'But why do you care?'

A bit of philosophy around moral framing, status assertion and social policing

Trying to open an incurious mind is like this

Cognitive abstraction is hard work. We come at things with prior intuitions and it’s easier to use those as a kind of armour off which all other perspectives must bounce than to start a process of understanding from scratch.

This holds, even among quite sophisticated people who know a lot of facts in certain domains.

It’s why we’re always at an impasse with others who have strong opinions and it’s the main cause of flattening; when an obviously complex issue is reduced to simple (usually moral) certainties.

The tensions caused by accelerating immigration and forced mixing of incompatible cultural values are easy to see but hard to address without hurting someone’s interests. Exactly the same problem arises with the tensions that obviously arise with maximalist transgenderism.

Because it’s hard work to think seriously about the philosophical implications of things we’ll tend to just pick a side and then bat for that team.

Then the business of actual discussion of the issues gives way to entirely focusing on the framing as legitimate or not, asserting one’s social and moral status and attempting to police the conversation in more or less subtle ways.

If you spend any time on philosophical abstraction you’ll know all the moves by now.

Familiar examples are:

1. Portraying scepticism about the messaging and proposed measures around climate change as outright climate denialism. Climate change is real and that’s an end to any argument about it. You anti-science person.

2. Positioning concern about immigration as implicit racism. Those migrants aren’t directly affecting you, so your concern is not legitimate. You right-wing media stooge.

3. Pigeonholing sceptical views on maximalist transgender ‘rights’ as bigotry. Why do you care that someone identifies as their non-biological sex. You transphobe.

4. Framing enthusiasm for AI agents as total trust in outsourcing all thought to machines. So you don’t see any problems with errors, hallucinations and slop then.

The process is something like this:

• Flatten the issue into a simple certainty.

• Frame it as if that is the only possible truth.

• Declare dissent as a moral failing.

• Police expression of dissent by inserting yourself into conversations, typically online.

The reason that the term ‘midwit’ came into being is because this tendency is often manifested by quite intelligent people who are nevertheless resist cognitive abstraction. They are verbally fluent while also being somewhat intellectually unsophisticated in a philosophical sense.

Midwits are clever in a limited way, highly attuned to status and personal position in the social pecking order and typically driven to police others by framing a dissenting opinion as morally rather than intellectually questionable.

This is why you can’t argue with a midwit. They’re good with words and you’re usually talking past each other anyway.

What inspired these thoughts was a couple of reactions I received to an observation I made on Substack Notes. Both came from people with whom I had no previous interactions and who presumably have no idea what Rarely Certain is about. They were archetypical, which sparked my curiosity to get a bit analytical with it.

Here’s what I posted.

In a country, you are a citizen.

In a monarchy, you are a subject.

In a regime, you are a thing to be managed.

One way to identify whether you’re in a regime is by calling a government helpline. So I just called one in the UK and was greeted with a long opening pre-recorded preamble about the primacy of respecting the staff, how abusive language will not be tolerated and that any infringements of these dictums may result in prosecution under the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

I only wanted to ask someone a question.

H/t David McGrogan

[I tagged McGrogan because he’s an academic philosopher who explores law and modes of governance and writes extensively about the emerging features of regime-style government in Britain.]

Reply 1: Oh good lord, this is the softest shit I’ve ever read. You’re feeling oppressed because you got an automated preamble reminding you not to abuse civil servants? Cut me a break.

Reply 2: I don’t think Barbara, working the phones in Durham, is part of a regime. And even if she was it isn’t nice to phone her up just to verbally abuse her.

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I noticed that these replies shared something in common, which was failure to engage with any aspect of the original frame.

There was no ‘what makes you see this in terms of regime governance’? There was no attempt to understand the basis for connecting the instantaneous positioning of me as a potential risk to the wellbeing of staff on the other end of the phone with the idea of a system of control.

State-citizen interactions do not necessarily involve abusive interactions and so there has been a choice made to launch every conversation on that helpline with a conduct warning and threat of prosecution.

Both replies skipped passed my framing and used different rhetorical tactics. There was no attempt to address preemptive tone policing in state–citizen interactions. Instead, they reframed my words as something implicitly bad.

I imagined them both coming across my Note and feeling sufficiently moved by it to start tapping on their screens in the way they did. It seemed slightly sad, because I remember doing this myself all day long until a few years ago. Jumping on people for saying things I didn’t like.

Let’s look more closely at the anatomy of this phenomenon.

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Let’s break down these replies to understand them better

Reply 1.

“Oh good lord, this is the softest shit I’ve ever read…”

1. Classic online contempt

This was just a status attack. The person was attempting to establish dominance by signalling that my thought about the preemptive call policing was beneath consideration. They weren’t even bothering to mount an argument because they were too busy positioning themselves in a social sense. This seems to be 99% of behaviour in people with strong ideological identities.

2. Attempting to reframe my observation as emotional weakness

I made a suggestion about institutional tone which was recoded as personal fragility:

• “you’re feeling oppressed”

That was a classic move. I’ve made it myself, often enough to understand it completely. It comes from an urge to avoid any actual cognitive effort in analysing a system by just diagnosing the speaker’s psychology instead.

3. Straw-manning

My proposition was thereby repositioned as a desire to be free to abuse staff on the phone.

There is a layer of the original proposition which suggests that the presence and tone of the message I heard indicates something about governance style, but that layer was stripped out for convenience. My interlocutor saved themselves the bother of thinking about it by pretending it wasn’t there.

4. No attempt at falsification

No counter-argument was offered, even though it would be quite simple to make one. They could have said that such practices exist in many other contexts that don’t qualify as regime-style situations. Or maybe that the cost to me of being kind of talked down to before I even open my mouth is outweighed by the cost to someone feeling stressed by an abusive caller.

That they didn’t offer anything like that tells you that the reply performed only one function. This was boundary policing. They were merely signalling that my interpretation of the experience was socially illegitimate.

Reply 2

“I don’t think Barbara… is part of a regime…”

1. Tone: superficially reasonable but structurally evasive

This one particularly tickled me because it’s quite trollish. It establishes the illusion of calmness via a kind of try-hard shrugging device. I used to do this too. Someone would rile me and I would come back with a sort of ‘chintzy’ chilled couldn’t-care-less riposte. Notably, it doesn’t address the actual proposition.

2. Making something seem concrete and simple, thus avoiding any abstraction or complexity

I was talking about systemic signals and how messages of that sort may align with regime modes of governance. But this person reduced it to an imagined harmless person who deserves to be spoken to nicely.

• “Barbara, working the phones in Durham”

By introducing an imaginary human face - good old Barbara from up north (which makes her especially ordinary) - they distracted from the system-level observation by making it about interpersonal ethics.

Whether my interlocutor actually thought about it in this way is debatable. I’m guessing they saw a typically right-wing talking point and conjured up poor Barbara, who only wants to do her job without people being mean to her as more of a knee-jerk reaction than having thought about it at all.

3. Introducing a category error - one of the oldest tricks in the book

Inventing Barbara meant that my interlocutor could implicitly suggest that I see her as a regime actor. Lol.

This was just less cognitive effort than thinking about what the structure and tone of a system says about regime features or characteristics.

4. Moral inversion - another popular one in the goodies’ playbook

There’s a norm that no reasonable person would violate, so they presented that to me as one with which I presumably wouldn’t agree. Albeit falsely.

• “it isn’t nice to phone her up just to verbally abuse her”

Now it’s all about me defending abusive callers and not caring about civility.

By sidestepping the substantive original point almost zero cognitive energy needed expending.

Posh people in academia call this a deflation strategy. This is the function of the reply for this person. It brings the issue down from the airy heights of political theory to everyday politeness, thus making me look unreasonable.

Nothing was learned. Which amused me because when I checked this person’s bio it explicitly stated that they are on Substack to find out about things.

What’s interesting to me about those two replies was that, despite their stylistic differences, they refused to acknowledge the existence of anything interesting in what I’d mentioned. In doing so they represented lazy drive-by political slop of the kind that first rose to prominence on Twitter.

I was interested in institutional signalling and philosophy of governance because the writing of David McGrogan has made me think more about these things - and more attuned to their various signs.

But my interlocutors stayed down at the level of personal or social behavioural norms and emotion.

Again, this is familiar. I used to tell people they were ‘butt-hurt’ because they were complaining about something. I did this for years before learning how to actually think about anything.

The tactic is always to avoid a core claim entirely by distracting and distorting it into something that it wasn’t about.

It could have been interesting if either of them had asked me whether the language of a pre-emptive behavioural control really can indicate anything about state posture.

I’m not wedded to the idea that my example really says much at all beyond the influence of unions on the subject of workplace harmony and the fondness of institutions to cover their arses with policies to protect their workers from feeling bad. It was just a thought to throw out and explore. It was interesting that a philosopher liked it, which suggested that there is a there there.

Given how David McGrogan argues so persuasively about the shift from citizen to managed object in bureaucratic and technocratic complexes it definitely felt that way to me when I called that number. Our lives are influenced by myriad tiny accumulating interactions and living in the country that turned faceless processes into an entire employment sector designed to oppress and extract from its citizens this has made me more highly attuned to the signs.

There could have ensued a conversation about what I was getting at, but that’s too much like work. Easier to substitute easier targets, such as my personal temperament or my desire to be free to behave badly toward Barbara (or, in fact, the helpful Sean who had worked there for 7 years and gave me everything I needed in an efficient and mutually friendly manner, as it turned out).

There’s something here about avoidance of abstraction by collapsing it into anecdote. I was using an anecdote to propose a potential heuristic but my twin interlocutors treated my Note as a literal complaint about a single phone call.

But it was a useful experience in teasing out some predictable resistance patterns I notice all the time, when people want to avoid cognitive labour on political and ethical issues. I’m guessing that my Note triggered a few of these.

• Discomfort with regime language applied to a familiar democracy. Regimes are something that happen to other people, far away, not in Britain.

• Preference for interpersonal framing over structural analysis. After all, it’s a lot less effort to discuss norms of politeness than models of governance or the consequences over over-managing things.

• Low tolerance for ambiguity. What’s more ambiguous than a tentative diagnostic heuristic like the one I proposed? There are no hard metrics to fall back on and so everything becomes moral. This is why tone, language and inference are so beloved of leftishists.

I’m being slightly flippant, but actually I find this kind of interaction tiresome and uninteresting. A couple of incurious people took it upon themselves to question my attitude to staff deserving protection from abuse and even whether abuse matters, when that was entirely irrelevant.

But at least I tried to highlight something that seems interesting to anyone who can conceive of political philosophy beyond the establishment and imposition of normative standards.

Despite those uninteresting replies, the question still seems worth asking.

When a state increasingly addresses citizens as potential risks requiring behavioural pre-management, what does that say about how it conceives of its relationship to them?

Neither reply engaged with that proposition at all. They redirected away from it - one with juvenile snark, the other more gently and humorously, but just as evasively.

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I mentioned earlier my sense that most conversations about hot button issues involve mostly talking past each other, rather than ever really engaging head on. This anecdote serves to illustrate some the of the underlying mechanism for that.

It’s about a mismatch in abstraction levels leading to rhetorically evasive shortcuts to the steady state of not really having to trouble yourself with the airy fairy detail of certain questions. It’s rarely about intelligence, which is why it can be so exhausting and frustrating. Someone with whom you disagree on something might be highly intelligent but either too uncomfortable or incapable of operating at certain levels of abstraction.

In these situations the discussion often descends into collapsing the issue in a quest for non-ambiguity along with a host of other things; moral reframing enabling status signalling, avoiding analytical burden and personal stabilisation. By this I mean that when a claim threatens someone’s worldview, rather than address it directly they will often retreat to a norm that they can defend confidently. That’s the motte and bailey approach you hear so much about.

None of it would matter much to me were it not for a personal predilection to raise my hackles at over-confidence. My personal bugbears are confidence paired with shallow understanding and reversion to obvious simplistic interpretations instead of accepting that things are typically layered and confusing.

When normative anchoring - clinging onto rules about how things should be in an ideal world instead of the one we really live in - overrides analytical curiosity I just switch off. The same applies when I see aversion to certain perspectives rooted in personal identity.

I suppose I was reminded of an old lesson. Most replies you’ll get on short-form platforms will lack depth, curiosity and rigour because that’s the nature of the medium. It doesn’t reward cognitive effort but it does reward status signalling.

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Looping back to the heading up top, I want to close on the classic ‘why do you care?’.

This is because my moral scepticism makes me highly attuned to moral moves in disputes.

The classic use of this is to undercut a carefully constructed argument about issues that are heavily freighted with moral implications. Immigration and maximalist transgenderism are the main areas where this move is pulled.

On the face of it ‘why do you care?’ is positioned as a request for motivation but really it’s a normative challenge. It shifts everything away from truth values to the question of whether the issue is even worth examining - and what it might say about you if you think that it is. It’s a classic pivot because once the focus is on your motives, rather than the facts, the actual issue can be bypassed.

That’s how cognitive effort is avoided, with the bonus of signalling your righteousness.

If I had a magic formula for avoiding all these moves I’d give it to you, but there’s not getting around human nature. We’re mostly lazy, status-seeking apes because that’s worked well for the last couple of million years.

My disappointing incurious interlocutors were, in the end, just creatures of evolution.