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?