[GUEST] The Ledger
Where we track who does what and hate people we owe
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.
A key concept in the author Edward Teach’s psychoanalytic book Sadly, Porn is The Ledger. The Ledger is the idea that people constantly track what others do for them and what they do for others, and build up a tally of who owes what. That people track who owes what to whom isn’t controversial.
Indeed, as Gabe points out in an essay about the same concept, it’s not surprising that we track our history of interactions with people on an intuitive level.
Tracking who does what to us is very useful, so we should track this. But we meet too many people, too often, to explicitly track everything.
Instead, we have a vibe, a feeling, an intuition, something tracking our interactions with others. This something is what Teach calls The Ledger.
Teach is very cynical about The Ledger, and documents many ways in which it can break down:
People hate owing other people
People hate others getting more than they got
Losing something is fine as long as other people lose more
Someone doing something only counts for the ledger if it is something that isn’t expected from them
In this essay, I will go over Teach’s models of how The Ledger can be used poorly.
Similar to my previous essays, 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.
People hate owing others
You may expect people to want to collect as much as possible to get as much as possible from others. But, according to Teach, this is very often not the case. If others do more for you than you do for them, that means you owe them. If you owe them, you need to do work for them in the future. Doing work can be hard and painful.
So people hate depending on others. They also hate the people they depend on. Conversely, people like making others owe them.
Teach’s version of this often looks crazy. He has a rather insane reading of The Giving Tree, a children’s story where a tree gives increasing amounts of itself to a boy. As the boy grows from a child to a man to an old man, the tree gives shade and a place to climb, her own limbs and trunk to the grown man for wood, then a stump for the old man to sit on.
The tree gives unconditionally to the man. She gives him her wood to make a boat to survive, even though she destroys herself in doing so, and gets nothing in return.
According to Teach, these gifts are often presented by others as unconditional love. In Teach’s view, the tree is increasing the boy's debt to it. As a result, the tree is happy because the man is deeply in debt to the tree. Conversely, the man resents the tree, as in his Ledger he is deeply indebted to it.
I do not remember The Giving Tree well enough to judge Teach’s interpretation, but I think the story clearly illustrates his point.
I have personal examples of this. I've seen people who are disabled resenting their caretakers, and seen others resenting friends and family who give desperately needed help and money to them. However, in none of them can I narrate what is happening cleanly.
I’ll also often see people be very hesitant to offer help that I freely give. However, if I ask for favours, they are much more comfortable giving favours. This effect is common enough that it has a name, the Ben Franklin effect:
The Ben Franklin Effect is a psychological phenomenon in which a person likes someone more after doing them a favor
Wikipedia's explanation is something twisted enough to come from Teach:
The effect can be explained with cognitive dissonance: individuals rationalize their helpful actions by assuming they must like the person, since their behavior would otherwise conflict with their typical behavior and self-perception
Teach would add another explanation: the person doing a favour implicitly marks a debt to the recipient and can feel good about it.
I’ve definitely been here before, more willing to help than be helped.
People hate others getting more than them
Teach does have examples of a more standard version of a ledger where people want to get as much as possible. However, it manifests itself more negatively than positively. Rather than trying to get more than others1, people hate it when others get more than they do.
His examples are typically obscene. Imagine if you have sex. If you have sex with a stranger, it makes sense that you try to equally satisfy each other. You do not know each other; the whole point is to enjoy yourself. The Ledger remains balanced. Say you pay an escort for sex. You get sex, they get money. The Ledger is still balanced, and you can both go your separate ways.
Instead, say you have sex with your partner, and they enjoy it more than you. That would mean they got more out of it than you. If this were a stranger and you both tried your best, or one of you was paying the other, fair. But this isn’t the case; you and your partner are supposed to be equal.
They are thus getting one over you; they are getting more than you. Even though they are your partner, that doesn’t matter. Why should they get more from you than what you get from them? In Teach’s story, a husband in this position gets very annoyed that his wife may be getting more out of his relationship .
This type of envy-driven spite2 is quite common. Resenting someone who is better paid at the same company is common, as is people resenting others who are more beautiful than them. An archetype in our culture is a family falling apart over an inheritance over who gets more than others, with huge amounts of spite between previously loving siblings.
Spiting ourselves to hurt others
The insane logic around ledgers also leads to another fucked up thing: people will hurt themselves to hurt other people more. If I lose 10 points and you lose 100, that is good.
In Teach’s obscene stories, from a husband getting bitter that his wife may enjoy sex more than he does, what does the husband do? He could try to improve their sex life, so they both get a lot more. But rather than doing that, the husband finds excuses not to sleep with his wife at all. This costs him the value of sex to him, but as it costs his wife more, he is happy. He becomes stuck in an asexual relationship! But his wife gets hurt more because sex was better for her, so it is worth it to him.
This type of spite occurs in many, many places.
Depressed teens who hurt themselves to hurt their parents. Family members who engage in self-destructive behaviours like blowing up during holidays over small issues may ruin their holidays, but at least they get the pleasure of ruining everyone else’s. Voters cut their own government benefits to enjoy seeing others’ cut. In the culture wars, if destructive behaviours hurt the other tribe, it is worth it even if we are getting hurt ourselves.
In the culture war, everyone does it, but there is a great quote that is unusually blunt about this from the annals of racism in America. A Republican strategist Lee Awater said about trying to get racist votes:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “{n-word}, "{n-word}, {n-word}.” By 1968 you can’t say “{n-word}”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
That is, he was attracting voters by promising to hurt them, but hurt people they dislike more!
Only extras count
Another part of the ledger is that you do not credit others for what they are supposed to do, only for actions beyond that. This leads people to ignore the core tasks they are supposed to do and instead do performative extras instead.
In Teach’s reading of The Giving Tree, the tree is explicitly not a parent. A parent has responsibilities to a child, such as disciplining the child when they misbehave. The tree just gives. However, many people see the tree as a selfless mother to the child. To Teach, speaks to the fact that they don’t see normal parental duties as counting. A parent would only get credit for selfless sacrifice. So the tree isn’t docked points for not doing basic parenting duties, but is credited for its sacrifice.
When it comes to The Ledger, only things you show as performatively selflessly above and beyond actually count.
I see this surprisingly often, too.
Indeed, parents are rarely given credit by society for the core, routine tasks that make up being a good parent. Governments often ignore core governance functions, such as maintaining physical infrastructure. Instead, they engage in performative nonsense to gain credit with voters. In many offices, routine maintenance work is rewarded less than shipping shiny new features, even though maintenance is more critical to company success.
At Google, this led to a culture of “launch and leave” and a series of updates that made established products worse. To get promotions, people would constantly ship new projects without maintaining them. The end result of this is a massive graveyard of projects, many of which had real promise and many users. While I have had friends mention this, the clearest quote I can find is from an ex-googler Michael Lynch3:
Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it.
My quality bar for code dropped from, “Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?” I didn’t file or fix any bugs unless they risked my project’s launch. I wriggled out of all responsibilities for maintenance work. I stopped volunteering for campus recruiting events. I went from conducting one or two interviews per week to zero.
Basic maintenance was devalued in favour of launching shiny new products, regardless of the actual long-term impact of the new project.
The Ledger, revisited
Some of these examples above feel incongruent and contradictory to me. We both want to be owed, but hate others getting more than we do? If I want people to owe me, wouldn’t that be a good thing if my partner got more than me when we had sex, or my sibling got a bigger slice of cake?
This would indeed be contradictory if The Ledger were, say, an accountant's ledger, where we carefully recorded each entry. After each day, we could then painstakingly check records against each other to make sure they all made sense.
But a big point that comes across throughout Teach is that people aren’t coherent. Again, as Gabe points out, being explicit about all of this would be too expensive.
As we do not write down points in a real ledger, The Ledger is a purely mental construct operating on vibes. It is very easy for vibes to be a contradictory mess, and even easier for them to be contradictory in ways that benefit us.
And so, when we dislike owing others things, it is because we dislike having to do work for them, which is painful for us.
When we see other people happier than we are, it is far easier to resent them than to work to make ourselves happier. So spite and resentment are the default.
When we have spite and resentment, it is easy to get more joy from the suffering of others than from any suffering we have experienced along the way.
And why should we credit people and owe them for work they had to do anyway?
Conclusion
Having an implicit Ledger is necessary, but Teach points out many ways in which it can break down into pathologies.
To be honest, this is the hardest essay on Sadly, Porn for me to write up to this point.
I struggled with writing out Teach’s examples. I struggled to find non-trivial examples of my own that I was happy to share.
Beyond simple examples, Teach is deeply cynical and does not discuss the benefits of The Ledger or ways to improve how we approach it.
This is true of all points in Sadly, Porn, but this was one of the harder ones for me to construct better responses to and not be left in a deeply cynical place4.
Nonetheless, I hope my attempts at constructing what The Ledger is, and how it can go wrong is useful.
I do think it is an important model to have.
—
With that depressing note, I hope you are enjoying my series on Sadly, Porn! I am about halfway through my essays on models I got from the book.
Once I finish those, I’ll have a more constructive essay about what to do with all of these models, then finish with a true book review.
Enjoy :)
Credit to Doug S. for pointing out “spite” is better than “envy” here
The hackernews thread is also quite illustrative
I didn’t even see the point of how The Ledger is necessary until Gabe shared his essay on it with me.