Personality

This post is about what it means to get to know someone. It consists of various previously unconnected points on this subject that I have gathered over the course of some years.

• History
• Conveyance
• Length
• Popularity
• Tolerance

History

Everyone has a story. By this I mean that almost everyone is able and, in some contexts, willing to tell their entire life story from birth to the present. The older they are, the more story there is to tell, but also the more times they have been asked to tell it before, which makes them readier to do it.

I have a story, too. I will not tell it here, but I have it down to a pretty coherent narrative that I tell a little differently each time depending on the audience, but the details of which are pretty fixed. I usually begin my story in 2017 rather than at my birth, considering events before that point uninteresting. Everyone who knows me knows my reasons for beginning at 2017; only a few, besides my family, know about my life before then. (My family, in turn, do not know much about my life since then.)

Not everyone is equally good at telling their story. Some people are particularly interested in some aspects of their life and will omit others. But there are a few major aspects to someone’s life, and you cannot be considered to know someone well if you do not know those, even if they usually pass over them. Roughly, in trying to get to know someone, you’re trying to get them to hit at least these points:

• Who are their current friends, and how did they come to meet them?
• What are their current interests (and/or career), and how did they get into them?
• What religion were they brought up in? How did their own religious views develop over time, if at all?
• How did their political beliefs develop over time, if at all?
• What have their romantic and sexual experiences been?
• What have their experiences with drugs and alcohol been?
• If they do not have children, do they want to? Have their feelings, with regard to wanting to have children, always been the same? Do they have any particular views on childrearing?

I just wrote this list up for the first time, so it’s not something I have been explicitly checking every time I wanted to get to know someone. But mentally, I have probably always gone through something like this, since I wanted to learn almost all of these things about most people I made a deliberate effort to get to know.

Conveyance

A distinction I like to make is between clarity and transparency.

Clarity refers to how clearly you can convey what you think when you speak; its opposite is obscurity. Transparency refers to how much you tend to say what you think; its opposite is opacity.

Someone who is very clear, but very opaque, will not often speak his mind, but will usually be understood when he does so; someone who is very transparent, but very obscure, will speak his mind a lot, but people will usually be confused as to what he means by what he says, and requests for clarification won’t seem to help.

I do not claim that the two tend to either go together or appear separately; the qualities are simply worth distinguishing. Both make someone easier to befriend.

Length

There’s a niche indie film called Classical Period, directed by Ted Fendt, which I know about because I have been internet friends with one of the actors, Calvin Engime. (Due to regional restrictions, I have not actually watched it.) Cal showed me some of the published reviews of the film, which spoke to its relative notability within its niche. One was this one by Jonathan Romney, which includes the line: “These are people who speak in paragraphs. Very long paragraphs. With footnotes.” This line has stuck with me for some years, because it describes me and my closest friends very well.

I have sometimes texted people who don’t read or write a lot. There’s a lot more orality to how they text than to how assiduous readers text, even if they stick to a high register – they’ll send many short messages to say what could have been said in one longer message, because that’s what writing looks like when written by someone who is more used to speaking. This style with a lot of short sentences, juxtaposed rather than connected, is also found in the Old Testament, which was written in a culture where writing was not very common yet.

Popularity

There’s one sense of popularity which is equivalent to notoriety, i.e., how many people know about you or have heard of you. This is the most common way to describe someone as “popular”, and while it can be measured by doing polls on how well people know someone, it is usually measured by checking the number of Google results when looking their name up, or by looking at their number of followers on social media.

There’s another sense of popularity which is something like likability or status, and which is seen in the phenomenon of “popular kids” in school. In school, due to common roll calls and such, almost everyone knows almost everyone else’s name, so everyone is equally notorious. But only a few kids are popular. They’re the kids that everyone likes, or admires, or aspires to be like – the coolest kids. Popularity, in this sense, refers to the extent to which people like you, or have a high opinion of you.

I have never been notorious. I do not do anything important enough, or widely enjoyable enough, to achieve notoriety. But I think I have usually been one of the more popular persons within the groups I’ve gotten into.

At the same time, I am peculiarly unlikable, and I am not allowed into many groups. My account on X (formerly Twitter) is blocked by so many other accounts that it often gets hard to read the site while logged into it, due to the large number of comments that are hidden from me. This had usually left me out of group chats on the site, as well, back when an account could not be in the same group chat with anyone who blocked them. Even after this rule was changed, I was still not added to many group chats.

I don’t like many people myself, either – sometimes I connect this sense of ‘liking and being liked by few people’ with a personality disorder. But this is not the place to go into this.

Tolerance

The novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, begins by describing a peculiar quality of its protagonist, Nick Carraway. I will quote the first three paragraphs of the novel in full, since it costs nothing to do so, since the book is in public domain, and space within a webpage is practically unlimited.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret grief’s of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

Carraway goes on to say that he had grown tired of listening to everyone’s personal story, but that he made an exception for Gatsby, the novel’s titular character.

Ever since it was pointed out to me by a close friend that I seemed to also have this quality, I have related strongly to Carraway’s sense of his tolerance, because I have also often had the experience of someone opening up a lot to me very quickly. The occasion in which it was pointed out to me was also significant – I was remarking to my friend that I was, at the same time, close friends with two persons who had also been close friends with each other, but were in the process of bitterly falling out, so that I heard both of them tell me how they felt about their dispute in closer detail than they’d ever tell each other to their face. This experience of being privy to the internals, as it were, of both sides of a conflict, was very interesting. (It did not, for all that, help me prevent their falling out, and they have not spoken in almost three years.)

Although I am not liked by many people, the people who can stand me are unusually comfortable with me. This is also, evidently, a quality that makes it easier to get to know people.

Catholics vs Protestants

Studying the subject lately, I get the sense that Catholicism is bourgeois and Protestantism is aristocratic.

Catholics believe in progress: the Church is infallible, so whenever theologians manage to develop doctrine such that a new dogma is defined, they continuously add to our previous understanding. Protestants believe in an original church that was good and which has horribly decayed, and to which we’re always imperfectly trying to go back. “Semper reformanda”: the church is not infallible, so it may always have to come back to some issue that it decided before.

Catholics believe in human perfection in this life, and deification in the next. We have help from God, through the sacraments issuing from Rome, to do perfect deeds that are pleasing to God, to become saints who totally fulfill the moral law, and then work wonders that no one has seen. New saints are still canonized, and new miracles are still ecclesiastically approved. In the next life, what happens (if we’re good) is we gain all the attributes that the pagan philosophers (not the vulgar pagans) allowed to the gods: invulnerability, bodily immortality, perfect knowledge of nature, a blessedness that cannot be interrupted.

Protestants believe that there is no perfection in this life. No matter how much we try, we still fall short of the ten commandments, and even divine grace does not change the fact that there is some measure of sin in every action we commit. We can go to heaven, not because our corrupt nature is made pleasing to God, but because God, in his mercy, chooses to count Christ’s perfection and merits as our own. We still get to be immortal, so we become what the vulgar pagans attributed to the gods: undying creatures who are still morally imperfect.

Catholics believe that we can understand the moral law philosophically, through our human reason. (This is Thomas Aquinas’s natural law theory.) “I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.” If man can understand the law with his reason, then he can criticize tyrants. The Church was the only institution outside the state with people learned enough to criticize it, and the fact that it existed only in the West was why liberalism arose within it, having had no equivalent in the East.

Protestants, insofar as they embody the Puritan principle, that nothing can be required when it is not clearly in the Bible, believe in divine command theory: something can only be immoral because the Bible says so. In this, they are the equals of Muslims and Jews. The more consistent ones see the Bible as the only source of political as well as of moral law, and hence want to copy what is essentially a bronze-age government. This led to oppressive theocracy in Calvin’s Geneva, and still has its defenders in the so-called theonomist movement – the one comprised of Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Gary North, and others, in which the virtues of stoning are extolled.

Catholics, through their philosophical interpretation of the moral law, found so many ‘just titles’ to interest that the Bible’s restrictions upon usury were reduced to a technicality; Protestants, while they ruled states (before they gave way to sceptical Enlightenment liberals), were much harsher on usury. Catholic Scholastics saw it fitting that we should enjoy our life in this world, and looking for how best we can do this, anticipated much of marginal economic theory; Protestant Calvinists, seeing work as a virtue and a sign of predestination, gave birth to the errors of Adam Smith, his labor theory of value and his idea of ‘unproductive labor’, which produces consumers’ goods as opposed to capital goods. This idea, which took a long time to be purged from economics, is that labor that contributes to consumption in the present does not add to wealth, only labor that increases our consumption deferred indefinitely into the future does. Only in the next life, for the Protestants, should there be enjoyment.

The Catholic Church, finally, is an international institution, indeed the only such institution that existed after the Roman Empire itself fell. It was against this institution that the Protestant revolution was fought. Protestants, early on and to this day, brought all power back to Europe’s petty local potentates, so that humans could be governed according to the accidents of their birth rather than according to their common nature. It is not to be wondered at that racism only reached its greatest horrors in Protestant countries.

Dialogical motivations

It seems useful to distinguish the “psychological motivations” for a belief from the “dialogical motivations” for it.

• Psychological motivations are your best account, given your model of someone’s mind, to explain how they got their belief; given usual “disenchanted” views of psychology, this may involve attributing most beliefs to emotions, or psychoanalytic complexes, etc.

• Dialogical motivations are the motives that a person themself gives for their own belief, when talking to you in dialogue.

(Note that I have to speak of “motives” or “motivations”, not “reasons”, because a person may be willing to admit that their belief is unreasonable, but nevertheless have motivations to give for it.)

---

I’m not sure how important the dialogical motivations are.

On the one hand, it seems that psychological motivations may allow us to explain the presence of a belief without any reference to the dialogical motivations. If someone’s psychological situation changes in such a way that the psychological motivations for their belief are no longer in place, then the belief changes. If you ask someone, “What happened to all those motives you told me before? Those didn’t change, so why did you change your mind?”, they might have to shrug it off and say, “I guess I just don’t care about that so much anymore.”

On the other hand, some people may place a high value on not ending up in a dialogue situation exactly like I just described; that is, they may highly value avoiding the appearance of their being fickle, inconstant, irrational. So they may prevent themselves from changing their belief until they can find a good counter to their own previous dialogical motivations.

And it seems, after all, that if someone has weak dialogical motivations, such that they keep getting embarrassed in an argument when they talk about their belief, then this may amount, itself, to a psychological motivation to change it.

And of course, it’s probable that the dialogical and psychological motivations will coincide in some cases, if someone simply reports their motives accurately; this seems most likely for low-stakes intellectual beliefs, where, indeed, the main effect of having them is that you’ll defend them in dialogues.

---

Someone said that the talk of “psychological motivations” seems redundant, since all motivations are psychological; he wanted to use different words, so as to focus on a contrast between a belief’s true causes and someone’s attempt to explain, and possibly idealize, what they are.

I said I’d really rather frame this distinction in terms of “you explaining someone” versus “someone explaining themselves”. The former is your attempt to do psychology, while the latter is someone’s attempt to look like they’re doing psychology while also possibly (though not necessarily) trying to, e.g., save face, or look good, or convince you of the belief. So that’s where I’d be coming from, regarding the nomenclature.

It is at least possible that the motivations someone gives in dialogue are always affected by ulterior motives such as “trying to look good”, whereas under a rare condition —let’s say, under hypnosis— they might give a “pure” account that is unaffected by ulterior motives and is, therefore, different; the dialogical motivations are the former. It is also at least possible that all three of, the dialogical account, the hypothetical “pure” self-report, and your psychological assessment of someone, are different from the person’s “true” motivations— which, if we are to operationalize without allowing for mind-reading, I’ll just say are the motivations that an idealized ‘very good psychologist’ would ascribe to the belief.

But really, with this post I’m most interested in the question of, what’s the value of dialogical motivations? If you imagine that it’s 2007 and people are hyped up in New Atheism debates, obviously they’re very interested in the dialogical motivations: they want to know all the possible arguments their opponents might give for their belief, and how to counter-argue each one. Which might be pretty removed from a psychological model, but it would seem that it can’t be totally irrelevant to changing minds either, if they’re caring so much. Even though, all the while, both sides might think that their opponents are childish and their entire belief is just an excuse for being an asshole.

It certainly feels like someone’s model of my motives, in order to be accurate, has to listen to my self-reports and attempt to explain them, even if it explains them away and opts for an account that diverges a lot from them.

Discourse ethics

If philosophy does not consist in a definite subject matter, but consists rather in a style of talking, then it does not provide knowledge, it only influences behavior. It is a rhetorical technique. I believe that this would not be philosophy. As such, I believe that philosophy has a definite subject matter, and provides knowledge about it.

I also believe that humans only have their reason and their senses, and are not provided with any additional faculties for obtaining knowledge. As such, all disagreement about a matter of knowledge can be settled with reason and the senses. If two persons disagree, then they must either have witnessed very different sensations in their experience, or at least one of them is being irrational to at least some extent. There is no third possibility, and usually the first one is excluded very quickly, which leaves the second. This is how disagreements happen in the most respected sciences.

So, philosophical ethics, if there is such a thing, must be what provides knowledge about the nature of good behavior. As with other matters of knowledge, any disagreement about it must be able to be settled with reason and the senses. Arguments about disagreements must be able to come to the point where at least one person’s belief is clearly shown to come from that person’s being irrational to at least some extent, or, if some matter of fact is relevant to the case, from their lacking some relevant sense experience.

This is the only kind of “winning an argument” that philosophy provides, the kind where your opponent is shown to be irrational. After he is shown to be irrational, your opponent may well decide that he prefers, in any event, to be irrational in this case, and that being rational is overrated anyway, and that, after all, it would be unkind of you to press him to behave rationally by accepting the conclusions that you defend, and so on. Any answer to this can only come from rhetoric; philosophy has done its job.

I believe, additionally, that philosophical argument is the only rational mode of engagement, in the sense that all other means of affecting behaviors and ideas do not work by means of reason, but work only by means of infra-rational elements in humanity, such as our emotions and instincts. I believe, further, that it cannot be rational to attempt to seek a different mode of engagement, if philosophical argument is available. It follows that any behaviors are irrational if they must lead to disengagement from philosophical argument. It is, therefore, irrational to make your good judgment suspect by arguing fallaciously, as well as to make your good faith suspect by deliberately lying within the argument, together with any other behaviors that would disrupt an argument and make it clearly unwise to continue.

From this analysis, a restriction follows about what sorts of behaviors can be defensible under philosophical ethics. However much, from the point of view of some nation’s creed, it may be right to lie, or to argue fallaciously within an argument, such a point of view cannot, nevertheless, be defended in philosophical argument. For to defend, in philosophical argument, that such behavior is right, is to make your good faith and your good judgment suspect, and therefore to endanger your participation in the only rational mode of engagement, and therefore to act irrationally, and therefore to show yourself to be irrational, and therefore to “lose the argument”, by the philosophical criterion. Once you are shown to be irrational, philosophy’s work is done.

I believe, finally, as part of my analysis of the practice of philosophical argument as it actually occurs, that it is right to break off an argument, if you cannot be sure that your opponent is seeking knowledge, such as is provided by a philosophical discipline such as philosophical ethics is supposed here to be, or by any other respected science. If it is shown that your opponent might be seeking something else above knowledge, such as entertainment, or a change in your behavior, or any ulterior motive, then there is also no certainty about his continuing to follow the practices of philosophical argument that secure it as a rational enterprise. He may lie to you, or make deliberate fallacies. He can no longer be thought of as taking part in a rational mode of engagement.

As such, it is part of the minimum doctrines defensible under philosophical ethics that, the only intrinsically valuable thing, which must be sought after above all others in all circumstances, is knowledge, or a kind of knowledge. For if you defend that anything else may always be sought above knowledge, then you put your rational engagement into doubt. And if you defend that it is sometimes, in some circumstances, a good behavior to seek something other than knowledge, then you also put your rational engagement into doubt, for your opponent cannot be sure that you are not about to believe yourself to be in such a circumstance.

Such then, is the minimum nature of philosophical ethics, as I see it. I believe that all other moral rules are deducible from these basic propositions, or that, at any rate, no moral rules are defensible philosophically that disagree with these, and there is no other basis for philosophical ethics under the conception here outlined, so that, it is by these criteria that ethics must stand or fall. All other approaches to ethics, such as intuitionism and so on, must be clearly seen to disagree with the approach to philosophical ethics that I have outlined in my first three paragraphs; if they disagree only with further points, I can only say that they hold beliefs about the general nature of philosophical argument that I think are implausible.

This approach is a kind of discourse ethics.

Wanting to be loved is irrational

I think that, properly speaking, you can never rationally want to be loved, as such. This will be clarified by my argument for it, as follows.

I think no one can want to “be loved” for its own sake, because by itself and apart from all particular signs of it in experience, “being loved” is a feeling in someone else’s mind, and doesn’t affect your experience of the world. So, the desire for “being loved” must exist for the sake of other desires, and therefore, it can be divided into the reasons why you want to be loved.

These reasons, I claim, are either:

• (a) unrelated to who it is that loves you (e.g. you want to be loved because you like being praised, receiving gifts, etc, and it doesn’t particularly matter where it comes from) or
• (b) precisely because of who it is that loves you (i.e. you want the person you love to want you around more, so you get to be around them more).

The first kind, (a), are not properly a “desire to be loved”, because they’re really a desire for some other good, such as praise, gifts, etc., and being loved doesn’t actually matter to that.

The second kind, (b), are technically a desire to be loved by that specific person, but this, in turn is also a feeling in someone else’s mind, and therefore, it cannot be desired for its own sake, and must be desired for the sake of something else, which means it can be divided into the reasons why you want to be loved by that person.

These reasons, I claim, are either

• (b1) a desire to be tolerated by the other person (if what you want is to get to know them), or
• (b2) a desire to be sexually wanted by the other person (if you have a sexual interest in them),

whereas any other feelings of love don’t really contribute to your experience, except insofar as they make it more secure that you’ll remain tolerated and/or sexually wanted.

So, properly speaking, you can never rationally want to be loved, as such, although you can want to be loved, by a specific person, as a kind of security regarding some of their other attitudes towards you.

Hedonometry and Mindreading

As a supporter of Murray Rothbard’s views on utility and welfare economics, I believe that it is impossible to measure individual utilities (often conceived of as pleasure and pain), in the sense of putting them in terms of a common cardinal unit (often called “hedons” for pleasure and “dolors” for pain).

I believe this because, as Rothbard noted, the lack of an objectively extensive physical quantity which would correspond to such units means that they cannot be operationalized, and therefore cannot be meaningful. (“Objectively extensive” means that it must be a quantity with physically extended dimensions in the objective, interpersonally-accessible world.)

If we grant, as we plausibly might, that it is physically possible to invent machines that manage to read into human minds, then this language about it being impossible to do this must be qualified to saying only that it has never been done, and that it is unlikely to be done in the foreseeable future.

I believe that, even in a world with such machines, there would always be stubborn hardliners, who would claim that their experiences are richer than, or different from, what the machines say they are. There would be an ideological split over whether to accept the results of mindreading machines. If I’m right about this, then even if mindreading is possible, it cannot be achieved in such a way as to be uncontroversial and universally accepted, or commonly accepted enough to be a basis of policy or of economic science. In this way, it may be called impossible as a ground for economics, even if it is physically possible in itself.

But I concede that, properly speaking, my strong claims about impossibilities can only really stand if all these caveats are made.

Brazilians Use Sunday First

Almost all calendars in Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil and Portugal, have Sunday as the first day of the week, because this is baked into the language itself. Portuguese, along with Galician and Mirandese, are the only Romance languages where, instead of the names of the weekdays being derived from the pagan planetary gods, they are derived simply from numbers, numbered from Sunday.

Example Brazilian calendar.

The names for the days of the week literally just mean “the Lord’s day”, “second-day”, “third-day”, “fourth-day”, “fifth-day”, “sixth-day” and “sabbath”. So calendars follow along with this, it feels wrong not to. In English, it is sometimes disputed that Sunday should not be first because then there is no singular “weekend”, there are two “ends” of the week at Saturday and Sunday. But we just use the equivalent expression and assume it refers to the “work week”.

Regarding the weekend, as in many other Romance languages, the word for Saturday is literally the same word used to talk about the Sabbath, while the word for Sunday is a word that just means Sunday, but is etymologically derived from Latin for “lord”.

Regarding the weekdays, the word used for “day” within the ordinal weekdays is “feira”, which comes from Latin “feria” meaning a day, but in modern Portuguese does not mean a day at all outside of these fixed weekday names, it means a street fair. Many children are confused why there are so many street fairs in the calendar, and often they don’t even get an explanation, they just stop asking about it.

Although it is so confusing, the word “feira” has the advantage of being feminine, unlike the normal word for day, “dia”, which is masculine. So it is in fact impossible to confuse the second-day (Monday) with the second day (e.g. of the month), since the latter is masculine.

Portuguese does have a descendant of “feria” from Latin in actual uncompounded use, which is the word “férias” (almost always plural) referring to a vacation. I like to use the Phineas & Ferb theme song as an example of that word: the initial line “there’s 104 days of summer vacation” was rendered in Portuguese as “são três meses de férias, que passam depressa”, which, translated back, means “there are three months of vacations, which pass by quickly”. (The additional clause, about “passing by quickly”, was inserted to fit the meter, because otherwise the line would be too short. And I guess they made it “three months” to make the song more plausible with regard to Brazilian school schedules.)

The word for “third” within Tuesday (terça-feira) is actually usually only used for a third as in the fraction (one-third is “um terço” in the masculine and “uma terça” in the feminine) in modern Portuguese, whereas for the ordinal third you usually say a different word (the third ordinal place is called “terceiro” in the masculine and “terceira” in the feminine).