Making Nobody Happy

The closest I think we’ve come in crystallizing the proper way to approach things is to live for God, not for the approval of others (our yourself). Living for yourself, doing things for yourself, is really just substituting the tyranny of the one for the tyranny of the mob. Both are fickle. Both have some advantages and problems. Doing things for yourself keeps your values closer to their immediate object and performance. So they might be clearer and better understood and executed. There is a purity that comes from having no outside influences causing confusion. But then again, with a group you have collaboration and the correction of the group, the pooling of ideas and abilities. Essentially, you have the advantages and disadvantages of dictatorship and democracy. When it comes to our personal selves and lives, in the West, we prefer dictatorship, whereas other in the East they seem to prefer a more democratic approach where the many have a say. Oddly enough, each favors the opposite approach at the larger political level. Dictatorship of the individual, democracy of the society, democracy of the individual, dictatorship of the society. I believe it’s a recognition that to some degree you always need both and will see both expressed.

Autonomy and tyranny are tools, they’re complimentary. They’re both necessary. They will be used, they will be expressed, they cannot be avoided. So the question is how do we use them? How do we use them well? Where should each be located? And this is where we’ve often corrected ourselves and found ourselves merely inventing new problems to solve. Anyone with a clear view of history can see that both rampant individualism and rampant socialism (the dominance of the group influence, I mean, not economic socialism, not that the two are unconnected, and you could see capitalism as a kind of economic individuals) have their problems. Parents raising children see these same problems arise. Some kids are way too concerned about what everyone else thinks and could use some independence, could do to care less. And some kids are way to concerned about what they want and don’t care about other people at all, and could do to care more. That’s how people are. So if you create a political system that raises those personality differences to the level of structural and political gospel, you’re looking at the excesses of childhood being writ large across a whole culture.

It’s silly to deny the power or value of the group. Social pressure is one of the great powers for shaping behavior, especially for certain types of people, making sure they restrain themselves and act according to the needs of society. An enormous amount of people don’t do certain things because society tells them they can’t and they’re afraid to be caught doing them. If they could avoid being seen, avoid being caught, they would act quite differently, according to their own interests, and would (and do) cheat on their taxes, break traffic laws, cheat on their spouses, take what they want, treat people like dirt online, etc. Look at what the anonymity of the internet has allowed so many of us to become, taking and acting in ways we could never get away with in person, in a real group. Humans are a social species, and all the dimensions of our lives operate in a social structure (because we aren’t alone in the world) as well as an individual one. We live in a way that recognizes the impact of there being other people in the world we have to share life with.

Our American culture is more one that venerates the primacy and power of the individual. And overall, it’s a very important contribution to history. One of the weaknesses of a social sense and system of morality is that it’s easy for it to become all about appearances and relations to others, without being properly founded in the individual. Socialized morality easily becomes all about power dynamics and appearances, and at home or wherever prying eyes cannot see you do whatever you want and work against the cultural ethos. And emphasis on the autonomy and value and rights of the individual allows an important shift in responsibility to the individual. It’s up to you to honor the ethos in your own life, for yourself, not just for the eyes of the masses. Your own inner life should reflect your values.

But if we get too focused on protecting the rights of the individual and forget that those protections were out in place to provide space for the assumption of individual responsibility (which would then, by its nature also translate to social value, because social structures are made up, ultimately, of individuals), and we neglect the role of the group in providing correction and support, then that approach can go just as wrong. If the idea becomes rhat your responsibility is only to yourself, you can become too free to conduct yourself however you like, and no one has the right to question or correct or judge you. When individualism becomes an overriding value it becomes very antisocial, and just as it’s true that social structures are made up of individuals, it’s also true that individuals are made up (in a different way) of social structures. Our own individual lives and so many of their aspects exist in us as a relationship, not solipsism. We need prosocial values and expressions in our individual lives in order for our individual lives to thrive and grow and operate. In order to be able to work, to communicate, to learn, to eat, to parent, to be cared for, to purchase goods, to build, to touch and have relationships, in order to do all these things that are what humans do and what they are, we must encounter and come up against and often work with and communicate with others. In order to be ourselves we must be with those who are not ourselves. To be us we must be part of more than just us. And without us those things cannot be.

This, then, is why individualism and socialism are, to a degree, unavoidable. We can’t help but be individuals. And we can’t help but be interconnected societies. So any good approach to how we should live must find the value and balance in both. And any system that tries to make only one the measure of all value and the only meaningful theater for action will inevitably slide into excess and pathological practices and either antisocial or anti-individual outcomes (or likely eventually both, since the two are not separate, but are interconnected and reciprocal and symbiotic).

Maybe we have gotten better at it in some ways, and maybe we have also gotten worse. Our swings to extremes in the last century were massive and catastrophic in their experimentation and consequences. And although we retreated from them in fear, they haven’t passed away. Memories are short. The danger remains, sleeping.

And we haven’t stopped finding other ways to toy with our own extremities. We find new ways to experiment with ourselves and see what beasts may arise. We build up voracious, all-consuming versions of our voice to devour the world within itself. And beasts rise to oppose them in return, as must be. The body reacts to itself, to contend with its counterpoint. The threat is sensed, the danger recognized, the correction arises, and the test begins. The greater the experiment, the greater the test; the greater the test, the greater the response.

And we keep hoping that if only we can reduce the world to just one facet, one voice, if only we can convert or destroy all of the other kind, we will find our utopia. If only we can fix that one thing wrong with the structure of the world, it will fix everything wrong with ourselves. And so every ideological utopia we plan launches a fresh hell of our own destruction. Even our best intentions go wrong, because we cannot prepare for what we cannot see. We are all at odds with one another over the very thing we need from one another. We hate one another for the precious truths we hold about one another.

Why must we hate those truths? Why must their voices be silenced? Because they tell a terrible tale. That we are limited, that we are incomplete, that we are imperfect, that we need, that we err, that we are not enough. That the tower cannot stand. We possess the collective vision of a god, but cannot bear those divine garments. We cannot makes sense of a world shattered by the babble of all these contradicting and discordant voices. We crave either unity or the silence within our own heads.

And it frustrates me and depresses me and makes me hate the world and resent them. It feeds the part of me that hates the world and humanity by reminding me of what they’re like, and in a way that especially seems to be tuned to distort my perceptions into the worst possible form. Social media just seems to have that power. It makes everything look worse, it makes everything intolerable.

And maybe that is accurate. Maybe people really are that awful and stupid and unwilling to listen and hungry for senselessness. But if that is the case, it isn’t helping me live with them or with the world. It’s opening me up to more than I can handle.

I had to leave Facebook largely because I couldn’t handle the view it was giving me of the people in my life. And I could see how it was changing them and making them worse, distorting their perceptions. And I couldn’t handle watching it any more.

In some ways social media has been good, but it’s hard not to see it as a distorting universal evil, a structural change to human interaction that should never have come to exist.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of blogs or podcasts either. They have a lot of the same problems as social media in general. They democratize stupidity. Often very smart stupidity, often more a kind of imbalance than real foolishness. But it’s a bizzare environment that gives platforms to people and ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be able to to be heard, thrive, grow, or work in the real world. And maybe there’s a good reason for that. Maybe all those barriers serve a purpose. Maybe they act as a form of selection and testing on human ideas.

I suppose TV isn’t really all that different. And even books. And art. Social media just changes the structure for dissemination so greatly that it alters the rules of the whole game. It changes the way we experience and interact with the world. And it’s so new, but it’s so big and pervasive. It’s completely trashed all existing limitations and adaptations and restrictions we developed to deal with media.

And that’s a problem. Media has been a problem forever. Plato had a lot to say about it, a lot of concerns about its abuse. And it isn’t clear that we had fully appreciated or solved the problems he pointed out in his day, much less the problems arising in our own. The average American seems to be no more media savvy than the average Athenian.

The world, as I saw it not long ago, was a line, a spectrum. And spread across that spectrum were the various colors that make up the human race. All the different personalities and the approaches that define them, their clustering into different political and religious and cultural and philosophical perspectives and approaches and responses to the world. There were extremes at both ends that fell off into excess. But in the middle, thanks to the need to be at least sensible enough to survive, a large part of humanity rocked back and forth, keeping one another in a somewhat messy but fairly stable balance.

But at this moment, the extremes seem to have swallowed most of America. Almost every structure we have has been eroded as more and more of it has been swallowed by these extremes. And the more those extremes devour, the more they must spread. The extremism of one side invites and requires the extremism of the other to oppose it. Their strength invites response. The threat of one justifies the arming of the other. And it’s not clear that either is wrong. In fact there’s a good argument that the real problem is that they’re both right about almost everything.

It’s very much like an argument I often have with my children. They both make claims against the other, paint the other as having acted in bad faith, as being terrible, of their anger and response as being justified. And they’re both actually right. They’re both human, so of course that extremely likely! They are both being terrible to one another, they both have good reasons to be angry and hurt and threatened, their claims against each other and all valid. So what am I supposed to do? How are we supposed to resolve such a mutually valid conflict? Just let them fight and whichever can destroy the other successfullt gets what they want? Both have equally good claims against the other, so why not just let them move on to outright aggression, if that’s what they both seem to think is justified and both seem to be right. Go on, get what you want, fight to the death, destroy your sister. Then at least I won’t have to listen to this conflict any more and the argument will be over! If there isn’t any other way to settle the conflict, because both are fundamentally right about the other, then why not just get it over with, decide how the future will look and who gets to determine it, and have some peace?

That’s how I feel lately about our whole country. The coming conflict is inevitable. Both sides are right in their claims against the other. And they can’t both claim the right to see their way, their claim, carried out and the other destroyed. So they either need to separate and go their separate ways, or annihilate the other. Because the middle ground for negotiation and reconciliation is pretty much all gone.

We don’t share enough of our basic worldviews in common any more to hope for any kind of crossing between the extremes. Our entire mental frameworks are based upon incompatible interpretations of the world. It’s not merely the data, but the entire framework for gathering and interpreting the data. Discussion has become pointless. The only possible solution is practical and historical. Let the conflict happen. Let the test of ideas happen. And see how it goes. Maybe one side or another will prevail and prove to be closer to the truth, more workable, and maybe the other will lead to ruin. Maybe that will decide it. Maybe one side will have to actively cast down the other and prove their historical validity. That’s the empiricism of consequences. What is most corrupt, most foolish, will hopefully die and fail the fastest and be revealed in its suffering and disfunction.

The cost of any such process would be enormous. Whole generations crippled and destroyed. Marx, of course, would simply steel himself and argue that the ends justify the means, and the historical process will justify itself. The conflict is a necessary means to reveal the truth and chart the necessary path of the future. I would prefer that not to be the world I leave to my girls. But there’s so much rising stupidity and extremism and imbalance in the world, I don’t see what else the future can be.

Christianity seems like lost cause. What little of it was left has been swallowed either by conservatism or by liberalism. I recall when I was a kid in the 90s and evangelicals were complaining about how liberalism had swallowed up the mainline denominations. And I saw that they were largely right. But I was also very concerned about th eir response, which seem to be pushing Christianity into conservatism in order to bakance and right this wrong. And I kept complaining and kept complaining that conservatism and Christianity were not the same thing, and it was dangerous to identify and marry the two or seek to use the doctrines and methods of one for the benefit of the other. A historical knowledge of Christianity and philosophy, including politics, had clued me in by high school to the fact that every time the church wedded itself too closely to the political and philosophical powrs of its time it wasn’t an alliance that saved it, it was its doom. When the political party or philosophy inevitably fell, it took the church with it.

But my complaints weren’t shared by others, and things went further and further the way I warned. The election of Trump was the seal on it. Almost the entire middle ground was driven out of Christianity. The moderates that remained were pushed out into the liberal camp, embracing those philosophical extremes to fight the rightly perceived excesses of the religious and political right. The snake ate itself up from both ends and I found myself trying to argue simultaneously against both sides as they closed in and swallowed up what was left. Christianity became an extension of either the political right or political left, it’s identity and expression and beliefs defined and restricted and tested and maintained by the political ideology of their respective extremes. Anyone who betrayed the faith from within by daring to pollute the vision, question the mission, was failing to hold the line against the enemy and their existential threat to America, it’s citizens, and our faith. And no one was immune. Leader after leader fell and became merely the roadies and mouthpieces and extensions of the political left or political right. They became priests of the culture. And to my eyes there was absolutely no difference between the two. Both were corruptions and distortions and betrayals of the faith. Both were equally right in their claims against the other and utterly guilty and reprehensible. And I thought it was the duty of Christians not to give themselves to either, not to let either take the faith for themselves, to skirt the difficult middle that has to apply judgment to all categories through this most central and important category.

But politics has changed. It used to not actually represent as divided a category. The underlying worldview and defining narratives of most people was much closer, and differences were less extreme. Other categories represented larger gulfs of difference. And there was more variety within political parties, and more overlap. But that has changed a lot in the last couple decades. People see their party affiliation as a much more defining aspect of their identity than they used to. It divides and differentiates them more. The concept of party is doing more work than it used to in seperating us from one another. What each viewpoint represents has come to be something much larger and more full of content, including orthodox content (what it means to belong or not belong to the group) than it used to.

Maybe this is partly because other categories have declined and become less distinct and defining. Religion, place of origin (your hometown or state), family, all of these institutions have crumbled over time and become less significant parts of our identity and experience. So something had to take their place. Political party has slowly been slurping up those corner of meaning and powers and arenas that used to belong to other parts of our society. It’s slowly been absorbing them and subsuming them all under its unifying banner. It is becoming the arbiter for how we see and experience the world and our place and others’ places in it.

And social media gives us a new kind of forum, a new kind of environment to work that process out, one unlimited by the old restrictions of time and place and environment that existed before. A city might have a certain identity and history, but on an individual level it would be quite diverse, quite full of all the different types of people, the different personalities that make up the most fundamental structure of common differences among humans. And geographic proximity forced our alliance to be fairly accommodating of such differences. Our identity within the group could only extend so far, only be so restrictive, because it needed to be open enough for most people to fit into the middle so the city could continue to exist and work together. And survival would have a powerful selective effect on what arose and persisted. We had TV stations, but because the whole country had to share half a dozen channels, in order to succeed they had to figure out adaptations that would let them work for a large, varied audience. Journalistic impartiality, for example.

But in the new environment, all those restrictions and selective forces are gone. In fact they start to work in reverse. The more outside the norm something is, the more specific, the more tailored to your tastes and prejudices, the more easily it can be matched by search and algorhythm to you and profit. The market knows what you want and it has the ability to give it to you, period. Is that good for you? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there was something good about a world that didn’t do that. Maybe there was something good about a world that restricted us and pushed back against us. Maybe having a world that just gives us what we want has caused us to lose the skills and adaptations that allowed us to survive and thrive and learn and compromise in a complex world.

There is, of course, some argument that in theory social media should actually help us. And it’s good enough in theory, and is probably true in some cases. But I think against that there are two arguments. First, that’s just not what people are like. We don’t want what’s good for us, we want what’s easy and pleasant. And if we have the option of candy over vegetables, we’ll almost always pick candy. Our increased access to food of all kinds could have made us the healthiest, most properly fed and balanced generation ever. There’s certainly an argument that that’s what should have happened, that there’s no reason it couldn’t. But that’s not what people did. Instead, we’re the fattest, most obese generation ever. To such an extreme that it’s become and overwhelming health crisis. That’s what we did with that new environment and opportunity. The old restrictions on our ability to get and eat food were removed. And we used the opportunity to ruin ourselves. It wasn’t something imposed on us it was something we imposed on ourselves and chose for ourselves. We just made a machine that gave us what we wanted. And what we wanted turned out not to be what was good for us.

Social media is the food industry of the mind. We’re all participants. Social media has removed all the old restrictions and difficulties and challenges, it’s changed the whole environment of ideas and how we encounter and test and adapt and react to the world. Its changed the ground rules for what’s possible. It’s created new ways to succeed, new paths around old barriers. And this is trumpeted as one of the great things about it. But it’s at least worth asking what it’s costing us, and what, having seen some of the practical results these last few years, taking away those restrictions and challenges and barriers has allowed through into our midst.

Both liberals and conservatives should be keely aware that there are some things they revile that could not have risen to their current prominence without the effect of social media. It’s lowered the barrier to entry for all kinds of things, and the most likely things that will get let in are things we want, that are agreeable to us. And the least likely to gain are those disagreeable but necessary realities, those challenges that develop our strength and flexibility. Those suffer in such an environment. They lose their advantage (which is often just practical livability) in a race that is defined by marketing appeal, by giving the customer what they want. It’s not in your interest as a news outlet to be fair or impartial or careful or circumspect with your words. In fact it’s a disadvantage in the competition for click-throughs. The more provocative, the more sensational, the more outrageous, the more it will command the news cycle and the attention of the customer. (And that’s part of the shift too, to an increased commodification of identity and ideology. And the things provided become less and less a service and more and more a product.) Nothing is so viral as outrage and nothing is so financially valuable nowadays as virality. Virality is fundamentally defined by how content makes you feel in control (or fear loss of control), how extreme the emotions it provokes are (valence), and how much it provokes you to a state of psychological and emotional arousal. So, dominance, valence, arousal.

The new market carefully selects the information that will define your world according to those criteria. That’s why outrage is the emotion de jeur. Outrage places you in a position of moral superiority, so you feel in control and want to share it (or you’re deathly afraid of losing control if you don’t react and act and share it; outrage has the advantage of both working in its favor). It obviously is tuned to provoke extreme emotions. You’re not curious or concerned, you’re outraged. The valence is extremely high. And it’s all about arousal. Outrage has a direct link to an actionable response; its emotional fulfillment, its release, is found in confrontation. You want the object of outrage stopped, you want it confronted, you are raised to a height of psychological arousal, your fight or flight response, so you can take action.

These three elements to virality aren’t something I made up, by the way, they’re the result of study by scientist and psychologists. And yes, cats and puppies and silly and stupid and fun memes are also viral. We’re complex beings, and often we want nice things too. But there’s a lot money and careers to be made off of fear and anger and outrage and provocation, especially when you’re looking for short term, sensational results. Fear is a most effective motivator when applied to the near term. In the long term it wears you down and exhaust you. Keeping your psychological arousal turned up to 10 all the time is hard on your body and mind. But if your main goal is just to get someone to go click or hover for a little while or share, or tune in again tomorrow or next week, well, it can be good enough. You can always mix in a little dominance and self-satisfaction, some optimism and goal-seeking, now and then to temper the porridge. But the good money is in outrage and provocations, and as I’ve said before, I find the arguments from both sides for their alarmist behavior equally credible.

I’m not arguing in the slightest that social media, or media in general, is a monoculture of fear or outrage or general emotional indulgence. I’m just arguing that in an environment where many barriers and limitations have been removed, that those approaches enjoy special advantages and the things that are good for us (but less immediately compelling) have special disadvantages. Very much like in the food industry. There’s a lot more out there than junk food. But junk food enjoys special advantages in such an environment as we have where we can just have what we want, and the whole ecosystem is tuned to remind us of it and give it to us.

Take this long, philosophical screed of mine, for instance. It’s actually one of the more raw and provocative things I’ve written. I’m often in a war with myself to balance and restrain myself and be thorough. And it’s probably quite boring. Few people will want to read it. And maybe that’s partly down to me as a writer, maybe that’s partly down to my material not being strong or compelling, but maybe part of it is also that it’s just very structurally disadvantaged in the current state of media.

Long articles like this, in another time and place, didn’t face such competition for attention and urgency, didn’t face such challenges of immediacy and sensation and presentation. You can see this trend even in the restaurant industry. Sure there are some amazing holes in the wall where one great cook makes great food. But they’re competing against restaurants that have staked out locations at the heart of passing traffic, spent millions in their buildouts and interiors, hired dozens of people to curate every step of the process, developed highly engineered food tuned to excite your interest (and likely enjoying the advantage of being stuffed with more salt, fat, and sugar than you could ever imagine fitting into a dish) and have amazing branding and advertising. How do you even get noticed when you’re up against that kind of finely tuned machine? As a customer, how do you resist such a siren call? It almost demands your wallet and your expanding waistline to pay it your respects. How can you not and avoid missing out?

I also recall a time when movies were much more slowly paced and edited. They took their time. Now we get a scene where it takes fourteen cuts in six seconds for Liam Neeson to jump over a fence (in Taken 2). And any time I watch an old TV show or movie with my kids I have to explain that there were different limitations to what you can do, and that’s why they don’t have all the crazy effects and the camera stays put more. And what do you often hear about CGI? The same as with the junk food. Crazier and crazier creations, but somehow it means less and less. Somehow the loss of restrictions eroded the reality of the film instead of enhancing it. Somehow the limitations before forced filmmakers to be more creative and put more thought into things. Again, that’s not to say that CGI is all bad, it’s just that we did with it what we did with everything when the work and limitations were removed, what we did with food and with media. We used it some to make great art and further our growth and creativity, but the easiest thing to do with it once it was freely available was to get lazy and give the customers what we wanted in the fastest, simplest way possible. And somehow that didn’t yield great results. It yielded junk food, and consumers fat and unimpressed by an endless buffet of the most amazing effects money could buy. Entitled consumers commenting and obsessing and complaining over every little facet of movies, and finding ways to commoditize their own reactions.

We made an industry out of reacting to our own meals and our own shopping trips and daily routines and petty compalints. We turned junk content into a behemoth industry. We made whole TV and radio shows out of just commenting on the news and making people afraid or outraged or angry or disillusioned with other people. And we made ourselves feel good about it, like we were actually doing something or accomplishing something by learning to resent and fear people we had never met and had limited knowledge of and little influence over.

In the old days you would hear about your own town, your own community or family, people you likely knew in a deeper way than merely as subjects of a for-profit sensation industry. And you could probably have some meaningful reaction to and influence over the things happening in your community. Your arousal was relatively informed, and your reaction, seeking resolution to your outrage, had a practical outlet. And your reaction was likely moderated and restrained by your need to continue to live in some sort of functional harmony with the other members of your family or community. And you had to put yourself at equal risk of scrutiny.

But the distance and anonymity of the internet, combined with its immediacy and it’s ability to pull together limited, carefully selected points of data from across a huge swath of the world and condense them to define and fill up your whole world, and its ability to provide a platform that specially favors the most extreme and provocative and sensational content that favors short term rewards and reactions changed all that.

All this is the gift of our expanding technology and media tailored to pander to our desires. And the result seems to be stress, separation, alienation, and disfunction. Why? It’s possible that our psychology and the internal structures of our mind, the things that help us judge evaluate information and determine our emotional reactions and subsequent actions was not designed for the kind of system we have created. It’s a vastly different system from how the world, and human society, works by nature and has worked for untold generations. It’s an entirely new paradigm, and a constantly changing paradigm. And it’s yanking us all over the place. Our young people are attempting suicide at startlingly high rates and reporting mental illnesses at a percentage unprecedented in human history, and all within the last ten years. And there seems to be a direct tie to technological and social and media changes rhat have occurred in just the last decade.

What, then, is the best prescription? I’ve been uncertain of that, but I’ve noticed a lot of people recognizing their stress and deciding to quit social media. I don’t think it’s fair to just simplify things too much and say it’s the fault of Facebook. There seems to be an invasion of junk media and junk food and junk politics and junk philosophy and all kinds of junk into all our lives in every area. But maybe Facebook (or comment boards or Reddit or Twitch or Twitter or YouTube or Pinterest) is where some people notice it most. And maybe pushing back against it there is the best place to start.

Maybe the best thing, if you’re being constantly infected by feelings and ideas that are specially selected for being viral, is to practice a little bit of social distancing. I did find that narrowing my scope to my more immediate world seemed to help. I focused more on the world actually around me, more on sorting out my own actual life and problems. The chaos nearest to me, and then the pain and chaos next nearest to me, in my home and neighborhood. What could I do about them, how could I make them better? And it made me wonder how much I was being distracted from that reality by social media, and whether it was actually a kind of escape from my own life and responsibilities.

I can’t say I have any certainty in this area, only speculation and questions. But my own experiments did help. I dropped off social media. I started aggressively filtering my other media too. Anything that seemed to be trying to take advantage of the structural problems I’ve mentioned here, I hid. I watched for mind viruses and I pulled away any time I saw their rear their heads. I tried to refocus my attention and effort and emotions. And it helped me stabilize. It made life more manageable. And when I came back recently, and started spending more time reading news online and watching media online because of the pandemic, it didn’t take long for me to start feeling stressed and unhappy and worried and angry again.

Maybe that means there’s just something wrong with me and how I’m using media. But maybe I also underestimated the inherent weaknesses and dangers I would be exposed to. I wasn’t a careless user. I had a much more curated intake than a lot of people. I was smart and thoughtful and self-aware, in my own estimation. I could handle myself. And yet somehow I ended up exactly like so many other people, especially young people.

So maybe I need to remember the lessons I learned before. Maybe I’m not ready to throw myself back in. Maybe I’m avoiding the world, maybe I’m depriving myself of something good. Maybe I’m actually being smart. I guess the proof is in the pudding.

Deer live fairly simple lives. They eat, they have babies, they get sick, they age, they get eaten by other animals. They live fairly short, simple, lives, but also, from our perspective, difficult, futile, insecure, and relatively meaningless lives. What makes deer able to live these lives of the constant search for food and temporary avoidance of death? What makes them able to stand it and not collapse from fear or depression or ennui? Well, simply put, they don’t have to think about it. They’re only aware of what’s in front of them, the immediate needs, dangers, pleasures, risks, and goals.

There’s a scene in the movie Men in Black where agent K criticizes agent J for making a scene, causing mahem and destruction by firing his weapon openly in the public pursuit of their quarry. Agent J reminds K that the world is at stake, and K tells him that the world is always at stake. There’s always some huge threat looming over humanity and threatening to destroy it, and what let’s the world keep running, what lets people go about their lives (which provides the stability needed so the Men in Black can even exist to confront these threats) is that they do not know about it.

That’s the burden of consciousness in action. The truth is, there are so many challenges and dangers in the world that any one person seeing them all clearly would be immediately overwhelmed. There’s no way one person can fix all that, and there’s no way one person can even contain it in their minds and not be completely mentally and emotionally overcome. We’re just not designed for such a burden.

There are a few ways we handle this problem. One solution is to outsource the problem to other people. As a child, I was always amused reading my comic books when Uncle Scrooge would pay Donald Duck to worry for him. Scrooge would expect Donald to moan and groan and tear out his hair, so Scrooge could sit calmly and get his work done. It’s a hilarious picture, but it’s not that different from what we actually do. We specialize, we hand off tasks to people who can focus on those problems so we can focus on our own. We distribute the psychic burden of life and all its dangers across the spectrum of human experience and ability (and some people are indeed much better at facing and solving certain kinds of problems than other people).

We also outsource a lot of our concerns to impersonal forces. God, the universe, the free market, karma, however you conceive of those laws that govern the way the world is structured. Those laws of justice will ensure that, generally, bad ideas and actions will fail and die and good ones will prosper; conscientiousness will lead to success, foolishness will be revealed in its own failure. Basically, the scales of cosmic justice will operate and good and evil will receive their just rewards. Mostly. At a macrocosmic scale. There will be some sense to the universe, some sense and logic to what actions lead to what ends. The world won’t be completely arbitrary and unjust.

Because, if the world is completely arbitrary and unjust, then there’s really no point in bearing the burden of consciousness. It has no benefit, because knowing our situation doesn’t grant us any control over it or understanding of it we can use. It merely allows us to see the senselessness and helplessness and injustice and random arbitrariness of our situation. If, indeed the world is fundamentally random and meaningless, it would be far better to be like a deer and at least not be aware of it, so we can keep our focus on the only level that actually matters: the immediate.

So, let’s assume for now that life and the universe aren’t just a cruel, senseless joke. Because if they are, there isn’t really anywhere to go. So how, then, do we manage the portion of the burden of consciousness that it is our part to bear? And what is it? These are very relevant questions that people have actually thought about a lot over the years and have developed different solutions for.

Government and the law are two of our main instruments for dealing with the existential burdens of life. We don’t carry the burden of maintaining justice, frontier-style, in our own personal lives. We don’t have to all carry swords or guns on our hips or defend our borders daily with personal violence and force. And in our big, complex world, it would be pretty hard to do do it in way that effectively recognizes and responds to every danger and need the world contains.

As much as we like the idea of the lone gunslinger brining justice and order to the world, the actual world is so big and so complex and the ways it needs to be dealt with are so varied and complex that it’s just not practical. It’s too much to expect of any one person. So we create institutions, structures, laws, and we choose people who can specialize in administering and enforcing various parts of those laws and the separate jobs and stages needed to make them work, and we trust those structures and people to do their job so we can get on with ours.

And hopefully that all works and we have good laws that are well designed to map on to reality and provide mechanisms to respond to the needs and problems that arise. And hopefully we have people in those jobs that are well suited in their abilities to see and deal with those challenges. That’s how you get a good, functioning society, one that makes it easier for all of its citizens to bear the burden of consciousness and allows us to maximize our potential. We each contribute according to our abilities and strengths and we’re protected in our weaknesses and blind spots by the strengths and insight of others.

In the old days, people had to bear a much larger total share of the burden of consciousness by themselves. Sometimes that even meant a completely solipsistic existence, of lone humans alone bearing the weight of the world. But the smallest fundamental unit where we came together to share and distribute those burdens was, of course, the family. Pioneers basically had to be their own government, their own town, their own police, their own education system, their own social and healthcare system, their own army. They were much more on their own and had to provide for themselves.

And that meant it took a lot of work and time and effort to accomplish things, because you had to do and be everything. Maybe you had one person to compliment you and help take some of the burdens off you and balance their strengths with yours in mutual protection and relief. That may not sound like a lot, but even the power of the smallest human society shouldn’t be underestimated. Those tiny societies, those families and little clusters of settlers and little villages kept us alive and growing and ultimately built the whole world we now enjoy.

And we have great respect for those people (or should) because they were able to do such a thing. Each family was like a city unto itself. Each settlement was like a country unto itself. What they accomplished, considering how much they had to handle, is amazing. But they did have one big advantage on their side. The total scale of problems they were aware of or concerned with or responding to was relatively small. They had to be everything to everyone, but fortunately “everyone” in this case meant just the six people in their own family, or the ten families in their settlement. And the bigger the community got, the less they had to be everything.

So, a kind of law of human consciousness emerges. The larger and more spaced out the group, the more narrow the focus of our consciousness becomes. The smaller and closer the group, the wider the focus of our consciousness becomes. Our mind works like a camera lens, getting wider but with a shallower depth of focus for a detailed look at things close up. For larger numbers of objects more widely spread, the depth of of the lens expands, but the area of focus narrows. Get a camera with a zoom lens out and play with it a bit and you’ll see what I mean. Pioneers live with their minds set on a portrait lens or macro setting, whereas a modern white collar worker might be thinking more like a telephoto. Our minds, much like our eyes, just seem to be built to adapt their focus in this way. You would need a pretty amazing camera to be able to take in a wide and narrowly detailed view of infinite focus at the same time. And most of us are really just average consumer models and aren’t built to process so much data.

So humans minds naturally adjust their focus and field of view just like camera lenses, and this helps us live and adjust to the needs of life and our own limitations and situation. In small groups where burdens cannot be easily shared, we take a wide angle view of the world with a shallow or narrow focus. In large groups where burdens can be easily shared, we take a narrow angle of view with a long depth of focus. This also means there are two intersections where things can easily start to go wrong and become a problem for creatures like us. Small group/narrow angle, and large group/wide angle. Basically, that’s like trying to take your family photos from six feet away with a telephoto lens, or trying to take detailed shots of distant landscapes with a macro lens.

I think the dangers of small group/narrow angle are fairly well understood, because the consequences are obvious and fairly immediate. If you’re a pioneer you take a fairly narrow and limited view of what you need to worry about and do, you’re going to get in trouble fast. If you only concern yourself with food, or protection, or family, or building a house, if you focus on just one of those things and ignore the others, things will collapse pretty quickly. People have many needs, and you need to be addressing all of them and keeping them all in mind and balance.

It’s no good having plenty of water if you freeze to death. It’s no good having lots of children if you can’t feed them. A strong house isn’t very useful if you don’t get your crops planted. And if you’re spending lots of time thinking about distant things related to one of those needs, like the general agricultural conditions and spending half your time working on techniques to adapt to them, meanwhile your house is crumbling and there are wolves circling and you haven’t got any blankets or medicine and no one is watching the kids or teaching them how to take care of themselves, then your not spending your time well or applying your focus and efforts properly, and you’re headed for swift disaster. I think most people can see that and know that fairly intuitively. “Have some sense of proportion! Get some perspective! That’s not what we need to focus on right now!” are all common corrections to that approach. Adjust your lens, is basically what they mean.

Where the dangers and weaknesses are much harder to see if at the other extreme, at the level of large group/wide angle. And before I get into this, it’s worth mentioning that there are challenges at every level. Just because it’s a necessary adaptation to develop a wider mental focus if you’re in a very small society and you’re able to develop a narrower focus in a large one doesn’t mean it isn’t still work, that it isn’t hard and does come with risks and problems.

Having to be everything at once in a small society dilutes our abilities and attention and forces us to address problems we might be poorly suited at solving. And the tendency to silo ourselves in a large society means we might lose sight of concerns outside our specialized viewpoint that we really should be more aware of or contributing to. Yes, there are great opportunities to either broaden our skill set or hone our skill set (and selves) in either situation, but even those opportunities come with costs, namely, what you lose at the other end. If you specialize too much you risk becoming too narrow. If you broaden too much you risk becoming too diffused.

And so life becomes a kind of balancing act, taking advantage of the chance to hone and focus our skill set and personality and set aside some of the broader spectrum of the burden of consciousness so we can dig deeper into our strongest niche, while also remembering that the rest of the spectrum of consciousness is still out there, and not becoming so focused on our area that we become blind and helpless in those other areas, remembering to broaden our skills and expand ourselves or at least respect the perspectives and contributions of others. Life becomes a constant push and pull between focus and balance, and somehow we need to find a way to make use of the benefits of both while acknowledging that our own limitations as humans mean we’re going to struggle anywhere in between those extremes.

OK, now let’s return to the area that I mentioned before. A large group situation combined with a wide angle and shallow depth of field. Using a portrait approach to telephoto photography. The problem is, the world contains so much information that we just can’t take it all in and respond properly to it. We can’t process it intellectually or emotionally. So we have built in filters and selective mental structures that tell us what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and select available information based on how it fits into and is relevant to our existing mental schema (basically, our internal story and values, what matters to us). Some of this is innate, some of it is encultured, and some of it is down to our individual personality.

My first daughter, when she was a baby, was so interested in people (and still is, they’re all that matters to her). She would look right in your eyes constantly and watch you all the time and would become terribly upset if she couldn’t see anyone. That was fun, but she was also a lot of work because she was so needy. She had almost no interest in toys or objects or exploring places. So she needed constant attention and interaction. Objects that weren’t people barely even existed for her. Places that didn’t have people in them held no interest.

My second daughter was quite different. It was hard to get her to meet your eye, she was often distracted by other things. She could be quite happy for long periods of time just staring at the world or digging her hands in the dirt or listening to music. You could drive around in the car and forget she was even there. You could never do that with my older daughter. From the moment they were born, they were processing information differently. They were assigning different values to different types of things, different types of information, and they responded to them differently. And they each have developed unique strengths and weaknesses and needs and desires and insights and abilties as a result. They often have a hard time understanding each other because they see and want such different things, but they’re also a wonderful compliment to one another. If if they can ever learn to properly understand and appreciate the other, they’ll have learned a really great skill and gained some real wisdom that will make them bigger than they were.

This kind of filtering is a necessary and innate part of the human mind. Everyone is filtering the world through the lenses of human perception, of their culture, and of their personality. We’re all doing it all the time. We have to do it. In fact one of the hardest things in developing AI and robotics has proved to be teaching them what information is relevant and what to pay attention to, and the realization that most of that process is defined by the meaning and purpose and goals that they were designed to pursue. They have to be taught to filter information according to their goals and needs.

Now, in our modern world we’ve come with some very interesting inventions. The internet, social media, newspapers, television. All of them are essentially information collectors and distributors. And they have an enormous reach. They’re able to gather information for us from the far corners of our world and deliver it to our lap. And because they’re so pervasive, they can wrap themselves around us so they define and filter our whole world for us. The rise of targeted and entertainment news, editorial news, papers and websites and groups and TV shows that cater specifically to our tastes, wraps us in an expansive world of fairly unitary focus and dimension.

At the same time, technology and lifestyle flexibility have allowed us to silo ourselves more and more effectively. They’ve also given us means of communication and action that remove us at a far distance from the people and events we hear about and respond to, the results of the actions we take, the dangers we hear about, the reactions of people we have affected, and the results and resolutions of the problems we concern ourselves with. The internet allows us to gather a selection of the juiciest and most provocative news from across a nation of 350 million people and funnel that direct to our individual doors. And it lets us shoot off comments and reactions to those events back to those people and many other people who we will never meet or know or likely have anything to do with. And we don’t have to see their faces, maintain a working relationship with them, or even have anything to do with them ever again, because they’re just names in a ladder of text.

What has been the result of such changes? Well, never mind how, but it seems to have made us much more partisan. It’s made us less able to understand or trust one another. It’s made us ruder and less civil and more easily angered. It’s also greatly raised our perception of threats. Outrage and fear and self-righteousness and violent resistance and incredulity at the idiocy of others are the prevailing emotional states. And yes, there are many reasons, but I think at least some of them (or the reasons for why the results have been so exaggerated) are structural. They’re because the way society is arranged now is at opposites to how we naturally process information, adjust our perspective, and assess needs and threats.

Human beings seem to have been designed to process information and respond to needs and threats and goals at a level of about 150 people. That seems to be the natural maximum size for a meaningful human community. There are only so many relationships of any depth you can maintain, only so many connections you can effective manage. Once you get past that level, your interactions are governed more by social structures and impersonal forces than any actual personal community. That’s about as much as a person can handle.

And so much of our communication is based around subtleties. Tone of voice, facial expressions, body language. Our faces and bodies are communication machines. They help tell our story, they humanize us to one another. And there’s also a very different social environment that exists when you actually know and have to live with someone in person, in the same physical space, and even more when you have to learn to live with one another (and maybe even occasionally need one another, one of the hallmarks of community in the shared-psychic-burdens model) long term. There are certain ways you can’t treat people in your own house or your community. You can’t expect the relationship to last or prosper if you don’t treat them with a certain amount of respect and understanding.

And proximity helps us achieve that positive social goal. We see people up close, in detail, as humans. We get a close-focus view of them that tempers how we treat them as representatives of our large-group, long-view personal perspectives. I might be a liberal who dislikes and disagrees with conservatives, but I know the guy who works at the lighting store, and although he’s part of that large, long-view group, I know him as a person, close up, eith a plethora of other tiny details that humanize and complexity him, and we have a good working relationship and respect for one another partly because our relationship with one another is not merely limited to my knowledge of how we differ in this one area. We can learn to appreciate each other’s viewpoints and see one another as actual, sympathetic humans that might have good aspects to them and good thoughts and motivations beyond what my wide, shallow assessment of the greater group indicates.

The truth is, it’s not clear that people were really meant to have their threat assessment reactions be the result of exceptional gleaning from a massive group of extremely distant and diverse people and situations, of which all you will ever know is likely to be the bit of editorialized information fed to you from a distance by a media outlet that profits in terms of clicks by feeding you the most provocative and alarming and outrageous material possible, framed to make it as compelling and necessary for you to read as possible, to speak to you in a unitary and simplified manner without all the complexity and extra information and relationships that make personal interactions so different.

It’s not clear that we were really meant to get our idea of people from an enveloping shroud of distant electronic information, instead of from real life encounters with people and places and situations that directly intersect our own lives. Not that it isn’t good to know about and touch a wider world, but we’ve fairly effective subverted the natural structure of how we encounter the world through technology. We live inside worlds of our own creation and curation. All our content is carefully selected by algorithms to perfectly match our desires and impulses and reinforce our ideas and prejudices, preferences, identity, and concerns.

In a time before the specialization of media, we had to share our sources. We had to share a small number of TV channels and newspapers, and we largely had to live inside the world as we daily encountered it in our own lives in our own communities. We saw the problems and the needs and took action within our own close, personal family and neighborhoods and town, within our own personal lives. Being forced to share resources meant we had to be less partisan, we had to strive to be neutral and unbiased. Because if your local media outlet wasn’t at least relatively neutral, they would lose half their audience. And the focus of media was more on a detailed reporting of local events and issues and a much smaller focus on the long view of far away national affairs.

But now we don’t need that. We can feel (incorrectly, in my opinion) that we’re really living in a quite different world from the place we actually physically live in, that we’re citizens of a more rarified community that represents us and validates us and supports us and understands us more clearly than the pedestrian rabble that surround us in the more banal sense. We see ourselves as living in the world of the specialized cultural narrative, the long view narrow angle of liberalism or conservatism or some other ism, or some idea of the international stage (whether or not we actually meaningfully know or spend and any real time with people in other countries), some idea of a community that doesn’t overlap with the physical community we live in (or maybe it does, if we’ve siloed ourselves effectively enough).

And this, I think, is part of the structural problem that is driving the unfortunate results we’ve been seeing lately. It’s a kind of alienation. Alienation from the intimacy and complexity and immediacy of real human community. It’s not good for us to be able to slaf off other people or treat them like garbage or like enemies online and not have to worry about any social consequences. I’ve often had to tell my girls, you can’t say things like that to people in real life and still expect to be able to be friends with them or work with them. We need politeness, we need standards, we need there to be consequences for certain kinds of antisocial behavior. We need to be lodged in communities that support that kind of correction to our own excesses. It’s good for us to have to be polite to people different from us so we can work side by side with them. It’s good to see the look on people’s face when we treat them well and the look on their faces when we don’t. It’s good to know about the fears and dangers that really are close to you and the things that need to be done. And since we only have so much emotional bandwidth and mental and physical energy, it’s good if we can avoid wasting too much of it on distorted perceptions of danger and action that needs to be taken on things that are far off, beyond our ability to meaningfully understand or judge or solve, things outside our actual lives.

Now, having said that, I need to make it clear that I’m not saying those long view things aren’t important. The problem is the distortion. The problem is the approach. Remember, the lens of our mind operates best along a curve of small group/wide angle to large group/narrow angle. The further you want to see clearly, the more you have to narrow your view. And we need people who can do that in a big, complex, interconnected world. But when that’s the main way we start to perceive and experience and react emotionally to the proximate, immediate, close up world, that’s going to seriously mess with our perspective.

It’s been shown fairly well that people’s instincts and understandings of statistics and threats and data are often unreliable when applied to large scale issues. The Science of Fear is a very interesting book on this subject. It concerns itself quite a bit with the way that our mixture of access to long-view, isolated facts, divorced from actual expertise and experience, combined with emotional reactions tuned for close-in experience (our brain interprets information about threats as if they were proximate to us, even if they aren’t), results in us drawing lots of wrong conclusions. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I singled out threats as an area of concern simply because they make easy examples (people respond so easily to outrage and fear, far more easily than to almost anything else, which has also been demonstrated; outrage is fundamentally viral, it spreads like a virulent disease), but the distortion operates on many levels in many different ways. It affects our reactions, positive and negative, how we value and prioritize and react to all kinds of information.

There’s a lovely kind of seduction to slipping the bounds of the lenses of human perception. It makes us feel like a god in our world. It gives us a lovely kind of distance and superiority in our immediate life. It let’s us reduce the wide world of immediate experience to a narrow peephole of perspective. It let’s us expand our shallow view of our immediate, myopic experience to cover all the farthest reaches of existence. It lets us see the near world so narrowly we don’t have to see anything that doesn’t fit our long lens of personal perspective. It less us see the vast, wide world so shallowly and myopically that we can’t make out anything that doesn’t fit our immediate perspective. In btih cases, we see a world that fits neatly into our own limited personal perspective and demands little from us except what our instincts naturally desire to see. It’s very self-affirming. It makes the bounds of the world the same as those of our own tempermental viewpoint.

I think an interesting modern example of the problems we can encounter applying the lens of human perspective to the vast world of information is the Coronavirus. Every day we’re absolutely bombarded with information about it. Statistics about infections and deaths are reported daily like football scores. And it is freaking people the freak out. It’s incredible stressful. People’s entire immediate experiences consist of a constant drumbeat of huge, world-spanning statistics and warnings of vast existential danger that they themselves have little experience of or efficacy toward. For some people, the virus is part of their immediate experience, and they’re dealing with it immediately, as an actual problem they or someone they know has, and they can see what the dangers are and know what they need to do to deal with it. And at the other end there are genuine experts whose specialized job is to deal with large scale issues like this and have real knowledge and efficacy in this situation.

But most of us are stuck in some in-between stage, surrounded by vast oceans of information and warnings about things we have little actual knowledge about and virtually no clear efficacy toward. In fact our day to day experience might largely contradict the narrative we’re concerned about. So we’ll most likely just start overwriting our interpretation of our experience in terms of the narrative. Our fear and anxiety reactions, that are meant to spur us toward action to respond to or avoid or remove the threat keep building and building and don’t know where to go or what to do with themselves. They become unproductive, even counterproductive. They cause us to turn on one another. Fearing a vast nebulous enemy, we fee a need to confront it, and if it’s not clear how to do that, we’ll find a way. We’ll find something or someone to stand in. It is a fact of human psychology that if you keep telling people “be afraid, be afraid, someone is out to get you”, eventually we’ll start to believe it, and if we can’t easily find the person we fear, we’ll just find them anyway in someone or something around us. Fear is fundamentally actionable. And if the proper action to resolve it isn’t clear, we’ll just find the best outlet or substitute we can.

There’s a funny psychological phenomenon called “concept creep”. Basically, what it means is that if you tell someone they need to find something, and you make it hard for them to find, they’ll just loosen and adjust their definitions of the thing they’re looking for until they can find it. If you tell people to find purple colored dots on a page of dots and then gradually over time keep reducing the number of purple dots, people will just start loosening their idea of what qualifies as purple. So long as the motivation to find the dots is compelling enough, most people will be quite happy to start calling blue purple, if it helps them find what they need to find. And fear is a great motivator. Concept creep is a problem of proximity and perspective and information processing that is deeply entangled with the issues we’ve been talking about here.

Psychologists have noted a large amount of concept creep in our social language lately. Terms that used to be very specific and restricted, especially terms describing threats and dangers and injuries, have gradually crept outside their former boundaries. Statistically, the world is far safer than it ever has been, yet out perception of the world is quite the opposite. We’ve got all these threat-seeking systems, but no clear, proximate external threats to direct them toward. But that doesn’t stop us from fidning threats to confront. We’ll just find them within the set of experiences we have.

That’s not to say that there aren’t real threats, both near and far, but to argue that our approach to them and the social results were seeing are clearly suffering from a certain amount of distortion. Our increasingly tribal approach to evils is also complimented by an increasingly tribal approach to goods. We assess long-view goods with a shallow consideration. We fail to criticize and judge with a clearer, more personal eye things and people that, in our immediate life, would fail our test of good behavior. We ignore things we should notice because they fall outside our long-view narrative window. We selectively pick out a narrow range of features from a far vaster sea of details because they fit our shallow focus. We let our positive value system be subverted and distorted by the same myopic landscapes and telescopic portraits that were distorting our negative value system.

This is probably the point where I should admit that I’ve got a serious perspective problem myself. My problem is that I try to do it all. I see all near points as lines extending off into the far distance. I want to follow every personal detail to it’s furthest horizons of abstract embodiment. What this means is that I easily get lost in the abstract and in the interconnectiveness of everything and completely lose sight of the really meaty personal details that actually connect to people in their actual lives. Now that I’ve arrived at this late point about Coronavirus, I remember that my whole point, the spark of my original idea, was just a few thoughts about how the way we’re experiencing reporting on Coronavirus is having some bad effects on our feelings and outlook, in part because of the weird structural peculiarities of modern life and media. But in order to explain anything I seem to feel like I have to explain everything. In order to make my point I have to establish all the background knowledge and arguments that led to and support and define my point. Maybe this is the fault of my philosophical training, maybe it’s just who I am.

But look at all the crazy feelings and behaviors and actions of people in Colorado Springs. Hoarding, anxiety, fear of even approaching or talking to others, fear of even going outside, feelings of stress and helplessness. You would think we were in the grip of the apocalypse. But the truth is, almost all of it is in our heads, not in our actual lived experience. I don’t know a single person who actually has Covid, much less anyone struggling to overcome it. This is a town of half a million people, and the amount of people who actually have it could fit in a single decent-sized meeting room. The amount that have gotten seriously ill and died is even smaller. You could fit them on a single couch. That’s not to belittle the value of those lives. The disconnect it between the our apparent perception of how pervasive the experience of threat is and how pervasive the experience of threat actually is. And since so many of us are experiencing such pervasive intellectual experience of threat, but aren’t directly connected to it in our actual lives, but we’ve still got these actionable fear responses in us, we’re going a bit cray cray. We have to find some way to express and deal with and confront the threats that our information I puts are telling us constantly are all around us, crouching right at our door! And if we can’t find a useful, focused, practical, immediate outlet, we’ll just find whatever outlet we can. We’ll start calling 911 to report our neighbors playing in their yards. We’ll buy up stacks of toilet paper we don’t really need to prepare for a supply shortage that never existed (until we crated it by artificially driving up demand). We’ll stress out and snap at each other and criticize each other for minor acts of minimal risk. We’ll criticize every step, every word, every action, every press release, every social media post. Our actionable fear reactions are stoked up and we need to work them out. (And how much of the vitriol on social media in general is just an expression of this same cycle, over different existential threats? ) None of this means that Corona is real. It is. But there’s a misalignment between our perception, our experience, and our course of action.

Note 1. I think it’s worth emphasizing that everything is a matter of degree. I grew up in a small town with a more limited options. So I loved the connections to other minds I found in books. I remember telling my sister that Dorothy L Sayers seemed like as good a friend to me through her writing as any of my friends in life. And she told me that was pretty pathetic.

I find it amusing to reflect on, and in a way I understand what she meant. She was very friendly and popular and sociable, and I was a bit odd and often bullied and had a hard time fitting in. Not that I felt any lack of friendship, I just found a lot of value in those thought peers that were hard to find in real life. So I understand the value and the attraction ability of modern technologyans it’s ability to connect us to our thought peers, those of like mind. It is nice.

I think the problem, as I said I think it’s a matter of degree. Alienation occurs because we go too far. We silo ourselves and surround ourselves in our thought bubbles to the detriment of a larger practical and experiential world of which we are, in fact, a part. Most of aren’t monks living in isolation on mountaintoos with no options to connect except through social media and the internet. Most of us live in a country, city, neighborhood, and even family with a lot of different people very close by who share our space and connect to our lives, and whose visibility, investment, and influence suffer when we mentally dislocate ourselves to more ratified thought communities. I think both they and us lose something because of how far we’ve taken things (and how easy it is to take it farther than we should).

It’s wonderful to be able to taste rarities gathered for our gastronomic pleasure from the far corners of the earth. But if we make that the basis of our diet, the foundation of what we live on, instead of living off what actually grows in the land that we live upon, that’s going to cause some long term problems, complications, and distortions for us, for the environment, for the global economy and supply chain, for the people we source those delicacies from, for the producers who live near us. I’m not saying that it can’t be done or even shouldn’t be done. Can’t is obviously water under the bridge in our modern world. Should, as I said, is more a question of degree. It’s a lovely thing to be able to enjoy, to a certain degree. But there’s a point in the progression where it begins to become structurally problematic.

The world, and ourselves, weren’t meant to work that way. It creates vulnerabilities and distortions, it creates weak points and an unrealistic picture of what the world around us is. And it’s not clear that everyone getting exactly what they want, all the time, is actually as utopian as it sounds. It’s not clear that it’s actually good for us.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Vitamins are good for you, and important. But they seem to really be the most beneficial when you can get them naturally, through your food, rather than through artificial supplementation. And it’s far easier to get way too much by taking supplements, at which point it appears they actually harm your health outcomes rather than helping them.

People tend to think in simple terms, like a dog or a child. This is good, so more of a good thing, maybe even all of a good thing, must be even better. Obesity is obviously one clear ubiquitous modern problem that disproves that theory. But it’s true even on a microcosmic level. Toxicity, as any good scientist can tell you, isn’t about identity, it’d about dosage. You need salt and water and a thousand other things to live, some in large amounts, some in very small amounts. And virtually of them, even the most obviously healthy and desirable, are toxic if taken in sufficiently large dosages. So many of the things that make life work are like that. In low enough doses even poisons can be harmless, at the right dose all kinds of things are beneficial, in high enough doses even the best things can sicken or kill you.

Modern media is the vitamin supplement version of human interaction. It gives you concentrated, simplified doses of the things you want, without having to wade through all that extra stuff and track down those hard to find nutrients you need. But actually trying to live off a diet that gets the majority of its content from supplements is a distortion of how humans were meant to feed themselves. It’s like the 1950s vision of getting all your nutritional needs from a single pill. It’s a nice idea, in a way. For starving people it might be a useful temporary remedy. But in the long term, for normal, healthy people, it’s not how humans were made to survive, and trying to live off a chemical diet is going to have some unanticipated complications (and in practice, does).

One of my dad’s own patients almost died from a vitamin overdose. She was taking huge amounts of supplements, most of which her body could eliminate, but some of which built up in her system until they teacher a toxic level and her organs began to shut down. She just assumed that more of a good thing couldn’t hurt her and must only be either better or neutral. Her blood had to be cleared of toxins by a machine, and those toxins were the very things she thought her good and health consisted in. If she had been forceded to eat like a normal person and get her nutrition through more natural means, by eating actual whole foods, she could never have achieved the kind of overdose she did. She could never have eaten enough in the natural way to reach those dosages. Her own body would have stopped her. But the structure of her approach removed those safeguards.

On a final note, having spent a certain amount of time reviewing different literature about personality and development and childhood and long term life outcomes, there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty and complication about what makes us who we are, today and tomorrow. There is no simple story, there are a lot of factors operating in parallel. Who we are and who we become is partly limited by our inherited nature, who we’re are born to be, and is influenced and altered and again confined or directed by our family and circumstances and culture and personal history. And one of the most powerful influences on us (one of several, but one not to be underestimated) is our peer group. Children, and indeed also adults, are enormously influenced and affected in who they become by their social peers. We are social animals. We understand and experience and define ourselves in a social context. It’s a huge part of what makes us who we are and who we become.

So what happens when you radically change the rules for the human social experience? When in the course of a few years you radically alter or remove barriers to certain kinds of communication or data gathering and response, when other rich and traditional channels of communication and experience are largely cut off in favor of just a few? What forces and influences and people are you empowering, and which are you neglecting and allowing to atrophy? What are the practical results of such a radical retooling of one of the primary influences on human nature? What are the dangers? Considering that all humans are finite in their capacities, that our faculties themselves have not been greatly altered or expanded, only their use and purview altered in their extent and selection so that we may choose more freely what we attend to, we aren’t really seeing or knowing or relating to anyone or anything more than we ever could, we just have more freedom to set our sights, our lenses, more easily at greater extremes of vision (the focus has changed but not the actual size of our viewfinder), what are we in turn neglecting and missing, and how will it affect our navigation in the world around us and how we walk through it, taking such a view? How much more carelessly might I walk among my near neighbors if I view the world around me only through binoculars? How much might I misjudge my steps and my interactions or even just ignore or misinterpret what’s around me? That’s not to say that binoculars aren’t very useful, or that certain people and jobs might be well suited for keeping watch with them. And a view through them can help us plan our steps. But should we make them the basis, the majority of our vision?

It’s an analogy, a loose one, one that doesn’t map perfectly to all circumstances. And one we shouldn’t follow too far or too slavishly. But I think it’s worth thinking about.

So he has a profound effect, not just on those outside his community, but an immense one on people within his comminuty. And when you see that a structure (the Trumpian political power structure) has a defining feature that is consistent across its top ranks, you can know that that affect applies all the way down. It has that effect from top to bottom. The example, the approach, the tone, are all set from the top. The manager defines the work culture, because they wield the power to define it.

So, setting aside his effect on groups he largely dismisses as insignificant or nonexistent or malignant, groups outside his social structure, which at least have a competing social and value structure to fall back on that validates and explains their position and provides support and solidarity and reward, what effect is he having on people within his own structure who find themselves at odds with their own society?

And I think the answer is that it’s catastrophic. And it’s most catastrophic for those people who in many ways represent the best hope for conservatism and the best guard against pathological conservatism.

Before we go much father, we need to dispose of the idea that there’s something fundamentally evil about either side or approach. Political parties largely represent differences in personality and survival strategies. And they’re both pretty valueable, and we need those different perspectives represented to keep us alive and thriving. You can’t get rid of a party whose defining modality is personality without getting rid of that kind of people. There’s some inherent value and utility in open and agreeable people, and there’s some inherent value and utility in conscientious and disagreeable people. The world is an unknown to us largely, and it’s hard to know at a glance whether the stranger among us is bringing valuable goods to trade or dangerous diseases to spread. You need people who are able to recognize both possibilities and are gifted to respond appropriately to both possibilities.

So value and utility and goodness aren’t reducible merely to group identities. And conversely, it’s a dangerous mistake to assume that danger and sickness and malevolence are a monopoly of any particular group either. There’s an equal potential for catastrophe in all people, it will just find different paths to that end. And it will always be easier to see how the other type of person’s approach will lead to disaster (and you are likely to be at least partly right) and it will always be easier for them to see how your approach will lead to disaster (and they’ll be at least partly right).

The mistake both sides make is in using their awareness of the value of their own approach and the danger of the other’s approach to antagonize the other side and use it as an excuse to not see the value in the other’s approach and the danger in their own approach. So if you go into either side from the opposing side or manage to flip between them somehow (difficult but possible, because it requires a certain split perspective that is hard to maintain or a personality reversal), you’ll notice that what seems to be going on, the attitudes, the results and expressions at an individual level, actually looks pretty similar. You’ll see a similar pathology being played out in a different structure.

One of the curious effects of this dyadic relationship is that the closer each side gets to the pathological version of their ideology or personality or perspective (because in a way that’s what a personality is, a particular perspective and a particular approach that responds to that perspective, and an ideology is just that idea written very large, often at low resolution, in a way that simplifies it and makes it into something more like a basic universal maxim), the more similar they actually become. Or the more similar the results become. And also, the closer each side gets to the healthy, balanced, nuanced version of their ideology or personality, the more similar they actually become and the results become! Because reality is actually complex and because humans actually have an equal fundamental potential for good or evil, health or pathology, no matter where you’re coming from, the results of driving too deeply into the tyranny of our personal identity will be almost identical. Because we’re more united in that capacity for evil if we embrace our own godhood, our own selves as the limit of value and utility and reasonability, and united by the capacity for good if we can learn to than we are divided by any difference. We’re more united in our tendency to end up in dire straights from solipsism and better straights from collaboration and objectivism (which maps closer to the actual structure of the world and is especially necessary for a complex society with safe versions of cooperation and competition, both of which are needed to survive and thrive). One problem, of course, with pointing this out, is that no matter what side a person is on, their response will be “yes, that’s what we’re trying to do!” And both sides are actually right! And also wrong! Within their side, there’s a good version and a bad version of that approach, and generally the good version is one that sees its own value but also see the value of the other perspective and learns from it and respects it and adds it to the whole understanding, creating more nuance and detail and a more accurate, more universal picture of reality and the ways it needs to be responded to. Both sides are actively engaged in trying to save the world, and both sides are actively involved in trying to destroy it. And because of the way that reciprocal responses tend to develop, often they’re both doing both at a similar rate. And you’re quite likely to see the best and worst versions of things co-develop in response to one another (to either their dysfunction and threat and extremism that needs a more extreme response to attempt to balance it, or positively in response to attempts by the other side to reach across and collaborate in a common endeavor and understanding, which provokes a reduction in threat and an increased ability to learn and share and trade).

The police are terribly unpleasant. They openly wield force and carry weapons, they’re heavy handed, they’re confrontational, they’re strict, they’re punitive, they’re actively dangerous, they wield a lot of power, they get right up in your face, they’re not interested in making you feel good, their direct goal is to challenge you and intervene and prevent you from doing what you’re doing and they’re OK with the disruption and discomfort and confrontation that will involve. They are very unpleasant. No one who has been on the receiving end of police intervention, even when it favors them, can argue with that.

So, considering that a lot of that sounds like very antisocial behavior, and a lot of cops test very high on conscientiousness and very low on agreeableness (they’re not here to make people happy or make friends), why do we tolerate their behavior? From a psychological standpoint, it’s because we need disagreeable people just as much as we need agreeable people to handle the broad range of circumstances life presents us with. We need a balance of both. And the harder we heel toward one extreme the more need we have for the other extreme. Criminals tend to be low in conscientiousness and high in disagreeableness (and so do a lot of children, especially 2 year olds, criminals are often people who never got socialized beyond that phase).

There is one big difference between the action of criminals and that of police, which are fairly similar in nature and expression, and that is the end to which it is directed. The chaos and anger and emotion and disagreeableness and confrontation of criminals is largely for themselves, with no regard for the good of others or the damage it might cause. It’s antisocial.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the police aren’t a dangerous and potentially damaging tool. That’s why the use of force needs clear guidelines. It can’t be purely arbitrary or based on mood of prejudice or feelings. It needs to have a logic to it, and that logic need to be explained and made clear, the reasons behind the response, the charges and punishments, the fixed statues of law, need to be explained and the action directly tied to and justified in reference to it. Prison is a harsh and terrible fate to bring against someone. That’s why we don’t just send people there arbitrarily; we have a process. We make sure that the person knew that what they were doing was wrong, we make a distinction between doing something you didn’t or couldn’t be expected to know was wrong and something you clearly did know was wrong and tailor our response accordingly. If they are a repeat offender and previous attempts to curb the behavior have failed, we increase the severity of the response and sentence commensurately with the established criminal record. If the consequences of the act are minor then we adjust the response accordingly. If they’re pretty extreme, if the long term consequences of continuing that type of behavior are very great, we increase the severity of the response to reflect that and add increased pressure against it.

And parenting is almost exactly the same. There’s only one really big difference. And that’s the environment. Parenting is practice for the real world, so you’re in a much safer space. There’s extra freedom to make mistakes and smaller long term consequences because the authorities are there to work with you over the long haul to rehabilitate you and socialize you. It’s the social and legal system written small, for little people. You’re able to learn in small ways instead of in big ways, by having your parents take away some minor privileges instead of being sent to actual jail or suffering broad social rejection. It’s the substitution of a small unpleasantness and confrontation that can stand in and help you learn on an achievable and understandable scale for your age. But the real work it’s doing is representing to children the really big stakes and dangers and consequences of the adult world.

One other really big differences in the environment is that your parents love you, are personally invested in you, are prejudiced in your favor, want you to succeed, and have the time and energy to really work with toward a good outcome. The law doesn’t care about you personally. It doesn’t have the funding to fix everything about you, especially if you aren’t on board. And if you’ve gone so far as to cause general harm to society, well, those people don’t know you or care about you, they aren’t your family, they don’t have a lifelong connection to you and investment in you. So they’re gonna treat you differently.

Your parents want you to succeed. They care about you becoming the kind of person who won’t be antisocial and run afoul of the law, or even afoul of the more minor but still very severe personal consequences of being antisocial in life. People not trusting you, people finding you unpleasant and unreliable. People finding you unfair and disruptive and harmful. Your goal as a parent is to socialize your kids well enough that other children and adults will naturally appreciate the healthy version of them they have grown to be and not find them a nightmare to deal with and be around. Because don’t forget, people have their own problems; if they don’t have some natural prejudice toward you and aren’t forced to deal with you, they’re not going to voluntarily put up with and suffer from your problems as well if they can avoid it.

Unfortunately, with dog training, with parenting children, with employee training, and with people in general, the fundamental rule of society is that people will do whatever they’re allowed to do. As much as their immediate society lets them do, they will do. To an extreme degree, so that if that society allows horribly antisocial (but personally enjoyable or just easy, lazy) behaviors, people will feel free to engage in them; and also they’ll do it to a broad degree, a huge portion of people will participate, maybe even the majority of people. Whether it’s something as small being an antisocial dog and jumping up on people or stealing food, or as big as something like Nazi Germany, the majority of people (or dogs) will participate. And if they do, the small amount of people who just genuinely don’t feel like doing that one particular thing will be screwed. They will be at a disadvantage, because they won’t be willing to use the tactics and force other people will, and there won’t be any stable system in place to reward them for their restraint. In fact, they will likely be disadvantaged or even punished.

In fact, being a conscientious person is only really as valuable as the society that person is embedded in is stable and just. In an unstable society, you’re just restraining your opportunities, sacrificing the present for a future you can’t predict, and collecting and storing up goods so thieves and opportunists can come and carry them off. If no one had any reason to fear the IRS, the majority of people would cheat on their taxes. If there’s no obvious benefit to being accurate (possibly even a disadvantage) and a clear benefit to being inaccurate, and no obviously immediate or personal bad consequence to being dishonest, the math is pretty simple. You don’t discount the present for the sake of the future unless you’re pretty certain that future is going to happen. And abstract arguments about some sort of general good are far less compelling than your own immediate need and benefit and suffering. Yeah, a Kantian might argue that I shouldn’t embrace any action I can’t universalize for all future actions and actions by all others, but if I’m hungry or jealous or greedy or unhappy or suffering now, if I could benefit now, in my own immediate life, I’m gonna do it. That’s how children naturally think. That’s how dogs naturally think. That’s how people naturally think.

We have a part of us that’s a potential Kantian, and we have a much more basic part of us, the immediate survival instinct, that has its own intuitions and methods and is a lot closer to Hobbes’ “nature, red in tooth and claw”. And part of our goal as humans, whether as dog owners, as parents, as politicians, as teachers, as law enforcement, is to feed and develop and protect that higher consciousness, that superego, and make it strong enough to restrain and direct the energies of the id, the impulsive instincts, and to create structures that reward that effort and confront and restrain the opposite movement toward selfish, impulsive, antisocial behavior. (Not that I’m a Freudian, but it’s a useful framework for conceptualizinf this issue.)

And that’s also why parenting from 2-4 is so important. The child has moved out of the infancy stage. At that earlier stage, the child is essentially always right. It’s entire world is about itself and meeting its needs. And parents are naturally prejudiced to respond to their infants in that way. They cry, they’re upset, you give them what they want. Food, a change, medicine, etc. The world is all about them and they’re pretty much always justified in their anger and tears and unhappiness. You don’t argue with a baby.

But then they go through a transition. They begin to become aware of a wider world of other people with needs and ideas and feelings and goals. And they’ve added intelligence and agency to the survival impulses that they once had as a baby but needed someone else to fulfill. They’ve gained power and the ability to affect others, to accomplish things themselves, to take action, which makes them much more potentially dangerous. Suddenly they’re able to seek and fulfill their own goals deliberately. And they realize there are other things out there, people, who could be used to get those things or could stand in their way. And it’s very much in their interest if everyone else could be like their mother and their parents, someone who they’re able to basically use to fulfill their needs.

And if they don’t get much pushback, that’s exactly what they’ll do. That part of them that recognizes that the world isn’t based around making them happy or feel good, the part that recognizes the individuality and goals and negative and positive experiences of others and seeks to work within that structure instead of imposing their own will on the world and treating everything as just means to the ends of their own private reality will not develop properly. It will grow weakly, it won’t be able to restrain and direct their energies and impulses. They won’t be able to control themselves even for their own benefit in society. And if they’re also aggressive and never learned to restrain that impulse, they likely have a criminal future, because the consequences will be writ so large and unavoidably. There are plenty of antisocial women, but because the majority of antisocial people who are also agressive are overwhelmingly men, they’ll reap larger and more obvious consequences.

So most real personal and parenting disasters have already occurred by age 4. Because if the transition away from natural, impulsive selfishness and ideological and value solipsism didn’t happen by that age, when the child became capable of engaging with the wider, more complex moral and social world, it’s hard to change. They’re going to be playing catch-up their whole lives. How their mind and brain works was being built, and once those structures are in place they get harder and harder to change. They’re not impossible to change, but it becomes harder and harder. And the shift from approaching your child as an entity who is essentially always right, who can operate correctly in a state of complete selfishness and lack of care for or awareness of others and their responsibility for their own actions, to treating them as a moral and social agent whose approach to others and behavior will have real consequences for their future success and happiness is a very painful and complicated process to manage. In your eyes they’re still that perfect, innocent, needy thing. You want to give them what they want. You want to make them happy. You want to soothe their unhappiness and defuse their conflicts. Because that’s what they needed as an infant. But that strategy can become maladaptive if it doesn’t grow and change as the child changes and grows.

So, on a practical level, how does this all affect my parenting? How does all this theory play out and what does it mean? Well, first, it informs my idea of what I’m actually doing and why. It gives me my understanding of what I’m actually trying to accomplish and what my role is. It also reminds me of the value of what I’m doing, what the good result is that I’m earning by my actions and suffering in the present.

Because it isn’t fun. Whether it’s my employees or my children, it would be so much easier, especially in the short term, not to put in the effort to confront them over things that bother me or that I’m concerned about or that bother other employees or family members but aren’t directly affecting me. I would much rather, espwin the latter case, not to have to get involved and take those problems into my present experience and create a crisis by confronting them. I only have the strength to do so because I keep my eye fixed on the future rewards. If I confront this now and pay the price now, I’ll be less likely to suffer the consequences of not confronting it in the future. I’ll help them become the sort of person who knows how to not create these sorts of problems.

I also know that I’m standing in as a substitutionary representative for how the world will eventually react to my children, positively and negatively. I’m a safe translation into a microcosm for them to learn from. If I’m too safe, I’m not being honest. If I’m too dangerous, I’m not making the game small enough and the stakes approachable enough for them to learn from it. So in a sense I need to cultivate my danger to help strengthen and protect my children, but I need to make sure that the danger isn’t too big to face and learn from. And I need to make sure they’re actually learning the rules of the game from my actions, that I’m explaining it and using it to communicate the rules, not just my feelings.

Rough play is like a kind of game where children learn to flirt with struggle and danger and push the limits, and they learn what’s ok and what’s not. If my kids are just getting hurt by me, they’re not learning to control and use their power and danger appropriately. If I just let them hurt me, they also aren’t learning anything. They’re not getting the feedback they need to learn what is and isn’t ok. Don’t just full-on hit me, don’t poke my eyes, don’t jump on me with your knees, let me know before you do that, be more gentle with that person or that part of me. Learn to tailor your actions so you can use your strength and test it and increase it and compete, but in such a way that it’s productive and fun and not hurtful.

Parental discipline is itself a sort of game. You’re giving reward and feedback and setting rules that create a microcosm in which your child’s actions can help them win or lose. So you want to tailor as accurately as you can the game to the thing it’s representing and teaching them about (the world, complex society, adult social relationships, work, school, family, community), and you want it to be tailored as close as possible to being understood and played effectively by your child. And those can both be pretty hard.

I’m a human, and I have feelings and eccentricities, things that bother me and things that don’t bother me. And the first place my kids have to love and adapt and succeed is my family. So to some degree they’re going to need to learn to live within that particular structure that is shaped by my individual prejudices and preferences (and their mother’s). But I also know that I’m representing the world as a whole to them, and since I’m not the whole world, just a bit of it, they need to learn a broader set of rules than my own personal ones. And that starts with the other people in the family. I need to incorporate the values and goals and vulnerabilities of other people in the house, their mom, their sister, into my approach. I need to protect the interest of those people too, so they can have good, productive relationships.

So I need to remind myself that I’m not in it as just a representative of myself and my feelings; I’m there to represent the good of the whole family society and the needs and feelings and interests of people other than myself. So I can’t just take one person’s side. I might need to confront multiple people. And all I can do is trust that they’ll recognize the fairness in that. That yes I called them on the big problem of how they were treating their sister, but I earned the right to do that by also calling their sister on how they were responding to them. I’m not on the side of anyone, I’m on everybody’s side, because I’m on the side of justice for the whole group.

Another thing I’ve had to learn, apart from learning to understand and appreciate my own role and how I fulfill it, is learning to appreciate the role of others. Children naturally look to their mothers for comfort and sympathy. They naturally look to their fathers for play, which is essentially a way to be pushed and to push back, to test limits and risk danger, and learn how to do it safely and productively. It’s not homogenous, but it’s a preferential structure in family dynamics so endemic that it’s an obvious fact about human behavior. And it’s supported not only by colloquial and psychological study, but also biological study.

Setting aside the unique massive increases in oxytocin that mothers get from breastfeeding and men get from orgasm, the increase in (much lower) baseline oxytocin that men and women get when parenting (and really just shows that there’s something they’re investing in and looking for rewards and meaning in something) is mediated through different behaviors. Women get it when the engage in care behavior, gazing on their infant’s face, cuddling them, holding them, comforting them. Personal-focused interactions. And men get it from object/activity focused interactions. Playing, tossing the kid in the air, rolling balls back and forth, messing with them, stimulating them to push back and react. Women who don’t give care and comfort by a vast majority don’t develop the increased oxytocin response. Men who don’t play don’t develop it. The result is the same (invested parenting), the object is the same (the child’s wellbeing), but the mechanism, the approach, if mediated differently. These results didn’t come out of different studies (although many have tested and confirmed it), they came out of the same study. The same study that clearly showed men and women both see a change in baseline oxytocin levels when invested in parenting also clearly showed that they got it by very different means.

The upshot of this, as I take it, is to remind myself to learn to respect the different value and outlook and strategies that my wife brings to parenting. We both have the same goal, we both have the same object. But how we’re pursuing it different. If I can remind myself of that, I can remember to frame your actions properly. I could see your approach, your way of being, as antagonistic to my own, as incomprehensible. As senseless. And that’s wrong. I need it. My girls need it. Yes, sometimes it contradicts my goals and ideas and efforts that I’m engaging in on behalf of the family. But I need to humble myself, realize I have a wife for a reason, I can’t be everything to everyone all the time (or it’s very hard) and learn to accept the gift that I can outsource some of those roles and ways of being to someone I can trust who shares my goals and has some natural ability for those jobs that makes them particularly gifted at them.

It’s hard for me to do both, to accept myself and to accept you. I often don’t really want to do what I feel like I should do. I often don’t feel like I understand or respect you and what you’re doing. They’re both unpleasant in their own way. So I have to remind myself that it’s a dance. And that means learning to understand and value the way the other person moves as well as being willing to understand and value the way I move. And since it can be hard to dance both sides of the pair at once, I need to learn to be appreciative of both. And my kids can’t lose either without suffering, without losing something they need to help them thrive. And of course everyone needs to learn a broader playbook than what comes easy to them. I need to learn to integrate more of your perspective so when I’m on my own, especially, or depending on what the circumstances are, I’m still bringing to the table a perspective my wife has helped me learn and skills my wife has helped teach me.

In learning to make the game fair and productive for my kids, I often have to remind myself to follow the rules you see written large with the law. Make sure they knew it was wrong. If they didn’t or couldn’t be expected to know, go easy, teach them first. Make sure that the response is justified by the amount of understanding they have. Also, make sure the response is justified by their record and the severity of the crime. So if it’s something they didn’t know was really dangerous, but it is really dangerous and could seriously harm someone, I have to strike a balance to communicate that effectively. They didn’t know, but it’s the sort of mistake they can’t afford to make more than once. How do I get that across so they hear me and remember? Have I done more than just get angry? Did I effectively explain why I’m reacting the way I am. If it’s a big reaction, have I explained that the reason is because they knew it was wrong, they’re a habitual offender, and it’s a behavior that really has some bad long term consequences?

If all I do is get mad, but my feelings don’t match up with my reasons, I’m not really being helpful. There isn’t a logic there that a kid can learn from and understand to learn to win at the game (and eventually win at life). There needs to be a clear logic, clear rules, a clear system, clear reasons behind why a confrontation occurred and why that particular type of confrontation occurred. And if, when I’m explaining it, I realize that I made the calculation wrong (which can happen either direction, it’s just as unjust and harmful for everyone to let a dangerous crime go unpunished as to punish a minor crime unjustly), I need to apologize, explain, and make amends so I can do better in the future and so they can make sense of my mistake and see the rules upheld. That makes it clear that there is a system, because even I have to follow it, and even I can get it wrong. That not only upholds the rational defense for when a punishment is too harsh, it also upholds the reasonable defense for when a punishment is justifiably harsh. It isn’t arbitrary, there’s an intelligible structure you can learn to navigate. And even I have to admit it when I failed to honor it properly.

So I’ve had to apologize to the kids a number of times, especially the oldest. Not for being harsh, because that’s just a tool, but for being unjustly harsh. Because injustice isn’t a function of feeling or prejudice or the content, me being upset or not upset at something, me being really confrontive and severe in my response or me being very mild and nonconfrontational in my response. Justice is a function of how appropriate and necessary the response was according to the nature of the person, their knowledge, their history, the current consequences or potential consequences of their behavior, how badly it affects our current and future society, and how badly it matters to their current and future happiness and health. It represents to them how seriously they should take this, how many of those red flags they’re activating.

So I need to always be asking myself, how well am I communicating that information in ways my child can understand and learn from? How well am I representing to them the potential consequences and reactions of their future world in this microcosmic instance (what the results will be if they carry this into their future life, how serious they are). How well do I understand their nature and their potential good or evil (how healthy or maladjusted they are vs how healthy and maladjusted they could become). If I don’t have a clear idea of and vision for and hope for the good version of themselves they could become, I can’t help them. I’ll just be crushing them and fighting them if I don’t have some idea of who they could be that handles this situation well in the future. There’s no positive vision for them to embrace. And if I don’t have a clear idea of the bad version of themselves they could become, I’m not helping them either, I’m not taking the proper precautions, I’m empowering the worst possible version of them and giving it freedom to develop. I’m not giving them a negative vision to legitimately fear and avoid. Kids are young and can’t always think long term, so sometimes they have to fear in me what they can’t understand enough to fear in their future life.

And my goal is gradually to wean them off that substitution to a proper fear and understanding of why they were being taught to avoid that outcome. If you won’t respect and fear the outcome where your sister later in life wants nothing to do with you because all you do is treat her like an enemy, I can at least make you pay respect to the threat it presents in me. I can stand in now for the danger it represents and forbid you from embracing it now, encourage you positively where I can, confront you negatively when it’s needed, and hopefully you’ll learn and change, be encouraged and nurtured in letting your politeness and trust toward your sister grow and be discouraged and restrained in letting your animosity and distrust toward your sister grow.

So what do I need from you? Well, the same things I struggle to give to you, I expect. I need you to see the value in my parenting. I need you to see me not as an antagonist, but as someone who is working for our common good, for the good of the family. I need you to see the value and necessity of me and what I do. I need you to appreciate and accept the gift and opportunity that my being how I am brings to the children. Our differences could be a conflict, a war, but they could also be a complimentary dance that plays to both our strengths. I think the biggest thing I need to do is to try to make sure I frame it that way in my mind and frame it that way for my children. So neither I nor they see me working at cross purposes to my wife, but in compliment to her.

Whenever there’s a conflict between you and the children, I try to see my role quite plainly. My first job is to support you and back you up. Maybe they’re doing something that’s bothering you or hurting you or hurting the whole family. Maybe I wasn’t there to see it, maybe it’s something that doesn’t really bother me or I don’t have an opinion on. Maybe I don’t even understand it yet. But my default duty, right up front, is to maintain a unified support for you. If your mom says this, if you’ve caused this reaction, I’m behind her. There’s time to find out the details, work things out, apply my own strategies and approach, evaluate my own feelings about what happened. There’s time for all of that. But my first duty is to back you up and validate your position as someone who is doing what they’re doing because they’re working with me for the good of the family. I honor that shared responsibility, that shared goal, that shared burden and struggle and contribution.

The kids, by being kids, are just fundamentally more in it for themselves, with a view to their own interests and feelings and knowledge. You and I carry the burden of expanding that consciousness and helping them learn to act independently in a way that will uphold and promote the value of our family as a whole. And that’s a big burden. So my first loyalty is to you, particularly in public. And if I really need to challenge or add to or alter or inform differently anything that you’ve done, I need to do it respectfully, in way that honors and preserves and adds strength, rather than criticism or antagonism, to our relationship and our actions and what we’re trying to accomplish.

I don’t want to confuse and destroy the value of what we’re teaching the girls. I don’t want to make them think that there are actually two different systems that are competing with one another. That’s not a system you can make sense of or win at. You can’t play two different incompatible, antagonistic games and make a sane picture of life. Children can make sense of both approaches if they are presented with a commitment to the unity of the two approaches. There aren’t two different games, there is one game, and my wife and I show respect to one another because we know that we’re actually fighting the same fight and seeking the same goals. Our honor for the other person proves it to them. We may have different approaches for doing to, we may have different strengths, different contributions, different reactions. But those are two paths to one goal, two perspectives on one reality.

Now, it isn’t always easy for me to do this. I can do it fairly easily when we’re all together, or in front of the girls, when the pressure is on, but it’s harder in private. It feels like losing face, sacrificing standing or admitting a fault. And it obviously becomes a problem for both of us if the other person ever seems to be directly antagonizing and resisting rather than backing us up as a parent in front of the girls.

I think this is part of why the police and people who support them get so upset about criticism. From their perspective, they’re not doing this for themselves. They’re doing it for everyone else. They’re putting themselves in danger and using force, being asked to engage in dangerous confrontations for the sake of the good of everybody else. Because they believe it needs to be done. Someone needs to stand up, someone needs to confront the danger, someone needs to be the guardian and stand up to people who are a danger to themselves and others. And they might get attacked or even killed for it. So to be criticized for being the thing that society has asked them to be and needs them to be, when it’s also very costly and dangerous for them on a daily basis, that breeds a lot of natural resentment.

And that’s not a great thing because we actually need them to be dangerous on our behalf, and so they are (so we don’t have to carry swords or pistols and fight duels or form posses any more). We’ve outsourced personal and retributive violence and added structure and controls to it so that this (sadly) necessary aspect of social control can operate less destructively and more cooperatively and in a way that presents less personal risk to us and is more comprehensible and predictable and has clear limits. That’s a big burden off our own shoulders. We don’t have to be prepared to fight and die on daily basis just to maintain some level of security. It’s a different kind of peace from the peace of mutual threat between everyone (guns pointed in every direction).

Being dangerous as part of their job means there can be some pretty bad consequences if the police aren’t being careful enough. More oversight, more careful guidelines as to how their power will be used, more effort to maintain balance and perspective are necessary (compared to other jobs) because of the power of the role we’ve surrendered to them. They’re specialized into confronting dangerous people on our behalf, and that specialization is going to affect how they see the world, at the least.

So it’s terribly important, when we do want to criticize or correct the guardians of a society (any society), to approach them with the utmost respect for their role and their burden and their experience. Otherwise, we undermine the real value they’re contributing and their ability to and willingness to provide it. They get resentful and defensive and feel unappreciated. And that doesn’t help them do a job we really need them to do. So our approach has to unify extreme respect for the importance of the role and its cost with extreme understanding that having such a powerful, important, helpful role can result in mistakes with very serious and powerful consequences. If we don’t respect the relationship we’ll lose the utility, if we don’t respect the utility we’ll lose the relationship. And we need both.

Being parents is a lot like being cops for your kids. We’re the play cops. And just like the real cops, sometimes we need a good cop, and sometimes we need a bad cop. Which is probably too morally loaded a term. We need agreeable and disagreeable approaches. We need admonishment and honesty as well as encouragement and comfort. We need hope as well as fear. We need respect for the group as well as respect for the individual. We need strong people as well as gentle people. We need both the extremes of human expression to help protect the opposite extreme.

There’s nothing like a good disagreeable person to help protect an agreeable person. The agreeable person will find it too hard to advocate for themselves, they’ll be advocating so hard for everyone else. But the well-adjusted, helpful disagreeable person won’t be scared to come in and say, hey, you’re taking advantage of that person, this needs to stop right now. They not only won’t be scared to confront the evil, they’ll enjoy it! A good disagreeable person will help protect an agreeable person from others and from themselves. And a good agreeable person will do the same for a disagreeable person. They’ll curb those excesses, they’ll restrain the disagreeable person when they go too far and it’s hurting others or hurting themselves.

Rather than being antagonists, our opposites are our best protection and our best complement. They’re the medicine to protect us from ourselves and to protect the world from ourselves. And the more we try to antagonize and get by without the other side, the worse a version of ourselves we’ll become. The further we get from integrating and learning from the values of our opposing dyad, the more unbalanced and prone to dysfunction we’ll become. We had better just pray we are trapped into a relationship that restrains us. If we ever got what we wanted we would lose half the world and end in ruin and excess and the poison of arrows in our own unacknowledged achilles heels.

Anyway, I think I pushed the cop analogy as far an it needs to go for now. One further question I often have to ask myself is, how do I know if I’m doing a good job at my goals and being a successful parent? That seems to be a bit harder to judge. Partly, I can look at the results. Each kid is different and might be easier at one age and harder at another, so I have to take that judgment with a grain of salt. I felt like I was doing terrible when Alex was younger, like every day was a full out war I couldn’t win and was making no progress on. And now it looks as I’ve won the war and everything’s great and I’m great. But neither is really the whole truth. And there are always new and different challenges ahead.

So I try to ask Alex and Avalon how I’m doing and to get their honest thoughts and reactions now and then. I try to get some feedback and a job evaluation. I explain what I’m trying to for them and let them tell me how they think I’m doing at it. Alex is pretty good at responding thoughtfully, although her instinct is to be so nice and appreciative and supportive and understanding of my parenting that her answer is a little questionable. And Avalon tends to be so negative and unappreciative and misunderstanding and prejudiced against my parenting that her answers are also a little questionable. I’m both perfect and terrible, so reasonable and so unreasonable according to them.

So I have to control for personality when considering how to weigh their reactions. Neither is really an honest, unbiased opinion. Alex has an almost amazing ability to understand my explanations behind my parenting and agree with them and Avalon has an almost amazing ability not to understand or agree with them. Part of that is age, because Alex used to be quite difficult too, and part of it is personality. I did spend an awful lot of time trying to explain things to Alex, and she just happens to be the sort of person who would eventually listen and have the capacity to understand.

I also try to judge how good I’m doing at running the game by the results I see in the other players. Is Avalon making Alex happy or miserable? Is Alex making Avalon happy or miserable? Have I given them the tools to be good friends to one another? Or do they act in ways that inevitably lead to anger and conflict? Do they make their mom happy or or make life harder for her? Have they learned to be good friends and children who behave in a way that is prosocial to their mom?

Unfortunately, I have to admit that the answer on all three is often pretty dismal. I’ve not done a good job teaching them how to be good to one another. They often act in ways in the family that would be absolutely ruinous in general society and long term relationships (including family, once you reach adulthood and aren’t forced to live together). But I counsel myself that there’s still lots of time, it’s a work in progress, and they’ve got so much growing to do, and I just have to keep investing so the tree grows more harmoniously and more beautifully and ethically, and just take it one day and one incident at a time.

Still, it’s a good measure I use to judge how much I should be concerned and be responding. If the results are consistent unhappiness and conflict between members of the family, there are probably some real problem behaviors driving it. And if the girls are constantly making me miserable when I’m around them together, I’m probably doing something wrong, I’m failing to adequately respond to the situation. I haven’t taught them how to win and how to help us all win by working together harmoniously. I’m not maintaining the structure effectively. And they aren’t, obviously, because they’re children, but I’m the parent who’s responsible for them. So I get pretty frustrated with them for being the particular ways they are, but I can’t change that, I can only teach them to be the good version of that person who is able to live with and be appreciated by others.

By isolating certain people, I can also get a different perspective. When I have just Avalon on her own, how do things go? When I have just Alex alone, how do things go? Is it harder or easier? How long can I keep things going well with just one of them, or just the two of them, or all of us together? That points out my weaknesses, as well as theirs. When it’s just one girl and no one else, I’ve got a big advantage, the society is simple. And it’s generally super easy. Give me a girl alone and I’m golden. We may have problems come up, but they can be handled and I won’t get stressed out dealing with them.

Start adding some extra complexity though, more relationships to manage, more people to keep happy, more concerns and goals to negotiate about, and it gets harder and I get more stressed. Still, most of the time you can leave me with the girls and it doesn’t concern me much at all, whether it’s an evening or a week. We’ll get through it fine and I won’t be too badly affected by it. Things will go well. Society will continue to function and everyone will be mostly happy in the short and long term. Neither the girls nor me get too wrecked by each other. But if I’m feeling stressed or depressed or sick or really busy and can’t get things done, that can sap a lot of my patience quickly. I have had some times when things didn’t go great and I really struggled and ran things badly.

When it’s just me, I have to run a tighter ship, because there isn’t another person’s energy and patience and effort to rely on, no one else to share and divide up the burdens of parenthood. That’s sort of like why large families tend to have stricter rules. The parents’ resources are spread way thinner. There’s a much greater need for the kids to learn to regulate their own behavior and follow the rules within themselves instead of being constantly micromanage by their parents, who often have much younger kids that need their attention. So when it’s just me, I’m more relaxed about some things, I can ease up on a lot of needs and rules and conventions that are there for your benefit, to help conserve your energy and attitude and spirit. But I have to double way down on the things that apply to me and benefit me and bother me. I need to conserve my energy and value and spirit way more.

So that’s an explanation of what goes on inside my head, some of the ways I try to judge my efforts and inform them. Am I a great parent? By my own methods of evaluating and seeking data for that question, no. I’m probably not. But do have a system that makes sense to me and gives me direction. I know why I’m doing what I’m doing, what my goals are, what my challenges are, and why I need to do it, even if I’m not doing it that well. And that helps me keep going through the girls’ failures and my own failures.

A final note on emotions

As an aside, people today often miss out of the value of fear. We have it for a reason. It’s good for us to have it. If we didn’t, we would be worse off. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom is what the Bible says. One way to understand that, understanding God as meaning the highest conception of the good and the source of the proper order for navigating life, is to understand it as, wisdom is learning to be afraid of the right things. We need fear, just as we need love. And making use of them is largely about learning to love and fear the appropriate things. There are some things that deserve our love, and some things that merit our fear. Knowing which is which, and how much, is something parents help to teach us, by standing in for those things in approachable microcosm themselves, as stated earlier. All the negative emotions have their uses, as do all the positive ones. And all the negative emotions have their dangers and pathology, the possibility for incorrect proportions or inappropriate objects or misapplication, as do all the positive emotions. That’s why we have both types of emotions. Neither are simply good or bad. Both types are useful for directing us toward or away from things we should move toward or away from. How well-founded and how skillfully trained they are to their use and objects, not their content, determines their worth.

They are nihilistic reality/nihilistic psychology (pure materialism and skepticism), nihilistic reality/meaning-laden psychology (into which I would lump post-modernism, the more hopeful versions of existentialism, the more skeptical versions of theism, and non-theistic philosophies like Buddhism), meaningful reality/nihilistic psychology, meaning-laden reality/meaning-laden psychology.

Life itself is a contradiction to the laws of materialism, so by its nature (which is purpose and intelligence) it is opposed to the concepts of skeptical materialism. So there is an inevitable push, one might argue toward an absurd view of the universe because life itself is quite absurd, in its nature. It contradicts the fundamental physical realities of the world. It resist them defies them, carries ends and content outside them. It’s such a peculiar beast that it’s inevitably absurd. It must be to be what it is, to survive in the face of a physical universe whose trend seems to be all against it. It’s so absurd that it makes us wonder, then, whether the universe is an radlndom and chaotic and meaningless as it seems. If perhaps there really isn’t an underlying intelligence and purpose and meaning to it, as we find eithin ourselves and within life having found something that doesn’t fit in the boxes, is it possible to expand or collapse them? Is life and its nature merely a curious illusion and the true reality contradicts our experience of the data we possess closest to ourselves (that of ourselves, of life’s existence). Or can our idea of the true reality be expanded? Is the world really more like life? Does life show (by being in it) that the universe has inherent purpose and intelligence and meaning and things beyond materialist reality? These questions seem not only valid, but inevitable.