Confessions: A psychological and intellectual autobiography

I confess to almighty God that I have sinned through my own fault in what I have done and what I have failed to do.

-The Confiteor, as I have remembered it

Everyone seems to want to tell their story- from opinion columnists to recipe bloggers. We live in a period of writing as-personal-narrative. I thought it would be interesting, fun, and above all expeditious to tell you the whole thing at once. Why laze about, making hints and insinuations, when I could just spill? I’m aware this is a narcissistic exercise, and that kept me from doing anything like this for a long time, but finally, I figured “Hey, it’s not going to hurt anyone, I haven’t seen this done before and it could be interesting”.

You will learn little about the external events of my life here, but you will learn more about who I am than any but my closest friends know. I promise you also that everything in here is true. I’ve reread it to make sure not only that it is true, but even that nothing in it is misleading or will misdirect you. I have cut back on some explicit details, both because I’m afraid of awkwardness for us both, and because I am afraid simpliciter. However, I have not made any ommissions that would even brush against dishonesty. Long-time readers will notice that a lot of stuff I mention here has been covered in its own essay at some point.

Core psychopathology

• My greatest fear, as I have confessed elsewhere, is harming other people. This is how my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder manifests. When I was younger I experienced this in a noble way- fear of harming others. As I got older it became less noble. It became a fear of hurting someone and then suffering reputational or legal consequences.

• As a result of this fear of harming others unintentionally, I have a deep fear of not being known. Of people thinking I am evil and cruel because I have harmed someone accidentally. The worst possible thing that could happen to me would be me getting framed as a serial killer or something like that. I don’t need to be universally loved, but I have a deep need not to be reviled.

• Because my greatest fear is unintentionally harming others and facing the consequences, I have sympathy for people who are abhorred. Rightly or wrongly I think “there but for the grace of God go I”. Or as Sufjan Stevens put it and in my best behavior, I am really just like him (John Wayne Gacy Jr).

• A lot of my OCD focuses on what I call a Sword of Damocles complex. I think that something or other I did years ago, maybe something I’ve forgotten or didn’t even realize was a problem at the time, will come to light and destroy me. No one will believe my protestations that I didn’t mean it, or that it was an accident.

• I have a theory that a person’s greatest fantasy is often a reflection of their greatest fears, so we come now to my greatest fantasy. My greatest fantasy would be to receive something like the following trade. I will be rendered unable to lie, but everyone will know that I am unable to lie. People would know who I am because I would tell them, and they would know that I am telling the truth. In the spirit of complete honesty- by greatest fantasy here I mean something like “the most integral to who I am”, not the most attention capturing- that one would probably involve Henry Cavill doing some rather nasty things to me that I’m sure he’s too much of a (straight) gentleman to do.

Does he even have a basement?

• I’m fascinated by lie detectors as a possible means to fulfilling my fantasy. Even though I know it would be dangerous, I would very excited to learn that someone had made a working lie detector. I know that having a working lie detector would probably be nothing like I think it would be. Nonetheless, I still find myself Googling technologies that I see as related to lie detection, for example, brain-computer interfaces, machine learning-based thought reading approaches, and others.

• I am amazed at how little interest there is in this topic from transhumanists etc because, in my more fantastical moments, I think that the creation of a lie detector might be an end condition for history. That is to say, lie detection may be a technology that would bring about a state change in society, a horizon past which we cannot see. I think about the changes- to politics, to business, to law, to international diplomacy and so on that would result. I suspect the cumulative effect would be either utopia or a dystopia.

• Related to the above about lie detectors, I suspect that 5-10% of the population are ruining it for the rest of us. So many social designs and arrangements become viable if you can rule out the possibility that a selfish bastard will interact with them. So many dialogues become possible if you know the person you are talking to isn’t secretly a dickhead. Dickheads are usually easy to spot, but nonetheless, the possibility that someone might be a secret dickhead leads to a kind of everyday Hobbesian trap. The feeling that a handful of dickheads ruin things, and the inclination towards mercy even towards the worst people, contort together within me.

Miscellaneous psychology

• A lot of people say things like “X is my spirit animal”. I would not think about it in those terms, but I have a very strong identification with bears, particularly grizzly bears. However strong you think this mental identification is, you’re probably undershooting. I have had this sense of connection since I was a young child.

• I have watched maybe ten to fifteen movies in my adult life. I recall watching only one TV series (True Blood)

• I hate my body. I’m a little overweight, and that certainly doesn’t help, but it goes much deeper than that. Even if I were at 8% body fat I’d still be bothered by my lumbering frame. I’m 6’3’’ and broad-shouldered even for that. My face is handsome rather than pretty. I’m a twink trapped in a (semi) hunk’s body, but let’s be real, I mean I am a sub trapped in a dom’s body. Faced with few options, I decided to give people what I wanted so much myself. I won’t get into the details about how this interacts with harm OCD and sexuality, suffice to say the complexities are complex. I’m sorry if this much is too much, but I felt in an intimate psychological portrait I probably had to say something about sexuality. I’m sorry also if my problems in this area seem trivial compared to yours, in some cosmic sense I’m sure they are, but they matter to me.

• I am talking a lot here about my foibles and weaknesses, but I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. On the surface, I’m pretty healthy, a bit melancholy but mostly stable. Only my close friends know that I’m filled with turmoil. I’ve never self-harmed or attempted suicide. Maybe once every 3 years on average I’ll have a breakdown and my family and I will consider getting me hospitalized, reject the idea, and then I’ll get better over a month or two.

• I’m a great believer in tossing around ideas without being sure they’re true. This is because, in my view, we should view our aim as trying to help society reach the truth in expectation, rather than reaching truth ourselves. I think things that are often seen as epistemically detrimental- like an individual latching onto an odd idea and seeking to prove it, rather than test it- can actually be healthy from the epistemic perspective of the whole.

• I don’t think I’ve ever been envious, in the sense of disliking someone for their beauty, or intellect or anything like that. I wonder if I am unusual in this regard, or whether envy is much rarer than certain moralists have claimed. When you squint at it, envy does sort of seem like a self-serving myth “Oh he hates me because I’m smart”.

• My favorite song is The Mystery of Love. My favorite poem is The Four Quartets. My favorite book is The Communist Manifesto.

• The error bars on my own sense of moral standing, relative to the rest of the species, are huge. Yet I feel that the fact I even care puts a floor on how bad I might be (for a wicked enough person wouldn’t mind) and a ceiling on how good I might be (for a truly good person wouldn’t care how good they are, thinking only of trying to do better).

• There’s a certain public figure I have a crush on (TBC- not Henry Cavill). For very sensible reasons, despite it being completely possible, I have never made a move on this guy by, for example, writing to him, so it’s clear I have no real interest in attempting to seduce him. Yet to amuse myself, I tell this mostly-joking, a mental story about how various things I’m doing are to try and get his attention. Building a public profile. Working on stuff we would both find interesting etc. It adds this kind of fairytale romantic comedy element to my life. Again, to be clear, none of this is real. If I wanted to shoot my shot, I would have written him a letter about shared artistic projects, I haven’t done that for ethical reasons, but playing this weird mental game in my own head is somehow sustaining to me.

Politics

• Politics is a perpetual struggle between the strong and the weak. Spelled out in those terms, how could anyone help but choose the weak? After all, people have declining marginal welfare in things/status, and tautologically, the weak have fewer things/less status, so the weak getting more of what they want will usually be more welfare increasing than the strong getting more of what they want.

• Let’s define a political loonie. A political loonie is someone who is driven to be insufferable by their politics, prone to constant outbursts of emotion, etc., etc. Loonie is not synonymous with distance from the center- I’m on the far left, but I’d like to think I’m not a loonie. Centrist loonies certainly exist.

• If you go on Twitter, and you look at the loonies, you’ll see two types, both defined by their inability to tolerate the contemporary world. The right loonies can’t stand how ugly it is. They have a very narrow range of aesthetic acceptability, and they have trouble outside that. They are disgusted easily- for example by the thought of sleeping with a woman who has slept with someone else, by unconventional aesthetics and lifestyles, and so on. Look at their propaganda, half of it is sharing ads (so idealizations to begin with) from the past and saying “look at what we lost”, as if the world had ever been so “fit for consumption”. They hate the fact they don’t live in a beautiful storybook.

• The left loonies on Twitter are also can’t handle the modern world, but they are filled with rage and contempt for unkindness. They can’t handle cruelties, disparities, etc. so they enter into desolation, anger, and sadness. Consider the fiction they like and dislike. They want fiction where no one is ever truly evil, where there might be a mustache-twirling villain but he would never, say, rape someone, or even discriminate based on race. They can’t even stand the sight of fictional cruelty that mirrors the cruelty of the world.

• But although I am talking about right-wing and left-wing loonies only, I think they capture something essential about the left and the right as a whole. So those are my options, two kinds of snowflakes, one kind that cannot handle a world they see as ugly (and a good bit of it is ugly) and the other kind that cannot handle a world they see as cruel (and it mostly is cruel). If these define the spirit of the two sides, I’m going to pick the crusade against cruelty, rather than the crusade against ugliness.

• I’m mystified by property. At the moment I’m reading a history of the medieval ages (Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe). At one point the author claims that peasants particularly objected to taxes, more so than rents. He doesn’t clarify this statement -at least not in what I’ve read so far. Maybe this special objection was because taxes were higher than rents, or unbearable because they were added on top of rent. However, I have a feeling that part of it might relate to the mystery of property. Viz, if you tell someone you own a bit of land, therefore they have to pay you rent, they’re much more likely to accept that than if you tell people you’re the government, therefore for using a bit of land they have to pay you a tax. People will even say that if you move onto a bit of land and someone tries to charge you rent and you refuse, so long as they’ve got an older claim than you, you’re doing violence to them, not vice versa, but then reverse the judgment for rent! As if taxes were qualitatively from rents, fees, etc. As if property were something that preexisted political authority and was separable from it.

• If you made me absolute king of America, for the most part, I would act slowly, but two things I would do with haste:

  • Make poverty an emergency. If there’s a single person below what I take to be an acceptable poverty line (about 20,000 US per annum), that is unacceptable and is to be solved immediately. Involuntary homelessness, in particular, is to be solved immediately- with interim accommodation to be organized hopefully before nightfall, as one would do in response to a tsunami. Treat these things with the gravity that you would treat a hurricane or invading troops.

  • Declare any immediate review of the case of every person jailed or imprisoned, with the aim of releasing as many people as possible. If any district isn’t playing ball, impose a quota- a minimum proportion of their prison population they must free. A rough goal would be to halve the number of incarcerated persons within the year.

• There’s a lot of other things I’d do, I’m far left after all, but on the rest, I would move cautiously. These are the things that strike me as genuine emergencies on which I would be willing to risk sudden action. There are two great calamities that can befall a person that it is in the power of the state to reliably rectify- prison and poverty.

Identity & politics

• I believe that there is a healthy balance possible between not caring about race, gender, sexuality and disability on the one hand, and the oppression Olympics on the other. That balance is hard to sum up in words, but the core of it is positing that we are all with the exception of a small oligarchy- in this together.

• Think about it. Of course conversations about identity and politics are paranoid and nasty. A lot of people in this area have a model of politics on which most people have some “privilege" or other. Morally they are expected to abandon this privilege, but, according to the model, doing so is not in their best interests. Of course, you’re going to be paranoid that they’re not really interested in abandoning their privilege- apart from abstract moral concerns, why would they? Any theory which says the people fighting for a better world don’t fundamentally have the same interests is going to leave people paranoid and prone to infighting.

• Granted this common interest must be created not found, because it only exists in the context of a certain strategy- fighting to make the pie bigger. If you aren’t fighting to make the pie bigger, the working class will fragment and infight, because infighting makes sense when there is only a zero-sum game to divide up the scraps between non-elites. On the other hand, if everyone believes they are on the same side against the wealthy and powerful, the venom will leave conversations about identity. The focus will move from ferreting out traitors who aren’t devoted to renouncing their advantages and interpersonal micropolitics, onto talking strategy about the best way to advance a common interest.

• This isn’t to deny the balance is hard. Drawing a line between legitimate complaints, and interpersonal grievance-power maneuvering is tricky, but as Darwi Odrade says in Chapterhouse Dune, there’s no secret to balance, you’ve just got to feel the waves.

Vanity and metacommentary

• You probably think that I have written this because I think I’m unique. Well, I suppose I am unique, but only in the sense that if you draw 7 cards from a 52 card deck, every draw is likely to be “unique” albeit not in any particularly meaningful way. I expect numerous readers will go “aha- yes, I recognize that bit of me. Some bits of me are odder than others, but in the main, I expect I am the intersection of several circumscribed types, just like almost everyone else.

• There is one feature on which I am unique at least in the circle of people I know (which is large, though not enormous). I know people who are vainer than me, and I know people who hate themselves more than me, but I know no one who combines the two attributes so perfectly. That’s not a cutesy bon mot, it’s very much my reality and there’s nothing (or at least not much) cute about it.

• To be clear, I know that there are a lot of people who are both vain and self-loathing -it’s not an uncommon combination-, but my claim (which is likely an instance of this very trait) is that even among these people I am exceptional. Moreover, it feels as if these attributes blend into each other. I wonder if they ever were separate attributes in me.

• Like many people, I often feel like my own personal Cassandra- recognizing my own faults and prophesying their fruits but powerless to intervene. I’m autistic, and when I was younger I had difficulty with social graces, except I could often see my own mistakes as, or even before, I made them, yet I couldn’t stop the process.

Theory of history

• I’m the guy who invented the blogosphere terminology of conflict versus mistake theory, so you might be wondering “is he a conflict theorist or a mistake theorist”. The answer is a conflict theorist, but it’s complex. Mistakes and irreducible differences of interest blend into each other in a subtle way. One of the most interesting aspects of this is that it becomes very difficult to tell what someone’s “baseline interest” is, and interests themselves are partly constituted by convention and structure, making the interplay of ignorance (mistake) and clashing will (conflict) interlaced. Some Marxists might say that two people share a common interest because they could engage in class struggle to advance a mutual agenda, but if getting to that point would require solving a collective action problem, do they still have a mutual interest “in the interim”? Or what of the phenomena of people making mistakes about a topic because they don’t care enough about the people affected by those questions to exercise good judgment- is that conflict or mistake?

• Addenda to the above: In a very different essay to this, I once wrote that a real fuckup usually requires both some malice and incompetence, although the proportions vary.

• Never trust anyone who complains overmuch about vulgar Marxism or vulgar historical materialism. Sure, vulgar Marxism is vulgar, but it’s better than 90% of the people who complain about vulgar Marxism. I like claiming to be a vulgar Marxist sometimes. To be a little mean, it infuriates all the people you’d want to tease- on the right, the center, and the left.

Pain for cruelties

• I am afraid of how much people are multiplying evil these days. You go on Twitter and people will call literally anything evil, or heavily imply it. I never understood this because it seems to me to leave you very ontologically vulnerable. In both the Babylonian Talmud and the New Testament we see the general idea that you shouldn’t attack someone for faults you have yourself. Well let’s add to that- you shouldn’t attack someone even for a fault you don’t have if you have another fault which is just as bad or worse. Now let’s add another stipulation, you shouldn’t attack someone else, even for a fault that is worse than any of yours, if you could have had a fault just as bad, but for a small difference in your circumstances. Really, on the whole, outside certain specific contexts where it is necessary, it’s probably best not to attack other people for their faults.

• I’m astonished by the way that people don’t seem to regard reputational harm as a real harm. People will say shit like “oh so what, he got publicly shamed, it’s just words”. Are you a person or a beast to care so little about your honor?

• This essay is both a protest against how brutish things are, a protest against myself, and an attempt to lash out at what I dislike in myself and in the world.

• No one has really tried persuasion, it’s been written off so prematurely. I know this because I’ve persuaded many people to move towards the left over the years. I’ve persuaded right-wingers to the center. I’ve persuaded centrists to the center-left. I’ve persuaded center leftists to the left. People claim that political persuasion is impossible because they’re lazy. They equate not being able to induce a road to Damascus moment in their rightwing uncle at thanksgiving with the failure of persuasion for all times and places and with all strategies. Persuasion requires realistic goals, patience, empathy and perspective.

Death drive

• Another fantasy of mine: a yearning to become an abstraction. A yearning to quit the messy business of being incarnate, and become an abstract force operating on history- lines of influence and ideas rather than a bone and blood person. This desire is, above all, the desire to cease being but remain as ideas. To merge with the world spirit, were there such a thing.

• And as a way of achieving that, I find myself fantasizing about martyrdom. Here’s an example- it’s a little bit embarrassing to articulate. I stop some horrible event at the cost of my own life, but as a result, people find out about the stuff I’ve written. My ideas come into play- the only part of me that I actually like- but I cease the messy business of living.

• Lest some people draw the wrong inferences from the above, what I don’t want, and I very much don’t want to be misunderstood on this point- is “cleansing violence”. The conceit that if only we had a “good war” this decadence would leave our system is itself a symptom of decadence. People who say stuff like “ a good war would get all the snowflakes out of our system” are themselves snowflakes with no grasp of the hard lines of reality, but without even the merit other snowflakes have- viz, an abhorrence of the cruelty of the world. There is a place for self-defense, for revolution and even for the odd just war, but that is not what we need right now.

Philosophy

• I have complex views on philosophy that wouldn’t suit the format of this essay. Analytic philosophy is the worst approach except for all the other approaches.

• My Ph.D. thesis is about welfare economics. I won’t go into the approach. The underlying rationale is trying to make it more egalitarian, democratic, and psychologically grounded, while grappling with traditional problems like interpersonal comparison, the role of value judgments, and cardinality.

Our Weimar republic

• I don’t get the part of the left that downplays the possibilities of domestic authoritarianism. I think they are committing the errors of the left in Germany who equated everything to their right with social fascism and thus denied the significance of fascism as a phenomenon. Things are bad, yes, but they can get much, much worse

• The problem with the United States is that democracy is impossible there because no one is accountable. Representative democracy requires a clear assignment of credit and blame to a governing party, who can be held responsible for their results. Everything that happens in the United States requires so many things to come together to happen that it’s not clear who bears the blame for inaction or bloated halfway measures. Furthermore, free of the obligation of governing, representatives and their platforms lose touch with reality.

• This is by design. The United States Constitution was built on trying to force elite consensus or near-consensus as a requirement for government action. But this model was only workable when the United States was, physically or at least metaphorically, expanding. When you can’t just give every faction more of the growing pie to make them happy, governance becomes harder. Sometimes this or that interest group has to be zero-sum fucked over for the good of the whole. Only that’s very difficult in the US elite consensus decision-making paradigm, where that group can just hit the veto button. This is a major tributary river into the special political crisis in America right now, though of course there are other tributaries, and then there is the matter of the more general global crisis.

Values

• I’m a romantic, I believe in the infinite possibilities of humanity, I believe in our glory. I believe in love.

• I believe in mercy.

• If you read the culture novels, in the very long run I want a society kinda like that, but everyone is a Mind. Also, more democratic & less anarchic.

• I view communism, by which I mean, production for need rather than exchange, as a regulatory ideal. We don’t know if there’s a way there or if it is sustainable, but it should be the horizon of our dreams. Right now we need to help people, and having this north star can help with that. Who knows how far we’ll get.

• My overall ethical system is something like utilitarianism, except instead of pleasure or desire satisfaction, what I want is something like maximized eudaimonia. For each person, increasing flourishing of virtue, joy, creativity, and love. The system is utilitarian, insomuch as the aim is to maximize the sum of this flourishing across persons.

• But for most government work, hedonic or desire satisfaction utilitarianism will suffice, but with a few side constraints, like “no wireheading people”. Generally, the conditions that make people sustainably happy will also lead them to eudaimonia- people are curious, people want affiliation with others, and so on.

• “What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in
  Reason? how infinite in faculty? in forme and mouing
  how expresse and admirable? in Action, how like an Angel?
  in apprehension, how like a God?”

• But because I’m a transhumanist, I think we can raise ourselves even higher, I think we should aim for apotheosis.

• “I like to think
  (it has to be!)
  of a cybernetic ecology
  where we are free of our labors
  and joined back to nature,
  returned to our mammal
  brothers and sisters,
  and all watched over
  by machines of loving grace.”

Atom and the social void

• Throughout my life I have found myself craving civil society. When I was in university, for example, I founded (with others) a political movement (still going I believe) intended to be a home for people with similar politics to me. This was because I was disturbed by the fact that there were no persistent institutions for those who shared my values.

• This craving isn’t about loneliness. I’m blessed with many friends because I’ve made an effort to make many friends. It’s about the fact that there are no permanent institutions anymore.

• There are many ill effects of this. The lonely with few social connections have nowhere to go. Politics happens in a near frictionless void, without real pressure groups to mediate between politicians, people, and policy. People have no sense of midlevel affiliation between family and friends on the one hand, and abstractions like “nation” and “humanity” on the other.

• I’m disturbed by how passive many people are in respect of this problem. I will concede that part of it is that people lack the time to act as a result of punishing work schedules- but that’s not the whole story. I look around and I see people who are lonely, who have friends, but who don’t contact them to arrange meetups. I see people who have hobbies, but who aren’t setting up clubs for people with similar hobbies in their areas. Unions, political parties, sporting clubs, churches, etc. have collapsed- we all know the thesis of Bowling for Columbine but I can’t for the life of me understand why people aren’t doing something about it. Why aren’t people creating clubs? Friend networks? Why aren’t people who don’t care if they get fired (and there are many) taking a shot at unionizing their workplace? We only have a few years on this earth, why aren’t people trying to build something that will last with those years?

• Although I have many friends, I have a constant feeling of lacking something I can’t define. This feeling feels a little bit like loneliness. Partly, I think, it’s a religious aspiration, I’ll talk more about them later. Partly though, I think it’s a feeling of isolation at not belonging to any kind of social movement.

• On my mother’s side, I am Irish (and nominally Roman Catholic as a result). I have a vague plastic-paddy sense of longing for Irish identity sometimes.

Futurology and other religious inclinations

• You’re probably sleeping on AI. Very few people understand how much it’s going to change the world in the next 20 years. A lot of friends make fun of my “the singularity is nigh” perspective, but I think I’m right.

• I’ve always really wanted to believe in religion. I’ve always wanted to think there’s a God that cares for us, and that death isn’t the permanent annihilation of bonds and beauty. I was raised, Christian, and have long been fascinated by Christ as an ethicist. At some point, I learned about Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov and his proposal to recreate the dead, and I was entranced by it. Even though we don’t know it’s possible, I think we should make it our goal- to redeem all of history with infinite mercy. I realized then that I had finally managed to reconstruct my Christianity around the constraints of my agnosticism, like a river finding a new route downhill.

• We don’t know the world we find ourselves in. Theism could be true. We could be part of a simulation. Our simulators could be benevolent. Something weirder than I can comprehend might be true. The uncertainty could be a basis for despair, but I choose to hope.

• The title of this piece? I have never stolen pears from a pear tree. If I had stolen pears from a pear tree, I would not feel bad about it, unless there was some reason to think it would hurt somebody. But here’s more the rub of it- I’m no saint, although my life has been defined by the absence of, and yearning for, sainthood in a strange way. Although I know little about Saint Augustine, I know he was wracked by guilt, longed for holiness, and had a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction with creation, and I see myself in that, so I thought it would be funny to title this after his autobiography.