“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.

“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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

It’s a start.