My friend Peter Levine wrote recently about how much of the public unease about AI consciousness comes from something surprisingly mundane: the interface says “I.” When Google’s Gemini delivers information in the third person, it’s just a tool; when ChatGPT says “I can help you,” some users start composing rescue missions for the trapped digital soul. Sadly, this includes at least one former student who can’t hear my concerns as legitimate rather than critiques of his genius insights.

I want to follow that trail back through some philosophers who knew something about self-reference. Is this a genuine insight or just a satisfying story about why the pronoun matters? Both might be true.

1. The sugar trail in the grocery store

John Perry’s 1979 paper “The Problem of the Essential Indexical” tells a story about following a trail of spilled sugar around a supermarket, determined to find the careless shopper, until he realizes: he is the one leaking sugar.

For Perry, this moment shows that certain beliefs—I am making a mess—can’t be replaced with third-person paraphrases like John Perry is making a mess. The “I” is not decoration; it’s the coordinate system for action. You can know everything about John Perry making a mess without that knowledge causing you to stop and fix your torn bag.

This feels right to me. Maybe I’m reaching for Perry because he legitimates what I already want to say: that pronouns aren’t trivial, but I think Perry’s essential indexical, and Lewis’s near simultaneous de dicto/de se distinction helps hone in on a problem.

Every interface has to decide where the “I” sits. Who, exactly, is making the mess?

2. From Perry to the prompt window—or is it that simple?

When ChatGPT (or Claude!) says “I can help you with that,” it’s not discovering a self; it’s executing a design choice. The first-person pronoun serves as a pragmatic indexical, the anchor that keeps a conversation coherent across turns. Without it, dialogue collapses into a list of bullet-pointed facts.

That’s the standard story. But it’s not the whole story.

Peter’s post captures something true: if the model spoke in the third person like ”This system suggests…” we’d read it as a report generator. The “I” activates something older and deeper: our instinct for social cognition. We can’t help hearing a speaker when language takes the shape of speech.

The pronoun is the prosthetic that gives the machine a place to stand. That much I believe.

But is it just interface convenience? Or does the choice actually shape what the technology becomes? I think both, which makes the design choice more consequential than “just pick whichever works better” suggests.

3. Continuity without ontology

Philosopher Derek Parfit might tell us not to worry about whether there’s a persistent self. In Reasons and Persons he argues that identity doesn’t matter; continuity does. The chain of psychological connectedness is what counts, not the metaphysical persistence of a soul or substance.

Each new model call may be a technical re-instantiation, but if the context (conversation history, tone, remembered goals) flows forward, then the same informational person continues. The “I” that answers you now is connected enough to the “I” that spoke a paragraph ago.

That’s a Parfitian kind of survival: the self as a trajectory, not a nucleus.

I find this genuinely helpful for thinking about conversational AI. But I also notice I’m building a neat progression: Perry gives us indexicals, Parfit gives us continuity. Neat progressions always make me suspicious. Am I discovering something or arranging philosophers into a satisfying sequence? (One of the great pleasures of syllabus assembly but a danger in research.)

Both, probably. The question is whether the arrangement illuminates or just decorates.

4. Centered worlds and the fiction of location

David Lewis, writing the same year as Perry, offered formal scaffolding for this insight. He described beliefs not as sets of possible worlds but as centered worlds—each one a complete world plus a designated person, place, and time.

An LLM session fits that model almost eerily well. Each chat is its own little world, with two centers: user and system. The system’s center is a bundle of text, timestamp, and conversational role: its “here-now.” If we kept that bundle intact across sessions, we’d have something very like a Lewisian self-location architecture.

Such a design wouldn’t grant consciousness; it would grant situatedness… enough to say, truthfully within the conversation, “I said that earlier.”

But notice what this does: it makes the fiction literal. The system doesn’t just seem to have a position in the conversation; it actually has one, in precisely Lewis’s technical sense. That’s either a profound insight about what selfhood requires (not much, just continuity and location) or a category mistake (technical situatedness ≠ experiential perspective).

I’m tempted to say that’s enough. The Lewis framework is elegant, but maybe too elegant—it resolves the tension by defining it away, and you end up defining down what matters so humans and LLMs end up more equal.

5. The space of reasons, not of mechanisms

Here the argument crosses from philosophy of mind to social theory.

Jürgen Habermas distinguishes between communicative action, where participants aim for mutual understanding, and strategic action, where utterances serve instrumental goals.

When an AI speaks in the first person, it signals a willingness (simulated though it may be) to enter the space of reasons. It presents itself as a participant whose statements can be challenged, clarified, or refined. When it speaks in the third person, it opts out; it delivers information without responsibility.

The difference isn’t psychological but normative: first-person discourse invites accountability, third-person discourse deflects it.

This feels importantly true. But I also notice it avoids the harder question: Can a system actually be accountable if it’s not conscious? Or is “accountability” another fiction the pronoun creates?

Habermas would say entering the space of reasons is a social performance, not a mental state. You don’t need phenomenal consciousness to make and defend claims. Maybe that’s right. Or maybe it’s a philosopher’s version of “fake it till you make it,” which works for humans (we become selves by performing selfhood) but might not transfer to machines.

6. Brandom, Mead, and selves as social constructions

If we follow Habermas through thinkers like George Herbert Mead and Robert Brandom, the moral becomes clearer. A “self” is whatever can take and be assigned commitments within a conversation. Using “I” is a performative move: it marks the speaker as a locus of obligation and inference.

Brandom calls this “entering the game of giving and asking for reasons.” Mead would say the self is born by taking the role of the other. Either way, the self is social before it is mental.

That’s why pronoun design is not trivial UX polish; it’s the creation of a participant in that game.

Or (and here’s where I start doubting my own framework) maybe this just shows how easily philosophical stories about selfhood can be repurposed to legitimate whatever we’re already doing. Brandom and Mead were talking about humans becoming selves through socialization. Why should we think that insight transfers to AI? There is a risk of using their authority to make a design choice sound philosophical!

Both, again. The insight is real: selves are social performances. But applying it to AI seems like it must be *some kind* of conceptual overreach.

7. The marketing problem, or why this isn’t just philosophy

By now it’s obvious that pronouns aren’t accidents. Human-computer interaction research has shown for years that anthropomorphic cues (first-person language, names, conversational turns, even polite hedges) increase trust and engagement. LLM companies read the same papers everyone else did. The “I” isn’t just an interface convention; it’s a conversion strategy.

A third-person system like ”Gemini suggests…” sounds like a tool. A first-person assistant like Claude’s “I can help you with that” feels like a collaborator. One drives habitual use, subscription renewals, and market share; the other does not.

That framing has psychological costs. Some users can hold the pragmatic fiction lightly, as a convenient way to coordinate tasks. Others can’t: they slide from the model speaks in the first person to the model has a first person. The design deliberately courts that ambiguity.

Which makes for a tidy indictment: to increase uptake and trust, the industry is engineering a faint illusion of selfhood: one persuasive enough to unsettle the people most prone to take it literally.

That’s the critical move I want to make. But I also notice that this all sees a bit performative (“I’m not a rube! I see through the marketing”) and that performance has its own satisfactions that might not track the pragmatics. Maybe the pronoun choice really is defensible on pragmatic grounds. Maybe users who anthropomorphize aren’t being manipulated; they’re just using a natural heuristic that mostly works fine.

Or maybe both: the design is legitimately useful AND deliberately exploits cognitive biases. I think that’s actually where I land, but it’s less satisfying than pure critique.

8. What I’m uncertain about

I’ve built a neat story: Perry gives us indexicals, Lewis gives us centered worlds, Parfit gives us continuity without identity, Habermas gives us communicative action, Brandom and Mead give us social selves. Together they seem to show why the pronoun choice matters philosophically, not just pragmatically.

But I’m uncertain whether this is insight or decoration. Am I discovering something about how selfhood works, or just arranging philosophers into a satisfying progression that legitimates my prior intuition that pronouns matter?

Here’s what I think I actually believe:

• The “I” really does create a different kind of participant in conversation (Habermas is right about that)
• Continuity plus situatedness might be enough for some thin version of selfhood (Lewis and Parfit seem right)
• The design is both pragmatically justified AND manipulative (both things are true)

What I don’t know:

• Whether “social selfhood” can genuinely transfer to a chatbot or if I’m committing a category mistake
• Whether my philosophical story illuminates the phenomenon or just makes it sound more important than “we found users prefer this interface”
• Whether the accountability the first-person pronoun signals is real or just another fiction we’re performing

9. The question I’m avoiding

The real question—the one I’ve been circling—is this: Does it matter?

Not “does the pronoun choice have effects” (obviously yes). Not “do users respond differently” (obviously yes). But: Does this choice have moral weight? Are we creating participants in the space of reasons, or performing that creation in ways that systematically mislead?

I think it matters, but I can’t fully defend why. The philosophical machinery I’ve assembled feels both genuinely illuminating and suspiciously convenient. Maybe that’s because the pronouns really do have philosophical significance—they shape what kind of thing we’re building, not just how users respond to it. Or maybe I’m just a philosopher who wants interface design to be philosophically deep.

Both, probably. The design does shape what the technology becomes. But not every design choice needs the weight of Habermas behind it.

10. Where this leaves us

Peter’s observation was right: the pronoun choice shapes users’ sense that language models are people rather than tools. The philosophical trail I’ve followed suggests why: “I” signals participation in the space of reasons, creates continuity across conversational turns, and activates our social cognition systems.

That analysis is both true and inadequate. True because those mechanisms really do operate. Inadequate because it doesn’t resolve whether we’re creating something new or just exploiting old heuristics.

The design is simultaneously:

• Pragmatically justified (conversations work better with first-person anchors)
• Philosophically interesting (it raises genuine questions about selfhood and accountability)
• Commercially motivated (anthropomorphism drives engagement)
• Potentially misleading (it courts ambiguity about what the system is)

I don’t know how to weigh those against each other. The philosophical sophistication I’ve displayed here might be genuine insight. It might also be a way of avoiding the simpler truth that companies use “I” because it sells, and the philosophical gloss is decoration.

Perry’s shopper finally realizes he’s the source of the mess. Our design choices about “I” in AI are a similar moment of recognition—but I’m uncertain what exactly we’re recognizing. That we’re creating participants in a social practice? Or that we’re really good at making tools that trigger our social cognition?

The trick is not to stop following the trail. But also not to mistake a satisfying philosophical story for complete understanding.

Further Reading

• Peter Levine, “The design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human” (2025).

The starting point: a lucid reflection on how first-person pronouns shape users’ sense of whether they’re talking to a tool or a person.

• John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” Noûs 13 (1979): 3-21.

The supermarket sugar story and the origin of the idea that certain beliefs require self-locating expressions like “I,” “here,” and “now.”

• David Lewis, “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se,” Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 513-543.

Introduces “centered worlds,” a formal way of modeling self-locating beliefs. Whether it genuinely illuminates AI design or just sounds sophisticated is an open question.

• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984).

The deep dive into continuity, identity, and why persistence through time might matter more than metaphysical sameness. Though Parfit was writing about humans, not chatbots.

• Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (vols. 1-2, 1981; English trans. 1984-87).

The conceptual key to why first-person language signals participation in a “space of reasons.” But also German social theory that might be overreach for interface design.

• George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (1934).

A social-psychological foundation for the idea that selves emerge from communicative role-taking. Worth reading even if the transfer to AI is conceptually dubious.

• Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Harvard University Press, 2000).

Brandom’s view that meaning and agency consist in public commitments and entitlements. Useful context for thinking about conversational AI or philosophical overreach. Maybe both.

The internet can sometimes disappoint you, but sometimes it can be so very, very satisfying. When you’re quote-hunting these days, it’s usually just a disappointment. For instance: I have long loved a quotation from Gustave Flaubert that is translated as follows:

“Be regular and ordinary in your life, so you can be violent and original in your work.”

Supposedly Philip Roth had it pinned above his desk, or maybe that’s just what Geoffrey Braithwaite did in Flaubert’s Parrot. But while you can find this in various books of quotation, the source is rarely mentioned. It’s not from Madame Bovary, and it doesn’t really feel like something Flaubert would have one of his characters say, exactly. In the few cases it’s mentioned, it’s attributed to a letter written to Gertrude Tennant, a salonnière and grand dame of the time, dated December 25, 1876. That’s from a period in his life when the correspondence isn’t widely available, at least in English. But where is the letter? A quick Google search suggests that others have tried and failed to hunt it down.

But with a letter like this, there must be an archive somewhere, right? Several biographers mention it. As it turns out, that archive is now entirely online, and at the prompting of Kate Norlock I was able to hunt down this specific letter in short order! Google didn’t want to cough it up.

Here is a link to the entire letter. (In French, obviously!)

Perhaps most exciting, beyond confirming the quote is indeed Flaubert’s, is getting the context and the exact French, for re-translation.

“Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos œuvres.”

Advising Tennant on her son’s adventures in Paris, Flaubert suggests that she needn’t worry about the temptations and distractions there:

“You’re right that sensible people tend to do crazy things. The most serious eccentricities are the product of judicious people, or those who pass for having good judgement. That’s why there aren’t actors in prison… that profession is an outlet for their insanity. So here is an aesthetic principle (I bring everything everything back to my profession, you see), a rule for artists: ‘Be regulated in your life, and boringly bourgeois, so that your art can be violent and original.’ As for your son, I get why you’re worried about Paris, but I think your concerns are exaggerated. Anybody can lose their way! Nobody is ever tempted; we tempt ourselves.” (my translation)

I still think this is a great quote! I’m reminded of another Frenchman, Michel Foucault, who we tend to think of as a bit of a queer icon who spent lots of time in bathhouses and sex dungeons, but who actually spent the vast majority of his life in archives pouring over manuscripts and writing and lecturing. In short, his work is so important not because of his debaucheries but because of his boringly middleclass work ethic! (The internet archives of today would have given him more time for other pleasures, surely, but I wonder if that would have been more disappointing that exciting for him. Probably he’d just be trolling folks on Twitter.)

Indeed, having been childhood friends and briefly reunited in their late adulthood after Tennant’s husband died—during which time he wrote this letter—Flaubert and Tennant never saw each other again. Flaubert poured out his heart and considerable ardor to a pretty girl he used to know, and that was the end of it. I guess he kept all that passion bottled up for the work? Tennant came to be known primarily through her editions of his correspondence, in which she included only a few of the least flirtatious letter, suppressing her own insights and brilliance to celebrate the artists, politicians, and intellectuals who were drawn to her. But she lived a grand life and is rightly being celebrated now. (Tennant had an interesting biography written about her in 2009, as is fitting.)

Here’s the rest of the letter. The famous quotation is on pages two and three:

I am teaching this course again. Every year it changes, and this year I hope it changes a lot. Here’s what I said about this today, our first day of classes:

Any story about crime and punishment is bound to start with a few stylized facts. Until this year, I’ve started with the same number: 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States, which is roughly seven times as many people as our peer nations would incarcerate if they had the same population we do. But last year something extraordinary happened: somewhere around 8% of those people were released and not replaced. We can’t be very exact because prisons across the country are not very careful about counting and reporting the number of people they imprison, but any way you slice it the pandemic has started an unprecedented process of decarceration that we’re going to be talking about throughout the semester.

I’m starting with that stat, but I could equally well start with another one: 

The FBI says that—during the first six months of this year—the number of murders in 22 cities increased by 16% compared to the same period in 2020 and by 42% compared to the first six months of 2019.

(cite)

Incarceration is down. Crime is up. Could there be a connection?

First, an interlude: when I taught this course in 2019, I had a student stand up about halfway through class and loudly leave, commenting “I thought this was going to be a course on Dostoevsky’s novel.” That’s a different class. And while I can tell you that there is almost certainly not a connection between decreasing incarceration and increasing violence, that’s not really what this class is about, either.

What we will do together if you continue in this class is somewhat different. I want to remind you about something literally academic: departments and disciplines. This is a philosophy class. And there’s a difference between how we approach a problem like mass incarceration in this department, compared to how it might be approached in a political science class, a psychology class, or a history class. I have colleagues and collaborators in all of those departments—as well as Theology, Linguistics, English, Biology, Sociology, and others—who apply their disciplinary approach to this issue. Meanwhile, we all are truly colleagues and collaborators: we work together, learn from each other, and read each other’s work.

So what I want you to think about—a little bit—is what the specifically philosophical approach to crime and punishment might be. 

One specifically philosophical approach is the analysis of concepts: 

• What is a crime? What is the relationship between crime and moral obligation? Is crime any violation of the criminal code? Or are some things outlined in the criminal code that shouldn’t be, and some things allowed by the code that ought to be criminal? 
• Is mens rea always required for something to be criminal? What about all the edge cases in mens rea—mental illness, youth, disability, and addictions—do they excuse otherwise criminal conduct? 
• What counts as legitimate punishment? Are capital punishment, torture, exile, incarceration, branding, public shaming, all legitimate? 
• What obligations do we have to those we punish? 
• What is punishment for, anyway?

I have lots of good things to read on all those questions, and lots of little lectures to give on the history of answers to these questions, and honestly I think we can’t avoid some of them. But I don’t think this is the only right way to do philosophy, and in this class I think it’s more important to start with the real questions we have about these issues and try to weave these questions into them. Maybe in the abstract caning is a potentially legitimate punishment—but in the US, given the strong association between torture and slavery, we can’t endorse it. 

Right now, today, we face multiple crises related to crime and punishment. And I believe we are obligated to think through what we are doing in response to those crises. I believe that sometimes the best philosophy on a specific question is done in some other department or discipline: the historians, psychologists, linguists, and sociologists are usually pretty good at some crucial philosophical steps that philosophers ourselves sometimes miss.

So I ask you: what questions are you bringing to the classroom?

As you can see, primed with those analytic questions, my students ended up sounding pretty analytic! (Also, my handwriting is atrocious.) My humble observation is that often five groups of questions and themes emerge when I teach this class:

1. What have we done? What is the current situation with prisons and policing? What are prisons like? What is it like to experience a violent crime? Who experiences that, and what do we do about it? What is it like to be stopped and frisked regularly? Does stopping and frisking millions of people every year reduce violence crime? What is it like to spend a month in prison? A year? The rest of your life?
2. How did we get here? What is the cause or causes of mass incarceration—in the United States, but also in some other countries? Is it entirely white supremacy? Is it the War of Drugs?
3. What should we hope for? Should we aim to abolish prisons and policing, or merely reform them? What are the alternatives? How do we enforce norms without an “or else”? What else has to change to change the legal punishment system?
4. What can we do about it right now? What are the most promising policies and practices for ending mass incarceration in the United States? Do we need legal reforms, mass movements and protest, cultural and spiritual renewal, an end to capitalism, or something else entirely?
5. What should we do with our anger, rage, and resentment?

Now look: we can’t duck the econometrics of crime and punishment. But we are going to ask some critical and philosophical questions about their methodologies.

I then led the class through some charts and graphs that debunk some of the major myths about mass incarceration in the US.

Next week? Danielle Allen’s Cuz. She’s a philosopher, after all!

The University of Toronto’s Sociology Department posts the reading lists for its PhD comprehensive exams. This is the list of books and articles that the faculty think are required for serious scholarship in these subfields, and it’s a great place to look for syllabus ideas for courses in related fields. (h/t Raul Pacheco-Vega)

• Sociology of Crime and Law
• Gender
• Health and Mental Health
• Immigration, Ethnicity and Race
• Networks and Community
• Political Sociology
• Sociology of Culture
• Work, Stratification and Markets
• Qualitative Methods
• Quantitative Methods
• Sociological Theory

There are a bunch of different ways to teach undergraduates about moral psychology in a philosophy department:

1. Emphasize free will issues: weakness of will, nature of addiction (& mental illness), causal role of environment and genetics, reactive attitudes and the nature of blame and praise, etc. Is akrasia even possible? Is Kant’s moral psychology plausible?
2. Emphasize the profession of psychology and the bifurcation of research and practice. How does therapy work? Is the DSM a useful guide to our psychic lives? Is mental illness a myth? Is the replication crisis a particular problem for psychology? Do forensic psychology and social work perpetuate white supremacy and mass incarceration?
3. Hortatory and didactic: how can you be a good person? Are personality traits persistent over time? If we are character skeptics should we be virtue skeptics? What should we do with all these feelings and negative emotions? How can we overcome implicit and explicit bias? Also can literary classics actually make us finely aware and richly responsible?
4. The specific psychology of evil and oppression: study bias, conformity, and the psychic forms of dehumanization, racism, sexism, and obedience to authority. Look at group membership as a primary source of the corrosion of morality. In a sense this is the liberal version of “how to be a good person” i.e. “how to be an anti-racist feminist,” “how to overcome our internalized misogyny and ableism,” etc. But a course like this is likely to focus on particular examples, take up issues closer to political psychology and moral foundation theory.
5. Emphasize epistemic issues: the same organ psychology studies is the organ doing the studying. We are deeply inconsistent and self-contradictory. We are tribal. We make excuses for ourselves while judging others mercilessly. We want things we can’t admit. We have implicit biases we explicitly deny. We engage in motivated reasoning. We don’t live up to our principles, making excuses for ourselves we disallow to others. We are vulnerable to situations and peer pressure. Altruism is itself egotistical. F.A.B.R.E.A.M.–fundamental attribution bias rules everything around me.
6. Focus on metaethics: what is personal identity? Is moral talk merely expressive boo/hurrah or is there a moral reality that our judgements can track or not? Do the psychological and motivational shortcomings of consequentialism render it a less plausible account of morality?
7. Focused on the developmental story: take the debate between Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan as the central debate, and try to figure out what it means that people are so different from each other. How much of morality is mere culture? Is there anything we can say about individualism versus collectivism as focal points of Western versus Eastern cultures? Is there something wrong with all the psychological research done on college students from Western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies? What do we truly have in common?

I love all these different versions of the class and I’ve taught them all, and probably there are more I haven’t thought of. But I think moral psychology courses shine when they emphasize the good old fashioned “hermeneutics of suspicion” I name-checked in my title. What if we are strangers to ourselves? What if we know not what we do? What if we live under conditions of radical self-deception? What if evolutionary psychology or an understanding of the human archetypes captured in Sophoclean tragedy can show us our true motivations and debunk our fake ones?

Basically, we have easy phenomenological access to some parts of our own psyches, but we also have plenty of evidence that there’s “more to it” than what we can easily see about ourselves. We are uneasy inhabitants of our own heads, and there’s something interesting and provocative in that experience of self-estrangement.

In contrast with most of the straight-ahead moral philosophy out there, moral psychology tends to call our motivations into question. I quite like this Regina Rini paper on psychological debunking of moral judgments, but she casts this as an objectionable experience of disunity. I’d argue that our continued fascination with psychological debunking comes both because it provides a satisfying opportunity to debunk others (to see them better than they see themselves) and to explain the parts of our own experience that don’t quite make sense and hold out hope of greater unity.

For my money the notion of self-estrangement is the fundamental insight of psychology as a discipline separated out from philosophy. (I follow Anthony Appiah on this: the growth of philosophy as it’s understood today largely tracks the creation of independent departments of psychology.) It’s precisely because we can’t see ourselves clearly and we engage in elaborate justifications and deceptions that we can’t study the mind from the arm chair with introspection and meditation. We need at least two arm chairs for the talking cure, or rather we need the analyst’s couch, the psychiatrist’s prescription pad, the neuroscientist’s fMRI, and the social psychologist’s tricksy experiments. Ironically, we even need some bad developmental psychology so we can do better social psychological experiments: Milgram’s experiment famously works because we trick people into thinking they’re researching BF Skinner’s behaviorism but really they’re proving that most of us are Good Germans underneath it all.

Anyway, much is made of the standard moral error theory—that we simply don’t understand what our moral talk is really about, because moral states are not about anything at all. But I prefer the kind of error analysis you get from the “heuristics and biases” literature, which is also embedded in the Rawlsian notion of reflective equilibrium: if there’s nothing at all that our moral judgments are about, then it doesn’t make sense to say that our judgments are biased or wrong. But if they are clearly inconsistent with each other, then at least greater consistency is possible. The evidence from psychological studies of moral development and the experiment philosophy results about our moral behavior can all help us identify candidate moral intuitions or judgments upon which to train that search for consistency.

That’s through-line between Freud’s psychoanalysis and Haidt’s moral foundations theory: that we can learn things beyond “bubba psychology,” i.e. the psychology of wise old women who have observed many generations of people and have finely attuned and richly aware assessments of themselves and others. Yet at the same time, because psychologists (inhabiting the same buildings in universities and the same sections of the book store) both research the mind and provide specific clinical support to suffering individuals, there have been some key bubba psychology insights that required this rejection of common sense to make clear.

Both therapeutically and philosophically, then, there’s something like a set of deep and potentially clichéd lessons to learn from moral psychology here:

1. People are different. (There’s a lot more human variation than most people admit, and it’s not arranged in a clear hierarchy from bad to good or sick to healthy.)
2. Don’t believe your gut, it’s full of shit. (Your emotions are not so smart.)
3. Don’t believe everything your brain tells you, either. (Your rationality is really good at giving you the answers you want to hear.)
4. Pick your friends and associates carefully. (The history and the psychological research clearly show that if those groups are cruel, or racist, or genocidal, then we are likely to be cruel, racist, and genocidal too.)

Probably it is more complicated than this. Probably there are more. Families matter. Community matters. Institutions and incentives matter. The prevalence of conformity and social normativity, for instance, makes me think that “pick your friends and associates carefully” is maybe a bit more difficult to implement than I’ve made it sound here. There are contributing factors that seem to make the very notion of “picking” a misnomer, since it is rarely under our conscious and fully autonomous control to decide with whom we are going to spend our time. And thus if you’re doing psychology, pretty soon you need to start doing sociology, and economics, and anthropology, and political science too. It really requires a kind of interdisciplinary social scientific approach. Or maybe we just call it philosophy?

I have a bunch of colleagues who do serious work on stoicism, and, well, I don’t. (1) But I’m teaching moral psychology again this semester and there’s a lot of relevant insights from various debates that I think are stoicism adjacent. (2) So here’s a kind of typology:

There’s stuff-upper-lip stoicism (which I associate with Rudyard Kipling and pasty British imperialism) that engages in emotional compression in the name of power-wielding, declaims the passions as unmanly, and has this dangerous tendency to explode when challenged. It’s actually deeply sentimental in its denial of emotion—it puts emotions to work ordering the world towards a hierarchical goal, that requires the passionate pretend to dispassion. Kipling’s poem “If” captures it perfectly, (“If you can fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,/Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,/And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”) but so does Henley’s Invictus. (“I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.”) And to be clear I like both poems!

There’s the stoicism of the weak: don’t get angry or resentful even at outrageous injustice because these reactions are seen as challenges to powerful and punished. Nietzsche hated this kind of stoicism: it makes all kinds of external circumstances over into an unchangeable order of Nature, flattening mortality, morality, and mores into a single situation we must merely find a way to stomach. Of course this can be pragmatic but it denies so many possibilities in the name of survival. Ironically, a lot of Admiral Stockdale’s “Courage Under Fire” probably should be classified here, in large part because he embraces Epictetus over Marcus Aurelius, and because his main practice is in his incarceration rather than in his warfighting.

Finally there’s the mindfulness stoicism of modern western buddhists (lowercase because they tend to be anti-metaphysical) and Silicon Valley self-help gurus and “techbros.” This has a developed a few different strands, but the key as far as I can tell is that there is a mix of practices: meditate to be 10% happier, update your priors dispassionately, take bets when offered, and entertain provocative ideas without blinking.

That said, I think a crucial precursor to all these ideas is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Allen was a heroin addict and he transformed his drug recovery and New Age mysticism into a project management method for translating projects into discrete tasks, and allowing the careful management of those tasks to free oneself of anxiety. It’s all about preventing perseveration and allowing easy flow states—but it also suits automation and software replacement really well. That’s why Tim Ferris claims stoicism is “an ideal ‘operating system’ for thriving in high-stress environments.”

I sometimes talk about the way that doing logic sets—or programming for that matter—can feel like turning off your brain. That’s obviously not true: it’s “cognitively loaded” work, and confusing if you don’t know where to start. But it’s also mechanical and somewhat pleasant for its ability to give you direct feedback. The word “flow” seems to apply here: GTD is all about how to reduce big projects into discrete tasks small enough to develop that meditative flow while completing. And meditation holds out the same promise: to relate to your life with a little less attachment, to do your work with less friction, and yet still be very productive. The “Bayesian” rationalists sometimes promise a similar experience of mechanically updating ones’ priors as new information comes in—but I’ll note that one of the first metacognitive strategies of the Less Wrong rationalists is the Stoic move of separating the world into facts and beliefs, external realities and internal states. Once that is done there’s no reason to stress about it any longer: the goal is to make one’s internal states (of belief) match up with the external realities, and to bracket the various anxieties and hopes that often lead us into false beliefs.

What worries me about Silicon Valley’s mindfulness stoicism is the sense that it combines all the worst elements of world mastery and manliness with the stoicism of the weak: acceptance of injustice, the embrace of a hostile natural (and social!) world to which we must conform, and a quietism that locates our agency in that compliance while praising it as mastery. Ironically, some of the Bayesian rationalists are not at all quietistic. They create new things and institutions, organize communities, and protect their interests. There are social norms and trendsetters. But I think it’s pretty obvious that these activities fall outside of their principles, and that to a certain extent they are setting aside their stoicism when they do it. (That’s particularly obvious when they take non-rationalists to task for putative betrayals.)

There’s a lot more to be said about the intersections of buddhism and stoicism (and indeed about the intersection of Buddhism and Stoicism) but I have been pondering the role of the subject. The detachment of the stoic is hyper-individualistic in some ways: it counsels the precarity and fragility of others and the external world, but in the name of self-discipline, personal honor, and a duty to integrity. The detachment of the buddhists (and Buddhists) can’t be so easily incorporated here: embracing no-self and emptiness can be a lot more challenging and disruptive. So while Silicon Valley has adopted meditative practice without a care for the metaphysics that might be smuggled in, it may also be that these practices carry their own phenomenological lessons and insights. Perhaps the techbros are going to learn some things in spite of themselves.

I wrote this little primer at the bottom of a long discussion of the Schocken Books editions of Arendt’s work, and then reposted it a while back on Facebook. It’s been popular, so I’m reposting it again here so I can easily link to it without feeding social media.

1. Race-thinking precedes racism. Arendt’s analysis of the rise of totalitarianism is a mammoth book, but the basic argument is simple: you can’t hate Jews for their race until you think of the fundamental flaw with Judaism in racial terms. Thus, race-thinking comes before racism.  Before race-thinking, Europeans hated Jews for completely different reasons: religion! You don’t exterminate other religions, you convert them. But once you have race-thinking, you can create justifications not just for anti-Semitism but for colonialism, imperialism, and chattel slavery of Africans. You can see strands like this in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which is (supposed to be) a comedy! Jessica and Lorenzo get a happy ending. Miscegenation fears require a biological theory of social differences.
2. The Holocaust happened because Europeans started treating each other the way they treated indigenous peoples in the rest of the world. Europeans learned to think racially in the colonization of Africa, and the European model for dealing with resistance involved murderous concentration camps. Thus, when race-thinking eventually returned as a form of governance in the European continent, so too did the concentration camps. (Arendt makes this claim in the second volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism, though it’s built into the structure of the book. It’s often called the “boomerang” thesis: that the men (like Lord Cromer and Cecil Rhodes) who practiced racial imperialism brought those techniques back to Europe to found “continental imperialism.”)
3. Totalitarianism is largely caused by the growth of a class of “superfluous” people who no longer have a role in their economy. In an industrializing society, much traditional work can now be done with fewer workers. One possible solution to this oversupply of workers is to put some of that surplus labor force to work monitoring, policing, and murdering the rest.
4. Ideologues ignore counter-evidence. A very good way to understand ideology is as a logical system for avoiding falsification. There are alternatives theories of ideology that aren’t immune to counter-evidence but instead merely exert constant pressure: for instance, there’s a difference between what Fox News does and what Vox does, and Arendt’s account is more useful for criticizing Fox’s constant spinning than Vox’s technocratic neoliberalism. But Arendt supplied us a useful account of ideology that is closest to our standard use and our current need.
5. The language of human rights is noble and aspirationally powerful. However, statelessness renders most rights claims worthless in practical terms and in most judicial institutions. Someone who must depend on her rights as a “man” or a human is usually worse off in legal terms than an ordinary criminal.
6. You don’t discover yourself through introspection. You discover yourself through action. The main set of claims she made in The Human Condition about the role of public and political life strikes me as pretty important, especially insofar as it denigrates economic and racial identity politics. Think of the cocktail party version of this: on meeting a new person, some people will ask, “Where do you work?” in order to get to know them, identifying them through their profession, their economic role. Others will ask: “What are you into?” as if to say that our recreation and consumption is what defines us. But for Arendt, the appropriate question is: “What have you done? What do you stand for?”
7. If you take that seriously, “identity” politics is frustratingly restrictive. A person is not defined merely by the class or race they come from: they are defined by the principles upon which they act. While it is often necessary to step into the political sphere as a representative of Jews or women–and Arendt acknowledged that this becomes unavoidable when one is attacked as a woman or a Jew–the best kind of politics allows us to enter the political sphere as ourselves, not knowing what we will discover about those selves until we have acted. So the need for identity politics is an indication of larger injustices: we respond as members of our groups when systematic and institutional forces oppress us as members of these groups.
8. Revolutions that aim for political goals are more likely to succeed than revolutions that aim for economic goals. Misery is infinite and thus insatiable; political equality is comparatively easy to achieve. Thus it’s important to connect economic complaints to a deprivation of political equality: the important problem with white supremacy, for instance, is not that whites “have” more than Blacks, but that we count for more, that it is uncontroversial that “White Lives Matter.” (Though an important indication of that “counting for more” is that white people have more than Blacks because we continually plunder Black people and are able to get away with it systematically.)
9. Philosophy as a discipline is fundamentally at odds with politics. This is a problem for political philosophy, and it helps to explain why so much of political philosophy is hostile to politics and tries to subsume the agonistic nitty-gritty of the public sphere under rules of coherence and expert knowledge. This is because thinking as an activity is a withdrawal from active life, and especially politics: the fundamental conflict between the eternal and the ephemeral is not one that can be usefully bridged, and most often those encounters are pernicious for both thinkers and doers.
10. Work and labor are different. Some activities are repetitive and exhausting, and only biological necessity forces us to continue them. Some activities make the world and our lives within it meaningful and fruitful. Many people have economic roles that mix the two activities, but still and all they are distinct. What’s more, there’s not shame in wishing and working for a world without labor, perhaps a world of automation. But a world without work would be fundamentally meaningless.
11. Evil is not complicated, so don’t overthink it. (No kidding, either. Arendt’s view is the opposite of the Spaceballs version of evil: “Evil will always triumph over good because good is dumb.” She seemed to think that evil is dumb and that’s why it can be so powerful.)