Greetings from Northern Germany,
In the past two weeks, I have been busy in a fully unplanned manner. I just did what I wanted when I wanted it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to an internal sense of peace which I will tentatively call happiness.
I celebrated my 36th birthday on the 13th with my wife and daughter, who spoiled me with thoughtful gifts and love.
Sometimes I am still surprised to realize that life goals don’t need to be complicated. Internal peace and some love.
Over the last few days, a mini storm was sparked over the rewriting of some of Roald Dahl’s work to fit a more politically correct perspective. Dahl wrote children classics such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and the Witches. The rewriting is done by the publisher Penguin and has been approved by the estate managing Dahl’s work after his death.
Here are a few examples of the rewriting shared on the internet.
The reaction to these changes has split people into two camps, as is usual these days. Even some open-minded people put themselves into one of the camps.
In this post, I want to argue that we do not have to join one or the other group. Awareness of nuances around beliefs might help us prevent further escalation of this culture war.
More importantly, it will help us be more level-headed in the upcoming wave of belief scrambling about consciousness, intellect, and human nature that AI will cause.
Anti-woke own goal?
Here is a well-meant opinion by Sam Altman, head of OpenAI and a fairly open-minded liberal person. On the surface, I agreed with everything he says here and almost retweeted to join my banner to his call for a reasonable and thoughtful approach.
Between the lines, he says that we shouldn’t rewrite history because humanity is imperfect. We should give all generations the benefit of the doubt.
So what is the problem with this reasoning?
If we follow it, future generations should also consider the Woke movement with indulgence and understand the context in which people were making these decisions. But why wait for future generations to show this indulgence? Why not start now?
History is not a factual science. Victors on the battlefield or in the arena of ideas wrote it. Whatever we have inherited in our history is only a biased glimpse of the thoughts of the past.
So, this rewriting of Dahl’s work is a new version of this historical process. It is even done more in the open than previous history rewritings!
Most anti-Woke people will say this is a significant problem and we should stop it.
Imposing beliefs on other people is wrong. Therefore I want to stop them and impose my own beliefs on them.
Beliefs can get us into somewhat inconsistent stances pretty quickly because they can’t be tamed with logic.
What is a belief anyway?
Merriam-Webster gives 3 flavors for belief:
A state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing
Something that is accepted and considered to be true, or held as an opinion: something believed
Conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon, especially when based on examination of evidence
When we talk about beliefs outside of scientific areas, there is no evidence to consider. We are often talking about statements that are considered to be true.
What is “true”?
Since beliefs have to do with what we consider true, we can’t escape mentioning Truth. I do not want to go into too much depth. Whole books have been written about it. But to me, there is one helpful analogy I like to consider.
When I think about this topic, I think about how physics treats truth. Often in physics, statements are made in a frame of reference.
A simple example is when we are on a moving train. As a passenger, if we dribble a ball on the train floor, we would perceive a different behavior than a person standing outside the train and recording the ball's movement.
This relativism helped Einstein unlock some profound insights about the universe. One of the strangest implications of this relativism is related to Time, one of those seemingly fundamental blocks of reality. Time is not just being perceived differently but applies differently to people in different frames of reference.
If you travel very fast, time will move slower for you. This is not just perception but actually how the world works. Our GPS systems take this phenomenon into account to give precise coordinates and adjust for the higher speeds of satellites vs. the surface of the earth.
If even statements about Time need to be frame-referenced, shouldn’t vaguer terms such as beliefs be treated similarly?
So why do people need to put themselves onto a given point on the spectrum of beliefs around a topic?
Because whatever we identify as our Self is just a collection of beliefs. And in the past century, we have been feeding the Self as much as we can, believing this is what happiness is about.
Me, myself and I
At the beginning of the last century, Sigmund Freud identified subconscious desires that influence our behavior. In an astonishing example of how strong ideas can spread quickly, the nephew and daughter of Freud - Edward Bernays and Anna Freud, were highly influential in helping American capitalism cater to these subconscious currents.
The way it was done was to channel these desires toward role-model images. These images helped steer the masses and feed the business needs for offloading large quantities of uniform products.
As this uniform consumerism still led to deep mental dissatisfaction, a new trend of self-expression took center stage. Everyone is different. We should find our true Self internally and express it.
As brilliantly explained in this documentary the Century of Self (thanks to David Perell for pointing to it), the American capitalist system latched on to this trend and started feeding this desire for self-expression.
More and more customized products and lifestyle-enhancing products were produced. Newer desires were “found” to express the Self and reach that happy place.
One of the crucial steps for this self-expression is defining our values. In 1978, a group of economists and psychologists at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) decided to find a way to read, measure, and fulfill the desires of these new unpredictable consumers.
Through new kinds of questionnaires, they found that self-expression was not infinite. It fell into identifiable types. The SRI team invented a new term for it - lifestyles. They had managed to categorize the new individualism. They called their system Values and Lifestyles.
This was one of the tools that introduced into our lives a form of self-expression constrained to a given set of groups. Business loved it and modern marketing is derived from this view.
To be happy, you need to know yourself better and know your values. This seems like an obvious and positive step for many people.
The question of why we still feel deep dissatisfaction as individuals despite decades of self-expression is worth considering.
Aren’t values important?
You might think: so what, humans are value driven and define themselves this way. It’s not like we can change that!
But is it the case that for our internal peace we need to bind ourselves to a set of specific beliefs?
Or is it that narrowing down on a set of beliefs is only necessary when coordinating with others in society?
In my opinion, so long as Woke or anti-Woke positions do not impact my Woke-neutral attitude, I don’t care.
But the three strands of positions need to co-exist in society. So the value of mutual non-annihilation seems like a fair value we can agree on. So long as can have access to Dahl’s original work with ease, is it a problem if the owners of the work want to rewrite them?
Some people will still say it is not possible to live this way. Sooner or later, the others will force you to choose.
Maybe. But there is a difference between reacting to circumstances and voluntarily pre-empting negative scenarios by seeking to destroy the other view.
Perhaps this is a secular and rational way to achieve the disappearance of the Ego, which more spiritual Eastern philosophies advocate.
I think it is already a good step to recognize three propositions: 1) beliefs are arbitrary, 2) We often automatically map ourselves on belief axes and sometimes are unaware that we do that, and 3) We may not need to fix our values on all essential social topics to have a peaceful existence in harmony with nature.
Nature does not have beliefs or values.
Thank you for writing this. You might also enjoy this post by Alex Michael on absolutism:
https://www.aquestionablelife.com/p/absolutism
One thing I have learned from my recent experience in mediation + conflict resolution: everyone makes sense to themselves. Anchoring and absolutism get us nowhere. The more conversations we have, the more room we make for nuance and understanding. Getting curious is the best approach.