Monthly Archives: January 2025

The Premise of Mister Rogers

You, the viewer, are the secret illegitimate child of a Presbyterian minister, who, being otherwise conscientious and aspiring to a high standard of decency and kindness, takes time out of his day, every weekday, to spend with you. He uses that time to talk with you about life, and feelings, to show you how things are made, to introduce you to different sorts of people, to play pretend and make handicrafts, and to tell you that he loves you just the way you are.

He meets you in a house that is not his house, but hangs up his jacket and wears a sweater he borrows from the closet. Likewise for shoes.

He speaks freely of families, of divorce, of all manner of difficulties. The only subject that is off limits is the nature of his particular relation to you. If he loves you so much, how come you don't live with him? Why do you only get half an hour, five days a week? Where does he live, if not here? Who feeds the fish on the weekend?

Predation as Payment for Criticism

A predator's success depends on exploiting specific flaws in prey - poor awareness, slow reactions, weak social coordination. Unlike resource competition or disease, which select based on physiological robustness, predation creates focused pressure on intelligence, pressure which favors the development of consciousness. A cheetah doesn't catch just any gazelle, but the one that fails to notice and react effectively. Prey get better at evading, predators get better at predicting, each side has to model the other's thoughts more accurately - an arms race that eventually rewards both sides for explicitly modeling the other's perspective, the basis for cognitive empathy. If you're glad you're conscious, no need to thank a predator - somebody else already did - by being eaten.

Continue reading

Can Techno-Saints help us cooperate with Cathars?

I hit a communication wall with a crypto-Cathar. The encounter exposed how an ancient heresy's worldview still blocks trust and cooperation. Here's lemonade.

While Calvinism proposed a mechanism by which agency could be recovered from corruption through the intervention of divine grace (Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency), Catharism took the more radical position that material existence itself was inherently corrupting, which means that fully embodied people simply cannot be trustworthy agents.

Continue reading

Marxism as Priestly Strategy, Communism as National Calvinism

Ben: I think I have a decent working definition of Marxism: A commitment to construe {locally and originally economic inequality, globally and convergently adaptive diversity} as conflict1, with a decorative camouflage of a jargon-laden pseudotheory with which a priestly caste can mark itself, and the lure of posturing in favor of victims and the intention to rectify injustice which helps it recruit well-intentioned people.234

Continue reading

The Drama of the Hegelian Dialectic

Let's say within some domain of controversy there are two major perspectives represented, X and Y. X is obviously and persistently wrong on issue A, which Y correctly points out. Y is obviously and persistently wrong on issue B, which X correctly points out. X and Y are cooperating to contain people who object-level care about A and B, and recruit them into the dialectic drama. X is getting A wrong on purpose, and Y is getting B wrong on purpose, as a loyalty test.

Trying to join the big visible organization doing something about A leads to accepting escalating conditioning to develop the blind spot around B, and vice versa. X and Y use the conflict as a pretext to expropriate resources from the relatively uncommitted.

For instance, one way to interpret political polarization in the US is as a scam for the benefit of people who profit from campaign spending. War can be an excuse to subsidize armies. Etc.

Continue reading