The Goodperson Problem

If I just keep criticizing Liberalism or Leftism or Progressivism the message may not come accross accurately and correctly to some people. Because, you see, these are ideologies. And I bet there are a lot of people – I know some – out there who think they have no ideology, they are just a random guy living his life and having his opinion about things. And I really don’t want to come up with  crazy stuff like if you don’t accept my ideology – do I even have any? – you belong to theirs. So I guess one way to approach this problem is to talk not so much about ideology but about personality types. Some personality types are causing certain kind of problems. Well, it is not exactly an overstatement, that is fairly standard psychology what kind of trouble you are going to have if, for example, your single mom is a narcissist. My point is here that non-obviously but still problematic personality types are causing widespread social problems, even, the whole set of problems we call a Progressive ideology is caused by certain personality types. And now I named that personality type Goodperson.

(Not saying crazy leftie murderers of the Pol Pot type were of the Goodperson type.  But they were rather obviously bad. Goodpersons were always their “useful idiots”, and they were not so obviously bad, this is why this is worth discussing.)

I hope this Goodperson term catches on in the English-language blogosphere. It is not my first language, so I checked, yes, Americans really say things like “if I do X, does that make me a good person?” and goodwife used to be a way to address women, so I guess we can say it is good idiomatic English.

But it does not come from there. It is my best attempt to translate Gutmensch, which is Germany’s buzzword of the year 2015.

I don’t know how old is the term. I picked up two hilarious expressions, mostly from the direction of Austria (who tend to have a better sense of humor than Germans), namely that Gerhard Hirschmann sarcastically called someone at some occasion “the Grand Duke of the League of Goodpersons” and at another occasion even more sarcastically mentioned “the United League of Goodpersons”.

Well, the humor doesn’t really come accross that well in English. In the original, when the “vereinigte Gutmenschenliga” is very worried that asylum seekers may not have all their human rights instantly fulfilled conjures a comical image of Al Gore types wringing their hands and being worried and somber. And the “Grossfürst der Gutmenschenliga” also carries the message, in a truly hilarious way, that these Worriers tend to be high status, rich, aristocratic, from the educated elites, which is weird, given how the message is generally egalitarian.

So Goodperson basically means a person suffering from pathological altruism. And there is also the intended undertone that they don’t just happen to be pathological altruists, they also find it very important that it makes the G-O-O-D people, either to signal this goodness to others or to themselves enjoy the warm feeling that they are GOOD people.

Note how Goodperson is a gender-neutral, sexless term. This is no accident. If you try to define the expression “a good man”, you will find answers roughly like: a good man supports his family, is loyal to his friends, does his work in a  reliable way and so on. Similarly, a good woman is loyal to her man, take care of her kids, does not spread ugly gossip about her woman friends. In other words, being a good man and a good woman is all about not defecting on people personally close to you. It is not universal. It is particular. A good man doesn’t just support a random family out there, he supports his family. A good woman doesn’t just take care of some random kids: she takes care of her kids.

Now, the Goodperson is entirely different. The general idea is to be altruistic to complete utter strangers even when it endangers the interest or safety of people physically close to you. It is as universal as it gets.

Here is a useful test. Does the idea of a media publishing a photo of you giving food some asylum-seeker child appeal to you? I am not interested if you want to help them in any sort of meaningful way. I am specificially interested in giving food to one kid, because the idea is not about the aggregate utilitarian/consequentialist outcome but how it reflects on your character. Would you like it if the world would see your character is fundamentally altruistic?

If yes, you could be a Goodperson.

I for example would really not want this. I would like to win some sports championship and then have a photo of me in the media, raising that prize with a big grin, that would be cool, as it would reflect on me being hard-working, dedicated, succesful and so on, but winning a prize in altruism to utter strangers just doesn’t come accross as a real prize to me.

I am not even sure if altruism to strangers is really a virtue, I mean, even in cases when you don’t endanger people close to you.  I always figured that utilitarianism should be some kind of a cascade, help someone in a way that he can help someone who can also help someone and so on. Helping someone who will perhaps never help anyone looks rather a waste. Besides, you really have to figure your long-term outcomes. Suppose you are an Effective Altruist and buy mosquito nets to Malawi so that kids don’t die of malaria. Yes, this looks real nice until you figure in overpopulation and the chance it will lead to them horribly killing each other while they fight over food. Or killing not each other, someone else. Perhaps, you and your descendants.

My point is, lots of ways to live a life that people can respect and altruism is just a small part of it, and generally if you want to help others you gotta make sure your helping goes to a good place, and that means, keep it in the circle of people fairly close to you. Don’t you have a poor nephew somewhere who could use a college degree?

Why do Goodpersons feel such a strong need to show or to feel that they are altruistic, they are GOOD? Why don’t they rather want to, I don’t know, signal strength, success, intelligence or achievement?

Well, my best guess is that the European Gutmenschen do it because of the American influence, and American Goodpersons do it because of having been raised in a culture of Secularized Hyper-Protestantism or Cryptocalvinism.

While I used to think religion used to be conservative in the not so long past, these days I wonder more and more, just how much of the characteristics of a Goodperson an average 18th century bishop had?  So I think this may be one element of it.

Another element is women, signalling  Goodperson status is something really popular amongst women, not really sure why, but I think it may be a certain distortion of motherly instincts. I figure, put a fairly modern priest together with ten women, of the type who have too much free time, and remove or emasculate the men, and they will unerringly come up with some kind of a distinctly Goodpersonly project.

A third element is beta/gamma men. They think, perhaps not openly, but subconsciously, that appearing to be a knight in shining white armor will get them laid.

I think this is one of my worst articles, the inspiration just isn’t coming. Let’s try to wrap it up: being a Goodperson means your behavior often has three elements occuring together:

• You are highly altruistic towards utter strangers, whom you don’t even know.

• This altruism of yours has more to do with you than with them, you are more interested in feeling good about yourself or showing you are a good person than providing lasting and meaningful help to the strangers, for this reason, you may be more interested in the pureness or in the dramatic effect of your sacrifice than in its actual effect. You also may engage in altruistic acts that don’t involve actual helping, just signalling, like carrying a refugees-are-welcome sign or changing your Facebook background to a rainbow flag. While you are doing it, your face may be smug. That is often a sign. And this also means you will approve of similar acts of others without really looking into how much they actually helped, rather you will just approve of the purity of the motive.
• You like to signal altruism at least as much as any other virtues. Sure, you may like to be smug about yours success or your fitness scores as well, but about altruism even more.

Why is this all harmful?

Isn’t it obvious? If people take bribes from an enemy tribe to harm theirs, they are called traitors and the act is called treason. And that is something really low. How do you call someone who doesn’t even need to be bribed?

Look, you often cannot meaningfully help utter strangers. You send money halfway over the world, you cannot be sure how it is used. So you let them in your own country and then you get other kinds of problems.

Meanwhile, you may be passing on a lot of options to help people close to you because it does not look that glorious.  When was the last time you bought surprise flowers to grandma? Yeah being such a good boy feels so small. It lacks grandness, it lacks glory, it lacks imagination, it doesn’t show your mind is so broad the whole world can fit into it. So, it lacks status.

But there are so many kinds of status. If you are a young man mostly interested in women, I can guarantee being a Goodperson won’t get you into any panties. If yes, those panties gonna be way too big because being fat is progressive. The kind of status you would get by putting a biceps on your arms, a motorbike under your ass (fun, too) and a bit of a devil-may-care attitude would get you more in the pussy department. When women start calling you that impossible, horrible guy, it is going to get good.

Goodperson-status is only really useful at the top. Obama can’t be a Prez without being a Goodperson, nor can, presumably, the managing editor of a local newspaper of a mid-sized cities in Germany.  They are elites. What are you? Say, are you a computer programmer working as an employee? At this level it is just stupid to care about Goodperson signalling. You are a working bee. No use in doing this at all, goodpersoning won’t get you promoted. Actual achievement, showing leadership skill and intelligence, and suchlike will. And remember, what defines a Goodperson is not altruism but altruism to utter strangers. If you are a fundamentally nice type, you can be a good employee instead of a Goodperson. Engage in altruism directly related to your role in the organization, like a database admin could be proactive at asking users what queries, reports could help their jobs.  Showing that kind of initiative is useful for one’s career, and it is being a good employee, not Goodperson, yet it feels sufficiently “nice” if you happen to need that feeling.  Even when you become a boss, a team leader, there is still no use in being Goodperson to strangers. You can invest all the altruism you want into keeping your team members happy instead.  Only when you become a real BIG big-boss, Fortune 500 CEO, big enough to actually be noticed by the media, that is when you have to write a check to an orphanage in Burundi (which will buy some nice technicals to the local warlord) and have a photo op done with a smug grin on your face. Not before. So why?

How to stop being a Goodperson? I think there is no way to stop signalling, it’s human nature, but try to signal something else, perhaps, success, achievement, strength. Also, if you like to keep the warm glow of altruism around, do it to people who personally matter to you. Better to offer free babysitting to your brother who has a small child or something. That way, you are not a Goodperson, you are a good uncle.

Not sure if this was coherent. I will try to rest more and have a sharper brain and then perhaps write it into a better article.

 

 

 

RE: The Best Lack All Conviction

Another excellent piece from TFP.

Some remarks:

But look a little past the short term, and this lack of courage results in a horrifying landscape of atomization. In general, every social relationship involves some friction. There is always a temptation to take the easy way out, to exit from demanding obligations to family and friends. But when you spread out a little conflict-aversion throughout a society, this avoidant behavior gets amplified into atomization.

OK, time to tackle this. Deep, meaningful, obligation-like human relationships are essential for a fulfilled life. But they do not come from just hanging out together, nor from directly wanting to have this kind of relationship, simply desiring these deep relationships no matter how courageously does not make them. They don’t even come from a feeling of obligation. They can only come from shared goals.

I mean, if you want to be close to your uncle, it is simply not enough to have this as an earnest goal, no matter how courageously. If you just think you should try to be close because you are relatives, it quickly becomes awkward: not the occasional rancor, but the constant sense of weird artificiality. If you are a good trad boy and strongly feel this kind of obligation, it still does not suffice, it can still be awkard. You must hide your feelings because if you were up front your uncle would say if the only reason you visit me is obligation then fsck off. So this does not work. What works, then? In short: you have to be working on common goals together, that gets people together.

We made friends easily when we were 17 because our interests weren’t just interests. If we were into racecar driving, we probably dreamed about becoming a driver ourselves or working in the sport as a mechanic or something. So we had goals, not just interests. This brought us together with other guys who were into it too. The goal may not have been consciously formed, it was maybe not a clear plan, but there was a goal-like animating spirit that was stronger than just interest, the feeling that in the longer run this thing may not just be a hobby but perhaps we will do more at it… But at 37 such things are usually just hobbies, our families and careers matter more, so we don’t make friendships so easily because we have hardly other goals than to progress in our careers, raise our kids well and have fun in the minimal free time we have left.

One of the great discoveries of NRx is that large parts of human psychology are reducible to to group dynamics and status-seeking.

Families and kinship satisfy both motives in a uniquely well suited way. The basic idea is to compete for status together, to help each other in the individidual pursuit of status and also to gain common status as a family: to bring honor to the family name.  (This is an upper-class way of putting it, perhaps, a lower-class person would have said “going up in the world”.) And of course every family competed with every other family in this because unlike wealth, status is zero-sum, which satisfied the group-dynamics urge. Families even often had more or less officially rival  families (fictional version: Barnes-Ewing feud in the Dallas TV series).

This shared goal of competing for status, or bringing honor to the family name, was what animated families and kept them together. In the long past this was explicit, then in the past few generations rather implicit and subconscious, as in the last few generations  “bringing honor the family name”, and “going up in the world”, and especially “rival families” sounded more and more ridiculous – but people still had ambitions towards social status and still found their family members the most obvious allies in this.

Then… it… fizzled… out.

I am not 100% sure why and how. We can make guesses. Perhaps redistributory governments reduced both the gains of winning and the losses of losing, and it is surely part of the story, but not all – in such a society, a government job would be the highest status, so people should theoretically compete for that. But we don’t see it family members vigorous cooperating so that someone of the family should become an Equal Opportunity Officer and the all can bask in the honor and glory of it. Because there is no actual honor and glory in it. People do see through the fake. Or perhaps it is diversity – without a uniform opinion, it is hard to have uniform high esteem. But again not fully so – the same decadence happens even in ethnically uniform places (say, Prague) and besides ethnic sameness is no guarantee for uniformity of opinion as the ghosts of St. Bartholomew’s Day can testify.

So it is really hard to guess why and how it happened. There is just a slow, slightly chilly wind of lethargic “why even bother?” blowing  through the West. But why is this lethargy? Why exactly can individuals and families no longer gain meaningful status, so that competing for this status with the other families would again unify families? Whence this lethargy?

Part of my best guess would be that Progressives achieved half a success. They managed to turn public opinion away from old forms of status but were unable to introduce new forms of their own. So on one hand they managed to sound it really ridiculous to say I will help my brothers to become the most privileged white males in our country, but on the other hand, nobody thinks Equal Opportunity Officers deserve glory and honor. (BTW this is a real job title in the UK.)

Part of the story is the lack of what the RP types call “inner game”, I would rather call it “internalized status”. Status has multiple aspects:

• Objective status: your actual position
• Interpersonal status: do people actually defer to you or not
• Subjective or internalized status: basically confident behavior, which also means feeling inwardly confident and expressing it outward

So, for example, a young lieutenant, assigned to lead a platoon (objective status) must really learn to fill out his boots (subjective or internalized status) or else soldiers will not defer to him (interpersonal status) and basically his sarge will run the show.

So any decent society has to have the kind of status system that elevates people who aren’t terribly deficient in testosterone. Not meaning we have to have Conans run newspapers (although, it is interesting that Arnold was succesful in everything), but we have to elevate people who can fill out those boots.

I think perhaps this is what got screwed, every aspect of high-T behavior got systematically vilified, to the extent that today e.g. if you start a business and make it big, you cannot really radiate that kind of old-time boss image, standing up like a Teddy Roosevelt and be like “yes, I made this, yes, I own this, yes, I run this show”.  Today you would be ridiculed for this i.e. for actual normal high-status behavior, because this is how normally men who really internalize their high status usually behave. Instead  you basically have to busy deny you have status and if you run a succesful company and say stuff like “we are a creative community of hard-working individuals” and so on, reducing your own role and pretending it is democratic. Look at how virtually all high status men are now self-deprecating and keep praising their team! Smart thing for motivation, sure, but they are overdoing it, they are making their own role seem minuscule.

And indeed, why bother? If you cannot own your success, your power, your privilege (let’s not fear this word: status-seeking is all about achieving privilege: if I could become an aristocrat in the old sense, I of course would), why even bother achieving it? Why get status if you are not allowed to internalize it and behave like a high-status man?

And we lost not only the internalized or subjective status but also the interpersonal kind. Today we need to learn complicated body language cues to figure out if others defer to us.  It has been a whole lot easier in the past. People addressed each other different “up” and “down”. This was even more outspoken in non-Anglo soceties, where Japanese has complex grammar for talking “up” and “down”, where languages with a T-V distinction had the case when higher status people used the T form and lower status people the V form, I figure Anglos had to contend with Sir/Madam vs. first-name terms. Similarly, while clothing is today largely something you wear depending on the occasion, suit to the office, jeans to the mall, back then it was something that depended on your status: gentlemen were always elegant. So all these things served to express interpersonal differences of status: making status gains all the sweeter and hopes and aspirations for higher status all the more fervent.

Let’s try to tie it all together. We have plenty of scientific evidence now that when people gain status, they get more T. You could even call it a reward system. Our culture systematically suppresses the expression of high-T behavior. You can gain status but not behave as if, not even really feel as if you gained status. People don’t much of the older kinds of dominant-submissive courtesies, and other status markers like class-dependent clothing were also outdated.

So indeed, why bother? If you would never allowed to feel not hungry, would you eat?  Would you bother having sex if orgasms were denied to you? Awkward parallels, but illustrate the point. All the fun was taken out from high status and all the reasons to aspire for it.

And without these status aspirations, we suddenly lack goals. Hence the kind of depression we can see in Houellebecq’s work.

And I think this is why we cannot find a common goal with our family members: in the past the common goal was to acquire status and bring honor to the family name, while competing with other families. This tied families together.

Let me add something more, perhaps an even deeper insight. Status-seeking shouldn’t be seen as a specific desire but as a meta-desire that underlies most other desires and gives them strength and focus. So when your little nephew wants to be a violinist it doesn’t simply mean he likes the sound of the violin or has talent for it, although it means both, too. But it also means he desires the status, respect, prestige, estimation that a Paganini used to have. This is a driving, animating force between most human desires. Without this, without a status drive to give an extra boost, most drives and desires lose their power. Then they just become an idle hobby. And depression, anhedonia lies that way.

Counter-check: today, men who are still driven and have bold goals and not threatened by anhedonia and demotivation tend to work in subcultures that managed to retain some kind of a status system, that gives them this kind of boost in the ass. Computer hackers and Silicon Valley are a good example. Eric S. Raymond is some sort of a “tribal elder” in hackerdom, and in order to preserve that kind of status he elected to work on projects that hackers respect, not projects that offer lucrative payoffs, even to the extent of courting financial difficulties. Want a smart man work his ass off for free AND be perfectly happy and motivated doing so? Give him the respect of a tribal elder. This is really how a strong motivator it is.

Every time we like doing something really much, more than half of it is liking the potential status doing it really well could bring.

It is the Bruce Lee movies that sent us kids to the martial arts dojos in the eighties, because the Little Dragon was such a cult figure, but of course he was precisely so because we normal mortals had no chance of becoming like him.  It was not the local competitions, where we actually had a chance to win, but precisely for this reason they were not so exciting. It is all about wanting to become members of clubs that would reject us. Marx was right. Not that one, I mean, but Groucho Marx. What is the point of becoming a member of a club that would take you? If they would take you, they don’t have a higher status than you so it means no elevation for you. And if they do have higher status they will not take you, because you reduce their average status. He understood this just perfectly.

Want more proof? People like to play videogames, and there are different kinds for different tastes. But it was already discovered in the arcades of the 1980’s that it all works better if we there are high score tables and we can brag about our initials being top for a week in the local arcade. Today, it is Steam achievements or Xbox trophies… same story, it is all about bragging rights i.e. status. Videogames are enjoyable without status gains, and clearly very few people have status gains as the main reason to play videogames, they are simply a fun activity, but status gains make them sweeter.

Once we see the status motive in everything, we can see how family cooperation used to be important. Sure, Joe wanted to be a  businessman and Jack a music conductor, but ultimately both meant becoming (or staying) a respected gentleman with the tall top hat. This was mostly taken for granted: they both are ambitious men, just with different ambitions. Ambition literally meant status-seeking. If you look at a quote page about ambition you can see that it did not just mean any difficult goal (like today) but a goal to gain status, a goal to climb high on that ladder against the sky.  To succeed meant not to achieve any random performance marker you choose but to actually gain the respect of your peers by doing your thing. It was less subjective, less of this “Achieve your goals!” and more intersubjective, like achieving the admiration of our peers.

So as long as you were ambitious about anything, which meant not simply liking to do a thing but also to achieve status via that thing, you had a goal, or at least a meta-goal in common with your family members. This was what kept people together.

A quick rule of thumb to tell, even some extent to quantify to what extent a society stayed sane so far: high-status men should wear distinctive clothing. Like suits a few generations ago in the West, when they were about showing your class, not just a uniform for office workers. There must be a form of clothing in a healthy society that advertises that a man is higher status than the average, of the privileged class or of the high achievers. Because this shows the extent to what a society is non-egalitarian: it shows the extent that status aspirations are still possible because you are allowed to express and enjoy it.

From this angle, let’s look at a few examples. Somewhat surprisingly, America looks worst – their love for baggy jeans is legendary, comparable only with the Brit love for tracksuits. (It is surprisingly only because the higher levels of wealth inequality they have: why do people aspire to be rich if they don’t express their richness is unambiguous ways?) France or Italy fares slightly better, at least their TV celebrities won’t  be caught dead by the paparazzi shopping in a mall in tracksuits and baseball hats, but a succesful lawyer or surgeon still will be… Eastern Europe is kind of weird, clearly suits are more respected by the average people than in the West, they give you vary looks, and the guidos in the richer discotheques dress downright kitchy, but it is hard to tell, because high-status people are rare there, there is not enough wealth in general to go around and the slightly less struggling are not going to differentiate themselves much from the far more struggling. In Arab soceties, for example, Iraq, I have read conflicting opinions, some say the bisht is just like a suit today, wear it for occasions then put it away, and some say it is like a suit a few gens ago, a class marker.

Can someone name a society where men of the top wear distinctive clothing and wearing it is still clearly respected, even a tad bit feared, wearing it for lower-status men is forbidden or laughed out, and they are not outcompeted by the “in” guys who wear fashionable Western stuff?

Not sure I can see any remedies for it. The point is, the Progs managed to destroy any other status than their own, but they kind of failed in creating high status for themselves. I know not everybody would agree with it,  but try going to some working class pub and ask the patrons about Noam Chomsky, 90% will be “no idea” and the rest will oscillate between “some prof” and “fucking commie”. Do you think they talked that way about Rockefeller? I think there was genuine respect, mixed with some fear perhaps. They don’t even respect each other. When Bismarck said of Disraeli “The old Jew, that is the man!”, that bore immense respect. Today the proggiest Progs get attacked for being white males, and feminist women get attacked for not being trans inclusive so basically we see a weird inversion now, we see the futile attempts to gain a bit of personal status by attacking other people’s status, even each others, but this doesn’t really work. Of course it does lead to equality of status, but in the sense of everybody equally resented. The old model was different: by tolerating a high inequality of status, it was possible to extended some amount of respect for a large number of people.

Incidentally, I remember a debate with liberals about 10 years ago. I talked about my medievalist fantasies and they told me – you wanted to be a lord, if you lived back there, not a servant, nobody wants to be a servant, right? And I told them I would totally be OK with being a medieval servant because if I am the best servant, and that is I could achieve with hard work and being smart, and in the baron’s grace, that would actually give me more status and power than what even a CEO can have today. Why have a problem with someone being above you if you can potentially have a lot of people deep under you? But apparently it seems they are mostly motivated by not wanting to have anyone over them, while I would be more motivated by having enough under me. To put it a bit cynically, the goal wouldn’t be to not kiss any ass, but only to have a good net sum of giving and getting it.

Anyhow this reminds of one SSC commenter who proposed a really plausible theory of depression. Dogs can get depressed, it is not a human thing. And one hypothesis says its evolutionary function is make the low-status lay low so that they won’t get killed for being too uppity. Clearly, depressed humans and dogs look really submissive. But how does a brain as simple as a dogs detect his status position? And he – I think Chaosmage was it – proposed that plain simply by detecting if there is anyone under you or not. If anyone defers to you, your status is not the lowest of the pack, so no point in laying low. And that is how having a pet or doing mentoring cures depression. Anyway, if it is true, then one can say men like me focus on not getting depressed: we are not troubled by having others above us, we just also want people under us. While it seems liberal types are motivated by a certain form of pride: really disliking having anyone put above them.

This can give us a certain hope that this Prog system could collapse, after all, seeing how futile it is for the goals of most people. If you cannot be Big Man by spouting Prog slogans, why bother? But until that, there is hardly any solid status-seeking possible, which means shared goals and alliances are hard, which means meaningful human relationships are hard.