Thank you. I'd heard good things about Fink but was debating between this book and the one with the lightning bolt on the cover (I think it was "Lacanian Subject" or something) - have you read both? Is this one better?
Oh man, I suggest avoid Fink, read this seminar 2 directly. Note: You yourself mentioned Finnegans Wake, and Lacan was friends and personal family physician of Joyce in Paris (20s), by the time he is in "aphoristic mode" as I call it, that is, 73 yo or something 1973(?), I think he hated the fact he got famous and those classrooms where packed with 1300 people in his last years, also to the conclusion he failed ("reason for a failure" is the name of a conference itself indeed. "I failed" too, a public letter iirc all found at staferla.free.fr) in his enterprise to reinvigorate the whole field and elevate it to the status of economics or linguistics as a science by overhauling almost any and every concept, epistemology, ethical practice, affiliation to different disciplines etc., that today it's lost, I escaped the lacanians who speak their own jargon, incredibly obnoxious smug.
But the explanatory power of Lacan is pretty big and can help so many in clinical settings practice; but not as long as it is coopted by his nephew and all this is shrouded in mystery and cultism. Also, I'm sorry, the Zizek, Zupancic & Dollar all are students of this already chewed Lacan, Miller was even Zizek's analyst during his stay as a graduate there in Paris in the 80s; So they draw on a not clinical Lacan, it's the film studies Lacan, although in the past decade or more Zizek has become critical of Miller for biologizing Lacan back into Freud. So You won't get much out Lacan to understand Zizek. My thesis is forget the style (syntax, prose) and previous knowledge (hinted by footnotes for example), or given it's given, what so difficult to understand? for me it's simple: it's unbelievable.
For example, regarding metaphor and metonym as the ways we make dreams and lapsus and symptoms and anything unconscious, he defines: the unconscious is structured as language. And language is a structure, so, the unconscious is structured how, through condensations and displacements, or metaphor and metonym, and specifically (here comes the bomb):
symptoms are metaphors and it is not a metaphor to say it. <--- swallow this. And so he goes one through many pages or hours trying to make and build around it. In history Aristotle had the same fate, de Saussure, etc., it might be we need another generation to die before he is "re-discovered"
> This was even more of a personal victory because it signalled the goal of my target of trying to figure out if there was anything of substance in Lacan following his rude and public flogging during the Sokal era (specifically I wanted to figure out the context for the 'penis is the square root of minus' one comment that drew so much laughter)).
So... did you find any substance? I've engaged with Lacan before on both the psychoanalytic and philosophical sides, and while I suppose I can't fault anyone who finds the former helpful (but definitely wouldn't actively recommend it!) I haven't pulled much from the latter. I think I have a grasp on the aesthetic appeal of where he's coming from, but when the best compliment I can give is "understandable aesthetic appeal" I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Mostly the core philosophy of language of his later work, intersubjectivity, the Real, etc. The concepts behind the obscurantism are all quite evocative, but there's still a general failure to attempt anything like predictive power - it's all competing explanatory narrative.
That's not nothing, especially if it can be backed by a solidly successful therapeutic record... but last I checked, psychoanalytics haven't managed any more success there than anyone else.
Unrelated but heads up that there's a newly published text (on Palgrave Lacan, which seems to be on the forefront) called "The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence" by Isabel Millar. It seems to apply Lacanian ideas to rationalist AI stuff -- the introduction is all about Roko's Basilisk -- and might be of interest if you already have a background in Lacan and are reading this blog. I haven't read it yet but I could be interested in gathering a group of like-minded to read it together and discuss, helping each other to work through the ideas.
Fink also cares about people. Leaving the apparent misanthropy of TLP aside, Fink is in a way a critique of the lack of caring in the current US mental health system. I'm not sure what your experience in reading him was, but for me, Fink really humanized the Lacan and Freud approach, ultimately making it all tools for greater empathy. I don't know if its correct, but at least in Fink's approach, the purpose of the Freud/Lacan work was to better understand people so he could help them.
hotelconcierge has been accused of that many times and AFAIK has always denied it and there's never been any evidence for it, even after TLP was doxed.
I find myself wondering this a lot too. Shame and Society in particular was so good that I go back and re-read it regularly. Hopefully he'll come back and write something again eventually.
I do the same thing with 'The Tower'. It's up there with 'Mediations on Moloch' ; blog posts that provided more value than most classic books I've read
Not the same guy. TLP inspired a lot of people to write in his style (just check out the subreddit), but the guys who floated to the to the top usually focused on subtly different subject matter or expertise.
So, you are saying that David Foster Wallace returned from the dead, this time without any empathy, now projecting all his self-doubt on to the world esp. his readers.
(Perhaps in our new alternate universe New Wallace simply stayed at Harvard, which would explain Teach/newWallace's baleful uncaringness and cold show-off-ey verbal tics.)
I think Kanye West is the black Andy Kauffman. His music sounds to me like what hateful racists THINK rap sounds like. Teach sounds to me what people who hate DFW but have never managed to read snything of his THINK Wallace sounds like.
I will now play the audiobook of "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" here in the shop at high volue and see how manypeople I can offend.
I think this Kanye take is dead wrong tbh, regardless of which era of Ye you mean. When I think of the racist rap-hater stereotype I'm imagining someone who is criticizing gangster rap for glorifying a life of crime and violence and such, and who thinks that it's narrow in instrumentation and musical themes and so in some way musically inferior.
And Ye has never been a big violence glorifier, and has always gone really hard to cross genre boundaries and try new things. I mean hell, the moment he could afford it (i.e. after his first big album blew up) he recorded the next one with a full string orchestra. That's not what rap haters think of.
I think a lot of hateful racists would have a big problem with New Slaves and other stuff like that. Even general rap haters can hate stuff that isn't Fuck The Police.
I'm sure they would. He's political, he talks race, and he would disagree with them to the extreme. But just being something they would hate is a far cry from being "what they THINK rap sounds like," that is a far stronger claim that I read in a much more specific way.
The first time I ever heard Kanye, I literally unplugged the amp, I was worried that one of the woofers had blown and shredded the cone. NOTHING could possibly sound THAT BAD. No way that professional musicians and recording engineers had deliberately made something that sounded like a massive electrical fire. Plus the lyrics were straight-up crazy racist.
"What the F*** was that?" I asked. "Kanye" "You have got to be shitting me! I know people who actually respect this guy, and THAT is what it sounds like? You be clowning me, dawg!"
I am pretty sure Kanye is semi-genius atist, who is so good he got bored, and maybe deliberately made albums that were 75% real work, and *possibly* 25% total bullshit, where that 25% was an easter egg where he made the most dumb pandering ear-candy stupid crap he could make in like 25 minutes, and put it out there as a "canary", where the un-hip would love it and play it and then the "real fans" would know they were otiose and un-hip and stupid and the real ppl would band togher more tightly and love KW even more.
But that is just speculation, KW don't return my calls, I called Hova but can't get through to that MFer, don't make me roll out to Calabasas, bitch....
I, for one, care a lot more about the insight than about the empathy.
And I suspect Teach would say your comment is exactly what's wrong with America today -- you prioritize empathy (the giving part of the giving tree) over achievement, meaning, insight, responsibility or anything else; ie the ethics of a perpetually 9-yr old girl.
Actually, I think the 'without empathy' thing is important as a distinguisher, while not being the priority. The narcissists and sociopaths I've known (and I've known some of them quite well, professionally and personally) think like this. Everything is about status/image, including the stuff they do when no one is watching, they envy anyone who has or accomplishes any thing, no matter how tiny, better than what they themselves have or accomplish, and anything anyone does (including themselves) is a manipulation and/or self-delusion. They're also often extremely passive, preferring that others come to them (except when they are extremely sure of succeeding, and can brush off the effort somehow), and the idea that they do this to avoid desiring and the responsibility to act on that desiring is a cool one.
And, quite logically, they assume that everyone else thinks the way they do. (As do people who are higher on the empathy side, of course. Until they run into enough narcissists and sociopaths .... And sometimes even then. See the 'there is a fragile, hurting child inside every narcissistic defensive shell!' theory.)
Narcissists and sociopaths also respect no one (except briefly a bully bigger than they are) and resent the hell out of everyone.
So, not all people who are low empathy are narcissists and sociopaths (seems they also have to be raised 'right' to achieve that), but it could be a good way to conceptualize these differences.
I've studied a decent amount of Lacan, and my general conclusion is that he'd also fit this way of thinking. And he must have LOVED making people work so hard to 'understand' his discourse/writing, while encouraging the doubt that those who tried to do so would always come short of understanding. Narc orgasm!
Also, at least when I lived there (now 25 ys ago), Brazilians (independent of age, gender or orientation) were mostly entirely unafraid of approaching an object of desire, in multiple fields of desire (sexual, romantic, friendship, food, all sorts of other pleasures....). Not sure what to attribute that to, although it seems to be (or have been, don't know if it still applies) coming from a fundamental security, that one can tolerate rejection just fine, especially when it's a) coming from someone you don't know that well, and b) on a matter so clearly one of individual taste, and one can tolerate disappointment and loss, without crumbling, at least not for long and not irremediably.
When I first moved back to Canada, I couldn't understand how people here manage to reproduce. Then I became convinced it mostly involved copious amounts of alcohol..... Very sad.
Thanks for reading the book, because I can't even begin to imagine how I could read something like that charitably. Methodologically, those excerpts remind me of Adorno (et al): take a text, free-associate yourself to a theory, and then claim it as a sociological/psychological truth.
It's not even possible, as far as I know. I'm not a great critic of art, but I can read pretty OK and I have no idea what this book is about. I feel like I read peyote.
I'm guessing the book would say you did figure it out, and just aren't acknowledging it to yourself, because it's that kind of book?
(Also I suspect it's right, in a sense. In something the same sense as enlightened people noting that enlightenment is mostly just realizing you were enlightened all along, actually. And I don't think that's an accident, but I'll maybe report back after actually reading it.)
Sort of? Not enlightenment, sort of adjacent. A lot of what it's doing is going to come across nonsensical, because a given reader is only the intended target of, like, 2% of it. I think that's it's biggest failure; it's trying to target everybody. It also makes it kind of fascinating to read, because it feels like somebody else's nightmare, at times.
The rough understandg i get, from your summary is: damn, people think about status a LOT, to the point where we sabotage ourselves to improve our perception of our own status, and it's kind of a bug, but i guess if you _can't_ get rid of that, maybe try to use the pursuit of status to actually become powerful, rather than just playing mind games with yourself.
That's the takeaway i get: see if i can catch myself either trying to get or maintain status, recognize how unhelpful that is, and see if i can't substitute something constructive in there instead
I agree that you didn't, but think there are way better uses of your time than figuring out what this rambling alcoholic misanthrope was trying to get at. If you want to read something weird, dense and dark and tell us what you think, how about some Wittgenstein?
I remember being in 9th or 10th grade and being introduced for the first time to the idea that free will is an incoherent concept. I found it profoundly depressing, and I suppose I still do. But over time I guess I just "learned" not to think about it because it was depressing and there was nothing I could do about it anyway and it was all making me a little crazy.
Sometime in college I was introduced to a very low-level version of some of the ideas in this review. Namely, that everything is about status. I had another mini-crisis about this, which culminated in my writing a ponderous and indulgent column in my university newspaper, which received predictably vicious responses from my readers. Still, I was haunted by the idea that I didn't *really* like the things that I thought I liked, and was only concerned with raising my status -- whether in the eyes of others or in my own. And like the free will situation, I never came to a satisfactory conclusion to the question of whether I really liked what I thought I liked, because it was basically impossible to verify anything, and just decided it was probably best not to think about it too much because it was making me crazy.
But at the risk of making myself crazy, I'll say this: I think status-related considerations, in general, play a fairly big part in my life when it comes to explaining why I like certain things. I can recognize myself pretty clearly when I read descriptions, in this review, of status-motivated reasoning and preferences. But I do struggle with the leap that sometimes gets made which is that status and signaling are absolutely everything. That to me seems basically unverifiable. I can grant, without much argument, that part of why I enjoy having sex with my significant other has something to do with the feelings of status (of being worthy of said sex) that accompany it. But I'm not willing to say that my entire relationship is completely determined by this, and I think sometimes the misanthropic perspective can over-emphasize these seemingly unsavory aspects of "human nature."
Where there is no I there can be no She. But there's no need to posit the existence of a subjective conductor (homunculus), brains still do stuff. Hearts pump blood, kidneys filter toxins, lungs exchange oxygen, the motor cortex activates limbs - sometimes to pet a cat. Who needs contorted definitions of choice to explain that?
"I remember being in 9th or 10th grade and being introduced for the first time to the idea that free will is an incoherent concept."
I would put a Teach-ian twist on it: the sort of free will that everyone says they need to believe in is an incoherent concept, which creates a lot of conflict and focus on that concept and draws attention away from the sort of free will that we definitely DO have which is incredibly powerful but people apparently think isn't good enough.
I like that spin. There's probably something to it. I certainly agree that the naive concept of free will that I wanted to be true at that time had some serious problems with it that probably render it incoherent. I think if Teach were to give their perspective on my high school philosophical crises, their take would be a lot less charitable to me :).
Totally agree: using a weird old definition of free will does produce an incoherent concept but most people do not use nor need this weird definition, and in a more usual and useful meaning of the terms, we definitely have free will.
As I have long put it, it doesn't matter if we "really have free will", because we have a radical and unavoidable constant* <I>experience of it</i>.
Even pure mechanists <I>always act like they think we have free will</i> except while <I>writing or talking about how we don't</i>, and they usually fail even then.
(Physically, of course we can't have "free will" in that sense, as you say.
Doesn't matter!)
* Most all of us, most all the time; people with various mental illnesses or trauma responses and such <I>experience lack of free will</i>, I'm led to believe. Never been there, myself.
People often mean two completely different things by "free will". One is the decision making ability and the other is some vague metaphysical freedom, which can include unpredictability, being the ultimate cause of ones action and existence of counterfactuals outside of ones mind. People usually claim that these two things are related or follows from one another: if there is no metaphysical freedom then we can't decide anything or, at least our decisions do not have some "special meaning".
And, as far as I'm concerned, this is completely wrong. Whether we have metaphysical freedom or not, doesn't affect our decision making at all. All the really interesting questions, related to the freedom of will, like agency or moral responsibility or futility of choice, require decision making and are irrelevant to metaphysics. Whether or not my decisions are determined I still have to make them, it is them that affect the future and that's what gives them meaning, not some metaphysics.
eventually you run out of things to claim 'aren't real'
if liking something 'for status' is the dominant reason we like things, then that's what it means to like. feels like this kinda book gets hyper focused on categorization
Well said. If we know how X works on a deeper level, it's an evidence in favour of X actually being real. And it's just the bug in our psyche: wanting everything important to be fundamental, which sometimes convinces us otherwise.
Agreed. If status chasing is what everyone is doing, then it is a bit much like semantic quibbling to act like desire is therefore not what we think it is.
Your pointing out the focus on categorization reminds me that I just recently read some papers, for unrelated reasons, by a few psychoanalysts and this particular idea came up a bit as a/the current conflict in the psychoanalytic community: categorical vs dimensional analysis.
Makes me wish I knew PS' author's real name so I could see whether they previously waded into that discussion as a professional. Might be illuminating.
No, that's no it. There are really interesting (and non-obvious) insights in the idea that most people have no idea what they do or don't like, they just copy people around them. This sort of thing, for example, shows why society has taken so many different forms over space and time.
(Which is not to say that human elasticity in infinite; but chances are the reason you think democracy is so awesome is because you were born in the US in the past 50 years, not in Rome 2000 years ago or Mongolia 1000 years ago, and not not because you've carefully analyzed all known historical social structures...
Or to put it differently, one month ago you couldn't have named the [Prime Minister? President? CEO?] of Ukraine. Today you're ranting to your friends about how the US should risk WW3 to do something. That's some pretty strong "I have no idea the reality of the situation, but I'll just do what every else around me is doing".)
I like keeping up with current events, ukraine became more prominent because of an invasion, so I learned more. Certainly this was to impress myself and my social group but humans are social animals-saying we only like things as a reaction to society just means that's what "liking" is, unless enlightenment is liking things somehow independently of the world we exist in.
I like eating chocolate. Could someone please explain to me how exactly this is related to status? (For the record, it is usually not one of those bitter 99% chocolates, but the regular kind that is made for plebs.)
I propose an alternative explanation where the so-called "lower" desires are genuine ones, and the "higher" ones are about status. (Because "higher" literally refers to higher status, duh.)
Also, if it helps, I'm reasonably certain that when he is talking about The Giving Tree, he is actually talking about the specific interpretation of The Giving Tree as a mother, not The Giving Tree as a book.
If he were responding to a different interpretation, he'd be saying something different (but would be saying, basically, the same thing, because what he is saying has nothing to do with the book, and entirely to do with how a person responds to the book - it is the response that is important to what he is saying).
> If he were responding to a different interpretation, he'd be saying something different (but would be saying, basically, the same thing, because what he is saying has nothing to do with the book, and entirely to do with how a person responds to the book - it is the response that is important to what he is saying).
How can he be saying basically the same thing in response to a completely different interpretation? Teach seems pretty interested in specifically talking about motherly love and obligation and independence, and I'm not sure how any of that comes about in response to someone whose takeaway from The Giving Tree was "the proper measure of Nature is in its service to human desire", or something even more esoteric.
Or did you mean that what he is saying is specifically centered on 'misinterpreting something as a fantastic version of motherly love'? If so, doesn't the whole thing fall flat to someone who isn't making that mistake?
I do not. To give the full version of the popular Tolkein quote: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned – with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
The Giving Tree is about a particularly generous tree, and its relationship with a particular boy. There are many metaphors than can be projected onto the story - and a multitude of readings for each interpretation - but any transposition will inherently inject some deviation. (To say nothing of inconsistency!) I do not "do violence to the text" by insisting on any particular interpretation, both as a point of critical analysis and because I authentically don't feel the need.
That's not to say there can't be value in those readings! But any argument that assumes I straightforwardly subscribed to what Wikipedia lists fourth in its catalogue of interpretations is... off-base doesn't feel like a strong enough condemnation.
Excellent. So, keeping in mind that you don't believe in the interpretation, if you were going to write what was written in spite of not believing it, for what reasons would you write it?
Why would you write a cuckold porn, when you don't really care about cuckoldry porn, and freely admit it could as easily be about BDSM? (Also: It's not written for people who like cuckold porn, it's written for people who hate it.)
> So, keeping in mind that you don't believe in the interpretation, if you were going to write what was written in spite of not believing it, for what reasons would you write it?
I'm torn between wondering what flavor of Voight Kompf test this is, and recommending the answer as "someone sent a little something to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa and asked nicely". Works even better as a response to porn commissions!
More seriously, I'm assuming "write what was written" refers to Teach's stream of consciousness directed at the person who believed the tree-as-motherhood interpretation, and not the interpretation itself? The obvious response is that I *wouldn't* write something premised on such a weakman, and hanging so much text on thin premises would be the result of the ample contempt on display and not any particular deep insight. Blowhards raging at morons isn't novel, and isn't a signifier of much worth.
If instead you're claiming that Teach doesn't believe the tree-as-motherhood interpretation and *also* doesn't believe the reader believes it, you return to the original task of demonstrating any value in the first reading and not as a dialogue. Blowhards raging is even less novel than the subset.
I think the point is that the collective unconscious, if you will, affects both the writer and the reader, in the way they can communicate cultural assumptions without either being aware of what they're doing. So it is _an_ interpretation, but it is fundamentally true if the wider phenomena it references are true.
Still going through the book. And - yes? But also no.
The book vacillates wildly between what I am pretty sure are actual points, and what I am pretty sure are stories whose purpose is to get some percentage of the expected audience to feel and/or notice something (and whose factual accuracy I am pretty sure the author does not care about at all, because the factual accuracy isn't the point). For that passage, which I haven't reached yet, I think it literally doesn't matter whether or not it is true in any sense.
But maybe none of it is "actual points", and those are just the bits that fit in with my worldview; maybe that's what The Giving Tree feels like to somebody who takes it as some kind of truth.
It's really weird reading; it's so close to what I do and how I write, and yet so different, focusing on different things. (Also, I find the book to frequently say outright what should be hinted at, and to hint at what should be said outright. Yes, masturbation is about satisfying yourself, and sex is about satisfying somebody else. Just freaking say this already, why the constant niggling hints over multiple chapters, using an encryption that nobody who doesn't already know this wouldn't be able to decode? Are you building up a mystery you are going to cash out to point out the obvious social ramifications of this?)
Can confirm that this book will never be ruled out as a work of great genius, but that's because nobody will ever understand it, and that's probably because it's nonsense. I promised a part 3 review on this, and I've been avoiding it because it's actively painful to read this book.
I actually kind of like how this book reduced you to these enjoyable ramblings. But I do have to say I've always been confused by people who thought TLP was amazing and profound, and especially was surprised by your admiration. (I think I heard of TLP from a David Wong Cracked article on the Alec Baldwin monologue in Glengarry. It's been a decade but I had a sense that article was popular and captured something about the early 2010s lead up to todays Culture World War.)
I have tried to read TLP many, many times in my life, and it always read to me basically no different from the excerpts you've chosen specifically because they're so abstruse. When you cite him as an important influence in decoding scientific studies and psychopharmacology, I was very surprised -- that is not at all what I thought people admired about him, but maybe I've never gone far enough back into his archvies and that's what he used to do?
Yeah, exactly. It's a shame because he was really excellent at that, but his cultural critique fame overshadowed this both in terms of what he wrote and in terms of how people thought of him.
I think his fame corrupted him and he became a caricature of himself. That happens to some people. There's a wonderful anthology by Dwight MacDonald called *Parodies*. It has 2 sections, "Parodies" and "Self-parodies," and the latter section is subdivided into "Self-parodies, conscious" (did you know Graham Greene won second prize in a Graham Greene parody contest?) and "Self-parodies, unconscious." Many fine writers produced unconscious parodies of themselves in their later years -- Hemingway is one example.
Watch out, Scott -- don't let that happen to you. (I don't see any signs of it yet.)
I am not sure what you guys mean about TLP becoming corrupted by his own fame and his later posts becoming self-parodies. The last post up on his site is "Who Bullies the Bullies?" which, at least by my reading, is a pretty cogent analysis of why activists' calls to censor and regulate the internet will only be successful to the extent that they align with corporate and other institutional desires to monetize and control.
Perhaps more importantly, the extent to which the activists (ie all of us) believe that they are challenging the existing categories of control, they are mostly just reinforcing those categories.
> I have tried to read TLP many, many times in my life, and it always read to me basically no different from the excerpts you've chosen specifically because they're so abstruse.
Same. Whenever I try to read something he wrote, it just fails to connect in such an immediate and decisive fashion. Ex: "It’s universally agreed that The Giving Tree represents a mother." Well, no, *I* never thought that. And now the next pages of strung-together thoughts aren't even starting from any grounding at all. "Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish." Haha, nope! *Definitely* falsifiable. And so on.
"Well, no, *I* never thought that." Yes, exactly. I read about 50 pp of Sadly Porn, first the opening 30 pages or so, then, in an effort to find my way in, random chunks from here and there, and my impression is that this guy keeps making the same move over an over: He presents some insulting caricature of what I, the reader, think, then scoots off towards the horizon cackling, apparently convinced that I'm willing to follow him to the ends of the earth in order to find a page where he shows a deeper understanding of me the reader, or to get a chance to argue with him, or to find out whether his insulting caricature was just a form of flirtation or . . . But I'm *not* willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, because I don't see enough evidence that he will have something big to give if he and I, the reader, reconcile. I followed him for 50 pages, saw the same move over and over, and left in search of greener pastures -- which are not all that hard to find, by the way.
"But it's not really falsified, since you're just in denial about how porn is your fetish, because it's a better power play and status move to claim you really have desires and fetishes!"
(That sort of argument is itself so deeply unfalsifiable and smug as to drive me to figurative rage.
Not literal, because it's not worth expending real emotion over.)
I found TLP to be around 50% interesting insights that I wasn't getting anywhere else and helped me see the world in a different way, and 50% pure unfettered bollocks. Luckily I have a pretty accurate algorithm for discerning the bollocks - it occurs primarily in passages containing the word "you"
That's very sensible and would probably work just fine in most cases. I think it might make sense though when reading this guy to have in the back of one's mind the idea that Teach is very very committed to a picture of himself as specialer and smarter than thou. Even when he's not raving on about "you" he seems to me like the kind of person who would pull away from saying the conventionally accepted truth about some subject *even when he thinks it's valid* because giving a conventional answer would interfere with his feeling special. There's mention of something like this somewhere in the comments here. Somebody quotes what he says about how the ancient Athenians handled something-or-other and says nope, he's wrong about that, and that the Athenians were way more interesting than that. I'm not terribly knowledgable about life in ancient Athens, but there was an era when I was interested in it, and when I read Teach's remark about Athenians I thought "wait -- really? -- that's not how I think of life in that era . . ." but I just skated over the comment, in the sort of irritated daze this guy's prose puts me into.
So much here but one part for me about why people like art and I guess why I read the whole thing and why I keep coming back to this substack:
I think, therefore I am.
Wtf? Therefore you exist.
To me, when I get to wrap my brain around someone’s ideas who is genuinely different from myself it gives me a much more visceral and immediate feeling that other people exist than in normal day to day interactions. My brain’s first thought is “what is this? Well, I didn’t make it.”
Re: "why write a book if you have contempt for the readership?" and "why repeatedly tell your readers they shouldn't be reading your book," I think it makes sense if you factor in opportunity costs and think counterfactually about what his readers would be doing with their time if he had not written it.
He may believe, "my readers are the kind of people who waste their lives reading insight porn and esoteric bullshit on the internet, when they should be putting their energy into real things like taking care of their families and advancing their careers. If I don't write this book, they'll waste their lives reading some other kind of esoteric internet bullshit instead. If I write something that will appeal to the kind of people who want to feel special by convincing themselves they understood and benefitted from some esoteric internet bullshit, maybe I can trick them into noticing that they're wasting their lives."
I bailed on this book less than halfway through, feeling stung but also spurred, and I think I did take some unusually direct actions relative to my baselines in the weeks after.
Yes -- and he says in the "disclaimer" that this felt like a "duty" to him, or at least that he "fulfilled his duty in life" which is left kind of ambiguous but I take to mean that writing the book was the duty.
I'm not sure if I understood what you're writing about here much at all (was I meant to?) but one thing did resonate with me. I was once mildly addicted to porn, but could never understand what anyone saw in going to strip clubs. I just assumed that this giant nationwide phenomenon was fundamentally unexplainable, even as porn was completely different. But I take you to be saying that rather than look as its patrons as automaton dupes to some social programming, maybe I need to try and *understand* a little better.
Well, you could try, if you like, but you could also do something else. I’m generally on team curiosity, but I think you get to be selective about what you’re curious about.
Deciding not to be curious about something feels vaguely wrong if you’re the sort of person who thinks curiosity is a virtue. But half-hearted research of things you’re supposed to care about isn’t a good substitute for actively wanting to learn how something works.
Going along with the book I am going to horrifically reduce this style of thinking to just being entertainment for the bored well-read. That's not to say it isn't good do self reflections on your desires and status seeking behavior, but this book accomplishes its goals of making sure only those who spend time on such obscurities get barely anything out of it. Which for me, if I am to be spending an absorbent amount of time on something, there are better books that offer more enjoyment and life payouts for time inputted. This also sadly updates me in the direction that Teach has gone insane, based on the giving tree excerpt.
So basically Nietzsche with a side of Bismarck. "Wir sind nicht auf dieser Welt, um glücklich zu sein und zu genießen, sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu thun."
Yep, and Teach wouldn't believe the sweet words - Bismarck must have loved his work/duty/mission more (as Otto wrote). Teach would approve: making a feeble Prussian King of an outdated monarchy into the absolute Emperor of a modern nation industrialising on steroids - much more Lord Voldemort than Harry Potter. And to many words of love anyway - just trying Edward Teach's perspective. - btw: Nice translation! https://archive.org/details/frstbismarcksbr00bismgoog/page/n317/mode/2up
I'm about 15% in and I definitely get a "modern Nietzsche with a healthy dose of misanthropy whose rants aren't curtailed by illness" vibe. I'm actually enjoying it, quite a lot.
I'm not sure, his description of the tendency of inaction felt like a personal attack. Late in high school, I realized that I secretly enjoyed it and eventually decided it was because we were forced to be there and didn't have to play any popularity mind games in order to have fun with friends.
The only thing I dislike here is that the whole section on "purposefully misreading something as a defense" is something that could ironically paralyze you into never taking action.
Holy crap, The Last Psychiatrist book finally came out??? Why isn't this bigger news? This is my white whale. I'm buying it just because I feel like I owe him for TLP, which had more influence on my life than any other single piece of writing.
I cannot believe you are actually Jason Pargin and I found you here of all places and this will be the first time I'm ever talking to you because I don't have a Twitter.
Good job on John Dies at the End, I hope book 4 which I intend to read rises to the level of book 1 if not ill still probably enjoy it anyways
And also that bomb article on fixing yourself and making yourself useful and needed like GOLD good job.
> what’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?
He hints at this early on, when he says:
> In this book you will find one sentence that will engage you and one sentence that will enrage you, and if you tell both those sentences to anyone else they will have all the information necessary to determine whether to sleep with you or abandon you at a rest stop.
> “Will this book help me learn more about myself?” Ugh. The whole earth is sick of your search for knowledge. In here you will not find explanations, I am not offering you information, this is an attempt to destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent.
The book is meant to frustrate the reader. One difference between psychoanalysis and psychology is that the former is a series of meta-frames which allow you to scientifically generate knowledge about a single individual. So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge.
It's important to understand Lacan himself through this same lens: he's not writing psychology, he's writing about *language*, specifically, how people use it, and how to unravel what it means to them. Any psychology Lacan uses, I would mostly attribute to Freud (I wrote a post about it here https://snav.substack.com/p/2622-the-sixth?r=2ppr3). The fact that Lacan's work centers around language is also conspicuously absent from Sadly, Porn, or at least hidden under the surface.
Finally, as for omnipotent vs omniscient, I prefer to read it through Hannah Arendt's distinction between "work" and "action" (herself heavily inspired by the Ancient Greeks), from "The Human Condition". For Arendt, work is when you have a prefantasied object that you want to create (you imagine a table in your head) and then you execute it. Action is something different. Arendt writes "To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, "to begin," "to lead," and eventually "to rule," indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere)."
The omniscient god performs "works", but since it already knows everything, past and future, it can never "act", because the results are always known to it (tautologically), and the key characteristic of action is setting something uncertain into motion (why would someone do this? Desire?). However, the omnipotent god "sets into motion", without knowing the results -- it leads us forward, rules us, desires. The Orthodox Jewish God, in His singularness and more importantly, ability to be Fooled (remember Adam & Eve), is omnipotent, but not omniscient -- contrast this with the Spinoza's Reform Jewish God, who is in everything, but seems to *do* nothing. Which one, of work vs action, do you think we moderns, according to Teach, have the most trouble with? And, as a result, where would we need the "external" support?
> "So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge."
You made me realize that this is exactly why I first hated, and then loved, his blog TheLastPsychiatrist. Reading this kind of stuff always leaves a kind of itch that won't go away, that demands I re-read and mull it over for days. There's an undeniable resentment as the mental worm works it way through me, but I come out the other side grateful for it.
1) This feels like you tried to write the most Scott-Alexander Book possible just to spite the people who say you suck and I'm loving the energy of it.
2) You really need to read René Girard's "Romantic lie & romanesque truth" and "Violence and the Sacred" (and probably one of his later books on christianity). They are about desires and mimetism for RLRT and primitive religions for Violence and the Sacred, and you will probably obscess about them for weeks, oscillating between "this is a whole lot of crap" and "this exactly describes the World as it is" (I've still not made my mind up).
I wanted to review one of those for the book review contest but I won't have time due to my dissertation...
I got the sense that Teach was drawing from Girard the way Jean-Michel Oughourlian uses mimetic desire to explain events like the mass "hysteria" among the nuns at Loudun. In any case, the relation of an individual to the society is the most profound relation. I'm fond of Otto Rank and his explanation of the artist's creative personality as it both draws from, and changes, the dominant ideology which evolves according to whatever is the current soul belief.
"The first page has an eight-page long footnote at the bottom"
Gods damn it, stop recommending me books I will want to read because I've already got my reading slots stuffed full of "I bought this and haven't read it yet".
Especially as this seems the kind of book to make me have out-loud arguments with it as I'm reading it! Which is one of the best ways of reading!
As in for instance:
"You are the kind of open-minded replicant who will say, “I don’t have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written!”
Well, yeah, *and* it has to ring my bell. Some things just don't, no matter how well-written they are (e.g. spanking and a lot of BDSM type erotica. I do not get spanking, it does nothing for me, and even when it's presented and explained as to why the person in the story enjoys it, I'm still 'how nice for them' but you could equally be talking about how having your feet painted purple turns you on). But that *is* the crux of the moral problem: if it's not a temptation for me, there is no virtue in resisting it (any more than not painting my feet purple). And badly-written crap of the "Joe got out his [long description of the exact dimensions in every axis of his cock] and started fucking" sort just does not tempt me. So if I condemn it, it's not on moral grounds, it's on "ugh, this offends my aesthetic sensibilities" even if I dress it up as on moral grounds, and that's an entire other chicken to pluck.
And yes, I did wonder if anyone got the Blackbeard The Pirate reference in the nom-de-plume, I should not have doubted this readership 😁
"I cannot spite-read this book and nit-pick every semi-colon of the footnotes with gleeful enjoyment that this is precisely my cup of tea, I do not have the time right now!" 😂
I think Teach is still condemning you here, even for expressing your aesthetic objection to poorly-written porn. I believe the idea is, demanding any kind of merit or standard upon content you're consuming is just a cheap way to signal, for purposes of status.
The "I don't have a moral problem, it just has to be well-written" is just a maneuver to *look* open-minded while actively advertising your selectivity. I think Teach might say that your substitution of "it has to be well-written" for "it should actually do a good job of being tittilating" doesn't really change the fact of what's going on.
Well, trying to work out what his meaning is from a second-hand report of what the book said is really throwing the oracle bones, but my interpretation is that he's saying "yes you *do* have a moral problem with porn, you're just pretending to be open-minded and liberal".
But he could well be saying "your aesthetics are your morals" or something, and that "you really do get turned on by the cheap grubby stuff but you want to signal that you are classier".
To which all I can say is that I'm about as classy as a potato, and the cheap grubby stuff does not do it for me, even if it's dressed up like the new Amazon "Rings of Power" trailers (I don't care how much gold you scatter on the Dwarven princess, where is her beard, you cowards?)
I know nothing about Lacan or Lacanian psychology, but this guy sounds like straight-up old-school Freudian which is a delight and an amusement to me - like encountering a living fossil today 😁 Also, and again it's because I'm only going by the excerpts, I'm not as affected by his attempts at conviction of sin, because I'm used to this - Original Sin and Redemptorist sermons. I already know we have all fallen short, and all our righteousness is as filthy rags!
To offer a perhaps orthogonal viewpoint, I would suggest Teach's observation would perhaps be closer to saying "I don't have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written" is like sighing over the decline of "Playboy" magazine *not* because the women are now the same age as your daughter, but because the literary enfants terrible -- P. J. O'Rourke let's say -- aren't to be discovered therein any more. "They used to be bold, daring! Now it's just tedious ads for Old Spice and Courvoisier intermixed with photos of tits photoshopped to the same unimaginative ISO-36DD standard." Sure.
But that just means his idea's unfalsifiable "because I say so" bulldada.
(I also dislike boring or badly-written porn about things I don't find interesting.
Before this discussion I've never really mentioned that, so it's not signaling-to-others, and I <I>do not do</i> status games in my own head [being in the "half" of people Scott mentioned who respond to the entire framework with "what, people are actually like that? WHAT?"].
Smut works better when the writing doesn't piss me off. That simple.
"Everything is always about status for everyone" is, to use Twitter terms, "some neurotypical normie bullshit".
I would not be surprised if Teach also thought "everyone literally sees pictures in their head when thinking about things", but here I am, aphantasic - and I should relatedly note that the first time <I>I</i> realized "what, wait, for other people a mental picture <I>is not metaphor</i>???" was one of Scott's posts.
The difference being I don't try and convince other people that they <I>aren't REALLY doing that</i>.)
I think maybe several people are talking past Teach here. Here's what I imagine he means.
Sure, there's (1) porn that's just objectively not readable for titillation: "He put his thingy into my you know what and then we did it." There's also (1') porn that is otherwise fine, but has terrible spelling and grammar; if you're the sort of person who gets too distracted by those to absorb the content, I don't think Teach has a bone to pick with you. (Until we get to the next way in which you're an Athenian democrat.)
But then we get to the divide between (2) porn that has basic technical competence, versus (3) porn that has characterization, plot, and actual literary merit. I think Teach is saying that if you refuse to read (2) because you demand (3), then you're just signaling.
1. Sometimes I do the "fantasize about singing/playing guitar on a song I really like to a rapturous audience" thing, too. I would just note that famous musicians seem to do pretty well in the sexual marketplace, so perhaps evolution is just trying to nudge us towards making use of whatever musical talents you/I possess? Just a thought. Not totally inconsistent with the concept that our desires are about preserving/raising our status, though.
2. Athens had unscrupulous aristocrats like Alcibiades who wanted to rule Athens like a king or a tyrant hanging around, no? Alcibiades is the only one I can name, but I doubt that he was unique, at least in terms of his desires. I guess that makes their habit of ostracizing successful people a bit more rational, although if there were enough votes to ostracize someone, did they really need to worry about that same someone being able to impose tyranny on an unwilling populous? I absolutely buy the idea that people want Elon Musk to suffer due to their own base motives. For some reason I want to spare the Athenians from suffering from the same foolish motivations, maybe because of their high status, historically?
3. Some of the stuff you wrote reminds me a lot of Rene Girard and his theories about mimetic rivalry and mimicry and more stuff that I don't know enough to speak about intelligently, but smart high status people like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen seem to take these ideas quite seriously.
1. I used to have these fantasies even before I got to know about sex and that famous musicians did well in the sexual marketplace. Now it could be that evolution had designed me to fantasize about activities that would ultimately help me do well in the sexual marketplace....or perhaps I was just fantasizing about being high status.
Well, as a datapoint in favor of the former, I knew I liked boobs well before there was any practical use for this, um, predilection. But then again, maybe this is merely about status, also. As the great lyricists Trey Parker and Matt Stone phrased this very philosophical question:
Thank you for throwing yourself in that grenade. From what you said, I think Teach has been parasitization by what Sufis would call his nafs, his lower self. The rest seems mere justification for how wonderful Teach is, in ever more fractal and strange looping recursions.
I think the interpretation of "Sadly, Porn" is a lot simpler: true to the name, it's mental masturbation that's trying to accuse everyone else of engaging in mental masturbation. Sometimes, when something is dense and inaccessible, it's because it's dealing with high-level concepts; here, I think it's dense and inaccessible because the author's ego has grown so massive it ended up collapsing into a black hole. Admittedly, this is because I don't find claims that some massive number of human beings are essentially p-zombies compelling. As my counterpoint, I'd point out that most people who believe this idea (usually dressed up as "everyone's a sheep; everyone but me") are some flavor of annoying narcissist (either by nature or by circumstance) and ironically the exact same kind of person he's lambasting in this book. I'd put that last part down to a lack of self-awareness.
Based on his writing, TLP is perfectly aware of this trap, and freely admits he is in it. I don't have a direct quote because I can't be bothered, but I know they exist.
That's still a failing of self-awareness, and frankly a more SEVERE one. It's one thing for a repressed preacher to rail against the degeneracy of the homosexual lifestyle while dwelling on the physicality of nubile, toned male bodies to a blatantly fetishistic degree. It's another to have a preacher rail against the degeneracy of the homosexual lifestyle while dressed in a leather daddy outfit and openly admitting he has gay sex on the regular and has no plans to stop, but that YOU should stop or else you'll burn in Hell. Instead of narcissistic ignorance, he's acting out of megalomanic delusion.
The point is not that people are p-zombies, the point is that you can be an actual human with free will yet think and act in very schematic and counterproductive ways without being aware of it.
I view TLP's writings less like "look how clever I am, you sheep", more like "so I found I am sick and you're sick and everyone's sick, now I'm going to insult you into seeing how because it sometimes works and also is enjoyable".
I think is exactly right. Reading a tone of superiority into it seems like a projection, it's more like "I think we're all fucked, I shall now elaborate."
1. I assumed his thesis wasn't "humans self-sabotage sometimes" or even "humans self-sabotage more often than you think" because, frankly, I'm not sure how someone could get as deep into adulthood as him without realizing that and his assertions (so far as I can parse any assertions from his manic rambling) seem more abjectly totalizing, along the lines of "99% of humanity self-sabotages at every turn and nobody ever actually enjoys anything, hate and spite are the only real human emotions".
2. If everyone is sick and there's no cure (because EVERYTHING is actually about how you're a hollow shell that seeks status, wants to be enslaved, and hates every other human being, including you "wanting" to not be those things), then AT BEST he's just saying nothing. At worst, he's done exactly what the wokes he decries have done: reinvented the concept of Original Sin but removed the possibility of redemption from the equation. My interpretation of his work as mental masturbation is me being CHARITABLE; if I wanted to be UNcharitable, I'd have accused him of trying to push vulnerable people among his readership into suicide, given that the parts that aren't purely masturbatory read extremely close to what my internal monologue sounded like when I was deeply depressed.
This is closer to what I believe if I had to try and guess his own emotional state. In my experience, most people who are misanthropic are in fact self-loathing and are simply totalizing their thoughts about themselves to the human race. That's certainly how it was for me, at least (they also tend to be narcissistic, in the "so wrapped up in their own problems that everyone else's problems stop existing" sense).
Do you have a recommendation for someone who hasn't read any of them? I know of Zizek in passing and i've seen an interview of him, but I'd like to read him.
I was immediately turned off on him when he first gained prominence, by who his supporters were, and his intellectual heritage, and - and this is probably unfair to his thought, but that's life - the sort of smarmy, pithy crap he got *quoted for saying*.
(In fairness, you could do the same with quotes from philosophers I rather like, though their fans mostly don't seem to; with Zizek I think it's the intersection of a Marxian worldview on the economic/social and obscurantist pomo writing style; "sounds deep and attacks the Capitalist Other" is more than enough to make you "brilliant!" for a certain type of person.
It's that type of person that soured me on Zizek; if he doesn't deserve that himself, well ... such is life.)
(I say this not as an entire outsider going "Ewww, Postmodernists!", but as a philosopher by training who's *tried to read their obscurantist bullshit* and found it lacking.
Zizek may well be extremely clever, but I've never seen a reason to take him seriously as a thinker or analyst. This *may be* my fault, but equally I have better things to do with my time than read someone's catalogue to see if there's a hidden gem in the manure.)
I didn't like The Last Psychiatrist-- it seemed like he could invent reasons for just about anyone to be considered a narcissist, and I was never clear about what he meant by narcissist.
He was probably right about disability payments somewhat substituting for a more general social safety net.
My current theory about a lot that's hard to explain: a lot of people, at least some of the time, would rather have intensity than practicality. This doesn't explain little details like what *sort* of intensity different people want.
No, I'm talking about real pleasures, or at least compulsions, as far as I can tell.
To take a moderate example, there are people who like martial arts well beyond a practical interest in self-defense. They want that experience of attention to fighting. (I'm looking at this from the outside.)
It's possible that practicality is doing things for the sake of the parasympathetic nervous system, and intensity is letting the sympathetic nervous system out for a run.
Here's a mild example-- people who stay loyal to a losing sports team. If there was nothing but comfort and safety, no one would do it. Instead, there's not just the feeling of loyalty, there's the hope of winning some day-- a very intense experience which does happen occasionally.
"Signaling" implies not actually being virtuous, but that isn't it. The most addicted to intensity actually are virtuous, at least within the realm they're trying to be. Think of Michael Jordan being so competitive to the point of being an asshole to every single person he ever worked with, or Kobe Bryant being so obsessive about optimizing every single possible minute of practice that he couldn't stand to wait in traffic or miss a day due to bad weather, and he got himself and his daughter killed because of it, but in both cases, that level of dedication really did lead to being the best in the world at what they were doing, not just a hollow signal to convince others or themselves that were better than they really were. Or think of early alpine mountaineers. The first people to summit Everest had a greater than 50/50 chance they'd die trying, and they were guaranteed to be in pain every second of the attempt. Even when successful, it's likely to lead to permanent reduced capacity, possibly disability. But doing it still means you're the best there is at alpine mountaineering. For a sufficiently competitive or driven person, that's all that virtue means. They won, no matter the cost.
Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading ACT felt like a giant waste of time.
If the goal was to create an antimeme it was succesfull because midway my only though was "Thank god i have a marxist basic training against over-intellectualisation" but then shortly after Marx and socialists were mentioned for some reason so I kept on reading because that didnt seem like a conincidence.
But it still felt confusing and really like stuff for people who do a lot of second and third guessing and then for some reason woke people were kind of insulted because they dont like Elon Musk?
I didnt get much of this whole text, and if this was the intention of the book I feel that its probably a bad book. It reminded me of trying to keep track of the narrations of a disorganized shizophrenic or rather of trying to keep track of someone who tried to keep track of an disorganized shizophrenic. Or of that one time where someone who believed really strong in NLP told story after story without conclusion and claimed that if someone was feeling confused by that, this was how it is supposed to work with a mysterios smirk.
All in all I will never read this book and I guess thats at least something positive.
There's not much connection between Kenneth Burke and Lacan (I don't think) but I remember studying Burke and seeing a photo portrait of him screaming. I imagined him screaming because of his realization that there was no escape from one’s own lexical frame—every choice of frame makes some thoughts unthinkable.
Lacan, and perforce Teach, seem to be a pure rendition of the Burkean scream. One's thoughts are trying to deceive one, but thoughts are the only way to access truth, BUT their treachery puts any conclusion permanently out of reach—especially for questions of what one wants and what one ought to do. Every positive statement becomes a new enemy, a new guise of self-deception to be triumphantly, then despairingly, unmasked.
To apply Teach’s method to himself is trivial, inevitable—as the Joker would say: “I want you to do it.” What is the hidden content of a book like this? To cause intellectual suffering of the kind that Teach himself feels; to inflict on others the iron maiden of reflexive self-recrimination to which he himself is confined. But it is no victory to point that out; maybe Teach says it himself. I don’t know. All the act of unmasking does is add another level to an interminable game.
There is no personal growth in this direction, only a growing sediment of “surfaced” perversions, each one seemingly superseded only to reappear again and again.
The way out of this is somatic: spend some time in your body, get some information straight from the source! And when you experience thoughts, face them not with suspicion that they are agents of some hidden psychological complex, but with open curiosity and with trust—not faith, trust—because engaging sincerely with one’s own thoughts is where trust begins.
Glad to know I'm not the only person who does the "pretend that I'm performing music and am awesome at it" thing while listening to music. Congratulations on raising your status to your imaginary society while allowing me to take less of a hit from my own.
More generally I've always thought that TLP was genuinely insightful but also that his narcissism theory could explain literally any thought anyone has while being completely unfalsifiable.
"I'd like to provide money to this charity."
"Ah, yes, to signal to others (who don't even have to exist) that you are charitable."
"Uh, no, because I believe in the cause."
"Because you want to perceive yourself as the sort of person who believes in this sort of cause."
"...yes?"
"Your admission that you are intentionally sculpting your perception of yourself is just a defense mechanism to keep you from developing real values."
"...okay?"
TLP got me through some really tough times, and there's something true and real at the bottom of all the...whatever it is he's writing, but for me it really just boils down to: "Saying happiness is your goal is like saying getting paid is your job."
Given the content of this review, it seems eminently appropriate to miss the point here and get bogged down in a mere subpoint. Please consider this comment as if it were a five page irrelevant footnote.
... anyway, on Biblical depictions of angels, it's a bit more complicated than the prevalence of the "biblically-accurate-angels" meme (referenced here as an "antimeme", but I'd argue it's actually the regular sort) would suggest.
The "biblically accurate angels" memes are derived from how angels are sometimes described in symbolic prophetic visions, e.g. (and in particular) Ezekiel 10, which has angels ("cherubim") described as some eldritch combination of wings, eyeballs, and wheels. It's possible these are intended as symbolic, and not literal.
... but when angels appear in the less prophetic/symbolic parts of the text and play a role in the narrative, it's usually implied that they look human: much more like the "traditional" view of angels.
Daniel 10 explicitly describes an angel looking "like a man" (albeit with "eyes like flaming torches"), Hebrews 13 says "Do not neglect hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.", and in a lot of places it's not remarked one way or the other, but I think if angels were always appearing in the form of reject Yu-Gi-Oh monsters, it would have been a relevant detail for the narration to have included.
It's possible that this is just how they choose to appear and maybe the crazy accounts are more of a "true form" but it's hard to say and it's not unreasonable to imagine them in the way they usually appeared. So, yeah, no halos or harps and clouds, and, like Balrogs, the wings are debatable, but the traditional view is probably more conventionally accurate than "biblically accurate angels" meme.
In one of the most famous angelic encounter in the Bible - when three mysterious strangers have dinner at Abraham's tent, they explictly looks like humans (so much so that the people of Gomorrhe then try to rape two of them).
However I must say that the first thing the angel says to Mary, "do not fear", makes both a lot more and a lot less sense if the angel looks like the eldritch horrors from Isaiah or Jeremy's visions.
Anyway angels don't actually have bodys of course, so the aspect they take is necessarily an illusion, either caused by the expectations of the human being or by the choice of the angel.
> However I must say that the first thing the angel says to Mary, "do not fear", makes both a lot more and a lot less sense if the angel looks like the eldritch horrors from Isaiah or Jeremy's visions.
I think it fits with something like Daniel's "human but with 'face like lightning, eyes like flaming torches'", fairly well.
Because, on the one hand, yes they said "do not fear", but on the other hand, it apparently *worked*. If they looked like Ezekiel describes, there's no amount of "do not fear" that you can tell me that's going to convince me to listen to what you're about to tell my about my pregnancy
There's nine orders of angels, starting with Sepaphim and Cherubim with many faces and unreasonable numbers of wings, and going right down to Archangels and Angels who might on occasion intercede in human affairs. Nobody seems too sure about the function of the "middle management" angels from Thrones to Principalities, but... well, as above, so below.
Luke seems to suggest that Mary was scared of the salutation of the angel, not his appearance. He said, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art though among women."
While it happens "when she saw him" she was "troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be."
Good point. In fact if we are doing serious analysis angels are truly frightening, not because of the way they appear, but because they are a proxis for the presence of God, and no sinful human can see the face of God and live. That's why Moses only sees God's back and Eliah put on a veil before stepping out of the cave to see God. Similarly in Isaiah's vision the eldritch angels are not what he is afraid of, they appear mostly as a warning, like the colours of a poison dart frog.
Yes, a lot of times when angels are described interacting with people they're described as just "a man in shining white clothes" or similar. And never with wings except in the visions of heaven.
There's exactly one place the now-standard (outside of "biblically accurate angels" memes) winged humanoid angel appears in the Bible, and it's so obscure that I think it's probably a coincidence (standard attribution is that the classic winged humanoid comes from Classical depictions of Nike and other figures.) Zechariah 5:9, buried in the middle of an obscure apocalyptic vision.
They are talking about obviously *winged* humanoids angels, not just humanoid angels. Their example doesn't seem to necessarily be about angels though. In Zechariah 5:5-11 there are two winged women who fly down and then fly away with a basket that contains another woman who represents wickedness. They take it to Babylon to build a house/temple and a stand for it. Zechariah never calls the winged women angels.
Another issue is that he talks about the problem of Biblical Literalism vs. those pop-culture depictions.
But neglects that Biblical Literalism in that sense is very much a modern [19th century or so?] American invention, as I recall the history of Christianity - but our pop-culture conception of angels dates to at least the Renaissance, centuries earlier.
(Your argument *also* undermines the facial contradiction, since the Literally Perfect And Accurate Bible - as the straw-Literalist holds it - describes them as able to appear both ways...
Mostly his argument just irked me because it looks like the typical Internet Atheist Problem of conflating "a minority view even among American Weirdo Baptists" with "what All Christians Obviously Believe" - same mechanism by which we get people shocked that the Pope doesn't oppose teaching evolution, because they have *no idea at all* that Catholics aren't Young Earth Creationists.)
I'm a conservative Protestant and sort of agree with your point but think the "Biblical literalism was invented by 19th century Americans" line of argumentation is also overplayed. It seems that in the two main sections of the Bible where literalism is an issue -- Genesis 1-11 and eschatology -- there has long been a diversity of opinion. And my understanding is this is still true, even within the Catholic Church -- the church has never repudiated YEC, though in practice conservative Catholics, both laity and clergy, are more likely to stay away from it than conservative Protestants.
What does seem to have changed in the 19th-20th centuries is that Biblical literalism/inerrancy became something of a Schelling Point, as Protestant denominations that didn't hold to it have had a strong tendency to break from a lot of historical notions of orthodoxy, which has led to a doubling-down on YEC that I doubt any of the Church Fathers or Calvin or Luther would have pursued, if they had access to our scientific findings in their own time.
But all that said, even among those who hold to YEC, there is a diversity of interpretations of eschatology, and a fair number of people who throw up their hands and say Revelation cannot be fully understood.
Are there really people who enjoy the 'English prof sleeps with his grad student' genre of literary fiction? I didn't think people were even supposed to read them, tbh, I thought they were some weird in joke amongst literary scholars.
Neal Stephenson, cruelly but (IMHO) accurately describes the split as The Literature of Competence vs The Literature of Incompetence. (And hints at, but never goes so far as to say, how that relates to the people who read each.)
I'd agree the one has nothing to do with the other.
Holbo's point is, perhaps, relevant and interesting to those who like or care about their fictional hero's having some sort of (generally extremely obvious) flaw; I am not one of those people, and I don't think Neal Stephenson is either.
Mostly I consider that genre ("flawed hero", ie Noir and all that crap) to be a subgenre of The Literature of Incompetence.
(And honestly, while Marvel have done a pretty good job in the construction of the MCU, it becomes least interesting when it becomes most obvious and ham-fisted in it's "let's now roll out this character's flaw and make a big deal about it" moments.
In particular I think he gets Guardians of the Galaxy completely backwards. That's a comedy of bumbling twits who manage to do OK, but that's VERY different from The Literature of Incompetence. Few identify themselves as bumbling twits, but The Literature of Incompetence is all about creating excuses for why, sure, you the reader may be alcoholic abuser cheating on his wife, but hell, here's 800 pages (or three boring movie hours) of why you are justified in behaving that way; or it's envious cousin "Sure he may seem so great, Mr CEO/policeman/politician but I bet you if you looked closely he's just as fscked up as I am, more so in fact, he's just better at hiding it".)
One set of authors and fans comes from a position of admiring competence (even bumbling competence) and wanting to be better; the other comes from a position of hating competence and wanting everyone to be as incompetent as the reader/author at life in general, albeit perhaps not in the narrow domain of a particular art form.
Of course this is one of the way's where Teach is wrong. Both populations are large; it's just that the envious incompetents control most of the cultural discourse so they seem ubiquitous, but they aren't, not if you go to genre art, to much of STEM, to much of manual labor.
If one wanted to really go out on a limb, one might even say that the admiration of competence is mostly associated with the masculine professions...
Around the time I gave up on reading literary fiction, I mentally tagged these kind of novels as the Hampstead Adultery Novel, because so many of them were professor has affair with hot student due to mid-life crisis/wife of professor has mid-life crisis due to her husband having an affair. Pages of "whatever shall I do now that I am in my 40s-50s, the kids (if we had any) are grown and left the nest, and this is the most successful and happy I shall ever be, and from now on it's just another thirty years of the same until the grave?" Some of them had the wife leaving the husband and taking up with a lover of her own, but generally it was just - not very interesting, unless you were a part of that class of people and could recognise the characters in your own social circle.
The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book.
As a stylistic note, the closest comparison I can think of is Mitchell Heisman's suicide note. 1900 pages of madness, with a preface of "this is an experiment to see whether people are more or less likely to promote this work after an actual suicide".
Very smart, intense people either a) eventually realize the naive view of the world is largely correct, and chill out or b) repackage the naive view of the world in obscurantism to justify the sunk-cost of their intellectual investments.
My articulation: We can (mostly) trust our perceptions about reality, and our intuitions about ethics. Our desires are legitimate, and not implanted or manufactured. Life is hard and full of suffering, but there's a lot of joy in it, so enjoy the good times and help others who are going through the bad. People want to live happy and meaningful lives, and the best path to those kind of lives involves self-discipline and/or dedication to an entity outside the self (family, vocation, religion, art, community).
I.e., put a thousand mundane self-help books in a blender and season with a healthy sprinkling of cliches.
Obviously, this view can be nit-picked and edge-cased to death. And it doesn't mean there's not value in studying those exceptions and other quirks of human cognition. But I don't think it's a coincidence that so much of what comes from those deep dives (in literature, philosophy, and psychology) is "Huh, the human brain really does weird stuff when turned inward. Maybe just stop thinking about yourself so much and go engage with the external world."
Imagine that this bundle of naive / small-c conservative / common-sense conclusions happened to be mistaken, but someone had already tentatively accepted it as largely true. How would that person find their way out of this mistake? If the fruit of their experience is that reasoning and literary-type introspection are not reliable ways to reach true, non-obvious conclusions, what's left? Religious awakening?
Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you.
I should add two other options: c) embrace extreme / bizarre theories that bear no resemblance to the lived experience of most human beings; d) generate useful +/- novel insights.
The aggregate societal benefits from d) makes it worth bearing the annoyance/costs of b) + c), but our pre-test probability that any individual piece of intellectual esoterica is d) should be quite low.
This is the second damn time I’ve made it through 2/3 of a review assuming that it was one of the ones from the competition, and thinking the exact same thoughts: “Wow this is good, but this person REALLY needs to read less Slate Star Codex and develop their own style”…
I have long believed that the reason PUA somewhat works (for a value of "works") has nothing to do with the techniques or the negging, and that's about teaching enough misogyny that it doesn't *matter* to you to get vast amounts of "no's" (because who cares what the bitches believe anyway?). This means that you can hit on them freely because rejection no longer imposes a mental cost on you, and with enough attempts, *something* is likely to work out sooner or later.
Alternate theory from Claire Thorn ?)*-- a moderate dose of PUA is good for men who suffer from social anxiety. They wouldn't go to a therapist, but PUA calms them down enough so that they can approach women.
The crucial thing is that they stop with the PUA culture then rather than letting it become their major social group.
*this doesn't seem to be the right name, but I can't remember it. A woman who's also written about S&M and has a thing for men who like theories about gender.
Wow Clarisse Thorn, haven't heard that name in years. She was moderately big name on a subset of feminist blogs over a decade ago.
Her theory is basically in line with the common ideas around PUA. You can't win if you don't play.
Negging and peacocking actually do work, though. But only on a subset of women. Something to try if you aren't having much success otherwise. Of course unlike "just ask women out" they are not morally neutral.
I thought peacocking was just wearing some interesting item of clothing in order to possibly get compliments from women. This seems harmless to me. I don't mock men for wearing fedoras, though I suppose that if the fedora has become a cliche, it won't work as well.
Negging is another matter. If you misjudge how the woman will take it, you can make her life worse.
Thank you. I'd heard good things about Fink but was debating between this book and the one with the lightning bolt on the cover (I think it was "Lacanian Subject" or something) - have you read both? Is this one better?
Oh man, I suggest avoid Fink, read this seminar 2 directly. Note: You yourself mentioned Finnegans Wake, and Lacan was friends and personal family physician of Joyce in Paris (20s), by the time he is in "aphoristic mode" as I call it, that is, 73 yo or something 1973(?), I think he hated the fact he got famous and those classrooms where packed with 1300 people in his last years, also to the conclusion he failed ("reason for a failure" is the name of a conference itself indeed. "I failed" too, a public letter iirc all found at staferla.free.fr) in his enterprise to reinvigorate the whole field and elevate it to the status of economics or linguistics as a science by overhauling almost any and every concept, epistemology, ethical practice, affiliation to different disciplines etc., that today it's lost, I escaped the lacanians who speak their own jargon, incredibly obnoxious smug.
But the explanatory power of Lacan is pretty big and can help so many in clinical settings practice; but not as long as it is coopted by his nephew and all this is shrouded in mystery and cultism. Also, I'm sorry, the Zizek, Zupancic & Dollar all are students of this already chewed Lacan, Miller was even Zizek's analyst during his stay as a graduate there in Paris in the 80s; So they draw on a not clinical Lacan, it's the film studies Lacan, although in the past decade or more Zizek has become critical of Miller for biologizing Lacan back into Freud. So You won't get much out Lacan to understand Zizek. My thesis is forget the style (syntax, prose) and previous knowledge (hinted by footnotes for example), or given it's given, what so difficult to understand? for me it's simple: it's unbelievable.
For example, regarding metaphor and metonym as the ways we make dreams and lapsus and symptoms and anything unconscious, he defines: the unconscious is structured as language. And language is a structure, so, the unconscious is structured how, through condensations and displacements, or metaphor and metonym, and specifically (here comes the bomb):
symptoms are metaphors and it is not a metaphor to say it. <--- swallow this. And so he goes one through many pages or hours trying to make and build around it. In history Aristotle had the same fate, de Saussure, etc., it might be we need another generation to die before he is "re-discovered"
> This was even more of a personal victory because it signalled the goal of my target of trying to figure out if there was anything of substance in Lacan following his rude and public flogging during the Sokal era (specifically I wanted to figure out the context for the 'penis is the square root of minus' one comment that drew so much laughter)).
So... did you find any substance? I've engaged with Lacan before on both the psychoanalytic and philosophical sides, and while I suppose I can't fault anyone who finds the former helpful (but definitely wouldn't actively recommend it!) I haven't pulled much from the latter. I think I have a grasp on the aesthetic appeal of where he's coming from, but when the best compliment I can give is "understandable aesthetic appeal" I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Mostly the core philosophy of language of his later work, intersubjectivity, the Real, etc. The concepts behind the obscurantism are all quite evocative, but there's still a general failure to attempt anything like predictive power - it's all competing explanatory narrative.
That's not nothing, especially if it can be backed by a solidly successful therapeutic record... but last I checked, psychoanalytics haven't managed any more success there than anyone else.
..."Rorty-esque anglophone sense of decency to not obfuscate"?
Rorty is a goddamn sophist who is only famous as a philosopher because he obfuscates so hard Rorty probably isn't even his real name.
Unrelated but heads up that there's a newly published text (on Palgrave Lacan, which seems to be on the forefront) called "The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence" by Isabel Millar. It seems to apply Lacanian ideas to rationalist AI stuff -- the introduction is all about Roko's Basilisk -- and might be of interest if you already have a background in Lacan and are reading this blog. I haven't read it yet but I could be interested in gathering a group of like-minded to read it together and discuss, helping each other to work through the ideas.
Fink also cares about people. Leaving the apparent misanthropy of TLP aside, Fink is in a way a critique of the lack of caring in the current US mental health system. I'm not sure what your experience in reading him was, but for me, Fink really humanized the Lacan and Freud approach, ultimately making it all tools for greater empathy. I don't know if its correct, but at least in Fink's approach, the purpose of the Freud/Lacan work was to better understand people so he could help them.
Did Teach also write the Tumblr "hotelconcierge"? The writing style is so similar! Does anyone know?
hotelconcierge has been accused of that many times and AFAIK has always denied it and there's never been any evidence for it, even after TLP was doxed.
^ correct -- can second this
I know they're not the same person, but I don't think hotelconcierge has ever addressed it?
Not directly, but he regularly acknowledged TLP’s influence on his writing.
What happened to HC? He left on such a strong note. His last two essays are the best things he wrote.
I find myself wondering this a lot too. Shame and Society in particular was so good that I go back and re-read it regularly. Hopefully he'll come back and write something again eventually.
I do the same thing with 'The Tower'. It's up there with 'Mediations on Moloch' ; blog posts that provided more value than most classic books I've read
Not the same guy. TLP inspired a lot of people to write in his style (just check out the subreddit), but the guys who floated to the to the top usually focused on subtly different subject matter or expertise.
So, you are saying that David Foster Wallace returned from the dead, this time without any empathy, now projecting all his self-doubt on to the world esp. his readers.
(Perhaps in our new alternate universe New Wallace simply stayed at Harvard, which would explain Teach/newWallace's baleful uncaringness and cold show-off-ey verbal tics.)
I think Kanye West is the black Andy Kauffman. His music sounds to me like what hateful racists THINK rap sounds like. Teach sounds to me what people who hate DFW but have never managed to read snything of his THINK Wallace sounds like.
I will now play the audiobook of "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" here in the shop at high volue and see how manypeople I can offend.
B
Crap, seems I'm not the only one.
Lol spot on.
I think this Kanye take is dead wrong tbh, regardless of which era of Ye you mean. When I think of the racist rap-hater stereotype I'm imagining someone who is criticizing gangster rap for glorifying a life of crime and violence and such, and who thinks that it's narrow in instrumentation and musical themes and so in some way musically inferior.
And Ye has never been a big violence glorifier, and has always gone really hard to cross genre boundaries and try new things. I mean hell, the moment he could afford it (i.e. after his first big album blew up) he recorded the next one with a full string orchestra. That's not what rap haters think of.
I think a lot of hateful racists would have a big problem with New Slaves and other stuff like that. Even general rap haters can hate stuff that isn't Fuck The Police.
I'm sure they would. He's political, he talks race, and he would disagree with them to the extreme. But just being something they would hate is a far cry from being "what they THINK rap sounds like," that is a far stronger claim that I read in a much more specific way.
The first time I ever heard Kanye, I literally unplugged the amp, I was worried that one of the woofers had blown and shredded the cone. NOTHING could possibly sound THAT BAD. No way that professional musicians and recording engineers had deliberately made something that sounded like a massive electrical fire. Plus the lyrics were straight-up crazy racist.
"What the F*** was that?" I asked. "Kanye" "You have got to be shitting me! I know people who actually respect this guy, and THAT is what it sounds like? You be clowning me, dawg!"
Well, sorry to hear you don't like him. I feel the same way about the last half of his albums.
I am pretty sure Kanye is semi-genius atist, who is so good he got bored, and maybe deliberately made albums that were 75% real work, and *possibly* 25% total bullshit, where that 25% was an easter egg where he made the most dumb pandering ear-candy stupid crap he could make in like 25 minutes, and put it out there as a "canary", where the un-hip would love it and play it and then the "real fans" would know they were otiose and un-hip and stupid and the real ppl would band togher more tightly and love KW even more.
But that is just speculation, KW don't return my calls, I called Hova but can't get through to that MFer, don't make me roll out to Calabasas, bitch....
MM, Maybe we carry this discussion on through several topics. I like your opinions.
For the record, my favorite/greatest rap/hip-hop artists are:
1) Rakim
....... (how do you even rank below the Rahj?)....
MF DOOM
Big Daddy Kane
_____________________
GODS OF HIP HOP LIKE RUN-DMC ETC
_____________________
Eminem
Etc
(Talk amongst yourselves)
> I think Kanye West is the black Andy Kauffman. His music sounds to me like what hateful racists THINK rap sounds like.
Probably the weirdest thing I've read in the day.
Right, DFW without Wallace's saving grace of, no matter how badly he may have lived it out, wanting to be a better person.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I, for one, care a lot more about the insight than about the empathy.
And I suspect Teach would say your comment is exactly what's wrong with America today -- you prioritize empathy (the giving part of the giving tree) over achievement, meaning, insight, responsibility or anything else; ie the ethics of a perpetually 9-yr old girl.
Actually, I think the 'without empathy' thing is important as a distinguisher, while not being the priority. The narcissists and sociopaths I've known (and I've known some of them quite well, professionally and personally) think like this. Everything is about status/image, including the stuff they do when no one is watching, they envy anyone who has or accomplishes any thing, no matter how tiny, better than what they themselves have or accomplish, and anything anyone does (including themselves) is a manipulation and/or self-delusion. They're also often extremely passive, preferring that others come to them (except when they are extremely sure of succeeding, and can brush off the effort somehow), and the idea that they do this to avoid desiring and the responsibility to act on that desiring is a cool one.
And, quite logically, they assume that everyone else thinks the way they do. (As do people who are higher on the empathy side, of course. Until they run into enough narcissists and sociopaths .... And sometimes even then. See the 'there is a fragile, hurting child inside every narcissistic defensive shell!' theory.)
Narcissists and sociopaths also respect no one (except briefly a bully bigger than they are) and resent the hell out of everyone.
So, not all people who are low empathy are narcissists and sociopaths (seems they also have to be raised 'right' to achieve that), but it could be a good way to conceptualize these differences.
I've studied a decent amount of Lacan, and my general conclusion is that he'd also fit this way of thinking. And he must have LOVED making people work so hard to 'understand' his discourse/writing, while encouraging the doubt that those who tried to do so would always come short of understanding. Narc orgasm!
Also, at least when I lived there (now 25 ys ago), Brazilians (independent of age, gender or orientation) were mostly entirely unafraid of approaching an object of desire, in multiple fields of desire (sexual, romantic, friendship, food, all sorts of other pleasures....). Not sure what to attribute that to, although it seems to be (or have been, don't know if it still applies) coming from a fundamental security, that one can tolerate rejection just fine, especially when it's a) coming from someone you don't know that well, and b) on a matter so clearly one of individual taste, and one can tolerate disappointment and loss, without crumbling, at least not for long and not irremediably.
When I first moved back to Canada, I couldn't understand how people here manage to reproduce. Then I became convinced it mostly involved copious amounts of alcohol..... Very sad.
Thanks for reading the book, because I can't even begin to imagine how I could read something like that charitably. Methodologically, those excerpts remind me of Adorno (et al): take a text, free-associate yourself to a theory, and then claim it as a sociological/psychological truth.
You know how Aaron Swartz was the person to take the time to figure out Infinite Jest http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
?
What does it say about you that you took the time to figure out Sadly, Porn?
Don't worry, I didn't actually figure it out.
I haven't read SP yet, just a few reviews. Yours made the most sense! Though IDK if that means much given what the book is.
It's not even possible, as far as I know. I'm not a great critic of art, but I can read pretty OK and I have no idea what this book is about. I feel like I read peyote.
Im just hearing about The Last Psychiatrist now. Are there classic posts you can recommend to get the flavor?
If you want psychiatry, start at the beginning. If you want psychoanalysis, start at the end.
This one is at the heart of him, though it won't make much sense the first time through: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/the_story_of_narcissus.html
This one is my fav: https://web.archive.org/web/20110903213849/http://thelastpsychiatrist.com:80/2010/11/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_1.html
Agreed on The Terrible Awful Truth About Supplemental Security. I
Also https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/01/penelope_trunk_abuser.html is an incredibly useful essay almost entirely devoid of the ouroboros of intellectual fapping that appears to make up much of Sadly, Porn.
Someone above recommened the Dove one, which I think works. It's real accessible.
This one is my favorite: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/07/my_name_is_michael_bay_and_i_j.html
Obviously couldn't constrain myself to just the recommended ones. Past two days have been non-stop reading. Favourite thus far is: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/06/amy_schumer_offers_you_a_look.html
I'm guessing the book would say you did figure it out, and just aren't acknowledging it to yourself, because it's that kind of book?
(Also I suspect it's right, in a sense. In something the same sense as enlightened people noting that enlightenment is mostly just realizing you were enlightened all along, actually. And I don't think that's an accident, but I'll maybe report back after actually reading it.)
Several chapters in:
Sort of? Not enlightenment, sort of adjacent. A lot of what it's doing is going to come across nonsensical, because a given reader is only the intended target of, like, 2% of it. I think that's it's biggest failure; it's trying to target everybody. It also makes it kind of fascinating to read, because it feels like somebody else's nightmare, at times.
Curious to see if it successfully targets me.
The rough understandg i get, from your summary is: damn, people think about status a LOT, to the point where we sabotage ourselves to improve our perception of our own status, and it's kind of a bug, but i guess if you _can't_ get rid of that, maybe try to use the pursuit of status to actually become powerful, rather than just playing mind games with yourself.
That's the takeaway i get: see if i can catch myself either trying to get or maintain status, recognize how unhelpful that is, and see if i can't substitute something constructive in there instead
I agree that you didn't, but think there are way better uses of your time than figuring out what this rambling alcoholic misanthrope was trying to get at. If you want to read something weird, dense and dark and tell us what you think, how about some Wittgenstein?
TLP, if you're reading this, you should start a Substack. This is the only way for you to find true happiness.
Im just hearing about The Last Psychiatrist now. Are there classic posts you can recommend to get the flavor?
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/05/dove.html
I remember being in 9th or 10th grade and being introduced for the first time to the idea that free will is an incoherent concept. I found it profoundly depressing, and I suppose I still do. But over time I guess I just "learned" not to think about it because it was depressing and there was nothing I could do about it anyway and it was all making me a little crazy.
Sometime in college I was introduced to a very low-level version of some of the ideas in this review. Namely, that everything is about status. I had another mini-crisis about this, which culminated in my writing a ponderous and indulgent column in my university newspaper, which received predictably vicious responses from my readers. Still, I was haunted by the idea that I didn't *really* like the things that I thought I liked, and was only concerned with raising my status -- whether in the eyes of others or in my own. And like the free will situation, I never came to a satisfactory conclusion to the question of whether I really liked what I thought I liked, because it was basically impossible to verify anything, and just decided it was probably best not to think about it too much because it was making me crazy.
But at the risk of making myself crazy, I'll say this: I think status-related considerations, in general, play a fairly big part in my life when it comes to explaining why I like certain things. I can recognize myself pretty clearly when I read descriptions, in this review, of status-motivated reasoning and preferences. But I do struggle with the leap that sometimes gets made which is that status and signaling are absolutely everything. That to me seems basically unverifiable. I can grant, without much argument, that part of why I enjoy having sex with my significant other has something to do with the feelings of status (of being worthy of said sex) that accompany it. But I'm not willing to say that my entire relationship is completely determined by this, and I think sometimes the misanthropic perspective can over-emphasize these seemingly unsavory aspects of "human nature."
Use it in the wrong framework and it will twist your mind into a mobius strip
Where there is no I there can be no She. But there's no need to posit the existence of a subjective conductor (homunculus), brains still do stuff. Hearts pump blood, kidneys filter toxins, lungs exchange oxygen, the motor cortex activates limbs - sometimes to pet a cat. Who needs contorted definitions of choice to explain that?
"I remember being in 9th or 10th grade and being introduced for the first time to the idea that free will is an incoherent concept."
I would put a Teach-ian twist on it: the sort of free will that everyone says they need to believe in is an incoherent concept, which creates a lot of conflict and focus on that concept and draws attention away from the sort of free will that we definitely DO have which is incredibly powerful but people apparently think isn't good enough.
I like that spin. There's probably something to it. I certainly agree that the naive concept of free will that I wanted to be true at that time had some serious problems with it that probably render it incoherent. I think if Teach were to give their perspective on my high school philosophical crises, their take would be a lot less charitable to me :).
I second that like.
Totally agree: using a weird old definition of free will does produce an incoherent concept but most people do not use nor need this weird definition, and in a more usual and useful meaning of the terms, we definitely have free will.
As I have long put it, it doesn't matter if we "really have free will", because we have a radical and unavoidable constant* <I>experience of it</i>.
Even pure mechanists <I>always act like they think we have free will</i> except while <I>writing or talking about how we don't</i>, and they usually fail even then.
(Physically, of course we can't have "free will" in that sense, as you say.
Doesn't matter!)
* Most all of us, most all the time; people with various mental illnesses or trauma responses and such <I>experience lack of free will</i>, I'm led to believe. Never been there, myself.
People often mean two completely different things by "free will". One is the decision making ability and the other is some vague metaphysical freedom, which can include unpredictability, being the ultimate cause of ones action and existence of counterfactuals outside of ones mind. People usually claim that these two things are related or follows from one another: if there is no metaphysical freedom then we can't decide anything or, at least our decisions do not have some "special meaning".
And, as far as I'm concerned, this is completely wrong. Whether we have metaphysical freedom or not, doesn't affect our decision making at all. All the really interesting questions, related to the freedom of will, like agency or moral responsibility or futility of choice, require decision making and are irrelevant to metaphysics. Whether or not my decisions are determined I still have to make them, it is them that affect the future and that's what gives them meaning, not some metaphysics.
eventually you run out of things to claim 'aren't real'
if liking something 'for status' is the dominant reason we like things, then that's what it means to like. feels like this kinda book gets hyper focused on categorization
are we allowed to just say "good comment"?
i think you just did
Well said. If we know how X works on a deeper level, it's an evidence in favour of X actually being real. And it's just the bug in our psyche: wanting everything important to be fundamental, which sometimes convinces us otherwise.
Agreed. If status chasing is what everyone is doing, then it is a bit much like semantic quibbling to act like desire is therefore not what we think it is.
Your pointing out the focus on categorization reminds me that I just recently read some papers, for unrelated reasons, by a few psychoanalysts and this particular idea came up a bit as a/the current conflict in the psychoanalytic community: categorical vs dimensional analysis.
Makes me wish I knew PS' author's real name so I could see whether they previously waded into that discussion as a professional. Might be illuminating.
No, that's no it. There are really interesting (and non-obvious) insights in the idea that most people have no idea what they do or don't like, they just copy people around them. This sort of thing, for example, shows why society has taken so many different forms over space and time.
(Which is not to say that human elasticity in infinite; but chances are the reason you think democracy is so awesome is because you were born in the US in the past 50 years, not in Rome 2000 years ago or Mongolia 1000 years ago, and not not because you've carefully analyzed all known historical social structures...
Or to put it differently, one month ago you couldn't have named the [Prime Minister? President? CEO?] of Ukraine. Today you're ranting to your friends about how the US should risk WW3 to do something. That's some pretty strong "I have no idea the reality of the situation, but I'll just do what every else around me is doing".)
I like keeping up with current events, ukraine became more prominent because of an invasion, so I learned more. Certainly this was to impress myself and my social group but humans are social animals-saying we only like things as a reaction to society just means that's what "liking" is, unless enlightenment is liking things somehow independently of the world we exist in.
I like eating chocolate. Could someone please explain to me how exactly this is related to status? (For the record, it is usually not one of those bitter 99% chocolates, but the regular kind that is made for plebs.)
I propose an alternative explanation where the so-called "lower" desires are genuine ones, and the "higher" ones are about status. (Because "higher" literally refers to higher status, duh.)
Thank you, adding to my reading list.
Also, if it helps, I'm reasonably certain that when he is talking about The Giving Tree, he is actually talking about the specific interpretation of The Giving Tree as a mother, not The Giving Tree as a book.
If he were responding to a different interpretation, he'd be saying something different (but would be saying, basically, the same thing, because what he is saying has nothing to do with the book, and entirely to do with how a person responds to the book - it is the response that is important to what he is saying).
> If he were responding to a different interpretation, he'd be saying something different (but would be saying, basically, the same thing, because what he is saying has nothing to do with the book, and entirely to do with how a person responds to the book - it is the response that is important to what he is saying).
How can he be saying basically the same thing in response to a completely different interpretation? Teach seems pretty interested in specifically talking about motherly love and obligation and independence, and I'm not sure how any of that comes about in response to someone whose takeaway from The Giving Tree was "the proper measure of Nature is in its service to human desire", or something even more esoteric.
Or did you mean that what he is saying is specifically centered on 'misinterpreting something as a fantastic version of motherly love'? If so, doesn't the whole thing fall flat to someone who isn't making that mistake?
Well, do you think The Giving Tree is about - I'm going to generalize a little, and say, parental love?
I do not. To give the full version of the popular Tolkein quote: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned – with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
The Giving Tree is about a particularly generous tree, and its relationship with a particular boy. There are many metaphors than can be projected onto the story - and a multitude of readings for each interpretation - but any transposition will inherently inject some deviation. (To say nothing of inconsistency!) I do not "do violence to the text" by insisting on any particular interpretation, both as a point of critical analysis and because I authentically don't feel the need.
That's not to say there can't be value in those readings! But any argument that assumes I straightforwardly subscribed to what Wikipedia lists fourth in its catalogue of interpretations is... off-base doesn't feel like a strong enough condemnation.
Excellent. So, keeping in mind that you don't believe in the interpretation, if you were going to write what was written in spite of not believing it, for what reasons would you write it?
Why would you write a cuckold porn, when you don't really care about cuckoldry porn, and freely admit it could as easily be about BDSM? (Also: It's not written for people who like cuckold porn, it's written for people who hate it.)
> So, keeping in mind that you don't believe in the interpretation, if you were going to write what was written in spite of not believing it, for what reasons would you write it?
I'm torn between wondering what flavor of Voight Kompf test this is, and recommending the answer as "someone sent a little something to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa and asked nicely". Works even better as a response to porn commissions!
More seriously, I'm assuming "write what was written" refers to Teach's stream of consciousness directed at the person who believed the tree-as-motherhood interpretation, and not the interpretation itself? The obvious response is that I *wouldn't* write something premised on such a weakman, and hanging so much text on thin premises would be the result of the ample contempt on display and not any particular deep insight. Blowhards raging at morons isn't novel, and isn't a signifier of much worth.
If instead you're claiming that Teach doesn't believe the tree-as-motherhood interpretation and *also* doesn't believe the reader believes it, you return to the original task of demonstrating any value in the first reading and not as a dialogue. Blowhards raging is even less novel than the subset.
I think the point is that the collective unconscious, if you will, affects both the writer and the reader, in the way they can communicate cultural assumptions without either being aware of what they're doing. So it is _an_ interpretation, but it is fundamentally true if the wider phenomena it references are true.
Still going through the book. And - yes? But also no.
The book vacillates wildly between what I am pretty sure are actual points, and what I am pretty sure are stories whose purpose is to get some percentage of the expected audience to feel and/or notice something (and whose factual accuracy I am pretty sure the author does not care about at all, because the factual accuracy isn't the point). For that passage, which I haven't reached yet, I think it literally doesn't matter whether or not it is true in any sense.
But maybe none of it is "actual points", and those are just the bits that fit in with my worldview; maybe that's what The Giving Tree feels like to somebody who takes it as some kind of truth.
It's really weird reading; it's so close to what I do and how I write, and yet so different, focusing on different things. (Also, I find the book to frequently say outright what should be hinted at, and to hint at what should be said outright. Yes, masturbation is about satisfying yourself, and sex is about satisfying somebody else. Just freaking say this already, why the constant niggling hints over multiple chapters, using an encryption that nobody who doesn't already know this wouldn't be able to decode? Are you building up a mystery you are going to cash out to point out the obvious social ramifications of this?)
Can confirm that this book will never be ruled out as a work of great genius, but that's because nobody will ever understand it, and that's probably because it's nonsense. I promised a part 3 review on this, and I've been avoiding it because it's actively painful to read this book.
Thanks for the link, Scott!
I actually kind of like how this book reduced you to these enjoyable ramblings. But I do have to say I've always been confused by people who thought TLP was amazing and profound, and especially was surprised by your admiration. (I think I heard of TLP from a David Wong Cracked article on the Alec Baldwin monologue in Glengarry. It's been a decade but I had a sense that article was popular and captured something about the early 2010s lead up to todays Culture World War.)
I have tried to read TLP many, many times in my life, and it always read to me basically no different from the excerpts you've chosen specifically because they're so abstruse. When you cite him as an important influence in decoding scientific studies and psychopharmacology, I was very surprised -- that is not at all what I thought people admired about him, but maybe I've never gone far enough back into his archvies and that's what he used to do?
Yeah, exactly. It's a shame because he was really excellent at that, but his cultural critique fame overshadowed this both in terms of what he wrote and in terms of how people thought of him.
I think his fame corrupted him and he became a caricature of himself. That happens to some people. There's a wonderful anthology by Dwight MacDonald called *Parodies*. It has 2 sections, "Parodies" and "Self-parodies," and the latter section is subdivided into "Self-parodies, conscious" (did you know Graham Greene won second prize in a Graham Greene parody contest?) and "Self-parodies, unconscious." Many fine writers produced unconscious parodies of themselves in their later years -- Hemingway is one example.
Watch out, Scott -- don't let that happen to you. (I don't see any signs of it yet.)
"Why Do I Suck?" seems like it might neatly straddle the line between "Self-parodies, conscious" and "Self-parodies, unconscious".
(For what it's worth, I still liked and respected it as a piece)
I am not sure what you guys mean about TLP becoming corrupted by his own fame and his later posts becoming self-parodies. The last post up on his site is "Who Bullies the Bullies?" which, at least by my reading, is a pretty cogent analysis of why activists' calls to censor and regulate the internet will only be successful to the extent that they align with corporate and other institutional desires to monetize and control.
Perhaps more importantly, the extent to which the activists (ie all of us) believe that they are challenging the existing categories of control, they are mostly just reinforcing those categories.
> I have tried to read TLP many, many times in my life, and it always read to me basically no different from the excerpts you've chosen specifically because they're so abstruse.
Same. Whenever I try to read something he wrote, it just fails to connect in such an immediate and decisive fashion. Ex: "It’s universally agreed that The Giving Tree represents a mother." Well, no, *I* never thought that. And now the next pages of strung-together thoughts aren't even starting from any grounding at all. "Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish." Haha, nope! *Definitely* falsifiable. And so on.
"Well, no, *I* never thought that." Yes, exactly. I read about 50 pp of Sadly Porn, first the opening 30 pages or so, then, in an effort to find my way in, random chunks from here and there, and my impression is that this guy keeps making the same move over an over: He presents some insulting caricature of what I, the reader, think, then scoots off towards the horizon cackling, apparently convinced that I'm willing to follow him to the ends of the earth in order to find a page where he shows a deeper understanding of me the reader, or to get a chance to argue with him, or to find out whether his insulting caricature was just a form of flirtation or . . . But I'm *not* willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, because I don't see enough evidence that he will have something big to give if he and I, the reader, reconcile. I followed him for 50 pages, saw the same move over and over, and left in search of greener pastures -- which are not all that hard to find, by the way.
"But it's not really falsified, since you're just in denial about how porn is your fetish, because it's a better power play and status move to claim you really have desires and fetishes!"
(That sort of argument is itself so deeply unfalsifiable and smug as to drive me to figurative rage.
Not literal, because it's not worth expending real emotion over.)
I found TLP to be around 50% interesting insights that I wasn't getting anywhere else and helped me see the world in a different way, and 50% pure unfettered bollocks. Luckily I have a pretty accurate algorithm for discerning the bollocks - it occurs primarily in passages containing the word "you"
That's very sensible and would probably work just fine in most cases. I think it might make sense though when reading this guy to have in the back of one's mind the idea that Teach is very very committed to a picture of himself as specialer and smarter than thou. Even when he's not raving on about "you" he seems to me like the kind of person who would pull away from saying the conventionally accepted truth about some subject *even when he thinks it's valid* because giving a conventional answer would interfere with his feeling special. There's mention of something like this somewhere in the comments here. Somebody quotes what he says about how the ancient Athenians handled something-or-other and says nope, he's wrong about that, and that the Athenians were way more interesting than that. I'm not terribly knowledgable about life in ancient Athens, but there was an era when I was interested in it, and when I read Teach's remark about Athenians I thought "wait -- really? -- that's not how I think of life in that era . . ." but I just skated over the comment, in the sort of irritated daze this guy's prose puts me into.
So much here but one part for me about why people like art and I guess why I read the whole thing and why I keep coming back to this substack:
I think, therefore I am.
Wtf? Therefore you exist.
To me, when I get to wrap my brain around someone’s ideas who is genuinely different from myself it gives me a much more visceral and immediate feeling that other people exist than in normal day to day interactions. My brain’s first thought is “what is this? Well, I didn’t make it.”
Makes the world bigger.
Ha, thanks. This is a nice sentiment.
Nice
You just named an experience I've never noticed having but do. Nice.
Re: "why write a book if you have contempt for the readership?" and "why repeatedly tell your readers they shouldn't be reading your book," I think it makes sense if you factor in opportunity costs and think counterfactually about what his readers would be doing with their time if he had not written it.
He may believe, "my readers are the kind of people who waste their lives reading insight porn and esoteric bullshit on the internet, when they should be putting their energy into real things like taking care of their families and advancing their careers. If I don't write this book, they'll waste their lives reading some other kind of esoteric internet bullshit instead. If I write something that will appeal to the kind of people who want to feel special by convincing themselves they understood and benefitted from some esoteric internet bullshit, maybe I can trick them into noticing that they're wasting their lives."
I bailed on this book less than halfway through, feeling stung but also spurred, and I think I did take some unusually direct actions relative to my baselines in the weeks after.
Gonna take that almost 2x pay job offer tomorrow.
Yes -- and he says in the "disclaimer" that this felt like a "duty" to him, or at least that he "fulfilled his duty in life" which is left kind of ambiguous but I take to mean that writing the book was the duty.
I'm not sure if I understood what you're writing about here much at all (was I meant to?) but one thing did resonate with me. I was once mildly addicted to porn, but could never understand what anyone saw in going to strip clubs. I just assumed that this giant nationwide phenomenon was fundamentally unexplainable, even as porn was completely different. But I take you to be saying that rather than look as its patrons as automaton dupes to some social programming, maybe I need to try and *understand* a little better.
Well, you could try, if you like, but you could also do something else. I’m generally on team curiosity, but I think you get to be selective about what you’re curious about.
Deciding not to be curious about something feels vaguely wrong if you’re the sort of person who thinks curiosity is a virtue. But half-hearted research of things you’re supposed to care about isn’t a good substitute for actively wanting to learn how something works.
Going along with the book I am going to horrifically reduce this style of thinking to just being entertainment for the bored well-read. That's not to say it isn't good do self reflections on your desires and status seeking behavior, but this book accomplishes its goals of making sure only those who spend time on such obscurities get barely anything out of it. Which for me, if I am to be spending an absorbent amount of time on something, there are better books that offer more enjoyment and life payouts for time inputted. This also sadly updates me in the direction that Teach has gone insane, based on the giving tree excerpt.
So basically Nietzsche with a side of Bismarck. "Wir sind nicht auf dieser Welt, um glücklich zu sein und zu genießen, sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu thun."
I don't think he believes modern people are doing a very good job of being happy either.
Bismarck's point was something along the lines of "Fuck happiness, there is work to do."
Also, fun fact: this quote comes from a letter Bismarck wrote TO HIS WIFE.
That's easy to say if you're Otto von Bismarck and your work is high status and important.
What if you're not, and it isn't?
Yep, and Teach wouldn't believe the sweet words - Bismarck must have loved his work/duty/mission more (as Otto wrote). Teach would approve: making a feeble Prussian King of an outdated monarchy into the absolute Emperor of a modern nation industrialising on steroids - much more Lord Voldemort than Harry Potter. And to many words of love anyway - just trying Edward Teach's perspective. - btw: Nice translation! https://archive.org/details/frstbismarcksbr00bismgoog/page/n317/mode/2up
I had no idea the Iron Chancellor could write like this. Very interesting, thank you.
In trying to find a translation, I was looking at a lot of Bismarck quotes-- he was very sharp, and the letter shows he could also be sweet.
I'm about 15% in and I definitely get a "modern Nietzsche with a healthy dose of misanthropy whose rants aren't curtailed by illness" vibe. I'm actually enjoying it, quite a lot.
I've always gotten the sense that 75% of what Teach says is just him projecting his personal neuroses onto all of society
The other 25% is sometimes interesting
Personal neuroses are rarely one-offs.
Yeah, but he overestimates how common his are.
I'm not sure, his description of the tendency of inaction felt like a personal attack. Late in high school, I realized that I secretly enjoyed it and eventually decided it was because we were forced to be there and didn't have to play any popularity mind games in order to have fun with friends.
The only thing I dislike here is that the whole section on "purposefully misreading something as a defense" is something that could ironically paralyze you into never taking action.
Im just hearing about The Last Psychiatrist now. Are there classic posts you can recommend to get the flavor?
Holy crap, The Last Psychiatrist book finally came out??? Why isn't this bigger news? This is my white whale. I'm buying it just because I feel like I owe him for TLP, which had more influence on my life than any other single piece of writing.
I can only imagine Seanbaby will be crushed to hear that.
I cannot believe you are actually Jason Pargin and I found you here of all places and this will be the first time I'm ever talking to you because I don't have a Twitter.
Good job on John Dies at the End, I hope book 4 which I intend to read rises to the level of book 1 if not ill still probably enjoy it anyways
And also that bomb article on fixing yourself and making yourself useful and needed like GOLD good job.
Seconding, JDatE was really impressive.
Holy cow, I did not know you had a substack. Thanks for posting here, I guess?
> what’s the equivalent for Sadly, Porn? If Teach ever felt motivated to explain his technique as clearly as this roshi, what would he say?
He hints at this early on, when he says:
> In this book you will find one sentence that will engage you and one sentence that will enrage you, and if you tell both those sentences to anyone else they will have all the information necessary to determine whether to sleep with you or abandon you at a rest stop.
> “Will this book help me learn more about myself?” Ugh. The whole earth is sick of your search for knowledge. In here you will not find explanations, I am not offering you information, this is an attempt to destroy the wisdom of the wise and frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent.
The book is meant to frustrate the reader. One difference between psychoanalysis and psychology is that the former is a series of meta-frames which allow you to scientifically generate knowledge about a single individual. So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge.
It's important to understand Lacan himself through this same lens: he's not writing psychology, he's writing about *language*, specifically, how people use it, and how to unravel what it means to them. Any psychology Lacan uses, I would mostly attribute to Freud (I wrote a post about it here https://snav.substack.com/p/2622-the-sixth?r=2ppr3). The fact that Lacan's work centers around language is also conspicuously absent from Sadly, Porn, or at least hidden under the surface.
Finally, as for omnipotent vs omniscient, I prefer to read it through Hannah Arendt's distinction between "work" and "action" (herself heavily inspired by the Ancient Greeks), from "The Human Condition". For Arendt, work is when you have a prefantasied object that you want to create (you imagine a table in your head) and then you execute it. Action is something different. Arendt writes "To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, "to begin," "to lead," and eventually "to rule," indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere)."
The omniscient god performs "works", but since it already knows everything, past and future, it can never "act", because the results are always known to it (tautologically), and the key characteristic of action is setting something uncertain into motion (why would someone do this? Desire?). However, the omnipotent god "sets into motion", without knowing the results -- it leads us forward, rules us, desires. The Orthodox Jewish God, in His singularness and more importantly, ability to be Fooled (remember Adam & Eve), is omnipotent, but not omniscient -- contrast this with the Spinoza's Reform Jewish God, who is in everything, but seems to *do* nothing. Which one, of work vs action, do you think we moderns, according to Teach, have the most trouble with? And, as a result, where would we need the "external" support?
> "So, to say the book has an overarching "point" is to miss the "meta-point", which is that the book takes as many angles as possible in hopes that one will hit, make you pissed off, and then hopefully get you thinking about why you got pissed off, and maybe discover something about yourself/your knowledge."
You made me realize that this is exactly why I first hated, and then loved, his blog TheLastPsychiatrist. Reading this kind of stuff always leaves a kind of itch that won't go away, that demands I re-read and mull it over for days. There's an undeniable resentment as the mental worm works it way through me, but I come out the other side grateful for it.
Had to verify, but was pretty sure Edward Teach was Blackbeard's true name. I wonder if there's a connection.
His writing does have kind of a hang-the-authorities, take-no-prisoners feel to it. That's what I'm going with.
IIRC Blackbeard was like a gentleman pirate. Erudite and vicious. It's as good an identity to steal as any.
Sadly, Porn sounds like what would happen if Infinite Jest were rewritten as a work of non-fiction.
That and he comes up with some rather convoluted explanations for are at base, simple psychological processes.
1) This feels like you tried to write the most Scott-Alexander Book possible just to spite the people who say you suck and I'm loving the energy of it.
2) You really need to read René Girard's "Romantic lie & romanesque truth" and "Violence and the Sacred" (and probably one of his later books on christianity). They are about desires and mimetism for RLRT and primitive religions for Violence and the Sacred, and you will probably obscess about them for weeks, oscillating between "this is a whole lot of crap" and "this exactly describes the World as it is" (I've still not made my mind up).
I wanted to review one of those for the book review contest but I won't have time due to my dissertation...
I got the sense that Teach was drawing from Girard the way Jean-Michel Oughourlian uses mimetic desire to explain events like the mass "hysteria" among the nuns at Loudun. In any case, the relation of an individual to the society is the most profound relation. I'm fond of Otto Rank and his explanation of the artist's creative personality as it both draws from, and changes, the dominant ideology which evolves according to whatever is the current soul belief.
"The first page has an eight-page long footnote at the bottom"
Gods damn it, stop recommending me books I will want to read because I've already got my reading slots stuffed full of "I bought this and haven't read it yet".
Especially as this seems the kind of book to make me have out-loud arguments with it as I'm reading it! Which is one of the best ways of reading!
As in for instance:
"You are the kind of open-minded replicant who will say, “I don’t have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written!”
Well, yeah, *and* it has to ring my bell. Some things just don't, no matter how well-written they are (e.g. spanking and a lot of BDSM type erotica. I do not get spanking, it does nothing for me, and even when it's presented and explained as to why the person in the story enjoys it, I'm still 'how nice for them' but you could equally be talking about how having your feet painted purple turns you on). But that *is* the crux of the moral problem: if it's not a temptation for me, there is no virtue in resisting it (any more than not painting my feet purple). And badly-written crap of the "Joe got out his [long description of the exact dimensions in every axis of his cock] and started fucking" sort just does not tempt me. So if I condemn it, it's not on moral grounds, it's on "ugh, this offends my aesthetic sensibilities" even if I dress it up as on moral grounds, and that's an entire other chicken to pluck.
And yes, I did wonder if anyone got the Blackbeard The Pirate reference in the nom-de-plume, I should not have doubted this readership 😁
I had the same reaction...
"I cannot spite-read this book and nit-pick every semi-colon of the footnotes with gleeful enjoyment that this is precisely my cup of tea, I do not have the time right now!" 😂
I think Teach is still condemning you here, even for expressing your aesthetic objection to poorly-written porn. I believe the idea is, demanding any kind of merit or standard upon content you're consuming is just a cheap way to signal, for purposes of status.
The "I don't have a moral problem, it just has to be well-written" is just a maneuver to *look* open-minded while actively advertising your selectivity. I think Teach might say that your substitution of "it has to be well-written" for "it should actually do a good job of being tittilating" doesn't really change the fact of what's going on.
Well, trying to work out what his meaning is from a second-hand report of what the book said is really throwing the oracle bones, but my interpretation is that he's saying "yes you *do* have a moral problem with porn, you're just pretending to be open-minded and liberal".
But he could well be saying "your aesthetics are your morals" or something, and that "you really do get turned on by the cheap grubby stuff but you want to signal that you are classier".
To which all I can say is that I'm about as classy as a potato, and the cheap grubby stuff does not do it for me, even if it's dressed up like the new Amazon "Rings of Power" trailers (I don't care how much gold you scatter on the Dwarven princess, where is her beard, you cowards?)
I know nothing about Lacan or Lacanian psychology, but this guy sounds like straight-up old-school Freudian which is a delight and an amusement to me - like encountering a living fossil today 😁 Also, and again it's because I'm only going by the excerpts, I'm not as affected by his attempts at conviction of sin, because I'm used to this - Original Sin and Redemptorist sermons. I already know we have all fallen short, and all our righteousness is as filthy rags!
To offer a perhaps orthogonal viewpoint, I would suggest Teach's observation would perhaps be closer to saying "I don't have a moral problem with porn, it just has to be well-written" is like sighing over the decline of "Playboy" magazine *not* because the women are now the same age as your daughter, but because the literary enfants terrible -- P. J. O'Rourke let's say -- aren't to be discovered therein any more. "They used to be bold, daring! Now it's just tedious ads for Old Spice and Courvoisier intermixed with photos of tits photoshopped to the same unimaginative ISO-36DD standard." Sure.
Plausible that that's his idea.
But that just means his idea's unfalsifiable "because I say so" bulldada.
(I also dislike boring or badly-written porn about things I don't find interesting.
Before this discussion I've never really mentioned that, so it's not signaling-to-others, and I <I>do not do</i> status games in my own head [being in the "half" of people Scott mentioned who respond to the entire framework with "what, people are actually like that? WHAT?"].
Smut works better when the writing doesn't piss me off. That simple.
"Everything is always about status for everyone" is, to use Twitter terms, "some neurotypical normie bullshit".
I would not be surprised if Teach also thought "everyone literally sees pictures in their head when thinking about things", but here I am, aphantasic - and I should relatedly note that the first time <I>I</i> realized "what, wait, for other people a mental picture <I>is not metaphor</i>???" was one of Scott's posts.
The difference being I don't try and convince other people that they <I>aren't REALLY doing that</i>.)
I think maybe several people are talking past Teach here. Here's what I imagine he means.
Sure, there's (1) porn that's just objectively not readable for titillation: "He put his thingy into my you know what and then we did it." There's also (1') porn that is otherwise fine, but has terrible spelling and grammar; if you're the sort of person who gets too distracted by those to absorb the content, I don't think Teach has a bone to pick with you. (Until we get to the next way in which you're an Athenian democrat.)
But then we get to the divide between (2) porn that has basic technical competence, versus (3) porn that has characterization, plot, and actual literary merit. I think Teach is saying that if you refuse to read (2) because you demand (3), then you're just signaling.
Wow, that was a doozy. A couple random notes:
1. Sometimes I do the "fantasize about singing/playing guitar on a song I really like to a rapturous audience" thing, too. I would just note that famous musicians seem to do pretty well in the sexual marketplace, so perhaps evolution is just trying to nudge us towards making use of whatever musical talents you/I possess? Just a thought. Not totally inconsistent with the concept that our desires are about preserving/raising our status, though.
2. Athens had unscrupulous aristocrats like Alcibiades who wanted to rule Athens like a king or a tyrant hanging around, no? Alcibiades is the only one I can name, but I doubt that he was unique, at least in terms of his desires. I guess that makes their habit of ostracizing successful people a bit more rational, although if there were enough votes to ostracize someone, did they really need to worry about that same someone being able to impose tyranny on an unwilling populous? I absolutely buy the idea that people want Elon Musk to suffer due to their own base motives. For some reason I want to spare the Athenians from suffering from the same foolish motivations, maybe because of their high status, historically?
3. Some of the stuff you wrote reminds me a lot of Rene Girard and his theories about mimetic rivalry and mimicry and more stuff that I don't know enough to speak about intelligently, but smart high status people like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen seem to take these ideas quite seriously.
1. I used to have these fantasies even before I got to know about sex and that famous musicians did well in the sexual marketplace. Now it could be that evolution had designed me to fantasize about activities that would ultimately help me do well in the sexual marketplace....or perhaps I was just fantasizing about being high status.
Well, as a datapoint in favor of the former, I knew I liked boobs well before there was any practical use for this, um, predilection. But then again, maybe this is merely about status, also. As the great lyricists Trey Parker and Matt Stone phrased this very philosophical question:
What makes a man?
Is it the woman in his arms?
Just 'cause she has big titties?
Or is it the way, he fights every day?
...No, it's probably the titties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=851BqHMCaeM
Thank you for throwing yourself in that grenade. From what you said, I think Teach has been parasitization by what Sufis would call his nafs, his lower self. The rest seems mere justification for how wonderful Teach is, in ever more fractal and strange looping recursions.
I think the interpretation of "Sadly, Porn" is a lot simpler: true to the name, it's mental masturbation that's trying to accuse everyone else of engaging in mental masturbation. Sometimes, when something is dense and inaccessible, it's because it's dealing with high-level concepts; here, I think it's dense and inaccessible because the author's ego has grown so massive it ended up collapsing into a black hole. Admittedly, this is because I don't find claims that some massive number of human beings are essentially p-zombies compelling. As my counterpoint, I'd point out that most people who believe this idea (usually dressed up as "everyone's a sheep; everyone but me") are some flavor of annoying narcissist (either by nature or by circumstance) and ironically the exact same kind of person he's lambasting in this book. I'd put that last part down to a lack of self-awareness.
Based on his writing, TLP is perfectly aware of this trap, and freely admits he is in it. I don't have a direct quote because I can't be bothered, but I know they exist.
That's still a failing of self-awareness, and frankly a more SEVERE one. It's one thing for a repressed preacher to rail against the degeneracy of the homosexual lifestyle while dwelling on the physicality of nubile, toned male bodies to a blatantly fetishistic degree. It's another to have a preacher rail against the degeneracy of the homosexual lifestyle while dressed in a leather daddy outfit and openly admitting he has gay sex on the regular and has no plans to stop, but that YOU should stop or else you'll burn in Hell. Instead of narcissistic ignorance, he's acting out of megalomanic delusion.
Hey, Essex. Teach irritates the shit out of me too.
The point is not that people are p-zombies, the point is that you can be an actual human with free will yet think and act in very schematic and counterproductive ways without being aware of it.
I view TLP's writings less like "look how clever I am, you sheep", more like "so I found I am sick and you're sick and everyone's sick, now I'm going to insult you into seeing how because it sometimes works and also is enjoyable".
I think is exactly right. Reading a tone of superiority into it seems like a projection, it's more like "I think we're all fucked, I shall now elaborate."
1. I assumed his thesis wasn't "humans self-sabotage sometimes" or even "humans self-sabotage more often than you think" because, frankly, I'm not sure how someone could get as deep into adulthood as him without realizing that and his assertions (so far as I can parse any assertions from his manic rambling) seem more abjectly totalizing, along the lines of "99% of humanity self-sabotages at every turn and nobody ever actually enjoys anything, hate and spite are the only real human emotions".
2. If everyone is sick and there's no cure (because EVERYTHING is actually about how you're a hollow shell that seeks status, wants to be enslaved, and hates every other human being, including you "wanting" to not be those things), then AT BEST he's just saying nothing. At worst, he's done exactly what the wokes he decries have done: reinvented the concept of Original Sin but removed the possibility of redemption from the equation. My interpretation of his work as mental masturbation is me being CHARITABLE; if I wanted to be UNcharitable, I'd have accused him of trying to push vulnerable people among his readership into suicide, given that the parts that aren't purely masturbatory read extremely close to what my internal monologue sounded like when I was deeply depressed.
I would go for he feels miserable and wants other people to feel miserable, but I'm not sure he's trying to push people into suicide.
Recent insight: people don't just try to spread their beliefs, they try to spread their emotional habits.
This is closer to what I believe if I had to try and guess his own emotional state. In my experience, most people who are misanthropic are in fact self-loathing and are simply totalizing their thoughts about themselves to the human race. That's certainly how it was for me, at least (they also tend to be narcissistic, in the "so wrapped up in their own problems that everyone else's problems stop existing" sense).
Do people really think that Zizek is smart / interesting? I thought he was just a meme made flesh.
It weirds me out to no end, but people do seem to think he is.
I always thought Zizek was more of a Monty Python sketch. For example, here: https://youtu.be/dp8aTYUrPi0
Have you read any of his books? He's not an idiot.
Do you have a recommendation for someone who hasn't read any of them? I know of Zizek in passing and i've seen an interview of him, but I'd like to read him.
Not convinced on interesting, pretty sure on smart.
I was immediately turned off on him when he first gained prominence, by who his supporters were, and his intellectual heritage, and - and this is probably unfair to his thought, but that's life - the sort of smarmy, pithy crap he got *quoted for saying*.
(In fairness, you could do the same with quotes from philosophers I rather like, though their fans mostly don't seem to; with Zizek I think it's the intersection of a Marxian worldview on the economic/social and obscurantist pomo writing style; "sounds deep and attacks the Capitalist Other" is more than enough to make you "brilliant!" for a certain type of person.
It's that type of person that soured me on Zizek; if he doesn't deserve that himself, well ... such is life.)
(I say this not as an entire outsider going "Ewww, Postmodernists!", but as a philosopher by training who's *tried to read their obscurantist bullshit* and found it lacking.
Zizek may well be extremely clever, but I've never seen a reason to take him seriously as a thinker or analyst. This *may be* my fault, but equally I have better things to do with my time than read someone's catalogue to see if there's a hidden gem in the manure.)
I didn't like The Last Psychiatrist-- it seemed like he could invent reasons for just about anyone to be considered a narcissist, and I was never clear about what he meant by narcissist.
He was probably right about disability payments somewhat substituting for a more general social safety net.
My current theory about a lot that's hard to explain: a lot of people, at least some of the time, would rather have intensity than practicality. This doesn't explain little details like what *sort* of intensity different people want.
Could you explain what intensity over practicality means? Is this along the lines of virtue signaling, perhaps to oneself?
No, I'm talking about real pleasures, or at least compulsions, as far as I can tell.
To take a moderate example, there are people who like martial arts well beyond a practical interest in self-defense. They want that experience of attention to fighting. (I'm looking at this from the outside.)
It's possible that practicality is doing things for the sake of the parasympathetic nervous system, and intensity is letting the sympathetic nervous system out for a run.
Here's a mild example-- people who stay loyal to a losing sports team. If there was nothing but comfort and safety, no one would do it. Instead, there's not just the feeling of loyalty, there's the hope of winning some day-- a very intense experience which does happen occasionally.
"Signaling" implies not actually being virtuous, but that isn't it. The most addicted to intensity actually are virtuous, at least within the realm they're trying to be. Think of Michael Jordan being so competitive to the point of being an asshole to every single person he ever worked with, or Kobe Bryant being so obsessive about optimizing every single possible minute of practice that he couldn't stand to wait in traffic or miss a day due to bad weather, and he got himself and his daughter killed because of it, but in both cases, that level of dedication really did lead to being the best in the world at what they were doing, not just a hollow signal to convince others or themselves that were better than they really were. Or think of early alpine mountaineers. The first people to summit Everest had a greater than 50/50 chance they'd die trying, and they were guaranteed to be in pain every second of the attempt. Even when successful, it's likely to lead to permanent reduced capacity, possibly disability. But doing it still means you're the best there is at alpine mountaineering. For a sufficiently competitive or driven person, that's all that virtue means. They won, no matter the cost.
Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading ACT felt like a giant waste of time.
If the goal was to create an antimeme it was succesfull because midway my only though was "Thank god i have a marxist basic training against over-intellectualisation" but then shortly after Marx and socialists were mentioned for some reason so I kept on reading because that didnt seem like a conincidence.
But it still felt confusing and really like stuff for people who do a lot of second and third guessing and then for some reason woke people were kind of insulted because they dont like Elon Musk?
I didnt get much of this whole text, and if this was the intention of the book I feel that its probably a bad book. It reminded me of trying to keep track of the narrations of a disorganized shizophrenic or rather of trying to keep track of someone who tried to keep track of an disorganized shizophrenic. Or of that one time where someone who believed really strong in NLP told story after story without conclusion and claimed that if someone was feeling confused by that, this was how it is supposed to work with a mysterios smirk.
All in all I will never read this book and I guess thats at least something positive.
Also enjoy this smbc. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/clock-speed
There's not much connection between Kenneth Burke and Lacan (I don't think) but I remember studying Burke and seeing a photo portrait of him screaming. I imagined him screaming because of his realization that there was no escape from one’s own lexical frame—every choice of frame makes some thoughts unthinkable.
Lacan, and perforce Teach, seem to be a pure rendition of the Burkean scream. One's thoughts are trying to deceive one, but thoughts are the only way to access truth, BUT their treachery puts any conclusion permanently out of reach—especially for questions of what one wants and what one ought to do. Every positive statement becomes a new enemy, a new guise of self-deception to be triumphantly, then despairingly, unmasked.
To apply Teach’s method to himself is trivial, inevitable—as the Joker would say: “I want you to do it.” What is the hidden content of a book like this? To cause intellectual suffering of the kind that Teach himself feels; to inflict on others the iron maiden of reflexive self-recrimination to which he himself is confined. But it is no victory to point that out; maybe Teach says it himself. I don’t know. All the act of unmasking does is add another level to an interminable game.
There is no personal growth in this direction, only a growing sediment of “surfaced” perversions, each one seemingly superseded only to reappear again and again.
The way out of this is somatic: spend some time in your body, get some information straight from the source! And when you experience thoughts, face them not with suspicion that they are agents of some hidden psychological complex, but with open curiosity and with trust—not faith, trust—because engaging sincerely with one’s own thoughts is where trust begins.
"Take a goodly dose of a serious hallucinogen."
(Serious alternative mode of somatic alternative to that trap.
Fortunately, I'm not in that trap, and Teach can't put me there.
A life of introspection can put some people in that trap, but it's made me absolutely sure that trap has no power over me.)
Glad to know I'm not the only person who does the "pretend that I'm performing music and am awesome at it" thing while listening to music. Congratulations on raising your status to your imaginary society while allowing me to take less of a hit from my own.
More generally I've always thought that TLP was genuinely insightful but also that his narcissism theory could explain literally any thought anyone has while being completely unfalsifiable.
"I'd like to provide money to this charity."
"Ah, yes, to signal to others (who don't even have to exist) that you are charitable."
"Uh, no, because I believe in the cause."
"Because you want to perceive yourself as the sort of person who believes in this sort of cause."
"...yes?"
"Your admission that you are intentionally sculpting your perception of yourself is just a defense mechanism to keep you from developing real values."
"...okay?"
TLP got me through some really tough times, and there's something true and real at the bottom of all the...whatever it is he's writing, but for me it really just boils down to: "Saying happiness is your goal is like saying getting paid is your job."
Well said, I don't know much about this but I think I agree
In the end, the measure of a theory should be its usefulness
I love the last sentence, did you come up with it?
I've been using it for years, but I swear I think I heard it somewhere else.
Given the content of this review, it seems eminently appropriate to miss the point here and get bogged down in a mere subpoint. Please consider this comment as if it were a five page irrelevant footnote.
... anyway, on Biblical depictions of angels, it's a bit more complicated than the prevalence of the "biblically-accurate-angels" meme (referenced here as an "antimeme", but I'd argue it's actually the regular sort) would suggest.
The "biblically accurate angels" memes are derived from how angels are sometimes described in symbolic prophetic visions, e.g. (and in particular) Ezekiel 10, which has angels ("cherubim") described as some eldritch combination of wings, eyeballs, and wheels. It's possible these are intended as symbolic, and not literal.
... but when angels appear in the less prophetic/symbolic parts of the text and play a role in the narrative, it's usually implied that they look human: much more like the "traditional" view of angels.
Daniel 10 explicitly describes an angel looking "like a man" (albeit with "eyes like flaming torches"), Hebrews 13 says "Do not neglect hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.", and in a lot of places it's not remarked one way or the other, but I think if angels were always appearing in the form of reject Yu-Gi-Oh monsters, it would have been a relevant detail for the narration to have included.
It's possible that this is just how they choose to appear and maybe the crazy accounts are more of a "true form" but it's hard to say and it's not unreasonable to imagine them in the way they usually appeared. So, yeah, no halos or harps and clouds, and, like Balrogs, the wings are debatable, but the traditional view is probably more conventionally accurate than "biblically accurate angels" meme.
Yes. I logged in to say exactly that.
It's not obvious that cherubim and seraphim are angels, as opposed to some other category of creature.
But it is clear that angels at least sometimes can look like people.
In one of the most famous angelic encounter in the Bible - when three mysterious strangers have dinner at Abraham's tent, they explictly looks like humans (so much so that the people of Gomorrhe then try to rape two of them).
However I must say that the first thing the angel says to Mary, "do not fear", makes both a lot more and a lot less sense if the angel looks like the eldritch horrors from Isaiah or Jeremy's visions.
Anyway angels don't actually have bodys of course, so the aspect they take is necessarily an illusion, either caused by the expectations of the human being or by the choice of the angel.
> However I must say that the first thing the angel says to Mary, "do not fear", makes both a lot more and a lot less sense if the angel looks like the eldritch horrors from Isaiah or Jeremy's visions.
I think it fits with something like Daniel's "human but with 'face like lightning, eyes like flaming torches'", fairly well.
Because, on the one hand, yes they said "do not fear", but on the other hand, it apparently *worked*. If they looked like Ezekiel describes, there's no amount of "do not fear" that you can tell me that's going to convince me to listen to what you're about to tell my about my pregnancy
As with everything else in Christian theology, this has already been thought through by some guy in the sixth century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_angelology
There's nine orders of angels, starting with Sepaphim and Cherubim with many faces and unreasonable numbers of wings, and going right down to Archangels and Angels who might on occasion intercede in human affairs. Nobody seems too sure about the function of the "middle management" angels from Thrones to Principalities, but... well, as above, so below.
Luke seems to suggest that Mary was scared of the salutation of the angel, not his appearance. He said, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art though among women."
While it happens "when she saw him" she was "troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be."
Good point. In fact if we are doing serious analysis angels are truly frightening, not because of the way they appear, but because they are a proxis for the presence of God, and no sinful human can see the face of God and live. That's why Moses only sees God's back and Eliah put on a veil before stepping out of the cave to see God. Similarly in Isaiah's vision the eldritch angels are not what he is afraid of, they appear mostly as a warning, like the colours of a poison dart frog.
Yes, a lot of times when angels are described interacting with people they're described as just "a man in shining white clothes" or similar. And never with wings except in the visions of heaven.
There's exactly one place the now-standard (outside of "biblically accurate angels" memes) winged humanoid angel appears in the Bible, and it's so obscure that I think it's probably a coincidence (standard attribution is that the classic winged humanoid comes from Classical depictions of Nike and other figures.) Zechariah 5:9, buried in the middle of an obscure apocalyptic vision.
I don't know what biblical reference you've got in mind, but the angel outside the garden of Eden is at least humanoid enough to hold a sword.
They are talking about obviously *winged* humanoids angels, not just humanoid angels. Their example doesn't seem to necessarily be about angels though. In Zechariah 5:5-11 there are two winged women who fly down and then fly away with a basket that contains another woman who represents wickedness. They take it to Babylon to build a house/temple and a stand for it. Zechariah never calls the winged women angels.
Another issue is that he talks about the problem of Biblical Literalism vs. those pop-culture depictions.
But neglects that Biblical Literalism in that sense is very much a modern [19th century or so?] American invention, as I recall the history of Christianity - but our pop-culture conception of angels dates to at least the Renaissance, centuries earlier.
(Your argument *also* undermines the facial contradiction, since the Literally Perfect And Accurate Bible - as the straw-Literalist holds it - describes them as able to appear both ways...
Mostly his argument just irked me because it looks like the typical Internet Atheist Problem of conflating "a minority view even among American Weirdo Baptists" with "what All Christians Obviously Believe" - same mechanism by which we get people shocked that the Pope doesn't oppose teaching evolution, because they have *no idea at all* that Catholics aren't Young Earth Creationists.)
I'm a conservative Protestant and sort of agree with your point but think the "Biblical literalism was invented by 19th century Americans" line of argumentation is also overplayed. It seems that in the two main sections of the Bible where literalism is an issue -- Genesis 1-11 and eschatology -- there has long been a diversity of opinion. And my understanding is this is still true, even within the Catholic Church -- the church has never repudiated YEC, though in practice conservative Catholics, both laity and clergy, are more likely to stay away from it than conservative Protestants.
What does seem to have changed in the 19th-20th centuries is that Biblical literalism/inerrancy became something of a Schelling Point, as Protestant denominations that didn't hold to it have had a strong tendency to break from a lot of historical notions of orthodoxy, which has led to a doubling-down on YEC that I doubt any of the Church Fathers or Calvin or Luther would have pursued, if they had access to our scientific findings in their own time.
But all that said, even among those who hold to YEC, there is a diversity of interpretations of eschatology, and a fair number of people who throw up their hands and say Revelation cannot be fully understood.
This guy sounds like he would be a joy to argue with. But a book seems like exactly the wrong medium to interact with him.
I disagree, the book gives a nice sense of distance. I think all those angry rants would be terrifying in person.
Are there really people who enjoy the 'English prof sleeps with his grad student' genre of literary fiction? I didn't think people were even supposed to read them, tbh, I thought they were some weird in joke amongst literary scholars.
I got a lot out of the Koan. 👍
That's "literary" fiction as opposed to "genre" fiction, a high vs low divide related to this:
https://acawiki.org/An_Economic_Theory_of_Avant-Garde_and_Popular_Art,_or_High_and_Low_Culture
Neal Stephenson, cruelly but (IMHO) accurately describes the split as The Literature of Competence vs The Literature of Incompetence. (And hints at, but never goes so far as to say, how that relates to the people who read each.)
Which would seem to have nothing to do with "The Unsung Romance of Incompetence": https://crookedtimber.org/2014/08/05/the-unsung-romance-of-incompetence/
I'd agree the one has nothing to do with the other.
Holbo's point is, perhaps, relevant and interesting to those who like or care about their fictional hero's having some sort of (generally extremely obvious) flaw; I am not one of those people, and I don't think Neal Stephenson is either.
Mostly I consider that genre ("flawed hero", ie Noir and all that crap) to be a subgenre of The Literature of Incompetence.
(And honestly, while Marvel have done a pretty good job in the construction of the MCU, it becomes least interesting when it becomes most obvious and ham-fisted in it's "let's now roll out this character's flaw and make a big deal about it" moments.
In particular I think he gets Guardians of the Galaxy completely backwards. That's a comedy of bumbling twits who manage to do OK, but that's VERY different from The Literature of Incompetence. Few identify themselves as bumbling twits, but The Literature of Incompetence is all about creating excuses for why, sure, you the reader may be alcoholic abuser cheating on his wife, but hell, here's 800 pages (or three boring movie hours) of why you are justified in behaving that way; or it's envious cousin "Sure he may seem so great, Mr CEO/policeman/politician but I bet you if you looked closely he's just as fscked up as I am, more so in fact, he's just better at hiding it".)
One set of authors and fans comes from a position of admiring competence (even bumbling competence) and wanting to be better; the other comes from a position of hating competence and wanting everyone to be as incompetent as the reader/author at life in general, albeit perhaps not in the narrow domain of a particular art form.
Of course this is one of the way's where Teach is wrong. Both populations are large; it's just that the envious incompetents control most of the cultural discourse so they seem ubiquitous, but they aren't, not if you go to genre art, to much of STEM, to much of manual labor.
If one wanted to really go out on a limb, one might even say that the admiration of competence is mostly associated with the masculine professions...
"Stoner", by John Williams, presumably qualifies. I enjoyed it very much.
I found it dreadful, and had an impression much like OP's.
Around the time I gave up on reading literary fiction, I mentally tagged these kind of novels as the Hampstead Adultery Novel, because so many of them were professor has affair with hot student due to mid-life crisis/wife of professor has mid-life crisis due to her husband having an affair. Pages of "whatever shall I do now that I am in my 40s-50s, the kids (if we had any) are grown and left the nest, and this is the most successful and happy I shall ever be, and from now on it's just another thirty years of the same until the grave?" Some of them had the wife leaving the husband and taking up with a lover of her own, but generally it was just - not very interesting, unless you were a part of that class of people and could recognise the characters in your own social circle.
The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book.
As a stylistic note, the closest comparison I can think of is Mitchell Heisman's suicide note. 1900 pages of madness, with a preface of "this is an experiment to see whether people are more or less likely to promote this work after an actual suicide".
Heisman was way more lucid.
(Based on my distant recollection of sampling a few chapters, but still)
Very smart, intense people either a) eventually realize the naive view of the world is largely correct, and chill out or b) repackage the naive view of the world in obscurantism to justify the sunk-cost of their intellectual investments.
Sounds like TLP is the latter.
My articulation: We can (mostly) trust our perceptions about reality, and our intuitions about ethics. Our desires are legitimate, and not implanted or manufactured. Life is hard and full of suffering, but there's a lot of joy in it, so enjoy the good times and help others who are going through the bad. People want to live happy and meaningful lives, and the best path to those kind of lives involves self-discipline and/or dedication to an entity outside the self (family, vocation, religion, art, community).
I.e., put a thousand mundane self-help books in a blender and season with a healthy sprinkling of cliches.
Obviously, this view can be nit-picked and edge-cased to death. And it doesn't mean there's not value in studying those exceptions and other quirks of human cognition. But I don't think it's a coincidence that so much of what comes from those deep dives (in literature, philosophy, and psychology) is "Huh, the human brain really does weird stuff when turned inward. Maybe just stop thinking about yourself so much and go engage with the external world."
Imagine that this bundle of naive / small-c conservative / common-sense conclusions happened to be mistaken, but someone had already tentatively accepted it as largely true. How would that person find their way out of this mistake? If the fruit of their experience is that reasoning and literary-type introspection are not reliable ways to reach true, non-obvious conclusions, what's left? Religious awakening?
Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you.
It reminds me of George Santayana on 'animal faith' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scepticism_and_Animal_Faith).
I should add two other options: c) embrace extreme / bizarre theories that bear no resemblance to the lived experience of most human beings; d) generate useful +/- novel insights.
The aggregate societal benefits from d) makes it worth bearing the annoyance/costs of b) + c), but our pre-test probability that any individual piece of intellectual esoterica is d) should be quite low.
See also: Jordan Peterson, who seems to be a mix of the approaches.
This is the second damn time I’ve made it through 2/3 of a review assuming that it was one of the ones from the competition, and thinking the exact same thoughts: “Wow this is good, but this person REALLY needs to read less Slate Star Codex and develop their own style”…
I have long believed that the reason PUA somewhat works (for a value of "works") has nothing to do with the techniques or the negging, and that's about teaching enough misogyny that it doesn't *matter* to you to get vast amounts of "no's" (because who cares what the bitches believe anyway?). This means that you can hit on them freely because rejection no longer imposes a mental cost on you, and with enough attempts, *something* is likely to work out sooner or later.
Alternate theory from Claire Thorn ?)*-- a moderate dose of PUA is good for men who suffer from social anxiety. They wouldn't go to a therapist, but PUA calms them down enough so that they can approach women.
The crucial thing is that they stop with the PUA culture then rather than letting it become their major social group.
*this doesn't seem to be the right name, but I can't remember it. A woman who's also written about S&M and has a thing for men who like theories about gender.
Clarisse Thorn
Thank you. I have no idea why Google didn't do better from the clues I gave it.
Wow Clarisse Thorn, haven't heard that name in years. She was moderately big name on a subset of feminist blogs over a decade ago.
Her theory is basically in line with the common ideas around PUA. You can't win if you don't play.
Negging and peacocking actually do work, though. But only on a subset of women. Something to try if you aren't having much success otherwise. Of course unlike "just ask women out" they are not morally neutral.
I thought peacocking was just wearing some interesting item of clothing in order to possibly get compliments from women. This seems harmless to me. I don't mock men for wearing fedoras, though I suppose that if the fedora has become a cliche, it won't work as well.
Negging is another matter. If you misjudge how the woman will take it, you can make her life worse.