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.
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.
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."
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).
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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?
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...
"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 😁
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I apologize if you reach this conclusion but I just wanted to say before I finisih the essay in case I forget:
This strikes me as yet another of the many many things where it's important to learn that something is possible, possibly even common, but equally important to remember it's NOT universal.
It's absolutely vital to survival in our society to learn that people can lie to you. But you can't assume everyone is always lying, or you wind up in an insane asylum. It's important to learn that people can steal, murder, or rape, but it's insane to assume that everyone wants to do those things all the time. It's important to learn that people frequently fail to do the things they claim they will do, even if they're not lying, but it's not the case that everyone who says they're going to be somewhere at 5 pm will show up at 6 or never.
It seems clear to me that some subset of people make decisions about some subset of things for status or mimetic reasons, and some people do not.
I will likely read this, but I strongly suspect he has wildly misinterpreted the Athenians and their actions. If nothing else, the Athenians were VERY OK with dragging everyone down to the same level. Suggesting otherwise is...odd.
Also, that Oscar Wilde quote isn't an Oscar Wilde quote. It appears to be from one psychologist writing to another, but was mentioned in the introduction of a book about Oscar Wilde. This makes sense, since Oscar Wilde predates the use of the term "sex" to refer to banging like monkeys (though, interestingly, I'm pretty sure I found an example of it from a few years before the supposed earliest one that can be found online. It is, unfortunately, somewhat ambiguous).
This Ed Teach sounds like the kind of person whose defense mechanism against realizing how psychologically screwed-up he is, is to project his worst problems onto everybody else. (There are a lot of people like that.)
"But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it." -- This particular neurosis is not inborn human nature, but diagnostic of having been a teenager in the 1990s, when pop music became self-conscious and ironic for (I think) exactly this reason, to the point where singers couldn't even sing honestly, but used a kind of nasal throttling-back of their voice so everyone knew they weren't even /trying/ to sing beautifully.
"Whatever your personal religious and political beliefs, it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions, and regardless of how much you believe times have changed or how bad you are at math you should still be able to observe that those are two separate lines." -- Platonism, Christianity, absolute monarchy, the French revolutionaries, Marxism, progressivism, Nazism, and Social Justice all deliberately united morality, religion, and politics. Other movements deliberately separated them. A big part of the history of Western civilization is the history of fighting over the very thing he says is obvious--whether these are two separate lines. And, yes; most Westerners /do/ think the answer is obvious--but they're split over which answer is obvious, which proves to any careful thinker that it isn't obvious at all.
"Greco-Roman traditions" isn't a coherent thing you can draw a straight line from, either. The three main strands of Greek thought represented by classical Sparta , classical Athens, and Hellenistic Greece, are all different, and all very different from Roman thought. And you CAN'T trace the correlation between the moral/religious and the political back to Greco-Roman times, 'coz there was no such thing as "moral/religious"--morality had nothing to do with religion to the Greeks.
His characterization of the Athenians as worshipping Lysander is bizarre. Lysander & Sparta set up 30 tyrants from the Athenian aristocracy (most of whom had conspired with Sparta against Athens during the war) to rule Athens, who immediately began slaughtering people who supported democracy. The Athenians rebelled and overthrew them just a few years later. Sure, some people welcomed Lysander when he came into the city--the aristocrats who'd conspired to bring him there. But that doesn't tell us anything about the psychology of most Athenians, and certainly not the thing he says it tells us.
My gripe isn't that any of these are important points. It's that it's easy to shoot down everything he says. Teach doesn't support anything he says well, and sometimes doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. His rhetorical strategy is to spew startling or offensive statements fast enough that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate them. It's basically continental philosophy, where by "continental philosophy" I mean substituting showmanship for epistemology.
definitely reading this book because it sounds like a trip but i have to say, the giving tree section rang extremely true to me.
as a kid we had these writing competitions in elementary school, or maybe it was 6th grade, where we had to do a book review. i didn't put a lot of thought into it - i've always been a procrastinator, and wrote mine the day it was due, maybe hours before. i so distinctly remember picking 'the giving tree' out of a vague sense that it was the kind of book the judges would love to see reviewed. i talked about how it's about parenting and about how it was so important to teaching me, jack, about how good my parents were and how i should be more humble and thankful.
but i remember knowing that the book had no importance to me, hadn't resonated at all, and was my parents favorite, not mine. my essay advanced a few rounds, but didn't win, but it was enough that my mom - a teacher in the school district, shared it around with her peers. i remember feeling guilty and not ever dwelling too much on it. i felt guilty because i felt like i'd hoodwinked everyone, but i maybe i was fulfilling some amazing fantasy: "finally, a child who gets what this book is about (to me) - how good a mother i am for being so self-sacrificing and kind".
now i live 1000s of miles from my parents, but these two things may not be connected.
Some of the quoted excerpts from the text are extremely evocative of Reddit comments made by people who admit to being on methamphetamine benders. Not to accuse Dr. Teach of anything, necessarily, but the wild psychological theorizing, misanthropy, hypersexuality, and the way that *it just keeps going like that forever and ever* really read like a text written under the influence of methamphetamine. (Or by someone otherwise having some kind of really intense manic episode.)
This captures my confused feelings about The Last Psychiatrist so well. Thank you for the work it took to articulate all this! It means a lot to know that I'm not the only person who wasn't sure whether to take him seriously.
This review either makes my want to buy "Sadly, Porn" or run the other way. Not yet sure which. I never felt like I understood anything after reading TLP, but man, the *feeling* of it.
I've now censored three different comments I was going to make after realizing that I had only written them for the purpose of feeling special and unique.
Really like this review, wasn't familiar with this guy, and I can see myself in several descriptions, though not all. Definitely going to try to get hold of a physical copy.
> “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”
My friend has played something like 5,000+ hours of a game that I tried for less than two before I put it down - just wasn't my cup of tea. I have *checks Steam* 1,762 hours logged in a game that he played for four. There is no "lack of understanding" to explain the difference there, beyond the observation that the investment of enormous amounts of time and energy sometimes hangs on essentially-random personal preference. Sometimes even on things that are trivial, by their own admission!
"Lots of people tend to do what I want" isn't mysterious, it's literally just leadership. It *would* be truly impressive if V could get arbitrary people to commit meaningful resources, but that isn't what's happening here - instead, you have recruitment from a population that's heavily-selected to be amenable for... recruitment. I have a lot more appreciation for charisma as a teachable skill than I used to, but even when I was (more) clueless it never struck me as odd that people who try to be leaders sometime succeed.
Dota patch notes won't really help you understand eSports as a general phenomenon, but they will give you insight into specific nuances that many people care strongly about. Lacan won't really help you understand cultishness, but it might help you understand the aesthetics of one particular cult. Those speak to things you might not know right now, but they aren't really "holes" in a map.
>...why is porn better than imagining the hot sex, in your head?
I have in fact always preferred the latter to the former and never understood why this was unusual. (In fairness, my psyche seems atypical in other ways as well.)
> Envy is different from jealousy: jealousy is when you wish you too had something nice, envy is when you wish the other person would lose their nice thing.
This is the exact opposite of how I remember being taught the distinction! Nor can I immediately find a dictionary source that really justifies it either way… what gives? Anyone else remember this differently?
Had been meaning to task here: what if cognitive biases are actually instrumental?
As in, if most people don't actually have goals of doing things in the world, and just want to look higher status, then beliefs should be picked up or dropped in relationship to how trendy they are.
And this seems to be what your analysis of teach is saying points at.
I like his rhetorical technique of "it is universally acknowledged that X, therefore you are wrong but I am not, so you should listen to me berate you about it".
I confess I'm a little confused; if he thinks that we're incapable of wanting things and only capable of playing this weird psychological status game, why do we play it? Do we want to play, or do we not realize we can opt out? Most of the quotes you chose feel like rhetorical sleight of hand.
That excerpt about The Giving Tree clicked perfectly in my mind and made so much sense that I have to read the entire thing now. I definitely do agree with him about the self-knowledge trap having experienced it firsthand. Although, I prefer imagining sex in my head as opposed to using porn and have always felt that this was more direct and enjoyable. Thanks for writing about this; not sure what it says about my thinking, that I find all of his explanations sensible but I'll have to explore more.
Minor correction on Rev 22:18 - the books of the Bible were collected as a library and canonized as scripture long after the Book of Revelations itself was written. While it's true that many people retroactively apply the verse in question as applying to the book as a whole, it's also impossible to read the various surviving texts without concluding that more than a few words in the Biblical texts were altered long before the whole thing came together as the 'Bible'.
It’s not called “insight porn” for nothing — though we could easily use the term “sage writing” a la Thomas Carlyle, which leads to an either interesting or disturbing comparison of TLP’s writing style and, say, Mencius Moldbug’s; both engage in a kind of speaking-at and speaking-for the reader, putting words (desires? other things?) in the reader’s mouth/mind, so that the particular *type* of insight porn is pretty clearly BDSM. As a commenter once suggested on TLP’s blog [paraphrasing] “you all visit this site as a comedown lecture after a fap.”
I think there is something in the principle of teaching by being deliberately obscure, though. I think that's one of the main understood reasons why Jesus used parables so often. If someone thinks they've understood you then they might go away and think about your point for a bit. If you say something memorable and people think they've not understood you, it'll niggle at them and they'll go on pondering what you said for longer.
> The main message I get here is “Teach really likes talking about classical Athens”:
What a coincidence. So do I. The difference is that I also like reading about Classical Athens.
This is normally where I'd expound on how wrong he was. But chasing down this philosophy's points of fact is a waste of time. It is, at any rate, missing the point. Nothing so pedestrian as facts is relevant. I know what they found in the dark, what they mined out of ponderous tomes and dead languages. It's nothing more than a dark art. Useful but uninteresting.
"Tyrannical government is an imperfect solution here; our government occasionally resembles democracy, which makes us complicit in its actions. What people really crave is domination by corporate HR departments. The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments and things like them."
You just described my personal hell.
Realizing the horror and revulsion the above statement caused me, for the first time in my career, I'm thinking about quitting and starting a one-man business.
I first heard about The Giving Tree being a metaphor for mothers when I found online a script for the original stage-play version of Cory Finley's Thoroughbreds (then titled "Thoroughbred"). It wasn't at all subtle in its repeated references to The Giving Tree, so the actual film was better off without it.
Spotted Toad claims the secret to Harry Potter's success is that it's from the viepoint of Harry mother, who loves him unconditionally:
This is a dense review, but my first and strongest thought was "if it's constantly telling you to lower your mental defense mechanisms to accept its truth, and you can't understand it but you get the feeling that if you did it would be some sort of massive revelation, and your definitely-not-a-cult-leader friend is a big fan of it... maybe it's a cult." Or at least, using the same tools as a cult.
Tell someone that you have rare and secret knowledge. Tell them that most people won't believe it, and they're special for figuring out the truth. Make your explanations deliberately a bit obscure, so that they feel invested in the work they put in to understanding it. If someone feels like they understand you a bit too well, tell them they're still wrong, they're falling for an antimeme, they need to study even harder. Keep them feeling like they're on the brink of a revelation without ever gaining the clarity that might allow them to notice that it makes no sense. Explain with wild free-association chains that give people the sense that everything is connected and so your ideas can explain *everything.* If they ever feel tempted to go with the normal, boring explanation that would connect them to broader reality, turn that temptation into a character flaw - the only reason they think that way is because they're giving in to their brain's defense mechanism and they can't handle the truth.
Defense mechanisms do exist, and sometimes it really is hard to explain a complicated concept without wrestling with various imprecise metaphors. But other times, it's hard to understand because it's not actually a good explanation and you're accurately noticing your confusion. And still other times, it's hard to understand because the simple explanation would sound something like "I want to sneak past your rational thought processes because I'm trying to manipulate you."
Hate to spam your comments section but I was thinking about your cult leader friend, the influential people I know, the general rise in conspiracy theories, and the way people talk about ostensible facts, and I'm wondering if any smart people know of resources on how symbolic thought works. In particular I'm wondering how fuzzy the line between concrete observation and metaphor actually is.
In my mind these are two distinct and complementary ways of thinking - It may get across the beauty and majesty of a sunset to describe it as gods spilling out paint onto the canvas of the sky or whatever but I didn't literally see any gods and I'm well aware of that fact.
If you talk to someone who believes Barack Obama was born in Kenya or whatever though...it seems like multiple things are happening:
1) The person says this in the same way that I said the sunrise thing: it's a story that explains all the things they dislike about Obama and why they think he's an illegitimate leader,
2) There's no correlation at all between whether they say this and their intelligence/curiosity/ability to observe the world and tell truth from fiction with less emotionally fraught topics, and
3) They appear to genuinely believe Obama was born in Kenya.
A popular theory among my mostly progressive friend group is that they're just straight lying - they don't actually believe Obama was born in Kenya, but they think they can say Obama was born in Kenya and that be taken as a fact mistake, where if they said "he has a funny name and is the wrong color" they'd have to own up to being racists. But this does not seem to be what's happening at all, and conspiracy theory experts seem to believe both the "it's a story that better explains their grievances than actual truth and that's why they say it" and the "but seriously they also believe it" idea.
Likewise, influential people often say things as though they are statements of fact when they're actually a simple opinion or obviously false. These are often statements that, if made metaphorically or more conservatively, would speak to very real problems that real people have. I've always assumed that their "followers" profess to believe this even though they don't actually because there was status to be gained in professing faith in an obviously untrue thing. But also it seems weird to just assume a bunch of folks are liars.
And then there's religion. Not to get into the weeds too much here, but my parents believe, truly, with all their hearts, that those who do not accept the existence of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be tortured for eternity in hell. They also are people of principle who would not let their son be tortured for eternity in hell for want of his company. But they do not bring up my atheism or lack of church attendance because it would make things awkward. That does not strike me as the behavior of someone for whom this fact, which I know they believe with all their hearts, is literally true.
My original question when starting this post was going to be "do y'all think other people might have a fuzzier distinction between metaphors that speak to deeper truths/values and actual object-level observation than I do?" but then it occurred to me that if I did this I'd have no idea I was doing it. So do y'all think people have a fuzzy distinction between metaphors that speak to deeper truths/values and actual object-level observation?
In the millennial generation, doing things "to be ironic" has been huge. The "hipster" sub-culture is almost entirely constructed around irony.
Anyway, I suspect irony is primarily a defense mechanism, whereby people are too afraid to say they like something (for all the reasons floated in this post) and so instead they pretend they *don't* like the masculine lumberjack ethos with flannel shirts and Carhartt hats -- but they're doing it anyway because -- isn't that ironic and edgy!
And that's for the bravest users of irony, who are willing to *act* on what they like but only if they can *claim* that they aren't.
Others "ironically" adopt objectively-hideous fashions and ideas -- just ride the L train to Brooklyn for examples -- because they aren't brave enough to either speak or covertly act on real tastes and desires.
By the way, you can even see it in basic sarcastic quips. Saying sarcastically, "oh, do you have high enough ceilings here?" spares you for having to actually say "you have really impressively high ceilings in your home" and actually saying something you feel.
Anyway, that's no way to live.
My sense is there was less irony in history, and my experience is that people in developing countries are more comfortable with expressing actual desires. Is excessive introspection enabled by material wealth leading to too much fear of just doing and saying what you actually want? Or is something else going on?
> This is the highest-grade antimeme I feel comfortable using as an example; if you don’t see the fnords they can’t eat you.
I almost stopped reading here, in case the other antimemes were actually more powerful, or less powerful but be unsettling or have some other effect.
Like other commenter here, I was (and still am when I think about it too much) also deeply unsettled to discover that all my actions could be explained by some kind of status seeking or desire to project some image of myself, possibly to myself. It certainly makes me feel like a hypocrite at one level or another, at all times.
From the review, it seems the theory in this book makes the annoying jump from "this is one explanatory mechanism for some things you to" to "this is the only explanatory mechanism for everything you do"! Imagine if we did that, say, in physics. Even if there a single mechanism, there's no chance we'd happen on it without first discovering a number of apparently disconnected things.
That particular ancient Zen koan is great. Thanks for making me aware of it.
I've tried reading TLP. I feel about the guy the same way I feel about woke stuff -- I don't understand why I should listen to someone sneeringly accuse me of motives and pathologies that do not match my internal experience at all. Seems masochistic.
On the whole, "omniscience OR omnipotence, choose one" thing: I think about the tagline on Teach's old blog was also a Wittgenstein quote, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." It reminds me of the first lines of the Tao Te Ching, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao." Even speaking is a form of action which negates your knowledge, words are themselves limiters. They are defined by what they are not. So you can know, but you cannot act perfectly, or you can act perfectly, but only if you concede that you do not know everything.
...and yet billions of words have been written attempting to explain the nature of knowledge and wisdom and our existence. Why does Edward Teach? Because while your action is almost certainly going to end up wrong, not acting is 100% going to achieve even less.
A thought about the Elon Musk example: I suppose Elon Musk prefers to be viewed positively by the general public. I also suspect that he has a lot of control over his public persona and a bunch of smart people advising him in that regard. So why would Elon Musk present himself as someone who has gotten to where he is because of his strong desire/will/actions/accomplishments? You could make a reasonably convincing case that the important factors in his success were his very wealthy and extremely well-connected family. He could present himself as something like the Harry Potter Archetype. And if I understand your interpretation of the book correctly that would make him more popular/beloved? So is this a failure of Mr. Musks PR-Team or is something else going on?
The fun thing about being a psychoanalyst, particularly of the 'you don't know your desires' school, is that the psychoanalyst is perfectly secure in their beliefs. If I say that I don't identify with the status games, then the psychoanalyst can simply say 'You see, you are simply double-plus-good at hiding your TRUE desires, which makes you feel smugly superior, so you ARE playing status games after all, ha-HA!', which is obviously a completely unrefutable type of argument that can be deployed against any criticism, whether from personal reflection or broader analysis.
I think that the advantage of pornographic literature over fantasies is largely the same as that of any literature over fantasies. A story that has actually been written down is much more concrete, but an imaginary fantasy is very fluid and it's difficult to get a coherent sequence of plot beats out of it (unless I'm trying really hard).
Fantasizing well enough to replace reading would probably require a decent portion of the work required to write a good story.
Charisma is something one has or hasn't. It's like having a big dick. Has nothing to do with understanding concepts.
For examples, here are some highly-driven highly-charismatic people: John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Keanu Reeves, Vin Diesel, John Travolta, Muhammad Ali. I doubt any of these people have a mental map one could use to become more charismatic.
There's a good reason Charisma is an independent attribute in D&D.
Not a new theme at all for TLP. He was posting back in 2015, paraphrasing here ... "you only married her so that you could keep her away from other men. If they knew how much you refused to enjoy her on a daily basis- they'd knife you."
Response - reading suggestion - to the part about "want those things so they can gain status points and deprive other people of them." you might enjoy this essay by an actual shepherd and his experience with his actual sheep falling into similar mental traps https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/ .
1. Zizek: I don't have a high opinion of Zizek because he's a communist and seems like yet another fraudulent public intellectual, but I don't think about him much and haven't engaged with him in a really long time so my opinion is only weakly negative.
2. Zen: Holding in my mind simultaneously the entire spectrum of input from all five senses seems easy but I can't point to any benefit of doing it.
3. Envy: Teach's weird definition of Envy (but I don't know a better word: Schadenfreude is too narrow because it doesn't encompass desiring hypotheticals, and Sadism is too narrow because it requires being the one inflicting the pain) has only been felt by me against people I hate, and I spent 80% of my life not hating anyone, and even in the other 20% Envy was rare. I hated some bullies in elementary school, and I hated some SJWs in 2016-2020, but I got over it. I have been Jealous of my friends' hot wives, and Jealous of my cousin's hot wife, but at no point did I desire depriving my friends or my cousin of anything, so it wasn't Envy in the way Teach uses that word. If I had a magic button that would copy my cousin's wife and make the copy be in love with me, I would press the button. If I had another magic button that would make the original divorce him and marry me, I would never push that button. If I had a magic button that would zero out the wealth of any billionaire of my choice, I wouldn't use it.
4. If all all our desires were just faked for status purposes, no one would ever have a low-status kink. So Teach is wrong about that. I don't think I gain any status by being a 36yo dude binging on high school rom-com-dramas on Netflix and crushing on some of the characters, who are typically 25 year old actresses pretending to be 16. (Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, To All the Boys I Loved Before).
This seems to just completely discount the possibility of viscerally pleasurable physical experiences, if I am understanding it correctly.
As someone who largely (get it) buys into the palatability theory of obesity, I am not sure how to square these theories.
The only thing I can think of, is that I am trying to sublimate (well the opposite of sublimate really ... deposit??) my secret desire to be fit, by instead making myself unfit. That some 'thing' happened in the 1970s that radically changed the culture such that it became a lot more common for people to secretly desire being fit which then obviously led to a lot of obesity.
Of course, this makes it fully generalizable and totally unfalsifiable. I do the high status things because I want status and I do the low status things to hide my secret desire for high status things. I am not sure if it is even possible for this type of analysis to ever be helpful so I must be missing something.
I know almost nothing about the Kabbalah, but I feel like Scott knows or people here might know. The one thing I picked up goes something like, when the sephiroth does the thing it does, quarks fly off into the past and future. And sometimes one of the bits is opposite in meaning or at an angle to the piece it came off of. I am sure that’s wrong, but I use it to tell myself “good things can have bad consequences” and similar wisdoms. When I read people reading Lacan - like now - or Freud (a few weeks ago for school), I come back to this idea. When a thing exists, it automatically starts firing off contradictory bits, and that’s true inside the psyche and everywhere else. In terms of “real desire,” it’s turtles all the way down. In terms of someone is telling me about their life and I should say something helpful, I don’t know how to tell if the quark went left or right. Guess I need to read more Lacan.
"Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it."
I can do some mad libs with this to explain obscurantism in terms of cowardice.
"Intellectually unhealthy people, e.g. postmodernists, don't have beliefs, at least not in the normal sense. Believing things is scary and might obligate you to have evidence to support those beliefs lest you look like a crank. Your belief might be wrong, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who is forced to update his map. Better to just avoid committing to saying anything unambiguous."
Great review. I think I'll probably read this under the Julian Jaynes exception, by which weirdo polymaths interpreting all of history and art through their insanely particular theory can be compelling as fiction if they're sufficiently good at writing prose.
Personally—and you can accept this and Teach can dismiss it—I read the old 800-page classics of western literature because they're really fun to read. They're also very insightful and profound sometimes, but something like "Anna Karenina" or "David Copperfield" is a page-turner in addition to all those artistic features.
My impression is that the naturalists and modernists of the late 19th/early 20th century got more into doomed professorial affairs and interpretational difficulty, but they made things easier on their readers by mostly making the novels much shorter. The Victorians (and their contemporaries) were writing sentimental barnburners that also just happened to be profound.
Where can/should I go to learn more about antimemes? I followed the link to the SCP Foundation and read the first entry. I'll probably go back there and read more later, but after a first impression I'm worried that that website is itself an antimeme.
>And what about self-handicapping? Here’s a study that’s stood the test of time, by which I mean AFAIK nobody’s ever tried to replicate it: psychologists asked some people to do a test.
I'm not sure anyone has done a direct replication, but looking at the PubMed page you linked (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/650387/), there are plenty of similar studies about self-handicapping. For example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15130190/ which claimed that "Following noncontingent success, high self-handicappers reported greater anxiety, more unproductive attributions and claimed more handicaps than low self-handicappers." (It seems that this study divided people into high and low self-handicappers.)
Everything is about power, except power. Power is about sex. - Hitler such an epic fail compared to Dschinghis Khan. - And pathetic me: afraid to win the jackpot, as it would leave me no excuse but to DO ... err ... not-Scott-like-stuff. Which some guys with much less dough DO. Edward seems to be right in parts, at least. We do excel in excuses. - Is the porn part any good? Elfriede Jelinek did some awesome porn (Nobel in 2004).
Seems like an interesting book. Teach's interpretation of "The Giving Tree" feels right to me, actually. It doesn't matter what Shel Silverstein intended it to mean; the point is that there's another reading that actually makes more sense, that gets behind the book's saccharine sentimentality to reveal a deeper and more credible psychology. Art is like that, if it's worth anything at all; it says things the artist didn't know he was saying. That the tree is less a mother than an idealized fantasy of motherhood with no correspondence to reality seems obviously correct, at least, and Teach makes some very good points about the relationship between love and obligation.
Scott, you seem to miss the context when he addresses the reader. He doesn't just say, "This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." He says, "You're stumped by the layout? This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." The context indicates that "This book isn't for you" is a response to those who are "stumped by the layout." "You" isn't you, personally (at least not necessarily); it's the kind of reader who would only misunderstand the book, and Teach does all these things (and tells you he's doing them!) to try to get them not to read it in the first place. When you say you had to replace "you" with "a hypothetical maximally unvirtuous person", I think you're close, but kind of overdoing it. The readers in question are hardly "maximally unvirtuous" (whatever that means; it sounds a bit like Caligula), they're just ordinary people who think the ordinary thoughts they were taught to think, who don't really want to be challenged, and wouldn't know what to do with this kind of challenge anyway because it's completely beyond their capabilities to seriously consider that the world might not be what they've been taught to believe it is. So when Teach says he's trying to drive readers away, I think you can take him literally. The thing is, it's not ALL readers, just the ones who are wasting their time reading a book that's beyond them (and they self-select by being put off by these tricks). The question is which type of reader you are.
You seem to be trying to look for some hidden meaning in Teach's writing when he seems, as far as I can tell from the quotes you've provided, to be laying it all out in plain view. Your response to the book reminds me of a quote I came across once, I forget who from (Mencken, maybe?) to the effect that if you want people to laugh and think you're joking, just tell them the plain truth.
Having read your review and the two you linked to, in the end I find that I don't really trust any of the three of you to tell me what this book is about. The self-styled Contrarian starts off by sneering that Teach's old blog was popular with "pseudo-intellectuals" (which we may take as an implicit claim that the Contrarian is a real intellectual, or at least able to tell the difference, which I am not sure I believe) and reviews the book after reading only about 20% of it; he also tells us that Teach's style is "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic," which is a fairly lame attempt at wit and, based on your quotes, seems to me rather exaggerated. Teach does seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice, but try Henry James or A.E. Waite if you want something that's "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic."
Lacan's justification for obscurantism reminds me of a quote attributed to Josiah Warren: "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." I would guess that Teach agrees, though his method is different; rather than being obscure, he makes his book hard (for some people) to read by simply being blunt and somewhat abrasive, not to mention the 30-page porn story, the long footnotes, and various other mechanisms.
I wonder Teach is really quite as condescending as he seems. At the very least, he apparently likes playing that part (and it surely helps to drive away the wrong kind of reader, so it counts as another tactic of that sort, along with the long footnotes, etc.), but he seems too perceptive. The best psychologists, in my experience, are good because they actually have a deep understanding of human nature and know that that understanding applies to themselves as much as to everyone else. I suppose he really could have a huge blind spot in that regard, but I'd be surprised if that were the case.
Anyway, I've ordered the book, so at some point in the future I'll have my own more fully-formed opinion of it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
I think this relates to free energy/error reduction? Ie. we don't become who we want to be, we believe that we already are that person and then act to reduce error. With the failure mode of externalizing the difference between inferred and phenomenal self.
For a text that self-confesses to be obscurantist, I was nodding my head in agreement an awful lot, both in terms of Scott's interpretation of what it's trying to say, but also the direct quotes. Whether that's because I've willfully misunderstood everything and am now patting myself on the back for these "insights", because I've converged on to something truth-adjacent, or because I've converged on to some Schelling point of crackpottery, is anyone's guess.
For a while now I've been drawn into thinking that humans aren't agents. And by that I don't mean the weak notion that humans don't exactly match the mathematical formalism for agents as that statement is pretty much trivially true (due to bounded computational resources imposed by laws of physics) - this is what the idea of boundedly rational agents is for. For me it's the stronger notion that claims it's almost never accurate to model human decision-making as optimizing (or satisficing, really) for their preferences. There are some trivial examples like observing that humans tend to claim to want money, and indeed they're likely to cash in winning lottery tickets or pick up hundred dollar bills from the ground (citation needed), but once you get into more complex behaviors, such as Scott's example of not asking people on a date despite yearning for a partner every single day, where exactly is the preference-satisficing behavior? One could argue that having a partner isn't people's true preference, that they actually prefer to be forever alone, or that being rejected hurts so much that even a perfectly rational agent would not risk it, but when people (I'm thinking about philosophers arguing for compatibilism in particular) talk about humans showing agenthood, they're explicitly giving some reality to people's preferences. On the other hand, to deny the reality of these preferences would seem like equating humans to rocks, that rocks have a preference to stay immobile because that's what we observe them doing, which I think is an even more radical view than my own.
My view is that the preferences people see themselves as having are real, but that accurate model of human behavior rarely invokes them and uses other concepts instead. These concepts are still endogenous (nobody's being puppeteered by an evil demon) but are often of the nature being talked about here. For example, I draw a juxtaposition from the story of the tree to ideas presented in HPMOR's chapter involving the troll attack: people often act out roles. The tree acts out the role of a mother, McGonagall a strict disciplinarian, and that way of modelling behavior might actually get you somewhere. Ditto for behaviors like virtue-signalling, or any of the other social games people unconsciously play that end up dictating their behavior.
Similarly, the idea that people want their freedoms curtailed speaks to me because I've also thought about that a lot. It seems to me that humans would indeed be the happiest in a state of "choicelessness" (I believe there's some Eastern philosophical concept for it, but if I've known one, I've since forgotten about it), always living in the moment because there's no other option. The extreme example of this would be monasticism, but this has to large extent been the general experience for most of human existence: you could in principle do something else than forage or work the fields, but then you'd starve so you don't actually have much choice now do you. Even in today's environment a lot of people seem to find the idea of not /having/ to go to work every morning abhorrent: what would they do with themselves? I've never drawn a connection between historical forms of choicelessness and modern forms like "domination by corporate HR departments", but now that the idea has been presented to me, it does seem to make sense.
(For the record, this does in no way excuse slavery: you can experience choicelessness without also being subjected to misery)
(Also for the record, I'm claiming no superiority here. In fact, I'm uncharacteristically incapable of acting on my claimed preferences)
Is there a word for this kind of "unassailable truth" writing ("condescending" doesn't seem to cover it), where the writer basically says a) you're too stupid to understand this, go away, and b) if by some miracle you're smart enough to understand this, you'll know just how brilliant it is? It basically screams "I won't take any criticism seriously, because if you disagree you're either the kind of terrible person I'm describing or just too dumb to understand what I'm saying."
Section 2: I read a chunk of it, and I have to admit it's not entirely wrong. The feeling of helping without taking responsibility is definitely a thing. Consider charities which don't track whether they're actually helpful. I'm not even talking about detailed EA levels of tracking.
This is also an example of what annoys me about TLP, and also possibly why he has a powerful hook for some people, though perhaps this book is worse than his blog. He's got an actual insight there, but he's not very clear about what responsibility covers.
What's clear is that he's saying he's so very right and a huge number of people are so very wrong. At least he admits that there are people getting responsibility more or less right, he's just not very interested in them.
Alright Scott, you're making me make a throwaway account for this. CW: frank and gross discussion of bizarre porn.
> Teach writes: “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.” This seems totally insane and also I can’t rule it out.
It is not insane. I've spent way too fucking long looking at online hentai communities for this to sound insane.
It's probably true of me: at some point I realized that the thing that makes my dick most hard isn't when I'm diving into a cool-looking hentai comic. It's when I'm scrolling through the grid of covers looking through to FIND some that I might like. The search, the potential for a nice surprise, is what kicks a part of my brain into gear. The diving into it is just the follow-through. You could literally describe that as having a fetish for nhentai's search page and you wouldn't be too far off.
And among the general populace of these communities, there's an oft-running "haha only serious" meme of 2D women being better than 3D women. I don't think everybody falls into that trap, but there are people that do, and it gets really sad really quickly: https://www.reddit.com/r/waifuism/
I'd say these people would sooner admit to the thought behind Teach's quote than most porn consumers, but that's probably just me falling into the same status-raising trap that's talked about in this entire review by trying to say "at least they're honest about it".
The "porn is your fetish" thing is even more true the more "extreme" or "weird" the fetishes get, particularly in hentai communities. You get people that fetishize shit that's illegal or immoral, sure, but then there are people that fetishize shit that isn't physically possible. You can't have that in the real world. Porn is literally the only outlet.
Can't resist saying that "Zen story" is fucking horrible. It isn't a passable Zen story at all because most of the real ones from "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones" are tremendously great stories that send chills down your spine, if nothing else.
No way it gave you a better understanding of Zen, rather it gave you a defense against pursuing a real grasping of Zen. Zen is not "understandable". It is, however, graspable. In a similar way that music or poetry is.
That said, keep writing more posts like this. Your book reviews are great. I think some who disliked this post can't separate the review from the book. The book sounds horrible, but I appreciate the post.
We need more negative book reviews. The writers are becoming soft.
What I don't understand about this "desire for desire" idea is I spent all of middle-school and high-school with a hard-on looking around at the girls in my classroom, imagining the terrible, beautiful things I wanted to do with them. As a Gen-X-er, talking to others in my generation, that's how we all experienced it. You'd spend all day in class imagining fucking the girl who sat in front of you in English class, then go home and jack off thinking about her the moment you got home. You couldn't wait to get home to jack off. It was torture.
But was everyone in my generation experiencing some memetic desire, something different from today because we consumed different porn? I grew up when porn meant Penthouse and Hustler magazines. You spent a lot of time looking at a picture of a hairy pussy. Did that create the desire I felt for my female classmates? It seems implausible, yet I don't know how to rule it out.
If that's the case, then it seems like magazine porn was the good porn, because it was just pictures of tits and cunts and made you want to experience them in the flesh. It wasn't a substitution, maybe it was a catalyst.
It strikes me as crazy that most young men haven't always spent most of their time fantasizing about exploring women's pussies. After all, aren't we here because that's what every generation before us did? It seems nutty to think porn is a driver of desire as opposed to a pacifier of it.
But maybe internet porn is different? Perhaps, but any "This time it's different" claim needs to make a strong, clear case.
Is it possible that much of this can be nested in the framework of competing desires? For example, the lady with the submissive fetish could be considered as finding a compromise between her desire to have sex and her desire to be a good moral person; it just happens that her understanding of ‘good moral person’ does not include asking for sex, hence the fantasy.
Likewise, people that don’t act on their desires are simply balancing their desire for 'safety' with their desire for other things that require action with non-zero risk.
‘the unmediated experience of the world’ quoted in that Zen section…… Scott and everyone else, what is your response to this possibility of a way of experiencing life?
So, this Teach says that just about everybody is sick. But does he have anything to say about whether there's a cure? Is becoming an obscurantist-psychoanalysis-conscious misanthrope good enough? Or it's good enough merely to became aware that everything is horrible and to derive pseudo-high-status from this understanding? Then I guess I'm there already, if having taken a somewhat different path.
As for porn, I always though that its main purpose (for males) was ersatz variety, which makes evo-psych sense. The same story/comic/video on repeated exposure do still arouse me, but less and less with each instance.
"Teach believes to a first approximation nobody represses anything about sex in modern-day culture - Who thinks sex is shameful these days? It would be like repressing that you like cheese!"
I can see why people [can't remember who or where, off the top of my head] would hypothesize The Last Psychiatrist is C-rt-s Y-rv-n... except this is way worse than UR ever was.
"a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about [...] playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me"
TIL Scott is mad jealous (though Teach might instead claim envious) of his little brother ;)
I remember, but can't find, a blog post on TLP is as an example of gaslighting. His writing is good at vaguely evoking bad feelings about yourself while never being concrete enough for you to critically evaluate.
His notion of 'narcissism' did seem to frame common features of the human experience as unusual pathology in 'you'.
I have to think if "Teach" read this essay he would be tickled, because (1) you seem frustrated by being not entirely sure you weren't just the victim of a truly moby prank, and yet (2) your writing style distinctly changed and it seems in a few places like your usual train of thought was derailed a bit and went off in a few novel directions.
Which means it *worked* and was well worth the $500. It does seem weirdly Zen, which is strange because I don't like Zen -- at least I think I don't -- but I find this highly amusing. Maybe actual Zen just suffers in translation and I need to learn Chinese.
What if the main theme in the book is some kind of intellectual cuckoldry analogue? "I, the author, have read all these hot sexy books, and you, pathetic reader with your limp and tiny below average IQ, has probably tried to read some of them, but did not achieve the understanding to satisfy the texts properly. Indeed, you'll never be able to do so, you weak-minded wage-slave! Let me proceed by explaining why your interpretation (and anyone else, in case you think this somehow doesn't apply to you) is WRONG while I insult and otherwise belittle you, you imbecile." This does appear to have decent anti-memetical potential, in the sense that I believe this is a very novel and rare kind of fetish.
Regarding "Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.", I think I agree, if we allow that the two usages of fetish have a different meaning here. The first meaning is the now most common meaning of "paraphilia", while the second is sacred/magical idol, totem or focus. At the least, it seems there is some property of porn that is more than the titillating information it contains, why else would people commission pornographic artwork that depicts a (highly unique) scene entirely designed by the commissioner? Why would they do more of the same, to the point of obsession? Maybe it's a simple trick for the senses, who are probably evolved to assume purely mental constructs are of limited use in procreation. Similar to a prayer bead for meditation, perhaps.
Sounds like this is well and truly intertwined with our old friend, The Transgender Lobster, and I mean that in a good way for both of them.
Incidentally, I go to an ex-marine therapist who has never heard of either of them, and doesn't know quite what an odd duck he is, but does tell me it's best to [metaphorically] clean my room and [literally] sit up straight.
Biblical angels are a poor example of an anitmeme.
Most people who read the relevant parts of the bible can picture one. They might not get the one the author intended, but they'll picture something. They show up in various pieces of popular media like Kill Six Billion Demons or Bayonetta, and while they're not exactly as depicted in the bible fantasy fans have no trouble recognising the concept of Bible-style angels.
Basically, biblical angels are a regular meme outcompeted by a much stronger meme, not an antimeme.
This post was an excellent reminder to me that every writing style has a different intended audience, as well as some kind of payoff for the author based on their original intention.
I would be curious to hear from more people who are excited to read the book after reading this review. What is attractive to you about it? What's the expected value here? I'm experiencing such a strong negative reaction to the snippets that I don't think I can be at all objective and would like any experiential counter evidence you were maybe hesitating to share in the comments (which I'm also reading).
My personal framework values accessibility and empathy in communication, so to allocate time to deliberately obtuse communication I'd need some guaranteed value up front that isn't defined here. Choosing to put time into a work that forces me to take the risk that it might be a narcissistic mind game, or just generally a flop, isn't really high on my own priority list.
I'm also curious to consider the argument that it promotes critical thinking further, but my gut response isn't so much that it promotes it, more that it limits your audience to people who have a predisposition to enjoy intellectual masturbation of some kind. You're more likely to enjoy or get something out of a deliberately complex work if you're predisposed to enjoying challenge, study, etc. If anyone can point me directly to extra studies or writing on the subject of priming audiences to manipulate (assess, analyze, debate, etc.) input I'd be grateful. Search engines will get me there eventually.
I'm not attributing any value judgment to this confrontational author stance by the way. I think it's a valid choice, if made with a particular audience in mind - if it's an unintended side effect, then another editor experienced in your chosen target audience could be helpful. This audience can also be the author, who has their own relationship with the work, and by extension with their imagined audience. The adversorial tone of the writing is so pronounced that it's a great signal to the reader. In that sense, I'd consider the writing extremely efficient: the author immediately defines the audience as readers who are willing to submit themselves to the writing, and who are therefore either open to the message or stubborn enough to stay until the very end without any guarantee they'll have a workable way to process the information (see Scott's experience).
It seems there's a conscious framing of the author-reader relationship that lies in the hands of the author, and that leaves me feeling uneasy. There's a lot of trust involved in this process, and I'm personally not open to someone who outright challenges that trust and frames it as a power dynamic, where they are automatically on top. But the author isn't either, so win-win?
Because of this interpretation, reading the book would be tantamount to me consenting to a relationship with someone who seeks only to challenge me, compare me to them, and measure my value entirely against their own sense of self worth (not positive in my book). The latter is already established in the author's mind, and because they are removed from the process, unless I email them or they read my comments somewhere, etc. It's a dynamic that ironically reminds me of red flags in BDSM relationships: the person submitting has no option for aftercare, no avenue to have a discussion about consent on equal grounds. You take it or leave it, without any knowledge up front of what effect the experience will have on you. Perhaps this mindset is exactly what the author intends to challenge. But if you hold a particular disdain for a way of thinking/being/perceiving, and you consciously use tools that are NOT efficient in engaging the audience you'd like to affect, then what's your goal? Intellectual/experiential segregation?
Anyway this is a very emotional rather than evidence driven reaction to a review of a book I don't intend to read. But it's amusing to me that this kind of loose analysis is exactly what the excerpts trigerred in me, while a quick look at TLP's blog seems to indicate they'd find this kind of thinking lazy or that I'm someone who goes to a therapist for the type of psychoanalysis that is preventing any growth/change.
"So if you hate psychoanalysis, you hate searching for self-knowledge, and you hate readers - why write a psychoanalysis book to help people understand themselves? I don’t really have an answer for this."
I do! Teach clearly hates himself, and is looking to share that pain and self-loathing with others.
It seems to be the polar opposite of *Sadly, Porn* in terms of (anti-)misanthropy. The internal conflicts of the characters are laid bare. Desire is of course addressed. What at first looks like superficial shallowness reveals exponential depths. I'm still reeling from the experience. As weird as it might sound, this feels to be the best piece of fiction that I have ever experienced. (And I'm not a teenager reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. Although I'm ashamed to admit that my fictional reading is probably lacking... *eyes the still unopened War and Peace on the bedside table*)
Oh, and it of course has plenty of hot sex, though YMMV in terms of specific kinks.
This sort of reminds me how I defected from academic lit crit after tearing a Lyotard book in twain in the midst of reading it. I remember thinking -- enough is enough, I don't need this bullshit.
At the same time, some of the quotes (from Sadly, Porn; not that Lyotard book) were intriguing, if not exactly enjoyable. I haven't read anything lit crit adjacent for a while, I'm sort of curious how I'd react as a more mature person, and this sounds like a fun book to try on. If only to see whether my book-tearing skills are still sharp.
The story I'm using to wall off the part of myself with lit crit inclinations (so that I can productively focus on other things instead of agonizing over whether it was the right decision) runs something like this: French people like intellectual games. Sophisticated conversation, sleight of hand essays, it's all part of the culture. It's fashionable, it's social currency, it's a way of displaying that you are à la hauteur.
But it's still mainly a game. Think La Septième Fonction du langage -- you can imagine how reading that felt cathartic to me. This means you don't necessarily say things you believe to be true, but rather things that maximize your score, or at least compromise in that direction. Because unlike e.g. in the rationalist community (which is -- hopefully -- playing a different kind of game), just being right won't get you (as m)any points.
The trouble starts when all this theory is taken up by Anglo-Saxon literary departments, which put a Protestant, literal-minded twist on it, and with their unimpeachable work ethic, build an entire industry predicated upon the belief that all of this French intellectual frolicking was meant in earnest.
Forgive me if I sound facetious, I realize it's a caricature, as sweeping narratives tend to be. My own mindset is much closer to what I labeled Anglo-Saxon in the previous paragraph -- which is partly why I tore that Lyotard book in half. I'd finally had enough of trying to understand this stuff for real, wasting precious brain cycles on it. I'm still interested in how language works, I just switched to linguistics, where I found questions and approaches which are a better fit for me -- typically less frustrating, occasionally truly enlightening.
But the point is -- this story I'm telling myself means I've largely written off learning more about these French intellectuals at the source of it, Lacan included. And while it's helpful in practice (I'm free to think about other matters), it's also somewhat unsatisfactory, for someone who generally gets a kick out of understanding things. So if you ever dig deeper into Lacan, I'm genuinely curious to hear what you find there!
Also, looking forward to highlights from comments. If anyone has any useful Lacan resources, I hope they'll turn up!
Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here! I STRONGLY suggest you seek out interminable, inscrutable, possibly-nonsensical stream-of-consciousness miasma manifestos, read them carefully, and then post interpretations.
We may want to page Robert Wright, whose "Why Buddhism Is True" has obviously absolutely nothing to do with anything mentioned here.
I love (in a terrified sort of way) the insight that where status-seeking behavior is concerned, all that matters is the chemical response in the brain. Your anonymous philanthropic donation (or my slightly pseudonymous comment) is still a bid for status because all it has to do is please the audience in our minds. I mean ... now Twitter makes sense. This is the great hack of our technological era. "likes" turn out to be an in-kind substitute for resources and access to mates. This is way better than "42". Now I can enjoy the apocalypse.
I remember the Last Psychiatrist from Metafilter days. You take a very charitable view of him. Allow me to present a much less charitable view:
1. ‘Teach’ is a narcissist. Not in the bullshit cultural critique redefinition he constantly sort-of-half-gives-half-alludes-to but the more boring dark triad kind. He wants to feel intellectually powerful, dominant, the centre of attention. He wants people to see him as the smartest guy in any room. He wants your attention. It makes him feel good.
2. Everything he writes is a manipulative strategy designed to garner him this narcissistic supply. This explains everything about his prose style and ‘insights’. He makes sweeping Barnum statements that enough of his readers will agree with that some come away seeing him as insightful. He makes cultural references*, so his readers see him as well-read and intelligent. He associates himself with the high-status utopia of classical Athens. He actually is intelligent, at least enough to successfully pull off this strategy (unlike a less intelligent narcissist).
3. His writing has an unintended by-product: intelligent people who read it come up with intelligent interpretations, some of which have real value.
4. This is because his writing exploits the deep human desire to make sense of things. It does this in the same way as a cold-reading psychic - gaps, allusions, ambiguities, provocations. His writing certainly reveals a keen awareness of when people assume other people know what they are talking about.
5. He also uses highly impactful concepts (‘you know, like rape’, references to sex/death/parenthood). This serves to (a) get attention and (b) throw his readers emotionally off balance, so they are less likely to realise they are being played.
6. He may or may not realise he is doing this. He may think his pathological search for narcissistic supply is actually real reflection and insight. Nothing of his I have ever read betrays any real self-reflection, but not many people openly do that in writing and self-reflection =/= self-awareness.
7. The psychology he is describing is, fundamentally, his own: in playing his game he can only build his model of the other players out of the material to hand. This rule applies to him the same as it does to everyone.
8. Why do it anonymously? Because he suspects, probably correctly, that the sorts of things he knows will get him the results he wants will have bad consequences for him if he does them in real life, including possibly colleagues realising that he is a narcissist who should probably be kept away from vulnerable people. But online has the advantage of intimacy, and he doesn’t want political or physical power and attention, he wants interpersonal status and admiration.
Also, if you are using “800-page novels about English professors who have affairs and then feel guilty about it” as your definition of “Classical Literature” then it is hardly surprising that it baffles you that people like it. Tolstoy is “Classical Literature” and an awful lot happens in the 1200+ pages of War and Peace. So much so that it isn’t hard at all to see why people like it. The ‘cheating English professor’ genre sounds like an extreme outsider's view of John Updike or D.H. Lawrence, which is only a tiny tradition within “Classical Literature”. I don’t much like that kind of book myself, but placed in historical context it again isn’t very hard to see why people read those kind of books, and unsurprisingly some of the ‘why’ is because they were frank about sexual experiences in an unprecedented or interesting way.
Some possibly presumptuous advice: if your map has a hole in it, don't waste time theorising about what *must* be over there or asking others what they think about it and trying to infer the hole's contents from their observations (they may be as ignorant as you or tell you lies). Don't put off action. Just go there any look for yourself.
Also, I’m more interested to know what you make of Lacan than I am in Lacan.
* TLA/‘Teach’’s cultural references are flashy bunk: for example the statement “This was not the case for the Greeks, not at the beginning, anyway. Personal morality was inseparable from the state’s morality, they were not overlapping, they were the same single thing, but in the opposite way you’re imagining it, not because the State was all powerful but because the state was themselves” is simplistic tosh. Even just for Athens, it doesn’t map on to any of the major classical thinkers, any account of Athenian life as we can reconstruct it (given the turbulent history of Athens) and that was just one city-state. He’s making Barnum statements trading on people’s vague awareness of the classics and a few Great Books, and constructing a fantasised pre-historic Athens corrupted by ‘Sophists’. This is not real expertise. Go and look at the things themselves - they are much more interesting to an intelligent person than anything a right-wing populariser or a narcissist with fascist sensibilities has pre-chewed for you.
I've always been very skeptical of these theories that claim to explain that all of human behavior emerges from a very small number of root causes. It feels like the creator found a few behaviors in a smattering of people that they could explain and then handwaved it over the rest of humanity.
My intuition is that humans are just way too dang complex for any single motivating factor to explain why we do what we do. So much goes into shaping a person, from their genetics, the culture they live in, their particular set of experiences, their peers, and on and on. Saying "well it's all just repressed desires" or whatever seems immensely simplistic.
Maybe I don't understand what these theories are actually saying. They've never seemed particularly interesting to me, so I've never had the curiosity to learn more about them.
Teach seems to be making a criticism of modern culture (and if I may, looking more towards elite culture such that Woke/SJ and iterated irony are heavily included), rather than a criticism of all societies except Athens. It wouldn't even make sense to say that all cultures other than Athens failed to Act, as there have been many Active cultures. The inclusion of only Full Democracies seems contrived, as many societies have had partial or significant Active populations, even if not everyone was. I happen to think that there are conservative cultures in the US that are very Active and specifically reject the psychological defenses Teach is talking about. Christianity teaches humility and a denial of self with an imperative to Act, such that many Christians have a memetic defense against the things Teach is worried about. Many "Christians" are also just floating along with elite culture and don't necessarily live life any different from what we might call "standard US culture" or on the opposite end "Right Wing culture warriors" so just name-dropping Christianity certainly wouldn't be enough.
Jordan Peterson comes to mind as someone trying to fight against the same target as Teach, and with a moderate level of success. Telling someone to clean their room is enforcing Action. Take Responsibility. Take Ownership of your life and your choices. Peterson's target audience is pretty clear - disaffected young men. I'm not sure who Teach is trying to reach, but it sounds like Western cultural elites who are in or near the Woke bubble.
Excellent post. The Zen comparison and the 'possibility of map-hole' thing are eye-openingly instructive about my enjoyment of The Last Psychiatrist's blog. I disagreed with Alone (or Teach, I guess - he always did claim to like his rum) on just about everything social and political, but it was always fun to think it through and reestablish why, and he always did seem to be driving at the Real.
Oddly, I rarely got the feeling of being berated and patronised by someone with superior insight or self-knowledge. It was more of a wistful 'we are all in this together, only I can see a bit further in the fog, and I'm by parts cranky about what I see and frustrated that you don't see it' kind of tone.
Plus, his diversions into psychiatry shop-talk were always cool, and his illustrations of narcissism, borderline, and other personality and mood disorders made good internal sense to me as a layman. But that could be just because I am a layman.
Might get the book. Probably won't read it through, but it'll sit there burnishing my self-image as someone who would read that kind of book, which is all that matters.
It seems rather in your benefit to understate the main theses of the book, which, are in no particular order: inability to fantasize, knowledge as a defense against impotence, lack of secondary source reading, envy and ledgers.
The audience you write for is the exact audience this is intended for. They will be happy to accept your secondary report, feel knowledgeable and give their power to you instead of wielding it themselves.
Your example on envy is a clear case. How many of us, consciously, believe we are envious and would think “I wish my friend didn’t have a hot wife” — we say to ourselves exactly as the pirate describes, “My wife isn’t hot because I’m ugly” — which means, “in [not] my fantasy of the world, I am ugly and that’s why I have an ugly wife [therefore in reality, my bitch wife is with an ugly guy and never will be satisfied, the “ledger” is even].
Writing any review of this book does it injustice. I would urge others to read this book themselves, entirely and immediately, but I hate my contemporaries and care little for the next generation, quite contrary to this Teacher.
On antimemes and Marx being insightful, but interpreted in a way useful as a defense: I get the same sense about Nietzsche, and he evidently got the same sense about himself. There's a passage - which I can't find but know exists - where Nietzsche is talking about his contempt for people who are joyfully enthusiastic about his work. He says something along the lines of "rather than showing you have understood my work, your exuberance shows precisely that you have not understood it at all. If you had, it would hurt you too much."
For all the merit of secondary literature it is either for advanced use (like you really read Lacan before), or is just not anti-meme enough, so you would just learn watered-down version of concepts (all these Big Other, small a, the Real, and so on) without comprehending the logic and method behind it.
I don't know if there's anything here, but this review reminded me a lot of House of Leaves. One reason is the footnotes. Another is the non-linear storytelling and out-of-left-field detours into unrelated subjects. But the biggest reason is just the novelty. The main thing that interested me about House of Leaves is that it is so utterly weird and so different from everything else that it is fascinating for that alone. (It's the fictional product of people writing about a documentary about a movie that doesn't exist in-universe. It's got multiple narrators, about half of the text consists of footnotes, and it has pages that look like this https://i.ibb.co/w7JcTJX/xx.webp)
Given that I still like this book even though I ultimately found it disappointing as a horror story, I have to wonder to what extent Sadly, Porn is weird because TLP wanted to make something weird, for the sake of itself.
"Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.
Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it."
It seems like both Teach and your cult-leader friend are utilizing a similar strategy of appearing misanthropic, but at the same time seemingly giving attention and respect to *you*. In Teach’s case, this is done through using sayings like “this book is not for” (a direct quote from the opening of House of Leaves, btw, another book I’d love to hear your thoughts on), while strongly implying that the “you” he is talking to is not *you*, the “true follower” of his work.
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a fist-blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, ... the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, ..., like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Young Kafka to a friend - translation check: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/1904/br04-003.htm#:~:text=Wenn%20das%20Buch%2C%20das%20wir,wir%20zur%20Not%20selber%20schreiben.
I'm pretty skeptical that antimemes are unknowable; it's a lot easier to believe that they're tawdry and sordid. "So and so from my tribe did the bad" is more recognizably an antimeme than whatever eldritch spookiness Teach is peddling; it's not just an idea you don't want to spread, it makes you less interested in talking about the whole category i.e. your tribe's moral fiber. Many people learn such antimemes without spreading them. Many more people suspect them or have heard a rumor of them based on the details of their non-spread. Most people would only reveal them reluctantly, and especially prefer to not actually say them but non-confirm them in a revealing manner when explicitly prompted. And we have memes reinforcing antimemes ("snitches get stitches", "loose lips sink ships").
I suspect "unknowable antimemes" are just a trap for very empathetic or curious people. They're baited with an interesting question and the parsimonious feeling of revelation while filtering out people who see intellectual abuse coming. You want me to subject myself to your haranguing for, <checks notes> zero or even negative return on investment? I bet you have a bridge to sell me too. But the reason the trap works is that you wouldn't dare subject yourself to the loss of perceived status of having wasted your time.
About 10 minutes after clicking away I got that kind of stiff back feeling as if someone kind of challenged you to a fight and you didn't flinch. A small rush of endorphins I think and a sense of proud resoluteness
He seems like someone who is gravely disappointed with being a human being and wants others to be even more disappointed while according him the status of Disappointed in Chief of a small elite band who are the least disappointing as a result of their self awareness of it
The theory of all things as preventative measures to the risk of actually trying to succeed is well represented in the form of the book itself. I can certainly think of examples in my own life. I choose no career partly because it represents a potential failure without sufficient reward. But most people aren't really usually like this. I feel pretty confident in saying I don't ask people out in person because I don't like the high probability of unhappy intermediate events rather than actually don't genuinely want happy eventual events
1. Someone doesn't have to appeal to everyone to be a cult leader. If Lacan's pscyhoanalysis applies to 1% of people, then there are 3 million Americans who would potentially be attracted to a would-be cult leader who relies on Lacan's theories.
2. I also have long agonized over difficulty with relationships and asking girls out. But I think I can point to exactly why I did it--involvement in activities that were male-dominated, general social anxiety, etc. Sure, I didn't want to be rejected--but that seems like a totally normal and surface level response, not something deep and hidden. I'm not saying I behaved optimally, but it doesn't feel mysterious, it doesn't feel like it needs to be explained.
3. There is something more "real" about a video than a story or a fantasy in your head. This is important if part of the porn or porn-substitute is the other person being "into" whatever you're imagining. Obviously if you're watching a video, then they don't care about *you*. But "the other person is enjoying this" seems to be a common aspect or requirement, and I think there is something different about an actual person enjoying a thing (or appearing/claiming to).
There's alot of comments, but i did a search and see no one quoted the Zero HP Lovecraft Review. His answer to your question "Why did Teach write this book?" and the related question, "who is Teach talking to" is correct. This interpretation further helps clarify what the purpose of his methods are. The "you" in the book is Teach himself. TLP is doing Lacanian analysis on his (and his class's) own failings to act in the world.
"I mentioned already that psychoanalysis is geared towards women, but the book is written as if it’s addressing men, and that the venn diagram overlap of that is men who think like women. The way that cashes out is that the book assumes you have progressive (normie) politics, even though I suspect anyone online enough to read this book probably does not have normie politics, though it’s hard to be sure. One theory is that it’s written to normie because the dissident can handle normie content, but not the other way around, another theory is that if the writer and the reader both pretend we’re talking about a normie then it gives us a certain kind of breathing room to maintain a critical distance while assessing the ideas. You don’t believe in psychoanalysis, you aren’t a normie, it’s OK, we’re both just talking about an object that’s far away. But if you’re reading it, it’s for you. TLP pretends to assume the reader will have normal, progressive-ish opinions like "I believe people are inherently good." The third theory is that he himself holds these opinions (and I think he does), and that anyone who writes about “you” or “we” is writing about himself. And that’s how he comes to write the following..."
I hope you write a follow up after reading 0hp's review.
Book Review: Sadly, Porn
Did Teach also write the Tumblr "hotelconcierge"? The writing style is so similar! Does anyone know?
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
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?
TLP, if you're reading this, you should start a Substack. This is the only way for you to find true happiness.
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."
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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.
> 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?
Had to verify, but was pretty sure Edward Teach was Blackbeard's true name. I wonder if there's a connection.
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...
"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 😁
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.
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.
Do people really think that Zizek is smart / interesting? I thought he was just a meme made flesh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 👍
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.
Sounds like TLP is the latter.
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.
I apologize if you reach this conclusion but I just wanted to say before I finisih the essay in case I forget:
This strikes me as yet another of the many many things where it's important to learn that something is possible, possibly even common, but equally important to remember it's NOT universal.
It's absolutely vital to survival in our society to learn that people can lie to you. But you can't assume everyone is always lying, or you wind up in an insane asylum. It's important to learn that people can steal, murder, or rape, but it's insane to assume that everyone wants to do those things all the time. It's important to learn that people frequently fail to do the things they claim they will do, even if they're not lying, but it's not the case that everyone who says they're going to be somewhere at 5 pm will show up at 6 or never.
It seems clear to me that some subset of people make decisions about some subset of things for status or mimetic reasons, and some people do not.
I will likely read this, but I strongly suspect he has wildly misinterpreted the Athenians and their actions. If nothing else, the Athenians were VERY OK with dragging everyone down to the same level. Suggesting otherwise is...odd.
Also, that Oscar Wilde quote isn't an Oscar Wilde quote. It appears to be from one psychologist writing to another, but was mentioned in the introduction of a book about Oscar Wilde. This makes sense, since Oscar Wilde predates the use of the term "sex" to refer to banging like monkeys (though, interestingly, I'm pretty sure I found an example of it from a few years before the supposed earliest one that can be found online. It is, unfortunately, somewhat ambiguous).
This Ed Teach sounds like the kind of person whose defense mechanism against realizing how psychologically screwed-up he is, is to project his worst problems onto everybody else. (There are a lot of people like that.)
"But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it." -- This particular neurosis is not inborn human nature, but diagnostic of having been a teenager in the 1990s, when pop music became self-conscious and ironic for (I think) exactly this reason, to the point where singers couldn't even sing honestly, but used a kind of nasal throttling-back of their voice so everyone knew they weren't even /trying/ to sing beautifully.
"Whatever your personal religious and political beliefs, it is a fact that our Western morality is a straight line from Judeo-Christian traditions, and our political beliefs a straight line from Greco-Roman traditions, and regardless of how much you believe times have changed or how bad you are at math you should still be able to observe that those are two separate lines." -- Platonism, Christianity, absolute monarchy, the French revolutionaries, Marxism, progressivism, Nazism, and Social Justice all deliberately united morality, religion, and politics. Other movements deliberately separated them. A big part of the history of Western civilization is the history of fighting over the very thing he says is obvious--whether these are two separate lines. And, yes; most Westerners /do/ think the answer is obvious--but they're split over which answer is obvious, which proves to any careful thinker that it isn't obvious at all.
"Greco-Roman traditions" isn't a coherent thing you can draw a straight line from, either. The three main strands of Greek thought represented by classical Sparta , classical Athens, and Hellenistic Greece, are all different, and all very different from Roman thought. And you CAN'T trace the correlation between the moral/religious and the political back to Greco-Roman times, 'coz there was no such thing as "moral/religious"--morality had nothing to do with religion to the Greeks.
His characterization of the Athenians as worshipping Lysander is bizarre. Lysander & Sparta set up 30 tyrants from the Athenian aristocracy (most of whom had conspired with Sparta against Athens during the war) to rule Athens, who immediately began slaughtering people who supported democracy. The Athenians rebelled and overthrew them just a few years later. Sure, some people welcomed Lysander when he came into the city--the aristocrats who'd conspired to bring him there. But that doesn't tell us anything about the psychology of most Athenians, and certainly not the thing he says it tells us.
My gripe isn't that any of these are important points. It's that it's easy to shoot down everything he says. Teach doesn't support anything he says well, and sometimes doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. His rhetorical strategy is to spew startling or offensive statements fast enough that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate them. It's basically continental philosophy, where by "continental philosophy" I mean substituting showmanship for epistemology.
definitely reading this book because it sounds like a trip but i have to say, the giving tree section rang extremely true to me.
as a kid we had these writing competitions in elementary school, or maybe it was 6th grade, where we had to do a book review. i didn't put a lot of thought into it - i've always been a procrastinator, and wrote mine the day it was due, maybe hours before. i so distinctly remember picking 'the giving tree' out of a vague sense that it was the kind of book the judges would love to see reviewed. i talked about how it's about parenting and about how it was so important to teaching me, jack, about how good my parents were and how i should be more humble and thankful.
but i remember knowing that the book had no importance to me, hadn't resonated at all, and was my parents favorite, not mine. my essay advanced a few rounds, but didn't win, but it was enough that my mom - a teacher in the school district, shared it around with her peers. i remember feeling guilty and not ever dwelling too much on it. i felt guilty because i felt like i'd hoodwinked everyone, but i maybe i was fulfilling some amazing fantasy: "finally, a child who gets what this book is about (to me) - how good a mother i am for being so self-sacrificing and kind".
now i live 1000s of miles from my parents, but these two things may not be connected.
Some of the quoted excerpts from the text are extremely evocative of Reddit comments made by people who admit to being on methamphetamine benders. Not to accuse Dr. Teach of anything, necessarily, but the wild psychological theorizing, misanthropy, hypersexuality, and the way that *it just keeps going like that forever and ever* really read like a text written under the influence of methamphetamine. (Or by someone otherwise having some kind of really intense manic episode.)
This captures my confused feelings about The Last Psychiatrist so well. Thank you for the work it took to articulate all this! It means a lot to know that I'm not the only person who wasn't sure whether to take him seriously.
This review either makes my want to buy "Sadly, Porn" or run the other way. Not yet sure which. I never felt like I understood anything after reading TLP, but man, the *feeling* of it.
I've now censored three different comments I was going to make after realizing that I had only written them for the purpose of feeling special and unique.
Really like this review, wasn't familiar with this guy, and I can see myself in several descriptions, though not all. Definitely going to try to get hold of a physical copy.
> “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”
My friend has played something like 5,000+ hours of a game that I tried for less than two before I put it down - just wasn't my cup of tea. I have *checks Steam* 1,762 hours logged in a game that he played for four. There is no "lack of understanding" to explain the difference there, beyond the observation that the investment of enormous amounts of time and energy sometimes hangs on essentially-random personal preference. Sometimes even on things that are trivial, by their own admission!
"Lots of people tend to do what I want" isn't mysterious, it's literally just leadership. It *would* be truly impressive if V could get arbitrary people to commit meaningful resources, but that isn't what's happening here - instead, you have recruitment from a population that's heavily-selected to be amenable for... recruitment. I have a lot more appreciation for charisma as a teachable skill than I used to, but even when I was (more) clueless it never struck me as odd that people who try to be leaders sometime succeed.
Dota patch notes won't really help you understand eSports as a general phenomenon, but they will give you insight into specific nuances that many people care strongly about. Lacan won't really help you understand cultishness, but it might help you understand the aesthetics of one particular cult. Those speak to things you might not know right now, but they aren't really "holes" in a map.
>...why is porn better than imagining the hot sex, in your head?
I have in fact always preferred the latter to the former and never understood why this was unusual. (In fairness, my psyche seems atypical in other ways as well.)
> Envy is different from jealousy: jealousy is when you wish you too had something nice, envy is when you wish the other person would lose their nice thing.
This is the exact opposite of how I remember being taught the distinction! Nor can I immediately find a dictionary source that really justifies it either way… what gives? Anyone else remember this differently?
Had been meaning to task here: what if cognitive biases are actually instrumental?
As in, if most people don't actually have goals of doing things in the world, and just want to look higher status, then beliefs should be picked up or dropped in relationship to how trendy they are.
And this seems to be what your analysis of teach is saying points at.
I like his rhetorical technique of "it is universally acknowledged that X, therefore you are wrong but I am not, so you should listen to me berate you about it".
I confess I'm a little confused; if he thinks that we're incapable of wanting things and only capable of playing this weird psychological status game, why do we play it? Do we want to play, or do we not realize we can opt out? Most of the quotes you chose feel like rhetorical sleight of hand.
That excerpt about The Giving Tree clicked perfectly in my mind and made so much sense that I have to read the entire thing now. I definitely do agree with him about the self-knowledge trap having experienced it firsthand. Although, I prefer imagining sex in my head as opposed to using porn and have always felt that this was more direct and enjoyable. Thanks for writing about this; not sure what it says about my thinking, that I find all of his explanations sensible but I'll have to explore more.
Scott it's Infinite Jest! Teach is trying to write Infinite Jest!
Minor correction on Rev 22:18 - the books of the Bible were collected as a library and canonized as scripture long after the Book of Revelations itself was written. While it's true that many people retroactively apply the verse in question as applying to the book as a whole, it's also impossible to read the various surviving texts without concluding that more than a few words in the Biblical texts were altered long before the whole thing came together as the 'Bible'.
It’s not called “insight porn” for nothing — though we could easily use the term “sage writing” a la Thomas Carlyle, which leads to an either interesting or disturbing comparison of TLP’s writing style and, say, Mencius Moldbug’s; both engage in a kind of speaking-at and speaking-for the reader, putting words (desires? other things?) in the reader’s mouth/mind, so that the particular *type* of insight porn is pretty clearly BDSM. As a commenter once suggested on TLP’s blog [paraphrasing] “you all visit this site as a comedown lecture after a fap.”
What a strange book.
I think there is something in the principle of teaching by being deliberately obscure, though. I think that's one of the main understood reasons why Jesus used parables so often. If someone thinks they've understood you then they might go away and think about your point for a bit. If you say something memorable and people think they've not understood you, it'll niggle at them and they'll go on pondering what you said for longer.
If you write more stuff like this, I think I will just gradually stop reading this blog.
> The main message I get here is “Teach really likes talking about classical Athens”:
What a coincidence. So do I. The difference is that I also like reading about Classical Athens.
This is normally where I'd expound on how wrong he was. But chasing down this philosophy's points of fact is a waste of time. It is, at any rate, missing the point. Nothing so pedestrian as facts is relevant. I know what they found in the dark, what they mined out of ponderous tomes and dead languages. It's nothing more than a dark art. Useful but uninteresting.
"Tyrannical government is an imperfect solution here; our government occasionally resembles democracy, which makes us complicit in its actions. What people really crave is domination by corporate HR departments. The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments and things like them."
You just described my personal hell.
Realizing the horror and revulsion the above statement caused me, for the first time in my career, I'm thinking about quitting and starting a one-man business.
I first heard about The Giving Tree being a metaphor for mothers when I found online a script for the original stage-play version of Cory Finley's Thoroughbreds (then titled "Thoroughbred"). It wasn't at all subtle in its repeated references to The Giving Tree, so the actual film was better off without it.
Spotted Toad claims the secret to Harry Potter's success is that it's from the viepoint of Harry mother, who loves him unconditionally:
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/ghost-witch/
The phrase "you can be omniscient or omnipotent but not both" reminds me of the lesswrong post "Introduction to Cartesian Frames"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BSpdshJWGAW6TuNzZ/introduction-to-cartesian-frames#5__Controllables_and_Observables_Are_Disjoint
(Which I imagine is NOT AT ALL what Teach meant.)
As another reader of the book, I completely disagree. However, I don't think I have ever read a more thought-provoking book review.
This is a dense review, but my first and strongest thought was "if it's constantly telling you to lower your mental defense mechanisms to accept its truth, and you can't understand it but you get the feeling that if you did it would be some sort of massive revelation, and your definitely-not-a-cult-leader friend is a big fan of it... maybe it's a cult." Or at least, using the same tools as a cult.
Tell someone that you have rare and secret knowledge. Tell them that most people won't believe it, and they're special for figuring out the truth. Make your explanations deliberately a bit obscure, so that they feel invested in the work they put in to understanding it. If someone feels like they understand you a bit too well, tell them they're still wrong, they're falling for an antimeme, they need to study even harder. Keep them feeling like they're on the brink of a revelation without ever gaining the clarity that might allow them to notice that it makes no sense. Explain with wild free-association chains that give people the sense that everything is connected and so your ideas can explain *everything.* If they ever feel tempted to go with the normal, boring explanation that would connect them to broader reality, turn that temptation into a character flaw - the only reason they think that way is because they're giving in to their brain's defense mechanism and they can't handle the truth.
Defense mechanisms do exist, and sometimes it really is hard to explain a complicated concept without wrestling with various imprecise metaphors. But other times, it's hard to understand because it's not actually a good explanation and you're accurately noticing your confusion. And still other times, it's hard to understand because the simple explanation would sound something like "I want to sneak past your rational thought processes because I'm trying to manipulate you."
FANTASTIC.
Hate to spam your comments section but I was thinking about your cult leader friend, the influential people I know, the general rise in conspiracy theories, and the way people talk about ostensible facts, and I'm wondering if any smart people know of resources on how symbolic thought works. In particular I'm wondering how fuzzy the line between concrete observation and metaphor actually is.
In my mind these are two distinct and complementary ways of thinking - It may get across the beauty and majesty of a sunset to describe it as gods spilling out paint onto the canvas of the sky or whatever but I didn't literally see any gods and I'm well aware of that fact.
If you talk to someone who believes Barack Obama was born in Kenya or whatever though...it seems like multiple things are happening:
1) The person says this in the same way that I said the sunrise thing: it's a story that explains all the things they dislike about Obama and why they think he's an illegitimate leader,
2) There's no correlation at all between whether they say this and their intelligence/curiosity/ability to observe the world and tell truth from fiction with less emotionally fraught topics, and
3) They appear to genuinely believe Obama was born in Kenya.
A popular theory among my mostly progressive friend group is that they're just straight lying - they don't actually believe Obama was born in Kenya, but they think they can say Obama was born in Kenya and that be taken as a fact mistake, where if they said "he has a funny name and is the wrong color" they'd have to own up to being racists. But this does not seem to be what's happening at all, and conspiracy theory experts seem to believe both the "it's a story that better explains their grievances than actual truth and that's why they say it" and the "but seriously they also believe it" idea.
Likewise, influential people often say things as though they are statements of fact when they're actually a simple opinion or obviously false. These are often statements that, if made metaphorically or more conservatively, would speak to very real problems that real people have. I've always assumed that their "followers" profess to believe this even though they don't actually because there was status to be gained in professing faith in an obviously untrue thing. But also it seems weird to just assume a bunch of folks are liars.
And then there's religion. Not to get into the weeds too much here, but my parents believe, truly, with all their hearts, that those who do not accept the existence of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be tortured for eternity in hell. They also are people of principle who would not let their son be tortured for eternity in hell for want of his company. But they do not bring up my atheism or lack of church attendance because it would make things awkward. That does not strike me as the behavior of someone for whom this fact, which I know they believe with all their hearts, is literally true.
My original question when starting this post was going to be "do y'all think other people might have a fuzzier distinction between metaphors that speak to deeper truths/values and actual object-level observation than I do?" but then it occurred to me that if I did this I'd have no idea I was doing it. So do y'all think people have a fuzzy distinction between metaphors that speak to deeper truths/values and actual object-level observation?
A related concept: IRONY.
In the millennial generation, doing things "to be ironic" has been huge. The "hipster" sub-culture is almost entirely constructed around irony.
Anyway, I suspect irony is primarily a defense mechanism, whereby people are too afraid to say they like something (for all the reasons floated in this post) and so instead they pretend they *don't* like the masculine lumberjack ethos with flannel shirts and Carhartt hats -- but they're doing it anyway because -- isn't that ironic and edgy!
And that's for the bravest users of irony, who are willing to *act* on what they like but only if they can *claim* that they aren't.
Others "ironically" adopt objectively-hideous fashions and ideas -- just ride the L train to Brooklyn for examples -- because they aren't brave enough to either speak or covertly act on real tastes and desires.
By the way, you can even see it in basic sarcastic quips. Saying sarcastically, "oh, do you have high enough ceilings here?" spares you for having to actually say "you have really impressively high ceilings in your home" and actually saying something you feel.
Anyway, that's no way to live.
My sense is there was less irony in history, and my experience is that people in developing countries are more comfortable with expressing actual desires. Is excessive introspection enabled by material wealth leading to too much fear of just doing and saying what you actually want? Or is something else going on?
> This is the highest-grade antimeme I feel comfortable using as an example; if you don’t see the fnords they can’t eat you.
I almost stopped reading here, in case the other antimemes were actually more powerful, or less powerful but be unsettling or have some other effect.
Like other commenter here, I was (and still am when I think about it too much) also deeply unsettled to discover that all my actions could be explained by some kind of status seeking or desire to project some image of myself, possibly to myself. It certainly makes me feel like a hypocrite at one level or another, at all times.
From the review, it seems the theory in this book makes the annoying jump from "this is one explanatory mechanism for some things you to" to "this is the only explanatory mechanism for everything you do"! Imagine if we did that, say, in physics. Even if there a single mechanism, there's no chance we'd happen on it without first discovering a number of apparently disconnected things.
That particular ancient Zen koan is great. Thanks for making me aware of it.
I'm don't know if I want to read that book and I don't know how to feel about that.
But thanks for the review, it was hilarious.
I've tried reading TLP. I feel about the guy the same way I feel about woke stuff -- I don't understand why I should listen to someone sneeringly accuse me of motives and pathologies that do not match my internal experience at all. Seems masochistic.
On the whole, "omniscience OR omnipotence, choose one" thing: I think about the tagline on Teach's old blog was also a Wittgenstein quote, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." It reminds me of the first lines of the Tao Te Ching, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao." Even speaking is a form of action which negates your knowledge, words are themselves limiters. They are defined by what they are not. So you can know, but you cannot act perfectly, or you can act perfectly, but only if you concede that you do not know everything.
...and yet billions of words have been written attempting to explain the nature of knowledge and wisdom and our existence. Why does Edward Teach? Because while your action is almost certainly going to end up wrong, not acting is 100% going to achieve even less.
A thought about the Elon Musk example: I suppose Elon Musk prefers to be viewed positively by the general public. I also suspect that he has a lot of control over his public persona and a bunch of smart people advising him in that regard. So why would Elon Musk present himself as someone who has gotten to where he is because of his strong desire/will/actions/accomplishments? You could make a reasonably convincing case that the important factors in his success were his very wealthy and extremely well-connected family. He could present himself as something like the Harry Potter Archetype. And if I understand your interpretation of the book correctly that would make him more popular/beloved? So is this a failure of Mr. Musks PR-Team or is something else going on?
The fun thing about being a psychoanalyst, particularly of the 'you don't know your desires' school, is that the psychoanalyst is perfectly secure in their beliefs. If I say that I don't identify with the status games, then the psychoanalyst can simply say 'You see, you are simply double-plus-good at hiding your TRUE desires, which makes you feel smugly superior, so you ARE playing status games after all, ha-HA!', which is obviously a completely unrefutable type of argument that can be deployed against any criticism, whether from personal reflection or broader analysis.
My impression of TLP is that he could be replaced with that rock, on which is written "you're a narcissist" (per his idiosyncratic definition.)
I think that the advantage of pornographic literature over fantasies is largely the same as that of any literature over fantasies. A story that has actually been written down is much more concrete, but an imaginary fantasy is very fluid and it's difficult to get a coherent sequence of plot beats out of it (unless I'm trying really hard).
Fantasizing well enough to replace reading would probably require a decent portion of the work required to write a good story.
Charisma is something one has or hasn't. It's like having a big dick. Has nothing to do with understanding concepts.
For examples, here are some highly-driven highly-charismatic people: John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Keanu Reeves, Vin Diesel, John Travolta, Muhammad Ali. I doubt any of these people have a mental map one could use to become more charismatic.
There's a good reason Charisma is an independent attribute in D&D.
Not a new theme at all for TLP. He was posting back in 2015, paraphrasing here ... "you only married her so that you could keep her away from other men. If they knew how much you refused to enjoy her on a daily basis- they'd knife you."
Response - reading suggestion - to the part about "want those things so they can gain status points and deprive other people of them." you might enjoy this essay by an actual shepherd and his experience with his actual sheep falling into similar mental traps https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/ .
Sounds like the Gervais Principle plus Adlerian psychology.
1. Zizek: I don't have a high opinion of Zizek because he's a communist and seems like yet another fraudulent public intellectual, but I don't think about him much and haven't engaged with him in a really long time so my opinion is only weakly negative.
2. Zen: Holding in my mind simultaneously the entire spectrum of input from all five senses seems easy but I can't point to any benefit of doing it.
3. Envy: Teach's weird definition of Envy (but I don't know a better word: Schadenfreude is too narrow because it doesn't encompass desiring hypotheticals, and Sadism is too narrow because it requires being the one inflicting the pain) has only been felt by me against people I hate, and I spent 80% of my life not hating anyone, and even in the other 20% Envy was rare. I hated some bullies in elementary school, and I hated some SJWs in 2016-2020, but I got over it. I have been Jealous of my friends' hot wives, and Jealous of my cousin's hot wife, but at no point did I desire depriving my friends or my cousin of anything, so it wasn't Envy in the way Teach uses that word. If I had a magic button that would copy my cousin's wife and make the copy be in love with me, I would press the button. If I had another magic button that would make the original divorce him and marry me, I would never push that button. If I had a magic button that would zero out the wealth of any billionaire of my choice, I wouldn't use it.
4. If all all our desires were just faked for status purposes, no one would ever have a low-status kink. So Teach is wrong about that. I don't think I gain any status by being a 36yo dude binging on high school rom-com-dramas on Netflix and crushing on some of the characters, who are typically 25 year old actresses pretending to be 16. (Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, To All the Boys I Loved Before).
This seems to just completely discount the possibility of viscerally pleasurable physical experiences, if I am understanding it correctly.
As someone who largely (get it) buys into the palatability theory of obesity, I am not sure how to square these theories.
The only thing I can think of, is that I am trying to sublimate (well the opposite of sublimate really ... deposit??) my secret desire to be fit, by instead making myself unfit. That some 'thing' happened in the 1970s that radically changed the culture such that it became a lot more common for people to secretly desire being fit which then obviously led to a lot of obesity.
Of course, this makes it fully generalizable and totally unfalsifiable. I do the high status things because I want status and I do the low status things to hide my secret desire for high status things. I am not sure if it is even possible for this type of analysis to ever be helpful so I must be missing something.
I know almost nothing about the Kabbalah, but I feel like Scott knows or people here might know. The one thing I picked up goes something like, when the sephiroth does the thing it does, quarks fly off into the past and future. And sometimes one of the bits is opposite in meaning or at an angle to the piece it came off of. I am sure that’s wrong, but I use it to tell myself “good things can have bad consequences” and similar wisdoms. When I read people reading Lacan - like now - or Freud (a few weeks ago for school), I come back to this idea. When a thing exists, it automatically starts firing off contradictory bits, and that’s true inside the psyche and everywhere else. In terms of “real desire,” it’s turtles all the way down. In terms of someone is telling me about their life and I should say something helpful, I don’t know how to tell if the quark went left or right. Guess I need to read more Lacan.
"Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it."
I can do some mad libs with this to explain obscurantism in terms of cowardice.
"Intellectually unhealthy people, e.g. postmodernists, don't have beliefs, at least not in the normal sense. Believing things is scary and might obligate you to have evidence to support those beliefs lest you look like a crank. Your belief might be wrong, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who is forced to update his map. Better to just avoid committing to saying anything unambiguous."
>the modern person wants to be special not because they accomplished great stuff but because special-ness is just who they are.
People want the proxy measures of low dna transcription error rates.
Great review. I think I'll probably read this under the Julian Jaynes exception, by which weirdo polymaths interpreting all of history and art through their insanely particular theory can be compelling as fiction if they're sufficiently good at writing prose.
Personally—and you can accept this and Teach can dismiss it—I read the old 800-page classics of western literature because they're really fun to read. They're also very insightful and profound sometimes, but something like "Anna Karenina" or "David Copperfield" is a page-turner in addition to all those artistic features.
My impression is that the naturalists and modernists of the late 19th/early 20th century got more into doomed professorial affairs and interpretational difficulty, but they made things easier on their readers by mostly making the novels much shorter. The Victorians (and their contemporaries) were writing sentimental barnburners that also just happened to be profound.
Where can/should I go to learn more about antimemes? I followed the link to the SCP Foundation and read the first entry. I'll probably go back there and read more later, but after a first impression I'm worried that that website is itself an antimeme.
Scott, does this need a [sic] or was this a transcription error from the original:
"this is an repayable debt that keeps the child indebted to the parent"
Is that "an unrepayable debt" or "a repayable debt" or "an repayable [sic] debt"?
>And what about self-handicapping? Here’s a study that’s stood the test of time, by which I mean AFAIK nobody’s ever tried to replicate it: psychologists asked some people to do a test.
I'm not sure anyone has done a direct replication, but looking at the PubMed page you linked (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/650387/), there are plenty of similar studies about self-handicapping. For example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15130190/ which claimed that "Following noncontingent success, high self-handicappers reported greater anxiety, more unproductive attributions and claimed more handicaps than low self-handicappers." (It seems that this study divided people into high and low self-handicappers.)
Harry Potter's super power, and the reason why he's the protagonist, is that he knows when the rules need to be broken.
Everything is about power, except power. Power is about sex. - Hitler such an epic fail compared to Dschinghis Khan. - And pathetic me: afraid to win the jackpot, as it would leave me no excuse but to DO ... err ... not-Scott-like-stuff. Which some guys with much less dough DO. Edward seems to be right in parts, at least. We do excel in excuses. - Is the porn part any good? Elfriede Jelinek did some awesome porn (Nobel in 2004).
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em
And Edward Teach has Edward Teach has Edward Teach has Edward Teach
And so ad infinitum.
Seems like an interesting book. Teach's interpretation of "The Giving Tree" feels right to me, actually. It doesn't matter what Shel Silverstein intended it to mean; the point is that there's another reading that actually makes more sense, that gets behind the book's saccharine sentimentality to reveal a deeper and more credible psychology. Art is like that, if it's worth anything at all; it says things the artist didn't know he was saying. That the tree is less a mother than an idealized fantasy of motherhood with no correspondence to reality seems obviously correct, at least, and Teach makes some very good points about the relationship between love and obligation.
Scott, you seem to miss the context when he addresses the reader. He doesn't just say, "This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." He says, "You're stumped by the layout? This book isn't for you, your brain is set in concrete." The context indicates that "This book isn't for you" is a response to those who are "stumped by the layout." "You" isn't you, personally (at least not necessarily); it's the kind of reader who would only misunderstand the book, and Teach does all these things (and tells you he's doing them!) to try to get them not to read it in the first place. When you say you had to replace "you" with "a hypothetical maximally unvirtuous person", I think you're close, but kind of overdoing it. The readers in question are hardly "maximally unvirtuous" (whatever that means; it sounds a bit like Caligula), they're just ordinary people who think the ordinary thoughts they were taught to think, who don't really want to be challenged, and wouldn't know what to do with this kind of challenge anyway because it's completely beyond their capabilities to seriously consider that the world might not be what they've been taught to believe it is. So when Teach says he's trying to drive readers away, I think you can take him literally. The thing is, it's not ALL readers, just the ones who are wasting their time reading a book that's beyond them (and they self-select by being put off by these tricks). The question is which type of reader you are.
You seem to be trying to look for some hidden meaning in Teach's writing when he seems, as far as I can tell from the quotes you've provided, to be laying it all out in plain view. Your response to the book reminds me of a quote I came across once, I forget who from (Mencken, maybe?) to the effect that if you want people to laugh and think you're joking, just tell them the plain truth.
Having read your review and the two you linked to, in the end I find that I don't really trust any of the three of you to tell me what this book is about. The self-styled Contrarian starts off by sneering that Teach's old blog was popular with "pseudo-intellectuals" (which we may take as an implicit claim that the Contrarian is a real intellectual, or at least able to tell the difference, which I am not sure I believe) and reviews the book after reading only about 20% of it; he also tells us that Teach's style is "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic," which is a fairly lame attempt at wit and, based on your quotes, seems to me rather exaggerated. Teach does seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice, but try Henry James or A.E. Waite if you want something that's "slightly wordy in the same way the Washington monument can be described as slightly phallic."
Lacan's justification for obscurantism reminds me of a quote attributed to Josiah Warren: "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." I would guess that Teach agrees, though his method is different; rather than being obscure, he makes his book hard (for some people) to read by simply being blunt and somewhat abrasive, not to mention the 30-page porn story, the long footnotes, and various other mechanisms.
I wonder Teach is really quite as condescending as he seems. At the very least, he apparently likes playing that part (and it surely helps to drive away the wrong kind of reader, so it counts as another tactic of that sort, along with the long footnotes, etc.), but he seems too perceptive. The best psychologists, in my experience, are good because they actually have a deep understanding of human nature and know that that understanding applies to themselves as much as to everyone else. I suppose he really could have a huge blind spot in that regard, but I'd be surprised if that were the case.
Anyway, I've ordered the book, so at some point in the future I'll have my own more fully-formed opinion of it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
I think this relates to free energy/error reduction? Ie. we don't become who we want to be, we believe that we already are that person and then act to reduce error. With the failure mode of externalizing the difference between inferred and phenomenal self.
For a text that self-confesses to be obscurantist, I was nodding my head in agreement an awful lot, both in terms of Scott's interpretation of what it's trying to say, but also the direct quotes. Whether that's because I've willfully misunderstood everything and am now patting myself on the back for these "insights", because I've converged on to something truth-adjacent, or because I've converged on to some Schelling point of crackpottery, is anyone's guess.
For a while now I've been drawn into thinking that humans aren't agents. And by that I don't mean the weak notion that humans don't exactly match the mathematical formalism for agents as that statement is pretty much trivially true (due to bounded computational resources imposed by laws of physics) - this is what the idea of boundedly rational agents is for. For me it's the stronger notion that claims it's almost never accurate to model human decision-making as optimizing (or satisficing, really) for their preferences. There are some trivial examples like observing that humans tend to claim to want money, and indeed they're likely to cash in winning lottery tickets or pick up hundred dollar bills from the ground (citation needed), but once you get into more complex behaviors, such as Scott's example of not asking people on a date despite yearning for a partner every single day, where exactly is the preference-satisficing behavior? One could argue that having a partner isn't people's true preference, that they actually prefer to be forever alone, or that being rejected hurts so much that even a perfectly rational agent would not risk it, but when people (I'm thinking about philosophers arguing for compatibilism in particular) talk about humans showing agenthood, they're explicitly giving some reality to people's preferences. On the other hand, to deny the reality of these preferences would seem like equating humans to rocks, that rocks have a preference to stay immobile because that's what we observe them doing, which I think is an even more radical view than my own.
My view is that the preferences people see themselves as having are real, but that accurate model of human behavior rarely invokes them and uses other concepts instead. These concepts are still endogenous (nobody's being puppeteered by an evil demon) but are often of the nature being talked about here. For example, I draw a juxtaposition from the story of the tree to ideas presented in HPMOR's chapter involving the troll attack: people often act out roles. The tree acts out the role of a mother, McGonagall a strict disciplinarian, and that way of modelling behavior might actually get you somewhere. Ditto for behaviors like virtue-signalling, or any of the other social games people unconsciously play that end up dictating their behavior.
Similarly, the idea that people want their freedoms curtailed speaks to me because I've also thought about that a lot. It seems to me that humans would indeed be the happiest in a state of "choicelessness" (I believe there's some Eastern philosophical concept for it, but if I've known one, I've since forgotten about it), always living in the moment because there's no other option. The extreme example of this would be monasticism, but this has to large extent been the general experience for most of human existence: you could in principle do something else than forage or work the fields, but then you'd starve so you don't actually have much choice now do you. Even in today's environment a lot of people seem to find the idea of not /having/ to go to work every morning abhorrent: what would they do with themselves? I've never drawn a connection between historical forms of choicelessness and modern forms like "domination by corporate HR departments", but now that the idea has been presented to me, it does seem to make sense.
(For the record, this does in no way excuse slavery: you can experience choicelessness without also being subjected to misery)
(Also for the record, I'm claiming no superiority here. In fact, I'm uncharacteristically incapable of acting on my claimed preferences)
Is there a word for this kind of "unassailable truth" writing ("condescending" doesn't seem to cover it), where the writer basically says a) you're too stupid to understand this, go away, and b) if by some miracle you're smart enough to understand this, you'll know just how brilliant it is? It basically screams "I won't take any criticism seriously, because if you disagree you're either the kind of terrible person I'm describing or just too dumb to understand what I'm saying."
Section 2: I read a chunk of it, and I have to admit it's not entirely wrong. The feeling of helping without taking responsibility is definitely a thing. Consider charities which don't track whether they're actually helpful. I'm not even talking about detailed EA levels of tracking.
This is also an example of what annoys me about TLP, and also possibly why he has a powerful hook for some people, though perhaps this book is worse than his blog. He's got an actual insight there, but he's not very clear about what responsibility covers.
What's clear is that he's saying he's so very right and a huge number of people are so very wrong. At least he admits that there are people getting responsibility more or less right, he's just not very interested in them.
Alright Scott, you're making me make a throwaway account for this. CW: frank and gross discussion of bizarre porn.
> Teach writes: “Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.” This seems totally insane and also I can’t rule it out.
It is not insane. I've spent way too fucking long looking at online hentai communities for this to sound insane.
It's probably true of me: at some point I realized that the thing that makes my dick most hard isn't when I'm diving into a cool-looking hentai comic. It's when I'm scrolling through the grid of covers looking through to FIND some that I might like. The search, the potential for a nice surprise, is what kicks a part of my brain into gear. The diving into it is just the follow-through. You could literally describe that as having a fetish for nhentai's search page and you wouldn't be too far off.
And among the general populace of these communities, there's an oft-running "haha only serious" meme of 2D women being better than 3D women. I don't think everybody falls into that trap, but there are people that do, and it gets really sad really quickly: https://www.reddit.com/r/waifuism/
I'd say these people would sooner admit to the thought behind Teach's quote than most porn consumers, but that's probably just me falling into the same status-raising trap that's talked about in this entire review by trying to say "at least they're honest about it".
The "porn is your fetish" thing is even more true the more "extreme" or "weird" the fetishes get, particularly in hentai communities. You get people that fetishize shit that's illegal or immoral, sure, but then there are people that fetishize shit that isn't physically possible. You can't have that in the real world. Porn is literally the only outlet.
Can't resist saying that "Zen story" is fucking horrible. It isn't a passable Zen story at all because most of the real ones from "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones" are tremendously great stories that send chills down your spine, if nothing else.
No way it gave you a better understanding of Zen, rather it gave you a defense against pursuing a real grasping of Zen. Zen is not "understandable". It is, however, graspable. In a similar way that music or poetry is.
That said, keep writing more posts like this. Your book reviews are great. I think some who disliked this post can't separate the review from the book. The book sounds horrible, but I appreciate the post.
We need more negative book reviews. The writers are becoming soft.
What I don't understand about this "desire for desire" idea is I spent all of middle-school and high-school with a hard-on looking around at the girls in my classroom, imagining the terrible, beautiful things I wanted to do with them. As a Gen-X-er, talking to others in my generation, that's how we all experienced it. You'd spend all day in class imagining fucking the girl who sat in front of you in English class, then go home and jack off thinking about her the moment you got home. You couldn't wait to get home to jack off. It was torture.
But was everyone in my generation experiencing some memetic desire, something different from today because we consumed different porn? I grew up when porn meant Penthouse and Hustler magazines. You spent a lot of time looking at a picture of a hairy pussy. Did that create the desire I felt for my female classmates? It seems implausible, yet I don't know how to rule it out.
If that's the case, then it seems like magazine porn was the good porn, because it was just pictures of tits and cunts and made you want to experience them in the flesh. It wasn't a substitution, maybe it was a catalyst.
It strikes me as crazy that most young men haven't always spent most of their time fantasizing about exploring women's pussies. After all, aren't we here because that's what every generation before us did? It seems nutty to think porn is a driver of desire as opposed to a pacifier of it.
But maybe internet porn is different? Perhaps, but any "This time it's different" claim needs to make a strong, clear case.
Is it possible that much of this can be nested in the framework of competing desires? For example, the lady with the submissive fetish could be considered as finding a compromise between her desire to have sex and her desire to be a good moral person; it just happens that her understanding of ‘good moral person’ does not include asking for sex, hence the fantasy.
Likewise, people that don’t act on their desires are simply balancing their desire for 'safety' with their desire for other things that require action with non-zero risk.
‘the unmediated experience of the world’ quoted in that Zen section…… Scott and everyone else, what is your response to this possibility of a way of experiencing life?
I don't get it.
So, this Teach says that just about everybody is sick. But does he have anything to say about whether there's a cure? Is becoming an obscurantist-psychoanalysis-conscious misanthrope good enough? Or it's good enough merely to became aware that everything is horrible and to derive pseudo-high-status from this understanding? Then I guess I'm there already, if having taken a somewhat different path.
As for porn, I always though that its main purpose (for males) was ersatz variety, which makes evo-psych sense. The same story/comic/video on repeated exposure do still arouse me, but less and less with each instance.
"Teach believes to a first approximation nobody represses anything about sex in modern-day culture - Who thinks sex is shameful these days? It would be like repressing that you like cheese!"
He's wrong, see https://putanumonit.com/2021/05/14/sex-positivity/ and references therein
I can see why people [can't remember who or where, off the top of my head] would hypothesize The Last Psychiatrist is C-rt-s Y-rv-n... except this is way worse than UR ever was.
There's no way I could handle that style of writing. Well done for reading that tosh
"a lot of the time when I listen to music, I find myself fantasizing about [...] playing the music in front of a big audience while everyone applauds me"
TIL Scott is mad jealous (though Teach might instead claim envious) of his little brother ;)
I remember, but can't find, a blog post on TLP is as an example of gaslighting. His writing is good at vaguely evoking bad feelings about yourself while never being concrete enough for you to critically evaluate.
His notion of 'narcissism' did seem to frame common features of the human experience as unusual pathology in 'you'.
I have to think if "Teach" read this essay he would be tickled, because (1) you seem frustrated by being not entirely sure you weren't just the victim of a truly moby prank, and yet (2) your writing style distinctly changed and it seems in a few places like your usual train of thought was derailed a bit and went off in a few novel directions.
Which means it *worked* and was well worth the $500. It does seem weirdly Zen, which is strange because I don't like Zen -- at least I think I don't -- but I find this highly amusing. Maybe actual Zen just suffers in translation and I need to learn Chinese.
What if the main theme in the book is some kind of intellectual cuckoldry analogue? "I, the author, have read all these hot sexy books, and you, pathetic reader with your limp and tiny below average IQ, has probably tried to read some of them, but did not achieve the understanding to satisfy the texts properly. Indeed, you'll never be able to do so, you weak-minded wage-slave! Let me proceed by explaining why your interpretation (and anyone else, in case you think this somehow doesn't apply to you) is WRONG while I insult and otherwise belittle you, you imbecile." This does appear to have decent anti-memetical potential, in the sense that I believe this is a very novel and rare kind of fetish.
Regarding "Porn doesn’t depict fetishes - porn is your fetish.", I think I agree, if we allow that the two usages of fetish have a different meaning here. The first meaning is the now most common meaning of "paraphilia", while the second is sacred/magical idol, totem or focus. At the least, it seems there is some property of porn that is more than the titillating information it contains, why else would people commission pornographic artwork that depicts a (highly unique) scene entirely designed by the commissioner? Why would they do more of the same, to the point of obsession? Maybe it's a simple trick for the senses, who are probably evolved to assume purely mental constructs are of limited use in procreation. Similar to a prayer bead for meditation, perhaps.
Sounds like this is well and truly intertwined with our old friend, The Transgender Lobster, and I mean that in a good way for both of them.
Incidentally, I go to an ex-marine therapist who has never heard of either of them, and doesn't know quite what an odd duck he is, but does tell me it's best to [metaphorically] clean my room and [literally] sit up straight.
Biblical angels are a poor example of an anitmeme.
Most people who read the relevant parts of the bible can picture one. They might not get the one the author intended, but they'll picture something. They show up in various pieces of popular media like Kill Six Billion Demons or Bayonetta, and while they're not exactly as depicted in the bible fantasy fans have no trouble recognising the concept of Bible-style angels.
Basically, biblical angels are a regular meme outcompeted by a much stronger meme, not an antimeme.
This post was an excellent reminder to me that every writing style has a different intended audience, as well as some kind of payoff for the author based on their original intention.
I would be curious to hear from more people who are excited to read the book after reading this review. What is attractive to you about it? What's the expected value here? I'm experiencing such a strong negative reaction to the snippets that I don't think I can be at all objective and would like any experiential counter evidence you were maybe hesitating to share in the comments (which I'm also reading).
My personal framework values accessibility and empathy in communication, so to allocate time to deliberately obtuse communication I'd need some guaranteed value up front that isn't defined here. Choosing to put time into a work that forces me to take the risk that it might be a narcissistic mind game, or just generally a flop, isn't really high on my own priority list.
I'm also curious to consider the argument that it promotes critical thinking further, but my gut response isn't so much that it promotes it, more that it limits your audience to people who have a predisposition to enjoy intellectual masturbation of some kind. You're more likely to enjoy or get something out of a deliberately complex work if you're predisposed to enjoying challenge, study, etc. If anyone can point me directly to extra studies or writing on the subject of priming audiences to manipulate (assess, analyze, debate, etc.) input I'd be grateful. Search engines will get me there eventually.
I'm not attributing any value judgment to this confrontational author stance by the way. I think it's a valid choice, if made with a particular audience in mind - if it's an unintended side effect, then another editor experienced in your chosen target audience could be helpful. This audience can also be the author, who has their own relationship with the work, and by extension with their imagined audience. The adversorial tone of the writing is so pronounced that it's a great signal to the reader. In that sense, I'd consider the writing extremely efficient: the author immediately defines the audience as readers who are willing to submit themselves to the writing, and who are therefore either open to the message or stubborn enough to stay until the very end without any guarantee they'll have a workable way to process the information (see Scott's experience).
It seems there's a conscious framing of the author-reader relationship that lies in the hands of the author, and that leaves me feeling uneasy. There's a lot of trust involved in this process, and I'm personally not open to someone who outright challenges that trust and frames it as a power dynamic, where they are automatically on top. But the author isn't either, so win-win?
Because of this interpretation, reading the book would be tantamount to me consenting to a relationship with someone who seeks only to challenge me, compare me to them, and measure my value entirely against their own sense of self worth (not positive in my book). The latter is already established in the author's mind, and because they are removed from the process, unless I email them or they read my comments somewhere, etc. It's a dynamic that ironically reminds me of red flags in BDSM relationships: the person submitting has no option for aftercare, no avenue to have a discussion about consent on equal grounds. You take it or leave it, without any knowledge up front of what effect the experience will have on you. Perhaps this mindset is exactly what the author intends to challenge. But if you hold a particular disdain for a way of thinking/being/perceiving, and you consciously use tools that are NOT efficient in engaging the audience you'd like to affect, then what's your goal? Intellectual/experiential segregation?
Anyway this is a very emotional rather than evidence driven reaction to a review of a book I don't intend to read. But it's amusing to me that this kind of loose analysis is exactly what the excerpts trigerred in me, while a quick look at TLP's blog seems to indicate they'd find this kind of thinking lazy or that I'm someone who goes to a therapist for the type of psychoanalysis that is preventing any growth/change.
"So if you hate psychoanalysis, you hate searching for self-knowledge, and you hate readers - why write a psychoanalysis book to help people understand themselves? I don’t really have an answer for this."
I do! Teach clearly hates himself, and is looking to share that pain and self-loathing with others.
I've recently finished reading a rationalist-adjacent story that seems to be "something almost, but not quite entirely unlike" *Sadly, Porn* :
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36676220-the-erogamer
It seems to be the polar opposite of *Sadly, Porn* in terms of (anti-)misanthropy. The internal conflicts of the characters are laid bare. Desire is of course addressed. What at first looks like superficial shallowness reveals exponential depths. I'm still reeling from the experience. As weird as it might sound, this feels to be the best piece of fiction that I have ever experienced. (And I'm not a teenager reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. Although I'm ashamed to admit that my fictional reading is probably lacking... *eyes the still unopened War and Peace on the bedside table*)
Oh, and it of course has plenty of hot sex, though YMMV in terms of specific kinks.
This sort of reminds me how I defected from academic lit crit after tearing a Lyotard book in twain in the midst of reading it. I remember thinking -- enough is enough, I don't need this bullshit.
At the same time, some of the quotes (from Sadly, Porn; not that Lyotard book) were intriguing, if not exactly enjoyable. I haven't read anything lit crit adjacent for a while, I'm sort of curious how I'd react as a more mature person, and this sounds like a fun book to try on. If only to see whether my book-tearing skills are still sharp.
The story I'm using to wall off the part of myself with lit crit inclinations (so that I can productively focus on other things instead of agonizing over whether it was the right decision) runs something like this: French people like intellectual games. Sophisticated conversation, sleight of hand essays, it's all part of the culture. It's fashionable, it's social currency, it's a way of displaying that you are à la hauteur.
But it's still mainly a game. Think La Septième Fonction du langage -- you can imagine how reading that felt cathartic to me. This means you don't necessarily say things you believe to be true, but rather things that maximize your score, or at least compromise in that direction. Because unlike e.g. in the rationalist community (which is -- hopefully -- playing a different kind of game), just being right won't get you (as m)any points.
The trouble starts when all this theory is taken up by Anglo-Saxon literary departments, which put a Protestant, literal-minded twist on it, and with their unimpeachable work ethic, build an entire industry predicated upon the belief that all of this French intellectual frolicking was meant in earnest.
Forgive me if I sound facetious, I realize it's a caricature, as sweeping narratives tend to be. My own mindset is much closer to what I labeled Anglo-Saxon in the previous paragraph -- which is partly why I tore that Lyotard book in half. I'd finally had enough of trying to understand this stuff for real, wasting precious brain cycles on it. I'm still interested in how language works, I just switched to linguistics, where I found questions and approaches which are a better fit for me -- typically less frustrating, occasionally truly enlightening.
But the point is -- this story I'm telling myself means I've largely written off learning more about these French intellectuals at the source of it, Lacan included. And while it's helpful in practice (I'm free to think about other matters), it's also somewhat unsatisfactory, for someone who generally gets a kick out of understanding things. So if you ever dig deeper into Lacan, I'm genuinely curious to hear what you find there!
Also, looking forward to highlights from comments. If anyone has any useful Lacan resources, I hope they'll turn up!
Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here! I STRONGLY suggest you seek out interminable, inscrutable, possibly-nonsensical stream-of-consciousness miasma manifestos, read them carefully, and then post interpretations.
We may want to page Robert Wright, whose "Why Buddhism Is True" has obviously absolutely nothing to do with anything mentioned here.
I love (in a terrified sort of way) the insight that where status-seeking behavior is concerned, all that matters is the chemical response in the brain. Your anonymous philanthropic donation (or my slightly pseudonymous comment) is still a bid for status because all it has to do is please the audience in our minds. I mean ... now Twitter makes sense. This is the great hack of our technological era. "likes" turn out to be an in-kind substitute for resources and access to mates. This is way better than "42". Now I can enjoy the apocalypse.
I remember the Last Psychiatrist from Metafilter days. You take a very charitable view of him. Allow me to present a much less charitable view:
1. ‘Teach’ is a narcissist. Not in the bullshit cultural critique redefinition he constantly sort-of-half-gives-half-alludes-to but the more boring dark triad kind. He wants to feel intellectually powerful, dominant, the centre of attention. He wants people to see him as the smartest guy in any room. He wants your attention. It makes him feel good.
2. Everything he writes is a manipulative strategy designed to garner him this narcissistic supply. This explains everything about his prose style and ‘insights’. He makes sweeping Barnum statements that enough of his readers will agree with that some come away seeing him as insightful. He makes cultural references*, so his readers see him as well-read and intelligent. He associates himself with the high-status utopia of classical Athens. He actually is intelligent, at least enough to successfully pull off this strategy (unlike a less intelligent narcissist).
3. His writing has an unintended by-product: intelligent people who read it come up with intelligent interpretations, some of which have real value.
4. This is because his writing exploits the deep human desire to make sense of things. It does this in the same way as a cold-reading psychic - gaps, allusions, ambiguities, provocations. His writing certainly reveals a keen awareness of when people assume other people know what they are talking about.
5. He also uses highly impactful concepts (‘you know, like rape’, references to sex/death/parenthood). This serves to (a) get attention and (b) throw his readers emotionally off balance, so they are less likely to realise they are being played.
6. He may or may not realise he is doing this. He may think his pathological search for narcissistic supply is actually real reflection and insight. Nothing of his I have ever read betrays any real self-reflection, but not many people openly do that in writing and self-reflection =/= self-awareness.
7. The psychology he is describing is, fundamentally, his own: in playing his game he can only build his model of the other players out of the material to hand. This rule applies to him the same as it does to everyone.
8. Why do it anonymously? Because he suspects, probably correctly, that the sorts of things he knows will get him the results he wants will have bad consequences for him if he does them in real life, including possibly colleagues realising that he is a narcissist who should probably be kept away from vulnerable people. But online has the advantage of intimacy, and he doesn’t want political or physical power and attention, he wants interpersonal status and admiration.
Also, if you are using “800-page novels about English professors who have affairs and then feel guilty about it” as your definition of “Classical Literature” then it is hardly surprising that it baffles you that people like it. Tolstoy is “Classical Literature” and an awful lot happens in the 1200+ pages of War and Peace. So much so that it isn’t hard at all to see why people like it. The ‘cheating English professor’ genre sounds like an extreme outsider's view of John Updike or D.H. Lawrence, which is only a tiny tradition within “Classical Literature”. I don’t much like that kind of book myself, but placed in historical context it again isn’t very hard to see why people read those kind of books, and unsurprisingly some of the ‘why’ is because they were frank about sexual experiences in an unprecedented or interesting way.
Some possibly presumptuous advice: if your map has a hole in it, don't waste time theorising about what *must* be over there or asking others what they think about it and trying to infer the hole's contents from their observations (they may be as ignorant as you or tell you lies). Don't put off action. Just go there any look for yourself.
Also, I’m more interested to know what you make of Lacan than I am in Lacan.
* TLA/‘Teach’’s cultural references are flashy bunk: for example the statement “This was not the case for the Greeks, not at the beginning, anyway. Personal morality was inseparable from the state’s morality, they were not overlapping, they were the same single thing, but in the opposite way you’re imagining it, not because the State was all powerful but because the state was themselves” is simplistic tosh. Even just for Athens, it doesn’t map on to any of the major classical thinkers, any account of Athenian life as we can reconstruct it (given the turbulent history of Athens) and that was just one city-state. He’s making Barnum statements trading on people’s vague awareness of the classics and a few Great Books, and constructing a fantasised pre-historic Athens corrupted by ‘Sophists’. This is not real expertise. Go and look at the things themselves - they are much more interesting to an intelligent person than anything a right-wing populariser or a narcissist with fascist sensibilities has pre-chewed for you.
I've always been very skeptical of these theories that claim to explain that all of human behavior emerges from a very small number of root causes. It feels like the creator found a few behaviors in a smattering of people that they could explain and then handwaved it over the rest of humanity.
My intuition is that humans are just way too dang complex for any single motivating factor to explain why we do what we do. So much goes into shaping a person, from their genetics, the culture they live in, their particular set of experiences, their peers, and on and on. Saying "well it's all just repressed desires" or whatever seems immensely simplistic.
Maybe I don't understand what these theories are actually saying. They've never seemed particularly interesting to me, so I've never had the curiosity to learn more about them.
I just wanted to say that I discovered you, Scott, by googling 'blogs similar to Last Psychiatrist', some five years ago. And I'm really glad I did.
I wonder about the value of reading a book that seems to have been written by the genuinely schizhoprenic.
Teach seems to be making a criticism of modern culture (and if I may, looking more towards elite culture such that Woke/SJ and iterated irony are heavily included), rather than a criticism of all societies except Athens. It wouldn't even make sense to say that all cultures other than Athens failed to Act, as there have been many Active cultures. The inclusion of only Full Democracies seems contrived, as many societies have had partial or significant Active populations, even if not everyone was. I happen to think that there are conservative cultures in the US that are very Active and specifically reject the psychological defenses Teach is talking about. Christianity teaches humility and a denial of self with an imperative to Act, such that many Christians have a memetic defense against the things Teach is worried about. Many "Christians" are also just floating along with elite culture and don't necessarily live life any different from what we might call "standard US culture" or on the opposite end "Right Wing culture warriors" so just name-dropping Christianity certainly wouldn't be enough.
Jordan Peterson comes to mind as someone trying to fight against the same target as Teach, and with a moderate level of success. Telling someone to clean their room is enforcing Action. Take Responsibility. Take Ownership of your life and your choices. Peterson's target audience is pretty clear - disaffected young men. I'm not sure who Teach is trying to reach, but it sounds like Western cultural elites who are in or near the Woke bubble.
This was a wild ride and I'm living for it
Excellent post. The Zen comparison and the 'possibility of map-hole' thing are eye-openingly instructive about my enjoyment of The Last Psychiatrist's blog. I disagreed with Alone (or Teach, I guess - he always did claim to like his rum) on just about everything social and political, but it was always fun to think it through and reestablish why, and he always did seem to be driving at the Real.
Oddly, I rarely got the feeling of being berated and patronised by someone with superior insight or self-knowledge. It was more of a wistful 'we are all in this together, only I can see a bit further in the fog, and I'm by parts cranky about what I see and frustrated that you don't see it' kind of tone.
Plus, his diversions into psychiatry shop-talk were always cool, and his illustrations of narcissism, borderline, and other personality and mood disorders made good internal sense to me as a layman. But that could be just because I am a layman.
Might get the book. Probably won't read it through, but it'll sit there burnishing my self-image as someone who would read that kind of book, which is all that matters.
It seems rather in your benefit to understate the main theses of the book, which, are in no particular order: inability to fantasize, knowledge as a defense against impotence, lack of secondary source reading, envy and ledgers.
The audience you write for is the exact audience this is intended for. They will be happy to accept your secondary report, feel knowledgeable and give their power to you instead of wielding it themselves.
Your example on envy is a clear case. How many of us, consciously, believe we are envious and would think “I wish my friend didn’t have a hot wife” — we say to ourselves exactly as the pirate describes, “My wife isn’t hot because I’m ugly” — which means, “in [not] my fantasy of the world, I am ugly and that’s why I have an ugly wife [therefore in reality, my bitch wife is with an ugly guy and never will be satisfied, the “ledger” is even].
Writing any review of this book does it injustice. I would urge others to read this book themselves, entirely and immediately, but I hate my contemporaries and care little for the next generation, quite contrary to this Teacher.
On antimemes and Marx being insightful, but interpreted in a way useful as a defense: I get the same sense about Nietzsche, and he evidently got the same sense about himself. There's a passage - which I can't find but know exists - where Nietzsche is talking about his contempt for people who are joyfully enthusiastic about his work. He says something along the lines of "rather than showing you have understood my work, your exuberance shows precisely that you have not understood it at all. If you had, it would hurt you too much."
About the introduction to Lacan, I would suggest the first Seminar of Lacan himself, and then take it from there chronologically. That's the one - https://www.amazon.com/Seminar-Jacques-Lacan-Technique-1953-1954/dp/0393306976
For all the merit of secondary literature it is either for advanced use (like you really read Lacan before), or is just not anti-meme enough, so you would just learn watered-down version of concepts (all these Big Other, small a, the Real, and so on) without comprehending the logic and method behind it.
I don't know if there's anything here, but this review reminded me a lot of House of Leaves. One reason is the footnotes. Another is the non-linear storytelling and out-of-left-field detours into unrelated subjects. But the biggest reason is just the novelty. The main thing that interested me about House of Leaves is that it is so utterly weird and so different from everything else that it is fascinating for that alone. (It's the fictional product of people writing about a documentary about a movie that doesn't exist in-universe. It's got multiple narrators, about half of the text consists of footnotes, and it has pages that look like this https://i.ibb.co/w7JcTJX/xx.webp)
Given that I still like this book even though I ultimately found it disappointing as a horror story, I have to wonder to what extent Sadly, Porn is weird because TLP wanted to make something weird, for the sake of itself.
You read through an ENTIRE BOOK of that kind of pompous, long-winded drivel?
"Sadly porn" = "Sly pardon".
"Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.
Psychologically unhealthy people, eg you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it."
By what definition of healthy/normal?
It seems like both Teach and your cult-leader friend are utilizing a similar strategy of appearing misanthropic, but at the same time seemingly giving attention and respect to *you*. In Teach’s case, this is done through using sayings like “this book is not for” (a direct quote from the opening of House of Leaves, btw, another book I’d love to hear your thoughts on), while strongly implying that the “you” he is talking to is not *you*, the “true follower” of his work.
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a fist-blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, ... the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, ..., like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Young Kafka to a friend - translation check: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/1904/br04-003.htm#:~:text=Wenn%20das%20Buch%2C%20das%20wir,wir%20zur%20Not%20selber%20schreiben.
I'm pretty skeptical that antimemes are unknowable; it's a lot easier to believe that they're tawdry and sordid. "So and so from my tribe did the bad" is more recognizably an antimeme than whatever eldritch spookiness Teach is peddling; it's not just an idea you don't want to spread, it makes you less interested in talking about the whole category i.e. your tribe's moral fiber. Many people learn such antimemes without spreading them. Many more people suspect them or have heard a rumor of them based on the details of their non-spread. Most people would only reveal them reluctantly, and especially prefer to not actually say them but non-confirm them in a revealing manner when explicitly prompted. And we have memes reinforcing antimemes ("snitches get stitches", "loose lips sink ships").
I suspect "unknowable antimemes" are just a trap for very empathetic or curious people. They're baited with an interesting question and the parsimonious feeling of revelation while filtering out people who see intellectual abuse coming. You want me to subject myself to your haranguing for, <checks notes> zero or even negative return on investment? I bet you have a bridge to sell me too. But the reason the trap works is that you wouldn't dare subject yourself to the loss of perceived status of having wasted your time.
About 10 minutes after clicking away I got that kind of stiff back feeling as if someone kind of challenged you to a fight and you didn't flinch. A small rush of endorphins I think and a sense of proud resoluteness
He seems like someone who is gravely disappointed with being a human being and wants others to be even more disappointed while according him the status of Disappointed in Chief of a small elite band who are the least disappointing as a result of their self awareness of it
The theory of all things as preventative measures to the risk of actually trying to succeed is well represented in the form of the book itself. I can certainly think of examples in my own life. I choose no career partly because it represents a potential failure without sufficient reward. But most people aren't really usually like this. I feel pretty confident in saying I don't ask people out in person because I don't like the high probability of unhappy intermediate events rather than actually don't genuinely want happy eventual events
Disjointed thoughts:
1. Someone doesn't have to appeal to everyone to be a cult leader. If Lacan's pscyhoanalysis applies to 1% of people, then there are 3 million Americans who would potentially be attracted to a would-be cult leader who relies on Lacan's theories.
2. I also have long agonized over difficulty with relationships and asking girls out. But I think I can point to exactly why I did it--involvement in activities that were male-dominated, general social anxiety, etc. Sure, I didn't want to be rejected--but that seems like a totally normal and surface level response, not something deep and hidden. I'm not saying I behaved optimally, but it doesn't feel mysterious, it doesn't feel like it needs to be explained.
3. There is something more "real" about a video than a story or a fantasy in your head. This is important if part of the porn or porn-substitute is the other person being "into" whatever you're imagining. Obviously if you're watching a video, then they don't care about *you*. But "the other person is enjoying this" seems to be a common aspect or requirement, and I think there is something different about an actual person enjoying a thing (or appearing/claiming to).
There's alot of comments, but i did a search and see no one quoted the Zero HP Lovecraft Review. His answer to your question "Why did Teach write this book?" and the related question, "who is Teach talking to" is correct. This interpretation further helps clarify what the purpose of his methods are. The "you" in the book is Teach himself. TLP is doing Lacanian analysis on his (and his class's) own failings to act in the world.
"I mentioned already that psychoanalysis is geared towards women, but the book is written as if it’s addressing men, and that the venn diagram overlap of that is men who think like women. The way that cashes out is that the book assumes you have progressive (normie) politics, even though I suspect anyone online enough to read this book probably does not have normie politics, though it’s hard to be sure. One theory is that it’s written to normie because the dissident can handle normie content, but not the other way around, another theory is that if the writer and the reader both pretend we’re talking about a normie then it gives us a certain kind of breathing room to maintain a critical distance while assessing the ideas. You don’t believe in psychoanalysis, you aren’t a normie, it’s OK, we’re both just talking about an object that’s far away. But if you’re reading it, it’s for you. TLP pretends to assume the reader will have normal, progressive-ish opinions like "I believe people are inherently good." The third theory is that he himself holds these opinions (and I think he does), and that anyone who writes about “you” or “we” is writing about himself. And that’s how he comes to write the following..."
I hope you write a follow up after reading 0hp's review.
(fixed some spelling issue)