August 20th, 2023

first comment

I guess up here is maybe where Tasshin's stuff is relevant (read my below comment first)

ahh importantly the "change interpretations" thing can be weaponized to mean "put up with my bullshit" and this is VERY VERY common in spiritual circles, which is the thing I have antibodies against. "try to make sure nobody in the world insults you again" is not realistic, but "stop hanging out with people who do" is totally reasonable!!

changing your situation (not others' behavior but your closeness to them) is a totally totally totally appropriate response, when you can do it! and it might be easier if you also change your interpretation, but that doesn't mean you should hold off on getting out of an abusive dynamic before you can hold it undramatically.

this seems right. I think simpler than introducing the stuff on "interpretation" at this phase would actually be to focus on the locus of agency stuff

eg to cite Tasshin's great post on Boundaries tasshin.com/blog/boundaries/

> Boundaries aren’t impositions or expectations you use to control others to meet your needs and preferences. They shouldn’t require any action or behavior change from anyone else.

> Instead, boundaries are actions you take that help you to meet your needs and to stay in loving connection with yourself and others. Boundaries can be with people, situations, or experiences.

so instead of "stop saying that", "if you keep saying that, I'm not gonna hang out with you" etc

then you can get to interpretation as a more subtle case of the same thing, perhaps

part of why I'm very sensitive to this stuff is that I spent some time in learning environments where I was trying very hard to control my interpretations in ways that I later realized were very counteractive, and therefore they didn't work very well/sustainably. but I struggled to try because I was supposed to and I didn't know another way.

so I wouldn't assume that people know how to control their own interpretations. and maybe you're going to explain how, but:

A) people might find it hard nonetheless

B) it would be worth saying you're going guide us through that, at the point when you first introduce the idea

as far as I can tell, our entire society is built around people being intercoupled in these ways; partially this is good, partially it's bad, but it's like "Why doesn't everybody already do the best thing for the climate?" and uhhhh that's a big complex question with a ton of incentives and attractors and lobbyists.

for more on this ummm idk here's a recent piece of mine 

this seems to me false, and actually an assumption that is part of how we GOT to this traumatized vibe in the first place. ie the preconquest article I linked above talks about an ecstatic experience of nonseparateness.

fundamental separateness is one of the main things I've been working on UNLEARNING over the past few years. we're deeply intertwingled.

I agree though with your more general point here around forcedness:

> No one can be forced into doing something they don’t, on some level, think is the best (or least bad) option available.

I like how Sartre puts this in Existentialism is a Humanism, where even if you try to outsource your agency, you are inevitably responsible for choosing who to outsource it to!

so instead of "we're separate" I would say "we have unalienable, non-outsourceable agency/choice"

our needs are... also intercoupled but sort of distinct, which is what creates the sovereignty. I can (as an adult, but NOT as a child) meet my needs without your help (though not _alone_—humans still die alone, without technology. I am dependent on humanity even if I have tons of options for which humans to relate to and how)

but this is created not because we are fundamentally separate but because I have the option to nope the fuck out of our relationship.

but yes, also, even if I don't have the option to nope the fuck out—to take the extreme example, Victor Frankl in the concentration camps—I do still have some remarkable capacity for choicemaking about my interpretations and my behaviors even in the context of PHYSICAL manipulation.

thus this: "I don’t believe that unilateral manipulation exists in human-to-human interactions that are also non-physical" is kinda wrong; unilateral manipulation of others' BEHAVIOR (aka "coercion") doesn't in this sense exist in human-to-human interactions even IF you allow for the possibility of physically harming someone if they don't do what you say. I've got a detailed writeup of this here: malcolmocean.com/2022/12/coercion-in-terms-of-scarcity-pct

but in two distinct other senses, both kinds of unilateral manipulation DO exist

1. someone who has enough power (and willingness to use it) that they can sculpt consequences such that you'd rather do what they demand rather than face the consequences, can get you do to arbitrary things, even if internally you feel this as a free choice. (which requires being able to seriously consider all options: "you'll kill me if I don't salute the Great Leader? fine. I shall die."). note that "spite" seems to be an emotion associated with refusing to be controlled in this way, and it's clearly adaptive.

2. someone who can direct you attention in such a way that you feel like you MUST do something because otherwise OH NO really BAD stuff would HAPPEN oh my god don't even think about it JEEZ you're not a BAD PERSON are you, just do the thing already why are you even standing there questioning, this limited time offer will end at the end of this webinar and you don't want to feel like an idiot when all the other people on the call got rich and you didn't.......... can manipulate your behavior via fucking with your attention (and interpretation is part of this, but not the only part) such that only one option feels available to you; in this way they are doing something like coercion/manipulation. and the interpretation & attention are both factors here; if you know how to control your interpretation but someone suckers you into forgetting you know how, they can still hook you.

so anyway yeah, if you're going to say this then either you're making a dualistic error as far as I can tell or you need to address that and demonstrate how you're NOT making a dualistic error.

and part of the dualistic error is reifying a "you" who is in control of "your actions" and can "observe your subjective experiences". which meditators regularly point out does not exist if you look for it thoroughly enough.

and so the model you're putting out here may be super helpful within this dualistic frame, but the frame is technically wrong and this will turn some people off and get others' stuck in a particular ontology, especially if it becomes load-bearing for them to believe this (which it probably will for some people if it works well!)

I think in most cases there's something much more precise than "I should take this seriously" going on. because maybe you should! it might be real info!

and you could also take it seriously as "wow, they actually really don't like me! damn, I thought I'd made a good impression"

but many people have a more specific belief that's something like "if someone insults me then that means I'm unlovable" and that makes the causal arrow a lot more obvious

ah you sort of get at this right below, but still, I don't think "take this seriously" is necessary or sufficient for you to end up unnecessarily suffering as a result of the insult

> Personally, if I were the boyfriend in that situation, and I determined that the problem was not the world but in how she was reacting to the world, I wouldn’t change my behavior at all. Of course, I would still do my best to care for her, but I just wouldn’t try to control her emotions by changing my behavior, even if she wanted me to. In a way, my actions would be counterfactually “causing” her suffering, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best solution for me or for her.

(from original)

> But this takes courage to do. She might say to me, “Don’t you want me to be happy?” “Yes.” “Don’t you want to help me?” “I can’t, and I won’t.” She might even threaten to break up with me for being “inconsiderate”, but I wouldn’t want to date someone who’s codependent and that’s that.

(from original)

first bit revisited

you're advocating for a specific kind of culture (more Ask Culture than Guess Culture, and perhaps more Tell or Reveal Culture but perhaps not)  and while I broadly think that the culture you're advocating for is better/saner, you are making a pretty aggressive statement from an intercultural perspective by saying "everybody should just X"

it's not just about discomfort. in certain cultures, making a request communicates THAT YOU THINK the request is likely to get a yes. if you act like it shouldn't, then you're communicating poorly, just like speaking the wrong language for a country