#scrupulosity content warning

[healthesick]

One good thing: Day 13

Today I gave a few of the random extra knitted potholders I’ve made to people with apartments near me.

Thinking of things to do is so hard. Please send me suggestions.

I guess this is proof I’m evil. I can’t even think of a month’s worth of nice things to do for people. Fuck. Fuck. When did this happen? Have I always been this way? Is that why I was attracted to Miger? Or did he corrupt me? I just don’t know what to do.

[balioc]

New everything-looks-like-a-nail theory:

Scrupulosity is a form of narcissistic injury.  It is the tearing-at-the-seams damage that results from an attempt to stretch your personal identity over a consequentialist or deontic moral framework that is not shaped to support human narratives. 

*****

The true perfect effective altruist does not fret about his failure to give more or to do more.  Why would he?  Fretting achieves nothing.  It will not add one QALY to anyone’s existence; it will not cloak one bed in a malaria net, or deworm one child, or put one dollar in the hands of the wretched.  And of course it actively adds a small dose of misery to the world, in a small-but-direct way, because fretting sucks.  No EA theorist recommends it.  The true perfect effective altruist gives everything he possibly can, and when that’s been exhausted, he stops giving and returns to himself with a smile on his face.  Needless to say, even if you are a flawed mortal effective altruist who gives only a little of what you can, your hypothetical true-and perfect counterpart would urge you to adopt his sanguine attitude.  (He would also urge you to give more, but the one thing is independent of the other.)  Beating yourself up doesn’t help! 

Yes, yes, this is all very obvious and well-established.  But it turns out that we’re not perfect utilitarian calculating machines with perfect control over our emotions.  Sometimes our brains make us feel the wrong things. 

Indeed.  So why is your brain making you feel this particular thing?  What is causing you to sink into needless unjustifiable misery over a failure that doesn’t actually affect you, or anyone you love, or anyone you even know? 

Some EA-type scrupulosity-sufferers talk about their elaborate, soul-shredding visions of all the suffering in the world.  I’m sure that they represent their experiences honestly, but I respectfully submit -- if The Suffering Out There were truly at the heart of the matter, the pain would manifest as great grief, but not as guilt.  Guilt is a feeling that focuses entirely on the self.  The guilty individual believes (or, rather, feels) that he has the power to tip the scales between goodness and badness, that it is worthwhile to focus on his own private sins.  The world contains great masses of suffering, no one person’s altruism is going to come anywhere close to changing that, and everyone knows this very well.  If your imagination can whip up a vision of the child who starves because of your failure to give a little more, then it can also whip up a vision of all the equally-real children who will starve regardless of what you do.  And, indeed, that too is a thing that happens to people, a different kind of depression induced by an overactive empathetic faculty. 

But your scrupulosity wants to make it all about you, right?  You didn’t skip enough meals to buy malaria nets, so you caused some poor African to die horribly, so you should lie in bed feeling like a worthless piece of shit. 

When some part of your mind goes into self-obsessive overdrive, and the topic under consideration doesn’t actually have anything to do with the practical details of your life or relationships, this is at least a strong piece of evidence that something narcissistic is going on.  

And consequentialist practices like EA can be built into the inherently-non-consequentialist makeup of a narcissistic identity, just like anything else. 

You stare into the mirror, and like all the rest of us, you cannot help asking: who am I?  And, because you have constructed one particular kind of story, you answer (in part): I am an effective altruist.  I do real good in the world.  I weigh the consequences of my actions, and give where giving will help, and save lives.  Which is, in theory, a fine and noble thing to tell yourself, at least if it has any truth to it.  But it means that, when you feel like your self-conception is under assault from the world, when you’re lost or lonely or scared, and you gaze inwards for confirmation of your ego -- am I really the effective altruist that I believe myself to be? -- you must proceed to apply the standards of judgment that come packaged with the EA identity.  Being an EA means precisely that you evaluate altruism-related claims with consequentialist standards.   

Those standards are not meant to hold up anyone’s identity.  They are, in human psychological terms, impossibly brutal and impossibly unfair.  They do not recognize a concept of “satisfactory” -- they do not even recognize a concept of “excellent” -- they recognize only more good and less good, and the domain space of more good is infinite.  There is no vision of the Worthy EA to which you can compare yourself, there is only the math, and the math will invariably tell you that you could have done a lot more. 

(The Giving What We Can pledge represents an attempt to combat this problem directly, by creating a vision of the Worthy EA and saying “a 10% income donation means that you can successfully identify with this vision.”  It’s noble, but I believe that it’s basically doomed to failure on a broader scale.  As a story,a cultural artifact, it can’t compete with competing virtuous-person models that have a lot more resonance and narrative talent behind them; its only real selling point is the quality of the philosophy that underlies it.  But anyone willing to care about to the philosophy will also insist on caring about the fact that 10% is an arbitrary number, and that the math stubbornly insists that you could buy yet more malaria nets with 11% of your income...)

*****

With religion, the problem is often much worse, because religious communities understand this phenomenon and actively try to exacerbate it.  

Some very high-minded and rarefied forms of religious practice -- various mysticisms, mostly, and the purest strains of mitnagdic Judaism -- use something akin to the fundamental logic of the EA theorists, except that they replace “QALYs” with “inherently divine action.”  This isn’t about you.  This is about God, and praise, and holiness [ / adherence to the Law].  Do what is right to do.  Focus on the glory of heaven [ / the fact that you are doing what is commanded].  Stop thinking so much about yourself.  It’s totally beside the point. 

That’s rare, though, and really super rare outside dedicated clerical communities.  What you usually get, instead, is a very cruel promise:

If you follow the rules well enough, if you are sufficiently holy in thought and word and deed, then you will get to incorporate it into your identity.  You will be a Holy Person.  You will be happy.  You will be fulfilled.  You will be saved.  You will be welcomed into the Kingdom of God.

Which is monstrous.  Because you can’t even theoretically follow the rules “well enough,” any more than you can “give enough” to charity.  Holiness isn’t virtue-ethical, it doesn’t actually provide you with a human model of success that you can live up to -- it just evaluates every single moment of your existence according to a strict code, and in any moment when you’re being less than entirely holy, it sends back “FAIL.” 

This is super terrible, if you want people to build secure foundational identities from which they can grow.  But it’s really great if you want people to be perpetually guilt-ridden and anxious, which is a useful state of mind to cultivate in certain kinds of low-ranking community members who are mostly supposed to be obedient.

*****

Much the same, I’m sure, can be said of social justice.