[GUEST] Action, Knowledge, and Oppression

Doing nothing is very easy

Note from Gabe:

This is a Guest Article written by Daniel Clothiaux (remember).

It explains a few concepts introduced in the book “Sadly, Porn”. The book is not well-written, but it deals with a dark type of psychoanalysis with which only a few authors dare engaging.

My friend Daniel decided to review it, in order to distill its essence and package it in a way that is approachable by others.

This is very different from my usual articles, most notably in register, it is much more vulgar than the usual Cognition Cafe article.

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In Desires, Envy, and Misdirection, I discussed how having desires is hard and scary.

The author Edward Teach argues in the psychoanalytic book Sadly, Porn, that people largely cope by not having desires.

Not fulfilling your desires is painful, so people avoid wanting anything. Not wanting anything feels bad, too, so people stack misdirections to not notice their lack of desire.

Yet having desires is hard and scary, taking action is far more terrifying and requires far more effort. It is easier not to act at all.

Not doing anything, being a lazy, slavish person, would also feel bad. So people come up with justifications for not doing anything. Two of the major categories of justification discussed are:

1. Using knowledge to justify doing nothing

2. Finding oppressors to place themselves under to excuse them

Teach applies these concepts extremely widely. I think it is better to see them not as universals but as common psychoanalytic models that apply to many people at least some of the time.

Similar to the previous essay, I will be vulgar here. I think it is an important element to better convey the vibe of his models. But unlike the book, there won’t be anything explicit in this essay.

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Acting

Doing things, acting in the world, can be hard and scary.

When I speak of acting here, I don’t mean literally doing things in the world. Most people go to work, buy and eat food, and generally do things.

I mean more to take proactive, positive action based on our desires. Take actions that came from ourselves that we were not required to take.

Actions that force you to take heroic responsibility and be accountable if you, or anyone depending on you, fails. Being agentic, without anyone prompting you to do things.

This type of action requires hard work. It is scary. You may fail, and if you do, many people will see you fail.

As a result, it is very easy to avoid taking proactive, positive action to avoid pain.

Not taking positive action might work if your world is fairly good, and you are content. Yet the world is very fucked up, and many people are dissatisfied with their lives; doing nothing feels bad. Unsurprisingly, then, when people don’t act, they come up with all sorts of reasons to excuse their lack of action.

Omniscience and Omnipotence

One of the most common reasons not to act is to search for excuses to do nothing. People use what they know come up with increasingly galaxy-brain reasons to do nothing.

• I can’t do politics; everything in politics is corrupt and hopeless

• I can’t start a company; I don’t have the connections

• I can’t ask out a girl; they only like giga chads

• I can’t become a giga chad myself; only shallow people do that

• I can’t ask a guy out; they only like shallow hot bimbos

…and so on. The more you know, the easier it is to construct rationalisations for not acting.

This leads Teach to say omnipotence and omniscience are mutually exclusive. If you are perfectly omniscient, you will always have the perfect excuse to do nothing.

This is a bit perverse, as if you are doing stuff, knowing what you are doing is very useful. Yet the more that you know, the more reason you have to avoid doing anything that would put you at risk.

Oppressors

Using knowledge to avoid acting is even better if the people you believe are preventing you from taking action have real power. Then you have an ironclad excuse to not act, to never act.

To avoid doing things, people find oppressors they can give power to, depriving them of the ability to act. Then it is never the people’s fault, never your fault; never my fault. You would have done something if only {{they}} hadn’t stopped you.

The thing is, true power is scary. If an all-powerful dictator had absolute power, you could get hurt. So people also look for pathetic oppressors, the most pathetic oppressor who constrains their actions. It is much safer to concede power to an HR department, to Woke or to Trump than to a truly effective dictator.

One example Teach gives of this is psychologists: they seem to be people of authority, so they can force you to do things and relieve you of the obligation to act. But they don’t actually have any coercive power they can use to hurt you. He has a nice phrase here, “people prefer power to be on the other side of the glass” (imagine a setting with a psychologist observing you from behind a one-way mirror). They have no real power over you, but complete illusory power. No danger, maximum excuse for inaction.

I see a lot of this in the tech industry. People put themselves in fairly evil positions: optimising addictiveness of youtube shorts to children to increase revenue. Building AGI even though they acknowledge it might kill everyone. Enabling widespread scams in order to collect ad revenue. Yet many workers who build these systems for the tech industry are not sociopaths getting what they can for themselves. They are nerds who are personally quite kind.

If you ask them why they do this, they outsource responsibility to the companies they choose to work for. “I’m just doing a job, they would do it anyways, competitor is worse.” A Teachian reading of this is that they found a petty tyrant, and cheerfully signed up to avoid responsibility for what they do.

There is something similar in politics. For many people, it is better to live under politicians you can blame then do politics yourself. Teach argues that a big appeal of authoritarianism is this abdication of responsibility. We all know that of course direct democracy where everyone votes on every issue won’t work. Teach argues there is a bigger reason we don’t want direct democracy. Direct democracy would mean we are directly responsible for all decisions our government (read: us) makes, which would be terrifying.

In short, if you can find some oppressor to constrain your actions, you have the perfect excuse to do nothing.

Conclusion

Being unable to act independently is so common it is even a major troupe in our fiction.

The standard hero’s journey has a call to action, which obligates the hero to act. It could be a mentor, an authority figure, or some mystic chosen one prophecy. But the key point was that action didn’t come from them and their desires.

The only people acting on their desires in these fictions are villains.

The equilibrium here is quite bad: if good people believe they must be obliged to act, they will mostly not act. The only people acting will be sociopaths and psychopaths who do not care for social norms.

Sociopaths and psychopaths acting while most people do nothing is a very bad place to be. Worse yet, most people will seek out these psychopaths and sociopaths to absolve them from responsibility.

Believing most people actively prevent themselves from acting is quite dark. “People look for reasons to not do anything, from rationalisation to finding people to oppress them” is a very cynical model.

Yet it is also one I’ve started to see a lot after I learned about it, especially when I ask people to do something about things they are complaining about.

One of the most common is a friend or an acquaintance will be ranting about politics. If I say something along the lines of, “Do something, then!”, I now highly expect a certain kind of set of well-rehearsed excuses about why that is impossible.

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As dark as these models of human behaviour are, once we’ve diagnosed the problem, we may be able to do something about it.

Exactly what to do, and yet more dark psychoanalytic models will be the theme of future essays.