conversations i had at manifest’25. very not verbatim.
day 1
oh hey! you probably don’t remember me, but we met in DC around a week before your life got slightly destroyed?
huh? it didn’t get destroyed!
oh, fair enough actually. um, slightly exploded?
exploded, yeah! i think it’s been mostly more good than bad, really.
huh, okay. i have some friends who’ve been through the same thing, and it was really rough on them even if it was also beneficial. how are you holding up? having the entire internet yell at you must have taken its toll.
oh no, i’m doing absolutely fine! it doesn’t bother me.
wait, really?
yeah, i’m just built different. anyways, as a result i ended up here and i had a photoshoot with aella! have you seen it? no? wait, let me pull it up for you. aurgh, one moment, i need to scroll a bunch to get to it because i’ve been tweeting a lot.
—
oh hi! i’ve, ah, been reading you for a really long time. do you mind if i sit down and chat with you a bit?
oh not at all, please.
thanks. im jenn. um. i really like what you write, obviously. i respect your thoughts a lot. and so when you kind of got the pronatalism brainworms-
sorry, did i do that?
um, i think you posted about it a bit?
i recall only posting about pronatalism in redacted, redacted, and redacted, and those were all somewhat tangential to the issue of pronatalism.
ah. um. you made a joke about it in redacted?
yeah but that really was a joke. sorry, i need to clarify my stance here. it’s actually really important to me to convey that [incredibly reasonable and nuanced analysis of the pronatalist community as it currently stands that i can’t really do justice to here].
oh! yeah, er actually, all that makes a lot of sense and i agree with all of that. so now i’m going to feel really stupid saying this next thing to you. i, ah, ended up donating eggs because of the pronatalism. that i guess was floating around the entire scene but not actually endorsed by you specifically?
i’ve been going through the penguin great ideas series at the pace of one a week, wanting a better grasp of the breadth of the great conversation outside my little bubble. overall it’s been an extremely rewarding experience: the curation work has already been done by someone who seems like a very thoughtful editor, llms now exist to help me interpret extremely difficult passages and trace intellectual lineages, and a wonderful and insightful friend has generously agreed to go on this journey with me, thus ensuring that i always finish a book before our standing wednesday meeting.
i have many thoughts on what i have read! stay tuned for when i pass judgement on the validity of the entire western canon in 2027, which is when this survey will conclude, inshallah.
one thing i’ll say for now, half a dozen books in, is that i really, seriously didn’t expect the misogyny to be as bad as it has been. i thought i’d be in for some paternalistic bullshit that i’d be able to handle fine. these were civilized men i was reading, after all.
i thought that the women who loudly proclaimed their disgust at these dead white guys because of their supposed rank misogyny were being a little too precious. maybe even using that as a convenient excuse?
well, mea culpa. i’m sorry, women.
i’ve now been exposed to so many entirely brand new arguments about the inadequacies of the female sex. they’re so lurid i literally don’t think any formulation of contemporary sexism can ever hurt me ever again. (please dont test this theory.)
the most gutting part of all this is that the thinkers i’m reading are, by and large, good! i like the way they think and write (or are translated), they’re clearly making a good faith effort at following good epistemic norms, and they have interesting and provocative takes that are worth pondering. i keep finding myself thinking “oh this guy would totally be a rationalist (complimentary)”, multiple guys in a row, until the figure ground inversion came for me. (like, montaigne prescribed a set of epistemic habits that gets you 75% of the way to rationalist ones literally 500 years ago!)
and then, like clockwork, all that careful reason seems to go right out the window the moment they start talking about women.
i thought i was getting the hang of it, somewhat. im developing new and ludicrously lower standards for what is acceptable and not acceptable to say about women. im learning a posture of detached ironic curiousity,”alright, lets see what weirdass allegations about womankind this next guy’s gonna punch me in the face with.” i actively have positive affect for orwell because he studiously did not talk about us at all, that is how low the bar is.
im developing the requisite emotional callouses, is what im saying. i am somewhat resentful that i have to do so in order to engage with the canon, but it is what it is! and no one can accuse me of being unwilling to get my hands dirty for the sake of intellectual development.
then i got to schopenhauer, and despite all this bracing, he still kind of broke me? his essay on women was the first essay in this project that genuinely hurt my feelings. (here it is for posterity but i want no discussion of it where i can see it, please.)
i liked the schopenhauer essays that were before this one so much! i thought he had a wonderfully bleak sense of humour and was good at updating all the way, to conclusions that felt just taboo enough to be thrilling. and i thought he was maybe secretly a bit of a softie – the trick he plays on you at the end of On the Suffering of the World is actually quite adorable. then, unceremoniously, i had ice water dunked on me in the form of his hatred for my gender. and this just. sucks so bad?
it sucked so much that i started flailing around for… meaning? a reason? and developing almost like, a sense of betrayal at the curator of these volumes. like, okay, sometimes the book is just one long essay, and the misogyny inside can’t be helped. in those cases, there’s really nothing i can do except try to enjoy the occasional insane claim embedded in these genuinely fascinating theses to the best of my ability:
oh, it’s remarkable to you, mister sigmund freud?
but in other cases, the editors handpicked 4-6 essays from oevres that spanned dozens if not over a hundred pieces of writing. and in that case, why waste the precious space inside to include one on their extremely outdated and noxious ideas about women?
well, once i calmed down from my womanly hysterics, i realized that perhaps this was actually a useful question to ask. what were the publishers trying to convey?
occams razor: these essays demonstrate an essential part of their worldview and philosophy, and/or were influential at the time, and so they should be presented without comment or judgement.
perhaps something a little more sophisticated: “look how these otherwise brilliant thinkers systematically abandon their epistemic standards when it comes to women. patriarchy is the mind-killer!”
that seems plausible as a thing a progressive-minded classicist reprinter might have thought worthwhile to communicate, in 2005.
a too cute theory that i like anyways: perhaps the editors were trying to gesture at the limitations of even really good epistemic norms. if women were deliberately and forcefully kept intellectually stunted by their society, even the most rigorous thinker would have had very little counterevidence to really work with. the inferiority of women would have been baked right into the observable reality they were trying to analyze. and our current discourse norms are likely just as helpless against whatever blindnesses our own culture has engineered.
i would like to believe that! except it lets these guys off the hook too much. schopenhauer’s mother was an intellectual in her own right, and his philosophical idol, goethe, vastly preferred her company to his. wollstonecraft had also already published a vindication of the rights of woman more than half a century before, and hes clearly living in a culture where this is a live question. so there’s motivated reasoning or willful ignorance at play here.
in any case, i do kind of wish he would stop trying to hammer this point home, or whatever point he’s trying to make. because the diatribes are still pretty unpleasant to read, and there are 114 books left in the series (of which only eleven are written by women).
anyways, i’ll keep reading, and ill try to… somehow… contend with and minimize the amount of misogyny i pick up along the way. perhaps i’ll go on a two year survey of feminist writing afterwards as a corrective. i shall start with the scum manifesto.
Scott posted this today, as an excuse to ask his readership about when they first became “conscious”.
I think my answer is that I disagree with the premise.
My first intense memory is of shame. I was the pampered and adored first born of my extended family, all of three years old, and my parents had recently bought me a pretty extravagant toy: a child-sized, functional electronic keyboard. Through their words and actions, they made it clear to me that this was an object of high value, and I liked that they loved me enough to buy me something precious. They were lightly admonished by the extended family for spoiling me with it, and that only made the gift sweeter. I think I liked playing with it too, but I’m not so sure.
One day I was throwing a tantrum about something or another. In my rage, I took the keyboard and I smashed it on the ground with all my strength in an attempt to break it, because I knew this would hurt them. My parents went pale and anguished looking at me, but instead of feeling the ugly triumph I was expecting, new sensations flooded my body. Uncertainty about the correctness of my actions. Guilt. And confusion – my parents did not have emotions that last forever, nor did I want to hurt them for an eternity. Yet when precious objects broke, they broke forever and cannot be fixed, and had to be thrown away. Obviously this tradeoff was not worth it, so why did I even do what I just did?
This isn’t consciousness, I was not conscious at three years old.
In second grade, while walking down the stairs of my elementary school for library time I had a sudden thought: I read a lot of books, but all the books I’ve read had happy endings. I resolved to write the very first story with a sad ending when I grew up, and it would blow everyone’s minds.
By the time the class got down to the foot of the stairs, I’ve realized that the world is too large and too strange for there to be no sad books in existence. It’s much more likely that they just don’t give that kind of story to seven-year-olds, because unfortunately the grown ups think that we’re babies. When I learned the word “tragedy” a few months or years later, I felt a pulse of satisfaction, like sliding the last piece of a puzzle in place.
This isn’t consciousness, I was not conscious at seven years old.
I had a lot of existential angst in my pre-teen years. I hated living in the suburbs, I hated all my so-called friends and their petty girl-drama, I hated all the hypocrisy and cowardice that I saw in the world.
When I read my diaries from the time, all I see is a seething ball of anger. But I also remember writing down the words that I did, and how self-consciously I wrote them to mask all the despair and confusion in said anger, because I was afraid of the depth of my sadness.
Does one require consciousness to feel existential angst, and to hate the hypocrisy and cowardice that they see in the world and in themselves? To consciously(?) attempt self-deception?
I started writing outside my diary a bit in my teens, you can see some pieces here: me at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. They’re dreamy and reflective and often quite melodramatic. When I think about my teen selves, they still don’t seem quite conscious. Does one require consciousness to reflect and to think about the shape of the future?
I also discovered the rationality community around that time, and started having a bit more “you can just do things” energy – using Luminosity!Bella‘s three favourite questions (What do I want?, What do I have?, and How can I best use the latter to get the former?) in decision making, reflecting how to fall into soldier mindset less during discussions, and starting to concretely prepare for the future (doing research on universities, actively starting to try hard at school, creating a budget and saving up money from summer jobs and stuff to make sure that I can afford my creature comforts when I moved out). But the amount of “you can just do things” energy I had then so much less than I have available to me today, so it feels weird to call that conscious.
I think my late teens to mid twenties was a bit of an interregnum; I was so busy with school that I didn’t have time to grow. Maybe as a side effect, I started getting a little into the Catholic Worker Movement. To this day, Peter Maurin’s general principle has often come to my mind: “[It is not enough to be good], we must make the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good.”
(Dorothy Day, reflecting: “But to make the kind of society in which it is easier to be good! One needs to be happy in order to be good, and one needs to be good in order to be happy. One needs Christians in order to make a Christian social order, and one needs a Christian social order in order to raise Christians. So it goes. “A vicious circle” is the term one usually hears, but this cannot be called vicious.” I of course reject the need for specifically a “Christian social order”, but the circularity here is an interesting koan.)
But school’s been done for a while, and I feel myself changing again. Here’s a few things about being alive that I really only started to internalize in the past few years:
You can actually just do things. (But I think this is also confounded by the fact that it’s literally true that my range of motion has expanded, due to increases in my resources etc). Change careers, write cold emails, exchange money for goods and services that make you happy.
Actively practicing at things will make you better at them. Actively practicing, with deliberate reflection on what you should attempt to improve upon and what you should be aware of in your practice, will make you better, faster.
(this one is kind of embarrassing lol) You can actively choose to switch from gross to fine motor control mode of all your appendages when you need to, e.g. when you are practicing a new sport, and this will help you actually learn how to move your body in new ways. You do not need to flail your limbs around clumsily and hope for the best when trying a new thing. It is not actually the case that you only have fine motor control of your fingers! Oh my god Jenn did it seriously take you freaking twenty seven years on this bitch of a planet to figure this one out.
So where am I today? More than half the time, I still feel like I’m sleepwalking – it’s just that the options that are available to me when I’m sleepwalking increase over time.
On a good day, I feel a bit of the spark, and I can nudge myself and my environment so that the path I take by default is a more virtuous or pleasant one. Very rarely, I have a day or a moment when I have no grayed out options whatsoever, and all I can really do is lie on the couch and try not to get too overwhelmed or do anything monumentally stupid.
Is it the case that I’m feeling the spark on an increasing number of days? I don’t know, maybe? But to me this almost feels like the wrong question to ask, especially when I think about my likely decline in middle age and older. (Hope for immortal transhumanism springs eternal, but I’m not betting on it.) It seems unwise to chase those sparkling days, when instead you can work on making the path that you take when sleepwalking the best one it could be.
I don’t have the spark today, by the way. But recently I picked up the ability to blog without it.
