It’s Not Real
Summoning the Courage to Reject the World
Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person or that person, this challenge, this deed. Quit the evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in right now. You are not some disinterested bystander. Participate. Exert yourself. — Epictetus
It’s ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain it’s own until the very end. For such a soul will never be at rest— by longing for things to come it will lose the ability to enjoy present things. — Seneca
The first step: Don’t be anxious. Nature controls it all… The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy. ― Marcus Aurelius
‘Far, far away Soria Moria Palace shimmered like Gold’, Theodor Kittlesen
As I look around the Western world I see a huge number of people twisting themselves into uncomfortable and ugly shapes and deforming their values to protect themselves from fear. Fear of what? Fear of loss, fear of unsuccess, fear of judgment, fear of embarrassment. These fears run around and through the lives of many educated and professional people and I believe that they’re an important element in what
has called ‘luxury beliefs’: ideas which are believed and advertised (by high status people) because they make the believer sound fashionable or enlightened or compassionate, and which, if they’re wrong, won’t cause any consequences for the believer but will cause damage for other, poorer people. Defunding the police is one prominent example. The idea that police departments (already struggling with hiring and training and mental health support) should have their budgets cut (leading to fewer police) and the difference given to community programs and social supports was an extremely fashionable idea in 2020… among wealthy progressives. It was deeply unpopular in the neighborhoods which need police the most (including among their black residents) because these people understood the real dynamics of crime and law enforcement in ways which richer people probably don’t. Why was this belief so popular? How did it spread so quickly? How could millions of people propose such a radical idea without doing any research or having any personal experience or speaking to any POLICE? I think the answer is simple. It made them feel good to think, and it made them look good to promote. They were overly concerned with status. To put it another way, they were afraid of the opinions and reactions of the people around them. It was just that none of those people were working class black folks.It seems to be a (rarely remarked upon) social scientific fact that educated / privileged / prosperous folks (which I will just call ‘elites’ here) are particularly conscious of status. Perhaps it’s not a mystery as to why this fact remains somewhat hidden. After all the people doing the noting would all, themselves, be elites (journalists, researchers, psychologists) and people don’t like to think of themselves as conformist or fearful of judgement and social pressure. Conformist and fearful people especially don’t like to think or talk of themselves in this way. It makes them feel cowardly, I imagine. In a sense they are.
In Psychology Today (not always a solid source, it should be noted), Jonathan Anomaly writes:
Because elites compete among themselves for cultural power, they often try to outdo one another in affirming whatever the dominant ideology expects them to say. If the ideology says that men and women are morally equal, a journalist may go further and say not only that they’re morally equal, but that men and women are biologically identical as well.
While this view is demonstrably false, it makes perfect sense that a professor or journalist would publicly endorse it. They are, after all, not so much describing reality as affirming their fealty to an ideology.
Writing about the phenomenon of richer Americans corrupting the college admissions process for the benefit of their kids, Elizabeth Svoboda says:
[P]laying the status game—in other words, staking your self-worth on how others view you—is ultimately self-defeating, as a large body of research shows. Tirelessly pursuing high status is associated with a number of adverse health outcomes, including aggression, addiction, and depression. “If status is your primary goal,” Hurd writes, “you’ll be unhappy without it and you’ll be unhappy once you acquire it.”
Another problem with status obsession, as the admissions fiasco proves, is that it can entice you to stray from your deepest values. When someone else’s assessment of you—or of your children, perhaps as an extension of you—matters more than your own assessment of yourself, you’ll be all too ready to sacrifice the latter on the altar of the former.
From an NIH study:
Relative to middle‐class counterparts, lower/working‐class individuals are less likely to define themselves in terms of their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self‐concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working‐class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely held view that working‐class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat. The fact that middle‐class norms of independence prevail in universities and prestigious workplaces makes working‐class people less likely to apply for positions in such institutions, less likely to be selected and less likely to stay if selected. In other words, social class differences in identity, cognition, feelings, and behaviour make it less likely that working‐class individuals can benefit from educational and occupational opportunities to improve their material circumstances.
More sources:
Elites Publicly Condemn What They Privately Support
The Rise of Post-Competitive Grievance Disorder
Care should always be taken when studies (especially social science studies!) confirm one’s preconceptions. Nevertheless, based on my experience and the literature I have encountered, I believe that high-status individuals are more likely to advertise their political views and judge others on the basis of theirs. I believe that these views often assume a kind of symbolic or fashionable role for the believer and are rarely applied in their lives, leading to public policy disasters. I believe that high-status people are more frightened of consequences (debt, arrest, ostracism) and I believe these fears drive much of their attitude formation and social behavior. They are terrified of the prospect of being fired (for example) in a way that many working class people (men, especially) are not. Fear, in a manner which is often absent in poorer people (who objectively are closer to disaster every day, by definition), brackets and shapes their lives.
, on luxury beliefs:Hollywood often portrays marriage as a trap. Stagnant and dull.
But when you look at the upper class in my beloved home state of California, they are far more likely than average to be married. For example, the marriage rate for college-educated parents in California is 20 percentage points higher than for non-college graduates.
Among the richest zip codes in Los Angeles, between 50 and 70 percent of households are married. Many of the people living in these areas are Hollywood executives and creative types working in show business.
In contrast, in the poorest areas, less than 15 percent of households are married.
Sixty-eight percent of Californians with a college degree say that it is personally important for them to have their own kids within marriage.
But eighty-five percent of Californians with a college degree say that family diversity, “where kids grow up in different kinds of families,” should be publicly celebrated.
My best friends in high school:
1 raised by his grandmother because his mom was an addict and his father was in prison
2 raised by single moms; one of whom had a new boyfriend living in their apartment every other month
1 raised by his dad who was married and divorced 5 times before we graduated high school
…And me, raised in a variety of turbulent situations
According to my fellow Californians, the affluent ones, these different arrangements should be celebrated. The richest Californians say these environments should be praised for my friends and me. Meanwhile they privately make different choices about their own family arrangements.
The Antidote
What is the antidote for this pervasive and fearful concern about privilege, status, the opinions of others? There are several, I think. One is tribulation, overcome. Difficulties only expand your mind and your character when they are summited. It is often not true that “what does not kill me makes me stronger.” Many troubles can weaken or break the sufferer but, if they do not and you emerge improved, you will have gained a priceless boon. I know from experience that mistakes and misfortunes are not, by themselves, indicators of wisdom or care. They’re sometimes (in the cases of arrest or poverty or broken relationships or psychiatric commitment, etc.) rather the opposite. Nevertheless, if you can surmount these troubles and change yourself into a better and kinder person, you will gain real wisdom. Meeting the challenges of life (which will probably be lighter if you’re already disciplined and decent and careful) with courage creates personal growth and lessen the fear of potential and future misfortunes.
Some other antidotes are travel, and education-real education. I don’t mean internalizing some theoretical lens composed by a different status-obsessed Westerner, or reading your assigned 60 pages of history or literary criticism every day in a dorm. I mean learning to think, exposing yourself to radically different ideas and points of views and trying to understand them fully as their believers do. I mean exposure to the great and abiding contemplations of the human condition which still litter our civilization, although they are perhaps less noticed and remarked upon these days).
Education can be conceptualized as travel through the landscape of the mind, journeying to different ideational and aesthetic places and learning their lessons. Travel can similarly be formative; (I do not mean touristing). Travelling around the world and actually seeing how other people live gives one an appreciation for diversity-real diversity: diversity of outlook and culture and belief-and establishes the idea that it is possible to be happy and brave and actualized even while being poor. Having to live in a smaller house doesn’t seem that catastrophic when you’ve seen the shanties of Costa Rica or the mud brick courtyards of Afghanistan. The world is full of wonder and trouble and only someone who’s mostly avoided contact with it can really believe that a college degree is a necessity for wisdom or flourishing, or that people can be usefully sorted according to their political identification.
has an excellent book called ‘Antipode’ (a random selection of which is below- this was my most recent piece of online reading and the chapter which obliquely inspired this essay). In it she describes her time as a graduate student in Madagascar, studying frogs and living in a tent in the jungle or in the towns of one of Earth’s poorest countries. It is fantastic and the lessons which Heying learns and reflects upon while on this massive island are simply things which can’t be taught in a classroom. They are instructions in resilience and the idiosyncrasies of individual personalities and of human cultures.
Kindness is another antidote, by which I do not mean niceness. I mean a deep and applied compassion for others (all others). Kindness provokes curiosity, and empathy. Take a white supremacist (to pick the most extreme modern example): such a creature is now truly the bête noire of the West, a mythical gargoyle whose invocation warrants shutting down any speech or discussion. But, as Daryl Davis recognized, even committed white supremacists (who are vanishingly rare and almost totally powerless these days) are people too. They have loves and beliefs and hopes and their ideas-while wrong-are comprehensible. We can condemn beliefs utterly without dehumanizing their believers.
I would make the same statement regarding members of ISIS. These men (and women) may feature an elevated number of sadistic psychopaths but most of them are psychologically normal people who love their families, are loyal to their friends, and earnestly believe that they are fighting a divinely-ordained war. When you believe that God and Heaven (and Hell) are the most important features of the cosmos the idea of temporal death and loss fades to insignificance (ideologically anyway). The effort in the West to ascribe dominant economic and political motives to them simply because those kinds of motives are familiar to Western academics is deeply asinine. As Sam Harris has said, if you believe these misattributions, “you lack empathy.” Would you kill children and detonate the bomb attached to your body as a response to historical conflicts in your region? Or as a reaction to a dearth of local economic opportunity? You might if you believed it was the will of God and would make you a hero of courage and compassion. Everyone is the protagonist-and not the villain-of his or her own story. In every human situation empathy is a useful tool. It is never not warranted.
“Wisdom is the ability to take your own advice.” I recently heard a wonderful anecdote. You can seek the details yourself if you’re interested but this is not hypothetical. These things happened, and recently. The LA Times declined (at the behest of the owner’s daughter-an ardently pro-Palestinian activist) to endorse a 2024 presidential candidate. A staff member at the Washington Post tweeted, admonishing all of those LA Times employees who had not resigned in protest (several had!). A week or two later the Washington Post announced its editorial decision to not endorse a presidential candidate. The journalist in question deleted her tweet, and continued working at her paper (rather than, say, resigning). Every day you can find her online, confidently opining on dozens of issues with a tone of deep assurance.
It seems clear to me that many people simply cannot bear the idea of failures or embarrassments (much less terminations or resignations) and so they frantically struggle to stay in the middle of their social ‘pack’ and generally do those things which will advance their careers and financial interests. When it comes to ideological conformity I think the impetus is often sub-conscious, but it is driven by fear in any case. This fear reduces their radical postures to mere play-acting. Fear of others drives them to take radical positions; fear of the world (poverty, difficulty, challenge) keeps them from living by them. Naturally misfortune befalls every kind of person. It’s not completely avoidable and our elites bear it (as we all do) when it comes but the prospect of these kinds of consequences and the fear of/concern for the opinions and reactions of others seems to drive their behavior far more than it does others. This is partly due to these people not experiencing as much misfortune as some (for what else is wealth and status, other than protection from misfortune?) and partly due to a narrow range of life experiences and a lack of wisdom about the world and its people. Only someone who has not encountered many working class people at length could believe that working class people are deficient in wisdom or perspective or knowledge of the world relative to college graduates. I would say that when it comes to basic knowledge about human psychology and the interactions of society smart veterans and working class people and ex-cons and immigrants are far superior to the average smart college graduate that has lived an easy life. That is purely my opinion and I would be interested to hear yours in the comments.
These limitations in courage and experience occasion a lack of empathy and kindness. The exercise of really trying to see the world through the eyes of others is only salient when you know many different kinds of people and have travelled widely. These gaps in wisdom and experience (for that is what they are) push people to be intolerant, narrow-minded, and unkind to people who are not like them. They also make them fearful of judgement or financial loss or educational failure. You can’t be principled without also being courageous and you can’t be courageous when the prospect of misfortune is terrifying to you. To compensate for this lack of courage and experience and authenticity people adopt radical and totalizing worldviews and use those (rather than kindness or perception or toughness) as measures by which to evaluate others, and themselves. The whole dynamic is a perfect social machine or creating bitter, suspicious conformists, frantic to avoid offense (of the wrong groups) or difficulty. There are millions of people play-acting at being brave and principled and this is a profound problem for us all.
Rejecting the World
15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
-1 John 2:15-17 (KJV)
Political and philosophical ideas must be salient and useful in the real world if they are to have genuine value. If they are useful they should be used. This is not a biographical essay and my experiences aren’t particularly relevant but I can say with absolute certainty that the lessons I’ve learned from recovery programs and Christianity and Buddhism and Stoicism and social science (discipline, humility, empathy, non-attachment, resilience, sociobiological realism) aren’t just abstractions to me. They are items of wisdom, hard won, and only given shape and label because of the things I have read. I didn’t learn them in books. I read about them in books but learned them in life. The idea of adopting ideas which I do not believe and advertising them for status seems absurd to me. Perhaps that is why I have such a strong emotional reaction to elites who pretend to want fewer police (while relying on police to answer their every call and protect their generous properties) or educational equity (while jealously guarding the privileges and prerogatives of their own children’s private schools from the hoi polloi) or stringent controls on emissions (while flying around the world and building dream homes and buying endless piles of emissions-intensive manufactured goods).
Ultimately the wisdom we all require is the wisdom to reject the world. Perhaps not completely (as the Christian gospels command), but mostly. We should recognize that promotions and luxury apartments and beautiful spouses aren’t paths to happiness. True happiness lies within, and if you spend all of your time seeking external rewards then those possibilities will entrap you and dominate your life. Conversely, losing friends and jobs and homes isn’t the end of the world. These things are unpleasant prospects… but not so terrifying that they should cause you to warp and betray your principles. We should recognize that the opinions of others are fairly minimal and mostly inconsequential. They are certainly not solid foundations upon which to build a worldview or a lifestyle. Marcus Aurelius wrote that “life is neither good nor evil, but only a place for good and evil,” and I believe that to be true. The world as it is and will be what it will be and our level of control is slight indeed. Knowing that, do not be afraid of the future or paralyzed by the possibility of misfortune. And know your beliefs and live by them. That’s probably the surest path to happiness for us all.
“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent— no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.” -Seneca
