Lies Aren't Compromise

[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]

In Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman Scott Alexander presents Slave Morality and Master Morality as the two extremes within the current culture war…

Wait, no, I need two paragraphs for context first.

Sometimes You Just Want To Stop The Harassment

My mother has been dealing with deep anxiety her whole life. (In her defense, she’s been remarkably functional while living with this!) To deal with this anxiety she often demanded things to “solve” a problem that were totally unfeasible. Often the problems were trivial (would resolve by themselves within days), or her solutions unreasonable (the request was worse than the issue it was trying to address), or both! As a Good Person I would initially turn down such requests with a honest explanation of why. But she was relentless in her demands. She couldn’t accept a No. She’d become a serial harasser that wouldn’t give one a moment’s rest until she extracted a promise of compliance.¹

I soon realized that if I wanted to get anything done while also turning down a request the only possible response was to agree to her demands and then just not do what was demanded. To ease her anxiety, only a False Yes was accepted. This worked because not following through had no consequences. (Until it did). She didn’t have enough power to enforce the requests she was making or punish me for not following through. The worst she could do is make me feel bad for failing to do so.

“You May Not Be Interested In (Culture) War…”

In Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman Scott Alexander presents Slave Morality and Master Morality as the two extremes within the current culture war. They are both cruel, but Master Morality wants to do things without regard for the non-masters that are hurt, and Slave Morality wants to stop anyone from doing anything so that no one can be hurt.

Slave morality hates power/excellence and refuses to justify it. Master morality says power/excellence is its own justification, and the rest of us have to justify ourselves to it. Liberalism says that sure, we can probably justify power/excellence, as long as it stays within reasonable bounds and doesn’t cause trouble.

Slave morality ignores benefits and sets the importance of harms at infinity. Master morality ignores harms, and sets the value of “benefits” (not that it would think of it in these terms - greatness doesn’t exist to benefit others) at infinity. Liberalism accepts the normal, finite utilitarian calculus and tries to balance benefits against harms.

Emphasis added.

Scott posits liberalism as the great compromise between these two. Which I love. 🎉 The original liberalism was the original compromise in the original culture war. The Peace of Westphalia stopped over a century of war that killed 7-17% of Europe.

One of the tactics that Scott says liberalism uses to balance the two extremes sounds kinda funny though…

A final secret of this compromise is that master morality and slave morality aren’t perfect opposites. Master morality wants to embiggen itself. Slave morality wants to feel secure that everyone agrees embiggening is bad. The compromise is that we all agree embiggening is bad, but leave people free to do it anyway. So half of Western intellectual output is criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism, yet capitalism and neoliberalism remain hegemonic⁵. Everybody agrees to hate billionaires; also, billionaires are richer than ever.

Emphasis added again.

This sounds like a compromise in the same sense that my telling my mother “OK I’ll do that” without any intention of doing that was a compromise.

It’s just lying.

I did this a lot in my past, and I now think it’s Bad, Actually. Not using words and arguments to make the case why good things are good just leads to growing resentment as more and more people see that the thing everyone agrees is horrible is blithely tolerated anyway. Is it tolerated because there is a grand compromise where we SAY its bad to appease the mentally handicapped slave-moralists? Or is it tolerated because even though 99.9% of us are good people who hate evil things, the 0.1% at the top are evil and control all the power? And they will get away with everything forever no matter how evil it is?

The latter is how we get things like pedophile-trafficking-in-pizza-parlor conspiracies. They get us “vote for Trump because he’ll burn down the system.” Or “just go out and directly burn down the system yourself.”

I want to be left alone and be free to do important things just as much as the next guy! And if there’s one thing I learned in my teens, it’s that you can easily accomplish this by putting on a mask of full agreement, capitulate to everything with your words, and completely ignore what you said. I understand the value of doing this in an environment that otherwise makes action impossible.

But what are we to do when talking to each other has no value, because we’ve all agreed to just say the words people want to hear regardless of what we actually think? How are we supposed to model each other if our actions seem to flatly contradict what we say we value? What are we to think of people who say “Yes, I agree that progress is evil. I hate progress, and rich people, and racists. Vile things.” and then see those people pursuing some or all of that evil unabashedly? Do we start to think they are actual paragons of iniquity, pursuing what they know to be evil like the actual demonic forces we were actually warned about in our youth?

Was it real all along? O_O

How do we affect change when we literally can’t speak to others, because everyone agrees to everything and changes nothing? (On both sides!) We shouldn’t so quickly shrug away our ability to talk. When words don’t matter we are forced to resort to a simpler kind of language. A language that doesn’t rely on words at all. “The language of the unheard.”

This is not the compromise I was hoping for.

Doubling Down

No really, this really does seem to be a bid to soothe people with happy-noises while ignoring them entirely. Footnote #5 in the blockquote above reads

Cf. Freddie de Boer here: “To recognize that those two simultaneously-embraced policies were the negation of each other was to fail to understand that they were meant only to be felt, not thought, much less to be implemented.”

This is explicitly Simulacra Level 4 thinking. The originator [strongest LW proponent]² of the Simulacra Levels calls Level 4

a combination of intuitive attempts to manipulate associational dynamics and vibes, and adaptation executions that have abandoned any logic and all links to the underlying physical reality

It seems Scott is explicitly calling for the enactment of Simulacra Level 4 norms as the great liberal compromise between slave and master morality. I straight-up despise Level 4 Simulacra. I can kinda see the arguments for Levels 2 and 3, but Level 4 is just the breakdown of human civilization. You can’t talk to people you don’t share a physical reality with. You cannot coordinate with people you can’t talk to.

Am I Too Dumb For 4D Chess?

Reading the suggestion that we just lie through our teeth and act opposite to what we say coming from Scott Alexander is so outside of my model of him that I suspect I’m doing something wrong. I keep thinking back to The Media Very Rarely Lies, which struck me as crazy at first. It was only weeks later that I realized how genius the post was. It was pointing out very clearly that the media lies constantly via true statements structured in a way that destroys their audience’s Map of the Territory the same way a direct lie would, except far more effectively than a blatant lie could ever hope to achieve. It did so by doing exactly the same thing the media does in exactly the same way. Nowadays whenever someone claims the media correctly reported something we’re in disagreement over I can just nod and say “yes, The Media Very Rarely Lies” and we both understand that the fact that the media reported something is zero evidence either way for any argument, and we need to find a different way to move forward.

Is this the same thing? Is this some 4D Chess move that I’m too simple to see? By calling for rank hypocrisy — destructive levels of hypocrisy IMO — is Scott actually slyly pointing out this is exactly what society has been doing for years? Is he secretly confident that his readers are smart enough to put together that this “compromise” is (partly) behind recent social turmoil and therefore it should be rejected? It would certainly be silly to expect him to cop to that just a few days after hiding that payload the way he did. But without that I feel like I’m skirting into conspiracy theory territory. If other people could weigh in here it would ease my fears a fair bit while letting Scott maintain deniability.

The alternative idea, the idea that we can all get along if we wear smiling masks and everything will be fine as long as the masks are all smiling at each other… it makes me very confused.

When You Don The Mask You Become The Shoggoth

One may argue that perhaps the lie-and-disregard option is bad, but can be deployed on occasion to keep the peace. I am unconvinced, but after many years I also believe there’s a deeper reason to not do this. It is corrosive to your psyche.³

I said “The worst [my mother] could do is make me feel bad for failing to follow through.” But no one wants to feel like an asshole. Especially not to someone they love. I quickly became extremely good at later explaining why I didn’t do the thing I had said I’d do. I developed this ability early in my teens. The arguments were abundant - forces beyond my control prevented it, technically I did do it, technically I hadn’t actually promised to do it, oh look it resolved by itself so why are you complaining, etc. High verbal IQ was extremely useful, and I exploited it to the fullest extent.

The notable thing here is that it felt like a compromise to me. I promise to do the thing, my mom leaves me alone. I don’t do the thing, everything turns out fine because of course it does, she was being nuts, and the world continues apace exactly as if we’d negotiated a sane, amicable resolution and everyone was happy. The outcomes were good, and that’s what mattered.

It turned me into a person who couldn’t be relied on, not because I lied outright, but because I lied the same way The Media Very Rarely Lies - my words and/or actions could always be justified after the fact, yet the best way to model me is as a chaos agent whose words have only random correlation to future actions. The point of words was to appease someone, not to resolve things.

This instinct continued into my adult life in every future relationship. As a result I frequently ended up with partners that it was not safe to be honest to. They were drawn to people who would lie to them to make them happy. I did that so instinctively I didn’t even know it was happening half the time. I believed my own explanations. It wasn’t until years after discovered Rationality that I began to realize the reasons I was giving were convenient rather than coherent. And even so it took many years to start unraveling my instincts and rewiring with better ones.

Don’t lie. It’s not a compromise, and it turns you into an ugly thing that can’t coordinate. But, maybe, sometimes, when writing online essays, it’s OK to propose eating babies to really wake people up to the fact we’ve been eating babies for a while.

1. Please note the severity of the problem is a little exaggerated by being the only thing I say about her in this post. This wasn’t a daily occurance, or even a weekly one. It was often enough to require routing around, but my life wasn’t horrible or anything.

2. From the comment from Thomas Ambrose, “the originator of simulacra stuff is Baudrillard, and I think Ben Hoffman introduced it to LessWrong types, not Zvi.” My mistake! Zvi does seem to be the strongest proponent on LW, but it looks like that all began with this post that credits Hoffman.

3. Your “soul” one might say, if one is inclined to use poetic language the way I am, secure in the knowledge that no reader would mistake me for believing in magic or mysticism.