A Response to Postmodernism: Asymptotes

(Inspired most recently by this random ask about metanarratives, but for people just stumbling on the topic check out this SSC post “Postmodernism for Rationalists”. And when discussing pomo, I am always reminded of this tweet by St_Rev: Postmodernism is like nuclear fission; true but too dangerous for humans to be trusted with.)

Let’s back up a bit. Lacan broke down mental experience into three parts: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. I’m going to accept this, but a) ignore the Imaginary, and b) append Social to Symbolic because they are the same. Which is to say:

Our experience of the world consists of the Real and the Social/Symbolic. What does that mean?

The Real is well, actual reality that exists independent of human understanding. It’s the stuff that’s still there if you close your eyes. It’s the fact that there isn’t enough food no matter what the Emperor says, or that we will all one day die, or the cruelty of cancer, or the unimaginable gulf between the stars. It is the reality that victory goes to the side with more guns not the nobler cause, or that some people won’t get along no matter how much you love them both and try to negotiate peace.

The Real is usually far too complicated and chaotic and unbounded for us to comprehend. Like in the question of “when were the Dark Ages” in the linked SSC post, the Real is all the individual lives and experiences of people over that time period. It’s too big to even put into words, but it’s still undeniably there. Any attempt to just ignore the Real is called repression, and the Real will eventually rise from that and disrupt your plans.

The Symbolic is our attempt to make any sense of the above. It is how we split infinitely varied things into simple categories and binaries, like the insistence that everyone is male or female (or good vs bad.) It is the map instead of the territory, and *every single word* we use is just a Symbolic interpretation of far too messy Real. (Like this post recently asking just what is a boss anyway? Or the well written post “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories”) Whenever we try to say something about every type of apple, or define what “life” is, or come up with an ideology that pits an obvious group of good guys and bad guys, or just try to predict the results of a scientific experiment with a probability curve, we are still thinking using the Symbolic.

This is not a huge sin. After all, we can not actually think about the ineffable Real, let alone communicate about it. If we want to make any progress at all, either in reasoning about the world or working with others, we *have* to use the Symbolic. It’s like physicists using models assuming spherical cows - it gets you somewhere, eventually, at least. (Certainly a tribe using imperfect Symbolic thinking would outcompete and defeat a bunch of brainiacs just meditating on the Real. Existence without using the Symbolic is just not sustainable.)

I even upgrade the term to Social/Symbolic since all of our social existence depends on how we use the Symbolic to express concepts to others. That’s well, what language is. And once you have a Symbolic term, and you share it with another via mouth-sounds or ink-scratches, then it takes on an independent Symbolic existence that can be read and interpreted by people who are neither you nor your intended target. Then these symbols really do have an external existence, spreading throughout the population, with no direction by a conscious mind. Words and concepts are like a virus living in the social body this way.

The narrative or metanarrative, is a Social/Symbolic entity this way - fairly detached from the Real that gave it meaning, and evolving based on what is most efficient for the social rules it inhabits.

Two brief examples:

- Science. Science is obviously a quest for the Real, and that is admirable. And yet even when trying hardest to do this, we create standards of objectivity and merit that reflect Social/Symbolic understanding. We talk of p-values and grant writing and peer review and hundreds of ways this search for the most raw truth is filtered through simplistic understanding, and incentive schemes that have long since become normal status-seeking rat races.

- Capitalism. Markets are a method of social relation of course. And yet the values and prices of things fluctuate in response to the necessities of the Real. If food becomes scarce, or a movie is truly terrible, or a new writer is brilliant beyond precedence, no matter how unexpected these things are to the powers that be, they can earn money and renowned in a market, proving some glimmer of the Real in doing so. Now the price of something is not an untainted mark of its true value, but it is at least related to it somehow.

Anyway, the tumblr version of Postmodernism (which is to say, that version that is most politically useful to the class of people who have currently discovered this concept - laypeople arguing about politics on social media) could be reduced to this:

1. In no cases do we ever know the Real, without relying on narratives found in the Social/Symbolic. (We can’t know when the Dark Ages began or ended.)

2. So choose which narratives you want to pursue based on Social/Symbolic reasons. (Do you want to align yourself with the narrative of the Dark Ages spread by the Catholic Church? By labor historians? Etc.)

The problem with these is that are true, but also noxious, as they would always mean dropping the evidence of our own eyes for the narrative of the class we are trying to support. And people who do this too much are very evidently stupid (in action, not in essence.) We see the results of this in Holocaust deniers and Stalin apologists and 9-11 truthers.

The issue is that they are forgetting that the symmetric case is true: the complete Real may be inaccessible *but so is the complete Social/Symbolic*. While amateur pomo knows you can never completely reach the Real, it forgets you can never *escape* it either.

In actuality, total Social/Symbolic is an eternal fantasy. It is referenced in FALC or the singularity, where you are immune from any needs and can spend all your time engaging with only concepts, or only the social sphere you have chosen, free of all messy entanglements. It is a powerful dream (or nightmare), with a lot to say for it, but it’s as impossible as knowing the mind of God. There will always be some element of the Real under the fantasy, repressed and pushing back in the ways we least expect or want.

Everything we know is between two asymptotes - which can approach the Real, but never reach it, and we can approach the pure Social/Symbolic but never realize it.

So an attempt to choose your narrative *solely* on Social/Symbolic grounds (like which side you want to support) will find itself constantly interrupted by rude counter-evidence. It might be the people voting against you, or your story not selling, or just an anxious feeling in the pit of his stomach. It’s really impossible to predict how the Real will erupt, but it always will.

You have to accept you are just stuck as a mutt in the muddled middle, never have authentic Real knowledge or pure Social/Symbolic simplicity, but a mix of both at all times.

Bad Atheism

In today’s SSC post, Scott and his commenters come up with a lot of theories why the atheist movement isn’t a strong pillar of the left (like climate change, concerns about sexual harassment, and poverty), but rather a source of awkward disdain. This is in response to a long article in the Baffler making fun of New Atheists.

They come up with a bunch of theories (Islam became a protected group, atheists kept talking about the science of gender differences, etc), but the post is a perfect example of a wrong form of analysis.

1. Authority is making claims about a group.
2. I disagree with those claims, or the results of them.
3. Therefore they must just be making these claims up, and we must figure out wholly different reasons they must have for the end conclusion, and this argument is 100% post-hoc rationalization.

Instead, we should read the claims directly, and see them as evidence of how that speaker is thinking. Let’s look at the article.

The heirs to New Atheism may have a new target and a remodeled ethos, but their rhetorical crutches remain the same. They announce at every opportunity that they revere logic, evidence, and science, even if the opposite is plainly true. 

…

In a political cartoon by Ben Garrison, an ex-libertarian who now panders to the alt-right, Molyneux is drawn popping bubbles—labeled “Trump is a misogynist,” “Trump is stupid” and “my feelings”—using enormous needles tagged “logic,” “reason” and “evidence.” In another, Molyneux holds a golden shield emblazoned with “REASON EVIDENCE LOGIC” as Hillary Clinton fires arrows representing her various campaign slogans. 

Uh. I think the author doesn’t like (the way atheists use) logic, evidence, and reason. Hell even if the author is a 100% cynical propagandist, there’s a reason they felt these jibes would resonate with their audience.

What we’ve seen in the last decade with social liberalism is an embrace of one-directional subjectivity. Instead of gender-blind tests for hiring, the new left has discovered the tests themselves are biased (they are), and you need an out-right pro-women hiring policy in order to redress structural inequality before a level playing field can mean anything. And we’ve seen cultural social justice crash up against this again and again: due process, metrics of any sort but especially economic ones, anything that tries to use objective or extrinsic measurement, is deemed retrograde by an ideology that focuses on the subjective experience of the oppressed.

(In no small part because of postmodern academics who are able to poke holes in the biases of many objective measurements. And because of the many obvious cases where you can find these advocates fall to bias and prejudice.)

If the left chose subjectivity (a wise decision in theory, but in practice it’s been executed horribly), then where would we expect movements founded around objective tools to end up?

And I did this by looking at the words they themselves use, rather than solely my knowledge of what various scandals happened in an elevator and on bulletin boards afterwards. This doesn’t mean I think they are right, but I do think their own words are the best way to examine a groups grievances.

***

I find this type of analysis particularly important regarding the Trump phenomenon. A large cottage industry has sprung up of “understanding Trump voters.” Is it just because they are racist? Is it they want jobs that no longer and exist and aren’t coming back? There are so many reasons we can hypothesize, and the more we hypothesize the more our theories will just reflect our own preconceived notions.

We can ask them. We can go on reddit, and listen to campaign speeches, and just hear what they say about the other half of America. We don’t have to agree it’s true, but we can look at the logic behind it and conclude “this is how they are thinking.”

Not Good or Nice, Just Right

“I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right.”

Let’s think about this in the context of the perpetual social media culture war.

You’re probably familiar with this. Some person who doesn’t like hostility and is uncomfortable about all these witch hunts says they just want to be kind and compassionate to people. And then some more aggressive warrior marches in, saying that person is just “nice”, while it’s more important to be good. They quote something about the worst masters under slavery were the one who treated their slaves “nicely” and smoothly perpetuated the institution, when obviously the only moral course when dealing with slavery was to be an annoying, mean, and stubborn as hell iconoclast who would tell the entire South that their economy needs to be torn down.

Nice, is short-term and short-range helpfulness and lack of hostility to the people you directly interact with.

Good, in their usage of this term, is doing what’s effective for their political cause. They say this good is better than that nice.

That’s nice vs good, and the latter has a point. Most of you readers probably flinch in regard to this, because you’ve seen a lot of pain and suffering done in the name of shouting down the nice people. You’ve seen a lot of idiots trample over functional groups in the name of being “good.” My sympathies to you. But it’s not that the “good” advocates are wrong, it’s that they don’t go far enough.

Really you could say that about every toxic social justice argument: they found a valid point, but never really committed to it. They took it only far enough to win an argument today, but they didn’t think about how it should inform everything they do, if they really seriously believed it.

The witch introduces us to a third concept on the same spectrum… Right.

How good is being good if you have chosen the wrong political cause? Then you’re just being an asshole, in service to a greater evil. (There are many such people who do that.) Or if your tactics are actually pretty bad and ineffectual. Before you can be Good you need to be Right, just to be sure your cause is actually good, and the anti-nice tactics you are using are actually accomplishing anything.

Because this, this arguing on tumblr? It may be “good” but it’s not right. You are not saving the world here. And the niche politics of fandom a troll may be advocating are ill-thought out and far removed from universal justice.

For instance, racial and gender equality will always be impossible without more economic equality. Which most on the left know and will pay lip service too. But actually fighting the economic order is damned hard. So most liberals… kind of throw their hands up in the air, vote for Democratic candidates, and get to complaining about toxic masculinity in last night’s Game of Thrones.

Their analysis and their praxis is flawed - no great sin, this is a difficult task - and so their ability to execute “good” actions is flawed. But culture war discourse discourages discussion of the greater goal or criticism of tactics, so you can’t work on being right. There is only trying to be good, harder and harder.

There is a place for nice. Sometimes being right is too hard, complicated, and horrifying to know the answer for. Then you might as well be kind to people because you don’t know what the fuck else you are doing.

There is a place for right. When being honest about your motives and how you should help the world.

The place for prioritizing good though… when you neither care about the people around you, or the real truth behind your actions… is heavily overstated to say the least. And the great middle mass of people concerned with being seen as “good” people, who are too harsh to be kind to the enemy but not harsh enough to examine themselves, who do the largest amount of damage in ideological crusades.

It's Good to Have Goals

Since @kenny-evitt is poking me about what I want, and @balioc is calling me out talking about tribalism here, this is a good opportunity to express some of my more positive vision, instead of complaining endlessly about capitalist ideology.

There’s an important distinction between utopian and practical goals, between long term and short term. If you talk your long term goals you get dismissed as irrelevant (or worse, a Leninist who will cruelly bend the world to your ill-thought out vision), and if you talk your short term goals you get dismissed as doing very little to fix things and leaving most of the underlying problems of the world intact, erasing whatever short-term progress you make. So it’s important to state clearly that you have both.

In the utopian sense, I am a Christian universalist. I really do believe in consensual anarchy and universal justice. Some day we can resolve all the major social problems that lead to fear and anxiety that cause us to do stupid, destructive things on a society wide scale.

I believe this will look like a humanist love towards every other person that exists. They are not just a commodity who can buy your stuff or sell their body to you, and they are not just a soldier who represents the threat of the Enemy. They are a person with their individual story, who cares about small things and big dreams, who can have effective dialogue, and be understood as a friend and a source of help. And it will be natural to share whatever we have with the, when it leads to overall higher enjoyment. This is taking all the good things about tribalism that balioc says

And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families.  It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction.  It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships.  It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.  

...applied to every other person who exists, not just one small group. This is the love of Christ (whether or not He exists.) It’s not just saying “you are a person so I guess you get this”, but seeing them as a full person, and because of that, wanting to share.

This is obviously very hard. I do not expect it in our lifetimes. But it remains that without this end-state, we’re basically never going to be happy on a wide scale. All other social utopias leave in place a lack, an anxiety, that this person may deceive you or be taking advantage of you, so you must remain ever on your guard against them.

Maybe it is even impossible. Maybe there will never, ever be universal justice. Humans are just too fallible, you know? What do we do if that’s the case?

Okay then, then we are not working on total solutions. We are just talking about harm reduction, acknowledging that any solution we come up with will still leave problems.

In that case, what I note is that in our current moment, our society’s ideology places way too much weight on the benefits of liberal individualism, and puts very little normative weight on the benefits of tribalism and communities. Tell someone you’re moving for a job or your spouse, ok. Tell them you’re moving for the weather/local culture, well you’re short sighted and hedonist but still reasonable. Tell them you’re moving for a non-spouse family member, or a group of friends, or some sort of club, and you get increasingly rattled looks asking are you insane???

(This is an exaggeration, but you take my point.)

Tribes - not just your family, but any time you’re thrown together with a group of people and all caring about something at the same time, and suddenly find yourself respecting the others as individuals because of that attachment - are a tremendous source of joy and support. But at the moment, rhetorically, they are mostly treated as a way conservative parents oppress their gay children, and as a cult if they are anything non-familial. (Rationalists, do you even know what they say about your Bay Area houses?)

It’s terrible. It scares people away from something that could make them happier and do all the things Balioc talks about. Sure, they aren’t perfect - there will be some abuses of power, some flakes and defectors who ruin it, some even terribly exploitative stories - but those stories happen under liberal capitalism too. We’ve just decided that the pains suffered because of individualist society are acceptable and due to “bad apples”, whereas the ones caused by tribes are reason to be wary of the whole concept.

(You can interact with people on the basis of what you know they actually like and can handle, and not on endlessly trying to find one-size-fits-all rules about what sort of approach is inappropriate or not. It’s so great!)

So my tribalism blog explores the short term solutions of embracing our tribal opportunities. It’s not a utopia, and there will always be problems in a society based on tribes. But there’s a source of happiness there that we can reach out to now, and take advantage of. And that seems a lot better than the impossible project of trying to refine liberalism and social justice and individualism into a contradictory morass of rules where no one ever gets hurt.

Just Language

Neil uses the term Lacanthropy to describe “The transformation, under the influence of the full moon, of a dubious psychological theory into a dubious social theory via a dubious linguistic theory.”

Which is a fair assessment of the bad opinion most well-read people hold of the works of psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan. Lacan had some bold, un-tested theories of the mind, after all. But what he, and the other mid-century French existentialists, was really obsessed with was “semiotics” which was sort of like linguistics but was more about “how symbols worked.”

Language was a system of symbols that worked, whether you understood what the word meant correctly, or believed in it or not. It was separated from your mind and intent, and yet, words certainly have a life of their own that is coherent and sensical. They fit into a broader system, one which the speaker may be utterly unaware of.

And since we don’t have access to each other’s inner minds, all of society can best be understood as the emergent effects from this substrate of language.

In modern parlance, we would talk about how memes can spread across twitter, independent of whether you are RTing them ironically or seriously or double-reverse-ironically, the meme doesn’t care it just spreads under a logic of its own. Then CNN reports on the meme and how many times it’s been RT’d or mutated and asks “what does it all mean?” Words are just more fundamental memes that way.

This means we are not interested in what the word means, what a dictionary says about a word or what we think when we say it, but about how it functions. What does the word do.

***

When I was young my father advised me to avoid the word “just” when talking about myself. Look at these two sentences:

• I was trying to help.
• I was just trying to help.

They mean pretty much the same thing. But the function of the second sentence serves to limit the conversation to my intent, delineating it as the only relevant thing. (Common parlance would be that it’s “defensive language”.)

The literal meaning of the word “just” does not capture what is going on here. But neither does appealing to the intent of the speaker, accusing them of some cowardice or malice based on how they used the word. They probably meant it innocently, or just do not consciously parse every single word for how it will come off.

What matters is what the word has done to the conversation, attempting to limit its scope, and positioning any resistance to limitation as a conflict now. That was the function of the word.

I did not take the simple advice and never use the word just from then on, but rather whenever I am about to say “just” I think for a second. Do I really mean that? What is the difference in effect between the first sentence and the second sentence, and which do I prefer?

This is what it means to study how a word functions, independent of the intent of the speaker. Or as the anti-crit crowd says “Death of the Author”. The broader system of how all these words (and symbols and memes) function is semiotics.

People from all over the political spectrum continue to use the term “SJW” despite it’s extremely insulting origins (and vague boundaries) because, well, it delineates a group that’s useful to delineate, and the usefulness of the word is more important to the semiotic system than the purity of its definition.

Or you might have heard the quip about ideological debate: arguments are like soldiers - you don’t stab them in the back. This acknowledges that it doesn’t really matter whether an argument is true or ethical, just whether it is serving the function, of helping attack the other side.

***

Let’s look at insults for a minute.

Most of you read the twitter post and tumblr commentary when some transactivist threatened Caitlyn Jenner that if she continued to support Donald Trump, activists would go back to calling her “Bruce.”

It was mean. And also a little boggling. Doesn’t the activist, as part of social justice doctrine absolutely believe that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman? Isn’t that the exact belief system they are fighting for? Unless you have some really weird epistemology where anyone who votes for Trump is definitionally male, the insult seems only to invoke “if you do not support the cause, we will not support your gender identity.”

As a factual belief, it is a complete hash. But as a threat, it’s pretty clear. And certainly as something that hurts Caitlyn, it’s utterly plausible “Your self-respect as a woman is always conditional on our political support for you. You’re not independently and authentically a woman.”

This is all extremely effective even if it’s completely non-credible that the speaker believe it. Even when the listener considers it factually untrue with zero doubt. What matters is “what the insult is doing.” There are fears we have, and the insult is touching on them to create pain and panic.

More prosaically, anyone reading this should not believe that being overweight is an accurate measurement of their moral character, worth as a human being, or virtues in any other field. We all just know this, and don’t think someone is bad because they are fat.

And yet, if you have a friend who is overweight (or just not the magazine cover image of thin), even a friend who knows everyone in their social group doesn’t judge based on weight… holy shit is insulting them over their weight devastating. Maybe you would do it ironically, or maybe you’re really drunk, maybe they misheard a word you said (you meant phat!), who fucking knows. It doesn’t really matter what you meant by it, or what you really believe… you have channeled the threat of the Big Other judging them into this insult.

This is true for most offensive insults: racial stereotypes, accusations of being a sexist, your lack of intelligence, your pretentiousness, a slur about your sexual orientation. We get upset at them from the enemy, we get upset at them from a stranger, we get upset at them from a friend for whom we have overwhelming evidence that they do not believe this.

(And even if they do believe this, why is the insult so bad? It’s much better to get the toxic belief out in the open and deal with it, than to let it lurk. And why would a second insult be bad after that, once we know they disdain us? Instead we strongly want them to keep insults to zero or a minimum. Because the function of the insult, ie a social attack from the Other, has not changed.)

And it’s important to note that even if in individual conversations an insult’s power may be limited and dismissed as not particularly upsetting, on the internet people like clicking on the posts about witty insults or passionate denunciations of them. So the insults get shared. And once they are leaping across the reblogs and hate-shares then they have an independent, one-dimensional life of their own.

(Mein Gott, am I tired of well-intentioned critics like Freddie deBoer agonizing over how every liberal only makes simplistic or navel-gazing arguments. No, people make all sorts of arguments, including thoughtful ones, or factually-rigorous ones, or just compassionate ones. What gets shared are the simplistic in-jokes and denunciations. The problem is not the people, it’s the system their words are evolving in. If there were not capitalistic pressure for outrage and glib quips, then @theunitofcaring would be most popular blogger on the planet after all.)

***

So for instance, the eternal debate about whether some liberal is “racist towards white people.” The denotation of racism is pretty clear about this (and it’s weird of a movement that insists it is fighting privilege and classism, to so often fall back on “well you should know this is what academics mean by that word.”)

(Or if we are coming from the other direction, liberals who say you are racist for discussing whether it’s okay to wear certain costumes on Halloween, or because you’re a low level admin for a company that has an all white boardroom, or because you made an awkward television ad.)

And yet, if we are talking about the word racism does, it’s function is to refer to a system whereby the powerful simplifies and denigrates the minority. “Racist” is usefully pointing to someone who defends this system.

Our attitude towards “a black person who says all white people dance funny” or “that bro with dreadlocks” is simply not the same as it is towards Jeff Sessions or Jefferson Davis. The word racist best functions as a rallying cry against gross defenders of the racial hegemony.

When you see these words as more building blocks in the system of language (and less, reflections on what the speakers internally mean) then it’s easy to see how they form a web that has certain patterns and rules.

Exiling someone with the argument “We don’t support racists” is of course non-sensical as a factual statement based on any thoughtful definition of the words involved. You could attack that argument from a dozen angles after all -- but it’s a very effective meme at silencing debate, isn’t it? No one publicly really wants to be on the other side of that argument (at least, no one polite.)

Similarly, all the problems the rationalist community has had with terms like virtue signalling and motte-bailey. They do define relevant concepts. But the use of such terms is “a phrase to dismiss whatever someone just said without interrogating its truth.” And so even though there are correct definitions for the terms, bigger blogs have just stopped or banned using them altogether, because they just end conversation.

***

I continue to be struck by the dynamics of “relatable content” from this article on tumblr wunderkinds I shared some months ago. And of course, how similar it is to Freddie talking about the behavioralist posturing among online liberal writers who consciously know better. (Go read them. They’re both quite good.)

Contra a simplistic interpretation of my previous post, words are not just memes following transmission vectors, they remain a way for intelligent beings to convey ideas they have generated.

But there seems a contrast or trade-off here. Sometimes words act more like mindless memes, and sometimes they serve as a way to express a complex idea, even the truth.

It’s easy on any social network, but especially tumblr, to become obsessed with how far your post travels. What’s the reaction to it, how many reblogs have showed it to others, how many people liked it, how many new followers did it get you. And it’s clear why instrumentally, reblogs and followers help spread your “good ideas” even more.

But anyone who has spent some time writing here has been struck by the vast and arbitrary difference between posts that go viral, and ones that get a single like or two. You can write pages of effort post, and get no response. But you’ll forever be known for the 100,000-note post about what you texted at 3am last night. @balioc writes beautifully about how to craft our identity in a banal and hostile world, post after post, but gets linked by a big blog for his one off comment about campus politics.

If you want to Make An Impact with your ideas, it can be very frustrating. You want to spread your new, brilliant ideas to as wide as possible an audience, but you don’t know how to phrase them to catch that viral wind.

And the answer lies in thinking about what “relatable” means. It means that many other people who see it understand it, as they had felt the same thing. Which, when you think about it, means… you aren’t actually adding anything new. That post about campus politics didn’t spread because you offered a new insight, it spread because people feel vague anger at campus liberals and you gave one more bullet of ammunition why they should, phrased in a way that also served their identity as puzzle solvers and empathetic thinkers.

The writing most likely to be shared like a mouse pressing a Skinner box, is well, the writing least likely to change people. It’s writing that doesn’t hook into the existing language system and follow the meme-winds to widespread recognition. The viral writing is writing whose qualities have the least to do with you individually.

Your writing has the choice between being part of self-replicating process, or being a lonely shout into the void, heard by many but repeated by few. That second sure is depressing, but in this light, it’s still a lot better to aim for than the first option.

Accelerationism: Dos and Dont's

Accelerationism is the word for the political tendency among radicals to encourage the worst among their enemies, and to be dismissive of short-term material gains that fall short of a revolution. It's a form of logical argument, and you can see this form replicated among many political movements with different concrete values.

It's leftists who argue that Trump will be good for revealing the ugly face of nationalism; it's right-anarchists who thought the ACA would be so bad it would undermine support for all of big government liberalism; an environmentalist would rather a park become polluted and ugly and get people to focus on corporate actors who contribute to climate change.

The current society is mired in a capitalist ideology dedicated to making everyone miserable. It cannot be redeemed or purified. Should measures like increased Medicaid funding, or a cool black man as President, be supported as making lives better and the oppressed happier, or should we withhold our support because they distract from the only goal that will get us out of this system: anti-capitalist revolution?

That's the question of accelerationism in a nutshell. Things are getting bad, do we make them get bad faster to bring about the inevitable end state sooner? It's an accusation that gets through around between center-leftists and far-leftists a lot.

But we are really talking about two different things, and that is key.

***

In purely material terms, should you help the worst off, or should you refrain in order to stoke the fires of their anger?

This is obviously a dumb question.

There is no guarantee the revolution is coming. There might never be a revolution. Or the revolution might just empower a totalitarian dystopia. Or your neglectful immiseration of people might be entirely irrelevant to that revolution.

The world is very large, and very complex, and incredibly uncertain. Especially when it comes to political tactics. Who the fuck knows what works. Who knows if your long-term goal is really a good idea. We're not talking "a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush," we're talking "a bird we're about to catch is still better than two thousand birds in a bush on top of a high mountain in another country that someone told you about once."

Your ethical responsibility is to proximate results. Help the people you can, do things that you know will work and that you can see the results of. Resist ideologies and political theories that say "actually doing this mean or easy thing serves the greater good in the very long term" and who never seem to actually pay out the greater good. Focus on specificity.

So yes, increased Medicaid funding is great. No ethical left should oppose it.

***

But there's a difference between helping everyone, and making a situation smoother and more pleasant.

For instance, David Simon, creator of the Wire which dramatizes amazingly well how the drug war hurts black communities, is opposed to marijuana legalization.

"I'm against it," Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. "The last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed. 

"I want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that's very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail," he continued, "and getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do."

(Yes, I'm assuming everyone who reads this is pro-legalization, at least in terms of ending the brutal Drug War.)

If you think Simons is being too blinkered here, let's imagine a more extreme scenario: What if we legalized heroin and instituted addiction-rehabilitation programs for the families of Congresspeople?

Now, the families of Congresspeople are people too. Their pain is real. If one of them goes to jail for possession, that is bad. And if they are addicted, humane and effective rehabilitation is better than jail. So from a pure harm reduction stance, how can you object to this?

But we of course know the incentives it sets up. It is good that Congress labors under the same laws as the rest of its citizenry. They should pay the cost for these laws like the rest of us, so that if the laws are cruel and unjust they will notice and get rid of them. A world where their kids don't go to jail for possession is more pleasant to them, but it's not beneficial for everyone.

That may be absurdly extreme, but it's not very different from "legalizing the drug white people do." The Drug War is cruel, invasive, and counter-productive - exempting some upper classes from it allows them to forget that experience, and to Other the people who do experience its vicissitudes.

This is, for instance, the problem with tax deductions for employer sponsored healthcare. It guarantees healthcare to the people our ruling class interacts with, leaving out and isolating the people our rulers avoid anyway, making it even harder to get any help for them. This is why universal programs are so important.

That accelerationism, to pull down the benefits some people enjoy that allow them to ignore the pain of the larger masses, is good and just. It is right to pull off the pleasant mask of capitalism or state violence, so that everyone sees its obscene underneath.

So, when faced with the question of, "do I want to make things worse in order to encourage far off radical solutions", we need to figure out whether it's a policy that helps everyone, or a policy that merely covers up the existing harsh reality, and then decide our accelerationism.

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@balioc replied:

I strenuously object to this framing. 
The “actually helping” versus “just making things smoother” dichotomy is not a real thing.  Or, rather, it is – but, seen for what it is, it is not a thing that you would support as a foundation for ethics or policy.  I certainly don’t.   

***** 

The examples of “anti-smoothing” policies that you support, on an abstract level, function exactlythe same way as the examples of “just causing pain” policies that you despise.  They hurt people unnecessarily, on the grounds that the hurting will spur the world to productive action, while relieving the hurt would lull the world into a sense of undeserved complacency.  As you say yourself: the white stoner kid, and the heroin-addicted Congressman’s child, are enduring real and morally-salient suffering at the hands of the legal system.  By choosing to let that happen to them rather than patching the system to prevent it, we are saying “we care less about your suffering than about some hazy unknowable distant prospect of greater systemic change.”  We are deciding that “allowing the upper classes to forget [the systemic problems],” which is a very abstract sort of problem that may not result in anything concrete at all, matters more than the ruination of kids’ lives.  Calling it “anti-smoothness” is a hypocritical fudge.  It is accelerationism, pure and simple.   

And on the flip side…well, if you really want to ensure that the rich-and-powerful aren’t allowed to forget about the big systemic problems, the best way to make that happen is to get the non-rich-and-powerful to riot.  Which works better if you take away all their stuff.  It doesn’t have to be a vague, heighten-the-contradictions “maybe things will hit rock bottom and then start going up again” kind of plan; it can be very tactical and very concrete.  This is the strategy espoused by all manner of radical groups back in the ‘60s, and today.   

***** 

So…what is the actual difference between the examples on your first list and the examples on the second list?  Who the victims are.  That’s it.  In the “unacceptable” cases, the suffering is endured by the “worst-off.”  In the “acceptable” cases, the suffering is endured by the “powerful.”     

You’ve reinvented the concept of privilege here.  You have divided people into classes and said “these people’s suffering is deontically unconscionable, but these’s people’s suffering doesn’t matter as much, it can be countenanced for the greater good.”  Bad universalist, no biscuit.   

***** 

The actual answer that yields the result you want is something you’ll like a lot less.  It’s not a Supreme Ethical Principle; it’s a calculus.  It’s the rationalists’ “shut up and multiply!”  Usually accelerationism is bad, sometimes it’s good, and the difference is (a) what the costs are and (b) what the expected payout is.  If we’re talking about laws that apply only to save Congressmen’s kids, well, the costs of not implementing them are (relatively) low and the amount of acceleration that you gain is relatively great.  If we’re talking about laws that give much-needed healthcare to millions of poor people who are not right this moment in the process of fomenting revolution, the costs of not implementing them are almost certainly too high.  

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So if you only paid attention to the two (point five) examples, and not to the abstract description, then yes I can see how you would arrive at that conclusion. It is in fact wrong to go “haha, the suffering of privileged people like Congressional kids, white UMC dope smokers, and employed people (??) does not matter.” That would not be ethical, and so you can be pretty sure that’s not what I meant, especially as it also contradicts the thesis (which you didn’t directly address, except by noting the absence of applicable examples.)

I should provide more examples then. But first, let’s go back to the beginning.

Accelerationism is an attitude we see frequently in political disputes. (Even Trump today is rejoicing that the AHCA failed, because its explosion will create pressure for future repeal.) It comes up often enough that saying accelerationism is always wrong (or always right) seems overbroad. There are too many cases of sick systems that need to be broken, rather than given short term balm. We need a differentiator.

Your solution is to “do the math.” But our ability to make these sort of cause and effect calculations is incredibly bad. And all attempts at making the sort of super-complicated predictions this requires just open our thinking to the sort of biases Less Wrongers know so well. We’ll choose the most comforting narrative and tell ourselves we are doing cold, hard math.

Consequentialism is hard, yo. If you’re talking trolley problem thought experiments where you know the probablistic outcome of all actions to the third significant figure, yeah go do that. But we don’t usually know it, but must usually make decisions anyway.

The different option I offer is an aesthetic differentiation. Is the harm you are preventing (or not) primarily material deprivation, or is it just a disruption of harmony? Is it unpleasant?

An example might be the election of Trump. Besides the possibility of nuclear oblivion, most of the histrionic liberal reaction to him was how unpleasant he was (at least relative to most other Republican candidates.) He said racist things, he said sexist things, he was cavalier about assault, he lied blatantly, it was just an endless parade of obscenities. And so when evaluating “Trump vs Cruz” (or even Kasich) we have to ask will he make the policy results that much worse, or will he just make political life more unpleasant, uglier, and rough?

And if we admit it’s the latter, is that really inaccurate? It’s more likely that Trump represents the truth of Republican positions (contradictory idiocy motivated by gut feeling that flatters white, rich Christians as the center of the world), and will accelerate the proper reaction to that. Not Trump as “easier to beat in the general”, but Trump as an acceleration President. The commentators who predicted that Trump would be hugely offensive but on material consequence not very different from a responsible, moderate Republican… have so far not been very wrong.

As @redantsunderneath mentioned in his film taste recently (which I share), the great thing difficult and visceral movies can do for us is to teach us to lean in to discomfort. We can differentiate between something that is actually hurting us and evil, or something that is disgusting or disharmonious. 

Sometimes this aesthetic improvement means “we have cleaned up the area around the powerful decision makers”, like kicking the homeless and porn shops out of Times Square, or legalizing drugs their kids are using. Even if there is some material component to that, we can tell the difference between what the primary vector is: actual broad harm reduction, or adding rosy tints to the windows of the subjective actors.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of asking “is that friend or commenter who I am very annoyed at hurting me, or just making me uncomfortable?”

To return to one of my original examples: I am not actually saying “repeal the employer-based tax deduction for healthcare to see what universal program Congress passes in its place.” We know the harm that would come from that. It was just an example of a policy that reduced harm, but did even more than that by reducing all the harm of being uninsured within sight of the wealthy and influential, and so also stalled further progress. We can understand this dynamic, and in the future try to build our programs around the dispossessed rather than around the affluent and hoping they work their way down to everyone.