Embracing outsidership

I confess to everything Musa al-Gharbi says

Where it all began

Musa al-Gharbi's essay on clever 'thinky' people being the most groupish, dogmatic and cognitively rigid is a must-read.

Quite long, so please remember to come back.

Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling

I come from the milieu he calls 'symbolic capitalists' but which can variously be referred to as 'the PMC' (professional-managerial class), 'knowledge workers', 'desk jockeys', technocrats, 'pointy-heads' and other less flattering terms for the broad 'intellectual' elite.

Low down in the pecking order (journalist, PR consultant, blogger, standard Batchelor of Arts Honours degree) but I'm somewhere in that class.

We are the sort of people who like that kind of article, but tend to apply the insights by looking outward rather than inward.

In a nutshell (if you haven't read it already) we are those who most cleave to our own beliefs and pronouncements for fear of peer disapproval.

Something clicked when I read it.

For some time I've been curious about my personal transition away from progressive leftishism.

It came to a head when I was pleased to see the re-election of Donald Trump and then said so in writing.

The story I always told myself (and subscribers here - albeit in good faith) was that I made a conscious choice to broaden my news and analysis sources. That way I came to more clearly see the bubble I was in, along with more of the information that never penetrated it. Blah.

This change in information consumption did happen and it did reinforce a process of changing perspectives. But it wasn't the root cause.

Something loosened something before I was able to relinquish doctrine. That had to happen before I was ready to see other viewpoints.

Reading al-Gharbi's essay revealed it to me.

It was overcoming the fear of openly being myself.

I was always scared of people I cared about thinking less of me.

Or that people I might need for something (work, sex, companionship, whatever) might back off, seeing me as 'low status' or morally corrupt.

This is because more or less everyone in my significant orbit has always been similarly minded. I can count on one hand the number of people I have been closely connected with who weren't leftish-liberal in their perspectives.

Over the course of a lifetime, that has its own reinforcing quality.

It suggests how you ought to be.

What's expected.

Our social and economic connections really are ties that bind.

Even as recently as 2 years ago a work colleague (who hadn’t read it) offered to promote Rarely Certain to everyone on a business Slack channel and I told her not to.

I was working with people who had pronouns on their Slack names and I'd sat through a 'training' on 'micro-aggressions' and the CEO had announced at one 'Town Hall' that he was 'determined to make this an anti-racist business'.

As a contractor, with no employment rights, it was more potential trouble than it was worth having people who don't know me properly read pieces like this.

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For a while I thought my switch away from lifelong doctrine had kind of spiritual and noble roots. It didn't.

Originally there was going to be an essay here about escaping from my head and establishing a more embodied state being the key to realising that much of modern progressivism is questionable and perhaps even unhealthy.

It would have talked about high falutin things like manhandling rocks in the cold rain to build a wall prising me out of the simulacra of narrative and placing me in the material world where ridiculous but rhetorically powerful declamations on various forms of 'correctness' have no heft.

And how Jean Baudrillard's concept of 'hyperreality' describes much of mature liberal culture and that you can't beat recognising the actual reality of being cold, wet and bone weary on a November afternoon during a global pandemic.

But all I'd have been doing was to construct a veneer of intellectual justification (based on some Googling of things I haven't actually read) for suddenly becoming a lot more economically right-wing and culturally conservative in my intuitions.

Instead, I'll tell you what was really going on.

But first …

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As a callow youth, immersed in musical culture with peers who were massively into things like Ska and massively against the fusty old Conservative Party twats who ran our world, I was left-wing by default.

It was never thought about.

I wanted the troops out of Northern Ireland because of course I did because that's what the edgier kids at university wanted and waving flags and placards instead of studying looked sexier than being a boddish cautious type who was principally concerned about bombings and kneecappings and all the stuff the Irish republican movement was doing to get independence.

[En passant, I understand why students are now so hot for the Palestinian cause while breezily overlooking myriad unpleasant facts. It's what you do when you're a kid. And because you tend to gravitate toward people with whom you can enthusiastically chat in a frictionless way, your beliefs become more social in origin than the result of active cognitive labour.]

Not that I was a fake, as such. The racism of the National Front and people thinking that homosexuality is wrong or disgusting pissed me off. I was an ordinary liberal organism with some ideas about acceptance and idiocy which have never shifted. Perhaps just a product of my time.

Having no downwardly redistributive tax system to speak of also pissed me off, but that was because I was subject to feelings about things that I didn't really understand, like economics and how markets work. This seems normal and healthy for a young idealistic person who is a recipient of easily-obtained state largesse and has never been exposed to anything other than the flattening of economics into 'selfish' or 'fair'.

Another phrase to describe that me is 'milquetoast socialist'.

Various factors supervened to shift this, starting with exposure to the radical academic leftish of Twitter and ending with the pandemic.

Enough has been said already (including here) about the hypocrisies, fantasies, cunningly constructed narrative artifice and general obnoxiousness of that milieu. Were I to say that I didn't leave the left but that the left left me, it would be somewhat self-serving as well as unoriginal. It's a factor, but there's another more important factor.

I simply gave up self-censoring because I cared less about potential social penalties for expressing the 'wrong' views.

We all think we are being ourselves when really we are often operating under layers of influence to fulfil the expectations of others.

This is where Musa al-Gharbi's points are a personal epiphany.

It was the winter of 2020 and I was alone. Like, properly alone. Cut off from my routine of working in Britain every fortnight. And I was indeed lumping heavy rocks around in the rain and feeling embodied and bone-weary at the end of each day. All that was happening.

Pandemic in full swing, I was in lockdown (France did a lot of this). I was off Twitter and not spending time with the usual people who expect me to express the conventional sentiments of our class.

The relinquishing of milquetoast naive socialism was just me becoming me and not caring what anyone thought about it.

There were some penalties, in terms of the occasional awkward dynamic, which I won't go into. But the sense of liberation - being able to wonder about things rather than leap to conclusions - was worth the price.

Hard to explain, but there is something crushing about conforming to your own myth to the extent that you actually believe it. It’s actually worse than conforming to external influence.

Reading al-Gharbi's piece it was impossible to avoid seeing that all of "our cognitive and perceptual systems are fundamentally geared toward self-advancement and coalitional struggles".

Cowardice seems to be a default state for socially-oriented beings. Women I wanted to sleep with would never get to hear of my scepticism around their claims of a 'patriarchy' oppressing them because it might cost me the chance of getting laid. Cowardice in the interest of self-advancement.

Here I want to congratulate 'young up and coming Substack star' (my description, which I hope he winces at) for risking his chances of getting laid by publishing this. Whether his arguments are 'correct' or not isn't the point. He's saying reasonable things that often come at extraordinary cost.

There's No Patriarchy

It’s not over yet. There is no happy ending. Just incremental improvement.

There are opinions I haven't revealed here (yet) because they will piss off certain people in my personal orbit who expect me to be in the tent pissing out, rather than my preferred vantage point outside the tent just observing the scene. "Maintaining or enhancing the standing of ourselves and the groups we identify with relative to 'others'".

So I've ended up reasonably persuaded by the points al-Gharbi makes, around belief-formation being rather more of a social rather than rational function. Partly because mine started to seem questionable the more alone I was.

Nate Silver gives a more easily digestible version of the 'fitting in' motivation here.

For most people, politics is about fitting in

I don't care what anyone thinks about anything except when I notice that their position is predictable, based on their identity, but they are insisting that they arrived there by a process of careful thought and reflection. That just annoys me, whether or not I agree with the substance.

You can see the group cohesion function of ideological belief every day on the ultimate forum for ‘knowledge worker’ membership credentials known as LinkedIn.

I look at all the people among my professional connections celebrating and agreeing with sentiments anathemic to my sensibilities and avoid chipping in to call bullshit because I'm scared.

My class of knowledge worker seems very adept at policing group membership by never shutting up about the plight of women, Palestinians, various gender identities or sexual orientations, this or that situation quite unrelated to our field of work.

But of course these things are tangentially related to our field of work because we are the sort of people who worry about those things. We are knowledge workers. That's how you can identify a knowledge worker. They think all the correct, if idiosyncratic anti-commonsense things, as al-Gharbi argues. And I have internalised these as the identity papers I need to be part of the group, which is why I didn't push back on the worst example of not minding your own fucking business I've seen this year.

In a way it took physical separation from my class, thanks to a tiny pathogen, to allow me the space to breathe and be more myself.

I think many of the same things that people outside of my class think and this threatens my good standing in the group, because we are supposed to sneer at outsiders.

I notice that my class is every bit as biased, incurious, unenlightened, selfish, hypocritical and self-deluding as the people they despise. Because that is our condition as humans in a complex society with lots of moving parts and competing interests. Mine too. I'm thick as a brick when it comes to seeing through the fog to any essential truths. But I know it and they mostly don't. Or won't.

Turns out that I'm not "declining to apply information we have about the world to ourselves and the institutions and groups we identify with" and it feels fine. That’s progress.

I'm even enjoying the thought that it is possibly possession of limited rather than superior intelligence grounding me at this point. I don't see many people being cleverer than me while also reporting the kind of subjective wellbeing I tend to experience a lot more of the time than I ever did pre-pandemic.

I know the answer to would you rather be right or would you rather be happy in my case.

There is still work to be done. I may not be cravenly conforming to group and peer expectations with approved pronouncements, but I still need to have the balls to say more than I do in support of many things that get 'normies' sneered at by their supposed betters.

I still need to become me.