it’s almost 1am and i should go to bed but i’d also like to fire off a wordvomit first if i can so let’s go for it. i want to write something about culture and deviance and prosociality. it’s tied up with my essay drafts about wretchedness and publics and bad actors. what’s the heart of all of it? what’s the question to ask? why isn’t everything wonderful and amazing? why isn’t everybody flourishing already? well, you could argue that we’re flourishing relative to our predecessors along certain particular dimensions, but why not more, why not faster? there’s a lot to dig into, but what’s a directionally correct short answer? should I just say it’s the bad actor problem? bad actors do exist. the existence of bad actors lead to the creation of taboos and cultural regulations to minimize their damage. the problem is that cultural regulations tend to simultaneously minimize the upside of what good actors can accomplish, too. think of how both the best and worst teachers get very personally invested and involved in their process. to prevent the excesses of bad teachers, teachers in general are instructed to stick to the curriculum. stick to the script. and the result is a kind of deadening. which… is understandable, but also not the most desirable thing in the world. how do we fix that?
I don’t think it’s really possible, given our present contexts and circumstances, to make large sweeping changes to large lumbering institutions, correctly and quickly. it’s too complex. there are too many moving parts, too many unintended consequences, too many broken-telephone-chains everywhere.
i suppose another way of asking the question is, how do things get better? and I find myself returning to margaret mead’s “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. in fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.” I think it’s true. the group has to be small so that it can have a clear vector, and it has to strike at a meaningful bottleneck, flip something that needs flipping, and then hopefully set off a good cascade. (Interestingly I think Peter Thiel has a similar idea: “a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future”. And this plays nicely with Paul Graham’s quote about The Well in startupideas.html).
I will stick to the domains that I’m familiar with, which are things like writing and internet culture. I believe– informed by thinkers like george orwell and bertrand russell– that we can improve language simply by thinking clearly about what we mean when we say what we say. we can do this in groups. a small-ish group of thoughtful authors can improve language for everyone else, and consequently, improve the quality of thinking that everyone else is capable of doing.
This kinda feels like an oblique goal, something that shouldn’t be the primary aim of something so much as it should be something that happens en route to something else. I’m reminded of how the posts on /r/zen are mostly people insulting each other for being insufficiently enlightened, whereas one of the most enlightened things I remember reading was from a kitchen knife forum, with someone talking about personal preferences and experience and so on. Trying to point at the thing directly causes some glitches. You’re better off talking about it while talking about something else. In my case I feel like I wanna talk about things like movies and media and pop culture and use that as a vehicle for talking about blessed engines, virtuous cycles, oases in barren deserts.
how will I approach FAN2? one way would be talk about how to flourish as a weirdo, sanity for deviants– that might be a decent standalone essay on my substack actually. I was gonna say- first how to flourish individually, then communally? but that feels a bit wrong because there’s no reason to go it alone at the start if you can help it. but lots of people have no choice because they’re in bad social environments. ideally they’d be able to find and help each other. easier said than done, and because people are imperfect this invariably leads to some kind of disappointment and heartbreak, which is what my novel Make Some Noise (not yet finished/published) is also about.
Man, it’s satisfying to see/feel how everything is the same thing. it really all boils down to flourishing. why aren’t we flourishing? well, we’re flourishing in some dimensions. what’s the difference between the dimensions that we are flourishing in vs not? here i’m thinking of the inner game / werner thread – it has to do with non-judgemental awareness. it’s very difficult to get better at playing some game if you can’t have non-judgemental awareness of the state you’re in while you’re playing it. there tends to be some upper limit to how far you can go with beating yourself up. though sure, some subset of people seem to thrive under those conditions. but very few things in life are like that movie Whiplash, including and especially “how to get good at playing jazz music”, which is why I find it very hard to take that movie seriously, lol. And I keep wanting to bring it up again periodically because I think it’s symptomatic of something wider, this misunderstanding that if you suffer enough and you’re special enough then you will triumph. which i think is downstream of a bunch of other things like the valorizing PR of those who made it. yes suffering is often part of the process, sometimes maybe inevitably so, but it isn’t the suffering itself that creates greatness. more often than not it’s something like a mix of discernment and courage and experimentation and persistence, and discernment tends to get squashed by suffering. i’m doing broad strokes here, there’s more details to get into, but let’s just wrap this up for now.
the point of a healthy scene is to create a context where deviants can flourish without being excessively regulated by taboos and such. the point of taboos is to protect wider society from the excesses of negative variance. but we want society to benefit from the excesses of positive variance. so, we need contexts where people can have informed consent to participate in something culturally deregulated. this does take discernment etc etc to manage fruitfully and non-destructively. great scenes from history tend to be fleeting in the grand scheme of things, they eventually collapse or blow up in some way, because maintaining the right goldilocks conditions is very hard. nonetheless, the magic is that the products of such scenes can persist beyond them, and we’re all richer for it. i’m hoping we can get better and understanding and recreating such flourishings.
ps: while i’m here i wanna include a link to this thread about suboptimal conversation trees, where it strikes me that people somehow aren’t serious about getting to useful knowledge about how to proceed with difficult challenges, and I suspect that it has to do with taboos against being too open/honest about the truths of winning and losing
pps: contrast with this: