Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
– Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
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Everything profound loves masks. The most profound things of all even have a hatred for images and allegories. Shouldn’t the right disguise in which the shame of a god walks around be something exactly opposite? A questionable question: it would be strange if some mystic or other had not already ventured something like that on his own. There are processes of such a delicate sort that people do well to bury them in something crude and make them unrecognizable. There are actions of love and of extravagant generosity, after which there is nothing more advisable than to grab a stick and give an eyewitness a good thrashing: – in so doing we cloud his memory. Some people know how to befuddle or batter their own memories in order at least to take revenge on this single witness: – shame is resourceful. It is not the worst things that make people feel the worst shame. Behind a mask there is not only malice – there is so much goodness in cunning. I could imagine that a person who had something valuable and vulnerable to hide might roll through his life as coarse and round as an old green wine barrel with strong hoops. The delicacy of his shame wants it that way. For a person whose shame is profound runs into his fate and delicate decisions on pathways which few people ever reach and of whose existence those closest to him and his most intimate associates are not permitted to know. His mortal danger hides itself from their eyes, just as much as his confidence in life does, once he regains it. A person who is concealed in this way, who from instinct uses speaking for silence and keeping quiet and who is tireless in avoiding communication, wants and demands that, instead of him, a mask of him wanders around in the hearts and heads of his friends. And suppose he does not want that mask: one day his eyes will open to the fact that nonetheless there is a mask of him there – and that that’s a good thing. Every profound spirit needs a mask; even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continuously growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is, shallow interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.-
Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil, Part II – Aphorism # 40
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If you have a truly revolutionary idea you’d want to be careful to state it in an oblique way so that it doesn’t get flooded or crushed before its time has come. be illegible to the people who would be hostile to it. find the early adopters who are able to piece it together, and support and encourage them. this requires being measured and disciplined, aka serious, which most people are not.
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(2022mar17) when you grow in public visibility/prominence, it becomes an education in how different people interpret words differently. there are a couple of hundred words maybe that can really cleave people into separate opposing groups.
there are a few classes of solutions to dealing with the increased friction that arises as your “surface area” increases
idk how to continue with that analogy but the most common paths are:
go quiet
go bland
go cold
go mad
I’m not a fan of any of these. “Go oblique” I think is the smartest choice for serious players.
I had a disagreement with a smart friend I respect who said, basically, that she considered obliqueness dishonest. I see how one could interpret it that way, and how in some cases especially it can def be be used evasively
but what is less obvious is that bluntness has costs too. (Well, less obvious to who? It really depends on who you’re talking to. There are entirely different worlds people inhabit depending on their agreeableness). People usually understand intuitively that you shouldn’t rush into a marriage, and you shouldn’t expect to say, rebuild a broken relationship with a parent or sibling instantly in one conversation. trust takes time, experience, varied contexts
The same is obviously true to me re: audience-building, or community building, but somehow this isn’t as obvious to other people. lots of people expect to be able to speedrun this and are startled to find that what comes quick also has a way of going quick. People are generally not too great at accurately perceiving and evaluating the costs of their choices if the choices don’t feel like choices. then it all just feels like how the world is. (h/t Jung: until you make the subconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate)
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(2022sep18) the point of obliqueness is not to be deceitful but to invite people to take their time with the truth, to really savor it. there’s not much sense in doing a “I read the Bible, here’s the top 10 things you need to know 👇🏾🧵” just so 1000 mfs “save to readwise” to never look at it. There’s a reason monasteries are built in obscure locations that you have to journey to get to, because the journey is part of the point
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@jachaseyoung: “After seeing how fragile ChatGPT’s restraints are I’m tempted to wonder if they were more, like, wink-nudge restraints than Restraints per se. If so, well played.”
me: wink-nudge restraints are good, it keeps out ~80-90% of the first order clueless. obliqueness stays winning
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Re: sex education: I would be kind of oblique about it. Have access to resources for people who need it, without making a huge deal about it. I feel similarly about things like race relations, gender relations and other culturally contentious things. And even answering questions like “how to live a good life”, I suspect might be better answered obliquely rather than directly. You want the reader to piece the answer together themselves, rather than take an answer at face-value, and misunderstand it.
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Be careful with fault lines
When you make it a practice to talk openly as much as possible about almost everything you think, see, come across, etc eventually you will stumble upon certain “fault lines” or “hotspots”. It’s sort of like taboos but not exactly. Sore points, maybe. Things that, when you point at them, talk about them (with the same casual curiosity that you use to talk about everything else!) you invite and incite disproportionate responses. It’s understandable why this is (and also annoying).
I define a nerd as someone who allows their curiosity to direct their behavior. Generally speaking, society will pay lip service to curiosity. Curiosity is good! Read! Learn! Ask questions! …no not like that.
But ok, you don’t want to be disrespectful, and there’s a lot of other things you’re curious about anyway, so you investigate other things. Also you investigate the meta-problem here: Why do these sore points exist? How do they work? And you learn the backstory, boy is it ugly.
My frustrating tentative conclusion is one that doesn’t surprise me, and yet it frustrates me anyway – there are some things that just don’t play well in public, because the public commons is not ready for it, because we do not yet have a high-trust public commons. I’ve circled around this a few times, bumped into it in multiple contexts the core of my frustration is: there are some kids who *only* have access to the public commons and nothing else, and if the commons is hostile and ugly, they will become that, too.
So this is a constraint that wasn’t so obvious to me (except intellectually) when I had a smaller following and could say whatever I wanted without as much concern about cascading effects. I understand better now why ppl with big followings are often bland. It’s humbling. Humbling how? I guess I used to think in some vague, hopeful way that, if I grow my following, I can choose to behave differently. And I’d like to think that I do still make a conscientious effort, I try my best. But there’s also a “physics” to it that I can’t defy.
I am determined to find ways to subvert these limitations though, and I think there are creative solutions available if you’re determined. The trick I think is to use intermediaries, use replies, to be subtle and artful, to reframe the problem(s).
Here’s a thing I don’t think anybody specifically told me: when you’re on a growth journey, there are things that you can do at each stage of that journey, that you can’t do at any other stage. Rather than be wishful for the next stage, enjoy what you can only do now.
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don’t break your ankles
(2023jan27) there are some contexts where directness is the best move. eg when you’re in an emergency. there are other contexts though where obliqueness is a better strategy. eg when being direct makes you a target for retaliation. I’ve had interesting disagreements w friends abt this before…
“target for retaliation” is not necessarily a bad thing either. especially in a trusted relationship, you want to have that back and forth. conflict is healthy. but in certain ‘dark forest’ type contexts you can’t know how big or bad or disproportionate the retaliation is gonna be.
there are situations in which being direct is going to trigger a retaliation event so large that it’ll basically “kill” you or “take you out of the game”, and this then limits the influence that you can have towards the outcome you want.
you might think, fuck that, I don’t want to play a game at all if I have to be oblique to achieve my goals, I quit. fair enough, that’s a valid choice, own it if you choose it.
what has been tiresome for me to witness over the years is when people get in over their heads after doing dramatic gestures and then quitting because they couldn’t take the heat of the retaliation that was, to me, clearly foreseeable.
It’s like watching people repeatedly jump from the window and break their ankles, instead of simply taking the stairs. and then now you’re out of the game. because, what, you thought the stairs were for sissies or chumps or something? But now you can’t even play!
I don’t even really care about the stairs vs window debate, or what you think a sissy or a chump is, or what weird issue you might have had with your dad or teacher that makes you think jumping out the window is smart. I mostly just wanna see people play.
stop jumping out of windows and then breaking your ankles. if you know you got some parkour skills or whatever then go ahead. I don’t care how you do it. Just think a little bit about how you would respond to how others might respond to what you do.
I get ahead of some of my peers in life just by not breaking my ankles. And I don’t even want to be ahead, I want us all to rise together and uplift the next generation and– you broke your ankles again? Ffs
No offense to the brittle bone community – in fact I bet you guys are even more judicious and careful and deliberate because you’re cognizant of the risks and I respect that deeply
“think 3 steps ahead so you can be public-facing without breaking your ankles” I think might be maybe an example of a prime number maze.
(1) what do you want to do, (2) how will people respond to that, (3) how will you respond to how people respond to that
you can go in the reverse direction too (1) what do you wanna do (2) why do you wanna do it (3) are there any more elegant or effective paths to addressing (2) simple dynamism, or I just like to call it “thinking”
but you don’t spend too long thinking; you have limited time and resources so think long enough to give you a fairly confident path of action, sanity-check against catastrophic failure, then act as survivably as you can. Again, all you need to do is not break your ankles
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Been in a nostalgic, reflecting-on-my-youth mood all day today. Another thought is: a lot of the problems that I agonized about solving, turned out to be solved in a rather oblique way than what I expected. like, I was typically framing it wrong, but there was no obvious way to know that that was what I was doing.
When I was about 20, I was kinda paranoid that I would never be able to get good at calendars and schedules etc, and so I would fail at life. Turns out, at 30, I still suck at calendars and schedules etc – but I just ended up putting all my skill points in other things, and it works out.
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Re: “technology is ruining teenagers” – let’s approach this obliquely. Let’s take cigarettes. The widespread narrative is that cigarettes are, obviously, bad for your health. No sensible person would dispute the core fact. But the question to ask is, what job is the cigarette doing?
There are a bunch of possible answers to that, often overlapping. For the rebellious teen, it’s an act of exercising sovereignty. For those who get addicted, it’s often addressing some other issue(s): anxiety, poor appetite, wonky blood sugar levels…
So my question is: if teenagers are self-harming with technology- and I’m willing to consider that it’s a possibility- why? What are the underlying issues there? My guesses from conversations with dozens of kids: lack of autonomy, sense of control, desire for connection.
And I will acknowledge that yeah maybe regulating kids’ tech use might alleviate the bad symptoms of tech use – although then you have to ask, what are the costs of that regulation? Is the parent going to use coercion to do it? How do you study the costs of *that*?
And my general worry with these things is that a simple-sounding problem with a simple-sounding solution might distract people from looking upstream at the harder & IMO more consequential problems: which is that our world itself is not very teenager-friendly (or people-friendly!)
I’m not saying “smartphones are great, hand them to babies and let them do whatever with no oversight” – of course not! I think the important thing to do as adults is to have honest, open conversations with young people in a way that isn’t dismissive. And also to sympathise with parents I think teens entering an autonomy-seeking phase might not be very interested in having those conversations with them. Which is why it takes a village: older brothers and sisters, uncles and aunties, a good public commons…
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Being even a slightly thoughtful person means you’ll need to cultivate all manner of social skills to deal with the fact that you know the future better than others. Or you’ll have to get rich enough to not care, which is doable, but you may also end up misanthropic or numb in the process and I’m not a fan of either of those options. This is basically the shaman’s path. being even slightly thoughtful makes you a bit of a shaman-wizard relative to the norm. every adult intuitively understands this when dealing with children. when you walk the path you realize we are all children.
The challenge: how do you be an adult who appreciates and enjoys the presence of children, without being condescending about it? without judging them for their childish ways? love them without terrifying them? be honest without being hurtful?
When I say “know the future better than others”, I don’t mean knowing the precise dates of specific events. I mean knowing the inevitability of change, which lots of people are deluded about to varying degrees.
Being a rigorously honest person means you’ll need to develop the social skills to deal with liars and bullshitters. malicious ones, sure, but also innocuous ones. I have a lot of material about this stuff, but I always approach it in a somewhat oblique way, because saying this stuff too explicitly in an overly head-on way invites the worst sort of attention from the most clueless bunglers who think they’re geniuses.
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Just realized I can make an interesting promise about my future YouTube videos: I will talk about painful, difficult, challenging topics, but I will never mention them in the title, so they will only be discussed in the comments by serious people and not drama-seekers.
I believe that this sort of oblique strategy is key to improving tensions at a lot of the flashpoints and fault lines in society. It can’t quite be done directly head on, because that’s too adversarial. it has to be done sort of diagonally, sideways.
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I used to blog about local politics, and I found it frustrating and unproductive. I prefer oblique approaches now.
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I think people are conditioned early on to be oblique about their social needs, because being explicitly socially needy is often seen as tacky – unless you’re doing it with finesse, like an artist or a comedian.
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tbc