Politics is a battle of who you love and who annoys you

This has important implications

1

I remember sometime, many months ago, hearing a story from Bill Maher about a chat with a Trump supporter. Maher and the Trump supporter (let’s call him Jim) were talking about politics — Maher was making the fairly obvious case against Trump. Jim seemed to largely be in agreement on the level of specific policies. But then, when Maher proposed voting for a Democrat, Jim told him a story.

He was in a parking lot trying to back up his either car or truck — I’ll assume truck because he was a Trump supporter. However, he couldn’t because behind him was a mother and her daughter. The daughter was shrieking like a demented swamp goblin (my words, not his) because Jim had a Trump 2020 sticker on the back of his truck. And the mother, rather than exercising authority or disciplining her child, was apologizing to the child, apologizing for the greatness of the affront to the child about Jim having an innocuous sticker on the back of his car.

And the man said to Maher “Bill, there’s no way I can vote the same way as these people.”

This is very obviously not rational. Whether an idea is correct has nothing to do with who agrees with it. Yet despite that, I find Jim really sympathetic.

While I don’t think I’d decide my politics based on what would irk me the most, I can definitely, on an emotional level, deeply sympathize with just not wanting to be on the same side politically as those that you despise on a deep, guttural level.

In my previous article, I told the story of some unhinged high-school and college debaters trying to cancel me. While these people were going after me for my allegedly despicable moral character, they exchanged literally dozens of messages on twitter talking about how much meat they were going to eat, as a way of irking me, given that I’m extremely morally opposed to eating meat.

These emotionally fragile lunatics who were going after me for asking someone questions, defending a friend, and making analogies — you can read a more detailed account in my previous article — were gleefully snickering for hours on end about how funny it was that they were complicit in the worst atrocity in human history, one that I was deeply morally opposed to.

These people truly disgust me at the deepest level. They combine a bizarre fragility, wherein words are violence, with a shocking willingness to be deeply complicit in unfathomable evil. If one thinks — as I’m inclined to — that factory farming is the worst thing ever, then they will see these people in many ways as akin to SS officers, whining about hurt feelings, as they laugh about Jews being sent to the gas chambers.

I’m not a retributivist. Really, I think that from the point of view of the universe, their well-being matters just as much as anyone else’s. But on a purely emotional level, I would not be distressed finding out that one of these people lived a miserable life.

There was one person who joined the pile-on against me who was a vegan and criticized the others making light of factory farming. This person irked me greatly. But my irritation at this person was less by orders of magnitude than my rage at the people who combined a shameful fragility with a psychopathic disregard for funding sexual abuse, torture, and murder on a massive scale.

Another time, someone claimed that I was in favor of the rape of disabled people publicly, based on what was in this article (I’d recommend reading the article — if you are literate, you will find that I argued precisely the opposite of what was claimed; I was responding to an article claiming Peter Singer supported rape of disabled people, and I pointed out that he did not, in fact, support that).

After exchanging several dozen messages with them, at which point it was revealed that the reason they thought my view horrendous was because they didn’t know what evidence meant, and thought that claiming X is evidence for Y means that if X is the case Y must be the case, they were fully unable to substantiate their case. It became very clear that their outrage rested on an elementary misunderstanding indicative of SEVERE Bentham’s bulldog derangement syndrome.

At this point, I insulted their intelligence. This apparently meant that I was deeply evil, terrible, and ableist.

This person, while not retracting their public accusation that I was in favor of rape of disabled people, began to play the victim, rather outrageously.

They thus are another who deeply disgusts me, on a very fundamental level. It’s the combination of breathtaking malevolence and sickening victimhood that really gets me to deeply despise a person.

A third person — one that I don’t know very well — is this person. They express apathy towards paying for torture and murder, while being outraged at making fun of a particular indigenous person who claimed that ‘white vegans’ — a term that’s almost exclusively used as a smear — think that plants aren’t alive. They then combined this claim with a putrid degree of condescension and facile accusations of racism.

At one point, I remember entertaining some relatively far-left view on some position — it was on a topic that most people in my political quadrant have pretty moderate views on. And it struck me for a moment, just a moment, that it would be awful if I had the same position as these people and a position different from most people with whom I usually politically agree.

I would like to think that this didn’t affect my assessment of the issue. But I’m not so sure that’s true. It’s very hard to agree with those that disgust you on the deepest conceivable level.

2

The conservative Richard Hanania has a They/Them pronoun sticker that he looks at whenever he needs motivation. The reason for this is the sticker deeply angers him — represents everything that he hates. As he says

I had never seen a pronoun pin before, and decided to take this one as a souvenir. I already had one foot out the door and knew that I did not want to spend the rest of my life around academics. The pronoun pin represented everything I hated about leftists, “experts,” and intellectuals, and I keep it around where I work for motivation. I’m looking at it as I write this.

Of course, this is deranged. Of all the things that can motivate me, why did I pick a stupid gesture that has close to zero direct impact on human flourishing and wellbeing?

I think the answer goes something like this. Our System 2 morality works in a way such that if you put me and an SJW in a room, we would agree that society should punish murder more severely than either using racial slurs or announcing your pronouns. This is despite the fact that emotionally, neither of us has that strong of a reaction when it comes to murder. An exception for an SJW is when say a white racist or a cop murders a black person, while for me it might be mass murder committed by communists.

System 2 relies more or less on reason, with all its flaws. It provides a check on instincts going too far, which is why even the most liberal jurisdictions don’t make racist comments punishable by life in prison, even if leftists are instinctually more morally outraged by them than they are by violent crime. See how quickly they look for the “root causes” that make thieves and killers the way they are in order to morally excuse their behavior, a courtesy they never extend to bigots or Republicans.

So what is it that is driving System 1 morality? I think it’s based in part on the story we tell ourselves about our lives and our relationship with the rest of society. We want relative status, and to feel better than other people. Emotionally, I don’t identify with the tribe of “people who don’t commit genocide.” That tribe is way too large to provide me with relative status, and doesn’t even particularly appeal to any of my inherent strengths. In this theory, “status” can be only in one’s own mind, as for me I’m very willing to say things that I think are true even if they are unpopular as long as I think I’m right.

My System 1 morality is based on what makes me unique. Subconsciously, I go through a process that is something like this.

There are dumb people in the world who think dumb things. That’s not very strange, but what’s interesting is how smart people tend to be wrong about as often. This is because they are conformists, weak, and subject to social desirability bias. I am unique in both being highly intelligent and resistant to groupthink, which is why I always arrive at the correct position on every important philosophical or political issue. But while I’m only a 1 in 1,000 level IQ, I’m more like a 1 in 100,000 non-conformist, so the latter is more important to my identity. Wokeness is the dominant System 1 morality of the weak conformists, so they are my main enemy and I will work hardest to reduce their status.

The wokes might have an internal dialogue that goes like this.

Most people are small-minded, tribal, and ignorant. Those who are more intelligent and willing to reflect a little bit see that racism, sexism, and heteronormativity are serious barriers to equality. Most scientists, academics, and thinking people more generally are liberal because this is obvious to anyone who seriously contemplates social and political issues. I am one of those serious and moral people, so of course I believe in overcoming white privilege and trans rights.

I hope I didn’t strawman the liberal internal dialogue. I’m confident I didn’t because frankly I think my own internal dialogue sounds a lot crazier. What’s easier to believe? That intelligence and reflection lead people to better social and political views? Or that I am a 1 in 1,000 IQ and 1 in 100,000 non-conformist, which makes me a 1 in 100 million guy who stands above not only dumb people, who I barely think about, but even the relatively smart portion of humanity too? Moreover, I’m convinced the paragraph above is not a strawman because I almost didn’t need to write the dialogue, as the social psychologist John Jost said almost the exact same thing a decade ago.

Haidt fails to grapple meaningfully with the question of why nearly all of the best minds in science find liberal ideas to be closer to the mark with respect to evolution, human nature, mental health, close relationships, intergroup relations, ethics, social justice, conflict resolution, environmental sustainability, and so on. He does not even consider the possibility that research in social psychology (including research on implicit bias) bothers conservatives for the right reasons, namely that some of our conclusions are empirically demonstrable and yet at odds with certain conservative assumptions (e.g., that racial prejudice is a thing of the past). Surely in some cases raising cognitive dissonance is part of our professional mission.

I even think there is some truth in the liberal dialogue. Steven Pinker’s idea of social progress puts a lot of faith in the power of ideas, arguing some people just needed to make the arguments that slavery and war are bad, and in part because of the inherent strengths and wisdom of those arguments, we now have very little slavery or war. I find that argument compelling, mainly because the material explanations for the declines of slavery and war seem extremely weak. I just think something has gone wrong in the process. Maybe we picked the low hanging fruit like “slavery is bad” and those who style themselves intellectuals have been grasping for something else to make themselves feel superior to the masses ever since.

So I am like liberals in being driven by emotion and the need to gratify my ego. I believe I am unlike them in that my emotions are driving me towards truth and ultimately trying to create a better world, thanks to having the unique high-IQ, low-conformity combination.

This is, as Hanania says, deranged. A pronoun pin gets him worked up more than looking at pictures of corpses, killed by brutal regimes. But this is a totally natural human response. If I saw a pronoun pin as a representation of those that deeply disgust me, I could imagine getting similarly worked up about this. If I saw those that I despise as a manifestation of the left as a whole — while I’m not proud of this — I could imagine it making me less sympathetic to liberal causes.

If there was a symbol of those who make fun of factory farms while being outraged about trivialities, that symbol would motivate me — a pure manifestation of that which I most hate.

The things that I do that are most important — being an effective altruist primarily — don’t have much to do with the things that outrage me. But the things that I feel most driven by are primarily the things that really resonate with me on an emotional level. And a lot of the reason they resonate with me on an emotional level has to do with the type of people that disagree with me on the subject.

We have mountains of evidence that disgust drives a lot of people’s views on huge numbers of topics. Hanania talks about this.

I dislike obesity, piercings, and most tattoos unless you’re in a biker gang or the Azov Battalion and they show commitment to something. One of my deepest instincts is that I like men who look and act like men, and women who look and act like women. When feminists say that there are double standards in how we treat the sexes, I say of course you are right, and that is good and natural.

I think this revulsion towards androgyny is a prejudice that dare not speak its name on the right. Conservatives share pictures of hulking “trans women” and short-haired they/thems in Libs of TikTok videos, but don’t have the language skills or self-awareness to admit that they simply dislike how weirdos look and enjoy bonding with others who feel the same way. Whenever a plus-sized model is put on the cover of Sports Illustrated or Vogue, conservatives start screeching about “glorifying obesity.” These are the same people that giddily mocked the Obama administration’s healthy lunch program, and show no interest in public health measures until forced to look at fat women in swimsuits. I share the same instincts, but would rather be honest about it. Of course, I’m not unaware that one of the many double standards we live under is that liberals can openly indulge in their aesthetic preferences, which take some absurd forms like finding the way heterosexuality works problematic.

I love Libs of TikTok because the videos she posts do a perfect job of drawing out people’s instinctual reactions to things we can’t honestly talk about. Those that dislike androgyny and appreciate conventional standards of beauty will come up with other reasons as to why they’re appalled by her content. This has taken the form of saying that they represent teachers “grooming” children, or conservatives creating a new standard that teachers should never talk about their personal lives, even if they’re heterosexual. Liberals make conservatives feel like they have to censor their aesthetic preferences — by classifying those preferences as “hate,” “bullying,” “undemocratic,” etc. — and then make themselves feel smart by pointing out that conservative arguments make no sense. Even though I find the System 2 arguments conservatives make on LGBT issues mostly lacking, I feel kinship with those who “get” Chris Rufo and Libs of TikTok, and distant from those that don’t.

So it’s no surprise that a huge amount of politics will be driven by what disgusts people. This isn’t just true of conservatives — liberals’ politics are also driven by disgust a lot.

If you ask a liberal what person utterly disgusts them, and who they disdain the most, I’d imagine it would be a Bull Conor style racist. These also seem to be the people that they’re most politically opposed to — there’s a reason that left-wingers tend to toss around accusations of racism quite frequently; the worst thing you can be called is a racist.

But not too far up on the list would be someone like Trump. Trump represents everything the left hates. He’s crass, narcissistic, and deeply contemptuous of high-minded intellectual elites. He’s the type of person who starts his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers — before adding the caveat that some might be okay.

I’d imagine that you could predict someone’s political affiliation with roughly 90% accuracy by finding out whether they found Trump’s claim, after Meghan Kelly pointed out that he’d called women lots of names, that he’d said those only to Rosy O’Donnell to be charming or horrific. I’d imagine that nearly all liberals would be disgusted by that claim and most conservatives would be amused.

This is certainly not universal. My dad is a Republican. But he’s a never Trump republican. He’s the type of republican who basically agrees with the aims of liberals but just thinks that free markets are really efficient and that liberals want to restrict markets too much. He doesn’t find liberals in general viscerally horrific. He does, however, find Trump to be viscerally horrific.

He is, what we might call, a conservative with liberal sensibilities. He’s a Romney-esque member of the republican party who — if asked to say the most negative thing he could imagine about liberals — would say something like ‘well, a lot of them are opposed to free trade’. He sees Tucker Carlson and Trump pretty much the same way that my liberal mother does.

But I think that people like him are rare and becoming rarer still in the age of social media. In the age of social media, it’s very easy to find all the terrible things your opponents are doing. The reason libsoftiktok is so popular with republicans is that she broadcasts the modern equivalent of two minutes of hate to those on the right side of the isle. She shows conservatives all the things that those who are most fundamentally antithetical to conservatism do. She provokes deep disgust in conservatives at all the horrible things that liberals are doing. And it’s working.

3

Tucker Carlson’s show also operates largely as a two minutes of hate broadcast. He’ll bring in crazy people with crazy views — like that trees are racist — and argue with them. He’ll usually crush them given that their views are, as I said, crazy.

I think the best anyone’s done on Tucker’s show was Gene Baur, a vegan activist. Now, Baur didn’t crush Tucker — he didn’t make some devastating argument against eating meat that Tucker had no response to. But he did make vegans seem ultra-reasonable. He made vegans seem like the type of people conservatives could be friends with. If he’d come in swinging, talking about meat being murder, that would have turned a lot of people off. Tucker even commented on how reasonable he was towards the end of the interview.

Making someone seem like you is a very good way of making you sympathetic to their ideas. I remember when I was in middle school and was bullied a bit, feeling more attracted to Ben Shapiro’s ideas, as a fellow somewhat bullied Jewish nerd.

There’s a reason that there’s a strong correlation between the political affiliation of parents and their children. Part of this is that parents imbue some of their values in their children, making their children more likely to believe the things they do. But a lot of this has to do that liberal parents tend to have children with liberal role models and vice versa.

This is true for a few reasons. One obvious one is that most people look up to their parents, so it’s no surprise that they’d agree with their parents a lot. But there’s a second, more subtle reason: liberals and conservatives both spend most of their time with people of similar political affiliation. This applies to their children too.

Liberals, for example, are much more likely to be in cities. As a result of this, most of their role models are likely to be in cities. These city dwellers are mostly liberal. When a child has mostly liberal role models, they’re much more likely to be liberal.

I heard a story at one point from a very left-wing person called Xanderhal detailing how they became alt-right and then stopped being alt-right. The story of how they became alt-right was pretty straightforward — they started watching some edgy anti-SJWs on YouTube. They identified with these anti-SJWs, for they were edgy gamers like Xanderhal. As a result of this, the YouTube algorithm began to recommend further and further right content, until they got all of their political information from extremists.

The story of how they stopped being alt-right was similarly straightforward. They saw an edgy left-wing gamer debate the edgy right-wing gamers they’d been following and dispatch their arguments easily. This then showed them that the ideas they’d been a fan of for a long time were idiotic.

This illustrates a broader theme — people are much more likely to agree with ideas if they’re espoused by people that they look up to, people that are like them. You won’t find many liberals whose role model is Donald Trump.

A while ago, in an EA forum post, I argue that EAs stray from controversy too much. My basic case was the following: if you look at pretty much any successful social movement, they’ve all been controversial. I surveyed the top 13 google results and found this pattern held universally.

Why is this? Well, the thesis I’m outlining here explains it. A huge part of what motivates people is being opposite from people they regard as vile. If you’re a Democrat, there’s a very clear group that you regard as vile. But the same isn’t true of EA. EA doesn’t have enemies — just a few unhinged critics like Torres.

No one gets out of bed in the morning motivated by how crazy the foes of EA are. People do, however, get out of bed motivated by how crazy the Republicans are. There are no compilations of EAs destroying anti-EAs, the way there is for politics. There’s a reason a Will MacAskill speech wouldn’t draw 1% the presence of a Ben Shapiro speech — controversy draws people like a moth to a flame.

There are a few relevant takeaways. One is, I think, the takeaway in the article that I wrote, arguing that EAs should be more willing to be controversial. But another is the following: we should try really hard to not be the person one hates most.

While fox viewers may not like vegans, it’s hard to hate Gene Baur. But it’s very easy to hate basically everyone platformed by libsoftiktok. If people are hugely motivated by those who they consider the vilest, it becomes very important to avoid being extremely vile in the eyes of anyone.

This, of course, depends on more specific facts about a movement. If a movement wants to be like Mothers against drunk driving, then they should try to avoid controversy. However, if they want to be a more dominant social force, at the cost of more controversy, they should be more controversial.

Politics is driven by love and hate. An ideal political movement will be loved by many, hated by few, and slightly opposed by many.