Culture - The Word That Fucked Up Our Species

I have written so many times about how almost all atrocities committed against our fellow animal family members is not considered immoral since people take umbrage behind the fucked up excuses of “culture”. 

People use culture to macro bullshit and not focus on micro morality which is precious for life on earth. 

Alex Nowrasteh’s wonderful piece is looking at this monster at a different angle. Different angle but same monster. 

The cleanest test is the divided-country natural experiment. North Korea and South Korea share a language, ethnicity, history, and culture up to 1945. One is among the richest countries on earth, the other among the poorest. East and West Germany diverged dramatically under different institutions and converged after reunification. Mainland China stagnated under Mao while Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong prospered, all four sharing Chinese culture. In every case, the culture was identical on both sides of the border. The incentives, shaped by the institutions, are what changed. The outcome followed the institution, not the culture. Untangling causality is difficult, sometimes impossible, but that’s no reason to embrace a false explanation like “the culture made them do it.”

At its root, the culture discourse is anti-intellectual. Culture is a faux explanation for social behavior and outcomes that have real explanations. Think harder. Use AI to search the literature if you have to because other researchers have probably already written about the issue you claim is just caused by culture. The cultural explanation is the one you reach for when you’ve decided the search isn’t worth your time. Better to remain quiet if culture is the only explanation you’ve got. Here are some examples.

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If a country is poor because of its culture, nobody has to examine the bad incentives facing members of that society. Intellectual laziness explains the rest. Finding the price, the constraint, the institutional mechanism that creates an incentive is hard, but invoking culture as if it’s a magical exogenous decider lets you stop searching. Cultural explanations are cheap to produce, requiring only anecdotes rather than data, prices, or evidence. It feels like an answer because it has the grammatical structure of one. “Japanese people ride trains because of their culture” masquerades as an explanation, but it’s just a tautology.

Culture is endogenous to everything. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is circular reasoning. Every cultural explanation must first survive a price, incentive, and institutional audit. Few of them do, but those that do are extraordinary findings, which is perhaps another explanation why so many claim it. Nobody would let economists get away with explaining a recession of high unemployment with the explanation, “It’s the economy.” We shouldn’t let others get away with the equally lazy non-explanation of “it’s the culture.”

 

Curiosity Is No Solo Act

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

In an Indigenous onto-epistemology, one is always coming to know in intimate relationship with other knowers, including not only community members, but also all the components of the earth itself. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of her own Indigenous curiosity. Growing up surrounded by “shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves,” she knew the plants had chosen her. Declaring a botany major in college, she soon learned to stockpile taxonomic names and functional facts, all while letting her capacities to attend to energetic relationships fall into disuse. It was not until rekindling her connections with Indigenous communities — and specifically Indigenous scientists — that she remembered how “intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.” Her scholarship and outreach are now focused on honoring this ray of scientific and social wisdom.

What is perhaps most distinctive about Indigenous philosophy is its imbrication of a relational cosmology with a relational epistemology. At the heart of this worldview is “the eternal convergence of the world within any one thing,” writes Carl Mika, such that “one thing is never alone and all things actively construct and compose it.” From this perspective of deep holism, talk of knowing any one thing is “minimally useful.” As such, knowledge is not properly propositional but instead procedural; it is less concerned with knowing what than with knowing how. And its wisdom lies in “sharing” more than “stating.”

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The Social Edge of Intelligence

If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity through cognitive offloading, homogenization of creative output, and the elimination of interaction-dense work—then the technology is gradually undermining the conditions for its own advancement. Its successes, rather than failures, create a spiral: a slow attenuation of the very substrate it feeds on, spelling doom.

This is the Social Edge Paradox, and the intellectual tradition it draws from is older and more interdisciplinary than most AI commentary acknowledges.

Michael Tomasello’s evolutionary research establishes that human cognition diverged from other primates by a process other than superior individual processing power. The real impetus came through the capacity for collaborative activity with shared goals and complementary roles. He argues that even private thought is “fundamentally dialogic and social” in structure—an internalization of interaction patterns. Autonomous neural capacity is far from enough to account for the abilities of human thought.

Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis quantifies the link: neocortex ratios predict social group size across primates; language evolved as a mechanism for managing relationships at scales too large for grooming. Two-thirds of conversation is social, relational, reputational. Language is often mistaken as an information pipe, but it is really a social coordination technology.

My own position is that collective intent engineering, found in forms as familiar as simple brainstorming, accounts for most frontier cognitive expansion. The intelligent algorithms of today have not been built with this critical function in mind.

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The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and trust that the productivity gains will compound into a wealthier, more efficient world.

The Social Edge Framework tells a different story. It says: the intelligence we are automating was never ours alone. It was forged in conversation, argument, institutional friction, and collaborative struggle. It lives in the spaces between people, and it shows up in AI capabilities only because those spaces were rich enough to leave linguistic traces worth learning from.

Every time a company automates an entry-level role, it saves a salary and loses a learning curve, unless it compensates. Every time a knowledge worker delegates a draft to an AI without engaging critically, the statistical thinning of the organizational record advances by an imperceptible increment. Every time an organization mistakes polished output for strategic progress, it consumes cognitive surplus without generating new knowledge.

None of these individual acts is catastrophic. However, their compound effect may be.

The organizations that will thrive in the next decade are not those with the highest AI utilization rates. They are those that understand something the epoch-chaining thought experiment makes vivid: that AI’s capabilities are an inheritance from the complexity of human social life. And inheritances, if consumed without reinvestment, eventually run out. This is particularly critical as AI becomes heavily customized for our organizational culture.

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The Social Edge is more than a metaphor. It is the literal boundary between what AI can do well and what it will keep struggling with due to fundamental internal contradictions. Furthermore, the framework asks us all to pay attention to how the very investment thesis behind AI also contains the seeds of its own failure. And it reminds leaders that AI’s frontier today is set by the richness of the social world that produced the data it learned from.

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Ideas Of Slavery

Now a new book, John Samuel Harpham’s The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, asks us to reconsider that standard account of events. Harpham does not discount economic or imperial explanations for the rise of New World slavery; what he suggests, instead, is that those explanations can make sense only within a culture where “slavery was available as an option.” His goal, as he puts it, is to discover “the reasons for which slavery was understood to be a status about which narrow-minded men could make calculations.”

The result is ironic and tragic in the way of the best history. Initially, Harpham claims, the English hesitated to embrace African slavery. Then, when they did, their decision was not based on any perceived racial difference or inferiority. It was based, instead, on something even more troubling: Harpham believes that English people enslaved Africans not because they were seen as different but because they seemed so very similar.

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Harpham’s history reconsiders Jordan’s account of that “unthinking decision.” If the keynote of Jordan’s book was that early English observers saw Africans as different, the keynote of Harpham’s is that English people had a lot of different ideas: about Africa, about Africans, about skin color and about slavery. Nowhere was there broad agreement, he claims, except perhaps about the essence of slavery. But early English ideas about slavery were also different from what we might expect.

Throughout the period when colonial slavery was taking shape, Harpham explains, English writers still relied heavily on a conception of slavery that they inherited from ancient Rome. In contrast to the ancient Greek idea that some people could be “natural slaves,” a view most commonly associated with Aristotle, Roman law defined slavery as the product of convention. Individuals were naturally free, in this view, but could be reduced to slavery if they committed a crime or, more commonly, were captured in war. “In short,” Harpham writes, “slavery arose in Roman law as the result of history rather than nature, as a fact of modern life rather than a timeless feature of the universe.”

Accordingly, the central question for English writers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not what qualities made a person a natural slave—a question that might lead to a racial answer—but instead what circumstances allowed for enslavement. The English showed a special interest in this question, Harpham suggests, because they were simultaneously forging a national self-identity based on “the conviction that theirs was a nation dedicated to freedom.” This conviction grew out of internal developments, such as the decline of villeinage (a kind of serfdom), but it also took shape in direct contrast to England’s chief international rivals, the Spanish and the Portuguese.

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Rebel - Refuses To Consent To Falseness, Injustice, Or Mediocrity

Rebellion is not merely reactive but creative. It doesn’t only tear down — it seeks to reimagine. Albert Camus understood this when he wrote that “I rebel — therefore we exist.” For Camus, rebellion was the refusal to accept absurdity passively. It was the insistence that life and justice still matter even in a godless world. To rebel, then, is to affirm the possibility of meaning precisely where meaning seems most threatened. It is to insist that one’s freedom and integrity are worth defending, even when doing so brings discomfort or risk.

Rebellion typically begins in solitude but inevitably reaches toward solidarity. The solitary rebel says no to hypocrisy, cruelty, or exploitation; yet the truest form of that no is said on behalf of all. 

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To live rebelliously in this deeper sense requires courage of a particular kind — the courage to trust one’s perception of what is wrong and to act in accordance with one’s conscience. Many people lose meaning because they no longer believe their own perceptions. They feel what is off — at work, in politics, in relationships — but they suppress that intuition in order to get by. Over time, this suppression breeds cynicism and fatigue.

Rebellion restores vitality by reuniting perception with action. It says: “I see what I see, I know what I know, and I will live in truth.” That alignment itself is deeply meaningful.

The pathway of rebellion does not exclude tenderness or humility. The most enduring rebels — figures like Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, or the many artists and thinkers who defied oppressive norms — rebelled not out of hatred but out of love: love for justice, for humanity, for the sanctity of truth. Rebellion, rightly understood, is a form of devotion. It refuses to let meaning be trampled by fear or conformity. It honors life enough to resist what diminishes it.

For the individual seeking reenchantment, rebellion may take quieter, more personal forms. It might mean refusing to keep up a façade of perpetual busyness or success. It might mean declining to participate in conversations that are mean-spirited or false. It might mean leaving a career that pays well but deadens the heart. In each case, rebellion functions as a reclamation of self. By saying “no” to what is meaningless, one makes room for what is real to appear. The act of refusal becomes the act of awakening.

This pathway, however, carries hazards. A rebel without an anchoring vision and a sense of humanity can become a cynic or destroyer, mistaking constant opposition for depth. To avoid this, it would be wise to tether rebellion to love, to beauty, to some image of the world as it could be. The purpose of rebellion is not to stay angry forever but to clear space for creation, renewal, and joy. Rebellion that remains open-hearted is not corrosive but cleansing; it removes what is false so that truth can breathe again.

In this way, rebellion restores the pulse of meaning through the experience of agency. The disenchantment of modern life often stems from powerlessness — feeling that one’s choices make no difference, that the world is too vast or corrupted to be changed. To rebel, even in a small and symbolic way, is to reclaim a measure of agency. It reignites the sense that one’s voice, one’s actions, one’s very stance toward the world still matter. That sense of mattering is one of the foundations of meaning itself.

Finally, rebellion reenchants because it reconnects us to the moral dimension of existence. It reminds us that life is not neutral or arbitrary but charged with value. Each act of rebellion is, at its core, an assertion of value: this matters; I matter; truth matters. That moral clarity dispels the fog of meaninglessness more effectively than any abstract philosophy. It returns us to the felt conviction that life is worth the trouble, that the struggle itself is vital.

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Aristotle & His “Not Even Wrong” Ideas

Unbelievable bullshit people like Aristotle made the shit up without any epistemic humility but the real issue, these folks are still respected. People like Norman Borlaug, Robert Trivers names nor their works are known to anyone. Well, god bless my species. 

In the 4th century BCE, the philosopher Aristotle had two theories about this. He postulated that they hibernated during the winter as other animals did. Swallows, for example, encased themselves in little balls of clay and sank out of sight to the bottom of swamps. His other idea was that the missing species transformed themselves into the birds that did stick around for the winter, and changed back when summer came.

The little old man in de Bergerac’s tale was an imagined Spanish soldier called Domingo Gonsales, and he was the hero of another story. In 1638, just a couple of decades before Cyrano’s “A Voyage to the Moon” became available, the English cleric Francis Godwin published “The Man in the Moone,” a fictional account of Gonsales’ lunar adventure. In the book, Gonsales trained 25 swans to pull an ‘engine’ he had made. One day, he took a jaunt in his swan carriage which happened to coincide with the time birds were accustomed to disappear, as it seemed, from Earth.

Gonsales was about to find out the answer to the mystery. To his surprise, the swans flew upwards, until they reached what we would think of as orbit and became weightless. French scientist Blaise Pascal’s experiments demonstrating the lack of atmosphere in space had not yet filtered through to Godwin, as both birds and man breathed as usual. In 12 days they reached the Moon, where he found other migrating terrestrial birds, such as swallows, nightingales, and woodcocks. When the swans started to show signs of agitation, he divined that they were ready to return to Earth; and so he harnessed them again and sailed home in nine days, gravitational pull on his side.

This was a ripping yarn for sure, but some thought it was a plausible alternative to Aristotle’s theories, especially as there was a Biblical passage that seemed to allude to it. In the King James translation, it goes:

Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming (Jeremiah 8:7).

Grounded In Reality Piece On AI Mania

I don’t say that because I think that AI models are bad or because I think they won’t get better; I think that AI models are very good and will get much better. No. The fault is not with the models, but with us. The world is run by humans, and because it’s run by humans—entities that are smelly, oily, irritable, stubborn, competitive, easily frightened, and above all else inefficient—it is a world of bottlenecks. And as long as we have human bottlenecks, we’ll need humans to deal with them: we will have, in other words, complementarity.

People frequently underrate how inefficient things are in practically any domain, and how frequently these inefficiencies are reducible to bottlenecks caused simply by humans being human. Laws and regulations are obvious bottlenecks. But so are company cultures, and tacit local knowledge, and personal rivalries, and professional norms, and office politics, and national politics, and ossified hierarchies, and bureaucratic rigidities, and the human preference to be with other humans, and the human preference to be with particular humans over others, and the human love of narrative and branding, and the fickle nature of human preferences and tastes, and the severely limited nature of human comprehension. And the biggest bottleneck is simply the human resistance to change: the fact that people don’t like shifting what they’re doing. All of these are immensely powerful. Production processes are governed by their least efficient inputs: the more efficient the most efficient inputs, the more important the least efficient inputs.

In the long run, we should expect the power of technology to overcome these bottlenecks, in the same way that a river erodes a stone over many years and decades—just as how in the early decades of the twentieth century, the sheer power of what electricity could accomplish gradually overcame the bottlenecks of antiquated factory infrastructure, outdated workflows, and the conservatism of hidebound plant managers. This process, however, takes time: it took decades for electricity, among the most powerful of all general-purpose technologies, to start impacting productivity growth. AI will probably be much faster than that, not least because it can be agentic in a way that electricity cannot. But these bottlenecks are real and important and are obvious if you look at any part of the real world. And as long as those bottlenecks exist, no matter the level of AI capabilities, we should expect a real and powerful complementarity between human labor and AI, simply because the “human plus AI” combination will be more productive than AI alone.

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There Is No Such Thing As Grand Strategy - The Continued Influence Of A Bad Genre

So this all begs the question, if not grand strategy, then what? If we discard the idea that states possess a coherent, elevated ideological and philosophical design integrating all instruments of power across time, what replaces it? I would simply say that doing so would provide a far clearer view of what strategy actually is. If we return to Gaddis’s original definition, “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities,” strategy appears not as a grand design, but as a continual exercise in discipline, prioritization, and adjustment.

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A more realistic approach, then, is to focus on decision points rather than designs. Instead of asking whether a state has a grand strategy, we should ask how it resolves specific tradeoffs at specific moments. Where does it allocate marginal resources? Which risks does it accept, and which does it avoid? Which commitments does it reinforce, and which does it quietly allow to erode? These choices, taken together, tell us far more about strategy than any post hoc narrative of alignment ever could. This reframing also forces greater intellectual honesty about failure. When strategy is imagined as a grand design, failure is attributed to incompetence or moral weakness. When strategy is understood as constraint management, failure is often tragic but explicable. States misjudge adversaries, overestimate capacities, underestimate costs, and act on incomplete information. These are not deviations from strategy; they are the conditions under which strategy exists.

Finally, abandoning the grand strategy genre clarifies what strategic skill actually looks like. It is not the ability to synthesize everything into a single vision, but the capacity to say no, to sequence objectives, and to recognize when ambition has outrun means. It is judgment exercised under uncertainty, not mastery imposed from above. This kind of strategic thinking is less glamorous and far harder to narrate, which is precisely why it is so often displaced by grander abstractions.

There is no higher plane of statecraft waiting to be discovered beyond politics, budgets, institutions, and tradeoffs. What exists instead is the ordinary, difficult work of governance under constraint—choosing among competing priorities, allocating scarce resources, managing risk, and accepting imperfection. Abandoning the language of grand strategy does not mean abandoning strategic thought. It means stripping away a genre that flatters elites and replacing it with analysis that takes politics seriously. Strategy need not be grand to be real. It needs only to be honest.

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No-Technological-Solution Problem

Bingo! What an insight!

We sapiens fucked things up, are still fucking things up, and promise, to continue fucking things up in future. 

Changing their mind and behavior is not in the equation but my species is planning to  innovate the fuck of technologies to clean up the mess they created while they continue to fuck things up. 

Hmm, god bless my species. 

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Dan Brooks about his new book A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century:

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. 

This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. 

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That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

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One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation.

 

Culture Is The Mass-Synchronization Of Framings!

This can be good and bad too. Hence, I have an aversion for that word - "culture".

The genesis of almost all savagery, ruthlessness, and immorality against animals is from so called culture, 

This is an insightful piece on the same topic: 

A mental model is a simulation of "how things might unfold", and we all build and rebuild hundreds of mental models every day. A framing, on the other hand, is "what things exist in the first place", and it is much more stable and subtle. Every mental model is based on some framing, but we tend to be oblivious to which framing we're using most of the time (I've explained all this better in A Framing and Model About Framings and Models).

Framings are the basis of how we think and what we are even able to perceive, and they're the most consequential thing that spreads through a population in what we call "culture".

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Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist and play a role in mental models—that arose in those same arbitrary but self-reinforcing ways. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of Our Success, brings up several studies demonstrating the cultural differences in framings.

He mentions studies that estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800's to have been around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture at the time was much poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer and less-defined moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models. Other studies found that children in Western countries are brought up with very general and abstract categories for animals, like "fish" and "bird", while children in small-scale societies tend to think in terms of more specific categories, such as "robin" and "jaguar", leading to different ways to understand and interface with the world.

But framings affect more than understanding. They influence how we take in the information from the world around us. Explaining this paper, Henrich writes:

People from different societies vary in their ability to accurately perceive objects and individuals both in and out of context. Unlike most other populations, educated Westerners have an inclination for, and are good at, focusing on and isolating objects or individuals and abstracting properties for these while ignoring background activity or context. Alternatively, expressing this in reverse: Westerners tend not to see objects or individuals in context, attend to relationships and their effects, or automatically consider context. Most other peoples are good at this.

How many connections and interrelations you consider when thinking is in the realm of framings. If your mental ontology treats most things as largely independent and self-sufficient, your mental models will tend to be, for better or worse, more reductionist and less holistic.

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The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation. This ability is innate in all humans, regardless of culture: we are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

Overimitation ... may be distinctively human. For example, although chimpanzees imitate the way conspecifics instrumentally manipulate their environment to achieve a goal, they will copy the behavior only selectively, skipping steps which they recognize as unnecessary [unlike humans, who tend to keep even the unnecessary steps]. ... Once chimpanzees and orangutans have figured out how to solve a problem, they are conservative, sticking to whatever solution they learn first. Humans, in contrast, will often switch to a new solution that is demonstrated by peers, sometimes even switching to less effective strategies under peer influence.

— The Psychology of Normative Cognition, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis theirs.

We have a built-in need to do what the people around us do, even when we know of better or less wasteful ways. This means that we can't even explain culture as something that, while starting from chance events, naturally progresses towards better and better behaviors. That's what science is for.

Once the synchronized behaviors are in our systems, when we are habituated to certain shared ways of doing things, these behaviors feed back into our most basic mindsets, which guide our future behaviors, which further affect each other's mindset, and so on, congealing into the shared framings we call culture, i.e.: whatever happens to give the least friction in whatever happens to be the current shared behavioral landscape.

This is why, often, formal rules and laws do indeed take root in a culture: not because they're rules, but because the way they are enforced creates enough friction—or following them creates enough mutual benefits—that, like in the corridor lanes, crowds will settle into following them. This is also why, perhaps even more often, groups will settle into the easy "unruly" patterns.

 

Deep Congruence

Congruence is a quality discussed by many psychologists—Carl Rogers popularized the word, saying that, among other things, it is a necessary trait in therapists. He defined it (roughly) as a state of unity between your experience, your self-concept, and your outward behavior. Which is to say: you aren’t pretending. I think this is a solid definition, but it’s likely to be misread. It can sound like living up to a scorecard—I said I would be an academic, now I’m tenure track. If that were the only requirement, congruence would be fairly common, when in fact highly congruent people are uncommon.

Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered. What stops congruence from occurring are layers of denial that are unpleasant to pass through. Although congruence is a source of endless happiness, the path there can be devastating. To paraphrase a cliche, you may have to finally give up on experiencing a better past.

But must we define it? We know it when we see the genuine article in abundance. We can spot people who live in non-naive contentment, or unhurried action. Running into them is comforting if we seek integrity ourselves. Speaking to my teacher feels like drinking water from a lucky well, filled with life-restoring minerals. On the other hand, if we’re interested in maintaining some variety of denial, the company of highly congruent people is disturbing. The falsehoods we’re trying to maintain immediately ring false before them. They appear as highly but particularly resonant chambers, in which integrity echoes and bullshit dies immediately.

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Congruent people compel us because they have little to prove; they have converged on an inner authority. Thus, when you encounter them, you don’t feel like you’re being enlisted in their ongoing arguments with themselves. You’re not recruited to shore up their self-image, or resolve their dilemmas. You’re liberated to be as you are—talking to them feels like entering open space. Their love isn’t grabby and manipulative, and they can say hard truths from a place of simple observation. They can deeply understand you without needing to suck up your essence, or merge with it. Being listened to in this way, by a person capable of it, is psychoactive; you hear yourself anew.

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Seeking congruence can sound selfish. However, in practice, it rarely is. Given that our environments consist of others in pain, facing the totality of your experience and remaining self-serving requires being a real asshole. Most of us are less cruel than that, and capable of gradually moving towards increasingly skillful love for others. The highly congruent people I know tend to support everyone around them, in ways both obvious and not.

One reliable test to see whether you’re in a place of congruence is the existence of boredom. When you are in a state of congruence, at rest you don’t feel bored. Instead you feel peace. What needs to be done has been done or will be done, there is no need to flail against the silence.

I’ve heard from multiple sources that deathbed enlightenment is a real phenomenon. Which is to say: approaching death, many disintegrated and suffering people suddenly find acceptance. Congruence is coming after you; you can almost outrun it, if you try.

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Akrasia !

Sometimes a simple word explains so much about humanity. 

Akrasia is a greek word, wiki page: 

Akrasia refers to the phenomenon of acting against one's better judgment—the state in which one intentionally performs an action while simultaneously believing that a different course of action would be better. 

Sometimes translated as "weakness of will" or "incontinence," akrasia describes the paradoxical human experience of knowingly choosing what one judges to be the inferior option.

Where do I even start unpacking this :-) ?  There are so many people who are akratic in some of the fundamental elements of one's life. I mean the core of existence 

Paul's piece about the stupidity of free-soloing, his accident and finally, how he learned from his akratic traits and now - the best part rebuilding his life with cat name Koshka.

for the record, I skipped the akratic segment and went straight to Max :-); man what a decision was that! Thank god, for once my pre-frontal cortex helped me.

Precisely because free soloing is selfish and stupid, it is a controversial topic even amongst climbers. The vast majority of free climbers do not free solo. Some of my closest climbing partners would commit to doing very serious traditional climbing routes, and yet firmly draw the line at soloing. (And trad climbing definitely is serious, as proved by the cripple voice dictating these words.) They told me bluntly that I should never do it, and they didn’t like hearing about it when I had done it. So why did I do it?

There is an ancient Greek term, akrasia. It is sometimes translated as “weakness of will” – although I don’t like that translation, because it already narrows and contorts the field in ways that distort reflection. Nonetheless, akrasia refers to situations in which a person apparently acts against their own professed best judgement. For example, the student who knows that the best thing to do is stay home and prepare for tomorrow’s exam (the outcome of which is crucial to her final grade), and yet who nonetheless goes to the party and gets drunk. She knows and agrees and affirms that the best thing for her to do is to stay home and revise. But she not only does something else, she does it when she herself knows and agrees and affirms that it is a worse thing for her to do. She is akratic. We all are, sometimes.

But the stakes of akrasia are not always the same.

[---]

On the way down, I texted my friend and told him what I had just done. He told me that I was a fucking idiot. I didn’t care. Sometimes you just have to go to the party, even when you know you shouldn’t. And whether you ultimately regret going will depend on more than just the fact that you went. Akrasia is a bird of many feathers.

[---]

But then I try to watch my anger, notice it – and let it slip away. Fair doesn’t come into it. It never did, and it never will. Such anger leads to nothing worth keeping. This week I adopted a cat. I’ve named her Koshka. You rebuild a life, one brick at a time.

 

3 Antidotes To Your Suffering

So simple but yet a profound wisdom from George Saunders. 

I hardly meet anyone who lives by just one of these, leave alone all three.  

• You’re not permanent. 

• You’re not the most important thing. 

• You’re not separate.

And why is this simple wisdom not omnipresent?

In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act… Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

 

Pain, Life & Knowledge!

Just a brilliant synthesis of knowledge. Just brilliant!

It never crossed my mind to think of knowledge along the same terms as life - struggling to evolve, and adapt. 

Very few can preserve and move knowledge through time while billions don't bother. 

But similar to life, knowledge probably also has a minimum external threshold needed to continue forward (life and knowledge doesn't have any self-imposed or innate plateau but a minimum external threshold to survive another moment in time). I hope we have almost infinite time to reach that minimum threshold. 

Read this small piece packed with knowledge... well I should say wisdom: 

All this grows from a tiny seed long ago swimming in a vast ocean: the sensation of pain. From “Ouch!” to “Eureka!”. We go to universities because our distant ancestors felt pricks and pangs: one sort of knowledge led to the other after a brief period of time (by cosmic standards). A super-scientist might have seen it coming (“It won’t be long before they have advanced degrees and diplomas”). The point I want to stress is that this is a natural evolutionary process, governed by the usual laws of evolution–cumulative, progressive, opportunistic, gradual. 

As species evolve from other species by small alterations, so it is with the evolution of knowledge; there is no simultaneous independent creation of all the species of knowledge. Knowledge-how, acquaintance knowledge, propositional knowledge, the a priori and the a posteriori, knowledge of fact and knowledge of value, science and common sense—all this stems from the same distant root (though no doubt supplemented). It was pain that got the ball rolling, and maybe nothing else would have (pain really marks a watershed in the evolution of life on Earth). Knowledge of language came very late in the game and is not be regarded as fundamental. Epistemology is much broader than language. Knowledge has all the variety and complexity we expect from life forms with a long evolutionary history. Quite a bit of the anatomy of advanced organisms is devoted to epistemic aims–the eyes, the ears, the nose, the sense of touch, memory, thought, and so on. 

Knowledge is not a negligible adaptation. Yet it must have comparatively simple origins. It didn’t arise when a human woke up one bright morning and felt a love of wisdom in his bosom. It arose from primitive swampy creatures trying to survive another day.

Knowledge, like life in general, is a struggle with obstacles. Survival isn’t easy, and nor is knowledge. In both there are obstacles to be overcome, resistance and recalcitrance to be fought, battles to win or lose. Knowledge is hard: you know it don’t come easy. It’s a difficult task. Those books about the history of science draw this lesson repeatedly—it wasn’t easy to figure out the structure of the solar system or the laws of genetics. But that is part of the very nature of knowledge as an evolved capacity—the struggle to be informed. The organism needs to know if it is in danger, so pain came along; we would like to know whether the Earth is the center of the universe, so astronomy was invented. Knowing is the overcoming of obstacles, like the rest of evolved life. Knowledge was born in pain and struggle. It is not for the fainthearted. This is epistemology naturalized.

 

Did Grief Give Him Parkinson’s?

Wow! Thats what I said out loud after I read first few lines. This is an unique and precious view into health which happens very rarely - unveiling the complexities of not just Parkinson's but life itself. 

I highly recommend reading this synopsis of Jack and Jeff's life: 

I had driven up to spend time with Jack, who has Parkinson’s disease, and his twin brother Jeff, who does not. Because they are identical twins with identical genomes, it may appear to be a mystery that only Jack is sick. Yet scientists have long known that genes alone cannot explain why some people get Parkinson’s and others don’t. While a handful of genetic mutations are linked to the disease, about 90 percent of cases of Parkinson’s are “sporadic,” meaning the disease does not run in the family. And twins, even identical twins, don’t usually get Parkinson’s in tandem. In one of the largest longitudinal twin studies of the disease, Swedish scientists reported in 2011 that of 542 pairs in which at least one twin had Parkinson’s, the majority were “discordant,” meaning that the second twin was unaffected. The discordance rate was higher for fraternal twins, who are no more alike genetically than any two siblings. But even identical twins had a discordance rate of 89 percent.

So if genes don’t explain most cases, how about the environment? Several environmental factors have been linked to Parkinson’s, which has been shown to occur at higher-than-expected rates in, for instance, people who were prisoners of war in World War II. There is also a higher rate in people who live on farms or who drink well water, probably because of exposure to certain pesticides.

But the environmental connection is precisely what makes Jack and Jeff so interesting. For almost all of their 68 years, they have lived no more than half a mile apart. They have been exposed to the same air, the same well water, the same dusty farm chores, the same pesticides. They built their homes a five-minute walk from each other, on two plots of their father’s 132-acre farm in eastern Pennsylvania. And since 1971 they have worked in the same office, their desks pushed together, at a graphic design firm they co-own. All this makes their particular discordancy tougher to explain.

The existence of a pair of twins with identical DNA and nearly identical environments in which only one is sick—that’s a researcher’s bonanza. Whatever difference can be untangled in the twins’ physiology probably relates directly to the disease and its origins. The genome can be held constant; environmental toxins and other exposures can be held constant; what remains, researchers are left to think, might be an odd shift in a particular neural pathway that has a relevant function all its own.

[---]

It’s where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son.

After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson’s but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.

[---]

Their lives diverged between the ages of 18 and 25, tilting their paths off course just enough to remain, forever after, the tiniest bit askew. First they chose different colleges: Jeff went to Moravian College in Bethlehem, about an hour from home; Jack went further away, to Syracuse University. They both reported to the draft board in 1968, but only Jack passed the physical. Jeff, who had had a childhood infection that left him nearly deaf in one ear, was classified 4-F.

[---]

The beauty of stem cell cultures is that they behave in the dish similarly to how they would in the body. That’s what happened in this case. The mid-brain dopaminergic neurons grown from Jack’s cells produced abnormally low amounts of dopamine. The Jeff-derived culture produced normal amounts.

But here was the first surprise: Even though Jeff showed no clinical signs of Parkinson’s or any other neurological disease, the Jeff-derived culture was not exactly normal. Both twins, it turned out, had a mutation on a gene called GBA (a mutation already known to be associated with Parkinson’s disease), and as a result, both of their brain cell cultures produced just half the normal amount of an enzyme linked to that gene, beta-glucocerebrosidase. They also both produced three times the normal level of alpha-synuclein, a brain protein usually broken down by a process involving the GBA enzyme. Alpha-synuclein is thought to be related to Parkinson’s, possibly by leading to the formation of the toxic lesions known as Lewy bodies that are a hallmark of the disease.

So rather than answering questions about the twins’ discordance, these findings only raised more. Jeff had the same Parkinson’s mutation his brother had, and his brain cells in culture behaved just as abnormally in relation to the GBA enzyme and alpha-synuclein. Yet he apparently has been spared. It was a puzzle. The scientists hoped the answer existed somewhere in those two Petri dishes.

[---]

To the twins, the “pressure cooker” way Jack dealt with stress, most grievously the loss of Gabe, helps explain Jack’s added health burden today: the Parkinson’s, the glaucoma, the prostate cancer. Jeff said those might be “physical manifestations” of the different ways they handled stress. “Jack internalizes more than I do,” he said.

The connection between stress and disease is a lively research topic, as scientists discover how life experiences alter gene expression and contribute to diseases ranging from diabetes to the common cold. But while statements about the “gene-environment interaction” have become a familiar trope, the twins’ story offers a different way to look at it. Traditionally, “environment” is defined as external events that occur over a lifetime, or the impact of those events at the molecular level, which is in the realm of epigenetics. According to Steve Cole, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, the relevant aspect of “environment” in terms of the twins might be something more interior and personal. Cole is interested in “the environment we create in our heads”—not what literally happens, but how the individual experiences what happens. “That is the most interesting aspect of the story of the twins,” he told me recently. “Their experiential environments.”

[---]

For now, when they try to explain their divergent medical histories, the twins return to the tyranny of small differences: Jack’s more introverted personality, rockier life, quieter grieving style. In this belief they tap into the suspicions of a small cadre of neuroscientists trying to pinpoint the connection between stress and neurodegeneration. Maybe the twins are on to something the scientists are on the verge of identifying. Or maybe the brothers who have been all but inseparable are trying to protect themselves from the cruel realization that fate can unspool in dissonant ways.

 

Truth & Unearned Certainty - Søren Kierkegaard

And from here on, when we talk about “faith,” we’re using Kierkegaard’s meaning — not belief in a doctrine, but the inner stance required to live with unanswered questions. 

If that sounds narrowly religious, it’s a misread. 

Kierkegaard is describing a stance that shows up wherever people have to act without guarantees: in innovation, in design, in leadership, and many other forms of work.

This pandemic is not just related to religion but also has spread into politics, nationality, culture and even sports, to personal preference of a goddam LLM.

Wise minds observed how humans embrace this pandemic with wide arms - this is a timeless trait of humans. These priceless observations from one such wise mind:

People were comfortable with answers being given to them before questions were even asked. Faith was spoken about constantly, often with confidence, but this confidence felt rehearsed. Kierkegaard couldn’t tell if people ever wrestled with or questioned their beliefs.

Eventually, he realized there was nothing to question. The system had already done the hard part. The role of the individual was to nod in agreement. This created a kind of harmony, but a shallow one… a collective certainty that never had to prove itself against anything real.

As he grew older, Kierkegaard saw how quickly certainty had replaced belief. Whenever a group becomes too sure of itself, it stops producing individuals capable of doing the inward work that faith requires. People learn to perform conviction rather than develop it. Say something often enough and you can skip the part where you understand (or question) it.

He noticed another pattern: People spoke confidently about truths they had never encountered firsthand, truths they had never risked anything to understand. And inherited certainty revealed an uncomfortable vulnerability: Once you depend on a system to hand you your conclusions, you tend to move as the system moves… and you move with confidence.

Kierkegaard wasn’t worried about disbelief. He wasn’t even worried about people changing their minds. His concern was unearned belief. Conviction without scrutiny and identity without introspection. The key here, is that the desire for certainty often poses as a strength, but usually signals the opposite:

A lack of faith.

[---]

Systems (institutions) depend on predictability, and certainty delivers. It keeps people aligned, keeps roles stable, and keeps operations smooth enough that no one has to confront the inner workings. Churches, governments, workplaces, even families in their more rigid forms, all learn to reward conviction that doesn’t ask questions. Call it clarity or discipline or commitment, but the effect is the same: the more certainty people perform, the less individual they become.

This creates a loop that’s hard to break. People adopt certainty because it makes them feel secure. Institutions reinforce certainty because it makes people easier to manage. And the more those two forces reinforce each other, the more faith becomes something referenced rather than lived.

Unearned certainty has consequences. As it takes over, faith has nothing left to do. The questions don’t disappear, but people learn to avoid them. Individuals learn to shrink to fit the expectations of the system… and the system rewards the shrinking.

[---]

It’s a familiar pattern. You don’t have to comprehend the complexity. You only need to sound aligned with it. Certainty becomes a performance of being well-informed, and systems reward the performance because it keeps everything moving in one direction.

This creates a strange contradiction. We now have unprecedented access to the full picture, but we rarely use it. We reach for summaries, frameworks, pre-digested opinions, and the moral scaffolding provided by the groups we belong to. We inherit not just the conclusions, but the emotional stance that comes with them. We feel confident long before we comprehend anything.

Getting information hasn’t been the barrier. The part no system can automate for us is the effort needed to understand the full picture.

People stop wrestling with ideas because the system makes wrestling feel unnecessary. Certainty is faster. Certainty is cleaner. Certainty signals belonging.

The tragedy is this: certainty has never been easier to acquire, and understanding has never required more from us.

 

On Confidence

Awesome insight!

Confidence doesn’t come before action. It comes after repeated exposure. You can’t wait to feel strong. You act, then strength follows.

 

 

 

How To Live A Rich Life

I am not a fan of the word ... well I hate the word intellectual. 

I prefer more grounded in reality; phrases such as a good living being or not being dead while still physically alive or simply the word "life".

This is a well written beautiful piece (and I didn't know 95% of all Wikipedia articles led to philosophy):

Conway’s Game of Life is an example of emergence and self-organisation.

When we surround ourselves with abundant, diverse ideas, complex ideas emerge. These ideas are unique and do not resemble the ideas from which they emerged.

Even if the initial set of ideas seem simple and disconnected, spontaneous order can emerge, leading to brilliant ideas.

Emergence and self-organisation are all around us. In the sciences, society, art and in nature.

[---]

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.

That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. 

We all need to come down from our peaks. For us to truly learn something, we need to abandon our views about it. Because the act of coming down from the peak forces us to do three things

• Understand the limits of our thinking: As we come down, and shed our views, we start seeing our field of knowledge more objectively, and understand that there are limits to our thinking, even though we are experts.
• Open space for contemplation: Once we come down, and make our way to another peak, we start walking, which opens the space for contemplation.
• Isolate ourselves from our ego: Once we have stripped ourselves of our views, and contemplated, we isolate ourselves from our Ego. This act of isolation humbles us, makes us realise our follies and helps us see illusions we have lived under.

[---]

Here is how you could do it

1. Define 1-2 areas you’d want to learn about. Something you have been genuinely curious about, ideally for a long time.
2. Ask EVERYONE you know - Hey, I am interested in learning about Y. Do you know someone who knows a lot about Y?
3. Once you find a connection, ask for a warm introduction. I can almost guarantee you, the expert will be happy to give you their time.
4. Ask thoughtful questions. Don’t expect them to explain things to you, but ask them to point you to resources, or craft a learning path with them.
5. Put in the hours, immerse yourself in the resources and update them about the progress you have made and the things you have learnt.
6. This in turn will start a conversation.
7. Repeat 1 - 6 for the rest of your life.

And what will happen?

You have kickstarted your own version of ‘The Game of Life’. Remember, the Game of Life has only one variable: The starting point. You now have not just ideas from your field, but ideas from fields you know nothing about. You will now see ‘emergence’ in action.

Perpetual Anger, Perpetual Grievance & Perpetual Need For Political Enemies

I have been writing about this for decades now... it started with talk radio and cable news. I observed friends, neighbors, and co-workers perpetually angry albeit most of them were better off than I was at that time. 

It was very weird to me since growing up in India, I lived around some of the poorest people on the planet but yet they weren't angry. They were content and most importantly were normal in perpetual penury. 

Around the same time, I started listening to talk radio and cable news, it was addictive to say the least. A simple pattern started emerging. They were angry all the goddamn time. 

How can someone live their life watching hours of spewing anger inside their living room. It was clearly unhealthy. I threw my TV away and the rest is history. 

The moron that I was, I started telling people that this stuff is not healthy and makes them sick. Of course, they didn't change but the right wing thought I was leftist looney and left wing that I was rightish madman. 

This was dangerous territory to embark on since what's lost to creative destruction never comes back. Plus add to this syndrome, the apt titles of some of Tyler Cowen books - average is over, stubborn attachments, and complacent class. Plus add to this a heavy dose of self delusion as if they are one step away from being millionaires or billionaires - a perpetual unattainable desire driven life.  

To make things even weirder, even people who attain an unattainable lifestyle are also angry! Go figure!

The younger generation with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex blissfully unaware of any of these; are sucked into their cell phones and waiting one day to join the perpetual angry force. 

One side offers a solution which is the exact reason a spark became a wild fire and the other side wants to be angry perpetually :-) 

It's a fucked up situation never seen in history and we are living now make an unique history. 

I have no idea where this is going to lead.. I have no goddamn idea. 

Ironically, there is so much more to learn, discover - knowledge we know now is minuscule and there is infinite knowledge out there for us to embrace with awe, wonder, and grow as living beings. 

We can create so many jobs, we already have enough shelter, food, water - all that is needed is masses to embrace this thirst for knowledge and drive.

But alas not many are addicted to perpetual need for awe and wonder.  

Paul Katsafanas's essay is the most important piece you will read this year and understanding this disease is crucial for humanity to survive this century. 

So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition. When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?

Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention. Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation. Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation.

[---]

Sometimes, movements face a vast set of obstacles and opponents. Take the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s. This movement had a clear goal: ending US involvement in Vietnam. It lasted for more than a decade and unfolded across multiple fronts, which ranged from marches to acts of civil disobedience to teach-ins to draft resistance. Participants faced real costs: jail time, government surveillance, public backlash, even violence. The targets of opposition shifted over time – from the Lyndon B Johnson administration, to Richard Nixon, to Gerald Ford. The tactics evolved: from letter-writing campaigns to draft-card burnings, mass marches, lobbying from wounded veterans, and testimony from grieving families. Nonetheless, this was a movement that aimed at a concrete goal. Opposition was necessary, but it was a means to an end. The focus remained on the goal, rather than on sustaining conflict for its own sake.

[---]

As Martha Nussbaum has argued, anger can play an essential role in democratic life by expressing moral concern and galvanising collective action. Iris Marion Young has made similar points, showing how opposition can affirm shared values. And in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr claimed that ‘the supreme task is to organise and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.’ But there’s a difference between opposition that aims to realise a shared good, and opposition that is pursued for its own sake. Some movements use opposition as a means to build something they value. Others make opposition itself the point. That’s the distinction I want to highlight: between what I call contingently negative and constitutively negative orientations. Contingently negative movements treat opposition as a means to a positive end, a way of building something better. Constitutively negative movements are different: what’s essential is the continuous expression of hostility, rather than the attainment of any particular goal.

[---]

But why would anyone be drawn to a constitutively negative orientation? Why are these orientations so gripping? The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards. Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility, offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.

To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms. Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed. They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.

Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have. If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure. In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks. Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want.

[---]

With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly. In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals. We have definite ideas about what the world should be like. We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices. From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them.

But grievance politics operates differently. It begins not with ideals, but with unease, with feelings of powerlessness, failure, humiliation or inadequacy. Political and ethical rhetoric is offered that transforms these self-directed negative emotions into hostility, rage and blame. Negative emotions that would otherwise remain internal find a new outlet, latching on to ever-new enemies and grievances. The vision that redirects these emotions will cite particular values and goals, but the content of those values and goals doesn’t matter all that much. What’s most important is that the values and goals justify the hostility. If the world changes, the values and ideals can shift. But the emotional need remains constant: to find someone or something to oppose.

That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire. People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want? Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?

Devotion is capable of bringing deep, serene fulfilment without requiring an enemy

But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears. The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies. Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation – as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond. It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause. If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain. It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage. The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.

How To Talk To Terrorists

When it comes to terrorism, governments seem to suffer from a collective amnesia. All of our historical experience tells us that there can be no purely military solution to a political problem, and yet every time we confront a new terrorist group, we begin by insisting we will never talk to them. As Dick Cheney put it, “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it”. In fact, history suggests we don’t usually defeat them and we nearly always end up talking to them. Hugh Gaitskell, the former Labour leader, captured it best when he said: “All terrorists, at the invitation of the government, end up with drinks in the Dorchester.”

[---]

And lastly, it is claimed that Sri Lanka shows a military solution can work. But Sri Lanka doesn’t demonstrate anything of the sort. President Rajapaksa managed to defeat the Tamil Tigers only because its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran – who had been considered a military genius for most of his life – turned out to be a military fool, in the words of one of the Norwegian negotiators who worked on the peace process. If he had stuck to a guerrilla campaign rather than trying to beat the Sri Lankan army in a conventional war, he would probably still be in the jungle fighting now. And the measures used by the Sri Lankan army to wipe out the Tigers are not methods that could be used by any western government that respects human rights and the rule of law. Finally, although the war is over and there is, thank goodness, no sign of the resurgence of a terrorist campaign, the political problem of Tamil rights still remains unresolved, and trouble will continue until it is.

[--]

The one thing I have learned, above all else, from the last 17 years is that there is no such thing as an insoluble conflict with an armed group – however bloody, difficult or ancient. Even the Middle East peace process, which has stuttered on for decades, will in the end result in a lasting agreement. The fact that it has failed so many times before does not mean that it will always fail, and an eventual settlement will be built on the past failures and the lessons learned from these failures, as was the peace in Northern Ireland.

It is remarkable how quickly a conflict can shift from being regarded as “insoluble” to one whose solution was “inevitable” as soon as an agreement is signed. Beforehand, and even up to a very late stage in the process, conventional wisdom states that the conflict can never be resolved; but before the ink is dry on the agreement, people are ready to conclude that it was inevitable. They put it down to outside events like the end of the cold war, to the effect of 9/11 or to changing economic circumstances. But this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Just as no conflict is insoluble, nor is it inevitable that it will be resolved at any particular moment in history. Believing that a solution is inevitable is nearly as dangerous as believing a conflict cannot be solved. If people sit around waiting for a conflict to be “ripe” for talks to start, or for the forces of history to solve it for them, then it will never be resolved. If the negotiations are handled badly, they will fail, which is why it is worth trying to learn from the experience of others. Dealing effectively with a terrorist threat requires political leadership, patience and a refusal to take no for an answer. What we need are more political leaders who are capable of remembering what happened last time – and prepared to take the necessary risks.

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