K: I was trying that FaceApp thing earlier today with photos of everyone we know. It looks pretty good. Except for some reason when I try to do the “hot” filter on you, it replaces you with a totally different-looking person.
Me: Ha ha, very funny.
K: No, I’m serious. (she shows me, and this turns out to be 100% true)
Me: Sorry, but I’m never going to visit your family in Tasmania. The whole place sounds horrifying.
K: No it doesn’t! Why would you say that?
Me: Well, between your stories about venomous snakes killing your dog, and bats flying into your bed while you were sleeping, and the shrieks of Tasmanian Devils keeping you awake all night as a kid -
K: No, that part is better now. The Tasmanian Devils were all killed by a weird contagious form of facial cancer.
Me: YOU’RE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE.
Friend: Sometimes cuddling can be scary.
Me: What do you mean?
Friend: I stop wanting to move and I stop thinking so much about things, and then I get this heavy feeling all over. I worry that I might be dying or something.
Me: Wait…do you just mean that you feel relaxed?
Friend: I guess that could be it.
Me: Well, at least for you it’s a self-limiting problem.
Me: Should I drive or do you want to drive?
Friend: I don’t think I’m a very good driver
Me: What do you mean?
Friend: Like, sometimes I’ll just go blank and forget which one is the brake and which one is the accelerator and have to derive it from first principles.
Me: You mean, like, cogito ergo sum?
Friend: Maybe second principles.
Me: How do you derive the location of the brake from second principles?
Friend: I don’t know, at that point I crashed.
Me: Okay, I’m driving.
K: Nate Silver was right again. Is he single?
K: (a few minutes later) Oh, he’s gay. I wonder if he’s flexible about it, though. Maybe I could just invite him out to lunch or something?
K: (a few minutes later) Wait, I’m looking at a picture of him, and I think I actually did have lunch with him a few years ago. A friend took me along to meet this guy who he said was doing some kind of politics thing, and I didn’t pay much attention, but he looked exactly like that.
K: (a few minutes later) Okay, I checked my emails, and that was definitely Nate Silver I had lunch with. I feel kind of stupid now. It was back in 2010, so maybe he wasn’t famous at the time?
Me: Dear, Nate Silver was named one of the “100 Most Influential Men In The World” in 2009.
K: Oh.
K: Well, one thing I like about you is that you don’t take me out to lunch with one of the 100 most influential men in the world and not tell me about it.
K: Do you?
K: Wait, that professor we had lunch with in Lansing wasn’t one of the hundred most influential men in the world, was he?
Me: https://twitter.com/Clathrus0/status/795669961373061120
K: Oh dear.
K: Wait, I thought Charlemagne was the Pope.
Me: Huh, no, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope was the Pope.
K: Yeah, but I heard they were in cahoots, which I figured doesn’t really happen in this world unless you’re the same person.
Me: And the ruler during this period was Antigonus Monopthalmus. Can you translate ‘Monopthalmus’?
@worldlypositions: Hmmmm. One…head?
Me: You think he was called Antigonus The One-Headed?
@worldlypositions: Sure!
Me: That’s not a very imposing epithet.
@worldlypositions:
Sure it is! If you called yourself ‘Antigonus The Two-Headed’, it would be scary, but not too scary, because there’s only one two-headed guy. But if you call yourself Antigonus The One-Headed, it suggests everyone else in your country must have more than one head, which is even scarier.
Elissa: That church over there, the one that’s kind of falling apart? It’s always bothered me.
Me: Why?
Elissa: It’s called “The Church By Jesus Christ”. And Jesus was a carpenter, so I think linking him to that kind of shoddy work is kind of insulting.
Me: What kind of a name is “The Church By Jesus Christ”? Is it supposed to be, like, next to him or something?
Elissa: I think it’s supposed to be started by him, or inspired by him.
Me: Seems a little implausible. I mean, Catholicism, maybe. Greek Orthodoxy, maybe. But a random Protestant church in Ohio?
Elissa: I mean, technically if Jesus is God, then everything is “by Jesus.”
Me: “The Holocaust By Jesus Christ”?
Elissa: I mean, technically, yes.
Me: I don’t think the people who made that church would endorse that Jesus caused the Holocaust.
Elissa: It’s not that he caused it. Just that he deliberately gave humans free will, knowing that it would happen. And that church is the same way.
Me: “The Church That Jesus Christ Failed To Prevent.“
K: “I remember when I was young I asked my mom if I was adopted, because I was nothing like the rest of my family. See, they were all pink squishy fleshy beings, and I was a consciousness of pure light and reason. She said ‘Your father used to say that kind of thing too.’“
TIL: JRR Tolkien’s great granddaughter, Ruth Tolkien, is the only blind person in the UK to be a competitive fencer. She is currently ranked the #186th best fencer in the country.
Tagging @funereal-disease and @slatestarscratchpad because I reference their writing in this and that seems only fair if they want to respond.
This is a dodge.
Any non-strawman model of individualism has room for…voluntary engagement with other humans. No one – actually no one – is saying “individualism, therefore you’re not allowed to form communities of interest.” Or “individualism, therefore you’re not allowed to find emotional satisfaction in closeness to other people.” Or “individualism, therefore you’re not allowed to be invested in your awesome summer camp.”
(OK, hypothetically, you might just be taking a shot at the sort of small-minded hyperconformist morons who look at anything other than nuclear-family-centric suburban anomie and say OMG THAT IS A CULT!. But if so, uh, that’s a pretty damn soft target and no one gives a shit.)
The individualist society is a society of voluntary communities of interest.
But voluntary communities of interest do have their limits. Most importantly on the macro scale, your kids aren’t likely to stick around to be part of them. Also, well, even when people love each other a lot, they do in fact change and get into fights and generally make decisions that put a strain on community cohesion. (I am very familiar with the internal dynamics of Awesome Voluntary Communities Full of Love Where Everyone Is Super Invested. I have seen them self-destroy hideously. I’d be surprised if this weren’t also true of you.)
And these limits…have consequences. A community where anyone could just up and leave, if he gets sufficiently steamed – even if you’re pretty sure he won’t – is a community where you’re probably going to be wary about just handing over lots of your resources. A community that isn’t likely to contain your kids is a community that isn’t going to absorb the entirety of your attention and your wealth. Etc.
You can get around those limits. Most human societies do. You get around them with coercive power, of the temporal and social varieties. You get around them by ensuring that people actually can’t leave, or that they will pay a huge penalty if they do. You get around them by ensuring that your kids are vastly more comfortable in the community than they can ever be outside it.
(The “constant fanatical enthusiasm” thing is kind of a strawman in and of itself, on the part of your interlocutors. No one seriously thinks that you can run a tribal society on that engine, which is why no one has ever seriously tried. But many dyed-in-the-wool individualists aren’t great at grappling with social structures like “if you walk out you will have zero money and zero skills and no one you know will ever speak to you again.” Which is funny, because presumably most of them grew up in modern Western nuclear families, which are mini-tribes that employ all the usual coercive tactics.)
There are concrete advantages to tribalism, although I am firmly convinced that they are really really really really not worth it. But if you want to defend tribalism, start by talking about tribalism, not about some kind of magic inhuman society that has all the freedoms of atomic individualism but it doesn’t matter because you can count on no one ever using them.