There used to be a pejorative that got slung around back in the mid-to-late-90s. And of course that's a period of history where yes there was internet, but not everyone had it, and those that did have it didn't necessarily have the patience to sit around waiting for jpgs to load. Yes it was a time when rich people got a second land line installed in their house dedicated to the internet so it didn't tie up their phone line.
So I always kind of assumed the pejorative 'try-hard' was a biproduct of grunge. And the speed of the internet is important because Kurt Cobain killed himself in '94, and grunge and Nirvana fandom were just making their way to regional victoria by '96-'97.
Then something happened. Like a generational change or something. Perhaps best captured in the first day of school scene in 21 Jump Street:
Somewhere, in like a decade or decade and a half, the script flipped.
What became cool was trying hard.
If grunge is a likely candidate for generating the 'try-hard' pejorative of the 90s, or maybe grunge was simply a symptom expressing the same reactionary sentiment; then maybe just maybe Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers' or Steve Job's 'your life is limited, don't waste it living someone else's life.' something in there made it really cool to try hard. Or you know perhaps Outlier's success was just a symptom of the same reactionary sentiment out there, and Steve Job's dress sense will never be explained.
Anyhoo.
What bothers me, is that effort, hard work, determination, persistence, investment. These are contextual virtues. For around the exact same time Nirvana were big, Michael Jordan was winning 6 NBA championships and he didn't mumble his way to 6 titles. We all loved Kurt, we all loved Michael Jordan. I like athletes, for example, trying really hard. Artists too. Except when an artist tries hard to please their lecturer at art school or something.
There goes my conundrum. Because I think so much of societal dysfunction, or even local community dysfunction, has taken a shape that is only possible in the absence of the pejorative of "try hard".
Let's get a better picture of what has changed. A lot of people alive today, that can legally drink while operating a vehicle have no idea about Nirvana, Michael Jordan or the Macarena.
Youtuber Todd in the Shadows describes Nirvana as something like the hardest (left/right?) turn in music history. He has a classification in Trainwreckords called "Nirvana Killed My Career" two examples being Billy Idol's Cyberpunk and Motley Crue's Generation Swine.
So I feel "grunge" is important an important concept. I think like all music, Nirvana's music was successful because its content spoke to the human condition. The presentation of grunge though was the big idea and the reason grunge was a phenomena that more slipped past the keeper in a moment of confusion than an inevitability.
My highly subjective experience being that whatever I think of the 90s as being it began sometime after September 10th '91 with the release of Nirvana's Nevermind and ended July 8th '96 not even half a decade with the release of Spice Girls' Wannabe. The 90s music scene wasn't just grunge, it was also hip-hop, trip-hop, alt-rock, alt-metal, indy-rock, techno etc. It was Indy movies Tarentino being the biggest name, but also you may be surprised to know, there was a time that Kevin Smith was considered cool and interesting, there was Trainspotting etc.
I only know of one book that has attempted to analyse what happened in the music industry, a book I haven't read but it echoes a phenomena which was basically the treasury doors opened and money was given to struggling artists and their shit got distributed and people exposed to it, found something they liked. My lasting impression of this period was a panic and scramble by the money men.
Crucially, what was briefly impossible, was that one could not optimize.
Now, let's talk about what Grunge isn't. Something well covered I feel by Todd's analysis of "Generation Swine" (Where "Cyberpunk" was more betting on the wrong horse).
I think nobody struggled with the 90s (Sep '91-June '96) more than Mayor Quimby with his struggles with wacking day. Whatever Grunge was intended to be, whatever it specifically was, what it couldn't be was buying pre-whacked snakes in order to gain esteem/status. Quimby's struggle with whacking day was probably the majority of people's struggle with the disorienting nature of the 90s.
Another excellent example of what grunge isn't I found on Pinterest, a wonderful resource in posts titled Grunge Aesthetic Outfits:
what?
nope.
still nope
Now I should cop to recognizing the difference between "grunge" and "grunge aesthetic" one is a thing and the other I should recognize as a simulacra, a different game, kind of like the difference between Japanese Lolita fashion (simulacra) and Victorian women's clothing (the thing itself). Keep that in mind that I'm not shitting on this blog post (the world needs less tweets and more blog posts) for which in my opinion maybe 5 of some 60 images come close to a 90s Grunge aesthetic.
The key point being, whatever grunge was in my opinion it was antithetical to how to guides. A "grunge" makeup tutorial is not a grunge make up tutorial. A magazine spread detailing the items to assemble a "grunge" look cannot be a grunge look. What you couldn't do, and be accepted or acclaimed grunge for the brief period where grunge rode high - was try.
This was something you could do in the 80s (Mar '80-Sep '91, Sep '98-Present) you could buy shit to gain esteem. There may be no single item less grunge than Air Jordan's. Ironically contemporary to Nirvana.
Grunge presented us with a Zen Koan of sorts: "How do you be cool?" "There is no how, you simply must be." Or as Yoda said "Do or do not, there is no try." in other words, people were condemned to meritocracy for an oh so brief period of time in an oh so small demographic.
But I think I cracked it. How to split the difference between laudable effort, the kind exhibited by athletes and trying hard.
Michael Jordan, for example, worked hard. But he isn't and wasn't throughout the 90s, a 'try-hard' even though he'd win a NBA championship, and then be in the gym the next day working out.
Jordan wasn't a try hard, because basketball doesn't have any easy answers. Being like Mike, it turned out, and turns out, does not involve simply buying a pair of air jordans. It took an incredible amount of work, in the meantime rivals are making trades, Shaq is getting drafted, the game constantly changes.
It's easy answers that make the try hard.
What do I mean by that?
It's actually quite hard to be 'cool' it likely most comes down to character and composure, temperament. Likely also divergent thinking, and shit that comes from within and you're probably talking about interplay between genes and environment.
So, in the mid 90s, there were easy answers to how to be cool. Bleach your hair into a kind of Labrador yellow, gel it into spikes if you're a guy (or a girl). Buy Oakley sunglasses. Get an eyebrow ring. Wear DC or Globe skate shoes. Basically go buy a Blink-182 costume from the stores and hey presto "cool".
But it also didn't work, almost like nature had gifted society a defence against sheep in wolves clothing. In that brief window of the 90s, we had some traction, some footing that briefly enabled us to say "I thought Spud was a fucking dipshit yesterday, now Spud owns a pair of Oakley sunglasses and I still think he is a fucking dipshit."
And that was I suspect, liberating for a tiny number of people. People I like. And for most people, devastating.
Michael Jordan made most of his money I believe, from a lie - (please note, I'm obviously being hyperbolic) - that if you buy the shoes Jordan wears, if you drink Gatorade, you can "be like Mike." which you can't. Paying particular attention to the prime contenders to be the next Michael Jordan, like Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Vince Carter and T-Mac wore their own shoes.
Shoes and diets are easy answers. Some problems have easy answers like "I'm hungry" has an easy answer. Other problems like "I can't stop drinking" don't have easy answers.
Once I drove someone to tears in front of me. Seems to me, this should happen more often, I am fairly mean. I probably take too much credit, but whatever. People who know me might think "oh god were you drunk and running your mouth?" No. I was trying to teach someone how to set intelligible goals. I use a format downloaded, literally from manager-tools.com referred to as MT goals, which is taking the old acronym SMART goals that people educated in the 90s would have heard ad-nauseum and removing all the useless shit from that acronym. Leaving you with "measurable" and "time specific" or "what" and "when". And we were literally going through the projects this person was working on and trying to get them to articulate MT goals. For example (not an actual example) if we were trying to control all shipping lanes in the pacific, an MT goal might be: Only encounter our warships in the Pacific Ocean by January 2023. We know what accomplishment of the task looks like, and when it should look like that.
Anyway, my trainee broke down and implored me "just tell me what you want." Catching me entirely off guard because the whole purpose of the exercise was to learn how to set these goals for yourself.
I don't think my trainee is a good example of the kind of people that were devastated by Grunge. But that incident is a good articulation of that devastation.
In contrast to Michael Jordan, Kurt Cobain made most of his money, I believe, from a truth. That truth being there's nothing you can do, to be like Kurt. Kurt Cobain effectively cornered the market, on being Kurt Cobain. So you can grow out your hair, wear a striped sweater with jeans and try your hardest to be like Kurt, and the harder you tried, the less like Kurt you were. In a beautiful symmetry of the people most like Kurt being Chris Cornell, Eddy Vedder, Dave Grohl in the same way the people most like MJ are KB, AI, VC and when KB became most like MJ was when he stopped trying at all to be like MJ. Something amazingly Simon Cowell gets.
...
I'm banking on you having met a try-hard couple in your life. Two people who both don't just believe in easy answers, but believe in the same easy answers.
Maybe they both belong to the same gym, and wear the same brands. Or maybe they both prey to the same idols. Or are both in the same open relationship. Maybe they both lost half their net wealth on crypto this year.
But they found eachother and they are going to be okay. It is the rest of us that have to suffer them.
But these people make the world go round. In economic terms. Of course the power of that saying is in the observation that no human activity actually makes the world go round.
Kurt Cobain had a huge market of fans. And you could sell those fans Nevermind, In Utero, MTV Unplugged in New York. But you couldn't sell them Kurt Cobain signature shoes. You couldn't sell them Gatorade. You would probably struggle to sell them heroin.
But say you did release Kurt Cobain signature Converse One-Star shoes. Spud the fucking dipshit buys them. He buys them expecting to walk them into school the next day and hear a deafening cacophony of "cool shoes Spud." but instead hears a deafening silence punctuated only be the occasional "what a try-hard."
That's not a commercial environment any maker of consumer products wants to be in. Brands and products ride atop a social contract. I can't help it, I'm going to divert into my favorite marketing term "prole-drift"
Burberry, specifically in the UK became a victim of prole-drift between 2001-05. Namely "Chavs" the then "white-trash" of Britain developed a taste for knockoff Burberry gear. To the point of Burberry the real brand becoming synonymous with the UKs lowest status people.
Many luxury brands face this problem, you sell a luxury car, you could also sell a bunch of hats with the brand of your luxury car on it, to people who could never afford one of your cars. This could bring in big money, but damage your core business. Prole-drift is a risk.
Introducing us to the more common paradox of status - if someone low status obtains a high status symbol, the status of the symbol is reduced rather than the status of the person increasing.
Prole-drift however is a much better problem to have, than Try-hard being a hurtful pejorative. So your wealthy long term customers abandon you as you rake in cash from the unwashed masses. Prole-drift can be quite profitable. But selling shoes, glasses, cars, hairstyles, dances, watches, clothes, cars and having your customers experience derision...
This is like selling bread, but suddenly, over night the customers that eat your bread get hungry instead of full.
For certain, a lot of money was made in the 90s (Sep '91-June '96) and Grunge never got 100% market penetration. There was an eclectic mix of products that consumers ravenously consumed: Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, No Doubt, Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins, Tori Amos, Bjork...watch enough Todd In The Shadows you'll realise everything was viable, you just could make the wrong move and hey presto - Nirvana killed your career, and that wrong move was trying. But U2, Metallica, Faith No More and Jane's Addiction coasted through and I'm sure a bunch of other 80s acts and even older.
It was a period though where easy answers were something people had to live without for almost 5 years, until "Wannabe" delivered relief (and subsequent Nu Metal) letting people know once again that there would be a set of easy answers one only had to dedicate their efforts towards and we've never looked back even though those easy answers changed, they would ever afterwards always exist, and they could exist because kids stopped calling people "try-hards".
People could be as desperate for esteem as they could stomach and nobody would give them flack for it, they would even encourage them. We all got a little bit more North Korean, we know our speech wasn't that great, but we'll take the standing ovation. Nobody dies of embarrassment that they spoke at a TEDx event. We went from the tragedy of Kurt Cobain, to the train wreck of Trisha Paytas.
Before concluding, I should probably spend less time on what I am weakest at - anthropology/sociology, and maybe just fucking define easy answers. That seems important.
Easy answers have no learning curve. In film, they require no montage. They are generally off-the-shelf. Easy answers are also, in the sense I'm using it, not an answer at all.
For example, Oakley's may feature polarised lenses, but wearing them does not display something clever or witty for Spud to say, they don't apply a red filter notifying Spud to not yell out the inane thing he was going to yell out in class, and it doesn't send electric shocks through him preventing him from groping Michelle's tits after someone accused her of stuffing her bra.
Oakley glasses have never fundamentally changed a person, though I'm not entirely dismissing the concept of a makeover. Certainly for example dying your hair electric pink may disabuse your fellow highschool students of the belief that your conservative parents wouldn't let you do it. Wearing Ray Ban (or any knock-off) aviators might make you feel cool in a way that makes you act with greater confidence in a way that makes you cooler. But it's entirely possible that behaviour learned, when you lose those glasses or sit on them or whatever, you don't lose your newfound confidence. It was in you all along.
There is likely a contradiction perceivable though between applying effort to easy answers. Something even try-hards understand. Oakley sunglasses weren't cheap. It's just doing something that might make you interesting like reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman and being able to articulate why you like or dislike it in 1995 was to someone like Spud incomprehensibly difficult. But working shifts stacking shelves in a grocery store, or flipping burgers at McDonalds for weeks on end all to channel that mindless suffering into a mindless purchase is the essence of being a try-hard.
And this may seem harsh, and selling that harshness is the marketing coup that ended the 90s in June of '96. Because calling someone a try-hard wasn't to diminish the effort and suffering of stacking super market shelves or smiling at bogans ordering Quarter pounders without pickles while other kids were playing Warcraft II but to express anguish that someone who suffered through that would spend it on something as trivial and vapid as Oakley's. And the even sadder phenomena of parents who had taken risks and worked hard to build up a profitable business so that their kid Spud never had to stack shelves, flip burgers or be polite to strangers in order to have a pair of Oakley sunglasses.
Perhaps the epitome of a try-hard, in my opinion, is also straight out of the 90s and has never escaped the cruelty and rejection of trying hard.
I'm talking of course about Hillary Clinton. If you can't take the example of Hillary Clinton the most qualified person in history to ever lose to the other least popular candidate in history of US presidential elections, and understand what a try-hard is, I can't explain it to you...no matter how hard I try... there's just no easy answer:
Jordan Peterson may be the highest profile victim of the narcissism of small differences. And I know Peterson is a Jungian, I'm not sure what his opinions of Freud are. But let's talk about times where he's had his feelings hurt by, I think I can confidently say, an unfair characterization.
Specifically Ta Nehisi Coates basing Red Skull on JP and Olivia Wilde basing the antagonist of "Don't Worry Darling." on JP.
Brass Tacks - The Narcissism of Small Differences
This is my broad observation of the JP phenomenon. Arguably only Trump has exceeded JP in commanding attention. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but one other comparison I can make between the two figures is that neither are particularly persuasive. More polarizing.
Now, I can draw a line between JPs effective detractors, and JPs ineffective detractors. That line being the narcissism of small differences and specifically, the ineffective detractors have a move they cannot make and we are left with two tribes staring across an impassable ravine at each other.
The move they cannot make is thus: It's not okay to tell yourself a comforting story.
Let me set a record for most used quotation on my blog:
We know, because this is something that people have theorized about since the Enlightenment, that in order for there to be a democracy there has to be something between you and me and our fellow citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is: a factual world. We have to have this thing called the public sphere where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain realities out there, and that from those realities we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that it's important for you and I, as citizens, to formulate projects, but it's also important in moments of difficulty for you and I, as citizens, to resist our leaders. Because if we're going to resist our leaders we have to say, "On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it's intolerable; therefore we resist." If there are no facts we can't resist, it becomes impossible. ~ Timothy Snyder, How to build an authoratarian regime - and how to stop one.
Jordan Peterson's effective detractors are mostly white straight men, they are often very much civil and JP's habit of engaging these effective critics (who are unlikely to be effective in persuading him, but can effectively create a public sphere - a world of facts through which resistance is possible.)
Now, my difficulty is that I haven't read "Between the World and Me" but I have seen Ta Nehasi Coates speak in interviews, speak with John McWhorter, I've read some of his articles from the Atlantic. I also haven't seen "Don't Worry Darling" and am not likely to. Let's keep it in proportion - Don't Worry Darling was a financial success seen by almost nobody, and likely readily forgotten. It has social commentary yes.
Wikipedia tells me that Don't Worry Darling has been compared to Stepford Wives, and Get Out. I'm also going to throw in 2020's The Invisible Man. I've seen the movies Don't Worry Darling has been compared to. Don't Worry Darling was made for $35 million, and made like $87 million at the box office. That's a tidy chunk of change. The Invisible Man '20 was made for $7 million dollars, and made $145 million dollars. Get Out was made for $4.5 million and made $255 million. There's two Stepford Wives, the original made $4 million at the box office which inflates to $24.2 million in '22 money. The 2004 remake was a financial and critical failure it made $100 million at the box office. Barbarian '22 was made for $4.5 million and grossed $45 million.
In this sense, what I have is tidbits of namecalling, that JP often spins into publicity coups or at least reinforce the notion that he has no effective detractors. And it's because of that move these detractors can't make which is - it's not okay to just tell yourself a story.
Leaving you with name-calling. They are bad, we are good. No! We are good, they are bad.
The Wilde Example of Ineffective Resistance
WILDE: Terrifying. We based that character on this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community. You know the incels?
GYLLENHAAL: No.
WILDE: They’re basically disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women. ~ from this interview
I've watched a couple of JP's responses, and I don't care. There's an obvious retort that can deflate the whole conversation and it involves speaking a tribal taboo.
COUNTERFACTUAL INTERVIEWER: But aren't you trying to be a psuedo-intellectual hero to a community of mediocre unsuccessful women? You know blamers and excuse makers?
And that's that. I feel it is fair to characterize Wilde's descriptions as "callous" and "flippant" from which I infer that Wilde, like Peterson prefers to tell herself stories rather than interrogate a world of facts. What generally indicates someone who interrogates a world of facts, is they employ things like qualifiers, refer to "nuance" and tend not to use ad hominems or come down strongly on people, but rather ideas.
Kramer: If you say a birthday wish out loud, it doesn't come true!
Franklin Delano Romanowski: That's just a sillysuperstition.
Do you get it? This is one of my favourite absurd jokes in Seinfeld so I hope I don't have to explain it to you.
Corrupt Mayor Analogy
Imagine the mayor is corrupt. You sit on the city council, and the other councillors approach you clandestinely to speak of the corruption - appointing friends, taking bribes, kicking puppies... and you say, okay, let's appoint an independent investigation to go through all our finances and review all our appointments and expose him. And then the other councillors go 'woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah... let's not go crazy. We were thinking we might just poison him.'
'Why wouldn't we expose his corruption?'
'...well, because we appoint friends, take bribes and kick puppies. We don't want transparency or accountability. We just want the mayor gone.'
A Short List of Effective Detractions
I've already embedded a Seinfeld clip, but for me there was a moment with JP that was a very Larry David sitcom scenario - the ones of the form: you trusted your accountant but you discover he does drugs, you trusted the pro shop salesman then you discover he can't play tennis, you trusted the chef then you discover he doesn't wash his hands, you trusted the psychiatrist then you discover he discloses patient details...
And for me, my moment with JP was on his second or third appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast where he uttered the phrase "I've figured something out..." it comes at the 21:49 mark of episode #1208 of the Joe Rogan Experience:
Hey so i figured something out that i thought i'd tell you about this took me like 30 years to figure out and i figured it out on this tour so there's this old idea you know that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale right from some monster that's deep in the abyss you see that pinocchio for example, but it's a very common idea and i figured out why that is i think so imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that you know if...
This is like saying "I figured out the end of Inception, I saw it 12 years ago and I've been thinking about the top spinning and the wobble for 12 years and I figured it out on this tour whether Dom is awake or still in a dream..." to which the answer is, you've figured nothing out because the information doesn't exist to figure it out. What you have is not knowledge but an opinion.
And to be clear, if JP said Dom is awake and Nolan does a Comic Con panel tomorrow and a fan asks if Dom is awake or asleep at the end of Inception and Nolan says "Dom is awake" JP would still not have figured out that Dom was awake, because again the information doesn't exist to figure that out. Even Nolan, the director is just offering his opinion on something outside of the film he created. I situation like this occurred with Ridley Scott saying Deckard was actually a synth in Blade Runner, or when JK first announced after the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that Dumbledore was gay. Ambiguous multi-valent clues like visions of a Unicorn and Dumbledore never smashing lady bits do not mean the information is actually in the text to figure out a definitive conclusion. I'm not sure a fan can yet conclude Dumbledore is gay, by watching the Fantastic Beasts films, which I feel might be able to be screened in Qatar.
Anyway I've digressed quite a bit, my point being that JP as anything beyond a clinical psychologist that noticed actual problems with then-progressive-now-woke initiatives collapsed and collapsed quite quickly. Read on in the transcript or watch the interview and you get what I would describe as "convoluted psycho babble to the effect of not saying much at all." aka words that are hard to distinguish from Judith Butler's.
Perhaps with the sole exception of Cosmic Skeptic who did laudable work with his video, not only are these people who can effectively resist JPs baseless claims and death-by-word-salad, most of them didn't have to do any special prep. to effectively resist JP. Harris reads from a book he had published a decade before anybody heard of JP, Matt Dillahunty just did what he does to any theist caller into the Atheist experience, Dr Grande just evaluated JP's videos the same as he always does - by the research papers. Dawkins just poses simpler and more plausible hypothesis for the collective unconscious, Stephen Fry just uses his usual eruditeness.
...so I, I can understand why a 19th century figure like Frazer or you know in "The Golden Bough" or, or, or like Mary McCarthy*, or Jung, or, um, Joseph Campbell can, can make wonderful myths out of myths, they're telling a story about stories, and telling us what they mean; well, I I I don't refute it, I repudiate. I, I, I, allow myself to believe - No, actually. Yes it's it's all very well and you can, you can build a very nice theory about what these myths mean and who these hero are, what these quests are, and how they're only seven stories and yes... But again, the the stand-up comedian type empirical system he says "okay so i'm a small roman person uh, under those circumstances and what is this really meaning to me?" I'm sorry no. I've I've got as Wordsworth put it: It's getting and spending and doing and having children and looking and hoping life gets better and enjoying life with my friends, but to erect it into a spiritual language and a theater of, of, of, uh...of human meaning uh, is delightful and it... but i think we have to recognize that it's a game, to some extent it may be it may indeed be true I mean I... You know I'm not saying this to to to demolish your argument, but i'm saying it's... ~ Stephen Fry from his interview on JP's podcast (37 minutes in) transcript by google, corrections, punctuation and emphasis by me. *I've never heard of Mary McCarthy prior to this interview, I found an author by that name on Wikipedia but couldn't connect her bio there to this subject.
And all these white men have this privileged move they can make with JP, which is they can question the legitimacy of telling yourself a story.
Lukewarm Conclusion
I'll wind up going in circles. I write far too much about Jordan Peterson, I feel this way because Jordan Peterson is someone whom I feel can widely be safely ignored. In fact, I'd go as far as to say JP is fundamentally wrong enough that he is vulnerable to "give him enough rope" if not having fallen prey to it already with the recent uptick in production values and having sponsored adds for investing in precious metals, releasing clips using the term "globalists" etc. JP may well have forked himself, I haven't watched it because of the inherent boringness of cryptocurrencies, but how well could this video have possibly aged?
The lukewarm defence is really just as it began - you don't have to resort to strawmanning, hit-pieces, ad-hominem attacks etc. to the extent that it becomes a diagnostic tool - it appears the people that get viciously fixated on JP do so because they are attempting to play the same game, and in turn this helps explains JPs obsession with woke-neo-marxist-post-modernist whatever because they in turn are trying to play the game he is playing, the game described eloquently on-the-fly by Fry. An attempt to take multi-valent material and saying it means this. "I've figured it out."
My last published post was on multi-valance, I cited JP as an example. JP is himself multi-valent, he can be interpreted as an intellectual or a psuedo-intellectual, or domain dependent he can be interpreted as both simultaneously. He can be read as a crazy ex-proffessor (a quite lucid, mechanical interpretation) or as a wannabe T.S. Elliot (a less lucid, something interpretation). Ta Nahesi Coates can interpret him as an authoritarian megalomaniac/cartoonish villain.
Captain America #28 - Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Honestly it's a pretty funny joke.
And far from characterizing it as a grossly unfair comparison, I think there's legitimate social commentary there especially with the context provided by Cap in the panel that proceeds the actual joke/comparison. The legit commentary is inarticulate people outsourcing their thinking. That's the essential value adding activity of public intellectuals, though this itself is likely an unfair characterization. Any audience we can divide into two groups (with no guess at percentages) an audience that engages with active critical faculties, and audiences that don't. Something that is as true of JP as Ta-Nehisi Coates' audience. However, it is likely far more common that the average person comes across someone who thinks uncritically that JP is the shit, as Ta-Nehisi Coates' fanboys. I find it hard to gauge the level of venom in Coates' joke, something that is much easier with Wilde, because of the interview.
My defence of JP is lukewarm because JP spends so much of his time, and is so invested in pseudo-intellectual garbage. It is likely that this interpretation can equally be applied to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Olivia Wilde and many other of JPs detractors.
What is different is that JP feeds off his ineffective critics, their efforts keep him relevant and solvent. Such that it was likely 3 years ago that I was hosting friends for lunch and had a guest ask me if I'd heard of Jordan Peterson. At that stage I felt it was too late for their to be no general consensus on JP, like say Eckhart Tole, Deepak Chopra, Sam Harris, Slavoj Zizek and Noam Chomsky. Maybe a year or two after that I still came across people asking for my take on JP. A phenomena of uncertainty and unfamiliarity that I do not understand.
JP's multi-valence I interpret as such: First the good. JP appears to have been a competent clinical psychologist, enough to say that becoming a patient of JPs is better than rolling the dice on the available pool of clinical psychologists (given that there is no extant regulation that forces psychologists to employ evidence backed therapeutic approaches, see Candace Newmaker and William Goble) which is to say if you suffer from depression, JP is going to get you into healthy eating and sleeping routines that sort of thing. Also if JP is your lecturer on personality and psychometrics, you will likely gain a degree of expertise on these subjects. Furthermore, JP is competent at identifying pseudoscience when it comes from the extremities of the left.
Alas, this is not unique. There are many champions against the excesses of the left, and some small percentage of them are not tribalist which JP certainly is. By this I mean it's pseudoscientific garbage when a feminist reads patriarchy into a text, or an anti-racist reads white supremacy into a text, but it somehow magically isn't when JP reads embodied consciousness and AI and robotics insights into the Book of Genisis. I couldn't find the actual podcast excerpt where Sam Harris reads to JP from "The End of Faith" just Holy Koolaid's animation, but going from memory JP at one point when Sam starts reading mystical insights into the Hawaiin cook book, comments that Sam sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic.
So onto the bad, I can interpret JP as non-integrated. JP suffers. Likely from cognitive dissonance based on how much of the meaning he gives himself is based on the precise methodology that ideologies he vehemently opposes do. I interpret that JP is emotionally incapable of the vulnerability to accept a proposition like "the universe is indifferent to our existence" and in that it predicts that JP is not an apologist for religious superstition in the same sense many secular liberals do, something that can be cynically described as the sentiment "stupid people need religion so let them have it." or a bigotry of low expectations.
JP needs to believe in something or he'll have an existential crisis. Is how I read JP. He isn't "boss" or "baller" but acknowledging the multi-valence of "beast-mode" maybe. He is incredibly fragile and that's why he fights so hard. At best he wastes a lot of people's valuable time, as he wasted mine with his lecture (delivered in my home town) where he promised he was going to actually answer the question "do I believe in God?" and as he waffles through word salad, he leaves space wide open to at worst, believe it's okay to tell a story to yourself that say, your best friend is Jesus and you have a good job and nice car and nice house because the omnipotent omniscient creator of the Universe cares about the petty details of your life. You have good reason to know that to be the case, you just can't understand or articulate it like JP does.
That's a lot of baggage. The A-Priori Christianity, the cognitive dissonance over post-modern methodology, the personal fragility. All that is there with JP for the interpreting.
By analogy, if you care and are concerned about the excesses of the left. You are having a dispute with your neighbour over a tree in their yard's branches encroaching on your yard. JP rushes up and courageously volunteers himself to champion your cause. On this issue you may be in the right and your neighbour a complete arsehole, but enthusiasm, even courage is no way to optimise your champion. There are lawyers that deal with these disputes dispassionately and professionally and they have track records. More importantly they are capable of resolving these issues, because they acknowledge and understand a world of facts, a public sphere in this case of the law.
JP doesn't acknowledge a public sphere of facts, hence Cosmic Skeptic has to do work to determine that JP is an atheist, he thinks for example that the events described in Genesis and Exodus are not historical events. He just can't answer questions about them in precise speech.
JP I can do without, Ben Shapiro I can do without. We just have a bad system with no alternatives for ellevating people to the role of Champion. One I suspect is largely based on spectacle rather than merit.
having or susceptible of many applications, interpretations, meanings, or values.
"visually complex and multivalent work"
By Bryan Derksen - Original image Cup or faces paradox.jpg uploaded by Guam on 28 July 2005, SVG conversion by Bryan Derksen, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1733355
Imagine flipping a coin to decide something and on one side of the coin it has a boat and on the other a book. Nobody notices this before the flip, and the person calls 'tails'.
Scrutinizing the coin, it has landed boat side up. 'Tails it is. Because it's not a head.' and the flipper disputes this 'no it's not a tail, boats don't have tails. Boats often have a figurehead. Figurehead. Heads I figure.' 'Nah-ah. Boats always have a rudder. That's a tail...' 'I'm not sure that's true. Rowboats don't have rudders, all boats have a stern and a prow. What's the other side, if it's a head then tails it is.' they flip the coin over and see the book. 'Well that's not heads, it's a book.' 'Yeah it's heads, books are written by an author.' 'Yeah but the picture of the author is rarely on the cover, it's on the back or inside the cover on the dust jacket. So it would be on the other side of this coin.' 'That's weak. How is a book 'tails'?' 'It's a tale. Books are tails...'
And so on.
Is it two faces in profile, or a vase? Is it a rabbit or a duck? Is it a young woman or an old crone? Does the cube pop out of, or sink into, the page? Something that is multi-valent goes beyond being able to say something either is, or isn't but people these days appear to increasingly act like we can draw concrete conclusions from a methodology that can produce pretty much any conclusion you like.
From this comes Multi-Valence's place in this series of posts about countering the competitive advantage intelligence gives. But multi-valence is merely the foundation.
It requires two things to successfully counter/confound intelligence.
1. The first thing required is a method by which you can derive any conclusion you want, hence using things that are multi-valent.
2. The second thing required after you have produced your desired conclusion is a means by which you can exclude all other conclusions. (often an ad-hominem).
And this is the crucial question, too often unasked, that means people using sounder methodologies or intelligence wind up with no real, or significantly reduced advantage over people using unsound methodologies or unchecked intuition - Why would anybody use literary criticism to determine something, if they could demonstrate it empirically?
And of course, this isn't limited to literary criticism. Maybe see a previous post in this series 'how to believe anything you want.'
Is Mono-Valance a thing?
Yes. In chemistry. But it has no formally recognised use as an expression.
Mono means one, and valance means application, interpretation, meaning, value etc. (valent is a multivalent word, but not infinitely so).
Here I posit are some examples of monovalent - the earth revolves around the sun, or it doesn't. You have money on your person or you don't. You own a pet or you don't. Your country has troops on foreign soil or they don't. You have a job or you don't. You love someone or you don't.
These are all positions where something either is or isn't. That is as far as interpretation goes.
I'm a fan of Youtuber Dr. Todd Grande, and he'll come up as an example of multi-valance later, but given the true-crime bent of his channel he has a number of videos now about mysterious disappearances. It's not quite a 'once you've seen one you've seen them all' but there is a recurring framework that comes up in the analysis of disappearing persons - namely there's a number of possible theories of the disappearance. Typically 1. They were murdered and the body never found. 2. They committed suicide in such a way as their body was never discovered. 3. They died by misadventure in such a way as the body was never found. 4. They disappeared deliberately in order to start a new life. 5. They were abducted.
What Todd Grande frequently points out is that one of these things must have happened, and then he'll typically weight the likelihood of each theory being true based on the facts of the case and historical statistics (like it is extremely difficult in the modern era to actually disappear and start a new life).
The key monovalent aspect is that something must be true, even if that truth is indeterminite.
I will now assert, that intelligence tends to base it's life around this notion that something must necessarily be true. There is a reality. Intelligent people operate on the assumption that not anything is possible. This is largely how intelligence debugs problems, when something doesn't work it follows that something must have happened and then narrow it down to points in the process where something went wrong, identify what went wrong, attempt a solution and then test that solution to determine whether the problem is resolved.
So for example, trying to hit a target with an arrow. If you miss, there's only so many things that could have caused the miss. Your aim, the sights, the bow string tension or your draw, the trueness of the arrow, weather conditions. Depending where the arrow misses, the multi-valence can go down - for example if there's no issue with range, it is unlikely to be a problem with the draw, it is likely aim, arrow, wind or the sights. If you make no adjustments and simply try another arrow and it hits, we are down to changes in the wind or the arrow.
So hopefully my simple example is complicated enough to demonstrate that mono-valent questions, questions of whether something is or isn't can be complex and require intelligence, but ultimately it is constrained to questions of what is or isn't.
When there's a question of whether it's a picture of a vase or a picture of two profiles, an old crone or a young lady, a black and blue dress or a white and gold dress...in fact "the dress" is a perfect example of mono-valance - my brain tells me it is white and gold, but the physical dress is black and blue. No matter how convinced I am that the white and gold dress is the one in the photograph I could never locate that dress, because it is a black and blue dress.
But even with the above optical-illusion examples they are certainly multi-valent because otherwise there would be no illusion, but the question of whether something is multi-valent for, I assert, an intelligent person is a mono-valent question.
So at the risk of losing you with meta talk, this post is really about the intelligence confounding insistence that multi-valent narratives are not multi-valent but actually mono-valent.
Scott McCloud's 4 Campfires
It all began for me, with Scott McCloud, but the story of multivalence doesn't start there, at least as an intelligence defeating phenomenon.
Scott McCloud drew a comic book called 'Understanding Comics' and later a comic book called 'Making Comics' and I can no longer remember in which one, or possibly both he broke down four creative camps - a kind of Myers-Briggs type astrology of comic book creators.
His four zodiac signs or creative philosophies/campfires are:
My brief recollected summary is that classicists tend to want to redo the classics, they are like 'Jack Kirby was great, I want to produce work that resembles Kirby's' Animists are all about the feels, they are like 'I want to make a comic that makes people cry.' Iconoclasts are the punk rockers, the antithesis of Classicists they want to tear down the icons and say 'look shit comics have their place too.' Which is harsh but probably describes 99.99% of iconoclastic comic creators and the remainder are your Alan Moores.
Most relevant though, are the formalists, these are creators that try to make a science out of art. They are the kind of people that would try to devise broad statistical categories to sort works and/or creators into. People like Scott McCloud.
In terms of multi-valence, when presented by Scott McCloud with these four creative campfires, I a) probably still believed in Myers-Briggs as something more than astrology/junk science at the time. and b) I could think of examples of creative works, comics, movies, music for each campfire except formalists.
For example:
Classisist - comic book: Kingdom Come, DC: The New Frontier, music: Wolfmother, Amy Winehouse. movie: Bond (any), The Artist.
Animist - comic book: Real (Takehiko Inoue). music: Comfortably Numb. movie: Life is Beautiful, When Harry Met Sally.
Iconoclast - comic book: Anything by Grant Morrison, Zines. music: Aphex Twin, Free Jazz. movies: Felix the Cat, Birdman.
Of course, there's a whole shitload of formalist content. But we'd generally call it 'theory' instructional works or literary/film/cultural criticism. At the time I was reading 'Making Comics' by Scott McCloud the culture really had a hard opaque partition for which all the candidate 'formalist' content was separated from the rest.
Reflecting now, these four fuzzy edged campfires are more clearly the same junk science as Myers-Briggs - like is Quentin Tarentino a classicist-iconoclast? I think I could also make the case for him being a formalist and an animist. And it is in itself as a framework, an excellent example as such of multivalence. These categories simultaneously describe everything and nothing. But there is something here.
Because then came the Video Essays. Youtube brought about a space in the culture for formalists to thrive. And video essays, are for me, at least, entertainment.
And at most, entertainment.
Memories of my brother.
“Just what would we be missing from the land of poorly scripted melodramas? Recycled plot lines, tiresome self-realizations. You throw in the occasional downward spiral of a dear friend, and maybe baby here and a death there, and all you really got is a recipe for some soul-sucking, mind-numbing, ennui. And I for one could skip it.” – Pacey Witter, Dawson's Creek.
Dawson's Creek was on the TV. My brother walked in and watched for maybe a minute as Pacey said something convoluted and pretentious and he passed his judgement - 'The danger of this show, is that people will watch it and think they are getting smarter.'
I don't know if that danger was ever realized. I didn't watch enough Dawson's Creek, in fact that same incident might be the sum total of Dawson's Creek I have seen. But while my brother's warning about Dawson's Creek may not rise to the level of prophesy, I feel it is certainly the danger of video essays.
The pamphlets of our era.
An Example
Here are two qualified clinical psychologists that have gone on to become entertainers talking about the same subject - Donald Trump and his proximity to the January 6th Capitol Hill riots.
Here is the very rational Dr. Todd Grande's take, keeping in mind that his analysis follows immediately after the events, he's had maybe minutes or hours to come up with this take:
And here is Jordan Peterson scratching his head trying to noodle out the conundrum of 'what happened with Donald Trump that lead to all the "stop the steal" June 6th capital hill riot insurgency after at least maybe 18 months:
Same stimulus, very different takes. Or maybe not so different. It's not that Jordan doesn't make a valid somewhat coherent analysis (with some characterizations I would dispute) the real difference is that JP finds it a real conundrum and Dr. Grande compares a hypothesis to the literature. This is the problem of 'Multi-Valence' and in many ways the futility of Peterson's mission/passion, whatever it may be, but that in my own mental shorthand I would describe as 'the bible is better than it reads.'
For the record, I like Dr. Grande's analysis much better. He appears to see no conundrum. In fact since 2019 I've watched many public intellectuals I leaned on to make sense of cultural phenomena basically go insane. (Watching Peter Boghossian with bated breath currently...his new series on NPR seems to promise an imminent conspiracy theory, can't quite explain why.)
Dr. Grande however has not yet gone insane. But it is worth noticing that the above video is a rare one where Todd Grande doesn't open with his regular disclaimer 'Just a reminder, I'm not diagnosing anyone here merely speculating on a situation like this...' like the riots on capital hill finally broke his patience and he was like 'that Donald Trump is a narcissist, is the simplest and most obvious explanation for his behaviour and the consequences of that behaviour.' He even has a video about the problem with diagnosing public figures.
Jordan Peterson, has always been a mixed bag, with most of that bag being composed of garbage. When asked by a friend what I made of Jordan Peterson, my quick summary is that he appears to be a perfectly competent clinical psychologist (this was prior to seeing the excerpt from his interview with Piers Morgan) maybe even an expert on psychometrics, but beyond that he basically espouses nigh-unintelligible garbage, Peterson is one of the best and most accessible public figures to demonstrate the problem of multi-valence. Dr. Grande has an excellent video I also refer people to. Reading Peterson's 'Rational-Wiki'* page taught me the word 'ultracrepidarian'.
*yeah, I feel Rational-Wiki is obviously uncharitable, and may have a far-left bias in terms of the population that actively edit the wiki. Even so, it tends to be adequate at documenting lay-up examples of pseudo-science.
Some More Examples
"Who, Damien? Nothing, just a mischievous, rambunctious kid." - Kramer, on the nature of Damien of 'The Omen' movie.
“Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT), Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
Okay this time from the aforementioned artform of video essayists - but I thought I'd lead off with an example of NNT because it kind of, maybe offers another way of thinking about multi-valent vs mono-valent, which is employing the Greek distinctions of techne and episteme. I'm not an expert on Greek and I suspect, neither is NNT, but even if appropriated a big and useful observation NNT makes is that there are expert and non-expert domains. Rocket science can have experts, they can get rockets to arrive when and where the experts want them to, as such it is an expert domain. Art critique is a non-expert domain.
Giorgione's "The Tempest"
So the above painting is a painting of mostly a landscape with some figures in the foreground. One is a woman pooh-bearing it with no pants partially obscured by a bush while breastfeeding an infant. Across from her a fully dressed dude is putting some weight on a staff of the foot he's putting most of his weight on looking on somewhat ambivalently.
I'm not wrong. The painting is of all of these things. In fact it is definitely a painting of two figures in the foreground of a landscape.
Now I'm a big fan of Waldemar's art history documentaries, and they provide a pretty innocuous example of multi-valance. With any luck, this embedded video should take you straight to the relevant episode, but knowing that it's a 23 minute diversion to take in the point, so consider it a recommendation and the relevant excerpt here: (spoilers)
...so could the tempest like veronese's feast at the house of levi, be a secret religious painting? Professor salvador cetis believes it is: “what i did is basically to read all the literature on on the painting and to see what is meaningful in painting what is not which means the the man the woman the child the columns which are there a serpent which is hidden uh in a bush the lightning in the sky but since the lightning was uh widely used as a symbol of god in Giorgione’s time; i assumed that there was an equivalence between god and lightning and it's a definite possibility that this is that. That actually the tempest represents adam and eve with the first born child: Cain, actually, and the serpent would be an allusion to the original sin so all, all different elements would be explained.”
But there's a major flaw in this surprising adam and eve theory, when the painting was cleaned, that serpent which Professor Settis claims to have located under this bush, turned out to be nothing more than the root of a tree. Can this really be the garden of eden?
I've looked at it on many occasions for many hours and never once felt any religious atmosphere. Over at the academia they prefer the simplest of all explanations. Which of the many interpretations of the tempest's meaning do you think is probably closest to the truth? none of them none of them none of them. I like michael’s one best of all, a storm with a gypsy who is feeding her child and a shepherd. So everybody else has been wrong?
...That lightning in the background of the tempest must surely indicate the presence of Zeus, the god of thunder and thrower of lightning bolts, but he's not seducing the woman in the picture, is he? She seems to be the partner of the handsome young man, so what is Zeus doing here? After 500 years of mystery, I think i've cracked Giorgione's code. There is a story and only one story which fits snugly with what we see in the tempest. It's outlined here by homer in the odyssey the most celebrated of all classical poems. It concerns Demeter, the goddess of fertility who made things grow. This is her with her clothes on, but i think Giorgione's painted her in the tempest with her clothes off. According to Homer, Demeter met a handsome mortal at a wedding called Iacian. Even though she was a goddess and he was human, they made love in a plowed field and had a baby. That baby was Plutus the god of wealth. Zeus, Demeter's brother and complicatedly, her former lover, who often enjoyed the embrace of mortals himself, was so angered by this illicit relationship between Demeter and Iacian that he killed Iacian with a lightning bolt. Smote him with his bright thunder, says Homer. The tempest shows the moment just before Zeus has deadly revenge. That's why the atmosphere is so charged. Demeter has given birth to the god of wealth, but the Iacian is about to be hit by a deadly thunderbolt, his crime: he was a mortal who made love to a god and we're like the audience at a christmas pantomime who can see what's going to happen and who want to shout “look out! look out!” once you know the picture's overall meaning every little detail falls into place… = Youtube auto-generated transcript of video below, some corrections, punctuation and emphasis added by me.
"The Tempest" is certainly multi-valent. From its wikipedia page:
There is no contemporary textual explanation for The Tempest, and ultimately, no definitive reading or interpretation. To some it represents the flight into Egypt; to others, a scene from classical mythology (possibly Paris and Oenone; or Iasion and Demeter) or from an ancient Greek pastoral novel. According to the Italian scholar Salvatore Settis,[6] the desert city would represent the Paradise, the two characters being Adam and Eve with their son Cain: the lightning, as in ancient Greek and Hebrew times, would represent God who has just ousted them from Eden. Others have proposed a moral allegorical reading, or concluded that Giorgione had no particular subject in mind.[5]
So Waldamer's interpretation cannot be confirmed. It's certainly coherent, plausible, intelligible I find it interesting. We could call it probable but we just cannot call it definitive or conclusive. What Waldamer, Professor Settis and anyone else are attempting to do, is guess the contents of the artist's mind, who is long dead and his grey matter rotted away.
More specifically it is taking something multi-valent, using it as a pretext to read-minds, and elevate that act of mind-reading to a confidence level we more commonly call "knowledge". Waldamer can think he has cracked the Tempest's code, but he doesn't know what it means.
I don't mind people populating the world with an ever growing number of interpretations, if you whip quickly back up, what I object to in Video-essays as an artform is when people use the kind of language to assert confidence they cannot have.
Here's one by Dan Olsen, whose video essays I quite enjoy, particularly his "Line Goes Up" video on NFTs, Crypto etc.
Fight Club is an ultraviolent reflection on masculinity, media, corporate culture, gender relationships, self-identity, fatherhood, and the conflict between individualism and collectivism.
Fight Club, intentionally or not, exposes the crisis of masculine identity as the 'hetero-white-male is displaced' as the societal default, and the ugly, hazardous reactions to that loss of unquestioned power.
I highlighted "is" because though this is a recurrent weakness of the video-essay genre, which is to merely assert things without making an argument, I have no problem with description in this way. Being familiar with the movie, I know all these themes are reflected on, intentionally or not. I also like the concession "intentionally or not" because it disregards mind-reading however, then we get into more assertions - like the word "exposes" asserts that whatever is exposed is real, and then there's a complex concentration of assertions that have been asserted to be real by "exposed"- that there's a crisis of masculine identity (experienced by who? How wide spread? is it universal? did Dan experience it? does the experience alluded to rise to the level of "crisis"?) and then that the hetero-white-male is asserted to have been a societal default, that it is being displaced and then fight club itself again exposes ugly, hazardous reactions to, what is asserted to be, an unquestioned power, that is asserted to be lost.
I'm probably engaging in what might be described as 'privilege preserving epistemic pushback', but I'm trying to make a general point about the hazards of the popular new artform of video essays. Assertions can just wash over your critical faculties, that or, they set off your defence mechanisms and you'll never engage with the content.
Perhaps think of it this way. Imagine your high school declared that literally anybody can write the textbooks now, and students can pick whatever text books they like. This would definitely open the doors wide open to innovation and improvement, there are bound to be problems with the ways secondary schools currently and historically commission text books. The best candidates to write our text books may have been sidelined for lack of connections etc. Those wide open doors however are almost certainly going to be clogged with crap.
Dan Olsen is very clever and very considerate, and that's why I would cop to 'privilege preserving epistemic pushback' because I'm confident he could furnish arguments, certainly valid ones, and maybe even persuasive ones to all the assertions in these opening statements. Hence if he were trying to deliver a lecture on Fight Club a la Jordan Peterson and Lion King, my challenges would probably just become a dick move bogging the class down so Dan can't get to his actual points.
The common misinterpretation of this phrase ["toxic masculinity"] is that it's being used to condemn all masculinity, as though manhood itself is something inherently bad.
This assertion comes a little later, but reminds me of another problem with multi-valence and episteme. In fact using Taleb's definition of 'episteme' as 'know what' (as opposed to techne 'know how') let's call it The Dark-Triad of Episteme - Mind-reading, Affirming the Consequent and Motte & Bailey.
But I'm getting bogged down, more examples:
The difference is a matter of deference. I do not mean to imply that the deep should keep its mysteries forever. I delight in every new taxonomy, obsess over new answers raising new questions. But the romantic, poetic side of me knows that sightings of the true legends have to be earned.We cannot understand those depths by the refuse that floats to its surface. Meeting the great unknown on its own turf requires a sort of surrender. We must give ourselves to the deep before the deep will give its knowledge in return. ~ Jacob Geller, Fear of Big Things Underwater.
It may not be the most egregious example of Jacob Geller's musing presented as knowledge. But certainly the excerpted passage demonstrates how liberally this art-form is peppered with contentious claims.
Jacob started YouTube because he “just had a visceral need to express, to get a bunch of these ideas out of [his] head and out into the world.”[12] His research “begins with just hearing a weird/interesting story that kinda sparks [his] imagination. From there [Jacob] casts around in [his] brain and online, trying to find other things that connect to that initial fact.”[13]
Rigorous craftsmanship if ever I heard it. Jacob's most egregious video that I have seen might be "The Men Who Couldn't Stop Crying, and Other Unbearable Realities" which I argue is egregious because he takes an apocryphal tale, literally something that didn't happen and then intentionally or not attempts to spin it into knowledge, like the historical Rumplestiltskin spinning straw into gold. A methodology I feel maybe half to 80% of Jordan Peterson's career is based on something like - regardless of it's truth there's a reason this story resonates therefore truer than a true story. As opposed to Mark Twain's "never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
Something my immune system reacts to, that is coming in with a video-essayist like Geller, is pageantry, production values. Visuals, sound effects etc. In Geller's case it might be as little as standing on a beach to deliver his narration. Gimmicks and costumes. So, Geller's work on youtube certainly entertains me. It is more, simply fascinating what he expresses, without me ever being under the illusion that he is figuring out knowledge with predictive power.
His presentation though makes me worry, that his video-essays may fulfil the dangers promised by Dawson's Creek - that people might watch them and think they are getting smarter. A danger I'm confident is true of conspiracy theorists Brett and Eric Weinstein and Heather Haying via their Dark Horse Podcast, though they do not utilize production values and theatrics.
Jacob's videos offer one valency (my own) of "extremely pretentious video game reviews." or in plain English "video game reviews surrounded by a load of wank."
As an April Fool's day prank, Abigail Thorne of Philosophy Tube released what can be interpreted as a shitpost of Jordan Peterson's more Jungian online content "the Philosophy of Anime" that can just as easily be read as a shitpost of Jacob Geller's content. A more succinct and entertainingly hyperbolic example of what Geller essentially does is Saturday Night Live's Inside the Actor's Studio: Charles Nelson Reilly, arguably a parody of trying to make something great and important out of something much much more mediocre, inconsequential.
Don't get me wrong, I'd almost certainly be flattered if Jacob Geller or someone like him devoted that much attention and thought to anything I had made. I don't begrudge people going hog-wild with their imaginations. I don't begrudge people being entertained by video-essays. Video-essays are fine as entertainment, in so far as a channel called 'The History Channel' is fine having entertaining programming about Ancient Aliens is fine.
Okay, getting worse now. Patrick H. Willem's "Shut Up About Plot Holes"
I know it seems impossible to watch movies wrong... but you're watching movies wrong.
Something important to (side)note. A lot of people appear to believe that media-effects are powerful. Like we are sold sex, as opposed to sex sells. In the concluding season of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmitt, we get one of the most concrete realizations of this idea. Kimmy comes across some losers in a park playing quidditch (a shitty game, like cricket, concept from Harry Potter) and has the epiphany that if these grown children retain a game like quidditch from their childhood, she could write a book that teaches boys to not be gross and do things like abduct her, which she goes on to do. Ending the patriarchy is just so easy, just rewrite masculinity in a best selling YA novel.
My feeling is, this doesn't really happen, not with any great power or efficiency. And if we observe media-effects as multi-valent we can't conclude if behavioural change is a result of personality change or merely preference falsification. If it did, boys would be heroic, courageous and so forth already, if in problematic ways like expecting women they rescue to marry them or something.
Anyway, I wrote a mega post about representation in the media. This Patrick Willem's video essay merely demonstrates that he is asserting that plot holes don't matter. Fortunately, this video doesn't pose any dangers because Patrick never suggests what does matter or how to watch films correctly. Nor, that I can find, does he ever establish why anyone should shut up about plot holes. Apart from asserting they don't matter, which is sandwiched between some helpful definitions, or surface level nit-picks of what isn't a plot hole, and a descriptive brief history of why youtube videos about plot holes came to be noticeable, at least to him.
I thought that video was much older than it is. And maybe it's a bad example, on account of being almost contentless, or it's a bad example of video essays in terms of it just being an assertion of authority on a multi-valent subject.
Because it suggests that if you watch a movie and don't enjoy it, depending on the reason you don't enjoy it, the fault might lie with you rather than you finding fault in the film, your stimulus.
Take the most basic example, my Aunty doesn't like Casablanca because Humphrey Bogart doesn't get the girl. She wants her tuppence back. Did she watch Casablanca wrong? Did she take away the wrong message? Did she identify with the wrong character?
I would propose that you cannot watch movies wrong. It is to suggest that something multi-valent is in fact mono-valent. The whole subject of this post, albeit to suggest plot holes don't matter and everyone needs to shut up about them, is unlikely to succeed and pretty innocuous.
In one sense, it highlights the slippery-eel nature of using video-essays to deal with multi-valent subjects - is this particular video essay of Patrick's lazy, or not lazy? He seems to have had an emotional reaction to a cultural phenomena that is untempered by logic, and in that sense it is lazy. Yet the video is a slick production, edited with graphics, it employs a friend, it has clips from movies to support points made and in that sense it is not lazy, but effortful, that's where I'm concerned that entertainment becomes edu-tainment by virtue of a halo-effect. Because there's effort put into the production, we might assume effort was put into understanding the subject.
You can see an effortful and in my opinion well argued rebuttal here.
I'd like you to be a bit of a guinea pig in a little experiment of mine right now how would you describe the character of Ebenezer Scrooge now this might seem silly but it does have a point so what is Scrooge like well he's selfish he's miserly he's cold-hearted unpleasant you know you get the picture "hard and sharp as a flint from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster" so my question is this: why is this the image of Scrooge that persists because of course this is only Scrooge's character at the start of the narrative but then you know things happen to him and he changes. A Christmas Carol is the story of how Scrooge transforms from a cold cruel person into a generous kind person yet we understand that if someone calls another person Scrooge they're saying they're unkind and mean rather than "as good a man as the good old city knew" as Dickens describes a Scrooge by the end of the story ~ Shaun, "Is Black-Panther Alt Right?"
Shaun has dealt with subjects of multi-valence in at least one other video-essay on Ex-Machina that I think is a much better argument than the one he presents for Black Panther. The hypocritical "alt-right" interpretation is certainly there to be had for the original Black Panther, a convoluted and confusing movie.
It's Audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is only slightly above Thor: Love and Thunder which I haven't seen but understand to be a confusing tone splodge offering from a director that likely didn't want to make the movie. It's below that of Thor: Ragnarok what to make of those stats? Anything you like, because they are multi-valent.
I wrote about Black Panther previously and largely because it's a multi-valent movie that was having a cultural moment that seemed to assert it was mono-valent without presenting any arguments apart from seemingly it made a lot of money and was popular and twenty million people can't be wrong or something.., for the record I was already bored/exhausted by the MCU before the first Black Panther came out. But I was invited to come see it by friends, but really I'd seen the Blade movies with Wesley Snipes, I can recall reading a blade comic, or at least a spiderman comic with Blade in it, but I was losing interest in seeing movie adaptations of comic book titles I didn't read. The MCU was becoming a TV show pretending to be movies, kind of like the Saw franchise. Then the MCU literally became TV shows.
But the point is, I can say it is multi-valent. The character of Kilmonger, for example is nothing like Obama being that Kilmonger murders innocent civilians directly, with 100% moral certainty, but the overwhelming impression I got from my one viewing of the film, was that Kilmonger's story line mapped onto a 'birtherism' plot - Kilmonger is African-American (Specifically Wakandan-American) and his legitimacy is questioned, when he is elected by the constitution of Wakanda the plot (he beats T'Challa in a fight and starts issuing executive orders) becomes about deposing him.
Likewise, Shaun has a point, unlike Trump, at the end of the movie T'Challa goes to the UN and makes a speech about Wakanda opening up. But it's less analogous to a Christmas Carol than Shaun suggests. It isn't a movie about T'Challa learning the error of his ways through ghosts that visit in the night. The only ghost character is his dad. He is visited by a coalition of the disenfranchised that egg him on to overthrow Kilmonger and then his UN speech comes pretty much out of nowhere, unless its the mere fact that T'Challa is allowed to travel.
Though I don't remember how Kilmonger dies, whether it was a defiant suicide after an offer to let bygones be bygones, whatever its not a good enough movie to revisit outside of it playing in a laundromat or bus-depot.
And are the alt-right valencies intentional by writer-director Ryan Coogler? or are they issues inherited by him given the IP was developed by two white guys in like the 60s or 70s? I felt all the problems arose from the constraints of 'Wakanda is futuristic beyond "first-world", we explain that by being isolationist, and it's a monarchy, the king is a super-hero because you know, we are white guys and we watched Zulu or something when we came up with this idea.'
Does this qualify as a video-essay? I'm not sure, but its where we are getting into the badzone of multi-valence, and a particularly poor example.
The syllogism being something like:
Premise 1: Black Panther and A Christmas Carol have a similar story beat.
Premise 2: Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok have similar story structure.
Premise 3: A Christmas Carol and Thor: Ragnarok have no right-wing interpretations.
Conclusion: Black Panther can have no right-wing interpretations.
There was a much simpler rebuttal to the question of 'Is Black Panther Alt-Right?' and that is to say, it's multi-valent, there is no definitive interpretation of the work regardless of what the collective creators intended or not. But that rebuttal doesn't allow anyone to posit a definitive interpretation, like Black Panther is a work of Anti-racism or something.
By Shaun's false analogy, all the work of academics identifying problamatic texts can be resolved by a speech delivered to the UN demonstrating the protagonist knows what the right thing to do was. That a book or movie like American Psycho, that can lucidly be interpreted as glorifying psychopathy, simply required Patrick Bateman at the end to say 'raping and killing is wrong, I realize that now.' to not be a text that somewhat glorifies killing and raping.
Multi-Valent Don't Get No Respect
…no it'll be fine. You don't have to worry about any other because your understanding of the movie transcends simple stuff like: plot structure, internal consistency and character development; you've discovered the deeper meaning, deviously hidden beneath the veil of lights and sound. No, this is all great you might think. No we can all stop talking about the nitty-gritty functional elements of movies and just concentrate on the ideas they represent. Instead it's like we've put aside our petty disagreements and ascended to a higher level of understanding…or something. Well I'm sorry to piss on your chips but there's a couple of flaws in this grand plan. The first one is that picking out the theme of a movie is a bit like looking for shapes in the clouds: everyone sees something a little different and what you see depends a lot on your own point of view. Shut up. The point here is that I could offer up any number of different interpretations of something like Midsummer all of which are equally valid. For example, you could see that movie as an allegory for the war in Afghanistan - a coalition of Americans and Brits enter into a foreign country full of high hopes and overconfidence, but their lack of understanding of the local population causes them to get bogged down in a situation they didn't plan for. Soon casualties start to mount and their superior technology fails to win the day for them. Worst of all their enemies turn out to be all around them, hiding in plain sight and ultimately forcing them to fight for their very lives. No this is bad enough, but things really start to fall apart when people decide [what] they're going to see, before they even see it and then trying to reinterpret the movie to suit their ideas. For example: Paul Blart mall cop could be seen as a sobering rumination on the dangers of rampant consumerism in a post-911 world, a warning against our misplaced faith in traditional authority figures simply because they wear a uniform, or a melancholic reflection on the struggles faced by working-class Americans against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, or it could just be a film about a fat guy on a Segway fighting criminals… the point here is that if you're willing to stretch your imagination far enough you can bend the plot of a film around just about any theme your twisted mind can come up with and if every interpretation is equally valid then every interpretation is equally [ __ ] they can simultaneously mean everything and nothing which makes them useless when it comes to making a judgment about a movie. ~most relevant excerpt from video embedded below.
I'm becoming conscious that since Video-essays are my chief inspiration of this post, I'm likely to wind up embedding hours of video people can watch, but are unlikely to. Especially if they read my blog off their phone during toilet breaks at their call-centre job. So I'll try to excerpt the relevant bits, as I have above.
This video, this critique of criticism of critique or "meta-meta-critique" pretty adequately captures the problem of multi-valence. Which is we can't draw conclusions from things that are multi-valent.
Below is one of the most transparently bizarre examples of multi-valence that doesn't use literary criticism - "The Bible Code" again if you can't be bothered/are unable to watch the video here's the most relevant excerpt:
"Did you know? Not paying out on Michael Drosnin or nothing, but how come Bible Code 2 which came out after September 11, predicted the tragedy, but Bible Code 1 which came out before, did not?"
This is what I mean by being unable to draw any meaningful conclusions from something multi-valent. Mathematical codes might seem esoteric to you, and on video it isn't very transparent how a guy with a computer uses 'the bible code' to show the 9-11 commission report postdicts the fall of Vanilla Ice's career; in which case consider the prophecies of Nostradamus his Rational-wiki page has this example:
The river that tries the new Celtic heir Will be in great discord with the Empire: The young Prince through the ecclesiastical people Will remove the sceptre of the crown of concord.
Obviously.
Ah...obviously that refers to historical figure...um the Celts are Irish right? But also in Scotland. Actually pretty much throughout the whole Commonwealth these days. Heir? Okay a quick google and apparantly 'Celtic' covers Britons, Welsh and Gauls. So pretty much everyone in England and France.
Ecclesiastical people is clearly the catholic church, how can a river be in discord with the Empire? Romans? I mean this could describe any British, Scotch, Welsh, Irish or French succession crisis that ever had a dispute with the Catholic Church. If the river you mean is the Rubicon, or the Rhine or the Danube just fucking say that. Why would you not specify the river by name?
Same goes for interpreting dreams, astrology, psychadelic trips...Terrence McKenna's work largely falls down on trying to draw strong inferences from multi-valent subject matter whether it be a DMT experience he once had, the Maya Calander or the I Ching:
When examining the King Wen sequence of the 64 hexagrams, McKenna noticed a pattern. He analysed the "degree of difference" between the hexagrams in each successive pair and claimed he found a statistical anomaly, which he believed suggested that the King Wen sequence was intentionally constructed,[5] with the sequence of hexagrams ordered in a highly structured and artificial way, and that this pattern codified the nature of time's flow in the world.[28] With the degrees of difference as numerical values, McKenna worked out a mathematical wave form based on the 384 lines of change that make up the 64 hexagrams. He was able to graph the data and this became the Novelty Time Wave.[5] ~From wikipeda page "Terrance McKenna"
The proper respect for Multi-Valence is to respect its inherent pitfalls. Kind of like the law does regarding circumstantial evidence. The law respects multi-valence. But the main way in which multi-valence doesn't get no respect is when people act like shit isn't multi-valent. Our legal system would be very broken if an inference was all that was necessary to regard a piece of evidence as direct evidence, rather than circumstantial.
Dark Triad of Episteme 1: Mind Reading
Mind reading is a cognitive distortion of the 'jumping to conclusions' family. I imagine it usually manifests behaviourally as an extreme confidence someone suffering the distortion knows the contents of someone's mind - be that a person's conscious intentions, motivations, attitudes or opinions, or their unconscious.
Mind reading walks hand in hand with affirming the consequent. But it gets special attention here because bad, non-innocuous video essays, in my opinion tend to be guessing at the content of either the creator's or the audience's mind, and asserting an unjustified confidence that their guess somehow rises to the level of knowledge.
Not all guesses are equal. For example, Shaun has a well argued video about Terry Prattchet's attitude toward Trans, using his book Monstrous Regiment to bolster his case. This is a good guess, though we don't know how he'd feel about gender swapping the role of Lord Vetinari in a recent live adaptation of one of his books. I imagine, and it seems entirely plausible, he'd be okay with it. It also seems entirely plausible that we shouldn't give a shit about the author's opinion of adaptations of his work, because all the live adaptations he signed off on or even appeared in while alive, are nigh-unwatchable-nerd-larping-shit, far worse than any audiobook where a single voice performs all the roles of his novels.
That's guessing the content of an author's mind. We are living in an age where this is less of a problem, because any author of a work of significance has generally done a bunch of press and interviews and has a twitter account where they espouse their political beliefs etc.
More problematic is the problem of reading the minds of a work's audience. The cottage industry of problematizing things.
Like going back to Fight Club as an example. I remember watching it as a kid, I really liked it. I didn't notice Edward Norton's character didn't have a name. It reminded me a little of Animal Farm - start a project, project turns into nightmare but then tack on a fairy tale ending where the nightmare is destroyed. I hated the 'twist' that Tyler Durden was the narrator, a figment of his imagination. It added nothing for me, but I'd maybe concede it was clever how Norton shot Pitt by committing suicide. That writing mechanic probably influenced me most out of the whole film, the 'his hand is actually my hand, so the gun is in my hand...' strange physics of a bifurcated personality.
I put nowhere near the thought into Fight Club that Dan Olsen has, but this is the limit of film critique you cant do a comprehensive analysis of a film to draw conclusions about the effects on the minds of the audience.
Fight Club came out while I was still in secondary school, and I recall being at a party where a couple of dickheads decided to start a fight club. I seem to recall that one of the rules of their fight club was you had to headbutt a post or metal gate or something. The club did not last long enough for any fights to break out. At its peak it had maybe three members, and right before the club dissolved it had one guy still talking who hadn't noticed the other two members wander off. It lasted like all of 40 seconds.
That is the sum total evidence I have, for Fight Club promoting toxic masculinity.
But I could speculate that they represented an audience that watched the movie and found any scene where Tyler Durden and the Narrator were talking boring and the fight scenes pretty cool and a fight club a cool idea. Like a boxing movie.
Likewise, I'm sure there are fans of Game of Thrones who like it because it has dragons in it. And fans of Game of Thrones that are critical of wyverns being referred to as dragons even though they clearly do not have four legs and wings, but that their wings are the same as their forearms. Just as I am sure there are fans of Fast and the Furious movies who love them because they have cool cars doing cool shit in action set-pieces and absorb none of the messaging about the importance of family.
I think Dan Olsen's interpretation is certainly the more lucid and coherent one, but Fight Club can be interpreted as an unintended reflection on all political activism, movements and private citizens confidently diagnosing the problem with society. So you could equally say it is a reflection on libertarianism or socialism, or a parody of radical feminism, as it is a reflection on toxic masculinity or a crisis of masculinity.
We could add to Tyler Durden's question "How can you really know yourself if you've never been in a fight?" or whatever the exact line is, "How can you really know yourself if you've never been paralysed from the waist down?" or "How can you really know yourself if you've never slept under the open sky?" or "How can you ever know yourself if you've never driven cattle on horseback?"
Why does this deep dive into the subtext of Fight Club exist? My fear is that it is born out of a concern that an audience who loves the film can walk away with a desire to get in shape and get a girlfriend having watched it wrong (missing the critique of masculinity and the striving for individualism creating more conformity) and are a danger to society. The subtext needs to be made into text to remedy the minds of an audience who treated the mono-valent as multi-valent.
Dark Triad of Episteme 2: Affirming the Consequent.
Affirming the consequent, sometimes called converse error, fallacy of the converse, or confusion of necessity and sufficiency, is a formal fallacy of taking a true conditional statement (e.g., "If the lamp were broken, then the room would be dark"), and invalidly inferring its converse ("The room is dark, so the lamp is broken"), even though that statement may not be true. This arises when a consequent ("the room would be dark") has other possible antecedents (for example, "the lamp is in working order, but is switched off" or "there is no lamp in the room"). ~ from Wikipedia.
1. I get ice out of the refrigerator because it's hot and I want my drink cold. 2. I put ice in a glass and drop a cube on the ground. I can't be bothered picking it up so I just kick it out of the way. 3. The ice cube melts into a puddle of water on the floor.
Now, affirming the consequent is to take the last part of that causal chain as the starting point - a puddle on the floor. Then go backwards to conclude how the puddle got there. like 1. There's a puddle on the floor therefore 2. It was an icecube that melted, therefore 3. I dropped an icecube and didn't pick it up just kicked it out of the way.
The reason affirming the consequent is a fallacy is multi-valence. There a number of ways you can wind up with a puddle. The puppy peed on the kitchen floor. Someone spilled water out of the sink while washing dishes. The dog drooled while you were preparing lunch. The bin leaked. The dish-washer or fridge is leaking fluids. The cat knocked over a glass. The plumbing leaked. The roof has a leak.
Okay, so hopefully that explains what is wrong with affirming the consequent. Let's do some examples of disrespecting multi-valence and work from right-to-left in terms of political spectrum.
So right-wing, if elections were stolen, it would look like Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump lost the 2020 election, therefore the election was stolen. This form of affirming the consequent is probably bolstered by an availability heuristic of watching news that makes it seem like its insane to vote for Biden, living in a community where all the signs on lawns are Trump-Pence and ignoring the innate plausibility of a President that never broke the 50% approval rating could lose an election, a simpler explanation than a vast conspiracy.
Similarly if a cabal of evil globalists wanted to get a mind-control or at least money-controlling microchip into the arm of every red-blooded patriotic American, they'd need a pretext like a global pandemic and a vaccine to do it. There's a global pandemic and a vaccine therefore there's a cabal of evil globalists trying to microchip everybody, ignoring the multi-valent more plausible explanation that pandemics and infodemics are regularly recurring historical events and completely predictable.
Got it? Let's go left.
If there is inequity, then there is prejudice based on immutable characteristics. That's the big almost ubiquitous form of affirming the consequent on the left. It is less insane than asserting a traditional ahistorical conspiracy, but in that sense it is more, I don't know if it is dangerous, but certainly more insidious to posit conspiracies that the conspirators don't know they are conspiring in.
So take racism, if people were really racist, one thing we could expect is socio-economic inequity to the advantage of one group, and disadvantage of another. We find indeed, that there is socio-economic inequity to the advantage of one group and disadvantage of another therefore the cause must be racism.
Then take sexism, if people were really sexist, one thing we could expect is socio-economic inequity to the advantage of one sex, and disadvantage of another. We find indeed, that there is socio-economic inequity to the advantage of one sex and disadvantage of another therefore the cause must be sexism.
These statistics are often multi-valent however, just like a puddle on a kitchen floor. Let's give another example of affirming the consequent:
If people were really heightist, one thing we could expect is socio-economic inequity to the advantage of one relative class of height, and the disadvantage of another. We find indeed, that there is socio-economic inequity to the advantage of tall men and disadvantage of short men therefore the cause must be heightism.
So affirming the consequent is for me, the usual suspect as to why a left-wing conversation cannot be had. I'd invite you to consider the difficulty of navigating "concern trolling" and the "fait accompli". Affirming the consequent, likely frustrates all parties as an offensive tactic. Consider a person identifying as female that leaves high school in the late 80s after having unpleasant and antisocial experiences like sexual harassment, goes on to tertiary studies and majors in gender studies, does honours year, goes straight into a PhD. and determines all the problems with the patriarchy and if not all, the logical first steps to take to dismantle the patriarchy. After 20 years in academia, they are invited by a group of female identifying people working for a large corporate firm to develope a presentation to address sexism within that corporation. After 21 years of determining the problems with and solutions to patriarchy, this accomplished academic female identifying person presents her ideas for the first time to a captive audience of male identifying people and that audience by-and-large reacts like she is from Mars. (no irony intended)
It will depend on context whether any privilege preserving pushback is "concern trolling" like in this case if HR has investigated over 10 individuals for sexual harassment in the workplace over two years with a workforce (including subcontractors) totalling 200. It should clearly be conceded that the organisation has a cultural problem with permitting sexual harassment based on the frequency and spread of complaints relative to size of the workforce and relative to other workplaces.
But it would be a fait accompli if the presentation requires all male identifying employees to enter into some form of therapy to deprogram toxic masculinity. It would be right to pushback on assertions that He-man, Transformers, Thundercats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and later Playboy magazine, GQ, Maxim, Under Siege, Lethal Weapon, Star Wars 1-6, Batman 1989-The Dark Knight Rises etc. caused this particular workplace to have a statistically significant problem with sexual harassment in the workplace.
You can have male identifying employees all sitting in bizarre and demeaning* group therapy sessions, formulating new stereotypes about women based on this experience, while it is understood by many of the participants is that the problem is Bob, Bob isn't personally harassing all the women, Bob is the majority owner that is overtly sexist, is immune to HR, has interfered with HR investigations of men accused of sexual harassment to undermine the process and give the relevant men wrist slaps rather than real consequences while simultaneously selecting for, incentivising and coercing male employees into committing acts of sexual harassment that aren't more widespread because most of the male identifying employees cannot stomach sexually harassing female identifying people, even in an absence of direct career consequences.
While [concern trolling] is a common internet phenomenon, the term is open to misuse. More paranoid circles (and echo chambers) may accuse someone of being a concern troll for the simple crime of not blindly agreeing with all of the group's dogma. ~ from Rational-Wiki
Multi-valence permits affirming the consequent. And affirming the consequent is in essence lazy. Skipping the actual figuring out what is going wrong. We should expect it to be widespread because self-diagnosis is widespread. I suspect the problem for the left (and the right) is that it would seem bizarre to study something for decades, even becoming an episteme-"expert" on a subject and then be accused of skipping the actual work or research/investigation/diagnostics. You can read a Holy Book and it's entire intellectual tradition for fifty years, you aren't going to figure out how the world works.
Dark Triad of Episteme 3: Motte and Bailey
"Defund the police" is a slogan that supports removing funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full divestment as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services. Activists who support the defunding of police departments often argue that investing in community programs could provide a better crime deterrent for communities; funds would go toward addressing social issues, like poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders.[1][2] Police abolitionists call for replacing existing police forces with other systems of public safety, like housing, employment, community health, education, and other programs.[3][4][5] ~ from wikipedia page "Defund the Police"
Understand and share what “defund the police” really means. It’s about a new, smarter approach to public safety, wherein we demilitarize the police and allocate resources into education, social services, and other root causes of crimes. What we’re doing now isn’t working — There are so many innocent people who have been harassed or killed by the police unjustly, and nearly every Black American has experienced some form of harassment by the police. Some good resources for this are this video by BLM and this Washington Post article. ~ #No.7 '106 things White People Can Do For Racial Justice' Medium.com
Putting examples ahead of definitions in this one. Chances are if you've felt crazy at all during an argument in the past 6-8 years, you've been trying to wrestle the slippery Motte-and-Bailey, which in accordance with NNTs definition of episteme takes the multi-valent and insists it is mono-valent.
So Motte-and-Bailey sounds like a silent film/early talkies slapstick vaudevillian comedy duo. But it's treated as an informal-fallacy, but I prefer the term coiner's characterisation as a doctrine:
Philosopher Nicholas Shackel, who coined the term,[1] prefers to speak of a motte-and-bailey doctrine instead of a fallacy.[3] In 2005, Shackel described the reference to medieval castle defense like this:[2]
A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land. ... the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed.
Shackel's original impetus was to criticize what he considered duplicitous processes of argumentation in works of academics such as Michel Foucault, David Bloor, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Berger and Luckmann, and in postmodernist discourses in general.[2][4]
The most unfortunate thing about the super useful M&B doctrine, is the near complete obscurity of its apt analogy. That's not helpful. The key point is, that it is a dishonest means of engaging in argument. The preconditions being a moral certainty that is contradicted by the facts. M&B depends entirely on multi-valence for its effectiveness.
Taking the whipping boy of "Defund the Police" a slogan so bad that it is now something white people can do for racial justice, is understand what it actually means, which is not to defund the police. Except when people do mean they want the police defunded or want to live in autonomous police free zones, like CHOP/CHAZ. An unreasonable position outside of idealism/fantasist discourse dramatized here in the best show of all time:
It's the marketer in me that cannot let "Defund the Police" go, can't stop kicking that downed mule. There are analogous examples on the right wing of popularism, but not as many, as often right-wing populists don't bother to pretend/do not recognize that their position is irrational and hard to defend. Like everything would be fine if immigration was stopped or whatever.
One that might be a candidate is 'Election security' where I have seen people advocate for say, voters requiring photo idea as "what's wrong with reassuring concerned people that there is no electoral fraud." coming from a side that has yet to try reassuring voters the elections are free of fraud. This sounds reasonable, except that dollars-to-donuts, what advocates of voter id reform laws actually care about is shifting from voters-elect-who-governs to the-government-elect-who-votes.
Overwhelmingly though M&B can be pointed to here, there and everywhere on the left side of popularism.
Antifa - "Antifa is just an idea, it stands for 'Anti-fascist' it's just concerned individuals opposing what they see as rising fascism through mostly peaceful protests." easy to defend, because who doesn't want to not try fascism again? Not even fans of british comic Judge Dredd want to try fascism again. But this isn't defending how Antifa is commonly practiced "Private citizens permitted to be judge, jury and now in an actual case, execution to oppose whoever they are convinced are secret fascists, by any means." aka a terrible idea.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) - I can outsource the Motte & Bailey to Ryan Chapman
"Mansplaining" - The easily defended bailey, of mansplaining, is that people are using it to describe male condescension to females. Maybe even specifying that it is when a man who is not an expert tries to explain to a woman who is an expert her own area of expertise. Alas, "mansplaining" is multi-valent, it has another motte interpretation - the moral certainty that men need to shut up and listen to (certain) women uncritically.
Decolonize your Bookshelf - again I recently wrote a megapost on attempting to honestly "decolonize" my bookshelf, and an almost ubiquitous feature of articles that explain the exercise was a caveat along the lines of "decolonize your bookshelf does not mean you have to take all your books by white, European authors and throw them away..." this to me, screems of M&B. I would argue the caveat exists because this is an obvious, lucid interpretation of "decolonize your bookshelf" as an idea, and probably even has its advocates. Activism tends not to be defined by people who actually read books though.
Virtue-Signalling - aha! a fine example of M&B tactics coming from the right. The M&B being that it's easy to defend the usage of "virtue signalling" to call out what is in essence "lip-service" insincere and largely inconsequential online behaviour that really serves the sole purpose of accruing esteem to the poster. But there's another interpretation which is just calling any positive statement "virtue signalling" in an act of mindreading to assert that someone is vapid or insincere.
In some sense, M&B might seem broadly speaking as a synonym for the innocent defending the guilty. But it's slightly different. M&B is described as a doctrine accurately because it is based around 'our policy says this works, therefore it cannot not work.' Hence, if the doctrine is that good people support your cause, then fuckwitz using a dangerous but available interpretation of your cause, cannot exist.
Labels I Never Thought Were Necessary
"Universals are a class of mind-independent entities, usually contrasted with individuals (or so-called “particulars”), postulated to ground and explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals. Individuals are said to be similar in virtue of sharing universals. An apple and a ruby are both red, for example, and their common redness results from sharing a universal. If they are both red at the same time, the universal, red, must be in two places at once. This makes universals quite different from individuals; and it makes them controversial..." ~ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.' ~ Phillip K. Dick.
I'm becoming more and more confident I'm just repeating myself in this series, because the simplest way to counter the competitive advantage of intelligence is just to deny what intelligence is good for - which is figuring out what the fuck is going on. But having now reviewed the previous installments 'conversation starters' and 'how to believe anything you want' I'm confident I at least haven't touched on this yet...
I was watching an interview conducted by Michael Shermer of Sceptic Magazine, I watch more of his interviews than probably any other podcast host so I cannot recall which one, but Michael Shermer described himself as a 'Universal Realist' to one guest, then handily defined that as 'someone who believes that objective reality exists.'
My initial response was 'huh. Good to know.' and then gradually indignation.
That indignation is based on someone having to declare that they believe in reality. Imagining kids sitting around a campfire on their first camp-out and rather than discussing whether they believe God exists, pedestrian though they may be, need to begin with 'does anything exist?'
Like, I feel it's a safe assumption that most people assume an objective reality exists. If crossing the street and the lights suddenly change, they hurry up presumably because they perceive the cars now accelerating toward them are real. Natural fucking selection should ensure we are all universal realists - because anyone who isn't should have jumped out a fourth story window by now.
I feel entitled to never have to label myself a 'universal realist' and while at it, never have to clarify that I'm a methodological naturalist, but not necessarily a philosophical naturalist.
This is an important thing about multi-valence, things may be multi-valent intrinsically, like why Donald Trump insists the 2020 election was stolen, is multi-valent, but not all those interpretations of the same phenomena will be correct.
Baby...you just failed to read my mind.
I wrote a story, published it on substack, haven't finished it. Someone like Jordan Peterson, who sees Judeo-Christian people with his trained 6th sense, might read the first two chapters of my story (if he had a spare hour) and conclude that I am Judeo-Christian to the core whatever that is.
Because, chapter 1 ends with my protagonist falling off a cliff and landing in icy cold sea-water. Chapter 2 begins with him being revived by a woman who uses her body warmth to stave off hyperthermia.
Because JP is easy to do an impression of, to the perpetual annoyance of my partner, I wish there was a way I could represent that impression in the written word. Let's give it a try... I gave up almost immediately.
But JP would probably make inferences about the content of my mind, or the content of my unconscious mind, drunk on symbols.
My protagonist takes a leap of faith, running from unimaginable chaos. He is plunged into water, deadly cold water which cleanses and purifies him of his former life. He is then reborn using the body of a woman that did not conceive him. She gives him life immaculately. He is supported by fishermen, just like Jesus' disciples...
Archetypes, collective unconscious all of that.
But here was my conscious process - I want my protagonist to arrive and take up residence in the waterfront of the main setting. Not to come in the gates on the land-side of the main setting. But he doesn't start out on a boat, but on a horse. There were a few other bits of exposition I wanted to achieve in chapter 1. Anyway, he falls in the water because I needed him to. He is rescued by fishermen because that seems probable/logical in a medieval setting. He'd probably get hypothermia, so I had him revived by a fat lady. Using an opening plot devise like "The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowing doesn't work with my setting that is in essence a demilitarized free zone, not a prison or prison colony, so I unconsciously chose not to ship my protagonist out in the first chapter.
Is my protagonist based on Jesus? Moses? Robinson Crusoe? Arthur Denison?
Not consciously, furthermore those characters that predate mine, are probably as much based on other characters as mine are. There's no Judeo-Christian "core" to hit unless you've successfully excluded the possibility of plagiarism for "Judeo-Christian" characters like Jesus, Moses, Samson etc. and I'm not convinced that work has been done.
But I know who I consciously based my character on, a real life friend. He's who I think of when trying to predict my character's response to situations. Incidentally, that friend stepped off a 58m high bridge over water and survived. So it seems likely that even though I was just logically trying to find a solution for getting my character from point A to point B, I have to allow the possibility that my strong association between my inspiration and surviving a 58m fall into the sea unconsciously determined my narrative decisions.
That and I've read all of Takehiko Inoue's extant Vagabond comic that features it's protagonist Musashi Miyamoto fall into a river and get revived by a homely country woman. A story that from memory doesn't appear in Eiji Yoshikawa's "Musashi" novel, that Inoue consciously based his Vagabond on, and I don't know if Yoshikawa is Christian, or was in any way inspired to make Musashi a christ-figure in his novel. It seems unlikely, Musashi more closely resembles a culture hero of pagan story-telling traditions.
The post-modernist two-step that Jordan Peterson is a master of, if mastery can be conferred to such a manoeuvre is finding the inference he wants/needs to make, and then asserting it as the legitimate inference.
I believe, and it is my inference, that Peterson as a Jungian, believes in the collective unconscious. That's how he explains recurring story themes and devices, as opposed to alternative explanations like logic and availability.
I can agree that like everything, natural selection applies to stories. Stories survive based on their fitness. That some old stories get preserved and retransmitted for thousands of years, is not arbitrary. But I just wouldn't explain it through archetypes and the collective unconscious, when there's a simpler explanation - common ancestor, like the Chaoskampf that goes East and West from the proto-Indo-Europeans.
Here I have to plead ignorance that I haven´t read ´Maps of meaning´ or JP´s corresponding lectures on Maps of meaning, but I will say it would be strange if Peterson hasn´t come across the linguistically reconstructed Proto-Indo-European common ancestor as the simpler, more parsimonious explanation as to why culture-hero-fighting-snake-monster-to-triumph-over-chaos shows up from Ireland to Japan.
What is Saint George not famous for? He's not famous for what he actually did, which was die:
Saint George (Greek: Γεώργιος (Geórgios), Latin: Georgius, Arabic: القديس جرجس; died 23 April 303), also George of Lydda, was a Christian who is venerated as a saint in Christianity. According to tradition he was a soldier in the Roman army. Saint George was a soldier of Cappadocian Greek origin and member of the Praetorian Guard for Roman emperor Diocletian, who was sentenced to death for refusing to recant his Christian faith. He became one of the most venerated saints and megalomartyrs in Christianity, and he has been especially venerated as a military saint since the Crusades. He is respected by Christians, Druze, as well as some Muslims as a martyr of monotheistic faith. ~ from wikipedia
What he's famous for is something he didn't do, which is slay a dragon. That multi-valently represents the devil, or to JP the chaos of nature. Judeo-Christian to the core you know, just like Marduk and Tiamat, Tarhunt and Illuyanka, Zeus and Typhon, Heracles and Hydra, Cadmus and the dragon, Thor and the world encircling snake, Sigurd and Fafnir, Beowulf and the Dragon, Fereydun and Zahhak, Indra kills Vritna, Susanoo and Orochi.
Here we have a multi-valent piece of history, where we can see a pattern of migrating plagiarism and adaptation (that explains differences, like serpents encircling waters or dragons holding treasures) OR another inference which is, I don't know, we have tree houses and storm gods and snakes imprinted on our unconscious by god or something.
Another thing I can't exclude is the collective-lack-of-creativity. Ask a person to power a vehicle using a mousetrap, and what do 99% of people do? They wrap a piece of string around an axel, then tie that string to the lever arm of the mousetrap, so when the trap is sprung the lever pulls the string propelling the vehicle.
When their vehicle works, people will pat themselves on the back and say 'problem solved!' or 'challenge met!' and this is true, but the solution was/is obvious and it is what everyone does. Hero slays serpent is likely a very obvious narrative solution that appeals broadly. Consider that making a pot, or a ruck-sack, or a lever, or a ramp or a wheel is also a story of man triumphing over nature, much like knight riding out of the city walls and slaying a dragon. When you are doing something laborious and tedious and then figure out, or have someone teach you how to up your productivity it probably evokes the same emotional response as having a predator removed. Life gets easier. But stories about someone saying tie to branches together and make a stretcher, fail as art, even though functionally it is the same as slaying a dragon. So we could argue that stories about dragon slaying have been preserved non-arbitrarily because they evoke emotions and engage audiences, but aren't useful techne (know how) that can be passed on like technologies that have survived at least equally long, through practical demonstration. Now JP what's a deeper truth? A lever or a dragon?
Multi-valence though is utilized to enable mind-reading. Particularly an obsession with the unconscious. Allowing that annoying-dangerous behaviour where somebody legitimately believes they can read the thoughts I'm not having, that they can accurately infer the contents of my unconscious, but I can't.
I actually have a rule, which is that I refuse to answer for my unconscious, given that it is out of my conscious control. This is not to say that I would refuse to select orchestral members via blind auditions or put a program on my phone that limits my internet access to focus on studying. It is more that people can hurl allegations of the contents of my unconscious all day long, I'm not going to answer those allegations whether it be that I'm an unconscious christian or unconscious commitment-phobe.
The Alternative
Sorry to dick you about, probably this should have followed from the bit about 'universal realists', multi-valance is being abused everywhere. That abuse I have hopefully established is insisting that something that could be, is.
The alternative is to try and restrict ourselves to what can be determined as is, or isn't, and the bedrock is determining what is and isn't certain.
Whether the movie Inception ends with the protagonist being stuck in a dream world, or having made it back to reality is uncertain, indeterminate. Even if Nolan has already stated that actually the protagonist never made it out. The information is not in the movie itself, and Nolan failed to execute on his intention.
We might also have to concede that dogwhistles work, by virtue of their multi-valence, and much like the prophecies of Nostradamus, can only be determined to be political dog whistles, after-the-fact, because we can't read minds and we don't want to live in a society that arrests people for thought crimes.
What we are left with is a bag containing two components - things that definitely are, and things that definitely aren't. 1's and 0's, a binary, and since you pretty much have to read this off a computer, you should be impressed somewhat about everything that 0's and 1's can be built into.
Let me try and give you something concrete: "Bird" with respect to flight is multi-valent, "Aeroplane" is mono-valent with respect to flight. Birds cannot necessarily fly - chickens, penguins, ostriches, emus, kiwi-birds, dodos, peacocks, cassowaries etc. all cannot fly by some technical definition (some may be able to fall with style). But an aeroplane must, by definition fly. Aeroplanes that can't fly, only can't fly in the same sense that birds that are dead cannot fly.
Birds, designed by natural selection and described by language are unreliable when it comes to a proposition like crossing the Atlantic, but cyclones and saboteurs and what not aside - aeroplanes crossing the Atlantic is entirely determinate and reliable.
And an aeroplane can be incredibly complicant, but deconstruct an aeroplane and boil it down and you will find everything above a subatomic resolution either is or isn't.
Birds are a bad or false analogy to the emphasis based on multi-valence, because "Bird" is really just a category term that is broad...
The Schrodinger Engine
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naïvely accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.
I don't actually understand Shrodinger's thought experiment. But it appears to me to be an example of multi-valence. But this is what I think is manifesting in what we might call 'applied post-modernism' but is a phenomena that as yet has been too little discussed and critiqued as yet, to have a name stick.
Alas, what is attempted is to build complex machines out of things that might be the case. A new system of 0s, 1s and ?s, where "?" is something indeterminate, ambiguous, multi-valent. What are the new rules for this beyond-binary building system? ?s are wild cards, you can designate them a 1 or 0 as you need.
My analogy is going to cause confusion because it will put people in mind of binary code, and think of ?s as a logic gate that flips from 0 to 1 but NO that's not what I'm describing. Think instead of a vehicle that is powered by a cat running on a treadmill. But that cat is sealed in a box with a geigar counter, a small amount of radioactive material that is decaying on an indeterminate quantum scale, and a vial of acid that would kill the cat if the radioactive material decays.
That component is the ? mark, and the machine, contraption, vehicle might be education, healthcare or government. And we are building these vehicles with components that may or may not function, and simply insisting that the cat is alive so when we plug it into the treadmill the engine will run.
This is just wishful thinking.
And I understand how it came about. Wherever you are, now imagine that I hand you an egg and task you with without you walking through a doorway, deliver that egg, intact, to me. There was a point in history, where that task would be impossible. Relatively recently. But now there's a huge complex apparatus that makes the task quite possible. You can pull out a phone, figure out who I am. maybe even where I am, but otherwise reach out to me, get my details, arrange a courier to deliver packing materials to wherever you are, arrange someone to bring it to you, pack the egg, transfer some funds or otherwise arrange someone to pick it up, post it, ship it whatever.
What couldn't be done, is if you in 1860 were required to make that whole apparatus in an afternoon by yourself. You'd probably make a bunch of mistakes, based on a bunch of assumptions and oversights and probably a bunch of them would be insisting something multi-valent is mono-valent.
So, to me it is simply to be expected that when modern thinkers try to redesign complex apparatus, they'll essentially make a bunch of radically wild guesses and trying to build dynamic structures out of active ? marks.
Conclusion
I'm tired and so I'm just going to outsource it to Chomsky, which I feel adequately answers the question of why someone would use literary criticism instead of empiricism:
...that it's kind of there is a drive among intellectuals to make things look difficult. It's a kind of self-protection: I mean what I'm doing can be done by, you know, the guy who is repairing my furnace. Okay. Then who am I? And then there's those physicists over there who took complicated things I don't understand, so I'd like to be like them. You know that drive is clearly there and I think it should be resisted. ~ Noam Chomsky, from his interview Postmodernism II.
And in some sense the great temptation for me, is to use my conclusion to tease an introduction, which is "Wouldn't it be nice, if everything was nice." is an omnipresent social force I as someone who attempts to practice stoicism, need to accept as a reality and deal with.
