Approximating Intelligence: How To Believe Anything You Want

 I'm agnostic as to whether James Lindsay's work at new discourses is a practical necessity. That's the premise of this post, but it wouldn't tell you much.

In the Simpson's episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover" Marge's mother is faced with a choice between marrying Mr. Burns or Abe Simpson. To which she rejects both suitors. And what I would state at the outset, is that if political camps are suitors, I reject both, and I think people forget that this is an option. 

The line I actually draw, is between poles of 'beliefs create reality' and 'reality constrains beliefs'.

And the central question I'm posing here, is IS it necessary to dig into Hegel > Marx > Lennon > Marcuse > Freire / Derrida > Foucault > Butler > Hooks > Crenshaw etc.

I say no.

But Can't I Already Believe What I Want?

Yes. Smart arse.

You can believe the universe is a chicken salad sandwich. This works fine for unfalsifiable beliefs. We can believe whatever we want where there are no stakes to settle.

I'm referring to a case like...

I'm taller than you.

It's generally good to be tall. Women who like men, generally like taller men. Tall men have better odds of becoming a CEO and better odds of becoming NBA players. There might be elevated risk of cardiac arrest in later life, and taller women can find themselves with fewer dating options etc. 

But generally, better to be tall. And I'm taller than you. I believe that. But you pull out a ruler, or a tape measure, or a marker or something and say 'let's settle this'.

Now if I believe what I want, rather than what our senses tell us, I'm going to look delusional.

That's why there's a technique for how to believe anything you want.

How To Believe Whatever You Want

SHUZAN held up his staff and waved it before his monks.
"If you call this a staff," he said, "you deny its eternal life.
If you do not call this a staff, you deny its present fact. Tell
me just what do you propose to call it?" ~ sourced here.

Similar to my last post in this series 'Conversation Starters' the technique differs only slightly. Rather than simply disregarding a generally accepted fact, asserting a false premise, in order to proceed with a conversation. The technique is a simple matter of disregarding the concept of knowledge itself. It's super tedious.

René Magritte – The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), 1929, photo: CC BY-NC 2.0 by Thomas Hawk

Basically you just create a gap, about an inch wide and then you cram a mile of spurious bullshit through it. What is that gap though? The gap is between language, and what language describes.

So we take Magritte's "The treachery of images" as an example. It's a painting of a pipe, with the caption 'this is not a pipe' which it isn't, it's a painting of a pipe. You can't pick it up, pack it with tobacco, light it and smoke it. Woah woaaaah woahhhhhhhh!

But as per the Zen Koan that opened this section, sweeping aside the esoteric language, you could do the same thing with a real 'pipe' because 'pipe' is "just" a word. What we mean when we say pipe, is wooden thing with a bowl and hole through it through which we smoke tobacco. And then WOAH WOAH WOAH you can do that with every word in my description of what a pipe is - 'bowl' is just a word we mean 'curved cavity in a substance that can hold other substances' and by 'tobacco' we mean 'green plant thing what has nicotine in it.'

And like 'woah' nothing really is what we say it is... therefore, women on average are as tall as men on average.

That's basically how to believe anything you want to believe. You dismiss the notion of a reality that constrains beliefs, by tediously using some variation of 'what is reality? It's *just* a word.' Shutting out the person responding to (what you meant as a rhetorical question) with: 'Reality is that which persists in the absence of belief.' ...Or you know, maybe you engage with pseudo-profundity by just asking: 

'But what is "persist"?'

1. Open your palms and say 'who's to say anything is anything at all...'
2. Then conclude 'therefore, [whatever you want.]'

That's it. Pretty much every time. This did not take me hours to illustrate, and furthermore, I don't think it necessitates a review of the literature, even if I drew on Zen philosophy and Surrealist paintings as examples. That's more to demonstrate that noticing a map and the ground are not the exact same thing is a common, pseudo profound intuition.

It may seem like you have a point, if you are working with a category that has fuzzy edges, like Wittgenstein's definition of a "game" but not so much when my old lady asks me if I want anything from the store and I ask for a "snickers". 

I have not, set her an impossible task. In fact it is quite predictable that she will bring me the exact thing I asked for. A mother fucking snickers.

It's the same if I ask her to buy a non-mass produced good like 'chicken'. Even in an alternative language that calls it 'pollo'.

One morning Shuzan asked his apprentice 'have you seen my staff?' and the apprentice said 'I have no idea what you're talking about.'

Which is to say, to believe anything you want, all you have to do, is ignore the entirety, and success with which language is conventionally useful. Ie. at describing things. 

It Begins and Ends With Zeno

You are sitting in a room, or somewhere outdoors. At some point, you will leave the area you are in. But to do so, you will have to first travel halfway right?

Surely you agree. And agreeing to that, you must agree that before you reach the halfway point to leaving, you'll have to reach the halfway point to the halfway point. Agreed?

And to get to that halfway point, between you and halfway, you'll have to pass halfway to that point. In turn half way to that. And half again, and again, and again, and again and again. Halfway to halfway to halfway to halfway to halfway...

An infinite number of subdivisions. 

That in my own words, is Zeno's paradox of motion. All of them. Whether it's Achilles and a tortoise, or an arrow in flight. 

Zeno is wrong. We could look east of ancient Greece to ancient India, somewhere between the 6th-2nd century BCE, where Kanada (Atom Eater) reasoned his way to the indivisible, the atom, such that any amount of space is not infinitely divisible, or halvable, but is finite such that we pass atom 2 on the way to atom 3 and that is all there is to it.

But much closer, allegedly/apocraphylly, to Zeno was Diogenes, who rebutted the argument simply by getting up and walking away.

Now let's turn Zeno on his side. Now he is standing atop a light-house having drunken an amphora of wine. Tipsy he slips and falls from the top of the lighthouse. To hit the ground he would first have to fall halfway, and before he can fall halfway...[three hours later] and halfway to that point. So Zeno and anybody else is fine. It is but a mere illusion that all objects accelerate towards earth at 9.8m/s^2 reaching terminal velocity when drag = acceleration. 

"And Yet It Moves"

Now we go from 5th century Greece BCE, to 16.5th century Italy CE, (Except we can't because first we'd have to get to the 2nd century CE and before that...[several years later] midday, and to get to midday we first have to get to 9am...) Where Galileo Galilei mutters under his breath 

'And yet it moves' 

after being forced to apologize for claiming the Earth isn't the stationary centre point around which the heavens revolve.

Some kind of trial had thoroughly proved, that the Earth does not revolve around the Sun using the very sound epistemology of consulting scripture.

Alas, when I said it begins and ends with Zeno, I was being hyperbolic. But it should for you. Diogenes rebuttal is rock solid. Zeno actually points the way though to 'how to believe anything' and it is, far from actually being interesting, the incredibly boring appeal to insisting language is, what reality was made of.

That language doesn't predominantly attempt to describe reality, but predominantly defines reality. It is somehow all the shit we talk about chickens, that render chickens unable to fly.

Giving the Devil His Due

The Church or whoever was giving Galileo a hard time just for speaking his truth, (incidently, the truth) provides an example of how the powerful can construct reality in the short term. 

Imagine a man old enough to be your father, but sexy enough to be your daddy... I'm detracting from the point I'm trying to make. Imagine you have a father or grandfather or brother or beloved male teacher or whatever, pick a guy you feel quite comfortable about. Then imagine that you discover he is guilty of 10 counts of homicide against women a-la-Dennis "BTK" Rader. 

A man that had a wife and 2 children and was a leader of his church.

Dennis the family man was a reality running from 1971-2004 or 5. Then the 'super' reality of BTK imposed itself on that constructed reality.

I pull out this case, because it's a kind of collapsing of two alternate realities that I imagine was super visceral for BTK's wife and kids. For his community and so forth.

It represents the kind of short-run concession I can make to the otherwise thoroughly unexciting notion of power-knowledge, grand-metanarratives and social constructivism.

Rader had the power to make himself known for some three decades (74~04) but he used that power to create a "reality" in which BTK did "not exist". The police didn't know who to arrest nor how to protect potential victims from him. 

Bodies turned up, as though nobody had killed them at all. Dennis Rader created a reality in which BTK did not exist.

This isn't to say that 'anything is possible.' There's no cosmic power being exerted here. All of society around Dennis Rader had to operate on a map that simply didn't match the ground.

The bible and other scripture are other such maps, that taken seriously, alter reality. We have to deal with people that variously believe the Israelites migrated from Egypt across the bottom of the sea. That the male common ancestor of all humanity and the common female ancestor of all humanity lived in the same place and at the same time, that there was a global flood and that a global flood is even possible and on and on with claims that are demonstrably false, ahistorical but... did have predictive power. 

It has predictive power insofar as people's behaviour is informed by their beliefs. Like if you believe that God chose your people from a bunch of spare people he also created for some reason, not to mention all the spare animals and creepy things that crawleth.

But a more grounded example might be somebody who acts on a belief that a financial security is safe. Because an institution rated it AAA, as safe as sovereign debt, even though that security is a 'collateralised debt obligation' or a bunch of 0.1% stakes in a bunch of garbage loans that were sold to you, in order to offload them from the lenders books who knew they were garbage.

A really common example of belief-creating-reality is all the people that secure loans and finance by convincing someone else that they are solvent, that they earn money, that they can someday pay it back with interest. It could be plain incompetent forecasting through to outright fraud. 

The point is you can take reality - someone who is broke, operating a business that loses money, and slap a new "reality" over the top of it and change reality...

For a while.

To Know is To Predict

In order to ultimately believe anything, one inevitably needs to dedicate oneself to a concerted effort to not notice that the cosmos are dynamic rather than stationary, that we can indeed move around, regardless of whether we understand what this means and that people know what we mean by terms like snickers, chicken, fried chicken and what not. 

Yes in some trivial sense, things are systemic, alas not arbitrary, and seldom malicious, more often self serving.

When push ultimately comes to shove, to know something is to be able to predict something. Whether that be in the past or future.

Take for example the question 'how much money do you have on you?' To know how much money you have is typically (and in cases of Visa paywave being available, historically,) a matter of predicting the face value of bank notes and coins on your person.

Accusations directed at me of bias, are true. I am bias, prejudiced, whatever, and it is towards the predictive power of knowledge. On that front, I can accept a concept like 'power-knowledge' whole heartedly. I just fail to care.

The first thing is that generally speaking, the epistemologies that historically have entrenched power, are widely available now - Empiricism (the scientific method), Rationalism (mathematics) and so forth are free to anyone with an uncensored internet connection. They are probably free to those with censored internet. Just not pictures of Xi as Winnie the Pooh or Putin in makeup.

Construction vs. Convention

It was Brown University Professor Glenn Lowry that pointed out to me that money is not a construction but a convention. 

Money has a bunch of properties, necessary properties, in order to be used as money. Even though constructed. It has to be relatively scarce, generally acceptable, a unit of account, a store of wealth etc.

Remove any of those qualities, money doesn't work anymore. At least, not as money. You might notice that Cryptocurrencies have none of these qualities except, arguably being relatively scarce. And as at writing this might explain how bitcoin has lost half its value in the past year. 

So people holding fiat currency worried that inflation has hit 6.1% p.a. it's a far worse story for people who bought crypto a year ago. But crypto isn't money. It's more like paintings, sports memorabilia etc. Crypto are most likely 'greater fool' investments. I.e. things that have no intrinsic value purchased by fools in the hopes that they can be sold to greater fools, fooling themselves.

Conservative comedian Matt Walsh released a documentary I haven't seen this year called 'What is a Woman?' where from what I can gather he gathered the very low fruit of watching theoreticians struggle to answer this question.

For the record, my intuitive response to 'what is a woman' would be 'a mature girl.' It's a common honorific bestowed upon females. 

There are some people who want to introduce terms like 'birthing people' for a variety of reasons, none of which I'm interested into going into here. And this is where construction runs into convention.

To pick out just one application, and it really is a separate post, "woman" as gender role is treated as a social construction, and therefore subject to reconstruction, redefining. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are other pieces of language like 'heterosexual' or 'lesbian' that had nested the social construction of "woman" within them. So redefining or reconstructing or deconstructing "woman" also redefines, reconstructs, deconstructs "heterosexual" and "lesbian".

But these were conventions. They had predictive powers. Before redefinitions such as 'trans women are women' If someone were to say they were heterosexual, we very definitely knew who they would not sleep with. They would not sleep with people who weren't women. After redefinition, we discover that heterosexual men and lesbians in many cases won't sleep with women.

I don't understand my own sexuality. If someone were to ask, I would say I am heterosexual. But if someone were to ask me if I would sleep with a trans woman, in principle, my honest answer would be 'not knowingly.' What's my justification? Nothing intelligible. Or rather, it need not be intelligible.

Why don't I want to put another man's penis in my mouth? Or less graphically, why am I reluctant to kiss another man on the lips? Why wouldn't I hold hands with another man as we walked down the street, or as we waited for our brunch to arrive?

There's no intelligible answer, but there was a conventional answer: 'I'm not gay.'

So redefining women isn't as simple as changing a social construction, because it also breaks conventions, that even with overlapping distribution (in this case, some number of heterosexual men and lesbians that would sleep with trans women) it's predictable that the pre-existing convention would either become a kind of 'black market' convention, ie. men call themselves heterosexual, women call themselves lesbian and officially would have sex with the new construction of "women" but in practice only have sex with the old convention of women.

Or you just get a linguistic arms race, where "straight" or "heterosexual" is ceded and men start identifying as "super-straight".

If you believe in nothing...

You'll believe anything. And now there's an intuitive method abounding that proves it true. 

For me personally it is extreme-left-wing politics that annoys me most with the tedium of believing anything they want. But my tribe is really neither right nor left but the people willing to have arguments constrained by a tentative understanding of reality. 

The outside tribe is that trying to bludgeon reality into non-existence. I'm not worried that they can ultimately invade and conquer. I'm worried about how much damage they will do until the truth will out.

Mostly, this stuff is a pain in the ass. Little more. Like insisting on photo id to vote. That's just a pain in the ass, given what is known about the incidence of actual voter fraud. Vaccine hesitancy is just a pain in the ass, given what is known about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Graysexual people, are just a pain in the ass, given the autonomy people still maintain regarding who they sleep with and date.

Some contrition would be nice, given the fullness of time.

What is proving true, even specifically by the example of 'super straight' is Timothy Snyder's prediction that without a public domain, there can be no resistance.

So does the Internet allow new things, or does the Internet create a channel for old things? I would say it's rather the latter. 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.

And this is the cautionary tale of believing whatever you want. It's self defeating. 

I do not know the origins of 'trans women are women' for example, and it's ambiguous as to whether it is linguistically equivalent to 'apples are food' or 'apples are apples' probably worth a google, alas I found nothing. My guess is that it's intended to mean 'apples are apples' as in to collapse the distinction of 'cis' and 'trans' and is certainly not intended to mean 'oranges are apples'. 

But we can see, there's no resistance to whatever unbearable oppression redefining women was supposed to make. As many discovered before the invention of 'super straight' was that it just doesn't work. Alas, heterosexual and lesbian never meant 'someone who sleeps with all and any women' The language never had the reality defining power to say 'you say you're attracted to women, I'm a woman therefore you are attracted to me.' And conversely for lesbians, the whole population of women however defined were never available to lesbians, not even a majority just the sum of lesbian and bisexual women.

How to Resist Any Belief

1. I feel like eating a KFC Tower Burger.

2. [Holds up what was conventionally known as a pinecone.] This is a KFC Tower Burger.

3. That's a pinecone.

4. Who's to say it's a pinecone and not a KFC Tower Burger?

5. [Throw's away pinecone.] Thanks.

6. I thought you said you wanted to eat it.

7a. I never said that.

8a. You just said it a second ago.

9a. I'm not who "I" said "I" was.

7b. Who's to say "throwing away" is not "eating" a KFC Tower Burger? 

 Yeah so just to hopefully illustrate the last point. If definitions, destinctions, facts don't exist, then they don't exist. Not simply when they suit someone to not exist.

All that is achieved by how to believe anything you want, is that someone has given up on the challenge of describing reality. Definitional offenses permit definitional retreats as beautifully illustrated by the 'trans women are women' > 'super straight' response.

More to the point of this post...

You Can Do All The Mental Gymnastics You Like

2. (derogatory) Inventive, complex arguments used to justify what is otherwise unjustifiable.

People often perform mental gymnastics in order to blame anyone but themselves.~from wiktionary.

I want to be clear, teenage boys in bourgeoisie high schools where a proliferation of new identies has made communicating whether they are 'gay/bi/straight' difficult when they are basically attracted to some cis women and not to everyone else, but some of those cis women identify as trans, non-binary, queer, or [shudder] sapiosexual etc. is while for me a sympathetic situation, not the most pressing application of people believing anything they want.

The postmodernist tactics of characters like Putin and Trump and Bolsonaro, has a far higher body count and is far more consequential, in my opinion. People who don't deal with pandemics if they don't feel like it, choose not to believe in free and fair elections, decide if they are winning or losing a justified or unjustified special military operation/invasion etc. I want that to be clear.

And when you have tremendous resources, like multiple news networks, a major political party, a private army etc. backing your process of 'Believing Anything You Want' you can kind of eke this shit out for a while before you  hit constraining reality. Before you are inevitably "destroyed by facts and logic".

Likewise, 'the law of attraction' can help you 'manifest wealth' provided you are a young attractive female who looks good in certain types of hats because there's a bunch of guys that want to fuck you and failing that jack off to images of you, and subsequently numerous young girls who want to be you and failing that live vicariously through you and desperately want to believe it's the yoga practice and the skin care regime that afford you attention and wealth not the genetics and particular stage of life you are in.

It's tempting to say, show me the "influencer" that looks like this:

By Kyle Hoobin (twitter.com/kylehoobin) - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Off2riorob using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11201182

But yeah, that's Eckhart Tole circa 2003, chinless german influencer and beneficiary of Oprah Winfrey influencer of influencers. Quack medicine and quack spirituality is alas another whole other post.

Reality will constrain all beliefs regardless. If human civilization ends, and by happenstance Alien archeologists attempt to cohere a narrative of what went wrong, a la Jared Diamond's "Collapse" or the "Fall of Civilizations" podcast (super excellent) I will bet the whole of human history now, that they will never conclude 'the powerful failed to define a sustainable reality' unless that very literally means 'humanity failed to perceive the reality they lived in.' 

This is really a variation of Keynes':

“Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

So Breathairians can stay delusional longer than their bodies can sustain life.

Or as Abe Lincoln (likely apocryphally) posed to his Generals:

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Conclusion

 Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: he really is an idiot. ~ Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup 1933

There's a way to throw out all the rulers, all the scales, all the evidence, everything our senses have evolved to tell us under our normal functioning, and insist on believing anything.

It's a complete waste of time, and life, and money. 

Mistakes are permissible, of course. My blood doesn't boil that people didn't figure out the germ theory of disease for ages. But mistakes are definitionally, only permissible if you are engaged in the task of trying to figure out what is. Rather than trying to create what isn't. 

Furthermore, individuals may profit from the demand to believe things that aren't. Jordan Peterson is a prominent person that makes a significant portion of his money being the-go-to-guy for 'The Bible is better than it reads' mental gymnastics, and Sam Harris is a "Judeo Christian" to the core. These individuals, in this capacity we can call "grifters" as a useful convention.

Individuals profiting from essentially a wealth transfer of your wasted time, life and money.

I sincerely hope though, that this post was not a waste of time, life and money. I hope it saves you a bunch.

If you want to recover your losses though, or diminish your profits you can listen to James Lindsay's deep dives:

Critique and the Linguistic Transformation of Society

How Paulo Freire Made Marxism Stupid

The Nature of Pseudo Reality

And that's in excess of 3 hours already, and I'd describe these as a "summary" Lindsay also offers chapter-by-chapter commentaries of works by Gramsci, Freire etc. Which, I don't listen to because mathematically you can't win if the masters of believing what they want don't have to read any Hegel or Marx or Marcuse, but to oppose them you have to read them all. I mean listen to James Lindsay and tell me you aren't listening to a man that has very possibly, driven himself insane.

Another Crack at the Unique Challenge of Psychotherapy

 An Englishman, an Irishman and a Frenchman walk into an emergency ward.

I only need one of them to make my analogy though. So one of them gets in front of a doctor and states their primary complaint: 'My back hurts.'

The doctor observes, immediately that the likely culprit for the back pain is the dagger sticking in that person's back. 

Now enters the unique challenge Psychotherapists face -

The doctor says 'Okay, well looks like this dagger missed all the organs, arteries and nerves, we should be able to pull it out, stitch you up and in a few weeks you'll be all fixed.'

and the patient says 'Nope. No. No way. The dagger stays.'

Then the doctor is like 'So, just to be clear. You want us to treat your back pain...without removing the dagger?'

...

So, adulthood has brought with it some disillusionment regarding the esteem and compliance afforded physicians. But on the whole, I feel maybe as much as 50% of the general population of the cultures I've been to, go see doctors when they feel sick, or are in pain, or have an injury and pretty much do as the doctor tells them, give or take forgetting to set an alarm to take their pill every 6 hours or trying to play tennis again a few weeks earlier than recommended.

The unique problem faced by those delivering psychotherapy is that any and all medicine has to taste good to the patient.*

As John Cleese repeated: 'How many psychologists/psychiatrists(?) does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.' 

I have friends that have said to me things to the effect of 'I tried talking to a shrink, but it didn't really work for me, I just handle my anxiety/depression with alcohol.'

What didn't work?

Well I think it's that: 'no, the dagger stays' part of the analogy. 

There's a wide scope of reasons people seek psychotherapy, and a wider scope of reasons people should seek psychotherapy. But I feel a large chunk of change involve 'I want to feel better, I want to like myself, I want to be satisfied with my life...but my father/mother/partner stays.'

And yeah, relationships are less invasive than a few inches of steel in your back, but they can be just as obvious. Not just to a licensed, qualified practitioner of psychotherapy, but pretty much everyone.

And I've been there. I needed counselling because I was struggling to get into an intimate relationship. I had problems with mate selection.

So it was never particularly difficult for my psychologist to diagnose what was going wrong. It was more that it would take 10 hours over a year and a half to surgically remove what ailed me from my mind. 

And then, frustratingly for us both, I would go out and get another dagger in my back requiring maybe 6 hours over 6 months to remove.

The thing was, I was committed to the process of getting better. No matter how much I struggled or resisted getting better.

My feeling is that most people hold this ultimatum to their counsellors head - 'find me a way to lose my suffering while keeping my meaning, or I'll just go with my addiction, I'll just keep my toxic relationship - I'll accommodate, I'll indulge my suffering.'

Thus I feel most people ask the impossible of psychotherapy - I want all my groceries in one bag, I don't want that bag to be heavy though. It's understandable, because psychotherapy is a service and in many/most cases and places in the world, it's quite costly. People aren't going to see it, necessarily, as a give and take process.

Because they probably can make you feel better, if you give up calling your mother every night. They can make you feel better, if you give up your relationship, move into a single apartment and change all your daily routines. etc. A psychologist can help support you undertake difficult changes. 

I've compared it, in the past to dislocating a shoulder. Reducing a dislocated shoulder (the strange, to me, term for popping the shoulder back into it's socket) can be a painful process. But once it's in, healing begins. There's this neutral position my dislocated shoulder and arm can be in where it isn't painful, but to get the shoulder in, it generally has to travel across a threshold of pain.

Having said that, I recently dislocated my shoulder again, for the first time in like 3 years, and while explaining to my partner how I'd dislocated it, it reduced itself, painlessly too. So you know, things can and do get easier with practice (or loose ligaments maybe).

But I do feel it's different. I feel almost nobody chooses to leave their dislocated joints out. People do choose to live with their anxiety and depression, with toxic partners, keep shitty jobs. They'll dismiss the counsellor to keep the suffering. 

Admittedly, maybe more people would keep their dislocated shoulder, if they could treat the pain and discomfort symptoms successfully with cigarettes and alcohol, online gaming, tinder swiping etc.

And maybe it's because physical ailments are by definition, unfamiliar. They are a shock to our system, our experience rather than the norm.

But I think psychotherapy is possibly, more difficult than surgery. Maybe not as risky, where one wrong move can kill the patient or paralyse them and send you to a medical malpractice suit, but the patient isn't anaesthetised and one wrong move can have them get up and leave and never come back as you try to extract their attachment to the persons or behaviors that are distressing them.

Anyway, that's my latest crack. I hope it inspires somebody to maybe give psychotherapy another crack. It's not all on you, incompetent counsellors exist, shopping for the right one is often financially unfeasible and COVID and everything.

10,000 Thumbs

So the headline is, I have a podcast now:

I've come to conceive of my creative process as scaling back an idea until it's something I can achieve on my lonesome. Collaborations - I'm on 3 for 20+ attempts. Most collabs fail to materialize for me straight out the gate. That's an enigma code I haven't really cracked. I suspect because when collaborating with cash poor, time poor artists, there's nothing really to give, in the give-and-take of collaboration.

10,000 thumbs is a series on heuristics, the introductory episode explains that. All the episodes are self explanatory, so I thought I might give a run-down as to why they are meaningful to me, at least the episodes I released thus far.

Failure Must Be An Option

For years I couldn't stop myself from pursuing the golden fleece, the holy grail, of a unified theory of why everything isn't great all the time. For years I bashed my head against a brick wall called 'risk aversion' behind which I felt was the one simple key to it all. 

During the pandemic I learned concepts like 'consent of the loser' something necessary for democracy to work. So to look at the Republican Elephant in the room, we can see from Bush v Gore thru to 'Stop the Steal' we had an institution in a democracy that was increasingly unwilling to consent to losing. 

The near-enough answer to me was in plain sight - rigging. Whenever something is bad, it is usually because something is rigged. And I may have singled out the republicans, but what is scare about US polarization, is that increasingly both parties adamantly refuse to put up presidential candidates and supreme court nominees that the other side can actually live with. It actually makes me feel national...maybe not pride, but not-shame, that Australia's electoral system actually pretty much mandates that the parties have to be something that the majority of opposition can live with. 

In a throaway line in my first real episode, I say that Popper is right and Marcuse is wrong - I'm referring to Marcuse's "liberating tolerance":

Marcuse argues that "the realization of the objective of tolerance" requires "intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed." He makes the case for "liberating tolerance", which would consist of intolerance to right-wing movements and toleration of left-wing movements.

That's a terrible idea. Admittedly I haven't seen Marcuse's argument, it might persuade me, but we are talking one hell of a persuasion job to swallow that pill. By contrast Popper:

 Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Like, what gets my goat is that I think people these days think Popper and Marcuse are preaching the same thing. Actually Popper's Paradox basically says we cannot tolerate Marcuse's "liberating tolerance" because it is a doctrine of intolerance.

So I would hope it is transparent that managers rigging things is not good, even on a triple-bottom-line analysis, this first episode is really important to me though because it is a rule that can be followed down to any aspect of life. From a manager who gets a bonus for driving a company into the ground down to a relationship where one partner won't let the other leave them on threat of death.

The Fundamental Rule of Taking Risks

A hard one to follow, but I try to, because it involves evaluations that I have not always done. Also the monkey mind. Like sometimes it is hard to not check my phone or tablet because I've been skinner-boxed into doing so, even though the rewards are seldom meaningful vs how meaningful the people I'm supposed to be paying attention to are.

Still, it's an important rule to me. If I were to be asked what the role or function of education should be, I would be inclined to answer 'to teach people to know when they are or aren't taking risks, how to take risks and why to take risks.'

A big part of that is covered by 'you don't risk something important to gain something unimportant'.

I feel how our education system, at least in Australia mostly functions is, teaching people to take low-risk-high-stakes gambles constantly for a steady stream of small gains. Namely, it encourages us to invest mammoth amounts of time and money into getting a qualification so we can work for someone and receive a steady pay check. Then to use that paycheck to leverage a lifetime of future paychecks to buy property.

That in a nut-shell is the 'Australian formula' and I'm not convinced it is so different from the US formula, the UK formula, the Canadian formula etc. Though I derive the rule from Warren Buffet this is something Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes a bunch about. Most people are betting $1 every day for a very low-risk payout of a steady stream of 5c. You bet $1, you can more-or-less expect to take home $1.05. 

Then something happens like Covid, the GFC, the World Trade Center Attacks etc. and the 'or-less' part stops being the fine print. Mass layoffs, economic contractions and people find themselves fucked. These are the perils of risk aversion, and I feel Buffet's rule is a better way of handling risk aversion than trying to seek out low-risk returns.

Assuming Inefficiency

Something I struggle with, mentally, is the idea that compensation reflects my worth somehow as a person. That when I fail, it is because I am intrinsically inferior. 

My struggle is made easier having been on the other side of that equation. Imposter syndrome etc. This episode is just a reality check that the world is full of waste. 

Again among my goat getters is Joe Hockey's 'lifters and leaners' characterization of Australia. Corporate welfare is massive. Whatever people tear their hair out over the government doing, you can bet the private sector is doing it only more so.

When for example did you hear any talking head discuss how much money is created by the private sector? I'm going to wager, once in the past three years to never. Yet:

Nearly all money in the US, UK and many other countries is created by the private sector through lending. ~ excerpted from this paper

More chaffing for me, is identifying people on welfare as 'leaners'. One of the most amazing factoids that came out of the UBI debate, and too little known, is that just giving everyone no-questions-asked payments of money (and by everyone I mean everyone) is cheaper than operating the welfare system we have. 

And I know, "leaners" exist in the private sector. I've met them. My old employer took 25 years to figure out we had a manager that didn't do anything. They got rid of them, and by doing so they then figured out that manager's manager also did nothing. 

Furthermore, what tragically I feel a lot of people on welfare flirting with poverty don't realize, is that there are young men driving porches with platinum credit cards and Italian suits and shoes who are handsomely compensated for running businesses that lose money.

We live in a world of illusions, and perhaps the biggest illusion is that we are anywhere close to running efficiently. Efficiency is an ideal finish line we are always approaching, and even with the tough times I'm going through, I maintain my optimism because there's still so much work to be done.

Don't Blame the Audience

This one is so dear to my heart. I know the temptation too. But fundamentally it's about agency.

People often seem so ready to sacrifice their agency to maintain their ego. Literally last night I was taking feedback on my resume that honestly, I felt was superficial and arbitrary. My ego defenses kicked in and my internal monologue was 'unreadable? seriously? how come you're reading it then.' instead though, with the appreciation that this was my audience and they were giving me feedback, I asked follow up questions to work with them to improve my resume.

I've been involved with NGOs who's go to explanation for performance failure was a global conspiracy, a machiavellian cabal thwarting them. The simpler explanation that their reading material was dense and unappealing, their representatives looked like crazy conspiracy theorists or hippies was intolerable, and it is from them that I largely learned this rule I follow.

When somebody doesn't buy a piece of my art, that's never their problem. It's always my problem.

I don't kowtow and just draw what people want me to draw. I go back to the drawing board and try to make another connection. I have literally renamed a piece to make a sale, based on feedback from the audience.

If 10,000 thumbs fails, I won't be blaming the audience.

Hanlon's Razor

I didn't invent Hanlon's Razor, but I care about it because society itself appears to somehow be cutting it's own throat in it's absence. Maybe Hanlon's Razor is more of a parrying dagger.

So I felt it necessary to record an episode just on Hanlon's Razor. It's something I'm quite passionate about because for me it falls under the purview of mental health. People forget or do not suspect the liberating power of realizing that whatever is bothering you, making you suffer, doesn't actually care about you. It isn't personal.

I really love this workshop Gabor Mate ran with social workers. Given the ability of social workers to reflexively leap to the conclusion that is most personal. People are being trained to actually do the opposite these days to infer malicious intent from banal inane interactions.

Not What, But How

This one was really about management, and for me is the crux of management. I feel being an employee in Australia is a bit of a crap shoot in terms of managers. Largely because the most well trod path to management is promotion rather than management training.

I'm sure great managers exist. Partly because I've worked for some. But most managers are more of the protean mold of 'hey you're the best at this on the team, so we're making you the manager of the team.' ignoring other factors like whether anyone on the team likes them, whether they have any communication skills, whether they understand why they were good at their role etc. (I've held some jobs where the major performance determinate was the voice the employee had. I've also held jobs were some of the strongest performers cut the most corners.)

There's some vagueness I admit, to "what" and "how" like if somebody commissions me to paint them a zebra, they are telling me 'what' to paint, which I'm fine with, and what I want to be left up to me is "how" I paint it. If somebody was like, draw me something but I want you to use a ruler for every mark on the page no freehand, and paint it on velum in oil. Like that's the worst commission I can imagine.

I developed this rule through practice. I was working with economists that really cared about the economics. I cared about management. So quite naturally, I didn't want to get into the nitty gritty of the projects they were working on. I had almost no value to contribute there, but I did want to know when they'd do them, when they would sit down to get them done, what their calendars looked like and how it all fit in with the organizational strategy.

I find often, managers want to do the work of the employees because they know how to do that, they don't know how to manage. Nothing is more frustrating when you're a competent employee. So this is how to do that.

Empathy's Value is Measured in Distance

So many of the people who invoke the panacea of 'Empathy' have mostly served as examples of 'how not to do empathy.'

Empathy done right generally does not result in outrage and protest but nuance and calm. It indicates a person has actually occupied a mind albeit briefly different to their own.

For me it's one of the most annoying things, and easiest to understand. People simply misinterpret empathy as something one does in one direction only - the marginalized, the oppressed, the downtrodden. People don't really intuit to use empathy to try and understand the people they don't identify with.

I have friends that understand chickens, pigs and cows better than they understand me.

If it was easy to know how and when to use empathy, we wouldn't need things like Hanlon's razor, to spare us a lot of the mental leg work.

That's Where I'm At

Forthcoming are map-ground errors, evaluating the gold-silver-platinum rules, want vs is regarding beliefs, and a lot more I have scripts worked out for defining professionalism, turning up for people, how not to be a corporate welfare recipient (or have a bullshit job and eternal existential dread of being cut off), success and succession, spirituality and relationship stuff.

I find it really fun and enjoyable to write and record and produce. And I'm making it all free because I've road tested everything I put out, and I live by all this content. 

I care about spreading these because any one, if followed can have a significant positive impact.

How I got Here

My first attempt at a podcast was 'The Mighty Genius Hour' and it was collaborative. I had the long end of the stick in that collaboration, I turned up and talked shit, my collaborator had to do all the audio, which was too much as it turned out. 

My second attempt was an interview series called 'Nobodies' it wasn't so much a collaboration, because I was just interviewing friends that like me were rolling the dice on creative careers and pursuits and hadn't got their break yet. 

The trouble was: recording was easy. Scheduling recordings was hard. And then well it's like going on a long run, where until you turn around and start heading home, the fact is that every step you take is a step you have to run back. It's great to have an unconstrained 3 hour conversation and record it. But without a producer to flag sections and questions, the editing becomes a nightmare, because you have to listen to and edit those 3 hours, something that might reasonably take 10 hours, given my 10 minute episodes currently take about an hour to edit each. Sure I designed it to keep editing to a minimum, but you can still have a guest (or me as host) say 'I don't know the statute of limitations on that thing. Better cut that bit.' 

The other thing was that people who aren't famous, aren't famous for all kinds of reasons. One of those reasons might be unreliability. One of my guests, It took something like 8 attempts over 3 months to get to show up. So it was hard to even get a season in the can, let alone edited. And another of my guests, we wound up talking about what it was like to live through Geelong Football Club 'The Cats' breaking their premiership drought for 2/3rds of the interview. My feeling was that while that was interesting, we both wanted another tilt at doing the interview.

So my learning curve as an interviewer was at the expense of my guest's time. And I never recorded enough interviews to actually release. Those I did took the better part of a year, and that year was 2016. 

Skipping from one year that everyone felt blew, to another, in the Melbourne 1st-2nd lockdown, while looking for constructive things to do, I started writing scripts about heuristics. I wanted to release them as Vlogs, on Youtube. 

There's a whole other post in there, but I think Covid was a wakeup call, and for me I woke up to the concept of the 'Good Time Revolution' which is basically, when times are tough, like you are in a desert or something - performance matters. You need competent disciplined people to conserve scarce resources, locate precious calories and not make costly mistakes. When times are good, you tend to get a revolution where people are put in charge who want to be in charge and maybe also that we want to be in charge because performance doesn't matter so much. Like when your struggle with calories is eating too much, and you need to waste energy and money going to a gym to work off the excesses you consume.

So I had this impetus to write these short vlog entries that if followed would render one competent to be in charge of anything be it a fast food shift or near as I can guesstimate the WHO or CDC.

I got busy with an interim management gig that was supposed to be 4 contact hours a week working with a small team and the board, but worked out to being like 20 hours a week. Though it was a good working reminder of how useful heuristics could be, and though it was quite meaningful work...

...actually there's too good a transition in their to pass up. I joined a board of an NGO during the lockdowns, and it turns out that I joined an organization in crisis. 

They'd had 25% of their staff resign, which sounds like a lot but there were only 4 people on the payroll. The resignation came with a well substantiated claim that the work environment was toxic and dysfunctional. The organization was flat, there were job titles but no job descriptions. Everyone was doing a little of everything, some people did what needed doing, some people did what they wanted to do.

They wanted to fire one of the three remaining employees. Unfortunately, they were an employee, and basically nothing was in place paperwork wise to be able to fire them. (See failure must be an option)

That might sound strange to people who's idea of corporate culture comes from the apprentice. But given the multitude of people who daily find out the hard way that you can't just fire somebody, let me do a short elaboration. (assume inefficiency)

You can't fire someone for performance issues if you've never specified what they should perform, if you've never reviewed their performance etc.

You can make somebody redundant, but for that it is ideal if they are actually redundant. You can't then hire people to replace them. (assume inefficiency)

You can't fire people for an 'instant dismissal offence' if you have no policy in place to specify what constitutes an instant dismissal. Well. you probably can, for unambiguous things like committing a criminal offense like assault or theft, but that wasn't on the cards here.

When you pick up a paper or watch a movie where someone gets told to clear out their desk, and is escorted with a cardboard box off the premises by security, here's what is usually happening - the employer has broken an employment contract with the employee. That employee is actually able to sue the company for breach of contract (unfair dismissal) and usually this aspect is opaque, because the matter is settled out of court and it's not uncommon for companies to pay a years salary, or three years salary just to get rid of a person.

There's a term 'golden parachute' that refers to big executives signing contracts that make it more lucrative for them to be fired than to succeed. (A perverse incentive if ever there was one). (Failure must be an option)

One of the things that can keep small firms small and toxic, is an inability to appreciate the risk of hiring anyone. (The fundamental rule of risk taking) It specifically translates to being stuck with toad employees, that are very hard to turn into princes. Furthermore, the less productive an employee, the more likely they are to stick with a small firm. Big firms, though it isn't efficient, can pay to get rid of these toads, small firms and organizations have to live with them. (Assume Inefficiency)

Anyway, to abridge the story, I offered to be an interim manager. There was actually some hope that this toad might turn out to be a prince, on account of this organisation had lacked any real management or leadership for their entire tenure. (Hanlon's razor)

I took an off-the-shelf free product in the form of Manager-tools' podcasts and started applying it. And obviously there's friction but in general it worked like a charm. We got a lot of stuff done in just three months and I was able to hand off to an actual employee to be manager, shortly before I relocated to Mexico.

I found the whole situation ironic. This was volunteer work, it was also meaningful and I could afford to do it because the Australian government stepped up during the pandemic and increased welfare payments (above what I'd previously earned working 20 hours a week in a job that was meaningless and draining), which I'd never been on before...or had I?

Previous to that, I'd worked for a private company who's primary source of revenue was government contracts. (assume inefficiency) I would call that job a bullshit job, specifically a sub-type of 'box-checker' I don't want to talk too much about it, so I'll use an analogy from Japan. If you spend any significant amount of time in the same place in Japan, like 3 months or so, chances are a bunch of streets in your neighborhood will be ripped up and replaced, often in the same day.

Furthermore, when you are walking to your local combini or train station, there will be a veritable army of workers in hi-vis vests with hats, whistles and glowing orange batons to escort you around the roadworks. Not the 'pedestrians use other sidewalk' sign that does this job in Australia, or simply fencing off an intersection like in Italy or Mexico with nary a construction worker in sight.

This phenomena is called 'hidden unemployment' where instead of just paying people welfare so that they can meet their living needs and stimulate the economy, you make up bullshit jobs to stimulate the economy and hide unemployment.

I had a job similar to third deputy assistant to the chief pedestrian traffic coordinator in Japan. When the government briefly just gave me the money no questions asked, I was actually able to do meaningful work.

And here's the meaning:

Management has a huge impact on people's mental health and quality of life.

Management works either for-or-against employees. Australia has some of the lowest standards of management in the world. (I'd heard this in high-school, and I recently fact checked it) and this finally brings me to 10,000 Thumbs - what I called my podcast.

They are short roughly ten minute episodes of rules that I use, and have found easy to internalize to generate above-all-else good mental health outcomes, but actual productive management. 

I was only interim manager for three months, but I felt the impact I made was both positive and sizeable. 

It might be a low-hanging fruit situation, when I can begin with 'what are your priorities?' followed by 'show my your schedule?' to check for discrepancies, and have employees lightbulbs immediately go on - particularly in cases where people hadn't realized they had 9 priorities and didn't have a schedule. 

But I've been in big corporations, and had a change in management from performer to dud, and witnessed people paid big money do nothing but screw constantly with the actual performance of work. (Not what, but how). I've lived to see those managers shit canned too.

That's why I believe in this product. Who the fuck am I? You can decide that. Even if that leads you to not even try my podcast. It may take a while to find its audience, but I'm going to keep doing it, maybe it won't get traction until after I'm old, dead and gone. I don't know. It's out now though and I'm glad to get something out in the audio medium.

 

On Ostracism

I was probably in a position to write this post as early as six years ago, I would have had around 2 years to percolate/steep in my shame. 

The difficulty of the subject of ostracism is trying to write about your experiences with someone who wants nothing to do with you. It's, in my thinking, a difficult subject to write about.

Involuntarily, I hear the voice of myopic ideaologues lecturing me: 'Don't you get it? You fucked up. They want nothing to do with you so leave them alone.' Which makes me shy away from tackling the topic. 

The thing is, I do get it. That's why I don't have a restraining order out on me. That's why I've never been in any legal trouble. That's why I'm a free man. But ostracism is wrong.

And I'm aware, that pretty much every woman I know has experienced ostracism, and I'll just confess I haven't even searched for the accounts of female voices on this subject. I'll merely concede that I'm probably a tourist in the mother country of women everywhere, and plough on with my accounting.

Is Ostracism Violence?

To the best of my recollection, Sam Harris was the first to outline the following dichotomy - that we only have one alternative to resolving conflicts with violence and that is communication.

Ostracism, or the cold shoulder, or ghosting, or cancelling seems to provide a third option - disengagement. 

There's space for this view in the undefined term 'violence'. I maintain that ostracism is violence, albeit much trickier to understand than kicking or punching, pulling hair, glassing, cutting a bitch etc. Those are straight forward.

I'm aware I live in times where a somewhat popular, if fringe, meme is that 'speech is violence' and 'silence is violence' (the latter if accepted would appear to oblige us to accept that ostracism is violence, however that's not the intent of the meme - to my understanding it implies an obligation to speak up lest you're "complicit" in violence)

The case for these memes, is I feel, weak. Naturally the cases haven't persuaded me. Much weaker than ostracism as violence.

I don't really know where to start making the case, so I'll just assert that it's my understanding that in the animal kingdom among social species (like us) being excluded from the group meant death. Not social death, but literal death. I have no idea when or where in history this ceased to be the case. I feel technology and capitalism and the enlightenment and modernity have made the condition of ostracism survivable, much like acute appendicitis.

Lacking the expertise though, I won't delve any further into that line because it'd just be speculation, though I'm confident ultimately that it's true. That there will be animals for whom shunning is just a low risk, safe and cruel way to kill some transgressor. It's just contemplating how historically consequential the effects of shunning were should raise questions as to how thirteen year old girls treat each other.

It's why I wouldn't be surprised if almost every cis-hetero male in their adolescence didn't have an experience akin to having their shoes stolen by their mates and thrown over the school fence, or having their lunch slapped out of their hand into the dirt, or getting a noogie, or dacked, or pantsed in pool, wet willy, squirrel gripped, wedgie, pushed over another guy that was crouching behind their legs, had their school books 'dicked' when they left them in the common room, or beat up, or piled on, stacks-on, or cup caked, tea bagged, dunked, swirlied...etc. and while picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, looked over and saw some girl in the school yard that had been shunned by the mean girls and thought 'man that's fucked up.'

Without expositing my notions of sex differences, my impression is that most men in male hierarchies do not experience life as under a constant threat of ostracism. Social media, by facilitating social interactions at a physical remove, probably have seen more teenage boys living under the conditions traditionally associated with female homosociality. Again, it's all just speculation on my part. And I've had a good 8 years to speculate.

My next case for ostracism as violence, would be common property. That would require accepting that damage to property is violence and I acknowledge this isn't a universal view. I'm unpersuaded that 'property is theft' or more extremely and further down the rabbit hole 'property is whiteness' and what not. I just want to acknowledge people convinced of this, exist. Having taken such views courteously and far more seriously than anybody should, I've arrived at having no further time to entertain them, so back to the schoolyard. 

If someone broke into your locker and stole your Texas-instruments graphic calculator, a day before SWOTVAC, the damages and suffering would be real. 

That's sufficient for me, the notion that because Pizzaro and Cortes plundered Mexico and Peru that it isn't violence to burn down someone's house, smash up their car with a golf club, slash their paintings or throw out all their clothes is ludicrous. Furthermore if 'property is theft' and or 'property is whiteness' it becomes hard to see what is wrong with the actions of colonial powers like Spain, Britain, Portugal, France and Italy when they came in and took all the indigenous people's property by force and duplicity, which is obviously ludicrous.

Anyway, there's not just shared physical property, which I care about the least but that's because of the low dollar value. There is "common property" in social circles, as in spaces that are/were shared, mutual friends etc. Obviously ostracism or shunning in most contexts doesn't work if the mutual friends don't participate in the shunning. This has never really applied to my experiences with being ostracised though. it's worth noting, even with my lack of insight though because from the outside looking in, who mutual friends side with confers power - literally the power to shun.

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere. ~ Coriolanus, Act 3, Scene 3, William Shakespear.

I do not share Coriolanus' contempt for those that banished him. But there is some remedy in that sentiment of stepping into your power and letting fly in equal and opposite direction. Again, from the outside looking in, if there's a group of mean girls, and Brittney decides she's had it with Alicia and persuades Tiffany, Connie, Heather and Naomi to all go in on ostracising Alicia... I can't help but look at it in a game theory lens: the complicit mean girls don't become friends so much as hostages, and each time this ostracism tactic is consented to, their own social life becomes ever more precarious because the precedent is set and reinforced.  Aka, you're next Tiffany, you're next Connie etc.

I'm sure there are histrionic and/or narcissistic Queen Bees that fuck up ostracism and go too hard too fast and find themselves de facto ostracised.

But property damage, in terms of depriving a person of access to what is common, by sending them out, is obviously much harder to do when there's a school campus or workplace operating as that common property. However, institutions like schools expel students, workplaces fire people. Is expulsion or termination violence? Probably, technically yes. Society sanctions this violence though, in much the same way it sanctions police's ability to detain people.

The big difference is, institutions can't arbitrarily expel or incarcerate or deport people - socially agreed upon criteria has to be met. Justice has to be justified. Not so with informal social structures. Ostracism could be for sleeping with someone else's partner, to correcting them in public, to wearing the same dress to a party. Arbitrary.

But a school can't expel a student for being Jewish. For stealing property, for fighting, for doing or selling drugs, sure. Employers can't terminate an employment contract for any arbitrary reason either, and innumerous wrongful dismissal suits testify to the violence of such actions. Damages are paid.

In the same way, alright, we are no longer friends, that simply means one of two people does not enjoy nor seek the company of another. They may even actively avoid them. But the right to pick and choose who we are friends with does not extend to taking command of common property, of deciding on which table another is or isn't permitted to sit, of who their friends can be friends with.

This segue's into questions of detainment and improsonment. Are they violence? I say yes. Ostracism is like locking someone out of a very small space, where their prison cell becomes the rest of the world. One might be inclined to think of the space from which the shunned is excluded as the prison cell, the shunner locked in and the shunned locked out. But functionally, the cell walls are there. I can testify.

I can wander for days and months without coming across a 'Truman' wall, but they are there in my email, in my phone, on my socials, in my mind.

I also feel that stalking conceptually is the equal and opposite kind of violence as that of ostracism. Here I feel that few, particularly women, would disagree that stalking is violence. 'No it's just a harmless pass time.' Stalking, simplified to exclude all the other damages it does, is the insertion of someone into another's life without their consent. Ostracism is the expulsion of someone from part of  their own life, without their consent.

Lastly on this question, let's talk rights. Does a person have a right to make amends? To me the question of whether ostracism or shunning is violence is overdetermined even without appealing to being responsible for someone's emotional state (which I would avoid because that's largely why I reject the idea that 'speech is violence') but there's a question of whether ostracism is even punishment or punitive.

Hear me out. Ostracism rather than holding someone accountable is actually holding them unaccountable. In that sense it is identical to life without parole or a death sentence. I may need to inject some clarity, if the ostracism is entirely conditional on something that is completely within the ostracised control - like if they just apologized the ostracism ends, I am choosing to disqualify that as ostracism. Just like there's a large and consequential difference between permitting the incarcerated early release for good behavior and conditions of parole vs someone locked up and the key thrown away.

It's still violence to corral a group of people into coercing an apology from someone, but it's significantly better than the violence of unconditionally shunning someone. 

If you are the kind of aggressive and violent person that is fond of a good shun, my feeling is, the burden of proof is on you that the shunned cannot more constructively redress the insult.

Let me invoke Louis CK and Kevin Hart. Louis CK had distribution of his film 'I Love You Daddy' withdrawn, he lost $36 million dollars, he left the United States and stopped doing standup for a year. Kevin Hart lost his opportunity to host the Oscars. I would say, both men were held irresponsible for their transgressions. They literally couldn't respond. And for some people are still held irresponsible.

I've written about the Louis CK case before, and I can't be bothered looking up the details. Now, I'm not being dishonest when I say, I'm not sure in the legal sense what Louis' transgression actually was. I know he masturbated in front of women. Everyone knows he masturbated in front of women. I just don't know whether it constituted sexual harassment, sexual assault, public indecency or if on account of the issue of consent it occupies a gray area of subjective coercion as viewed by certain academics fixated on notions of power defining truth.

More to the point, the jacking off show had from my recollection ceased maybe 8 years or so before the article that exposed him. The same article indicated that Louis had expressed remorse and apologised to the women. It was just that it was all a private matter. For context, legally the US federal statute of limitations is 180 days, with some states providing for 300 days, or under a year.

So we had a situation where Louis had ceased the offending behavior, apologised to the offended parties, then apologized to the general public and acknowledged wrongdoing, and he stopped performing. 

Acknowledging that somebody like Tig Notaro may have a distinct and seperate grievance ie. being coerced by Louis and his manager not to talk about it or bring it up, I feel most people are stuck on the jerking off in front of women thing. 

Given that what's done, cannot be undone, I cannot imagine what more Louis could have done to respond to a behavior he had stopped engaging in.

Kevin Hart's case is much shorter. He was announced as Oscar's host. Then someone dug up homophobic comments from 7 or 8 years earlier, he stepped down. Issued an apology. And eventually he independently came to the conclusion that nothing would satisfy the mob that had mobilized against him.

In transactional analysis there's a life game called 'Now I've Got You You Son Of A Bitch' and in these high profile cases, that appears to be what is going on with cancel culture. The point of the game is not seeking restitution for damage done, but personal gratification. That's why I question whether ostracism or shunning even constitutes punishment. 

I was helped in this understanding by my friend Shamira, somewhere at about the 3 month mark of my ostracism, I was constantly ruminating on what I could do to actually respond to the situation. Of particular torture was that in my capacity as a friend, I wondered if I had made a mistake by respecting my friend's wishes to leave them alone, as they only seemed to grow angrier the more space I gave them.

Shamira informed me of her opinion, which is near as I can recall, that ostracism isn't for the benefit of the ostracised. They are, as it were, a sacrificial offering. If you got shunned, you were basically screwed. You were there as an example to the others.

So holding someone accountable, or holding them responsible generally by societal standards means serving their time, making their penance, restitution, repairs which I believe to be a fundamental human right. Ostracism functions as 'Now I've Got You You Son Of A Bitch' and in practice and function is about keeping someone irresponsible in order to maintain or cultivate the rage.

Shimmy Shimmy Ya.

Fuck it, I will expound my theory of sex differences. I see these as cultural, rather than innate, though I don't see culture as arbitrary, I think it is determined by environment, technology, and yes even genes are going to interact.

For some reason an epiphany came watching Old Dirty Bastard's film clip for Shimmy Shimmy Ya, expressly when he sings:

For the ladies who know me tell them who the fuck I be

For the niggas who know me tell them who the fuck I be

I was like, what a perfect example of masculine aggression. ODB is calling on those in the know to inform the ignorant that he is not to be treated as any old person, he's ODB.

Masculine aggression (not restricted to males) takes the form: 'Get the fuck out of my way.' and Feminine aggression (not restricted to females) takes the form: 'Get the fuck back in line.'

One form of aggression is non-conformist: 'Fuck you I won't do what you tell me.' and all that. The other form of aggression is ultra conformist: 'We all like the fuchsia bridesmaid dresses.'

 And in the spirit of ODB, for anyone who can't handle the cognitive dissonance that ostracism, shunning, cold shoulder etc. is violence might cause, I'd say fuck off you know exactly what you're doing - you are trying to inflict hurt and suffering on somebody. That's the whole point.

Ostracism as Passing the Buck

So in my case, after my own ostracism commenced I disrespected the wishes of my ostracism in two ways. 

The first, I attribute to ambiguity which I'll elaborate on further later. But I would describe these breaches as 'testing', they are kind of embarrassing, or shame inducing in hindsight because they basically punctuated long periods of hoping with these break downs of will and essentially communicating in an indirect way 'hey, is my ostracism over?' Basically, inane emails sent as if nothing had happened. 

I can forgive myself these transgressions though, because it's in my view, so human. If you dump someone in darkness they are going to reach for the walls. It's even puppy like behavior when the amygdala or whatever fails to hold the puppy in the sitting position and sends it charging at whatever the stimulus is.

The second type, was that I reserved for myself the right to make apologies. So by far the most substantial breaches of my ostracism, or shunning, are apology emails. I don't feel ashamed or embarrassed about this at all. If you've done something wrong, you should apologize.

That said, I could appreciate that if any third party were to look at them, they might see somebody bumbling through the darkness, walking into every coffee table in the room and collapsing with a foot in their mouth.

They might look clumsy, incoherent, egocentric, tone-deaf whatever. 

There's a really good reason for that. I got ostracised. Not confronted. Not informed. I got absolutely no means of feedback to figure out exactly what it was I'd done, that was so unforgivable. 

Okay, so say, unambiguously I was in the wrong, and I did something worth severe punishment. The punishment feels severe, I can testify to that. I get I upset them. But now, I am somebody else's problem. Like the troll two billy goats gruff left to their bigger brother to deal with.

'That guy's dangerous. Better lock him out with everyone else. Better climb the fire escape and pull the ladder up.'

And to be clear, it's not that say somebody with a toxic friend or partner is obliged to suffer that toxicity to protect the rest of society. It's more:

'I don't want to see you anymore.'

'Okay. Obviously my intuitions and judgement failed me. Can I get some clarification in order to avoid doing this to anybody else?'

'I said I don't want to see you anymore.'

And sure, somebody manipulative could try to enter an argument, that's something to be wary of. But I would maintain that there are ways to maintain your boundaries. Like:

'Sure, put them in a letter. It might take me a while to respond.'

Ostracism though just passes the offender intact to the next person they will offend. And in my case, I suffer when I make my friends suffer, so ostracism asks me and somebody else to maximise their chances of suffering again.

Friendship, Responsibility, Boundaries and Ambiguity

In my own experience of ostracism, something that amplified the distress of the process was ambiguity. I got a request for space, it was also clear my friend was angry and upset. I acknowledged and then the spacing began.

So initially it seemed like a big but temporary deal. A week? A fortnight? A month? Two months? Three?

It was also entirely the case that initially we both stood to benefit from that space. I needed to cool off and collect myself too. Initially I had no idea that I was being/had been ostracized.

I have a folder in my email labelled 'autopsy' that collected (mercifully) the email exchange that stimulated the ostracism response. I went through that, not attempting to rationalize my actions and absolve myself. But to interrogate what and why and when and how I'd gone wrong. 

I would revisit it every time I saw or heard something that gave me a new framework through which to understand where I'd caused the hurt. Frankly, my attitude was that whatever my friend had said or done was irrelevant given my objective was to ensure our future friendship was safe for them, safe to resume, and how to demonstrate that.

The memories fade and decay, but somewhere between three and six months it became clear that the space was in fact, here to stay. 

Time for delineation, you may be familiar with 'two to tango' given often as advice or reality checks to spurned people unable to deal with a breakup of a romantic relationship. I do not feel friendship is synonymous with relationship. You cannot be someone's boyfriend, girlfriend or otherwise intimate partner without their consent. 

It is simply the case that people are friends to people who are not their friends. Or let me put it this way, Jimmy is Timmy's friend, but Timmy is not Jimmy's friend.

I have in my life, ended friendships, because I came to the realization that I was not that person's friend. I even wound up shunning them, which I regret immensely. I hurt them pretty bad. I ended the shunning and wound up just explaining. That hurt them worse, no doubt because I'd dicked them around with shunning first. 

I see them around though, it's civil, we can converse, there's no need to avoid each other we just aren't friends anymore. I don't know though, they may still be my friend. I don't check, I don't test it out.

With my own ostracism, it is as a friend that I submitted to it, beyond the ambiguous phase where I was testing the boundaries by sending emails intended to 'test the waters' until I was rebuked.

Respecting someone's wishes and boundaries is how one can fork oneself when it comes to being ostracized. 

Why?

Because friends don't ostracize their friends. 

But as a friend, if you are told by a person that the friendly thing to do is to fuck off right out of town (and just to be clear, by the time I left town,  I had accepted as fully I could that I was dead, or persona non-grata to this person. I didn't flee the country because of ostracism or anything.) Then that is how you be their friend. 

That's pretty much all you can do, as best you can.

On the flipside, you can't be a friend, and subject someone to torture. Ostracism is torture, particularly when the condition of uncertainty is built in. 

Scenes come to mind from movies you probably haven't seen, or shows you don't remember. Like when David Spader's character in 'Just Shoot Me' is sent on an assignment to a new office not knowing he has been ostracised by George Segal's boss character. Or in 'The White Tiger' where the protagonist is brought in and his masters are suddenly all friendly to him and saying he is family as they press him to sign a confession that he was driving a vehicle that killed a child. Or Shutter Island where Leo Dicaprio finally has it revealed that he isn't a visitor to the asylum but a permanent patient. 

Alas, I have to grant, it's difficult in the moment to say 'you screwed up and I don't want to repair it, I just want you gone forever. I choose not to confront this.' and I give the benefit of the doubt that the major driver of the ambiguity was that my shunner believed also that it would be temporary.

The moment I really knew that I had lost a friend, was my dog died. She died on her 16th birthday. I'd had her half of my life. That can't happen again unless we get a dog breed that can live to 40. My friend knew what that dog meant to me, and when she died I emailed them and two other friends that knew my dog. My two other friends, as friends do, responded with their condolences. My friend kept their silence, and I knew, I was not their friend anymore.

If I can't move you with my story of a dog, maybe you can pretend you're a football coach on superbowl sunday and while you are trying to give the team a pep call your wife calls asking for a divorce...

How Do They Treat You When You're In the Wrong?

This I learned from dogs. Or maybe... about dogs. Dogs are good teachers in all matters that don't relate to planning for the future.

So it's a generalization, but if a dog submits (rolls onto it's back) to another dog, and that other dog attacks them, it's fairly safe to say the attacking dog has behavioural/socialization issues. 

It might seem grossly unfair, but I maintain the ability to judge people when I've already been found by myself and or them to be in the wrong. 

I was making a round of apologies to my friends for basically selfishly leaning on them to pursue an addiction, and one of my best friends when I apologised to him unexpectedly unloaded on me with years of pent up dissatisfaction.

We are still best friends, and I took all his feedback on board and tried to redress the issues he raised. I'm still trying almost a decade later. I also told him about my dog theory and he in turn took that on board, so it was quite a constructive exchange. 

Interestingly the friend that shunned me was on that same apology tour and was the only one to refuse my apology on account of the behavior I was apologizing for they shared and hadn't reached the point of being willing to cease it.

Just for the record, I have two emails pinned permanently to the top of my inbox, and one of them is a friend's peerless response to my apology:

Who are you? 

Come on don't need do that, we are always side by side. 

So, love is free to you to give. 

Keep asking me my love to you. 

You can get it as much as you want and whenever. 

Brian of Nazareth said 'Judge not lest ye be judged' and it holds true. If you've been ostracized, maybe as a friend, you have to respect that ostracism, but you don't have to respect the choice to ostracize you.

Which I don't. Beyond it being cruel and unusual, it doesn't appear to be effective. My friend, (my friend) went from seeming together, mature and responsible to just getting angrier, and more afraid the less they confronted me and the more time passed. They seemed to grow in their incapacity.

I was talking it over with my friend Jon, or rather we were talking about the concept of forgiveness, which very few people get the direction of. The common intuition/misperception appears to be that if you don't forgive somebody, you hold some kind of power over them.

I believe the reverse is true. I think most people conflate forgiveness with endorsement and that's where they get caught up. My friend Jon said, and it made an impression on me:

'If you don't forgive someone, then you're letting them live in your heart and your head.' 

On reflection, I think it's worse than that. Particularly in the case of permanent ostracism. I feel someone out there actually maintains a shrine to the worst incarnation of me, while depriving themselves of my best. I think that's what ostracism takes.

Tiger by the Tail

Somebody eats your lunch out of the office kitchen fridge. So you burn down their house.

There's a threshold where the punishment exceeds the crime. 

Another reason I can't respect ostracism, is the ease with which for the shunner, you wind up holding a tiger by the tail, and if you let go that tail...

To be clear, this isn't a threat. If my shunning were to end tomorrow, all I'd do is probably cry, like the Kid Detective, at the hours of friendship lost over 8 years that can't be got back.

The thing is, that there was this sweet spot between the 3 month and 1 year mark, where I was at peak contrition. I took responsibility, I was apologetic, I came to them on my knees, and they chose to turn the thumbscrews tighter. That's where my loss of respect became salient.

Somewhere in there, what was done to me, exceeded in damage, what I had done to them. 

Yes, you can argue that I kicked things off. That I 'started it'. My feeling though is that by that logic, it leaves us defenseless in situations where say, a lover that discovered an infidelity murders their partner. I maintain that all we can take responsibility for are our actions, we can't take responsibility for someone else's reaction. 

When I play out the ever more remote prospect of reconciliation, I imagine what would take priority is my initial insult. Parked in the 'parking lot' or 'bike rack' is the issue of their response - my ostracism. Reconciliation isn't really possible if we don't discuss the fact that they shunned me for the better part of a decade and counting, for my transgression. And yeah, I take into account that at a certain point maintaining ostracism is much more an act of omission rather than commission. Most days I don't think about it, I'm sure it's the same for them.

That's kind of the tiger they have by the tail. I think what also makes it difficult is that, in the course of 8 years, I managed to forgive myself.

I know what I did, I feel confident I know why I did it, and I haven't done it again. I actually don't need their forgiveness. (and one never does.)

7 years ago, to read the emails I sent, induced such shame that I could feel the blood drain from my orbital frontal cortex. I literally experienced psychosomatic blindness trying to force myself to confront myself.

As recently as four years ago, which I think was the last time I reviewed my emails, I basically saw a few sloppy things here and there I would change, but that it was basically okay.

And that's a big risk of ostracism - you get angrier, and the shunned gets better. I think there were probably even some things I chuckled at, much like when I randomly pick out a blog post I wrote ten or fifteen years ago.

Certainly it helps to not feel shame if you know you already apologized for something you did. It recontextualizes it.

I think what I've outlined here, as a 'Tiger by the Tail' scenario, is actually a revelation that helped me finally accept my ostracism. 

It's the curious case where the power dynamic shifts. I'm no longer belly up unable to look them in the eye. I likely see the situation as they would have to see it, to initiate a reconciliation - it wasn't such a big deal, perhaps they overreacted.

But the ostracism is a big deal. While I accept it, it's something I wish my friend hadn't done, because it's hard to come back from, even if there's an understandable ulterior motive, or circumstances in their life. But...it can't be good for anyone if ostracism is sustained by shame.

I hope they can forgive themselves. Precisely the kind of well wish that could make blood boil and tack another decade onto my ostracism. But their forgiveness is trading at a historic low. Unless it's the forgiveness they withhold from themselves.

An Opportunity to Sit With Shame

Shame is very very powerful. Just ask Brene Brown. I'm not going to talk much about shame, just that in my opinion, there's almost nothing a person won't do to not feel shame. If you've been ostracized, be cautious of self-medicating.

Some people are natural 'fuck you' people when they are admonished. A bunch of us though, it just confirms some deeply held belief that we are worthless pieces of shit.

What I will say for ostracism, is that it gives ample opportunity to sit with and experience shame in your body. To recognize and make peace with it. The hollowing out feeling, the implosion of the meat of your face. The psychosomatic blindness. The deindividuation.

Like eating a porcupine though, once I started sitting with my shame and making peace with it, I didn't stop. That shame, has no power over me.

Maybe think of being ostracized as like winning a free entry into an ultramarathon you hadn't trained for. That's the opportunity to seize.

Surviving/Making the most of Ostracism

At two weeks I told myself three months. At three months I was already telling myself a year. Between the second and fifth year, it was only fleeting moments I remembered and cared.

I saw them once, on the street, I had broken my usual routine because I got a flat tire and was cutting through a pedestrian heavy area with my bike. I saw them, they didn't see me, near as I can tell. They seemed happy, I kept walking.

Diogenes of Sinope was abducted by pirates to be sold as a slave. I can't find the anecdote, it was maybe in a video when I was binging Diogenes, but he complained to the pirates that his breakfast was insufficient. They gave him food, and the other captured slaves asked him how he could eat in circumstances like this, and he was basically 'my complaint has been rectified'. 

Cynicism is Stoicism Plus. The best friends the shunned and ostracised have are acceptance, forgiveness and responsibility.

For a while responsibility might involve soul searching, contrition, restitution. You'll probably grieve. Even before I knew the ostracism was permanent, I cried a lot in the first two months. It's a good opportunity to listen to Pink Floyd, anything else that makes you purge that sadness.

After a while though responsibility becomes an obligation to just make the most of things.

Your prison cell, your island of exile is so vast. There's no need to forget, just wander.

This was my prison cell:

This was my prison cell:

This was my prison cell:

I'm still in my prison cell, and life is good. 

It's not that my friend is dead to me, just I dead to them. I have dead friends, I still love and care about them, so 'dead to me' doesn't make much sense anyway. 

I've written about my friend's suicide, and much as that clearly fucked me up. Ostracism hurts worse. Because it wasn't everyone, just me.

You've been exiled to the literal rest of your life. Every day the number of things you've unwittingly said goodbye to, grows, be that friends or family, or pastimes you enjoy. Allow the things you know or fear you can never enjoy again to preoccupy your mind as little as possible.

Bake something. Do something. Go somewhere. Not to flee them, or yourself. But to go to somewhere.

And yes, I would be remiss if I said, just as I feel ostracism is the likely wrong reaction to conflict, there are wrong reactions to ostracism, that you are responsible for.

Do it wrong you get a restraining order, or a jail sentence. 

Hope is going to torture you, desperation will fuck you up.

So if you've been ostracized. I'm sorry. Good luck. Make the most of it. The water isn't so cold.

And I'd rather be shunned, than shun.