Normativity and Anti-Normativity

reconciling with that which doesn't want to reconcile

A concept that’s been floating around my social circles, and my blogging, for the past several years, is normativity.

My friend Hazard even created an “anti-anti-normativity starter pack” that contains a lot of my old posts. How much I still agree with what I once wrote varies — my writing has often grown out of conversations, and sometimes it was more of an attempt to articulate someone else’s perspective than my own.¹

I’ve long had a conflicted relationship to normativity, I think I’m not the only one, and I think it’s an important issue that’s at the root of a lot of showier (psychological, political, etc) issues that are very visible in 2024.

But, anyhow, what do I mean by normativity?

What Is A Normative Stance?

Normativity is the view that good is better than bad.

In other words, you can rank or evaluate things, some are better than others, and it is preferable to make things “better” rather than “worse”.

A strong normative stance would say that this is literally always the case — it is always preferable to make things “better”, there is never a reason for leaving them “worse” on purpose.

• Good is always better than evil

• Just is always better than unjust

• Following (good) rules/norms/principles is better than breaking them

• Effective is always better than ineffective

• Competent is always better than incompetent

• Success is always better than failure

• Rational is always better than irrational

• Correct is always better than incorrect

• Smart is always better than stupid

• Beautiful is always better than ugly

• Strong is always better than weak

This is hard to argue with; it’s close to tautological.

But it presents a very demanding standard.

A hard normativist will never say “I am bad” or “I am making the wrong choice” or “my belief is false”. He will only say “I made the wrong choice (and am changing my behavior)” or “my belief was false (but I changed my mind)”.

Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2008:

It is, I would say, a general principle of rationality - indeed, part of how I define rationality - that you never end up envying someone else's mere choices. 

Being rational means you’ll never say “I expect to regret this choice I am making, relative to some other choice I could make.” Never ever ever. You are literally always “trying your best”.

For a lot of people, literally always trying your best seems daunting, even impossible. Surely you don’t always have to try your best? Surely a more reasonable, humane approach would be to mostly or sometimes try your best? After all, you don’t want to exhaust yourself or burn out.

The normativist will respond that this isn’t actually an argument against normativity, it just means you need to emphasize an inclusive concept of “trying one’s best.”

If you think something has catastrophic downsides (like exhaustion or burnout), then you already don’t think it’s the best thing to do!

If you think relaxation is necessary, then normativity says to relax!

It’s a little bit like this perspective shift — an omni-benevolent perspective, by definition, incorporates all concerns, including concerns that there’s something wrong/bad/harmful about what the omni-benevolent perspective says!

If you “fold in” everything that matters into your value structure, then tautologically, being “absolutist” or “optimizing” isn’t going to lead to disaster, it’s going to give due consideration to avoiding any disaster you fear, including unknown-unknowns.

Hard normativity is a demanding standard, but not a stupid one.

It does not ask that you beat yourself up for tiny flaws, like a stereotypical Tiger Mom yelling at her kid for getting only 99% on a test.

Normativity says that tiny flaws are flaws, but tiny ones — proportionality matters.

Normativity, by itself, doesn’t tell you how to decide which things are flaws (or failures, errors, transgressions, injustices, etc) — that depends on the specific norms being used.

Normativity just says “if it really is a flaw, you should correct it”. (And, conversely, “if you really shouldn’t correct it, then it isn’t a flaw.”)

Normativity, by itself, doesn’t forbid any object-level behavior at all; what it forbids is more like “low self-esteem” or “perversity”, deliberately lingering in zones you already believe to be bad.

What’s Anti-Normativity?

Anti-normativity is the intuition that absolute normativity would be really terrible.

Intuitions like:

• I can only feel safe around people who are:

  • non-judgmental, tolerant, understanding, validating

    • i.e. won’t shame me for being inadequate or “bad”

  • “cool”, transgressive, antinomian

    • willing to violate conventional morality

  • ashamed or insecure themselves

  • likely to make exceptions to the “rules” for people they like

  • genuinely relativist in their belief system

    • don’t believe in a hierarchy of “better” and “worse” at all

    • don’t believe in objective “truth” at all

    • don’t believe that it matters whether someone is “right” or whether their feelings are “based on reality”

• Being “normative”, doing the right thing or believing true things or being your best self, all the time without exception, is disastrous

  • impractical:

    • following a fixed, mechanical playbook will drive you off a cliff in the Real World (and normativity inherently requires robotic rigidity)

    • following moral principles strictly will get you clobbered in the Real World (and morality inherently requires doing things that predictably turn out badly)

  • undesirable:

    • being relentlessly goal-oriented makes you:

      • miserable and stressed

      • callous and cruel, convinced of your own superiority and entitlement to oppress your “inferiors”

      • unreflective and tunnel-visioned, unable to consider other perspectives

    • being a moral absolutist makes you:

      • an annoying scold

      • a dangerous zealot

    • being strictly rational makes you:

      • humorless, uncreative, dull

      • cold and unemotional

      • socially awkward

The intuition is that it’s actually really important to sometimes do things that are “bad”, “wrong”, “incorrect”, “dumb”, “irrational”, “crazy”, “crappy”, “weak”, “ugly”, etc.

That being bad-on-purpose, at least a little bit, is somehow an essential nutrient for a life worth living.

Now, a normativist may see this and go “oh, I get it! it’s important to do some things that superficially seem bad or suboptimal, or are conventionally considered taboo, but that’s not actually bad.”

Like, “you say you want to make a “bad” sketch, but that’s not a bad thing to do. Getting rid of inhibitions and sketching quickly is a great way to improve your art! You don’t actually need even to deprecate the sketch, the “bad” label is at best a clunky hack to get over immature perfectionist anxieties and eventually you’ll move past needing it.”

A genuine anti-normative attitude will resist such reframes.

There will be an insistence that “no, it really is bad, I really do think what I’m doing is bad, and it is important to me that I get to do the thing and that I get to consider it bad.”

There’s some attachment to the negative label itself, some sense that it would be “terrible somehow” to give it up, even though the particular ways anti-normativists claim it’ll be terrible are quite implausible.

Strawmanning Normativity

Someone with a genuine anti-normative attitude will reliably strawman normativity as dumb and terrible.

One great example of the way normativity is strawmanned as cruel is the saying “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

I mean, think about it literally for a second.

It’s insane. Of course an eye for an eye doesn’t leave the whole world blind! Not everyone gouges out people’s eyes, jfc!

There’s this intuition that “justice” is cruel and thus you need it to be tempered with “mercy”. That is, if you consistently treated people as they deserved, if you always enforced the penalties for breaking laws, then something incredibly horrible would happen like condemning everybody to death or torture or blinding.

This is bogus!

No reasonable person wants everybody to be dead, blinded, or tortured! Someone pursuing justice simply would not design a system of laws and incentives that predictably had that result!

If enforcing your laws consistently would result in a hellish amount of punishment, then your laws are too restrictive and your punishments too severe.

You don’t need “mercy” to let a few people off the hook in an unprincipled manner; you need actual justice, i.e. not hanging your entire population on hooks in the first place!

People consistently have this intuition “if we admitted this thing was at all “bad” we’d have to punish it really harshly” and that’s just not true. Mild disincentives exist! You can mildly disapprove of things, or charge a fine for them, or make the default option something else, or allow people to experience the natural negative consequences of the thing!

There’s a lot of similar completely inaccurate strawman assumptions about normativity, stuff like:

• If you think you’re better than other people in some way, you must want to oppress them or force them to be like you

• If you believe in “reason”, you must be opposed to emotion and/or imagination

• If you believe in “trying your best”, you must believe in cruelly punishing every mistake

• If you believe in “holding everybody to consistent standards”, those must be unrealistically high standards

• If you believe in “doing the right thing” you must believe in self-sacrifice to the point of self-destruction

These are not only untrue, they aren’t even really natural misconceptions.

You wouldn’t ever come up with the idea “I want to get the right answer to this math problem so I must become totally numb inside” on your own. I have a six-year-old and when he solves a math problem there’s a lot of excitement (or frustration) and a very dramatic delivery of…THE ANSWER.

The idea that doing things “right” is a sort of tyranny of boringness and/or suffering is…at best an exaggeration of a much more modest sort of discomfort. But more likely it’s a sort of cover story for something else.

What’s Really Going On: Mistrust

The normativist may insist that he wants only benign and reasonable things — he’s not tyrannical or punitive, he doesn’t want to force everyone to follow “his rules”, he just thinks you should believe only true things, and always do your best. “Seriously, this is basically a tautology, it’s barely a claim at all, how does anyone actually disagree with this?!”

The most honest anti-normative response, I think, is just “I don’t trust you”, or even “I can’t trust you.”

It can be something like this:

“I was burned in the past by people who divided things into Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, True and False. They ranked some people as better than others. They were cruel and unfair; they didn’t see things in a nuanced way; they labeled me “bad.” I don’t trust anybody who makes those kind of absolute value judgments to really take my concerns into account or sufficiently understand that what seems or gets labeled bad might be good actually.”

“I expect the things I value to be low-status or inarticulable; I don’t trust that they can be included in the metrics of the people who trumpet their desire for Excellence, Strength, Winning, Virtue, Rationality, or Goodness. There are things I love that will never appear in a self-righteous proclamation; people will seek them in silence, or shamefacedly confess to them, or defiantly wallow in them, but nobody can call them good. And anybody who tries to call them good doesn’t really understand.”

“You can tell me all day that you mean me no harm, but I won’t really believe you, emotionally, until you show me. And you can show me by showing me that you have suffered the same kind of damage as I have.”

“If you don’t identify as having dark desires, or at least “human foibles” that you’d hate to be pressured to “correct”, then I’m just going to assume that you hate my “human foibles”, my bad-coded motives. Emotionally, being around you feels exactly the same as being around the mean authority figures who punished me for my “foibles”.”

The normativist may complain that he doesn’t deserve this much mistrust, but that’s not really how it works. You can’t get people to trust you by demanding their trust, even if their mistrust is unfair or pathological.

Wiggle Room For The Shadow

Anti-normativity feels like an imperative to “leave wiggle room” for things that cannot be defended on their merits.

Like, “please don’t invalidate my emotions, it doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong” as opposed to “actually my emotions reflect my (correct to my knowledge) beliefs about the world.”

Recently I saw a debate about whether “Pluto is a planet” is a false statement.

One side was basically “Categories are human creations, scientists voted to redefine “planet” so it doesn’t include Pluto, that was a categorization choice based on value judgments not an advance of knowledge.”

The other side was basically “yes, deciding that Pluto isn’t a planet is absolutely an advance of knowledge, some definitions are better than others, and it was learned by recent astronomers that there are tons of solid bodies in the solar system that are just as big as Pluto, so there’s no reason to categorize Pluto as a planet but not hundreds of other things.”

And then there’s this:

2005 SOLAR SYSTEM ONTOLOGY ORTHODOXY DEFENDER CHALLENGE: ACTUALLY DEFEND 2005 SOLAR SYSTEM ONTOLOGY ORTHODOXY RATHER THAN HOLDING SPACE FOR A DEFENCE FOR SOME REASON

This is a statement of normativity.

“If you believe it’s actively good for any reason to define “planets” such that Pluto is a planet, then argue in favor of “Pluto is a planet” — if not, then just accept that Pluto isn’t a planet and the old ontology is worse than the new. But don’t “hold space” for an idea, insist that it shouldn’t be criticized too much, defend its adherents, if you have literally nothing good to say about the idea itself!”

At this point, I got pretty bothered.

From the anti-normative perspective, this is a rather cruel dichotomy.

Either a thing has to be good, and I have to come up with some positive claim in its favor, or I have to accept that people are right to call it bad?

Why must I only do things that are good? Why isn’t someone allowed to believe Pluto is a planet?

The normative perspective here would be “Of course you’re allowed to believe whatever you like, I’m not going to literally command your thoughts, I am just saying some thoughts are better than others because they reflect reality better.”

But the anti-normative perspective isn’t always satisfied with that.

It seems terribly unfair that for everything I do, or everything I believe, I should have to either assert it to be a positive good, or renounce it. I do want that third option of “holding space”.

I’m not, myself, attached to Pluto being a planet, but I am attached to lots of things I don’t expect to be able to defend in verbal argument.

I also don’t love the option of saying “I can’t articulate my reasons, I don’t expect to persuade you, but I am convinced this is true/good” in the face of skepticism — from the inside, in that situation, the thing I’m attached to doesn’t seem True or Good. It feels like sort of “cheating” to consider something Normative privately if I can’t prove it publicly to a skeptic.

Thus the plea for “holding space” or “nonjudgmentalism” ends up being loadbearing.

“It’s not that there’s any particular reason to consider Pluto a planet, but it isn’t exactly wrong to hold that opinion, and we shouldn’t be hard on people who hold it.” “It’s not a big deal”, “it’s a harmless opinion”.

Maybe this can be interpreted as “don’t scapegoat/condemn/punish people who think Pluto is a planet” — but the normativist would insist he’s not doing that to begin with!

What’s really going on is that the anti-normativist doesn’t trust the normativist not to scapegoat, and also doesn’t feel safe making “private” normative claims that can’t be proved to a skeptic.

True normativity is “always do your best”, not “always do what you can prove to be your best to a skeptical stranger” — the latter really would be an unreasonable expectation.

In order to live normatively you have to do a bunch of stuff based on controversial, hard-to-explain, nonverbal, or otherwise private information, that might look like gobbledegook to a skeptical stranger. If you can’t act on your private information, while still considering yourself to be actually (if unprovably) doing your best at all times, then you’re going to have a powerful need to have “space” held exempt from the “tyrannical” reach of normativity.

The anti-normative conviction is “I’m wrong, yes, but what you don’t understand is that it’s okay to be wrong.”

The normativist is confused by this. What could it even mean for it to be “okay to be wrong”? Like “don’t persecute people for their opinions” is fine, “there are no negative consequences to having the wrong opinions” is obviously extremely false — is the anti-normativist saying something banal or something perverse?

But the underlying thing is more interesting. The anti-normativist says “I’m wrong” from one perspective (the “inner critic”, let’s say, who’s highly condemnatory) and “but it’s okay” from a different perspective that (secretly) has some disagreements with the inner critic and sees some positive value in the supposedly “wrong” thing.

(If there were no perceived positive value, there would be no motivation to insist that “it’s okay to be wrong” here — it would be easy to renounce the “wrong” thing.)

This is just inner conflict. There’s a secret, private, “shadow” perspective that actually sees value in the supposedly “wrong” thing but doesn’t want to talk about it or even admit it.

And so the anti-normativist constructs this whole “don’t be judgmental”, “it doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong” edifice to protect the secret “shadow” perspective from the cold light of skepticism and criticism.

Unsilencing

Elsewhere in the Pluto discussion, someone was speculating that people want Pluto to be a planet because they’re nostalgic for the things they were taught as children. This hypothesis was conveyed with a lot of scorn. Obviously that’s a bad reason to believe anything!

But…okay, back up a second. Nostalgia, if that’s really what’s going on, is more real, more worth paying attention to and integrating, than this “don’t judge” stuff. “Don’t judge” is an abstract generalization — but it’s protecting concrete things. Those things are interesting. Worthy of investigation, whether or not they ultimately turn out to be worthy of approval.

(This is one of my own semi-controversial views, something I can’t fully prove to a skeptic — that introspection is worth doing, that finding out what’s under your own tarp is a very real and essential process.)

Fundamentally, whenever someone is pushing in the direction of “being too good would make life just awful” or “you don’t want to always be rational” or whatever, there is some secret shadow desire they want to get away with.

Is the “shadow desire” an innocent motive that a person’s society/upbringing has traumatized them into being ashamed of, or a genuinely sinister/malevolent motive that they’re trying to hide? It could be either! (Or both.)

The point is that the person wants to do something they think is bad…but also kinda think is good, in a way they don’t feel able to talk about or look at.

To “own” a motivation, to fully face up to it, you need to be able to frame it in its own terms, as something positive that you value, not just as something that you call “bad” because you anticipate other people will have a problem with it.

If you know that you tend to do a thing, and even consciously you have a sense that you really don’t want to give it up, but all you can call it is a “bad habit” or “character flaw” or whatever, then you haven’t really brought it out of the “shadow” zone. Your motivation needs to be able to speak for itself, to show its own perspective.

Otherwise you can’t balance it against any other consideration. If you don’t know why you want a thing, if you’re stuck at “the devil made me do it”, you can’t actually weigh the pros and cons of doing it! The “pro” column is hidden!

This is how a hypnotist describes using a technique called “anchor collapse” to overcome a fear of dogs:

Say you're afraid of dogs. You don't want to be afraid of dogs, of course, because you like dogs and everyone knows that only some dogs are mean. You can't just "decide" to not be afraid of dogs, are you kidding? That's just how brains work. It's a conditioned response and you can't just "decide" not to be conditioned - besides, don't you think you'd have done it already if you could?

Well yeah, you can't write the bottom line first. That's your problem. However, you can decide whether to be afraid of dogs. And you don't want to even consider deciding to be this afraid of dogs because we all know that would be stupid - and you don't want to be stupid, so you deny that the other side of the argument even exists. "There's no reason for it"/"its irrational"/"I have a phobia".

This even happens over things we normally like to think we have control over, like physical behaviors. If the fear is so irrational, then there's no real risk of petting the dog, right? Go pet the dog... Oh, you "can't". Because you're afraid. Right.

But let's be real here. Dogs bite. I've been bit. If you're phobic, you've probably been bit too. If you give yourself some room to not worry about looking stupid and look at the facts, there's a reason to be afraid of dogs. You can't guarantee you won't get bit again, and getting bit really freaked you out. You really don't want it to happen again. Once you admit this you can start to frame it as a decision.

…

So you've admitted that yes, the dog might bite you, and that would be really bad. But you still want to pet the dog! So you tell me "jimmmy! I want to not be afraid of dogs so I can pet them!"

"So pet the dog"

"But it might bite me!"

"It might"

"But I don't want it to bite me!

"You don't. And if it does, it will be real hurty. Have you considered that maybe you shouldn't pet the dog?"

"But I want to pet the dog!"

"Then pet the dog"

"But it might bite me!"

...And we can go on all day like this. You're wanting to pet the dog and not be afraid, but you're also not wanting to get bit. As if there's anything I can do about it. The risk is part of the territory.

But you won't make your decision. You won't shit or get off the pot. You're keeping the desire to pet the doggy separate from the desire to not get bit. So it goes back and forth and there's this inner conflict.

And the way people often handle these is to just get sick of the struggle and suppress one side. "Okay, I know its a nice doggy so I'm gonna pretend that I'm okay with risking getting bit when really I'm not and I'll just suppress that". Only what they actually say to themselves is more like "I know its safe. I already decided. The fear is irrational and I want it gone."

But that's not shitting or getting off the pot. That's not collapsing the anchors. The two desires are still separate, so that's not actually deciding. You just decided to tell yourself that the toilet is actually the most comfortable seat in the house.

But that's nonsense. Of course you don't want to get bit. Who wants to get bit? Getting bit is hurty and bad. And you want to pet the doggy. At the same time. Of course you want to pet the doggy. Doggies are cute and nice. And you haven't let yourself go there because "I can't have it so I'm not allowed to think it" but you really wish you could pet the dog with no risk of it biting you. It's the best of both worlds. It would be really nice to pet the dog with no risk of it biting you.

…

The interesting thing is what happens the moment you stop holding the desires apart and experience them both simultaneously. This is collapsing anchors.

And it goes something like this...

I want to pet the doggie, and if I do, I might get bit.

...

...

...

(Seriously, give it a moment. Shit takes time.)

...

Is it worth it?

Am I willing to stick my hand out and pet that dog knowing that there is some chance that the dog is going to bite it?

And then you sigh a bit. And then you're silent. And you picture not the separate issues of petting (good!) and being bit (bad!) but the combination package of getting to pet the dog but maaaaaybe getting bit.

…

If your answer is yes, then you can say "yes, I want to pet the dog, even knowing that I might get bit. I still want to pet the dog because it's worth it. I want that package deal where my hand gets bit sometimes."

Or if your answer is no, then you say "No, I don't want to pet the dog. It's not worth the chance of getting bit". And that's the end of it. It's not "but I wish I could pet it and it wouldn't bite me!" because you know that comes with the territory - it's a dog and you can't predict them perfectly. That "but I wish..." thought just feels pointless. Like "of course I wish! what's your point?". Like "Wouldn't you like a million dollars to just fall out of the sky?" "um, sure? who wouldn't?" - but the thought doesn't hold your attention.

And either way, there's no conflict. No two separate desires. Just a congruent choice coming from a decision you had not made before.

That’s pointing at the same phenomenon I’m talking about. To get rid of inner conflict (like a phobia), you have to actually weigh the pros and cons, let them balance against each other. No compartmentalization. No taboos. No labeling something “irrational” instead of letting it speak for itself.

In a weird way, this is being non-judgmental, but in a way that means something almost diametrically opposed to the kind of non-judgmentalism that says “I don’t care if it’s right or wrong, it’s okay by me and I won’t look too closely.” It’s “I’m giving this motivation a chance to make its case, in its own language and its own frame, that it’s actually for realzies Right and Good. I’ll zoom in super close and look right at it, and see what it really IS, which I can’t do if I’m distancing myself by labeling it Bad.”

You’re only going to be anti-normative if you want to protect a shadow desire that you’re convinced is bad-but-secretly-good in this knotted kind of way. And you’re only going to have that kind of knot if you can’t let the “it’s bad” and “it’s good” perspectives interact with each other.

(Real) Empathy

One thing that has often bothered me is that people get very into exhortation to do the right thing, or condemnation of those who do the wrong thing, without ever getting around to dealing with the motivation to do the wrong thing.

Why do people want to do #BadThing? What does it feel like, from the inside, to want to do it? What value, real or apparent, does #BadThing offer people? What happens if the perspective that sees it as valuable gets to talk to the perspective that considers it “wrong”?

In what sense (if any) are people who do #BadThing misguided or confused? Where did things get mixed up, and what (if anything) would get them un-mixed-up?

This is where people tend to get annoyed.

“But “somebody really wants it” is not a justification or an excuse for anything! It’s still wrong, no matter how they feel about it!”

Well, one way of looking at it is that a robust understanding of why a thing is wrong requires you to know why, even if you fully understood what it was like to want to do the thing, even if you imagine having that motivational pull towards doing the thing, you would still on balance choose not to do it.

Like, what countervailing considerations, reasons, motives, etc, would still be compelling to someone who desired to do the thing?

Otherwise, you sort of…only oppose it in a fragile way. Your opposition to the sin can’t withstand empathy with the sinner. In a sense you don’t REALLY know why HE shouldn’t do it, only why YOU shouldn’t.

Maybe, as an individual, you don’t need to do that; it’s not your job to be everyone’s therapist, after all, and you don’t need to have some kind of deep empathetic understanding before you’re allowed to criticize or engage in self-defense.

But I do see a need for somebody to be trying to do this work. Whenever it seems to many people that some pattern of belief or action is a Big Problem in the world, I’m going to think it should be understood psychologically. It should be understood from its own perspective, and somebody should be trying to synthesize its perspective with the perspective that thinks it’s a Big Problem. Otherwise the conflict will persist and recur.

I do believe that a lot of “human nature” really is shared, even though individuals and cultures differ. We all have the psychological equipment to murder and to model (and empathize with) murderers, for instance — otherwise murder would be really rare in history and prehistory, and it wasn’t.

Cain didn’t kill Abel because he was a “monster” — he killed him because he was jealous and angry. Well, we get jealous and angry too.

We should expect the basic motivational building blocks of most human actions to be comprehensible to us, familiar from our own lives and the people we know, though maybe pushed to extremes we’ve never seen firsthand.

That means that “how do I help someone stop being That Way”, “how do I prevent someone from becoming That Way”, and “how do I prevent myself from becoming That Way, or change if I already am” are important questions, because That Way is persistently in the human repertoire.

And for that you need empathy.

(Which requires letting That Way speak for itself, and seriously considering the possibility that maybe it’s Good Actually, at least in some contexts.)

Empathy that just shows patience and understanding and doesn’t integrate with the negative judgment is no good either.

“Oh poor baby you’ve had it so hard” isn’t actually interfacing with “You committed an atrocity”, the two are compartmentalized, so no progress is actually getting made. The gears aren’t connecting.

Another example: “Intellectually I suppose you’re right” and “But people like you just give me such a bad vibe” — there’s no interaction there.

Where does the bad vibe come from? What would have to change to make it good? What is the thing you’re keeping vague and “vibey” because you don’t dare be candid about something more specific? Can we get from the wishy-washy “I suppose you’re right” to “I know deep down you’re right” or “Actually I have some doubts”?

Typically people aren’t patient with “vibes”, and certainly not with trying to tease out intelligible meaning from them. The reaction is more like “you can’t articulate it? Ok, you lose the argument” — forgetting that “winning the argument” verbally doesn’t actually win the other person’s long-run cooperation in real life.

Psychological talk gets demonized as unproductive, but my sense is that when you’re doing it right it’s absolutely vital and we all crave the Real Thing on some level. It’s extraordinarily satisfying to connect with people about the thing that seems most crucial in life at present, to understand and be understood, and to work towards things making sense. The fact that so many stabs at Figuring It Out fail doesn’t necessarily mean that the overall mission (and practice) is a bad one.²

The other day a friend pushed me to reconsider my belief that “I’m irrational”, which was really helpful in this vein. I had to think about “ok, what are the things that are so important to me that I definitely want to keep, that feel “irrational”, and are they maybe…not irrational after all?” And my answers are tentative but I found the exercise helpful. Just because a thing gets called bad or stereotyped with a pejorative word doesn’t mean it’s literally a Bad Thing in my all-things-considered opinion. It’s an actual question, and it’s helpful if we push each other to ask such questions.

1. as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to have stronger boundaries about this sort of thing; if you ask me to use my blogging platform to promote an idea, I’m going to be much more picky about being sure that I myself fully stand behind that idea.

2. Though I do admit that some people seem to have gotten major life improvements from a sort of “shut up, drop the issue, just do a meditation practice/focus on day-to-day responsibilities/work out/Get Religion/etc” approach. I can’t imagine dropping the discursive/introspective life myself, but credit where credit is due, it does work for some people. (Some even claim it’s best for everyone — but I can’t take their word for it!)