On Foolishness

I’d tell you to avoid my mistakes. Sadly it doesn’t work that way.

I’m a fool. I’m not sure for how long I’ve been a fool. In all likelihood I’ve always been a fool, but only recently have I realized it.

1.

From when I was a wee lad I identified with my intelligence. I was proud of this at the time and sourced the gravity well of my ego from there. I now think this was a coping response to relational/emotional trauma that disembodied me.

That disembodiment made me very thin—I was very picky and barely ate. This did no wonders for my social success and at some point I got into my mind—aided in part by Bodybuilding Propaganda—that the problem was that I wasn’t Jacked And Yoked.

So I became a competitive weightlifter and won the national junior weightlifting championship at 17.

A few years after that I got my second big bout of trauma: I overtrained myself all the way into a deep vein thrombosis, which meant I couldn’t work out for a while. My self-image shattered: who am I if not Someone Who Is Jacked And Yoked?

I reached back to the identity I had before that: intelligence. I can be intelligent again. So I searched online for the best way to become even more intelligent and found LessWrong.

2.

I bought into it: hook, line, and sinker. What was good now was to Be Rational.

This eventually led to me moving to the Bay Area where I realized that intelligence/rationality are distributed in a long tail. I couldn’t really compete. That life also blew up for its own reasons. Big Trauma #3.

3.

Now, more than half a decade past that, I’m back to the Bay and I see things very differently.

I clock people in a different way.

For example, I witnessed a “rational discussion” between two people where it was obvious to me—but not to them—that what was really happening was that Person A was triggered by some of Person B’s choices. Neither A nor B realized it so they kept arguing about the “rationality” of those choices, blind to what was really going on under the surface.

Every question, every glance, every move—everything that could be otherwise leaks tons of information and, if the people around you can read it, they’ll form views on you really quickly.

I’ve been doing this: using my ability to clock people to dismiss them. I don’t need to engage with someone’s “arguments” when I can see what’s actually generating them.

This seems ‘mean’ but I think this just follows from the fact that people will choose to self- and other-present in a way that is, if not accurate, then more positive than what is the case. So clocking will always leave you disappointed.

4.

I’m calling this clocking: not taking other people’s stories (mainly about themselves and what they’re up to) at face value. To allow yourself to painfully notice that self-deception is legion and to not just reflexively enable it. ‘Y said X. Therefore X’. No. Therefore ‘Y said X’.

Now of course everything I’m saying applies to me as well: I self-deceive. And others must have been clocking me on it for the longest time.

Most of my memories as a child are of being unfairly dismissed: just because I was a child adults wouldn’t engage with my arguments. Maybe they did dismiss some arguments they shouldn’t have but I find it hard to now sit with the previous belief that they should’ve seriously engaged with all of them. Most likely sometimes I was just being a little shit.

5.

This foolishness-clocked-dismissal started when I was young and almost certainly didn’t stop there. All those people that “for no reason” dropped off from my life? Yea…

Logos—logic and reason—isn’t sufficient when ethos—credibility and character—isn’t there: there’s only so many hours in the day, you need to use some heuristic, why engage with someone with very high verbal intelligence when things never seem to go their way? Seems like a lot of words for copium.

6.

I want to push on this point harder because I see this a lot: the “Rational” person specializes in something at the cost of everything else and then dismisses everyone else for being so “irrational” about it. They’re not “irrational”, they’re well-rounded and making lots of complicated trade-offs you’re too cowardly to make, preferring to deceive yourself into believing they don’t exist. The reason they (comparatively) suck in that one thing is that they wreck you in everything else.

They see more than you, not less.

7.

So, where does that leave us? Where does this leave me? I remember seeing John Vervaeke’s “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” a few years back. In it he operationalized wisdom as “the capacity to catch and correct self-deception.”

By starting to notice how others self-deceive into stories that are more pleasant than what’s actually going on, it’s easy enough to infer that I too must be doing the same: I’m not “rational”, I’m foolish. I’ve always been foolish. People were right to dismiss me.

But maybe, even though it feels horrid, I’m in a slightly better position than before: before I was foolish and didn’t know it. Now I’m foolish and am painfully aware of it.

Maybe, hopefully, this might be the beginning of knowing myself.