Take the Clearpill

Opt out of politics you can't influence

Housekeeping: I’ve been interested in reputation lately. Last week we launched VC investor reviews (LP next!) and have over 300 so far. Today we launched reviews for startup service providers and SaaS tools (please upvote/leave a review). We’re also working on company reviews too, please leave one here.

To be determined on how this all fits together. :)

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In previous posts we discussed how beliefs are not about being accurate, but about establishing and cementing your membership to your desired tribe.

To recap, we model people as rational actors deriving their beliefs from first principles, but if anything, most of human rationality is not used to create belief systems, but rather to come up with arguments to rationalize opinions the subconscious brain has already made.

People don’t even have beliefs per se, separate from the current moment and what their peers think. The idea of “belief” itself is a misnomer. Implied in “belief” is an individual, first-principles, derivation process of figuring out what’s true, whereas it’s more like a complex algorithm that takes into account one's peer group, the loyalties one owes and to whom, who has more status and what talking points fit better accordingly.

That’s the purpose of beliefs, to characterize who’s in the tribe and who’s an enemy. 

And the crazier the belief, the more implausible it sounds, the better it is as a bonding mechanism. 

Yes, the crazier a bonding ideology is — the further away it is from objective reality — the more powerful it is in forming tribes. Why? The crazier the idea, or the crazier the stuff one does in order to get into the tribe, the more it proves one’s loyalty to the group by shutting off their other available options. Because defection is so common, this is significant. After all, if loyalty is just a social contract between convenience and utilitarian calculation, logic tells you to look for a better deal down the road. Then by backward induction, you say: “Well, if there’s a better deal down the road, better for me to defect now”. But if all societies followed this thinking, they’d crumble pretty quickly. So if you don’t want societies to fall apart, and if you want something larger than a tribe and a family, you’re going to need people doing crazy stuff that burns their boats to other options to prove their loyalty. You need people showing you they have no other place to go, no other tribe to join.

To summarize: People don’t choose beliefs according to the merits or logical value of those ideas—people choose ideas that will best improve their reputation within a tribe. 

So politics is about bonding people over beliefs, crazy beliefs in particular. Hence the rise of conspiracy theories. But what is the role of philosophy or truth in a world where people are incentivized to bond over beliefs that aren’t true? After all, even debunking crazy beliefs won’t dispel them. 

In fact, some ideas are so “fit” that evidence asserting their falsity won’t debunk them. People are so incentivized to believe them that they keep believing in them in spite of evidence to the contrary. Religion, communism, and fascism are common examples. If you expect these to go away via the marketplace of ideas, you're going to be waiting for a long time.

So. This is why things seem so stupid: The truth doesn’t win, because that's not what binds people together. There’s certainly a market for truth – the thousands of intellectual shards that permeate Substack, Twitter, and other independent media  – but it’s often niche by definition, much to my chagrin. So what does that leave us with? The Anderson Coopers or Alex Joneses of the world: The Current Thing, or The Bizarro Current Thing. The rest of us who want rational conversations are on ice floes headed slowly out to sea.

Enter Leo Strauss

Strauss wrote about the relationship between how we think about political life on one hand, and how we think about metaphysics ontology or fundamental philosophy on the other. 

Leo Strauss posits that political life always rests on some sort of partial opinion, some half truth, whereas philosophy always tries to see the big picture.

Politics is the domain of opinion, and philosophy tries to transform opinion into knowledge. That can have the effect of undermining the beliefs that are necessary for political community, since you're questioning what may be should be taken as an axiom. 

So Strauss argue there's always going to be a tension between the political way of life and the philosophical way of life, and thus we need to protect both from each other. We need to protect philosophy from the city so that you don't get another Socrates instance where you have somebody sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods of the city. And you have to protect the city from philosophy, because philosophical inquiry puts the holy pieties of social and political life into question because it puts everything into question

So there's always this conflict between what we can think as independent thinkers and what's required of us as citizens out of a sense of civic duty and responsibility. 

It’s hard to even speak of this tension, because people can’t handle the truth that they can’ handle the truth.

So, what do we do as independent thinkers?

To speak against power or not to speak against power?

Two authors took a different approach to how to handle this question. 

Vaclav Havel’s “Power to the Powerless” showcases the struggle of a shopkeeper who has to make a very important decision: Does he plant a sign on his store saying “Workers of the world, unite?” even if he doesn’t believe in it. If he does it, he will be left alone, though internally he will have shame. If he doesn’t, he will suffer greatly, though he will have his pride. Either way, he is broken. 

“The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."

If he had said “I am afraid and obedient” that would be too shameful for him, as well as too embarrassing for those enforcing him to put up the slogan. The slogan serves as a way to establish power dynamics without revealing the game.”

Ernst Junger’s “Eumeswil”, a political allegory for living as a German under the Nazis,  presents a counter case to the green grocer: The anarch. 

The difference between Havel’s greengrocer and Junger’s anarch is that the greengrocer just suffers. The anarch however makes a deliberate choice to formally comply while internally maintaining independence. The anarch has his own project that is not simply suffering but also doesn't trigger the regime antibodies in the here and now.

In Eumeswil, the anarch is a historian. He gets full access to the monarch (as the manager of his personal bar) and to the technologies and records of the regime. He learns, understands, and writes the history. The simplest form of anarch in our time is simply "taxpayer".

Being the anarch is like being an American expat in Costa Rica. You're sitting at the cafe having your morning coffee and writing your novel. The locals are sitting all around you going on and on in Spanish about the local political issues and the local political races etc., and you don't know what any of it means or who any of the politicians are, and none of it matters to you anyway, so you just go back to your coffee and novel. As a result, the Costa Ricans are fine with you — you spend money and pay taxes — the end.

Ernst Junger, lived this reality under the Nazis. He wasn't speculating. He was not a Nazi, nor was he about to mount some fruitless and doomed resistance to the Nazis. He meant to survive with his body and soul intact, until things changed. Which they eventually did!

Junger argued that it's mainly impossible for an individual to "make a difference in the world". Most resistance to the ruling regime will simply be crushed. Completely pointless and suicidal effort.

The Clearpill

Taking the clearpill (a concept popularized here) is being like the anarch (or expat in Costa Rica) opting out of activism entirely.

The logic goes like this: Engaging in politics is either supporting the regime (in which case you are supporting the regime, and the regime already has the power, so what are you doing?), or opposing the regime (in which case you are motivating the regime to attack you, and the regime gains strength by attacking its enemies, so what are you doing?).

So either you’re a regime puppets by virtue of supporting the regime, or regime puppets by virtue of opposing and therefore motivating the regime. If you support the current power structure, you don’t need to do anything since it’s already in power. If you’re anti the power structure, fighting back will actually hurt your cause, since you just inflame and enrage them further, activating their energy to fight you to even higher levels.

By fighting against power you function as the catalyst in a chemical reaction. You actually make the problem you are trying to fight more intense. So you make them stronger, paint a big target on your chest, and lose anyway. So only fight when you can win, and most people, at most times, can’t win.

What does it mean to opt out of activism? The sweet spot to play is not provoking that which triggers the Friend/Enemy Distinction. As we’ve discussed previously, having different political opinions with someone is like approaching a bear. That’s the friend/enemy distinction.

So everything is safe to write about and talk about and fund that doesn't trigger the Friend/Enemy Distinction. Once you trigger that distinction, you are the Enemy.

To bring this to today’s Current Things: What are you achieving by posting in favor about Israel or Palestine or Ukraine or Russia? You have no idea what’s actually happening about the ground. You are not influencing any policy. You’re not convincing anyone, if anything you might make them less likely to support your cause because you’re being so morally righteous about it which is annoying to them. 

I haven’t found that arguing with people is that effective in changing people’s minds; arguments often just solidify people’s positions. I remain curious about people’s beliefs and will share my perspectives when it’s a safe space or when I think they’re open to persusasion, but I’m not trying to risk relationships with friends by deliberately trying to change their minds. Unless I feel I can make a difference or that they actively want it, it’s just not worth it. It’s mindboggling to me that relationships with friends and family could be broken over something like politics. Like many things that are good for me but not as fun, I don’t always take the clearpill, but I see the benefits when I do.