Inside and Outside View Of Conflict and Identity
We already did adulting, but what about post-adulting
This is one of the perspectives on the last few chapters of “In Over Our Heads, The Mental Demands Of Modern Life.” When I last read this in 2016, this was one of the most difficult and insight packed non-math books I have every read, thought since then I have encountered a few harder books.
The book generally deals with the series of developmental milestones from childhood to adulthood that enable more and more sophisticated thinking and task completion, starting from stage 3 (relationship / communal / anti-systematic / tribal ), stage 4 (independent /systematic / modern / rational) to stage 5 (fluid / meta-systematic / post-modern / post-rational).
Moving from Stage 3 to Stage 4 is already an accomplishment that we talk about in popular culture as going from "technically being an adult" to "actually adulting." There are plenty of books which take some aspects of "adulting" and focus on it. "12 Rules for Life" is a good example. "Systems not Goals" from "How to Fail at Everything and Still Succeed" is another one." Most of "In Over Our Heads" is basically a dense compression of all of these types of books into a single one. Except the last few chapters deal less with those and more what comes beyond adulting or "post-adulting" (this is a term I made up).
Also advice for going from 3 to 4 is different from advice for going from 4 to 5. So, as a developmental question, a stage 5 description is not appropriate for people still struggling with the mental demands of modern life and stage 4 stuff. For example, strengthening one’s identity as an atomic individual is an important part of 3->4 transition, while weakening and fragmenting one’s identity is an important part of 4->5 transition.
Examples of stage 4 abilities:
(a) Ability to create formal roles for oneself and others where none existed before
(b) Self-evaluation of one’s work independent of other peoples’ evaluation
(c) Ability to write without needing to constantly double check for “permission” from society
(d) Ability to recognize stylistic / cultural differences in communication as stylistic, not hierarchical
(e) Ability to take the point of view of system of reasoning, or organization, such as a company and or principle-based ethical theory
So if you do not feel like you are “adulting" or struggling with making or the above list seems difficult, you might want to consider skipping this blog post and saving it for later. However, if you are, in fact "adulting", this post aims at going "post"-things. In the meantime, a meme!
The parallels of Stage 3, 4 and 5 are best seen in the middle row of the meme. Man vs Man, or Tribe vs Tribe is Stage 3.
Man vs Self is sub-ordinating the desires of self to a system, thus becoming a part of that system and deriving identity from it is Stage 4. This is useful as a tool for many things, such as making money, but in defeating oneself, one loses part of oneself.
Man vs Reality, is not how I would put Stage 5, but it can certainly be how it feels sometimes. Man vs "Reality" with quotes is probably more accurate. Systematic identity imposes a "reality", which is still a layer of perception, but a layer that makes one easily mistake the itself for the real thing. "Breaching" this "reality" is a topic of likely a whole other post.
There have been many words aimed at describing the set of Stage 5 mental developments. "Post-modern", "post-rational," "post-liberal," "meaningness" etc. Like many terms aimed at a complex philosophy, these can be imprecise, tough to separate from the communal usage and not necessarily grounded in theory. Still this should gives one a rough idea of where we are going.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at how Stage 5 deals with inter-personal and inter-group conflict, particularly around prolonged systemic fights like “the left” vs “the right.” Here is the general outline of insights at the post-modern construction of value conflict:
1. Conflict precedes and causes Identity
2. The model of each person as a system of subagents, rather as a separate individual
3. Outer conflict is evidence of inner conflict
1. Conflict precedes and causes Identity
Consider the inside and outside view of conflict. Many people can take a look at another society from the outside and see “both sides of whatever” fighting for what they both think is right and being “saviors of civilization” and treating the other side as a bunch of “irrational and or unethical” brutes.
Imagine a non-human society. If you come to another planet and meet with a aliens and your universal translator shows: “they have two words: “Ra” and “Kek”” and they are opposite of each other. The group you met with calls itself the “Ra” tribe. Now, ask yourself, what is the probability that there is also a “Kek” tribe? I am going to say ~100%.
The outside view on conflict is the following: almost every identity, including systematic identities is defined in opposition to another tribe or system. The identity of “rich” simply *cannot* exist without the identity of “poor,” the identity of “right” cannot exist without the identity of “left”. They are defined in a “relative” sense. If your parents tell you “we are aristocrats” and all your friends are “aristocrats” and you live in castle and have never met any peasants, you are still damn sure that *by the virtue* of the “aristocrats” identity existing, a complementary identity exists and you are bound to be in a conflict with them.
While it’s easy to see that is the case in case of tribal identities, this is true even of more “systematic” identities, like “effective altruist”. You would not need the label of “effective altruists” if most altruism was “effective.”
The inside view on conflict and identity *feels* very different from the outside view. Inside view feels like the following:
There exist *those* other people over there, who happen to be wrong and I am one of the people over here who happens to be right. Not only that, the inside view of identity is that of comfortable security, in knowing who you “are.” As an “effective altruist” all you want to do is just to think about making the world better. As a “libertarian” all you want to do is just to be left alone and not bother people and the other people just keep wanting to take your stuff. You might be compelled to action, you might be content with sitting back, you might want to start arguing with people in order to push them to your side. You also might pride yourself in your ability to “agree to disagree,” which is a common sign of a systematic (Stage 4) mental organization.
The slightly “more outside" view on identity is a perspective that a lot of ideologies provide signaling and bonding material to communities. Oh, you are “X” as well, how wonderful, let’s cooperate. It’s important to see the bonding material that identity provides to community separate from the ideology itself. “Effective altruists are cool because they throw good parties” is a very different appeal from “effective altruists are cool because they have discovered the right principles.” The struggle between the community aspect of identity and the principled aspects of identity is something that a leader of a systematic community can relate to. On one hand, “providing community” and being welcoming pushes people into their community. On the other hand, they would far rather have a lot of systematically minded people who do not need community to stick to their principles and commitments, who can provide ideological stability to others without much help. So, the “communal” or signaling bond is both helpful and unhelpful into introducing people to the “principled” stance. It both provides support and can underscore the assumption of needing people around you to support you in acting a certain, which is an assumption that needs breaking as one becomes more systematic. In a work setting it not hard to teach someone how you evaluate a their work, but it's a little harder to teach someone to view their own evaluation of their work as a separate and independent entity that superceeds your evaluation.
But, at the end of the day, even at Stage 4 level, there is still a desire for a next level of community that is enabled by a systematic identity. The desire for community where every person is an independent individual, who takes a responsibility for one's feelings, thus freeing the other members of a community from needed to micro-manage them.
Thus, the inside view of “adopting principles” because they are right is still different from the outside view of “adopting principles” in order to create Kegan 4 levels bonds (bonds which allow each person to be responsible for one’s own feelings) between individuals. Thus even at the systematic level, there is a desire to push on principles more than is “necessary” for the sake of social bonding.
Aside from the communal aspect of “identity”, you might experience the attachment to the phenomenology of identity. The feeling of frisson about working towards something bigger than you, the feeling of experiencing of a “stable self,” the feeling of confidence when other people can safely rely on your identity as a guide, the ability to answer complex questions rapidly by bringing up the application of one’s principles and even the distraction from chronic physical pain are all legitimate feelings that can themselves create an incentive for sticking to identity beyond the truth of it’s ideology. This is similar to the appeals of “eternalism” as described by Chapman.
However, all those things do come at a price, which is the creation of a persistent conflict between all the people who have not adopted your identity or feel frustrated about the negative status differential that come from labeling oneself as “rational” or “effective.”
How one deals with this conflict at Stage 3 is “outgrouping” or “filtering” – refusing to consider other world views as legitimate at all. How one deals with this at Stage 4 is “agreeing to disagree” where you view the “separate individuals with their own values” as a “unfortunate” feature of the world, which you have to deal with and pride oneself in one’s new-found ability to deal with. At Stage 5, you don’t view “separate individuals with their own values” as an “unfortunate” feature, but rather a “necessary” feature just by the virtue of having values at all. This isn’t necessary a rejection of all identity, although it might feel this way at first, but rather being mindful of the choice to have values / tribes / identity. That choice is ultimately connected to which conflicts you are choosing to enter.
Yet, this is a description from Stage 5, but what are the steps and strategies and models that Stage 5 uses to deal with conflict? This brings us to:
2. The model of each person as a system of subagents, rather as a separate individual The internal model of people as a system of sub-agents is necessary, but not sufficient evidence of stage 5 consciousness. Movies like “Inside Out,” therapies like internal family systems and rationality’s System 1 and System 2 are similar visions of a separate self shown to the 2, 3 and 4 audience levels respectfully. It’s one thing to “intellectually” understand separateness or to “feel separate desires” at different times or to hold “contradictory” beliefs at once. There can all happen before the model of “individuals” as sub-agents is internalized through and through. In particular the stage 5 model involves viewing each person as a system of identical set of subagents, where identification with a particular sub-agent in expense of the others is the formation of identity.
3. Outer conflict is evidence of inner conflictIf each person is a system of some number (say 9) sub-agents labelled S1 through S9, and they are identical, then what creates individuality are the “weights” on these subagents, showing the personality as P = W1 * S1 + W2 * S2 + … + W9 * S9. Thus when P1 comes into conflict with P2, especially when they are both reasonable and mature individuals and the conflict is prolonged through years or more, this is strong evidence of a particular subagent in P1 (say S1) having a low weight and in P2 having a high weight. If this wasn’t the case, they would simply agree on everything. Thus for both P1 and P2, the existence of an adversarial relationship between them is evidence of an adversarial relationship within P1 towards S1, where a piece of that person’s personality has been suppressed, generally through tribal or systematic identification with another subagent. This can and does cause actual health problems.
So for stage 5, each conflict and debate are not games that need to be played with grace and poise, where convincing the other person is the goal of entering the debate. Instead, each conflict is an opportunity to re-connect with a forgotten part of oneself to rebalance from the previous adoption of identity. In other words, stage 5 accepts conflict, not to win in glorious debate, but to re-discover the “weapons” that they have been using towards others and to use the opportunity to stop using them towards oneself.
Since this has been extremely abstract. Let's take a recent controversial set of examples regarding COVID failures from both left and right. So what happened on COVID? America failed in many ways but to pick two particular examples, the right failed on masks and the left failed on drugs.
The right failure on not accepting masks, or for that matter, nobody accepting masks in March, looks like a mis-guided attempt at craving "freedom", the left's failure on drugs is an over-emphasis on the role of particular aspects of scientific authority. My piece in the American Mind goes a bit deeper on this question of scientific authority and the mis-guided faith in it.
Both are, of course, knee-jerk reactions to the other side embracing a particular issue. One advice you can try to gain is "don't embrace a knee-jerk reaction to a particular issue just because your enemies oppose it." This is good advice by itself, but it's really the "meta" advice I am proposing.
The issue is that even if we take a "systematic" notion, such as "freedom", we can find that it has become both an idea and a dividing line between tribes. Masks symbolize a of lack of "freedom," which is true, but has a clear over-emphasis on "freedom" as a concept. Freedom can be justified based on the implied utilitarian guide of improving everyone's well-being if each person pursues their own well-being within a particular system of rules. However, it's on that boundary of "system of rules" that this concept begins to break down and fall back to it's utilitarian roots. Clearly property rights as restrictions against stealing are considered essential to freedom, but the creation of new laws against assembly due to COVID is not considered essential. So "freedom" as a legal concept is much more of a demarcation of a negotiated boundary between the power of judiciary, which is substantial and the power of the people. This negotiation, while not exactly arbitrary is not done with full collective action in mind. Cars are a symbol of freedom, for example, which has always been strange to me, as they seem like a thing you are "forced" to own and pay for.
The left's issue of going hard against drugs, such as HCQ and Vitamin C / D is itself a knee jerk reaction to Trump's tweets. However, even more systematic people who should know better have taken upon themselves to try and debunk and suppress potentially life-saving info. Is it bad for people if a politician tweets knowingly incorrect info? Sure. However, in search of scientific certainty, the big tech "authorities" have decided that controversial and disputed scientific debates must be decided one way already and mere "users" had no "evidence" to offer against "consensus," even if consensus is made by journalists and users are doctors. The science system is too rigid and in the hacker's words, too easy to pwn.
Of course, the meta-systemic synthesis here is: would you really want to take "scientific authority" to it's logical conclusion? If the scientists said that sealing down doors of apartments buildings was the best way to prevent COVID, would you go for it? How would residents get food? Well, the scientists didn't work that part out in the randomized controlled trial.
On the other hand, would you want to maximize "freedom" to it's logical conclusion? The previous negotiation has also created the consensus of "private companies controlling speech is ok," which has itself created a devastating glut of good life saving information on social media.
In other words, the emphasis of "freedom" or "science" comes through a suppression of obvious edge cases. It further comes with a suppression of both object-level tactics as well as higher level concepts or "personal sub-agents."
Talking about left and right is tricky in 2020. If reconciliation is still possible, it could be done through a path of post-systematic synthesis of systematic left (more neo-liberal) and systematic right (constitutionalism) respectfully. Of course, that first requires a that the tribal left and tribal right become more sub-ordinate to systematic left and systematic right respectfully, which is a big ask by itself. However the reconciliation needs to start from somewhere - a recognition of mental conflict caused by outgroup conflict.