Most of what we know about the world, we learn from other people. Therefore, our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.
We live in a world full of people who need and want things. They will ascribe value to us according to our ability to provide for their wants and needs.
People are complicated. Assessing and navigating our position in the social universe is the most difficult, and most important, mental task that we perform in life.
Each of us will die, and others will live on after us. Whatever we may believe about the afterlife, this is the only empirical truth we know about life and death in this world.
Author: asherabrams
Identity.
Identity in a group is negotiated between the individual and the group. It is a bilateral relationship. The group agrees to accept the individual as one of its own, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities. In return, the individual agrees to abide by the rules and norms of the group, and to uphold the group’s values and honor. In many cases, membership may entail an element of exclusivity: If you want to call yourself a member of A, you cannot also belong to B. And this process is the model of how the individual, as a unique being, comes to terms with his or her place in society. It is the process of growth, maturity, and further growth.
The social market.
The social market is the complex web of courtesies and communications, small talk and discourse, through which we negotiate our interactions with others. Through it, we assess the trustworthiness and relevance of the information others provide, and attempt to establish the value of the ideas we share with others.
Notes
Almost everything we know about the world, we learn from other people. It follows that our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.
What we can observe directly is the behavior of the people who control the information.
The technocrats are acting like they’ve got something to hide. They are showing with their own actions that there’s something there.
I don’t have a lot of specialized expertise. I look at what I can observe directly. What I can observe directly is the people in power and their actions; what I can observe directly is the media and their actions.
We make practical and moral decisions primarily, and most reliably, on the basis of first-hand knowledge. The function of propaganda is to supplant what we know from direct observation.
Human beings are competitive, like all living things. Unlike other creatures, we have the ability to follow a moral code, and we are competitive even in that. Virtue envy – the resentment of another person’s moral standing – is as old as Cain and Abel. Even when we stand to gain nothing by it, it is easier to take the other guy down than to build ourselves up.
There’s a deliberate strategy to decouple moral reasoning from the objective, observable consequences of your actions. Global warming, pandemic masks. It’s so that your sense of guilt can be properly manipulated.
Performative virtue: disconnection of perceived “virtue” from any tangible results in the real world.
If I convince myself that most people are ignorant bigots, then I get to feel “special” just by not being a bigot. If I believe the other guy is a nazi, then I only have to be 1 percent better than a nazi to be the good guy.
The Covid scare campaign appeals to a certain strain of vanity: the conviction that “I am among the selfless few, bearing the burden for an ungrateful and ignorant humanity”.
What “climate change” and the covid scare campaign have in common is that they are designed to focus your moral decision-making on things that you cannot directly observe – global temperatures or infection rates – so that you must outsource your moral decision-making to the Authorities. This is the same top-down model of the communist command economy, applied to our social, moral, and cognitive universe.
The goal of the technocrats is to get you to subordinate your local, mundane knowledge – things you can observe directly – to the “information” you are fed by authorities.
How do we know what we know?
Source analysis toolbox: an ongoing work-in-progress.
Look in the mirror.
This is really the most important thing when analyzing a source for credibility or bias: knowing your own beliefs and your own possible biases. It’s always tempting to accept something uncritically because it fits what we think we already know.
Premises / logic / values.
Know what you differ on: what you believe is a fact, or what consequences follow from it, or whether something is good or bad.
The spam filter.
All of us have a mental filter that works like the spam filter in your e-mail program: it examines input and tries to weed out stuff that appears irrelevant, false, or that just wastes your time. It’s what makes you tune out crazy people. And we need that filter – our mind couldn’t function without it. But the filter is not perfect, and every so often we have to re-calibrate it (just as we need to check our spam folder every so often) to make sure we’re not missing something important. Every once in a while, even the person we thought was crazy might have something important to say.
Flattering beliefs.
We have a natural tendency to want to believe things that are flattering to ourselves. For example, I may be tempted to hold a belief because it makes me feel more virtuous or more intelligent, rather than because it is supported by the evidence.
Competing values.
“I believe in peace.” “I believe in justice.” “I believe in freedom.” “I believe in security.” And so on. These are all perfectly fine things to believe in, but real life often requires us to make trade-offs. Very often the person who disagrees with you believes in the same good things you believe in, but assesses the trade-offs differently.
Confirmation bias.
This is our natural tendency to believe things that fit our world-view. I find it helpful to divide between “things I think I know” and “things I know I know”. Only verified factual information – things I KNOW that I know – is useful for evaluating the truth or falsity of a new claim.
Narrative.
What kind of overall picture, or “narrative”, is the source trying to present?
Baseline.
Before you can determine whether an event is significant or unusual (for example, a crime wave), you need to know what the normal state of affairs is (for example, the average crime rate).
Question sensational reports.
There’s a military saying that “nothing is as good or as bad as first reported”. Sensational reports do just what the name says – they appeal to our sensations (of fear, hope, disgust, arousal, etc.) and can short-circuit our critical thinking. News stories with especially lurid details should be treated with skepticism.
Internal consistency.
Do all the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense?
External consistency.
Does the report agree with verified facts – things I know I know?
Dialog and dissent.
Does the source welcome opposing views and seek to respond to them?
Awareness of objections.
Does the source attempt to anticipate and refute objections?
Nuance.
By nuance I mean the recognition that a thing can be true in general and still admit of exceptions. For example, it may be true that tall people are generally better basketball players, but it can also be true that some short people may be outstanding players.
Logical fallacies.
There are many mistakes in basic reasoning that can lead us to wrong conclusions.
Red herrings / straw men.
A straw man is an argument that can be easily overcome, but that nobody on the other side actually made; you can “refute” this kind of argument to try to make it look like you refuted your opponent’s argument, but you didn’t actually respond to the claim they were making. A red herring is any kind of argument that is irrelevant to the main issue, and distracts you from it.
Unexamined assumptions.
If I ask, “Why is Smith so evil?” I am not questioning whether he is evil, and the form of my question does not allow you to question the assumption “Smith is evil” either. Similarly, if I say “Jones, who was responsible for the disastrous Program X …”, I am closing off any question as to whether Program X was a disaster, or whether Jones was responsible for it. These are examples of framing a question or a statement so as to avoid debating certain things that you don’t want to debate – assumptions that you don’t want to examine.
Snarl / purr words.
Some words have negative connotations (snarl words) or positive ones (purr words). Using them can be a way to appeal to people’s emotions instead of arguing by reason.
Vague quantifiers.
“Many experts believe …” Stop! How many is “many”? A majority? Half? Two or three? A claim involving numbers needs to give you specifics, or it tells you nothing.
Attributions.
Misquoting another party is, literally, the oldest trick in the Book – going all the way back to the Serpent in Genesis. It is also easy to selectively or misleadingly quote somebody, to give a false impression of what they said. My rule is, “go by what the person said, not what somebody else SAID they said.”
Black propaganda – rhetorical false flag.
This is a particularly nasty trick: creating outrageous or shocking arguments and making them appear to be coming from your opponent, to discredit the opponent.
Discrediting by association – “57 Communists”.
This is a little more subtle than the rhetorical false flag. This is the practice of making known false statements, which can be easily disproved, that appear to come from your opponent. The goal is to damage your opponent’s credibility – or more accurately, to damage the credibility of a CLAIM made by your opponent. A real-life example was the case of ‘National Report’ – the granddaddy of fake-news sites – which created all kinds of hoax stories designed to fool conservatives; the conservatives then would be made to look gullible when the stories were shown to be false. (See the “fifty-seven Communists” scene in the film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’.)
Bias of intermediaries.
More subtle than the ‘straw man’ is the practice of pretending to present a neutral forum for debate, but deliberately choosing a more articulate, stronger debater for one side and a weaker debater for the other.
What are the source’s financial interests?
I think this one is a no-brainer, but a person who owns a lot of stock in XYZ Corporation is going to have an incentive to promote pro-XYZ legislation and contracts. In the case of the MSM, we all know that “bad news sells”.
Debts and favors.
Is the source looking for a payoff down the road? If I go on record saying nice things about Candidate A, maybe I am hoping to get appointed to a nice comfy job if A wins the election.
The medium is the message.
News stories go through news networks, broadcast networks, and publishers. Books go through publishing houses. In other words, somebody has to provide the materials for the message to be communicated. Somewhere, a network executive makes decisions about what gets on the air and what doesn’t. Somewhere, an editor or publisher decides what gets printed and what doesn’t. So if you’re reading a book you have to think about not only the author’s background and point of view, but also the publisher’s orientation: for example, they might publish mostly liberal books or mostly conservative books. Knowing something about the background of a publisher or a broadcast network can help give you an idea of what to expect.
What are the source’s own experiences? How might those experiences be relevant, and how might they affect the source’s perceptions?
First-hand knowledge of any issue is always helpful; on the other hand, a person might have had an experience that was atypical or unrepresentative. A soldier on the front lines is going to have a very vivid, detailed, and specific recollection of a battle. The general in a command bunker may not see the battle up close, but he will have information on the “big picture” of troop strengths, enemy positions, strategic decisions, and other things that the soldier will not know, and may not be allowed to know. The soldier’s memory may be distorted by trauma, confusion, fear, or shame (of a real or imagined failiing on the battlefield); the general may ignore or suppress key information, perhaps with his career in mind. Both perspectives are valuable, both have their limitations.
Psychological factors.
There are basic psychological factors that operate in all of us to one degree or another. Resistance to change is one. There is a need for approval of others; there is also a need for a sense of autonomy and a belief that we determine our own destiny. And of course we all like to be thought knowledgeable, which is why we are often tempted to speak more than we actually know.
The human voice.
By this I mean an intangible quality that may include a distinctive personality, awareness of ambivalence, self-analysis and self-criticism. This one is not a matter of rigorous logic but of gut instinct: something tells you that the person sounds real or fake.
Hard to win a debate, easy to lose one.
When you’re debating an issue, it is very difficult to “win” in the sense that your opponent throws up their hands and says “Oh, you were right and I was wrong.” Or even to definitively convince an audience that your position is the correct one. However, it is very very easy to LOSE a debate, simply by saying or doing something that brings discredit to yourself and your cause: getting your facts wrong, making a basic logic error, or losing your cool and cursing or attacking your opponent. Sometimes the most important part of debating is knowing when to stop.
Meaning and identity.
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.
– Viktor E. Frankl, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’
One universal quality of identity is that it gives life a meaning beyond life itself. It offers a connection to the world beyond the self. … Whatever its form, identity offers a sense of life beyond the physical and material, beyond mere personal existence. It is this sense of a common world that stretches before and beyond the self, of belonging to something greater than the self, that gives strength not only to the community but to the individual as well.
– Natan Sharansky, ‘Defending Identity’
Socialism and Philanthropy
The same arguments that hold against socialism in the commercial sphere, also apply with equal or greater force, I think, in the world of charity and philanthropy.
A competitive free “market” of benevolent organizations ensures that I remain in charge of my charitable giving. If I learn or suspect that the ABC Foundation is abusing its donors’ trust, with its executives living in luxury while its purported beneficiaries receive scant aid, I can choose to withhold my donations from ABC Foundation and give instead to the better-reputed XYZ Foundation.
Entrusting charitable functions to the Government risks shielding those functions from scrutiny, and deprives the “donor” – that is, the taxpayer – of any direct control over how his or her funds are to be used. This is not to say that the Government should never attempt to “do good”, but it is to say that this is a slippery slope.
Socialism appeals to idealists who harbor a sincere and laudable desire to “make the world a better place”. The correct path to this goal is through liberty, not tyranny.
The Hours, the Days, and the Years
There are no computers and no kung fu fights in “The Hours”; and when people fall out of buildings, they don’t get up again. And yet, like the denizens of the apocalyptic world of “The Matrix”, many of the characters seem to live in an invisible prison – one they cannot “smell or taste or touch”. And some of them, like Neo and the other inhabitants of Zion, choose to confront the reality of their world – even if it is unpleasant and dangerous, even if it threatens their very sanity. Virginia Woolf has no use for the comforting retreat of the suburbs, and precious little patience for the well-intentioned efforts of others to “take care” of her. She, too, prefers “always to look life in the face, and to know it … to love it, for what it is.” She is a red-pill person.
But there are many kinds of prisons. Mental illness – Virginia’s depression, Richard’s schizophrenia – can also be a prison. Sometimes the only way to exercise your autonomy is to have some say (as Virginia says) in your “own prescription”, just as Neo must choose for himself which pill to take. (Or like Richard, who simply takes too many pills.) The choice is in your hands; but once the choice is made, you must live with the consequences.
I live alone, and spend a great deal of time in my own company. Often, this blog is the only conversation I get during the day. It’s a strange conversation, the one you and I are having: we do not meet face to face, and with the exception of a few friends who read my blog, we are probably strangers to each other. All you know about me is what you read here; and all I know of you is the anonymous statistics collected by SiteMeter.
Sometimes I have a certain feeling – as if something is wrong, it’s not fitting together somehow, and it’s not a problem that’s definable, and it’s not a problem that is fixable. As if no matter where I go or what I do, I’ll always be surrounded by this invisible membrane that keeps me separated and locked away from the rest of the world, from humanity, from life. I don’t even know what name to call it; I don’t know if it has a name.
I do know that I can make my own choices. I do not want anyone making them for me. I don’t want anyone telling me how to live, or what to read, or what to listen to, or how to think. I don’t want anyone feeding me pre-digested answers like some kind of processed food. And I do not want to be stuffed into some kind of mental coccoon and told that it’s for my own good.
We do not get a choice whether or not to die. That decision is made for us, and in the end, without exception, it will always end the same way. The choice we do get is whether to face each and every day. Sometimes it is not an easy choice. Even the most fortunate among us may inhabit prisons invisible to others. Freedom from fear does not, alas, bring freedom from suffering. To choose, consciously, to live each and every day that is given to us – to say, “Today is not the day” – this is the real test of our humanity.
We are at our most when we forget ourselves. Clarissa is sustained through the difficult years – which seem to go on and on – by her duty to her old lover. (“When I’m gone,” Richard mockingly reminds her, “you’ll have to think about yourself.”) Neo can fulfill his mission only after the Oracle convinces him that he is not “the One”, the messiah of Zion.
When Virginia walks into the river, she makes a choice that many of us have contemplated at one time or another. Perhaps, like many people who make the same choice, she is no longer the master of her own actions. Do such people sin by this act? Perhaps that is for the Righteous Judge to decide. What we do know with a certainty is this: That just as the actions and kindnesses of others have affected our own lives, so too do we affect the lives of others, even in ways that are hidden from us. We have the choice to extend and accept such kindnesses – whether in the form of a fancy dinner or a simple cookie – at every moment we draw breath. By choosing kindness and love, we also choose conflict and suffering; but we choose life.
The Radical
I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading ‘My Year Inside Radical Islam‘ by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross. Daveed’s book interested me because his journey in some ways paralleled, and in some ways mirrored, my own. And I believe there are also important lessons to be learned about identity, will, and the spread of radical Islam today.
Daveed was born in 1976, into a liberal, secular Jewish family in Ashland, Oregon. They lived at what he describes as “the hippie end of a hippie town” and embraced a spiritual, multicultural ethos. In his activist college days, he became friends with al-Husein Madhany, who would provide Daveed’s introduction to Islam. Before long, Daveed embraced the Muslim faith and converted.
Al-Husein’s mystical, universalistic, Sufi-oriented brand of Islam appealed to Daveed. But as he became more deeply involved in Islam through the Al-Haramain Foundation, he quickly became exposed to a very different side of the faith – one bitterly opposed to the message of people like Al-Husein.
I recommend reading the book to find out how Daveed found his way out of radical Islam, and came to embrace another faith.
I found DGR’s book fascinating on a number of levels, some of them personal. Like Daveed, I’m a convert, but not to Islam or Christianity. Born in suburban New England about half a generation earlier than Daveed, I grew up in a home that, apart from my family’s lack of Jewish roots, sounds similar to Daveed’s in a lot of ways. My parents were nominally Unitarian Universalists, who had broken away from their conservative Christian upbringings and met in a Unitarian church. As a young adult I became interested in Judaism, learning Hebrew and attending Jewish services (first Reform and Conservative, later Orthodox) from my late teens to early twenties. At 25 I had an Orthodox Jewish conversion.
But I want to get back to DGR’s book. Reading ‘My Year Inside Radical Islam’, I was struck by the way the fanatical Salafi stream of Islam drove out the milder Sufi and Nashqibandi strains – and I was reminded of my friend Michael Totten’s book ‘Where the West Ends‘. Totten traveled throughout eastern Europe and western Asia, along the fault-lines of cultures. He witnessed many things, including the inexorable advance of radical Islam against the moderate forms of the religion. In my review of the book I wrote that
There is the image of the lonely liberal, surrounded by a sea of increasingly hostile and violent factions. There is the conflict between old traditionalism and new fundamentalism. …
The Serbian film writer Filip David is one of those lonely liberals; so is the half-Serbian, half-Bosnian Predag Delibasic, who takes pride in having declared himself variously a Jew, a Muslim, and a Yugoslav – and claims that nonexistent nationality to this day. Perhaps the loneliest, though, is Shpetim Mahmudi, an Albanian Sufi mystic who must watch the gradual encroachment of foreign-backed Arab islamists on the grounds of his religious compound. His story is tragic.
It also points to something important about religious conflict in the Muslim world: that the conflict is often not – as Westerners sometimes imagine – a case of Western modernity threatening to extinguish Islamic tradition. Rather, it is instead a direct attack on centuries-old, evolving religious traditions by well-armed, well-financed followers of a comparatively recent fundamentalist sect. It is ancient moderation versus newfangled fanaticism.
And I think that that’s the same thing Daveed Gartenstein-Ross witnessed in his time in the world of Islam.
My own relationship to religion is complicated and better suited to another post. But I do want to bring up Natan Sharansky’s central insight from his book ‘Defending Identity‘:
“The enemy’s will is strong because his identity is strong. And we must match his strength of purpose with strong identities of our own.”
The widely-accepted fallacy is that “conflicts arise because of religious dogma, so if we get rid of religious dogma we’ll reduce conflicts”. But the danger in having no fixed set of doctrines is that you can easily get drawn into all kinds of crazy stuff. And that’s as true today as it was when Daveed was in college.
Devotion to a good doctrine can give you the strength and the faith to reject bad ones. What you believe matters.
Thoughts on Gender
In the past couple of years there have been a number of anti-transgender articles appearing in the conservative media. These are written by people who simply do not know what they are talking about. Listening to them is like getting an economics lecture from Michael Moore, or small arms training from Nancy Pelosi.
Gender is part of what makes us who we are, and I’m not an expert but I don’t think it’s a stretch to suppose that – like almost everything else about how we think and experience life – it might be connected to the way the brain is wired.
Some of the most important people in my life have been transgender people, and if you have a problem with trans people then you have a problem with me. If you don’t want to read about gender or transgender people, then don’t read this. If you think Jenner is getting too much attention, then jiminy frickin’ cricket, don’t write about Jenner.
I was in the Middle East when the former Bruce Jenner came out as a Republican and it seemed the noise of car bombs was momentarily drowned out by the sound of heads exploding.
The right wing reacted about as you’d expect. Conservatives love to wax eloquent about the dignity of the individual, as long as that individual isn’t too inconvenient. The left wing reacted predictably, too; presumably the same folks dismissing Caitlyn Jenner as a “rich white person” will be lining up to vote for Hillary Clinton.
You can read Zoe at A. E. Brain for knowledgeable, intelligent discussion of transgenderism and transgender issues, such as this recent post on Paul McHugh’s ‘Surgical Sex’.
Zoe seems quite interested in the Republican Party, too, but for some strange reason she has not – as of today’s date – had much to say about Caitlyn Jenner’s political leanings. Odd, that.
Liberty Wolf does, though, and I’ll close this post by quoting him:
The far left actually has often been historically at odds with LGBT people and recently our worst detractors are called “TERFs” or “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists”. I can also attest that some of the most hostile folks in any crowd that comes to one of the readings for my memoir are far lefties who are “against the binary”. I can usually spot them in the crowd, they are usually women with their lips set into a straight line, terse with anger way beyond any skepticism. They are the “queer women” who dislike me for being “too binary”.
So really, trans people have the rare and odd privilege of being denigrated by certain actors on both the left and the right — there is no pleasing everyone and sometimes anyone at all.
Of course, there are many on the left who are supportive and the right as well. Dennis Prager has said some supportive and clarifying words on transsexuals and I’ve noted that duly in this blog. It all comes down to people being informed and not having an ax to grind.
Freedom and Power 