself must use a language that is, unavoidably, a system shaped by the very powers and orders that it hopes to reveal. Language can never be liberated from lies. One cannot speak outside of language, and one cannot directly speak the truth within it—this not only in the reflexive sense proclaimed by rccent critical theory, but in a political sense as well. To separate oneself from language, in an attempt to be free from its imposed order, is to enter a world of chaos and vacancy. This tragic realization is at the ideological center as well as on the stylistic surface of the book. Gravity’s Rainbow does not propose—with the romantic fervor appropriate to such proposals—that you escape the systems of pain and control that occupy and shape the world: the book insists that it is impossible to escape those systems yet retain any decency, memory, or even life—just as it is impossible to escape from language yet communicate. If the connectedness of the world has its metonym in paranoia—“nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation” (703)—then Slothrop’s detachment from the world’s order and the order of language (he is in the end unable to speak or even to hear) may be called “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long” (434). (168-9)

As you rightly point out, there are a lot of things going on in SAS: Rogue Heroes. There’s the myth-making of post-war Britain, the high definition footage of shirtless and sweaty and exceptionally attractive young men, and a dozen other cinematic offerings besides. Yet, at a meta-theatrical level, one of the things that I find most interesting is the extent to which such dramatisations necessarily sell to us a kind of (forgive me!) ‘Trojan Horse’ fantasy: on the one hand, they characterise the idealised lifeworld of the British SAS soldier as being not so much rule-breaking as rule- indifferent, as somehow anarchic, as radically ‘free’ ‘from’ ‘bureaucracy’; on the other hand, simultaneously, they smuggle in the assumption that ‘bureaucracy’ is ultimately synonymous with order, with language, with meaning, and with the very possibility of coherent action at scale. In the opening scene, our born-to-fight hero—who is, of course, both desperately agentic and desperately handsome—sees that the convoy needs to refuel to reach Tobruk. He sees, too, just as immediately, that the paper- pushing Officer Class has failed to achieve the bare minimum level of competent contact-with-reality. And, in relating to this system, he naturalises for us the idea that there is a need for bureaucratic logistics at all ; he shepherds us into believing that fractalised planning committees are the necessary pre-condition for coordination and movement at scale. (If only an isolated fuck-up hadn’t been allowed to sully the elegance of the Ideal Military Convoy!) We fantasise about his exceptional competence and lawlessness — if he is so attentive to the physical necessities of a long and sweaty journey towards dangerous explosions, here, imagine such a mindset elsewhere — and then, distracted by the jawline, we buy the layered lies.

David Graeber says, of Dungeons & Dragons, that it is “on one level the most free-form game imaginable, since the characters are allowed to do absolutely anything,” with the role-played characters acting very much like “what anarchists would call an ‘affinity group’”, and yet it on another level (with its endless rules and catalogues of stat-blocks) “the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy” (293-4).

It is the same here: the charisma of the individual is transformed in such a way as to contain, within our fantasy, a presumed necessity of interviews, paperwork, and little red rubber stamps on forms that mark “S.A.S.” beside the names of the men who are appropriately (ie, State-usefully) independent. How else would you turn ‘independent agency’ to ‘pro-social’ ends? And, really, how could anyone be like this and not be psychopathic in their violence?

Fisher’s account generalises. Our resistance and opposition to The System is commodified in fantasy and sold back to us. Or, just as fitting, Žižek:

Cynical distance is just one way … to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. (30)

Like the dog that eats the pill because it’s smeared in peanut butter, we fall for it every time:

‘There is no alternative.’

Have you watched SAS: Rogue Heroes? It’s a recent BBC release, and I spent much of the last week watching it. Perhaps they went with SAS because it didn’t require the budget to film a bunch of men in the desert as it would have to do the Battle of Britain again (the BBC at 100 years is in some ways still very much a post-war broadcaster). In any case, once you have put a bunch of young, violent men in the desert (with an officer class that’s conveniently classically educated), the references to The Iliad pretty much make themselves. A psychopathic rendering of Paddy Mayne sits in his tent, having lost his former tent-mate and clandestine lover to a foolishly overconfident first mission, and is accused of acting Achilles.

The young men who make up the SAS are shown selecting it for themselves, ‘raging’ for battle, counting kills, and lacking much of a self-preservation instinct. While the Generals that gave them the go-ahead might have benefited, they didn’t have to push them: in fact Stirling has to break into GHQ to get an audience with them in the first place. A portrayal that matches with the historical reports of the real SAS, at least, when it comes to David Stirling and Mayne. Thus far, all in in line with your proposal that ‘Picking glory over longevity is what young men do. And it’s the thing that old men make use of.’

But if we compare this fiction with fact, there’s actually a lot of dialogue in SAS:RH that mirrors the gratuitous violence and the ‘when shit is fucked up’ aesthetic that interview you linked. This kind of thing:

‘if you can’t handle a knee to the guts, a kick to the ribs, what good are you in the trenches, what good are you when shit goes wrong, in life, y’know?’

The engagement of the team with the ‘outside’ is, as you say, ‘mere environment’. Enemies armed or unarmed disposed of in night raids (recall Odysseus and Diomedes with the Thracians - is it significant that that whole book is thought to be a later edition?). The ‘desert heroes’ spend a lot of time talking about how to challenge authority when mistakes are being made, and the importance of each soldier knowing the why so they can recover when things don’t go to plan. Nevertheless, they’re almost caught and killed because they were too lazy to shave their beards before an undercover mission. This they also share with Achilles: getting themselves into unnecessarily terrible situations out of shortsightedness, glory-seeking, and recklessness.

I write all this because it seems unusual for it all to be televised in the course of a show that is also, possibly fundamentally, about watching shirtless, sweaty young men do violence for ‘good’. Perhaps war crimes just aren’t that emotionally challenging when the enemy is literally Nazis. Or perhaps SAS:RH is trying to do something else, or at least accidentally accomplishing it. Unless the argument is that The Iliad itself was propaganda for heroic glory - which its willingness in portraying the consequences of the death of the enemy (unmatched until Austin Powers came along) and its portrayal of Agamemnon as the failing state do something to undermine - there’s a space for texts that thread a needle between increasing the public’s comprehension of extreme violence and increasing their acceptance of it. Then again, maybe getting that message out isn’t easy in practice.

Today, two stories. The first is impersonal, and is about the difficulty of handling immediacy and specificity in the context of State violence. The second is personal, and is about the difficulty of handling abstraction and generality in the context of personal agency. Two angles on the same cultural phenomenon.

One: No Theatre for Achilles

Writes Graeber,

We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as violent institutions—except perhaps in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not abstract. I am not speaking of conceptual violence. I am speaking of violence in the literal sense: the kind that involves, say, one person hitting another over the head with a wooden stick. All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force. “Force” in turn is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence: that is, the ability to call up people dressed in uniforms, willing to threaten to hit others over the head with wooden sticks.

It is curious how rarely citizens in industrial democracies actually think about this fact, or how instinctively we try to discount its importance. This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on that fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required. It’s almost as if the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm. (58)

A subterranean question that I’m interested in surfacing: by what means—psychological, cultural, political, economic—are the “armed men” in this story rendered willing and able to cause physical harm to total strangers in libraries? Or, in another context: what is the process by which The State convinces its pilots to fly reaper drones?

A simple, too-cute answer: it’s the uniforms.

Well, it’s not the uniforms per se. Instead, more precisely, it’s a network of relations that makes uniforms seem possible as natural kinds. It’s a web of symbols and signification—a worldview, an ontology—that reorients those who exist within it around extremely stylised notions of identity and ethical behaviour.

You write that

To motivate yourself into certain acts—to be an actor (in the sense of someone who does things)—sometimes relies on the transformation of self into an actor (someone who pretends to be a certain kind of character who would do those acts).

I disagree. To be an agent is to be someone who does things in the environment in response to desires and expectations; to be an actor is to be someone who does things in the course of fulfilling a role. The distinction is subtle, but important. In many harsh (or ‘immediate’, or ‘concrete’) environments, the ‘motivation’ to act is immanent in one’s relation to the environment. Think of the way you are when you’re hiking. Or the way a dingo acts. Or an albatross. Think, also, of how you feel about the suffering of farmed animals. I don’t mean how you feel about it ‘as an abstraction’, or as that kind of something which most people flinch away from receiving any information about. How do you feel about the suffering of factory farmed animals when you consider that suffering as the visible consequence of real events in the real world?

The thing I’m claiming is that a certain kind of theatricality is a sufficient (though not necessary) pre-condition for motivating some kinds of anonymous, Us-vs-Them, Group-on-Group violence. Individual violence is plainly possible. Even ‘small group’ violence arising from the control of territorially-bound resources seems ‘natural’ enough. But the kinds of things that modern soldiers (predominantly) do are importantly unlike the kinds of things Achilles does. And the murders perpetrated by modern soldiers are (even in fiction) characterised in ways that are, as you rightly point out, importantly unlike the death of Alcathous.

The threatricality isn’t something that happens ‘in parallel’ with this ‘Group As Moral Patient’ phenomenon. Rather, theatricality is a means of traumatisation, of moral injury, of destroying and reconstructing the ‘individual’ so that they are more reliably ‘actor, not agent’.

While I’m not the first to say this, it’s relevant here: to a first approximation, The Iliad is a story of a powerful aristocratic figure (Agamemnon) trying to translate more personal forms of warfare (which focused on ‘raiding for glory and stolen resources’) into a modern, transpersonal, impersonal form. And it’s a story of that project basically failing. Agamemnon tries to turn early agrarian warfare (identifiable individuals fighting over territory) into the kind of thing that the American army as an institution does today. But, well, it doesn’t work.

In some of the post-Homeric stories, Achilles—hidden on Skyros—makes one of the only truly free choices in Greek mythology. If Achilles stays away, he knows that the Greeks will lose the war, but he also knows that he’ll die as a happy old farmer. That he’ll be loved by his sons, remembered by his grandchildren, and then (in a few generations’ time) forgotten. If he instead takes up the spear, he’ll die in the war. Young and bloody. But with his help, the Greeks will sack Troy, and his name—Achilles’ name—will last for millennia, synonymous with ‘hero’ and ‘warrior’. Only by dying at Troy can Achilles burn away the last mortal parts of himself. Only there can he finish what Thetis started.

Achilles, of course, goes to war. He’s a young man, trained by Chiron, and he’s the human embodiment of the phrase ‘too much testosterone’. Picking glory over longevity is what young men do. And it’s the thing that old men make use of. And because Agamemnon fails in his project, Achilles is—from the perspective of maximising the interests of The Group—allowed to remain too much of an individual agent, and not enough of an actor. Achilles is a great warrior, but a terrible soldier. Theatricality, moral injury, trauma … these are the means by which modern soldiers are produced. And the means by which anonymous armed men can be motivated to “use force” against strangers in libraries (or sleeping in doorways), as manifestations of institutions that are necessarily patriarchal and racist at their root.

Modern states such as America and Australia rely heavily on small teams of highly-trained, ‘special’ forces to enact the most personal violence. And it’s a fraught affair. First, as far as I can tell, modern States find themselves in need of extremely specialised, personalised, high-precision forms of personal violence. The occasional Achilles, in addition to a cop. First, the State tries to (re)construct low-fidelity simulacra of Men Like Achilles from a subset the already-usefully-traumatised-and-reliable mass of ordinary soldiers. This doesn’t work, or rarely does, and so the system instead resigns itself to selecting people who can’t or won’t submit to ordinary military structures and—at a kind of strange “arm’s length” remove—allows the older and more experienced of these to recruit, train, instruct, and direct the younger and less experienced ones. Provided these small teams are sufficiently violent in useful-to-the-State ways, they’re given the resources and freedom to develop a kind of parallel culture. It barely interfaces with the normal military, because it barely can. Inside a given team, one sees largely structureless, formal-hierarchy-disrespecting, positive-sum interactions; members of these communities believe, fundamentally, that every person and thing ‘outside’ their is mere environment or terrain (and so not morally relevant). Including their ostensible commanders.

The State tries to narrativise these groups of Extremely Personal Violence Executors in ways that are more palatable or comprehensible to ordinary citizens (eg. heavily-funded fiction such as the ‘Seal Team’). The system finds excuses for their beards and lack of uniform. The system does its best to titrate Achilles-like glory. The system does its best to tame the monsters it needs. It mostly fails. The reality breaks through. These people look like us, and talk like us, but they’re from a culture that’s alien even to the larger military that produced it.

(Compare the fiction to the reality.)

The theatricality to which I am referring is not a precursor or precondition of Achilles. It’s a thing that someone like Agamemnon is using (or, at least, the cultural system which generates Agamemnon is using) in an attempt to create the useful-to-the-State attitude of the blank-faced bureaucracy, or the Nazi Guard.

Two: As Christian Patriarch

I was talking to my mother about her father—let’s call him D—a while ago. D’s got Late Stage Parkinson’s Disease, and he’s been in a nursing home for a few years now. It’s a good nursing home, as they go, and a necessary situation. My grandmother couldn’t care for him at home and, really, nobody could. But he’s miserable. He wants to die, but can’t. He’s felt this way for years. It’s not a great scene.

The other day, I wrote:

While at first nobody believes the masks they’re holding up are ‘real’, the moral injury inflicted by the things they’ve been complicit in has made removing masks impossible. All they can do is switch from role to role. What seemed at first to be a temporary ‘play’ becomes embodied as The Real for its players. One is motivated, now, to redefine identity and being for oneself. One redefines belief. One naturalises masks. And, as a matter of psychological survival, one is motivated to continue that re-definition until everything is theatre. It’s a one-way street.

I found myself trying to explain this to my mother, in the way that adult children sometimes do in tense relationships with parents. I failed. Maybe it’s generational. I don’t know. I’ll try again here.

My mother is confused, I think, in her distress. Or maybe she’s flinching away from what she doesn’t want to see.

By her account, for years—since before D went into full-time care—my mother would have these interactions with her dad. The three of them would sit together—my mother, my grandmother, and D—and he’d be chipper and cheerful. Then, my grandmother would leave the room to make tea, answer the phone, whatever. And D would suddenly switch.

“I can’t keep this up,” he’d say, in a moment of grim honestly, “And neither can she. I’m not going to get better. You’ve got to help me.”

Then my grandmother would return, and he’d be chipper again.

If my mother tried to bring up D’s stated ‘privately’-stated feelings in larger conversations with him and others (my grandmother, a doctor, whoever), he’d play it off and minimise it, or deny it outright. His suffering was real—is real—but it was like he’d reached a negotiated settlement within himself, where he’d admit it to his daughter but not his wife.

He still does this. In the nursing home, to just my mother, he’ll say openly that he wants to die. But when she sits with him and his GP, as she does—as he asks her to do—he can’t seem to bring himself to make a plan.

The closest he came to it was when he first moved into the nursing home; to his doctor, I’m told, he said he wanted to go off most of his medications, so that a chronic infection in his hip would take hold and speed things along. But he couldn’t seem to articulate it forcefully enough, to anyone, and so the doctor’s line was “it’s a distressing time, a lot of change; let’s put you on an antidepressent and revisit the issue once you’re settled.” (True and reasonable.)

Now it’s three years later and everything is worse.

Here’s the thing about my grandfather. He was a methodist missionary, in Africa, before the family was deported from the country because of his support of a union movement and the end of white colonial rule. Later, he was a leader in the church. Deeply sympathetic to what I think he and I would both call ‘Quaker values’. Then, as my grandmother puts it, “feminism happened”. They left the church and, with some others, formed an ‘intentional community’ that remains stable to this day. He was a teacher, and a community leader, in a deeply Christian mold.

My mother seems confused because she thinks that, when he articulates his preferences to her, that means he wants to act on them. When he can’t articulate those same preferences to his wife or doctor, she thinks he just needs help or encouragement to do so.

The sad fact is: I think he’s switching between artificial roles that are so deeply ingrained he’s naturalised them as ‘self’.

I asked my mother to look back on her own memories of childhood.

“How many separate memories do you have of him,” I asked, “where he came home late—visibly exhausted, angry, or depressed—because he was putting first the preferences of some other group of people you hardly knew?”

“Those are the only memories I have of him,” she said.

This is the ugly heart of so-called Christian Values, and the role of the Christian Patriarch that a man like him had internalised as “moral action”.

On a deep level, he thinks that it’s his duty to sacrifice himself: to subjugate his needs, and suffer in order to lessen (or somehow ‘bear’) the suffering of others. At home, as the patriarch, he’s the Provider of his house. And in the world—in every community he was part of—his Polaris was something like “Is this self-sacrifice? If so, it must be good for the group. It must be moral.”

No amount of ‘progressive values’, or ‘feminism happened in the church’, or ‘leaving the church’, or ‘intentional community’, actually replaced this decision framework. It’s too ingrained. And it’s too widespread. It’s not just Christian, now, it’s Western and it’s modern.

There is uncertainty about whether ‘good’ means ‘good for the individual’ or ‘good for the group’ or ‘both’. In Christianity, with Original Sin, the only good is ‘good for the group’. And so the individual Christian is taught to utilise an imperfect proxy measure for ‘good’: bad for me. And then Goodheart’s Law does its work. For two thousand years.

The earlier account I gave was framed in terms of an entangled violence/theatre/spectacle object in the cultural superstructure. While I think I probably owe more precise definitions of ‘violence’, ‘theatre’, and ‘spectacle’, in the meantime I’ll try to clarify the edges of that account.

To my knowledge, my grandfather was never engaged in any spectacle violence. However, the explanation of his behavior that best fits the facts is that he’s doing the exact same thing—psychologically—that you say participants in spectacle violence necessarily do: he’s generating his behavior from an understanding of generic ‘parts’ he knows how to play.

He’s not a coherent agent who looks for things that are at least good for him and mostly good for both him and others. He’s assuming a zero-sum dynamic, everywhere, and then behaving as if ‘losing in the zero-sum dynamic’ is what A Moral Person does.

For years, he’s had a coherent preference to die. He won’t act on it. He can’t act on it. He will, however, articulate it to his daughter. Why?

I think it’s because the role he plays with his daughter—the drama they play out—is one of ‘ailing father’ and ‘doting daughter’. She gets to feel like she’s a caring ‘good daughter’ and he gets to feel pride at having raised (having socialised) a daughter who plays this legible part so well. When both were younger, he was the disciplinarian, the distant father, and she was the rebellious teen. Now the arc of the narrative finds purchase: he softens, opens up to her, and she fulfills the role as feminine carer.

When he’s with his wife, however, he’s playing the part of ‘Christian husband’. He sacrifices for her and hides, as best he can, the very fact and extent of his sacrifice. He falsifies his preferences to himself so that hers—or rather, his model of hers—can be better satisfied. For this, he is emotionally rewarded. Externally, I’m sure, there are social rewards: he’s brave in the face of a degenerative illness, as is expected of A Man Like Him. There are also internal rewards. A ‘society’ within him, acting as the generating function.

And he does this so naturally, so instinctively, that he doesn’t even see it.

People, through some theatrical spectacle, some embodiment of the dramatic, become motivated to kill people who are otherwise total strangers. This, if I understand what you’re suggesting, is parallel to what is going on when the Good is taken to be the Good of Society rather than the individual. It’s a role-play where there is such a thing as ‘A Society’ made up of a cast who know their lines and that they’re performing them.

To motivate yourself into certain acts - to be an actor (in the sense of someone who does things) - sometimes relies on the transformation of self into an actor (someone who pretends to be a certain kind of character who would do those acts). And this carries with it some kind of loss of individualism. Without meaning to, you have transformed yourself into something inherently group-orientated, audience aware.

I’m not certain, but my instinct is that this isn’t what’s going on The Iliad. I mean, there’s a lot going on in The Iliad, and much of it (including everything Achilles does or says) could be interpreted to be relating to this very question: what motivates men to risk their lives to kill others?

But first I want to talk a little about what death looks like. Frequently, when someone kills a man, there is a pause in the action right at the moment the reader finds out who is going to die. A typical example, one of the dozens of times this same pattern occurs:

Next [Idomeneus] killed the hero Alcathous, the dear son of Aesyetes,

nurtured by Zeus; he was the son in law of Anchises,

and had married the eldest of his daughters, Hippodameia,

loved by her father and revered mother with all their hearts

in their halls, since she excelled all girls of her age

in beauty, in handiwork, and in good sense; and so it was

the best man in broad Troy who had gained her in marriage.

He is was whom Poseidon beat down by Idomeneus’ hand,

bewitching his shining eyes and shackling his bright limbs;

he was unable either to run back or to swerve aside, but

stood motionless like a grave-pillar or a high-leafed tree,

while the hero Idomeneus stabbed him with his spear

in the middle of his chest, and broke through the bronze tunic

that had up to then kept death away from his body; but

this time the spear tore through it with a loud grating noise.

He fell with a thud, and the spear stuck fast in his heart,

but then towering Ares took away the heart’s fury, and

Idomeneus gave a great shout, and boasted terribly over him…’ [13.427-445, Verity]

Yep, that’s right, this is the moment to spend a little more time getting to know his aging in-laws! And his soon-to-be bereaved wife! Notice he is already dead this whole passage, and then he dies again at the end of it, but with all the graphic violence and specificity second time around. It’s not like we’d met this character before the moment of his death. He was just one of a crowd, heading towards becoming a body in the pile, until the poet decided we needed to hear a bit more about his shining eyes. In order to what, though? To truly appreciate the significance of the action of taking away a stranger’s life?

While the dead would often be strangers to the reader, if not for these interludes, the heroes on opposing sides do regularly recognise and even speak to one another. In the passage above, just after I left off quoting, Idomeneus boasts to Deïphobus (referring to him by name) - who had just killed Hypensor in order to avenge Asius, who died seeking to protect the body of Othryoneus - that he has killed three in exchange for Deïphobus’ one. Only once, in amongst the many deaths in war, do two heroes speak to one another, and afterwards mutually decline to even try to kill one another (the famous ‘guest- friendship’ of Glaucus and Diomedes in Book 6).

These passages do humanise the dead, but why not focus on the grief and friendship of those that fight alongside them, instead of those back home? After a death, grief frequently comes over their allies, but this comes later, and is generally described in practical terms, often associated with the stripping of their armour by their killers. Deïphobus, for instance, goes to fetch Alcathous’ brother-in-law Aeneas ( ‘Aeneas, counsellor of the Trojans, now surely is the time for you to help your brother-in-law, if indeed grief for him touches you. So come, let us go and save Alcathous… Look, spear-famed Idomeneus has stripped his armour from him [13.463-467]) and the resulting rally by the Trojans leads to consequences in battle: several more deaths on both sides. But I’d argue these death passages consist of an assertion of the loss of the individual - outside of their membership of a group or a force or cast, they have ‘real’ lives, a wife who is skille d in needlework, who has a mother who loves her.

But look, ​can you tell me why, if what The Massacre at Paris is doing is describing our whole attitude to violence and by extension, the modern attitude to morality, it couldn’t also work as a play? Because it really doesn’t work as a play.

You write that

If this culturally contingent tendency of comrades to grasp for totalising power is, as you put it ‘downstream of a worldview in which ‘the group comes first’ because, on some level, ‘The Group’ is the moral patient’ — then I would like to know where this comes from, because I don’t think it’s rooted in historical activist politics.

I agree. It’s not a consequence of historical activist politics. Old unionist poems are strong evidence when read in their historical context. At least in the beginning of the modern labour movement, ‘success’ of the movement was by definition identical to the improvement of the conditions of real, individual workers seen as whole humans.

If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers, for bread is food for the body, but flowers are food for the mind.

I wrote that

I think one can read this pattern of culture—in its birth, its presence, its absence, its effect—in places as varied as The Iliad, The Massacre at Paris, the Australian Western Desert, the archetype of the ‘Christian Patriarch’, and the Heraclitean deathroll of a crocodile.

I now take that list of ‘places’ to be a kind of hasty mud map sketched by one of my subagents (without my parliament’s complete consent). A contents page. Perhaps a dare.

The Iliad is your terrain. Today, I’ll start with what, for me, feels like the most familiar ground: The Massacre at Paris. My apologies.

Christopher Marlowe died drunk, aged 29, with a friend’s dagger in his eye. Before that, though, he was a successful spy and playwright. He wrote Dr Faustus, Tamburlaine (Parts 1 & 2), Edward II, Dido, and The Jew of Malta. All great plays of the Elizabethan English stage. Unfortunately, his remaining play, The Massacre at Paris, is not so great. The Massacre at Paris really sucks.

At least as the playtext survives, The Massacre is a shitty, shitty drama. Rick Bowers describes it as filled with “scenes of violence that are brutal, abrupt, and noncausal” (131). Paul Menzer says it “reads like it was written on the back of a cocktail napkin” (363). I’m not kidding when I say that both critics are being kind. The play has got a lot of bloody violence and very little of the Marlovian language we ordinarily expect. No great soliloquies. No great character studies.

The thing is, beneath the surface, The Massacre is also an incredible illustration of the structures of transpersonal conflict. More precisely, I think it’s an account of the phenomenology by which personal conflict is transformed into transpersonal, impersonal, collective conflict. It’s a (fictionalised, historically-specific) catalogue of some of the social, cultural, and institutional mechanisms by which less toxic modes of individual thought — many of which focus on assessing tradeoffs to maximise wellbeing, minimise suffering, and satisfy preferences of actual agents — are subtly altered and restructured until one feels that one must, instead ‘do bad to do good’ or ‘sacrifice oneself for the wellbeing of The Group’ (even and especially if that ‘wellbeing’ doesn’t correlate with increased wellbeing for any members of The Group).

Marlowe’s play depicts, on stage, the events of a real-world massacre that occurred nineteen years prior to the play’s performance: the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 1572, in Paris, in which a series of targeted assassinations of high- status Huguenots (= French Calvinist Protestants) spiralled quickly into widespread religious violence, eventually killing somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 across France. Today, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is generally understood to be a key turning point in the French ‘Wars of Religion’: the Huguenots were crippled, and the Catholic-perpetrated violence was (in a strategic sense) ‘successful’. Written by someone who was working in the midst the ongoing Catholic-Protestant religious conflict in Europe, with intimate knowledge of the aftermath of that massacre on the Continent, The Massacre is—for us—a case study in exactly the mindset we’ve been discussing. Narratively and structurally, Marlowe gives us a window into one mechanism by which ordinary individuals in post-Agrarian cultures become motivated to kill people who are otherwise total strangers. I imagine this is a theme to which we’ll return in the future—touchstone texts include SLA Marshall’s Men Against Fire, Joanna Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing, Dave Grossman’s On Killing, and Daniel Bell Jr’s Just War as Christian Discipleship. Today, let’s stick with one Elizabethan playtext.

There are 22 scenes in The Massacre. While you should feel free to jump this summary, here’s scene-by-scene list of staged events for later reference:

1. The marriage of Henry, the young Huguenot King of Navarre, to Margaret of Valois, the sister of Charles (the Catholic King of France) and daughter of Catherine de Medici (the Catholic Queen Mother). The marriage is an attempt to put to bed existing conflict. Nobody is happy about it.
2. We meet the Duke of Guise, a deeply Machiavellian member of the Catholic League. He’s a man with a plan: use a gift of poisoned gloves to kill Henry of Navarre’s aging mother (who is also, obviously, a Huguenot). In so doing, set Huguenot against Catholic once again, stoke the violence, and use the ensuing chaos to make a play for the crown. Real ‘chaos is a ladder’ vibes.
3. Guise’s poisoning plan works. The Old Queen of Navarre dies. The Lord High Admiral is shot by a sniper while carrying the Old Queen Navarre’s body, and he’s seriously wounded. Catholic/Protestant conflict starts ramping up again.
4. The Catholics (King Charles, Catherine the Queen Mother, the Duke of Guise, Duke Anjoy, Duke Dumaine) all set to scheming. A general massacre is planned, with explicit discussion about how isolated murder will be made to spread into the streets by means of theatrical staging. King Charles, ever the soft touch, visits the wounded Admiral.
5. The massacre gets going. Guise and his men kill the already-wounded Admiral, and then kill Loreine, a Huguenot preacher.
6. The massacre continues. They kill Seroune, another preacher.
7. The massacre continues. They kill Ramus (the King’s professor of Logic). The young King of Navarre (Henry) and his brother, the Prince of Condy, realise that Guise is to blame. Guise & friends let Navarre & Condy leave, but kill their schoolmasters.
8. Duke Anjoy (a Catholic, and brother to King Charles) flees to the safety of Poland to ensure the continued safety of the Catholic crown (in the event of revenge/violence from the Huguenots).
9. Two soldiers are tasked with disposing of the Admiral’s body. They argue over how to do it, remarking that the heretic’s body will contaminate any part of the world it’s disposed in. Guise, the Queen Mother, and the Cardinal of Lorraine (the Guise’s brother) discuss the ongoing massacre.
10. Massacre of the Huguenots continues. Unnamed protestants are killed, and their bodies dragged away.
11. King Charles (the Catholic King) dies of a broken heart. All assembled high-status Catholics agree that the massacre of the Huguenots has been successful, and so Catherine (the Queen Mother) calls for the Duke Anjoy to return from Poland and take his dead brother’s crown and become the new King of France. It’s pretty obvious that Catherine is still very much in charge (in our Game of Thrones, a kind of Cersei).
12. Duke Anjoy returns from Poland and is crowned King. At the feast, they catch a cutpurse and cut his ear off. (Off stage, we learn, Navarre has escaped.)
13. The Duchess of Guise hangs out with her Maid, writes a letter to her secret love (Mugeroun). The Duke of Guise catches her. Predictably, he’s furious (and then scheming).
14. Navarre learns that Guise is raising an army to attack Navarre & finish the job he started in the massacre. Navarre immediately raises an army to oppose Guise.
15. Duke of Guise sends the Duke Joyeux as general of the army.
16. Navarre successfully kills the Duke Joyeux, defeating Guise’s army.
17. One of the Guise’s men kills Mugeroun (in revenge for the affair with the Duchess of Guise).
18. Navarre hears that Guise is on the out with the King. Navarre decides to offer aide to the King of France against Guise. More violence planned.
19. Before Navarre and the newly-crowned King of France can join forces, the King of France organises for three assassins to kill the Duke of Guise. The murderers hide in the next room. Guise is invited to court, and enters. The King briefly makes nice with Guise, then leaves. The murderers reenter, kill Guise. The King fetches the Guise’s son (and others) to behold the body of his now-dead father. The King sends the murderers away to kill Guise’s remaining brothers.
20. Working for the King, the murderers kill Guise’s brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine.
21. The Guise’s other brother, the Duke Dumaine, gets news of the other deaths. The Friar who gives him the news offers to kill the King of France in revenge.
22. The Friar goes to kill the King of France. He stabs the King with a poisoned knife. The King stabs (and kills) the Friar in return. An English ‘Agent’ appears, as does a surgeon. When it becomes clear to all that the King will die from the poison, he names his successor. The King dies, and yet more violence is promised, and the play ends.

All this occurs in something like ~1250 lines. (Like I said: a lot of violence, not much talk.)

Back in 1983, Julia Briggs wrote a paper called ‘Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris: A Reconsideration’. In it, at length, she catalogues the “forms of ritualized violence” that occur across the course of the play (259). She argues that those instances of violence are structured in a series of mirrored repetitions. As Leah Marcus, summarises it, more recently:

the play’s structure hinges on a series of ritualized repetitions: the second half with its ‘massacre’ of the Guise faction repeats with differences the first half with its reenactment of the St Bartholomew’s Day killings: so the soldier’s assassination of Admiral Coligny in the first half is replicated by his assassination of Mugeroun in the second half; both the Admiral and the Duke of Guise are promised safety, then murdered, and so on. (153)

By ‘ritual’, here, the critics mean something like ‘a thing with defined stages’. First, a separation from ordinary meaning; second, a liminal space of symbolic reversals and necessary ambiguity; and, finally, a return to the ordinary (with new identities). On this reading, the play is taken as a kind of ‘tragic glass’: movement into a liminal space of totalising violence, reflected and repeated with symbolic reversals, and then finally a return to a domain of (relative) ‘order’, with new identities standing in for the old.

While this description gets us somewhere, it is—I think—a kind of near miss reading. Briggs and Marcus are both concerned with a linear unfolding in The Massacre’s events. By talking about the play in terms of a ritual structure, they’re focusing on the ways in which elements of earlier scenes are repeated in later ones (with different significance). What’s striking, really, is that isolated scenes in The Massacre, such as Scene 19, strongly resemble the play as a whole. It’s not so much that Marlowe’s Duke of Guise dies, in Scene 19, in a way that resembles and ritually repeats the earlier death of the Admiral, though he absolutely does; rather, it’s that the scene which depicts the death of the Duke of Guise depersonalises his death by turning it into a kind of miniature theatrical spectacle for even the fictional characters participating in it. This depersonalisation-through-theatrical-spectacle is how the whole play works. (Spoiler: it’s also how modern Western culture often does its violent thing.) While it’s a mechanism of self-similarity under displacement that Marlowe is pointing us towards, it’s also self-similarity under change of scale.

I’ll save you from a repetitious reading of ‘violent theatrical spectacle’ in every scene in The Massacre, but we need to talk about Scene 19 at least. In the framing that ‘sets up’ the murder of the Duke of Guise, in the characterisation within the scene itself, and in the post-murder stage reactions that immediately follow, violent conflict is self-consiously staged like the play of which the violence is a part. In so doing—I want to say—such violence is made psychologically possible.

The scene opens with a conversation. Cossin, Captain of the Guard, prepares our ‘Three Murderers’ for their ordered action. The three assure Cossin that they are “resolute” and ready to perform. Cossin, in turn, assures them that they will be paid and instructs them to “take [their] standings within this chamber” [when performed, this is literally a space on stage where the actors stand and pretend to be hidden ‘in the next room’, waiting]. In fourteen lines of dialogue, violent action is promised in exchange for money, and the Murderers—the company of actors in the coming spectacle—are directed in their starting positions. The ‘outer’ audience [that’s you] is shown the businesslike preparations for a violent spectacle: a director addressing his cast. Parallels to Scenes 2 & 4 (in which the Duke of Guise plans and directs the violence of The Massacre) are made, here, pretty explicitly. With the concealment of the murderers, this preparatory mode transitions into a three line choric prologue:

Now falls the star whose influence governs France,

Whose light was deadly to the Protestants;

Now must he fall and perish in his height.

What the Captain is doing is describing a universalised model for what is about to unfold. It’s not a murder; it’s the tragic, inevitable fall of an apparently great man. A genre of a play that we’ve all already seen a thousand times. It’s no mistake that our miniature chorus-figure is literally the Captain of the Guard. The person telling this is a ‘trustworthy’ (read: predictable) figure of impersonal state power. A cop. He’s instructing the audiences, both real and stage, in the fact that they’re about to watch a de casibus tragedy … which is itself predictable, role-governed, and subsumptive-of-the-individual. Just like him. As all things should be. Troni Grande defines a de casibus model of tragedy according to three features:

first, in a tragic universe, retribution overtakes all sinners, especially the ambitious or power-hungry; second, Fortune (often regarded as the servant of divine providence) reigns supreme, and her wily shiftiness can be neither controlled nor eluded; and, third, death is a spiritual as well as a physical fact, leading to self-reflection, repentance, and worldly renunciations. (54)

Ambition—real, concrete goal-directedness, which entails a certain kind of unpredictability—is, here, taken to be synonymous with ‘sin’ and tied to unavoidable consequence. In the de casibus model, if you are an ambitious, goal-directed, worldly agent, you will be brought low by superstructural forces, will be made to repent, and will become ‘properly socialised’ in death. In what would otherwise be horrifyingly specific (an identifiable murderer; an identifiable victim) we’re told to see only an improvisational enactment of the general and the spiritually unavoidable.

When the murder itself kicks off in Scene 19, yet more theatricality ensues. Throughout the violent inset scene, Marlowe foregrounds the fact that every character on stage is acting. The characters on stage, it seems, know this as well as we do.

Obviously, in this, there are the murderers. As I said before, the natural reading of the scene’s opening is that The Murderers are a company of three ‘actors’. They exist on the stage for only two scenes (19 & 20), and are introduced with the sole purpose of performing the inset violence as directed. What’s weird, I think, is that everyone (even the characters) seem to notice. Their role as performers is emphasised by two more subtle aspects of their characterisation: first, the perceived social status, and second, the possible use of doubling.

In the space of thirteen lines, the Duke of Guise twice calls the murderers “peasants” and “baser men”. Even accounting for the arrogance of “proud Guise”, there is truth to this assessment. The murderers are attendant figures in a playtext whose cast is largely composed of Kings, Queens, Lords, and Dukes. While other messengers and attendants appear in The Massacre, they tend to be present on stage for only brief and instrumental periods. The sustained presence of the murderers marks them out as unusual figures in the scene and, by extension, marks the scene itself as unusual. And, it seems, the character of the Duke of Guise is aware of this weirdness. He talks as if he knows that he and they are playing parts.

A more practical factor also marks the murderers as unusual: doubling. The actors who play the murderers would have been present on stage in earlier roles. By my count, population of The Massacre is at least 53 characters. The usual population of an Elizabethan company was well below that number. What characters in the play could double with the murderers? Well, two interesting possibilities. On the one hand, the roles of murderers may double with Lords, such as the two Lords of Poland and the actor who plays King Charles. On the other hand, the murderers may be played by three of the Guise’s many victims. This latter category—the victims—comfortably includes the anonymous protestants, two priests, schoolmasters, and the Lord Admiral. Either choice (victims or lords) would certainly lend the Guise’s line “Villain, why dost thou look so ghastly? Speak.” an interesting resonance. But regardless of which roles are doubled, the mere fact of doubling adds another layer of distance and self-reflexivity to the murderers and the spectacle violence they perform.

So: murderers are playing roles. What of the others? Within Scene 19, both the Duke of Guise and the King are depicted in an interlinked reversal of their ‘normal’ roles. Here’s what I mean:

In the play as a whole, the Duke of Guise exhibits many of the traits of a Marlovian ‘Machevill’. He’s ambitious, vicious, and unscrupulous. Much like The Jew of Malta’s Barabas, the Guise “fits the stereotype of the underhanded, scheming anti-Christian villain which had become popularly synonymous with Machiavellianism” (Minshull 53). In the earlier movements of The Massacre, the Guise is a craftsman of death, orchestrating and directing the majority of the violence on stage. In this regard, I think, it’s natural to see Guise as extending Barabas; he’s similarly representative with what Andrew McCarthy called a “playful inversion of the craft of dying to crafting the deaths of others” (70). Yet in the miniature spectacle of Scene 19, this craftsmanship is nowhere to be seen. The Guise of the inset is not so much unscrupulous as he is uncertain: he is taken aback by the appearance of Epernoun at the door; he hesitates, seems to doubt himself, and even asks that his murderers “Give [him] leave to speak” in the moment of his death. When the Guise turns to his sword in an echo of an earlier scene, it is as if out of fear and misplaced hope more than any kind of savage craftsmanship. And while his penultimate cries repeat the earlier anti-Huguenot sentiment, Leah Marcus suggests that the Guise’s death retains “elements of tragedy in spite of his villainy” (157). In short, the Guise of Scene 19 is powerless.

The King is precisely the reverse. Whereas the King of the outer play is characterised by a profound powerlessness (first as the Duke Anjoy, and then as crowned monarch), the character we see in Scene 19 inhabits precisely the part of the Machevill that the Guise once held. As Catherine de Medici observes, this change is sharp: he is “a changeling”, not her son. He crafts the death of the Guise with a speech that basically amounts to blank verse stage directions; he assures his victim of safety; he delights in the spectacle that results from violently betraying that just-promised protection.

Both King and the Guise are separated from their previous selves. Playing different parts. More precisely: they’re no longer ‘self-directed agents, bound by rules’, but rather ‘improvising within a set of constraints defined by narrative parts’.

Momentary role-reversal is one thing. What makes the treatment critical is the role collapse with the reaction of the inner audiences (ie, the other characters watching on) once the violence is complete.

After the re-entrance of the Captain, and the King’s remarks on the “sweet sight” of the Guise’s body, the King calls for further inner audiences, commanding that the Guise’s son be brought in to see his murdered father’s body. At first, the King seems to figure himself as the author of the spectacle and controller of its effects. He thinks this new role that he’s just been playing is Real and Permanent. He goes so far as to explicitly suggest that the spectacle has given him status and power, as if those things are a stable currency one can keep in savings. The violence is, he thinks, completion:

Let Christian princes that shall hear of this

(As all the world shall know our Guise is dead)

Rest satisfied with this.

His use of the phrase “rest satisfied” may signal the redemptive possibilities of “making the duke of Guise a demonic scapegoat figure” (158).

Except it doesn’t last. That second onstage audience that the King himself has called for—the Guise’s son—quickly unravels any suggestion of power and restful satisfaction. Instead of submission, as the King expects, stage directions tell us that “he offereth to throw his dagger”. In response to the boy’s anger, the King immediately recognises a need to “kill the Duke [Dumaine]” and “strangle the Cardinal” before “these two […] make one entire Duke of Guise” and the effects of the spectacle twist out of his control. In other words, the King begins to recognise a dangerous mimetic tendency in the world of the outer play. Much like the two henchmen tasked with disposing of the Admiral’s body in Scene 9, everyone can see the problem wrought by violence: a pervasive risk of infection. Like the body of the Admiral, the violence of The Massacre “will infect the fire, and the fire the air, and / so we shall be poisoned”. As Lawrence Manley observes, this is “a very Marlovian moment, as the purest hatred coincides with the truest revelation: we breathe the smoke of those we burn” (126).

Catherine de Medici is no more supportive of the newly played King-as-Machevill, either. She curses her son, the King, calling him a “miscreant” and a “Traitor to God and to the realm of France!”. These accusations have previously been directed at the Guise himself. Almost word for word. Even as the King vows that he is “lawful King of France”, the outer and inner audiences recognise the futility of his protest. As Penny Roberts observes, “as with the death of Coligny, the victim, Guise, is ennobled by a martyr’s fate […] while his murderer, [The King], appears sullied” (39). While the King is momentarily made a Marlovian Machevill by the structure of the spectatorial inset, he cannot sustain the fiction; the reactions of the inner and outer audiences destroy that possibility.

More importantly, I think, the fact that he can’t sustain the fiction generalises. More than the simple dissipation of the King’s momentary generic artifice, all the reactions to the death of the Guise are layered collapses into each other, and into generic structures. It is almost as if generic structures, stylised narrative roles, and stereotyped behaviours are all that can remain once the spectacle is done. The spectacle was violent, immoral, and constituted by such generic structures. Nobody can understand their complicity in the violence except by continuing the stereotyped dance. In the case of Catherine de Medici, for example, the audience sees a sudden movement out of the ambitious manipulator into the generic Elizabethan feminine: in the words of Alison Findlay, “she collapses emotionally and generically from political overreacher into the feminine genre of complaint” (244).

After first being shown a kind of ‘play-within’ in which the characters are sharply differentiated from the ‘play-without’—in which neither the Duke of Guise nor the King are quite themselves—the real-world theatre audience is then shown a totalising deconstruction of that model: a tearing apart of the artifice of the miniature de casibus tragedy of violence that’s just unfolded. In a very real sense, there are no agentic ‘survivors’ of this iterative dissolution of roles. By the time the scene is done, nothing feels ‘real’ for any natural definition of the word. All there is to grasp is artifice. We see that, while perhaps the King thought he was in control of the violent spectacle and its effects, he wasn’t. Instead, he was subsumed by a narrative role. The subterranean culture that had generated him was the ‘real’ author: a culture that contained the King, but which used long-run symbols to supplant each individual’s interests and turn each person into a kind of helpless actor improvising at the edges of a strictly-scripted part.

We may as well use the technical term at this point. Every scene in The Massacre is intensely metatheatrical. The play itself is a violent theatrical spectacle; however, it’s also theatre about theatre. And, in my view, it’s theatre about how things get turned into theatre for manipulative effect. The fictionalised character of the Duke of Guise plans his own miniature play-like violent spectacles, directs his own performances, and eventually plays the part of ‘victim’ in a spectacle directed by another. Much like the real Duke did. If you’re thinking of the ‘mousetrap’ play (The Murder of Gonzago) in Hamlet, you’re on the money. Well, except you’re not quite there. I’m making a bigger claim.

Even in less ‘metatheatrical’ theatre—a normal play, without a ‘mousetrap’ murder—there’s already tension. As a medium, the theatre requires that audiences ‘play along’ with a fragile representational metaphysics. Real objects—bodies, props, spaces between—stand in for illusory ones in the fictional world. A prop knife substitutes for a real weapon, though the prop is itself ‘real’. And on the Elizabethan stage, a bladder of pig’s blood (once burst) stands in for human blood at the site of a wound. “Such substitutes for human blood,” writes Maik Goth, “were vital for creating the theatrical semblance of a genuine piercing of the characters’ skin” (142). True enough, but risky. Furnished with performed pomp and manufactured circumstance, an on-stage chair must stand for an imagined throne. The felt reality of an actor’s body must act as proxy for the fictional body of the character represented. And as theatre-goers and performers, we’re always flirting with the failure. If the actor ‘playing dead’ lies insufficiently still, the map-territory lacuna rears its ugly head. More dangerously, perhaps, if the actors perform their royalty with too much camp, well, oops, now we’ve manufactured a different mirror on the world: all thrones are just chairs + people pretending. Right?

In the metatheatrical, the ‘playing along’ is layered. In real time, real-world audiences are shown how to play along: actors, playing characters, playing audiences, watching actors play characters play actors play characters. Without that play-within-a-play, we’re just watching actors ‘represent’ characters. Once the play-within gets going, and those characters sit down to watch, we see a model of what audiences are meant to do when they see spectacles. It’s fun, but it’s a mindfuck.

What I’m saying, really, is that the mindfuck is the point. As Jake Orthwein says, in another context:

As we struggle to tease reality apart from fantasy, the emotional reality of the spectacle begins to take hold. Eventually, it’s no longer clear where kayfabe stops and the real world begins.

In Marlowe’s Massacre, it is precisely the layering of the theatrical—staged violent spectacle within staged violent spectacle—that makes the psychology of group violence possible. If the murderers who kill the Duke of Guise weren’t ‘acting’, it wouldn’t be a show. And if the Duke of Guise kept the violence personal, no widespread massacre of Huguenots could be effected. It is the signalling of roles, of generic structure, that makes men into soldiers. As we see the reactions to the violent spectacle spread beyond the intentions of its self-styled director—as we do in the end of Scene 19—we also see, I think, a deeper truth. While at first nobody believes the masks they’re holding up are ‘real’, the moral injury inflicted by the things they’ve been complicit in has made removing masks impossible. All they can do is switch from role to role. What seemed at first to be a temporary ‘play’ becomes embodied as The Real for its players. One is motivated, now, to redefine identity and being for oneself. One redefines belief. One naturalises masks. And, as a matter of psychological survival, one is motivated to continue that re-definition until everything is theatre. It’s a one-way street.

In 2015, when ISIS took Palmyra, they executed 25 men on the stage in the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre there. Later, only once the spectacle was done, did they destroy it.

I am neither traffic nor in traffic. This is the greatest joy of travel by bike. I am amongst, but not frustrated (in either sense) by the presence of other people. At risk of stretching the analogy too far, that’s not a bad working model for how I’d like to travel through the world.

To go back to the cop and the ‘comrade’: the nights I’ve passed a police car on my ride home through the busy and churning streets of a city like London, all of a sudden acutely aware that my bike lights have gone flat and I could be stopped and fined, what I’ve wanted (perhaps a selfish desire, certainly enbued with privilege) was flexibility: the ability on their part to decide priorities, or to respond to me with a human kindness.

If deterrence is mostly achieved by certainty of being caught, rather than the punishment when you are caught, then yes, the best way to avoid crime would be to have this predictable, programmatic, procedural responder. Accurate, reliable, and creating perfect legibility for the boundaries of the state. But even in that case, and allowing that most people think there is some social benefit to the police, I don’t think I agree that they have this robocop in their mind as what a good representative of the force of state should be (it’s certainly not a great match for the ones glorified in police dramas). This blank face reliability is exactly what I understood Graeber as getting at in The Utopia of Rules, when he argued these standardised relationships represented a loss to the average person of context and specificity, with more rules and less give.

That’s not to say there’s no benefit to being able to model accurately the actions of power. Graeber draws from feminist standpoint theory, arguing that masculine jokes about the impossibility of understanding women were one half of the results of a power inequivalence, with the other side being the effort and understanding women put into imagining and managing the lives and emotions of men. Women didn’t have the luxury of not understanding men, because they were, at least at the height of popularity for these jokes, in the dependent position.

Here I feel like it might be useful to draw a distinction between predictable as in ‘lacking internal epistemics’ and the kind of predictable involved in our ability to model our friends and lovers which you described as ‘subagents’. Most people, as you point out, would prefer not to be in utterly torpid relationships but in order to not run into one another constantly when moving, it’s helpful to map each other’s trajectory. Is that predictability?

It seems like you’re trying to explain the way the individual or relationship or model is perverted when power is involved (personal vs state mediated, how we should accomplish the Good), which brings us nicely to the state of middle-class climate activism today.

If this culturally contingent tendency of comrades to grasp for totalising power is, as you put it ‘downstream of a worldview in which ‘the group comes first’ because, on some level, ‘The Group’ is the moral patient’ – then I would like to know where this comes from, because I don’t think it’s rooted in historical activist politics. Take this fragment from the old unionist poem, Bread and Roses:

As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,

The rising of the women means the rising of the race.

No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,

But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;

Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.

There is moral good of the group here, but it is aligned with the good of the people, not on their sacrifice. I attributed the change to the rise of individualist politics, a corporate-mediated perversion of the strident claims for equality into a kind of pessimistic self-sacrifice: the slow death of solidarity.

Imagine that you’re walking down a street in a big, Western city. Let’s say central London. It’s late at night, but the pedestrian traffic is still pretty thick. It’s a Friday evening, let’s say, and the pubs around you are disgorging their noisesome and well-lubricated masses. You’re tired. You’re headed home. You’re in your own head, mostly, moving through the crowd towards the Tube station, when suddenly you see a cop—a ‘bobbie’?—walking towards you. Not walking towards you, specificially, but walking down the street in your direction.

Imagine the ideal version of ‘an interaction with this cop’. Imagine that the cop catches your eye and stops you. Or imagine something dramatic happens in the rapidly-shrinking stretch of sidewalk between the cop and you. In the ideal case, how do you want the cop to behave? How do you want things to go down?

I claim that, for the most part, you want the cop to be as predictable as possible. [Conditional on you thinking that cops should exist, that they provide some social benefit at least some of the time] I claim that the ideal cop (in most people’s minds) is never capricious, never goes ‘off script’, never applies the law according to their individual preferences or whims. Sure, they respond to the unfolding situation. They ask for information, if they need it; they ‘step in’ to de-escalate some interpersonal conflict, if that’s what’s needed, too. But the ideal cop that you’re probably imagining would never do anything that you wouldn’t be able to predict if you had the relevant information about the external world. The ideal cop is a machine, in a certain sense. They lack any rich internal epistemics. They don’t act on their own preferences. Rather, they act on information programmatically or procedurally, and those procedures are—in the ideal case—legible to you. They’re great at dealing with situations that look similar to situations they’ve encountered (and been trained to handle) before. That’s what it is for a cop to be a ‘good cop’, a ‘reliable’ and ‘trustworthy’ agent in the world.

Now, instead, think of the ideal friend, or the ideal lover. Think about what makes them good, reliable, trustworthy in your mind. In the case of an intimate partner or close friend, often I think the opposite is true: the thing that it is for someone to be ‘reliable’ or ‘trustworthy’ in that context is, instead, that they’re (in a very particular sense) unpredictable to you. Often, I think, we want friends/lovers/collaborators who share our values, but have their own capacities. Rarely, I think, do we want friends/lovers/collaborators to be predictable in the machine-like sense that an ideal ‘cop’ or ‘soldier’ is predictable. I can’t imagine anything worse than a friend who can be ‘trusted’ to ‘act in the same way every time’ but can’t be ‘trusted’ to ‘process and respond to novel information in novel ways’. I want a lover who surprises me, a friend who pushes me, a collaborator to whom I can delegate some of the work of investigating, judging, and responding to the world (and who delegates to me in turn).

To a first approximation, a cop/soldier is good insofar as they’re cog-like; a friend/collaborator is good insofar as they’re not.

I think this tension—in everyday notions of trustworthiness and reliability of agents—is itself a gesture towards what I want to call two competing definitions of The Good.

1. Something is ‘good’ insofar as it provides benefit to The Group.
2. Something is ‘good’ insofar as it provides benefit to one or more (identifiable) Individuals.

In a naïve account, these two definitions are coextensive. ‘The Group’ is just a set of Individuals. If something is good for ‘The Group’, then it’s (definitionally) good for identifiable Individuals.

The problem: I don’t think it’s quite so simple.

My sense is that, if you’re using (1) as your working definition, then—in many agrarian and post-agrarian contexts, at least—you start to imagine that ‘Doing Good’ entails self-sacrifice. That you should ‘bear the burden’, so that others don’t have to. While this is a Christian mentality, it’s not (in my view) uniquely Christian so much as it is uniquely ‘the kind of mentality one might end up having if one exists in a society that runs on fixed agriculture’. If you’re instead using (2) as your working definition, my sense is that you tend to start with an assumption of positive-sumness. The most easily identifiable individual is yourself, so something is ‘good’ insofar as it’s ‘good for you and other people’.

When you wrote about your comrade’s “radical proposal”, you pointed out that the proposal was entangled with “a model of belief in which we could know and not do (even when it was ostensibly within our power)”. You pointed out that within such a model of belief, the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ was necessarily one to be enacted and “mediated neither by self-interest or rational thinking or community agreement but by totalising power”.

I don’t know how to say this without it reading like the first draft of a manifesto, so you’ll have to forgive me:

You identified, in your comrade, a reflexive mental motion which I think is both incredibly common and deeply culturally contingent. More than that, I think that if you and I try to trace this reflex to the cultural nervous system that generates it, we might also start to see the ways in which everyday notions of ‘the good’ as ‘good for The Group’ turn out to be deeply harmful, patriarchal, racist, repugnant, pro-suffering, and anti-life.

There is, I think, a general (modern) tendency to grasp for “totalising power” as if it is the natural and ‘necessary’ force which binds Individuals together into Systems. My intuition is that this tendency is downstream of a worldview in which ‘the group comes first’ because, on some level, ‘The Group’ is the moral patient. My intuition is that a certain kind of transpersonal violence is deployed, to traumatic and manipulative effect, to transform humans from ‘agents who think positive-sumness is everywhere’ into ‘agents who play archetypal roles in service of the Collective’. I think one can read this pattern of culture—in its birth, its presence, its abscence, its effect—in places as varied as The Iliad, The Massacre at Paris, the Australian Western Desert, the archetype of the ‘Christian Patriarch’, and the Heraclitean deathroll of a crocodile.

If you’re interested, I can try to point towards this pattern in the coming letters, and we can try to untangle my many uncertainties about it.

In the meantime, a question: do you ever feel like you are traffic, or do you only ever feel stuck ‘in’ traffic?

A few weeks ago I found myself sitting in a local park, amongst a mixed-age, somewhat scruffy group of locals, at an Extinction Rebellion-organised ‘community assembly’. At some point, sitting in breakout groups, we were tasked with coming up with actions which we could approach the local council with and ask them to ‘co-create’ with us. Surprising to me from the outset was how radical the ideas of my group were, given how inherently conservative the task was. Free public transport was the first idea that the group endorsed, which was complicated slightly by the fact the councils don’t run the public transport here. At that point, when even the moderator was suggesting perhaps the second could be a little more of an easy win, one of the middle-aged members of the group started talking. She explained that we had all learned how lovely it was during the pandemic to not have the noise and pollution of cars and how disappointing that they had come back. So the council should ban cars but – twist – only every second day. Everyone would have to develop alternatives but would have alternate days to do essential car things in the meantime! Nobody should be driving their kids to school every day anyway! Of course there would be all the necessary exceptions, for disabilities and so on.

Weird, I thought but didn’t say, how we’d all learned that we hated cars and yet the cars were still persistently there. Because implicit in her statement was a connection between the actor (driving the car) and the we that had learned something. She at least wanted to believe that we were all the same people, that this wasn’t, as some listeners might have uncharitably been thinking, a simple classist us vs. them thing (where we might have learned that we didn’t like what they were now doing). This was a model of belief in which we could know and not do (even when it was ostensibly within our power) and as a result, government needed to step in and solve the coordination problem. A radical proposal (no cars!) to be mediated neither by self-interest or rational thinking or community agreement but by totalising power. Then last night at a dinner, an old friend from our hometown said she’d struggled with dating men with alternative lifestyles, because ‘in certain circles’ anti-vax sentiment was rife.

When I think about ‘community’, this is what I think about: the left needs the individual and the group to be in harmony, and is uneasy but dependent on the ways that government mediates that relationship. When I think of the ‘certain circles’ you reference, subagents seem to be a way to understand broader influence on individuals without having to fall back on referencing things that are simply ‘in the water’. If the left struggles to understand misalignment of the conscious choices of individuals, then the rationalists will always favour agent-led models over the unconscious.

Talk of ‘subagents’ is getting pretty popular in certain circles. Given your delightful use of ‘stilts’—which I take to be a pretty elegant metaphor for the way that an oft-used frame of ‘friends as supports’ really works from the inside—I think it might be valuable for us to untangle some of the other metaphors that this intersects with. I’m hoping this will make future discussion a little easier.

As the title of this letter suggests, there are four terms I want to gesture towards: subagents, supports, stilts, and shims. The first two are ‘in the air’. The third is yours. The last is mine. Let’s take them in turn.

First, there’s subagents. I take the subagents view to be (basically) rooted in some variation on the following general structure of insights:

1. We tend to think of individual humans as unified/coherent ‘agents’. This is an imperfect model (or ‘leaky abstraction’ if you prefer).
2. In reality, most individual humans are (to at least some extent) fragmented/incoherent in the sense that they exhibit (and usually report having) internally conflicting desires, motivations, and needs. As a result, most individual humans take not-totally-coherent actions. It’s possible to ‘let yourself get the better of your better self’.
3. Given (2), a better model is that a given individual human is ‘composed of [sub]agents’, where each of those subagents has its own (more coherent) wants and needs.
4. The action of an individual human arises out of (some kind of) process of negotiation between that individual human’s subagents.

There are various approaches which make radically different claims on top of this basic structure. If you don’t mind a bit of woo with your crumpets, there are theraputic frameworks such as ‘Internal Family Systems’ (IFS) which suggest techniques by which ‘you’ can access, name, and stage productive conversations between your subagents. If instead you’re more into “trying desperately to make actual progress towards being able to guarantee robustly safe & aligned AI before it’s too late”, then you can use this subagent model as a way into more general work on the possibility of ensuring that any truly powerful systems we build are both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aligned in various important senses of those terms. And then, of course, as always, there’s a universe of stuff that builds on that trauma book, and points out the extent to which symptoms of incoherence & conflict between these ‘subagents’—including, perhaps, ‘akrasia’—overlap with certain kinds of trauma symptoms.

You asked:

What are the consequences of letting go of the brain as a machine, and favouring the brain as a parliament? By introducing politics into our internal decision making models?

I take discussions of subagents, and the negotiated resolution of disagreements between subagents, to be at least in part discussions of that.

Second, there’s talk of (social) supports. In my mind, this kind of discourse shades all the way from vanilla ‘self-care’ to social justice ‘solidarity’ to anarchist infrastructures of ‘community’. Whereas the universe of ‘subagents’ discourse focuses on a rethinking of individual agents, my sense is that the ‘social support’ discourse is instead rooted a desire to reorient outwards, towards a line of claims that’s something like:

1. We think of ourselves as atomic, self-sufficient individuals.
2. In reality, we’re all intensely embedded in networks of relations to other individuals.
3. Given (2), we should consciously build and maintain strong, positive relations to other individuals so that we ‘support’ and ‘be supported’ by them when bad things happen.
4. Most people don’t do (3) enough.

This is all fine and good. I bounce off most self-care-is-solidarity-and-community talk, as you know. But this is all fine. (Honestly, I dream of one day stumbling onto a peer-reviewed paper that suggests ‘community’ is in fact unimportant to self-reported wellbeing, or that strong/positive social ties have absolutely no impact on any measured physiological stress markers. At least then the little Welsh troll at the base of my skull that whispers phrases like ‘file draw effect’ would shut up.)

Third, there’s your addition: stilts. I see this as something like ‘supports, but with awareness of subagents’. I take the thing you’re saying (indirectly) to be something like:

1. If you introspect, you notice that neither ‘individual identity’ nor ‘interpersonal relations’ are particularly well-defined concepts.
2. In practice, any serious attempt to be a coherent agent in the world entails some amount of ‘being able to rely on interpersonal relationships to hold the-you-that-you-are up’, and some amount of ‘recognising that those interpersonal relationships also alter, direct, and transform the-you-that-you-are (and the direction ’you’ go in)’.
3. There are inherent tensions in (2). In particular: the people at the other end of the interpersonal relationships are themselves constantly shifting.
4. ‘Balancing’ in light of (3) is less of an identifiable ‘state of affairs’ and more of a ‘constant process’.

I’m reminded of the famous line from Clifford Geertz, in ‘Thick Description’:

The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pronouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication. (Geertz 5)

In the stilts account, you come to understand (and tame?) the “solipsistic self” which (inevitably?) intrudes by tracing the webs of significance in which you find yourself suspended. In a coarse-grained, first-pass, quick-and-dirty sort of way, self is world. In a more careful analysis, ‘self’ and ‘world’ are phenomenologically suspect terms. Insofar as there’s a habit to be developed, here, or a reflex to be overcome, it’s something like ‘learning to stop unconsiously replacing the phrase “to help understand the world around me” with the phrase “to help understand myself”’. Here, relations are just too entangled with selves —‘supports’ too entangled with ‘subagents’—for us to have any hope of explicating one without simultaneous explication/construal of the other. No sitting in a darkened cave, alone, and hoping for deep understanding that will generalise. Be pragmatic.

This brings us, finally, to a new metaphor I want to introduce: shims.

In general, a ‘shim’ is a small, thin, tapered or wedged piece of material. A thing you use to close gaps, modify spaces, make things level, or provide a smoother interface. A shim is that little piece of metal that you slide underneath the foot of your lathe when you install it so that you can be sure that it’s perfectly level. A shim is the bit of wood you use to align a gap between two large chunks of timber when you’re building the frame of a cottage wall. In a pinch, when you’re picking a padlock, a shim is the thin piece of a Red Bull can that you cut with your Leatherman and then slide into the space between the shackle and the lock body to bypass the catch mechanism. And in computing, ‘shims’ are libraries that intercept calls to one API and transparently reformulates the call (or redirects it entirely) so that it can be handled by a different API. Writing a ‘shim’ is the thing you do when you need older code to be compatible with newer code; as Axel Rauschmayer puts it, “a shim is a library that brings a new API to an older environment, using only the means of that environment”.It’s solid material as lubricant, as glue, as improvised spacer.

In this metaphor, I claim, humans are often trying to create (or discover, or repair, or modify, or share) shims of various sorts. At the level of individual humans interacting only with themselves, ‘shims’ are the habits we form (and masts we decide to bind ourselves to) so that we can fill some of the gaps between our subagents and reduce the damage they would otherwise do to each other when they rattle about. And at the level of the ‘interpersonal’, shims are the things we use to make our relationships more manageable and robustly positive-sum (or our stilts more easy to balance on). They can be rules, or habits, or psychological technologies, or physical technologies. The key is that a metaphorical shim, here, is

1. small,
2. often transparent once installed, and
3. either (a) used to fill an otherwise-damaging gap between two systems, or (b) used to create a useful gap where otherwise a damaging, friction-filled interface would exist.

When I decide to answer the phone if and only if I reflexively smile when I see the name of the contact that’s calling me, I’m (unilaterally) acting to increase the energy I put into the vibrantly positive-sum relationships in my life. That blanket decision rule is a shim.

When Zvi describes having lost 100 pounds using Timeless Decision Theory, I claim that—in the moment of actually internalising the insight that “sticking to the rules I’d decided to follow meant I would stick to rules I’d decided to follow”—Zvi was (in effect) wedging a generalised shim into the spaces between some of the-subagents-that-exist-within-the-human-agent-we-designate-as-Zvi.

And when you and I commit to writing these letters to one another, in public, as a continuation of conversations that began in private over a decade ago, this blog is a shim.

I sometimes imagine each of us as standing upon stilts. When I look down, I have more than two stilts below me, though each still has a single leg going down to it - I guess I have more than two legs now, although my imagination is too lackluster to sharpen the focus around the midriff area to make it clear how that works. At the base of each stilt there is one of the people that keep me upright in the world. I can’t grip the wood with my hands and direct them; it doesn’t come up past the foot, they’re not that kind of stilt. When the people I’m standing upon move away from me I tilt, waiting until they come back, or I can shuffle the rest of them into a more balanced arrangement. If everyone stays still for a while, or there’s suddenly a benevolent arrangement of support, I might have time to look up. Pyramidal - very cohesive with Maslow.

Sometimes I’m a leaf on the wind. That is, I am unguided, exploratory, seeking change rather than progress. Trying to let go of the cyclical aspects of behaviour, of trauma. The best way not to repeat things is to be on a genuinely different path. The best way to avoid strong emotion is to not be in the situation that calls for it.

What are the consequences of letting go of the brain as a machine, and favouring the brain as a parliament? By introducing politics into our internal decision making models?

What I’m trying to say is we have different ways of understanding ourselves and those metaphors of self guide us into different behaviours. Broadly speaking modern psychology is also doing this a lot of the time. Are negative thoughts separate from the ‘you’ that is keeping track of them? This would mean ‘you’ can identify and reject them. Or are they perhaps coming from some kind transgression of an underlying belief, something that sits below the conscious self, which keeps the self within the lines using the piercing umpire’s whistle of self-loathing?

Is changing the self a zero-sum game? I prefer ‘two sides of the same coin’ over something like a ‘double edged sword’, but the question is the same regardless: personally, can I have the social o​bservation skills without the hyper-criticality? Can I have the analytical power without the sharpness of tongue? Can others have the warmth without the neediness? Can they have the free spirit without the chaos? Is there a perfectly shaped human, living within the geometrically perfect circle? Are all of these models just ways of excusing or rationalising our poor behaviours?

ze frank says, ‘Let me find and use metaphors to help me understand the world around me and give me the strength to get rid of them when it’s apparent they no longer work’. Of course I notice now that he says, ‘to help understand the world around me’ and I remembered it as ‘to help understand myself’. The solipsistic self will intrude. My question really: how I could I think about myself in a way that would allow myself to post this, to begin? If I post it, does that mean I must have found out?

There’s an ancient thread of tweets from @fucktheory, peace be upon him. Firsthand record of the thread is gone, and the account suspended, so you’ll have to believe me when I say that it went approximately as follows:

For at least twenty years, upper-middle class, often tenured academics have been teaching young people that politics is a futile form of irony.

I’ve watched Ivy League professors with tenure explain to graduate students with no health insurance that striking for pay is silly.

I’ve heard smug male assholes with PhDs describe registering voters as the “busy work” of political activity.

I’ve watched Derridians and Lacanians who own homes sneer at 19-year-olds who raise their hands to ask what forms of activism are useful.

I’ve watched post-Žižek fuckboy marxists condescendingly tell young socialists that signification, not class, is the real locus of struggle.

I’ve watched Tim Dean tell young men that ethical gay liberation means filling as many anonymous assholes with cum as possible.

I’ve watched Lee Edelman tell students, with a shit-eating grin, that hope is surrender and fighting for the future is “heteronormative”.

Kids who were the first in their family to go to college. Kids who spent their whole life fighting for a scholarship.

Kids who worked full-time while they studied for their SATs, rather than having a family tutor come to the Hamptons every summer.

Kids who, like me, grew up looking with awe at the worn, dog-eared copies of the Communist Manifesto on their grandparents’ bookshelves.

Kids who, like me, had the shit kicked out of them for being smart, for being queer, for being brave, for being different.

The smartest kids. The most determined kids. The most enthusiastic kids.

The kids who need a concept of ethical politics the most.

The kids who could, and in so many cases would, have gone back to their communities to teach, to read, to lead, to work.

Lately, in spare moments, as I wait for the kettle to boil, I’ve noticed that I keep thinking of ‘The Professor of Parody’. And I keep wondering whether this whole situation—the situation of The World to which I can only, y’know, gesture broadly— might be, in some sense, a just brutal reminder of our collective failure to internalise the ‘Professor of Parody’ critique.

Maybe the Year of Our Lord, Twenty-Twenty-Two, is the year that we’ll all have to face the facts: Martha Nussbaum was basically correct when she wrote her critique of Butlerian discourse fetishism a full twenty-three years ago. And then she was basically correct (and basically ignored) in every intervening year. And now notions of ‘practicality’ and ‘feasibility’ and ‘reality’ are—at least amongst middle- and upper-class genpop—empty signifiers that one is encouraged to sneer at. Only the abstract vibe of ‘ironic grift’ remains acceptable.

This comment was the tipping point for me. Not even the rationalists seem okay. Sure, yes, they’re holding onto a ‘do real things’ mentality. But it’s tenuous at best. The default reaction is “this won’t work, because material things don’t work; signification is the real locus of struggle”.

It’s a start.