An accurate description of a system is an attack on it.
—Proverb
Many systems function well because the vast majority of participants don’t understand how they work. You can use this; many systems are your enemies. This is what is meant by “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Other systems stop working if any adversary figures out how they work. In cybersecurity, this is called security by obscurity and it’s not used in an approving tone. The positive sense is defence-in-depth. Know your buzzwords.
These dynamics often apply to your own mind and motivation systems. When you figure out why you do something, once in a while the thing seems to be not that interesting anymore. You can use this to your advantage
[1]
. The Elephant in the Brain explores this idea in depth without ever mentioning the attack dynamic: people lie better to others because they lie to themselves about selfish motivations.
Sometimes other people attack you using an accurate description of your motivations, too. Sometimes they do that using information and intuition that you did not have. This is a gift, accept it graciously. Or do not. Social status matters too. That was an attack. What do we do when attacked? Curl up and hope they leave us alone? That’s dumb. Instead‚ either accept the blow and laugh at its weakness, or…
The best defence is a good offence.
—Proverb
So, we mount a counterattack. The most obvious method is employing the same exact weapon. Describe the attacker’s motivations for the attack. Accuse them of hypocrisy, jealousy, envy, or even flattery, but never bad intentions or stupidity. Or just ask neutrally, that’s more powerful than anything else.
There are more powerful moves than counterattacking. A counterattack shows that the attacker has hit something real. Or perhaps you’re only pretending that they did.
Pretending innocence has its drawbacks, but it is a powerful move. When attacked, simply countering with “I didn’t know” or “I didn’t mean that”, or even the really powerful “I’m not playing those kinds of games, what kind of person do you think I am?” sidesteps the attack quite well. The downsides include being thought dumb
[2]
or otherwise too unsophisticated to cooperate with
[3]
. The more severe problem is that they might not believe you once you’ve displayed the level of success that’s unlikely without serious competence. The Elephant helps you here; people are excellent at lying to themselves.
The next level is plausible deniability. This can look like pretending innocence, or a counterattack, or a joke, or something else. Rao calls this Powertalk in The Gervais Principle
[4]
.
Even more advanced move, but one with serious drawbacks, is manufactured innocence. The Elephant, again, can help you with this but it’s rather imperfect and directly pointing at things sometimes reveals the bare truth before the Elephant retreats to another layer of lies. Thus, this rarely occurs on an individual level; it’s way easier with organizational support. BitsAboutMoney describes one such move:
It’s not just illegal to disclose a SAR to the customer. It is extremely discouraged, by Compliance, to allow there to be an information flow within the bank itself that would allow most employees who interact directly with customers, like call center reps or their branch banker, to learn the existence of SAR. This is out of the concern that they would provide a customer with a responsive answer to the question “Why are you closing my account?!” And so this is one case where in Seeing like a Bank the institution intentionally blinds itself. Very soon after making the decision to close your account the bank does not know specifically why it chose to close your account.
Some systems can run under full adversarial pressure. Such systems are resource-intensive to run, or at least costly to set up. This is one of the reasons why legibility is so expensive. It makes it hard to pretend innocence.
According to Chapman, Kegan’s fifth stage involves running your own motivational systems in a self-adversarial-robust way. Or at least that’s my take on it. In a sense, building anything consistent on top of moral nihilism requires this, too.
Left as an exercise to the reader ↩︎
Often an advantage too ↩︎
Has no upsides ↩︎
Just read the post, no point repeating it here ↩︎
Discuss Read More