Waking up on the 14/11/2023 with OCD

1. There’s an old mystical tradition according to which great capacity for good and great capacity for evil go together. This is true in a trivial way because the strong can do a lot of good, and a lot of evil through their might, but is it true in a deeper sense, is a greater capacity for benevolence associated with a greater capacity for malice? There is at least one sense in which it is true- thoroughly understanding the consequences and potential consequences of your actions, the quality of wisdom, can make you into a better person, but it can also give you an astonishing capacity for malice. It’s not symmetrical though- knowing the consequences of your actions can make you better sometimes, but it is not wholly necessary to have goodwill, while knowing the consequences of your actions to a fairly high degree is necessary to fully embrace evil. A child is capable of truly praiseworthy deeds long before they are capable of truly blameworthy deeds. In other words, knowing more about the consequences of your actions only might make you better but it will also make you more culpable. This makes sense, I think, of why several religions claim eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the beginning of (human) evil.

2. I want a softer world, kinder, more forgiving. I’m obsessed with my own mistakes and sins because I have OCD. Once I saw someone destroyed by certain revelations about her life- bought down by something like greed. She’d always been an advocate for a cheery and kind world, and someone sardonically remarked “She really only ever cared for a softer world because she wanted a world soft enough to forgive her”. Ever since then, I’m been stuck, like a butterfly on a pin, with the thought that all my longing for a kinder world is simply longing for a world that might forgive me my sins. I’m cursed, through OCD, to be unable to know the magnitude of my own wrongdoings. Probably they are much smaller than I think they are, but I have known people with OCD who, nonetheless, have done awful things. This unknowing can be acute in OCD, but all humans suffer from this, whether they recognise it or not. It’s cruel to have just enough self-awareness to wonder whether or not you’re a bad person, but not enough to judge impartially.

3. I think I used to be more charming than I am now. I used to win people over more readily. There are many possibilities. Maybe I’m out of practice in some sense on practice. Maybe I’m hanging around more awkward and introverted people than in the past. Maybe now that my hair is obviously greying, people expect more of me, and my childish streak is grating. Maybe there was a vibe shift after COVID and I’m no longer in sync with the world. Maybe I loop in tighter circles, re-trudging the old ground. Maybe I’m just noticing it more, and the bemused look and one-sixteenth of a sneer was always there. A horrible voice says maybe it’s just more obvious to everyone you are now. The desire to be known and to not be known are both so strong inside me that it feels like if I ever were totally known, that would be the end of me in this form at least, a kind of apocalypse in miniature for my current mode of existence. Although the two feelings war within me, my inclination to be known is stronger. I would give up the ability to lie in a heartbeat if there were some way I could tell people I’d lost that power and have them believe me utterly. I wish I could lay myself out without the possibility of deception or disbelief.

4. I feel like I’m trapped between cowardice and bravery, a burning tropics between two poles. If I were a little more cowardly I could run away into ignorance. If I were a little braver, I could reason fear is useless, and reject it regardless of its factual basis. Rigid in all the wrong spots, supple in all the wrong spots.

5. The hardest thing to learn is that essentially no trait fully shields you from evil. Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil, and this is one face of evil that is often hidden from us, recognizing that evil can be the boring administrator now employed in the concentration camp as a pen pusher is important, but it’s harder to reckon with evil than can generously offer us a seat and dinner in a warm home, the evil that is kind to strangers, the evil that thinks it’s a good man pushed too far, the evil that thinks it’s just protecting it’s children. That’s what I find so hard about social media, watching people who are, if not kind, at least kindly nonetheless calling to heaven for the blood of their enemies. Are they not afraid heaven will hear them?

6. I’m so tired, life is so long, memory is so fallible, errors never go away, we’re all exposed yet we’re all opaque, I’d like to be wholly known or wholly hidden. I’d be so much happier if I were wholly good, and though I’d never want it if I were wholly evil. I wish everyone would love me so perfectly I could know they couldn’t stop. I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done wrong, especially the things I do not realize are wrong. I forgive all sins against me and relinquish all claims to retribution for the sake of retribution. Sorry, thankyou, I forgive you, please… And now it frightens me/ The dreams that I possess / To think I was acting like a believer / When I was just angry and depressed / And to everything, there is no meaning / A season of pain and hopelessness. etc. etc. etc. Interminably it goes on, I want to shut up, but I can’t, at least inside my own head. I meant everything I just said, but all of this feels largely empty in a world in which eight billion people are dying. Yet again, even as it feels empty I can’t stop feeling and thinking these things over and over again. I am embarrassed. Have you ever listened to a sad banger on repeat, feeling the swelling emotions again and again and then realizing that someone was listening to the whole time? It feels a lot like that. Am I cocooning myself from something worse? There’s nothing especially noble in the Werebear’s Fortress.

7. You’ve got to care about all people. There’s no safe shortcut because if you let yourself make exceptions, you’ll exploit that. It’s like going to the gym. If you have a pattern of occasions you go on, and you break that once because the circumstances are exceptional then it will make it harder to keep up going to the gym in the future. Here’s the worst bit, it’s true even if the circumstances really were exceptional, indeed even if you really couldn’t go at all. If you give yourself license not to care about some villain, you’ll expand that out to that villain’s passionate apologists, then you’ll expand it to the lukewarm and you’ll add more villains to the list and more dividing lines between the reprobate and righteous. Next thing you know your theoretical love of all humanity amounts to yourself and three people whose flaws you haven’t found yet. I know I sound like I’m joking, I know, but I have seen it happen almost literally like that. Most people will never get to the end of that process, but unless you make a deliberate effort to stop it then I’ll bet you go further than you’d like to. The best place to stop the process is at the beginning, love everyone.

8. Using social media is like being trapped alive in amber. You can’t move. You can’t touch the things around you. You can’t really be heard. You are dissected by eyes. You are outside time only in ways that can never benefit you.

9. Let me give you my silly bit of advice. Something that’s deeply undervalued by our time is trying to look at the world with a little bit of distance. From standpoint epistemology on the left to “How would you feel if it was your family” on the right. Both of these have their moment of truth, and there is certainly the possibility of foolishness in thinking you have obtained the view from nowhere, and yet there’s a real value in trying to see the world from the eyes of a beneficent but distant creature who wants to help, and is thinking through the situation for the first time. I know some of the most irritating people in the world think and talk like they’re doing that, but nevertheless, try looking at yourself from outside and a long time in the future. Look at yourself like this and don’t just think yourself like this.