Bridges to Unexplored Regions
My brother's brain is toast
Turns out, my brother is a full blown neo-Nazi. I'm just trying to figure out where he lands on the spectrum between a LARPer and Timothy McVeigh.
I wrote about my rationality fail earlier, and I was on the right track, but I probably could have figured this out 4 or 5 years ago...
In fairness to myself, we really cut down contact around then. He got busy with a startup and was doing a ton of travelling. We went from seeing each other weekly down to a few times a year.
They say humans are bad at imagining exponential rates of change, and I think my brother walked off a cliff during this time. I was only figuring things out at a linear rate. I have been online long enough to have read and seen other people take this path, and so while I'm surprised it happened to my brother, I do understand a bit about the nature of what happened. The challenge has been trying to convey it to friends and family.
My parents in particular are struggling with what they feel is a contradiction: my brother is not an evil/hateful/crazy person, so how can he hold such evil/hateful/crazy beliefs?
My parents don't see my brother as an evil skinhead. He doesn't fit the mold of what they would expect a neo-Nazi to look and act like.
This is why I struggled as well. My brother and I have a long history together. We are so alike in so many ways, I couldn't imagine any way that I could believe those things. To this day, I think we both sincerely try to understand the world, and dig in to the 'hard problems'. We hold many of the same premises about the world and agree on a lot of facts, but we came to very different positions on what to conclude about them. For example, when we would agree to observations like "the system is rigged against those less fortunate" and "capitalism is unfair to those without capital", the thought of Jews never entered my mind. We were having conversations like this for a very long time. But at some point, my brother decided that it is the Jews.
All our common language and previous discussions became 'evidence' to cement his new belief. So how long has he been thinking that the Jews account for all these observations in our previous conversations? How many discussions have I innocently had that helped cement these beliefs?
How come I didn't end up believing in something equally crazy? How do I know what I believe is sane? How do I make sure I remain sane?
What is NOT an answer to this question: good intentions and lots of effort.
You can end up believing all sorts of crazy things using good intentions and lots of effort. Both history and the current day is filled with it. Someone like Alex Jones cares deeply about protecting the country and is afraid the government is corrupt. I think lots of people would agree with that statement, if they didn't associate it with Jones. Jones has good intentions and puts in a lot of effort to make others aware. He would be admirable if he had a process that kept him tethered to reality. But he doesn't.
It's not just Jones -- most people don't have a process. They rely on good intentions: their own and those of people they trust. People driven solely by good intentions mean well. But without a process the good intentions become fuel for rationalizations. You end up using good intentions to draw conclusions, and then put in effort to justify them. It is confirmation bias on steroids.
Once you start justifying baseless conclusions, you can end up vilifying whole races of people. For my brother, I truly believe he still wants to make the world better -- but his solutions at this point are violent and racist, and based on nothing real.
Good intentions can get you stuck believing wrong things. And by 'stuck', I mean your beliefs can only develop in one direction. This is the process of 'radicalization'.
"Words build bridges to unexplored regions" - Hitler
Without a process, you might build a one-way bridge to any sort of reality-denying belief. Your brain will become toast. Coming back across one of these bridges will only happen by pure chance. You will have lost all agency -- the beliefs will drive all of your behavior and taint all information that you take in. All meaningful thought ceases. You just have conclusions that you cannot stop believing. Your brain can't do anything but halt and catch fire.
So how can process beat good intentions and effort?
We have the "guardrail" toolkit posted and that is the basic process. (It is pretty dense and requires some explanation to help it make sense. We will provide full commentary in the coming weeks.) The reason the process works, is that all the rules are categorical. There is no situation in life you can't use them. Since the 'tools' are categorical, the toolkit is rote. There is no 'decision' besides listening to yourself and how much you 'care' about any given topic. In that sense, Ford's process uses our natural inclinations to our advantage. You just have to reflexively always use the toolkits. That is the only failure point. I made a single exception and you can see the results. With enough exceptions (or lack of any process), you can end up believing things like my brother, and thinking you're the good guy for it.
One of the issues I feel most of us have, is that we are afraid to think of others as full and complete human beings. My parents don't want to think of their son as 'evil', because that erases all the good things they know about him. But that misses the point. They don't have to call him evil (he doesn't think of himself that way). All the good things he's done are still true. It's just also true that he now believes really bad things.
A related issue is that we are afraid to take evil ideologies as arguments. I understand why this happens: it is revolting to do. Why should we take this hateful crap seriously?
But Hitler had a sympathetic crowd when he spoke. They built bridges using his words. They all had good intentions: a better life for the German people. How did that turn into war and genocide?
Humanizing is a tool we must employ to better understand the problem. How are these one-way bridges being built? What words are building them? How are the words changing how people think? How do 'good' people end up believing 'evil' things? We need to humanize 'evil' if we want to learn how to prevent it. We also need to humanize 'evil' in order to recognize when it shows up in real life, even if it's coming from people we love.
Millions of one-way bridges are being built right now, this very second. This problem has been documented all over our modern world. We all worry about fake news and misinformation. We already know that the truth is important.
But truth isn't just 'important'. It is the ONLY thing that matters. And process is the ONLY thing that gets us to the truth.
...Do you have a process? What types of bridges are you building?
Homework for concerned citizens: I would recommend watching Imperium (2016). Do any of the characters think of themselves as 'evil'? Both the FBI and the neo-Nazis are trying to 'get rid of evil' in the world. Why should we presume the FBI is 'good'? Try using a reality vs fiction framing instead of good vs evil. Does it get easier to believe 'nice' people would do horrible things?