Am I Truly Mardukth

  • Why is the state of human welfare so bad, even for those at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy?
    • Lots of people have their basic needs met
    • So why are they still unhappy
    • While it is true that some people are in more precarious situations one would imagine, even people who ought to feel secure in their wealth and social status don’t feel secure
  • Before we can answer that question, we need to ask why we should expect people to be happy in the first place
    • The role of happiness is not to serve as a baseline emotional state
    • The role of happiness is to reward you for performing adaptive behaviors
    • Modern society has become so good at providing for our basic needs that the periodic bursts of happiness we used to get from providing for our basic needs have lost their meaning
    • This leads to aimlessness and anomie
    • However aimlessness and anomie are still preferable to a situation in which we’re stressed out about providing for basic needs, even if we got periodic bursts of meaningful happiness
    • This aimlessness has afflicted elites for as long as we have had civilization, but with technology driven increases in wealth, it’s starting to affect middle and lower class people as well
  • 3 basic solutions
    • Enlightenment (in the Buddhist sense)
      • Restructure your mind and modify your utility function so that you no longer desire the sensation of successfully hunting for rewards
      • Effective, but doesn’t scale - there have only been a tiny number of enlightened sages out of the millions or billions of people who have ever practiced Buddhism
    • Create artificial needs whose fulfillment triggers artificial rewards
      • Also known as setting life goals
      • This is necessary, but not sufficient to ensuring happiness
      • Bad things happen when people tie up their selves in particular goals and then fail to achieve those goals
      • People need some basis for psychological well-being beyond achieving goals
    • Narcissism
      • Tell a story about who you are and why you’re worthwhile
      • Has an unfortunate negative connotation
      • Creating narratives allow you to persuade yourself that you’re still a worthwhile person even though you’ve suffered a setback
    • The problem is that narcissism has a number of failure modes that have given it a negative connotation
      • People can build narratives around destructive identities
      • People can build narratives that diverge from external reality, so long as they have some way of justifying the narrative to themselves
      • Getting tied to a narrative opens people up to narcissistic injury
        • No self-narrative will always be 100% consonant with reality
        • When the narrative conflicts with reality, and reality wins, people can lose their sense of selves - feel adrift without knowing what sort of person they are
        • The conventional answer to narcissistic injury is to be less narcissistic
        • This may no longer be a feasible approach, given that the world offers fewer and fewer sources of external validation
    • The task is to get the benefits of narcissism without its failures
  • Three-pronged approach to creating identities
    • Build identities around worthy, virtuous stories rather than stories incompatible with utopian existence
    • Keep one eye on reality so that constructed identities don’t diverge arbitrarily from external reality
    • Build human relationships and social institutions to reinforce identities rather than undermine them

The Story of the Self

  • Identity is about aesthetics, not making useful predictions
  • Maintaining an identity narrative about yourself allows you to appreciate your own life in the same way that you appreciate stories
  • People appreciate stories more powerfully than they appreciate facts about the real world
  • Before we can talk about constructing narratives about ourselves, we need to talk about narratives in general
    • The dominant form of narrative in the West is the literary novel, which consists of narratives about ordinary people living ordinary lives and having ordinary emotions
    • The dominance of this form of narrative didn’t sit well with geeks/nerds, who migrated off into genre fiction
    • However, in the fan-works set in many genre fiction universes, the people who ostensibly rejected the tropes of literary novels ended up reinventing them
    • People are willing to put up with boring emotional drama in stories when they lose patience with that same emotional drama in real life
      • The fact that the emotional drama takes place in the context of a story gives it a sense of purpose that real life lacks
      • The protagonist in a story is worth caring about solely by virtue of them being the protagonist
  • One of the best characteristics of people is their ability to construct narratives about themselves
    • Reduces the mundanity of everyday life
    • Allows us to define our lives in more mythic terms
    • These narratives don’t have to be true or even falsifiable, since they’re more about aesthetics than falsifiability
    • Narratives allow you to find resonances between events in the world and your own life

The LARP of the Covenant

  • Theater Live Action Role Play (LARP)
    • Each person has a character sheet
    • Character sheets are mostly narrative exploring the character’s motivation and goals
    • LARP is like a play, but without audience or script
  • LARP experiences can have profoudn effects on people
    • People see their own lives through social or metaphysical lenses derived from games
    • Sometimes people shift their personalities to better match a character that they particulary identify with
  • Why do LARPs have this effect on people
    • The most commonly cited reason is that LARPs are escapist fantasy
    • Yet LARPs lack the realism of other forms of escapist fantasy (books, video games, movies, etc)
    • When people talk about their LARP experiences, they don’t talk about the escapist fantasy parts, they talk about the parts that are awkward simulcra of everyday life
  • Real life may be full of drama and wonder, but it doesn’t feel like a story from the inside
    • LARPs imbue the character that you play with a certain sense of importance, merely by virtue of your inclusion in the story
    • LARPs provide a shared context that allows you to communicate your narrative self with the other participants in the LARP
    • LARPs are pre-packaged psychological validation
    • The problem is that it’s totally fake - the validation isn’t for you but for the character you’re playing
  • Maybe, if we can turn reality into a LARP, we can get the benefits of LARPing without the disconnection from reality

What’s Your Type: Identity and its Discontents

  • People crave to be told what kind of person they are, even though the categories they may be divided into are functionally meaningless
  • This is related to Heidegger’s dasein, which is better understood as identifying as, even though it’s translated as being
  • Dasein is all about exaggerating a particular aspect of yourself in order to better fit in with a particular group
  • The problem with dasein is that it makes it impossible to assess merit when questions of identity are in play
  • It becomes difficult to separate facts about the world from expressions of people’s identities
  • This leaves us with a choice between channeling identities into safe forms of “pretend-play” or attempting to get rid of the need for identity entirely

Responsa

  • Neutering or removing the desire for identity is harmful
  • Having an identity is important people’s hedonic well-being
  • If you don’t rely on identity construction as a major part of your own hedonic well being, you’re suffering from major introspective failure
  • Identity is so strongly coupled to human flourishing that it may as well be a terminal value
  • Identity is what we use to define the self and give it form - self actualization is impossible without identity
  • The goal is to build a future that allows people to have strong identities and thrive with those identities
  • To do this, we need to have ways to allow people to create strong identities for themselves without losing touch with external reality or exposing themselves to undue narcissistic injury
  • This requires cultural engineering to set up incentive structures, compelling symbols and self-reinforcing behavior norms