Ran Prieur

November 7.

2022-11-07T19:30:50Z

November 7. With the American election tomorrow, I want to go temporarily back into politics. From Ask Old People, What will the US be like if it becomes a fascist government?

One comment mentions the "14 defining characteristics of fascism." That list comes from this article, published in 2003 by Lawrence Britt. But it's not the only answer. Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini, had already published a different list of 14 Features of Fascism in 1995.

I don't like the word "fascism" because everyone agrees that it's bad. In the 1930s, politicians would stand up and say "I am a fascist." Now we have Rudy Giuliani, who totally would have self-identified as a fascist in the 30s, calling his opponents fascist because the popular definition has been watered down to anything the government does that you don't like.

So I want to try to do what I tried to do last week with "love", and look for a low-level definition from which high-level definitions can be derived. And I want the definition to be emotional, because I think it's obvious that people decide what they're going to believe for half-subconscious emotional reasons, and then cook up rational justifications.

I suggest, as the root of repressive human institutions, feeling good about positive feedback in power-over -- and by extension, feeling bad about the erosion of power-over.

So whoever already has power over someone else, you feel good about them using that power to consolidate and increase their power. From that, you can derive everything from supporting China annexing Taiwan, to supporting paddling in schools. You can derive the philosophical belief that humans are basically evil, because that's what you have to believe, to rationally justify solving social problems with more police and prisons (positive feedback in power-over) rather than wealth redistribution (negative feedback in power-over).

The good news is that power-over makes people stupid. Surrounded by yes-men, they make bad decisions, no one likes them, and inevitably they fall. So whatever happens tomorrow, or in the even scarier 2024 election, I just remind myself that Hitler only ruled Germany for 12 years, and I might live to see the pendulum finally swing the other way.

November 4.

2022-11-04T16:00:15Z

November 4. Continuing from yesterday, when I say "Love is feeling good about it, whatever it is," I'm not holding that up as the true and only definition, only suggesting a useful way of thinking. What I like about it is how low-level it is. It doesn't require a relationship or even another person. I don't want to exclude, from my definition of love, something like loving the sound of rain.

But if you want to get from there to a high-level definition, like Erich Fromm's in The Art of Loving, the path is to practice feeling good about feeling good, whether it's another person or yourself. And then you can continue the recursion: feeling good about feeling good about feeling good, and so on, sensing your way out into the universe.

Related: last week I mentioned Bruno Latour, and this Aeon article is the best explanation I've seen of what his deal was. Bruno Latour showed us how to think with the things of the world. Basically, Latour was an anti-reductionist. Reductionists are like, look, I've boiled down this complex subject to only one thing, and now we can ignore all that other stuff and just focus on this. And Latour was like, no, you can't do that.

Because he wrote about the social construction of facts, he might seem like a radical relativist, but he was the opposite. You can't just believe anything you want -- you have to unpack your belief, look at the actual things that it came from, and go out and engage with those things.

November 3.

2022-11-03T15:50:32Z

November 3. Psychedelics: a personal take is the report of someone who was very lucky: "After I did psychedelics for the first time, I waited for that magical feeling to go away, waited to slide back into a vaguely anxious numbness. It didn't happen."

Yeah, the only permanent effect I ever got from psychedelics is seeing the beauty of trees. Everything else fades when the drugs wear off. That's why I keep using them once or twice a year, to remind me of the mental state I'd like to have all the time.

When the drugs don't do the work for us, we can still do the work ourselves. So I've been edging closer to that mental state by grinding through numerous practices, and it's all obvious stuff. Get out of your head and into your body. Move your attention to the present moment. Be grateful for small things. Talk to yourself the way you'd want a friend to talk to you. Be curious and non-judging about your own emotions. Have fun, but don't do anything you know is wrong.

A lot of people come back from psychedelic trips with the insight that love is all-important. I'm sorry, but that's not helpful. Everyone is already in favor of love and no one can define it. So I've been casting about for a practical application of that insight, and this is what I've come up with.

Love is feeling good about it, whatever it is. If you can't feel good about it, feel good about feeling bad about it. If you can't feel good about feeling bad about it, feel good about feeling bad about feeling bad about it.

A lot of us look at the world in search of what's wrong with it. I don't know why, but this is such a strong urge that it has taken over the media. On Ask Reddit, "What's something everyone likes that you hate?" gets way more comments than "What's something everyone hates that you like?"

Sometimes I think fate is like TikTok: it gives you more of whatever you're looking at, even if you don't like it. But looking at things you dislike, and disliking things you look at, are simply habits, no different from physical habits like grinding your teeth or slouching. The cure is to make a commitment to watch yourself, and calmly correct yourself, about ten thousand times over several years, and gradually the new habit will take hold.