Introduction To Series On Curtis Yarvin

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Trump acts on his stupid ideas, and on the foolish chatter of whatever loon has his ear. He and his courtiers and henchmen recite crackpot theories to justify working for their own ends, with no pretense of oversight by Trump or Republican legislators.

Some of these weirdo theories, like the tariff gibberish and Christian Nationalism, are well-known. They’ve been discussed in progressive circles for some time, and are occasionally acknowledged in the billionaire media. What I did not know, and what was rarely reported in the media I read, was the influence of a group of anti-democracy advocates.

Recently I began to read about Curtis Yarvin. Heather Cox Richardson mentioned him in one of her Letters To An American, and commenter TruthBtold linked to this substack reporting on Yarvin.  Here’s an article in Commonweal, Yarvin’s Case Against Democracy.

In 2012 Yarvin gave a speech titled How To Reboot The US Government. He gave more speeches and interviews on the subject and drew the attention of rich techbros and right-wing politicians like J.D. Vance. It looks like Elon Musk used Yarvin’s ideas first to remake Twitter as a hang-out for creeps, and then as a template for destroying our govenrment from the inside.

Yarvin claims that democracy has failed and that the only way forward is to get rid of it and replace it with a dictatorship, or a monarchy. It’s a view shared by a lot of people on the far right, and for different reasons by the same filthy rich thugs who’ve been wrecking our country out of hatred for the New Deal and all things that make life better for working people. I’ll be looking into Yarvin’s writings in my next series.

Background

This stuff is wild. To orient myself, I read a chapter written by Joshua Tait in a book, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy. The book is supposedly available through your library. Tait focuses on a blog Yarvin wrote under the name Mencius Moldbug, Unqualified Reservations.  He gives an introduction to Yarvin’s theory of neoreaction, and his rejection of democracy.

Neoreaction’s basic assumption is that humans desire power. Interpreting democracy through this framework, Moldbug claims that democracy’s appeal is that it disperses power widely, indulging the mass desire for useless fragments of power. Since power-seeking is pervasive, society trends toward greater division of power and a concomitant erosion of order. Democracy is a “dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos.”

Trump and his henchmen don’t acknowledge the anti-democratic aspect of Yarvin’s thought, at least not so far, unless you consider Trump’s third-term garbage. They just follow his plan for destroying the institutions that diffuse power; and work at concentrating power into the hands of Musk and Trump. Yarvin’s views  can be seen as justifying the unitary executive theory, and for presidential kingship, as contemplated by John Roberts and his anti-democratic colleagues in Trump v. US.

In his blog Yarvin traces out the development of his theories of history, economics and other matters. The blog ran from 2007 to 2014. He has a substack, Gray Mirror, which began in May 2020 (after Tait’s article) where he posted drafts of his book Gray Mirror: Fascicle I: Disturbance, published January 2025. The title is Yarvin trolling: fascicle is close to fascist, but means something else. I’m reluctant to buy the book so I plan to read from the two online sources first. He shows up on other social media sites, but I’m not going there.

I plan to focus on the anti-democracy material and his views of human nature. We’ll see how that holds up.

Defending Democracy

I won’t defend democracy here. I follow Americans like John Dewey and Richard Rorty. See, e.g. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. My rationale for defending democracy is my understanding of human nature, which I discussed in my series on individuality.

But I also think that we as a nation have for a long time regarded democracy as background for our lives. We see it as a game we watch on TV. We yell at politicians as we would yell at referees. We don’t think of democracy as making any demands on us, much less as something that requires our constant maintenance and improvement.

Caveat

It’s very difficult to write about material with which you fundamentally disagree. There’s a strong tendency to minimize any good points, and to mock rather than try to understand.

I plan to be very careful about separating Yarvin’s words from my thoughts on how to understand what he’s saying, and to try to indicate where I’m having trouble following an argument, so that readers can check my thinking. That should help with the bias problem.

It’s important to note that Yarvin isn’t some Qanon weirdo cranking out conspiracies. I assume that he’s read the material he cites, and that he has tried to be intellectually honest. That distinguishes him from craven ideologues like the SCOTUS right-wingers and from lazy hacks like David Brooks.

Final thought

Yarvin and the filthy rich idiots he influences are dangerously wrong, wrong in a deeply fundamental way. They think they know what’s best. Not what’s best for you and your family and community. They think they know what’s best for the future of the human race.

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Techbro Theories Of Everything

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The Trump mob has a bunch of crackpot theories. One of these, beloved of techbros with Ketamine-plasticized brains, comes from Guillaume Verdon, a 32 year physicist. This Wired article is primarily about Verdon’s alternative to quantum computing, but it gives an introduction to Verdon’s big theory of “effective acceleration”, or e/acc.

Will Knight, the author of the Wired article, gives this bit of background:

By the 1990s, a British philosopher named Nick Land was advocating for a real accelerationist movement that would unshackle capitalism from the restraints imposed by politicians and welcome the technological and social destruction and renewal this would bring. Accelerationist ideas are echoed by other alt-right thinkers, including the influential blogger Curtis Yarvin, who argues that Western democracy is a bust and ought to be replaced.

Let’s take a look at Verdon’s manifesto.

The thermodynamics of the origin of life

Verdon starts by asserting that life emerges as “matter reconfigures itself such as to extract energy and utility from its environment such as to serve towards the preservation and replication of its unique phase of matter.” He links to this article by Katherine Taylor  about a theory created by John England.

Current views of the origins of life begin with a primordial soup of raw chemicals in bodies of water with external sources of energy like sunshine and lightening, and constant motion. England’s theory explains how that system can lead to early organized forms of matter. The article explains England’s theory, starting with the words “At the heart of England’s idea…..”

At the risk of oversimplification, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy increases over time. In certain systems, entropy can decrease in clumps of matter that absorb and use energy and emit energy in a less concentrated form, which is to say at higher levels of entropy. Entropy increases in the overall system, but decreases in a small part of the system.

A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Taylor’s article suggests that this process, called dissipative-driven adaptation of matter, lies at the heart of all evolution, which may or may not be England’s view. Either way, the article acknowledges there are countless other factors that influence the outcomes.

Verdon calls this process dissipative adaptation. He says it “…tells us that the universe exponentially favors (in terms of probability of existence/occurrence) futures where matter has adapted itself to capture more free energy and convert it to more entropy.”

First Interlude

Notice that Verdon uses phrases like “matter reconfigures itself” and “the universe favors”. These phrases could be read to suggest that the universe and the matter it contains have some sort of drive or even a purpose. In this setting, words are used metaphorically, to describe England’s equations. We don’t use the words to reason about the implications of mathematical language, because you can’t safely reason from a metaphor.

Here’s an example. When I was a kid, we had an encyclopedia with a representation of the Bohr model of an atom. It was a map of the US, with a basketball in the center of the country and a couple of ping-pong balls on the coasts of California and Virginia. Someone asked why if there was so much space between the nucleus and the electrons you couldn’t squash the atom into a tighter space. That’s an example of reasoning with a metaphor. Don’t do that.

Also note that Verdon claims that this theory is about extracting “utility” as well as energy. No it isn’t.

Accelerating Evolution

So, the first part of Verdon’s manifesto is consistent with current evolutionary theory, apart from the utility thing. Then Verdon tells us:

Intelligence emerges as a smaller timescale specialization of this adaptation principle; it allows life to identify patterns in the environment which have utility towards acquiring more resources to procreate and/or maintain said intelligent life form.

We’ve gone from absorbing free energy to, I suppose, catching prey. But this view of intelligence isn’t consistent with Darwinian theory in its current form. The range of evolutionary pressures is much broader than simple identifying patterns that represent energy.

Verdon goes on to say that consciousness is the natural limit of intelligence in the individual. So much for people. Then there’s meta-consciousness in the form of organized groups of humans, like corporations and governments and states. In a capitalist system, these “compete for resources” with other meta-organizations.

Second Interlude

Well, that’s nonsense. Elon Musk isn’t competing for resources. He took control of the government and is using it to grab resources from all of us to use as he sees fit, without regard to the impact on other people. Other capitalist organizations do the same thing, though usually with less law-breaking.

As an example, consider renewable energy. In Verdon’s theory, everyone should be grabbing the free energy of renewable sources like the sun. It’s now mostly cheaper than fossil fuels, and is more sustainable. But the giant oil companies have fought it, lied about it, and pushed for more pollution, with the aid of complicit politicians. So if the universe favors free energy, why does this happen?

Or consider the LED bulb. These marvels use far less energy than incandescent bulbs. But the shriekers on the right wing erupted in an apoplectic fit  when the government began to insist on their use. Why? It has nothing to do with free energy and dissipative adaptation, that’s certain.

Capitalism is a form of intelligence

Verdon writes:

Hierarchies of information propagation and control are part of the civilizational intelligence; these should be dynamically adapting at all organisational scales and on various time scales, in order to be optimal at identifying and capturing civilizational utility.

Has this guy never heard of intellectual property? That’s part of the capitalist system, and it works against this bullet point, if the bullet point has any meaning outside Verdon’s head. And who gets to decide what “civilizational utility” is?

Verdon says that capitalism is a form of intelligence. The explanation is that it “dynamically morphs” civilization to grab all the utility/energy out there. In his telling making the world safe for profits is a marker for intelligence.

E/ACC has a goal

The goal of e/acc is to recognize this “multi-scale adaptive principle” and accelerate it. That is accomplished by “… letting the intelligent meta-organism system dynamically adapt by itself to new environmental variables whenever they present themselves.”Apparently the universe favors profits.

We already do that. We let corporations, those paragons of intelligent meta-organisms, dump tens of thousands of chemicals into our environment. Turns out a bunch of them are poisons that interfere with our endocrine systems, kill bees and pollute the Gulf of Mexico. That doesn’t seem at all intelligent.

He says that e/acc wants to follow the will of the universe, presumably referring to that free energy/utility/resource/(profit?) thing that keeps morphing in this screed. In other words, he wands to accelerate the transition from the current state of entropy to a higher state of entropy. But why? He doesn’t say.

How do we accelerate?

Deregulation. Low taxes. Freedom for the Techbros. There is no price too high to pay for these goals, including human lives.

Discussion

1. I rarely read the writings of the people Trumpians call intellectuals, mostly because it’s dumb and badly written. Sadly these yahoos have have power now, so it seems like someone should.

2. Verdon doesn’t explain how e/acc will help us be better humans, or live better lives. He’s not interested in this world or the lives of people who live in it. He only cares about the next world he’s trying to imagine.

3. Hannah Arendt says that the Nazis and the Communists claimed to be following and accelerating a scientific program. For the Nazis, it was the laws of nature, and for the Communists it was the laws of history as discovered by Marx. Both programs were said to lead inexorably to the perfection of human beings and human society.

Verdon wants to do the same thing with his very scientific program.

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Sell Your Tesla Dump Your Stock

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That was one of the chants at the #TeslaTakedown event I attended in Chicago last Saturday. But selling your Tesla car is not easy. There isn’t much of a market for used Teslas in this area. There’s a similar problem in Boston. And Seattle. It seems to be a world-wide problem. Perhaps Trump will single-handedly create a market for used Teslas among his cult. That would be great, since only a few years ago they were crazy angry about libtards driving electric vehicles.

If you want to sell your Tesla stock, that’s easy. There’s a robust market in the stock. Over 110 million shares traded on March 17. But there is the problem of figuring out how much $TSLA you own, According to the 2024 Tesla Proxy Statement, after Musk, the two largest holders are Vanguard and Black Rock, both huge in investment funds and pension management. If you have a 401k, an IRA, or a pension plan, you most likely own at least a little of the stock of Tesla. It has the 9th highest market capitalization of US stocks,

This site says there are 517 ETFs that hold stock in Tesla.  You probably wouldn’t expect Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF to hold Tesla stock. Its largest holding is Amazon at 23%, and it includes MacDonalds, Chipotle, Loews, Booking.com, and similar stocks. The second largest holding is Tesla, at 17%. I do not think of electric vehicles as a consumer discretionary expenditure.

I searched for ETFs with low Tesla holdings for the past year, and almost all of the results were funds with lots of Tesla. There are, of course, investment vehicles that don’t hold Tesla. You could look at industry specific funds like ETFs investing in Pharma or Health Care. But you’d be wise to check the actual holdings. I found some on this site where you can search for several sectors.

If you search for Tesla stock you’ll find plenty of people saying it’s fairly valued, or even undervalued. The Yahoo Finance site says the one year target price is $343. Here’s one that’s not so rosy. if you want to see for yourself, here’s a link to the 2024 10-K. .

Note that the people talking about dumping their Tesla cars don’t take about the car itself, in fact most of them like their Teslas. They’re selling, even at a loss, for other reasons. In the same way, the decision to sell Tesla stock doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t good reasons to hold it. That decision may nave nothing to do with the fundamentals of Tesla, or its businesses.

The Proxy Statement says that Elon Musk has pledged about 1/3 of his holdings as collateral for loans, probably including loans for the purchase of Twitter.  It seems plausible that the lenders will demand additional collateral or even call the loans if the price sinks dramatically. For example, the current PE Ratio is about 116 at market close March 17. If it were selling at the same PE ratio as the information technology sector, approximately 35 at market close March 17, the price would drop from the current $240 to about $75.

Search for the term Tesla meme stock. It’s possible the chanters have a point.

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Conclusion To Series On Individuality

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Index to posts in this series

 

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires’. M. Servan, Le Soldat Citoyen, 1780, quoted in Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Pp. 102-103 Kindle Edition.

 

 

[The attitudes of Trump voters and non-voters] are created by their experiences in their environment. The people shaping those environment are the truly contemptible shitheads. Me.

The series was motivated by the idea that the books I’ve read over the years and the writing and thinking I’ve done here might give me some insight into Trump voters. Not the racists, the Christian Nationalists, the misogynysts, the homophobes, the Nazis, the nihilists and the other freaks, their motivation is obvious. It’s the regular folk who think they’re decent people I want to understand.

I had a tentative idea, an image of Trump voters trooping to the polls like so many soldiers. That led me to think about the nature of individuality, because soldiers surrender large parts of their nature to achieve what they think is a higher good.

I suppose others might see Harris voters the same way. That’s what the Repub operatives say. But it’s stupid. There is no information bubble telling regular Democrats what to think. The Democratic Party isn’t capable of telling anyone how to think about the world around us and the problems we face.

Democratic voters have to work out a view of reality based on a range of sources, from Billionaire Media to blogs to social media, teachers, friends, family, books etc. There are strategies for that, but very few, if any, just take the word of a tiny group of professionals, especially Democratic politicians, for anything.

Trump voters are immersed in the world view created and maintained by creepy billionaire right-wing donors, ratfuckers, enablers in the business and legal communities, grifters and loons. We see it all the time. We listen to our parents who have crossed the line into Foxworld. We hear it from cousins convinced the MMR vaccine is dangerous. We see it in stories like that of Ryleigh Cooper.

All of these filthy rich actors and their enablers are trying to kill our political community. They use words to veil intentions and their deeds are brutal. See The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, p. 200, Kindle Edition. They’re succeeding at destroying, but they have no replacement and people are suffering. Ask Ryleigh Cooper and her family.

I don’t think there’s a single explanation for why people voted for Trump. That was a foolish idea. No matter the “reason” they give, it’s incomprehensible to me that anyone would vote for this deeply repulsive creep.

Conclusion to series

Immanuel Kant wrote a four-page essay titled Answer To The Question: What Is Enlightenment? In 1784. Here’s a readable free translation by Ted Humphrey, made available by the New York City Public Library. Here are the opening paragraphs.

1. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.

2. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance …nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians.

It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.

The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult.

Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts. Fn omitted; my formatting.

Side notes: Guidance probably means something more like instruction or direction. The word go-cart is probably better translated as something like pony-cart. I left the misogyny in, but should I have deleted it?

Kant’s guardians are a big part of the problem, just as Servan, Kant, Arendt, Bourdieu, Foucault, and many others have said. But there’s nothing to prevent any of the ridden from thinking for themselves. Nothing, says Kant, nothing but laziness and cowardice. It’s too much trouble. I might get it wrong. I don’t want to get cross-ways with my neighbor.

I’m not saying everyone has to spend hours and weeks and years studying things. But. Billions of people have taken the Covid vaccines. The incidence of death is nearly zero. The incidence of serious complications isn’t much greater. But lots of people listen to loons on social media. They don’t perform a single-step thought process to see that it’s safer to take the vaccine than risk illness and death from the disease. I think that’s what Kant means when he tells us to use our own understanding.

The billionaires and their cronies who created this bubble of non-thought, are the guardians Kant is talking about. They are riding their herd just as he said. and it’s tough to tell one individual in a herd from another.

Enough. I am a child of the Enlightenment. I’ll leave this series with this aphorism from David Hume, an Enlightenment philosopher. Here’s a link for context.

A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

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Neoliberal Individuals

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Index to posts in this series

Note: This post may be helpful in understanding the ideas here and in other posts in this series.

Many of my early posts at Emptywheel were devoted to  neoliberalism. I focused on its impact on the national economy. I saw it as the intellectual (I use the term loosely) force behind the deregulation policies of both legacy parties in the post-Reagan era. These policies gave us several financial crashes that hurt millions of Americans. Also, they gave us at least 813 billionaires who have taken control of our government.

I thought that the success of Biden’s Keynesian economic policies proved once and for all that neoliberalism was trash. I was wrong.

Neoliberalism had another deadly barb: homo economicus. This cursed idea is that human beings are isolated rational consumers focused on maximizing their own utility in head-to-head conflict with other consumers. This is a stupid, evil idea. I thought that even religious fundamentalists would reject it because their preachers insist that humans were created in the image of the Almighty, and conflict-based consumption could never be an attribute of an all-powerful Deity. I was wrong.

People who hold this view of themselves think that everything they have is the result of their own actions, and is the just reward for their goodness and risk-taking. If they have little or nothing, it’s their own fault. They aren’t good enough at the conflict, and deserve what they get.

An ideal alternative

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition lays out a better view of human nature. I say better because it emphasizes the potential of our species. In my last post I quoted this summary of her thinking on our current situation.

For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. …

Snip

Arendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key features: these are world alienation .… World alienation refers to the loss of an intersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means of which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of reality.

Arendt thinks we have lost  the source of our power as human beings. In Chapter 28, she says that our power comes from our ability to engage with each other in the public sphere by speech and action. Power disappears when that ability is not present. She writes:

What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss.

Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. Kindle Edition p. 200, my paragraphing.

I read Arendt as saying that we have the ability to make and enforce decisions as a group, but only if we are prepared to meet each other in open discussion, in a setting where “words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities” and actions are used “to create new realities”. I think she is saying that we have lost this capacity.

Arendt contrasts forms of government arising from her conception of power with tyranny. Chairman Mao said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Arendt disagrees. She says that isn’t power, it’s violence.

Tyrants destroy power by isolating the tyrant from the subjects, and by isolating the subjects from each other. The primary tool of the tyrant is violence, which, she says, is stronger than power. Subjects might be able to pursue their own interests in arts, crafts, or manufacture. But they are impotent, they lack the power to  dream new dreams, to create new realities. She says  that the tyrant has the ability even to take from the subjects their own projects. This is what happened in George Orwell’s 1984.

Discussion

1. The theoretical framework of Arendt’s views of power seems to harmonize with my story of human evolution through cooperation.

2. There is no place for speaking and acting in our current political structure. The Republicans are a top-down group. The rubes who support it take their marching orders from its lieutenants, especially right-wing preachers, right-wing talking heads, and the incredible array of anti-vaxxers, Qrazies, and grifters on right-wing social media. They gain power by isolating their voters from alternative views.

The Democratic Party is just as bad, but in a different way. How many times have you written a legislator on an issue and gotten a reply email saying thank you for your interest I love to hear from you little people vote for me and give me money now go buy stuff?

There are plenty of smart people identifying problems and offering solutions, and plenty more working to sharpen those ideas. But professional Democrats don’t listen. They pat you on the head and smirk behind their hands. When things don’t go their way they blame you. We have forged places to do this public work, but we are ignored by the rich people and out-of-date incumbents who dominate the party..

Democratic politicians do not see the left as an element of power. I have no idea where they think power comes from. Money? Incumbency? Their magnetic personalities?

2. The people who voted for Trump are responsible for our immediate situation. They refused to participate in good faith in the political system. Their motivation is irrelevant. They want something and like good neoliberals they don’t care how they get it. Politics is a field of conflict, just like the fight for resources. They have internalized the neoliberal view of themselves as chimpanzees fighting over a termite mound.

If that means supporting a tyrant, then fine. The tyrant will crush their competitors and give them what they want.

3. The people who didn’t vote in the last election abdicated their own potential power and their own capacity to participate in power. They quietly submit to whatever damage Trump and his henchmen inflict on them and their families. They have internalized the second part of Homo Economicus: they believe they deserve whatever happens to them. They are passive and unseeing, unable even to recognize the depravity of their treatment.

4. I think both Trump voters and non-voters are to blame for our current situation. They cannot escape their responsibility and I will not excuse their behavior.

But they didn’t act randomly. Their attitudes are created by their experiences in their environment. The people shaping those environment are the truly contemptible shitheads.
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Front page image by Lear 21 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0,

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Expressions Of Individuality In Democracy

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Index to posts in this series

I gave a tentative description of what it means to be an individual here, including speculation about mechanisms.  In this post, I will add some detail on mechanisms, and try to sharpen up the notion of individuality.

More on mechanisms

In his book The Evolution of Agency, Michael Tomasello describes self-monitoring as a feedback loop. We set a goal, then form a plan to reach the goal, and self-monitor to see how well the plan is working. Setting goals and making plans can also be seen as feedback loops. We consider possibilities,, consider their ramifications, and choose. Self-monitoring systems can be used to rank and to modify goals. The process of setting goals also seems close to the neuronal firing I discussed in the linked post.

That description suggests that our brains operate with nested and linked feedback loops. Years ago I read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. There are lengthy discussions of Bach fugues, Escher’s astonishing prints, and Gödel’s theorems. It left me with a strong sense that our neuronal structures use recursion to formulate plans.

In math, a recursive function is a series of calculations using a single equation. The value of the equation is first calculated using a seed. Next the equation is calculated again, using the result of the first calculation. This process continues until the result of two consecutive iterations is the same, or until the value gets too large. The Mandelbrot Set is reached by such a function. The calculations start with a simple equation, and each point in the plane is defined by whether the calculations converge or grow to infinity.

We can compare Tomasello’s feedback loops to Hofstadter’s recursion. The crucial point for our purposes is that small changes in the initial conditions of both might (or might not) produce radically different outcomes.

There are, I think, limits to the amount of variation in human brains. We have physical limitations at every level of our existence, and presumably that’s true of our brain activity. From birth we train our brains to do the things we need to do to survive. That strengthens certain neural activity and weakens the possibility of other, different thoughts and actions. This comment by community member PeaceRme gives an excellent description of the impact of domestic violence on people’s thought processes.

Tomasello says social norms play a large role in determining our behaviors. We are likely to try to conform our actions and our thinking to the norms of our group. When a person’s brain produces actions that are too far outside the range our society thinks is normal, we consider the person sick and take action to protect ourselves from them, maybe even to try to heal them.

Of course, this is all rank speculation. I enjoy the speculation; it’s fun to think about things you don’t fully understand. It’s delightful when things you’ve read at different times and for different reasons seem to fit together.

A closer look at individuality

Several commenters point out that people show individuality in their personal lives, so what’s my point. This comment by community member Eschscholzia is an excellent example. Another way to see this is to look at random bios on Bluesky. People describe themselves in terms of their interests, favorite sports teams, or basic political stances. These are indeed facets of individuality.

When I started this series, I was thinking that the question was something like: what part of your persona consists of choices you made after due consideration, and what part are habits you learned without conscious choice. For example, I have thought a lot about why I support democracy. On the other hand, I never thought about why I don’t like celery. I just don’t like it so there. I have given at least some thought to almost all of my political views. I give very little thought to choosing sports teams.

I think some things are more important than others. Democracy is more important than celery. The things that establish the conditions under which we all live are more important than the activities that give us pleasure. So, democracy is more important than my singing career.

I’ve been trying to read The Human Condition (1956) by Hannah Arendt. Shortly after I started it, I read a discussion of the book in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to get an overview of the book.

Arendt thinks we have lost something important in the current era, something she sees in the past. This is from the linked article.

For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. …

Snip

Arendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key features: these are world alienation .… World alienation refers to the loss of an intersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means of which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of reality.

Arendt describes the active life as consisting of three parts — labor, work, and action. Labor is the things we do to keep ourselves functioning, sleeping, bathing, eating. Work is the things we do to produce goods and services necessary or useful in our daily lives. Action is, in essence, our participation in public life. There we use our rational skills in politics, poetry, the other arts, In the process make ourselves, our true selves, known to others, and, I think, indirectly to ourselves.

Arendt thinks that action is the most important aspect of our existence. As to politics, she thinks the ancient Greeks had the power to make joint decisions about crucial matters, from war to the rules that make society better.

She thinks the rise of totalitarian states, the rise of huge bureaucracies, and a change in our relation to work have changed us. We focus on material goods and our groups of friends and family, and we forego the power to plan for our future as a species.

I think this is right. Our highest and best calling is to contribute our thinking and our actions to making a society that will be better for us, all of us, and our children, all of our children. Of course that isn’t our sole goal, we want and need to attend to all our abilities, including the ability to experience pleasure.

Democracy gives us the opportunity to do both. We should consider our individuality to consist of our power of reason, our experience, and all our personal qualities, those we display in our family life, and among our friends. All democracy asks of us is that we use that individuality to form a shared intersubjective conception of reality, to identify our problems, and to devise solutions. We have the tools. We just need the will.

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Lemmings running off a cliff. Caption translates as Turn back? After we've come so far?

Individuality Is A Big Deal

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Index to posts in this series

So far I’ve written four essays on becoming an individual in the US, without explaining why this seemed like a worthwhile question. The answer lies in the last election. The conventional wisdom is that the state of the economy and the character of the candidates are major factors in the decisions of voters. A third major factor is tribal identity.

But no reasonable person can deny that Trump is a revolting bag of guts. He has no integrity, no loyalty to the Nation or anyone besides himself, and no reason to want to be president other that personal gratification and staying out of jail.

It is equally inconceivable that any sane person thinks that the current Republican Party cares about the economic or physical well-being of anyone except themselves and their donors. There is nothing in the history of the last 45 years to suggest that Republicans will enact any legislation, adopt any budget, or make any rule change that will benefit any of us. Most of their plans will hurt millions, including their voters.

So why did so many people flunk this basic test of democracy and vote for this oozing pustule?

Their answers

I’ve run across lots of explanations, without keeping track of sources. He says he’ll protect my abortion rights, said one woman. He’s the imperfect tool the Almighty is using. He’s against killing babies. He’s so masculine. He’ll fix the economy. The economy was better under his first administration. He’ll fix the border crisis. He’s for law and order. The Democrats didn’t help me. The price of eggs. Vaccines are killing us.

That’s all crazy, and I doubt it’s the real reason.

Why it matters

We say we live in a democracy, that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. But we ignore the responsibilities democracy puts on us. We do not form a shared view of reality, and of the problems we face. We do not listen and hear ideas about solutions.

Blue voters think the point of government is to make our joint lives safer and more pleasant, and to give everyone the best chance of flourishing. I have no idea what Trump voters think the purpose of government is. Most of them couldn’t tell you. Only the Christian Dominionists have an answer.

I think Trump voters follow leaders who tell them what their problems are. These leaders insist that the important things are abstract ideas  around sexual morality, racial purity, white male superiority, and religious fundamentalism, among others. Trump and his henchmen find or invent instances exemplifying those fake abstractions, and the leaders and the media amplify them. These leaders (preachers, Fox News belchers, Qrazies) tell them Trump will solve the problems created by Trump and amplified by those very leaders.

Normal people know government can’t solve those abstract problems. It can only make life hard for the targets of right-wing obsessions. The leaders know that too. They don’t care. They want votes and obeisance, things that will benefit them.

Two explanations

I think existentialist philosophers like Camus and Sartre are right that many people don’t want freedom. They are willing to do just about anything to avoid exercising it. Perhaps they think it might expose them to ridicule or hostility from the people around them. Perhaps it’s too hard to make a decision. Maybe they’re afraid of the responsibility that goes with exercising freedom. Maybe they think that if everyone exercises freedom, chaos will follow. Freedom is dangerous.

I used to think this existential dread was just an rationalization to explain why so many Germans supported the Nazis, and why so many French people supported the Vichy government. But now I think that they were on to something important. Freedom is terrifying.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a different explanation.  This is taken from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Soon, there become distinct social classes and strict notions of property, creating conflict and ultimately a state of war not unlike the one that Hobbes describes. Those who have the most to lose call on the others to come together under a social contract for the protection of all. But Rousseau claims that the contract is specious, and that it was no more than a way for those in power to keep their power by convincing those with less that it was in their interest to accept the situation. And so, Rousseau says, “All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom, for although they had enough reason to feel the advantages of political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.”

Doing what the dominant class tells you to do is a trade-off for relief from fear of chaos. Watching the fearful vote for Trump is just like watching people run to meet their chains.

Both explanations seem to rely on a deeply human desire for security and certainty. Not all people succumb to that desire. Many of us know that there is no permanent security, and that there is no certainty. That knowledge does not frighten but inspires. The question becomes not how to escape freedom, but how best to use our freedom in an indifferent universe.

Conclusion

1. We all look to others for our ideas. I do. So who am I to judge others for choosing Trump or some rando on YouTube as a leader? Well, I think some things are better than others, and I can make these distinctions, guided by the insights of people who don’t want anything from me. In particular, they aren’t asking me to give them powers they can exploit for their own ends.

2. I used to think conservatism was driven by principles, even if I could not quite articulate them to my own satisfaction.

Now I think millions of Americans choose to abdicate their freedom and responsibility to judge based on their own principles.

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The caption on the front page image translates as “Turn back? After we’ve come so far?”

 

 

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Human Individuality

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Index to posts in this series

The question for this series is what does it mean to be an individual in contemporary US society. The first posts lay some groundwork for this question. In this post, I give a tentative answer to part of the question: what do we mean by individuality.

I began to address this question in the conclusion to the series on Michael Tomasello’s book The Evolution of Agency, The idea is that all human characteristics, including consciousness, reasoning capacity, and emotions, evolved over millions of years. The main point of that post was to deal with the difference between free will and agency.

This is Tomasello’s description of agency:

…[W]e may say that agentive beings are distinguished from non-agentive beings … by a special type of behavioral organization. That behavioral organization is feedback control organization in which the individual directs its behavior toward goals — many or most of which are biologically evolved — controlling or even self-regulating the process through informed decision-making and behavioral self-monitoring. Species biology is supplemented by individual psychology.

I suggest that we find individuality in the way each of us selects goals, directs our behavior toward those goals, and the way each of us controls and self-regulates ourselves through informed decision-making and self-monitoring.

It may seem that I am just pushing back the problem to another level: what are the goals and how do we form them, what are the control and self-regulating functions, what are informed decision-making and self-monitoring and how do they work. I don’t think so. I think we can’t handle the broad question of individuality, but we can find approximate descriptions for Tomasello’s operations. And, I think the part about setting goals and the part about informed decision-making carry us most of the way to individuality.

What Peirce Got Wrong

I like the ideas of C.S. Peirce, including this 1877 article. He tells us two things that are often true.

1. Thinking is hard and we don’t like to do it. We only do it when faced with doubt, and even then only when other techniques of dealing with doubt fail.

2. When doubt reaches the point that we can’t ignore it, we look for some other opinion. Not necessarily a true opinion, but just something that causes the doubt to subside.

I suspect that this is true of a lot of people (like MAGAts and me when someone attacks my heroes). But I think a lot of us enjoy thinking, talking about stuff, learning new stuff, meeting people not like us, traveling, and we happily do it all through our lives. I think it starts with curiosity, that force that drives children to ask questions about everything. For such people, truth matters.

Probably most of us are a combination of these two poles depending on the subject, but once you start with curiosity, it tends to undercut other certainties we hold, which in the long run might mean a bias towards true answers. I might even come to question my heroes.

A Metaphor

My brother Michael did a number  of single cell studies as part of his research into the transmission of pain signals to the brain. He said a neuron fires when the number of charged ions in the cell hits the magic number. When that happens, the cell fires, sending a signal down the axon to the next neuron. The first cell then returns to its resting state, ready for the next burst of charged ions. See also this.

I think one way we set goals for our actions is sort of like that. We get a stimulus outside what we anticipate, and we shrug it off, If that keeps happening, we hit a magic number and we decide to look more closely. Nothing changes until the magic level is reached. We just coast along.

Here’s an example. You go for a hike in a national forest. You’re looking around, but mostly at the ground to avoid tripping. You notice a bush with berries. Fine. Later you see a similar bush with more berries. And again. Then again, and this time you look closely. What are they? Are they edible? Am I hungry? A whole series of questions suddenly arises based on that stimulus.

Here’s another example, this time fairly close to my recollection of my own experience. I was raised Catholic, and starting in third grade, attended Catholic schools. I read a bunch of books about the lives of the Saints, including one I found recently: Ten Saints For Boys. I knew the stories, read about relics, read kid versions of the Bible stories and the Gospels, and it all seemed fine.

By high school, some of the stories started to feel a touch unreal. They didn’t correspond with the things in my life, and the histories didn’t sound like anything I knew about. One in particular was the doctrine of the Assumption of the Body Of The Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. That was very difficult to believe, but I tried.

Then I found out that the doctrine of papal infallibility was not established until 1870, suspiciously close to the loss of the Papal States in connection with the reunification of Italy that same year. That was a tipping point. Over the next few years  I modified my understanding of Catholic teachings  using a much broader range of sources, many if not most of which weren’t Catholic at all.

Now that’s a simplified version of what happened. I was doing a lot of related reading in those days, including existentialisn, math and physics, even Zen Buddhism, including Eugen Herrigel’s Zen In The Art Of Archery which I recommend very highly; and mysticism, including Thomas Merton’s Mystics And Zen Masters. I’m sure all that worked together to lead me to examine my thinking.

Selection Of Influences

We don’t get to choose our initial influences, parents, their friends and family, the people we live next to, teachers in K-12, the people and leaders of our Churches. Those choices are made for us. Today many of us don’t select much of what we read on social media because algorithms do the picking. We are at the mercy of  the Billionaire Media, and Google or some other profit-driven search engine, which generally sucks. (Side note: Musk attacks Wikipedia; one of the few useful sources of vetted information, donate if you can. I use it a lot so I donate regularly.)

But we can select what we read if we try. We can look for those who can teach us things we care about. How we pick what to read and who we can trust to teach us, and how we understand what we read and are taught, these are crucial factors in our individuality.

Summary

I think individuality is found in our control of our goal-setting and self-monitoring. I think we learn from other people, and that selection of those other people is crucial to our individuality. I think some things are better than others. Those choices are driven by curiosity. It gives me great satisfaction and pleasure to read and understand other people’s thinking. The world and the people in it are endlessly interesting.

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Wimpy Patriarchy

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This article by Professor Molly Worthan at the University of North Carolina diseases the form of religion taught by Bishop Robert Barron.  Worthan says that Barron operates Word on Fire, a ministry that uses social media to preach a tough version of Catholicism that appeals to men, especially young men.

This [tough view] is not the message that [Barron] got as a young Catholic. “To be frank about it, when I was in the seminary, it was more of a feminized approach,” he recalled. “We did a lot of sitting in a circle and talking about our feelings.”

Whatever is in his instagram and You-Tube videos, which I, of course, won’t watch, it seems to appeal to younger men, as his audience is over 60% male. Worthan says that among college grads under age 40, 69% of mall claim a religious affiliation compared with 62% of women.

Male resentment

Worthan offers this possible explanation.

Some pundits argue that as gender norms shifted and women started outnumbering men in universities and the white-collar workforce, men have grown resentful and nostalgic for patriarchy—so they seek it in traditional religion. J. D. Vance is the country’s most famous Catholic convert, and the story of his rightward shift might seem like a template for all Gen Z and Millennial men interested in Christianity.

This explanation says that men respond to the success of women by asserting their superiority as the men of the patriarchy. Historically men were dominant and women were subordinate. For many this cashed out as men have all the power and women are submissive. Historically, this system was enforced by the state and by religious authorities. Today it’s a part of all religions, and is a central aspect of all fundamentalist religions.

Seeking a solution to the apparent superiority of so many women in the Patriarchy  is an example of what C.S. Peirce calls the method of authority, one of his four responses to doubt. From his 1877 essay The Fixation Of Belief,

Let the will of the state act, then, instead of that of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young; having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated, or expressed. Let all possible causes of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehensions. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. .,,

Males Adrift

Worthan offers her own explanation:

Many young men feel unmoored—lonely in a time of weakening social institutions, unsatisfied and overworked by an accelerating professional rat race, alienated by political tribalism. “Men my age, we don’t have the social organizations that our fathers or grandfathers did,” Torrin Daddario, a Barron fan who converted to Catholicism from a Protestant background, told me. “We’re adrift.” Over the past decade, both the left and the right have tried to fill the void with morality tales that treat unfettered individual freedom as sacred and split the world into victims and oppressors. Those stories are getting stale.

Worthan explains that these young men get much of their information from YouTube and other social media. She says they might check out Jordan Peterson, for example, leading to Christianity, and the algorithm leads them to Barron.

This is an example of Peirce’s third possible response to doubt, which we might today call the method of common sense.

Let the action of natural preferences be unimpeded, then, and under their influence let men, conversing together and regarding matters in different lights, gradually develop beliefs in harmony with natural causes. … [Systems of metaphysics] have been chiefly adopted because their fundamental propositions seemed “agreeable to reason.” This is an apt expression; it does not mean that which agrees with experience, but that which we find ourselves inclined to believe.

Listening to random people who don’t have better information that you do is a recipe for failure. Listening to people hawking the old solutions, including patriarchy in its many forms, has the same result. You don’t get answers that are useful in our society. You get contemporary versions of answers to questions aur ancestors asked centuries or millennia ago. We living people have different questions based on radically different societies from those of our ancestors.

Beyond Atheism vs. Religion

All this gets boiled down into a discussion of atheism vs. religion. In the US, this debate is between people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the New Atheists on one side; and the Bishop Barrons and aggressive groups like Opus Dei and Christian Domionists. It almost always is understood as atheism vs. Christianity, ignoring the teachings of other religions. It deals with untestable beliefs like the existence of a Supreme Being or the proper form of worship, and never the moral teachings. This kind of simplistic dualism pervades all  public discourse on almost any issue. I am very skeptical of all dualistic framings, especially dualisms originating in the distant past.

The feelings Worthan describes are common among large numbers of people at especially after the First World war. The result was the origination of  secular theories of humanity that seem to me to transcend arguments about the existence of a Supreme Being and forms of worship.

One example is Existentialism. Those adrift young men listening to Barron might recognize themselves in the ennui expressed in Sartre’s play No Exit. The most famous line in the play is “hell is other people”. The three “other people”, condemned to hell for their sins, will torture each other through eternity. The play concludes with the words: “Well, well, let’s get on with it. …” But is that the answer to the problem they face? Wallowing?

Sartre doesn’t think so. Neither do the other existentialists. Look at The Plague by Albert Camus. The hero is the doctor. In the face of a deadly plague he does his best to tend to the sick and dying, advise the living how to protect themselves, and find a cure. The other characters display other responses to the plague, some modestly useful, others worthless. Camus tells us we have to act, to help, to fight the inevitable, to resist the meaninglessness of the universe by finding meaning in other people.

The odd thing, of course, is that traditionally the fundamental character of the masculine was action, while the feminine was characterized by passivity. Men find their place in society by accomplishment. Women find their place in the home and in child-rearing.

How ridiculous is it that men respond to women’s action in the world by becoming passive wimps? Or by asserting an invented superiority not arising from personal accomplishment?

 

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Image; Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her Columbia academic regalia, 1959

 

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Maturing In US Society

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Posts in this series

In the last post I offered a story about human evolution. In this post I offer a framework story for how we mature in US society.

Introduction

I’ve read a lot of philosophy material trying to define human nature. It seems to me that almost all those accounts start with adults. They start with a fully mature male (because of course they do), and you can almost feel the self-examination at the root.

One obvious example is René Decartes with his skeptical doubt of everything, leaving him with his “I think therefore I am”. He never seems to think of asking himself what he was before he could think, and then what he was when he first started to think, and then, wait, when did I start to think and what was that like? All those questions seem more interesting than his trivial proof of his own existence as a first step to deriving the world.

When I read this material, or listen to podcasts like Philosophize This by Stephen West and The Partially Examined Life. I often find myself asking the air “What is the pathway to that view?” The absence of a pathway permits all sorts of answers that seem ill-suited to our day.

And that’s what attracts me to Pragmatism. It tells me that those old guys are asking interesting questions, but that the answers aren’t always connected to the way we actually come to be ourselves, or the way we actually are. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, who seems to think all philosophers asked interesting questions for their day. He says we need to ask questions relevant to our own times, taking what we can from our predecessors. (Disclaimer, I haven’t read Deleuze, and rely solely on outside sources.

Becoming

So, here’s a story. It’s not a universal story like the one in the last post. Instead, it’s a kind of individual story that might apply to us.

Cat Bohannon writes a lot about nursing babies in her excellent and very readable book, Eve. One critical part of the process begins shortly after birth when the mother offers her breast to the newborn. As Bohannon describes it, the two have to work together to get the breast to provide sustenance. The newborn has an instinctive behavior, rooting, but the mother must help and the newborn must respond to the assistance. This might be a very early example of the cooperation that I think forms part of our wiring.

Through the next year or so the infant takes in all sorts of information without using words, without knowing what a word is. (H/T commenter Gruntfuttock). This information is experiential, not formal.

Then the little one learns to talk. This is also a cooperative process. It has already heard words, and maybe even worked out what they mean, like its name and mama and dada. As the vocabulary grows, the child can take in information from parents and others, including information about the use of language. Hopefully our little person stops licking everything in sight.

Then the questions start. Why is the sky blue? Why do I have to go to eat these green things? And more and more. And then they get harder. Why doesn’t X like me? Why can’t we go see Grandmother? Why do I have to go to school? Kids expect their questions to have answers, and to expect that the parents know the answer. Gradually they learn that other people have answers.

Then they learn that their parents don’t have all the answers and that they have given incomplete and misleading answers, and even wrong answers. They turn to new sources of information and answers. Hopefully they don’t get many wrong answers.

The point of this story

None of us made the world we live in. We didn’t create social norms, we didn’t generate any of the material goods we have, we didn’t create a morality. We just showed up. Our parents first, and then everyone else in our lives helps us grow accustomed to the social, physical, and moral world we inhabit. Hopefully we become able to survive in it, to succeed in it on its terms, and maybe even to add something to the accumulated store of human understanding.

We get used to living in a certain way. As Pierre Bourdieu explains, we develop a habitus, a set of practical responses to the things that might happen in our world. Once that habitus is in place, we have stock responses for almost all events. We don’t think. We just respond.

So how do we react  when something happens for which our habitus is inadequate? What happens when something arises that raises doubts about the assumptions behind our habitus? I turn to the early Pragmatist C. S. Peirce (pronounced “purse”). I discuss his seminal 1879 essay in this post. Peirce says we don’t like to think. It’s hard. It’s no fun. And besides, we were just fine before that stupid doubt appeared.

Peirce says there are four responses to doubt. First, we could just ignore that irritating doubt. That works more or less well, depending on how important the belief is to our daily lives, and how irritating the doubt is. For example, we can do just fine with “the sun rises in the East”, unless we hang around with normal people who know better and laugh at us.

Second, we can look for an authoritative source to force other people to agree with us. Galileo found out about that.

Third, we might get together with other people and try to create a new view by consensus. That might work, depending on who we talk to. Hint: avoid QAnon people. Also people who you just found online.

Finally, we can try what we now call the scientific method.. This approach has been elaborated and partially formalized since Peirce’s time. For a good discussion, see Jonathan Rauch’s book, The Constitution of knowledge, discussed here. Because the same method, modified slightly, can be used for most subjects of expertise, we now generally think that expert knowledge is always contingent on new information and new ways of thinking about old information.

Individuals as individuals

1, So this, I think, is the way people mature. Of course, specific people can stop anywhere along the way. But the goal is always to find a place in a complex society that was there before us, will be there regardless of what we do, and will remain when we’re gone. But the process of maturation isn’t in itself a satisfying answer to the question of what it means to be an individual in the context of our society. I’ll offer a tentative answer in my next post

2. I don’t think this description is judgmental; it wasn’t meant to be. I think judgment of individuals has to be based on criteria outside the process of maturation.

3. I didn’t mention individual agency in this story. One element of habitus is the range of responses available to each of us in response to specific events. One of the goals of the people who raise us is to shape the rane of responses we consider in confronting an event. For example, our parents don’t want us to hit a sibling for taking a toy. That is a restriction on our individual agency.

Depending on the way we are raised, and the reactions we get from our responses to events generally, we limit our agency so that the responses are at least bearable. As an example, if we repeatedly do badly at school, we might form a habitus including the proposition that we aren’t very smart, and that limits the things we think we can do. This amounts to limiting our own agency. There are many ways in which society operates to limit our exercise of individual agency.

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