It's All True
February 2, 2024·Politics
original artist unknown, reprinted by Business Insider
“Don’t write about crazy people if you want to say something true.”
That’s what my creative writing professor told me 38 years ago after I had turned in some Southern Gothic, A Rose for Emily-esque short story, and he was totally right. He was right because it’s next to impossible for a non-crazy person to truly get inside the head of a crazy person, and even if you can it’s even more impossible to relate those motivations to an audience of non-crazy people. Unless you’re William Faulkner – and I am not William Faulkner – it becomes a cartoon exercise, like a comic book portrayal of a villain, a depiction of an interpretation, a non-crazy lens on what crazy IS. All of which can be very entertaining, like Hannibal Lecter or The Joker, but isn’t TRUE.
So that was my first thought about Justin Mohn, the 32-year-old in Levittown, Pennsylvania who murdered his father, cut off his head, and made a YouTube video showing off his trophy and saying he did it because his father, who worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers, was part of the “Biden regime” and was a “traitor to his country”.
Don’t write about a crazy person.
My second thought was after reading some tweets about all this from dependable lefties like Josh Marshall (who I like, btw), writing about Mohn’s “political motivation” here and how this was the real story.
No, no, no. This is a terrible story about a crazy person, and it just as easily could have been the other side’s politics or any other ideology that made him snap. There is no political motivation here!
My third thought was after listening to a CNN segment on the murder, where their expert (John Miller, I think) and host were talking about how Mohn was “copying ISIS” and clearly (to me, anyway) implying that there oughtta be a law against saying horrible things about the Biden Administration in order to prevent this sort of “domestic terrorism”.
OMG, are you really going to twist this into a “we must stop criticizing the government or else the terrorists win” kind of thing? This language of “domestic terrorists” and how Trump supporters and Biden critics are “extremists” is entirely intentional on the part of Biden and his media Renfields, and we should all call it out for the bullshit that it is, even if you’re going to vote for the man.
My fourth thought was about the friends and family members I have who use exactly this sort of language about “traitors” and are increasingly comfortable with the prospects of organized political violence “if it comes to that”, by which they mean (or so it seems to me, anyway) that it will inevitably come to that and it’s already being started by the other side so LFG.
I don’t know anyone who is as crazy as Justin Mohn, but I absolutely know people who are on the crazy spectrum, as it were, and they are ALL using exactly the same language as Mohn was using, and they are ALL being fed this language from the same MAGA and Q-adjacent sources.
My fifth thought was about the stalker I had a few years ago, the crazy guy who thought I was sending him coded messages in Epsilon Theory to harm others and himself, the crazy guy who wrote an 80-page manifesto about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk and I (but mostly me) controlled the world, the crazy guy who went to the FBI with his “findings” but their unwillingness to stop me just proved how powerful I really was, the crazy guy who wrote me to say that he was driving up from Florida so that I could confess and he could “end” this. My stalker was an enormously troubled 40-year-old man who had recently assaulted his stepfather (tried to strangle him). I won’t go into all the details here, except to say that our public safety and mental health systems are entirely, 100%, utterly without exception built on responding to horrible things after the fact and are entirely, 100%, utterly without exception incapable of preventing horrible things before the fact. The only thing we were able to do was to cut him off from Epsilon Theory, with the hope that without the provocation and motivation of WORDS, my stalker would get overwhelmed by the incredible difficulty of daily life for a crazy person and lose his singular focus on me. A few months later he killed himself, which I’ve come to learn is the inevitable outcome here, and that when the time comes you just hope that they only kill themselves.
Words are absolutely responsible for winding up these terribly damaged, terribly dangerous people, and if my stalker had been inundated with words like “traitor” and “patriotic duty” to give him a driving purpose and motivation, if he had been constantly prodded rather than consistently distracted, I believe in my heart of hearts that before killing himself he would have killed others.
My sixth thought was something I learned from talking with security and former FBI guys while dealing with my stalker.
There are SO MANY Justin Mohns out there, SO MANY terribly damaged, terribly dangerous people. I mean, you have no idea.
My seventh thought was the most obvious.
This language of “traitors” and “regime” and “stolen elections” and how your “patriotic duty” is to fight against the “evil” Democrats is entirely intentional on the part of Trump and his media Renfields, and we should all call it out for the bullshit that it is, even if you’re going to vote for the man.
My eighth thought was the most painful.
Hey, Ben, weren’t you the guy who used to say Burn It The Fuck Down?
I don’t know how to reconcile these eight thoughts. I really don’t. All I can come up with is the same thing that Hemingway wrote about religion: it’s all true.
1) Yes, it’s true that there’s very little to be learned by writing about crazy people.
2) Yes, it’s true that crazy people do not have political motivations in the same way that non-crazy people have political motivations.
3) Yes, it’s true that the Biden Administration will cravenly use this murder for political advantage, with less than zero care for the civil liberties that their actions squelch.
4) Yes, it’s true that the words used by the murderer Justin Mohn to describe his own motivations, words like “traitors” and “enemies”, are exactly the same words that pervade every MAGA and Q-adjacent circle, and only pervade MAGA and Q-adjacent circles.
5) Yes, it’s true that words are The Thing that motivates terribly damaged, terribly dangerous guys like Justin Mohn, and increasing their exposure to fighting words like “traitors” and “enemies” absolutely makes a difference in who and how many people they destroy before they destroy themselves.
6) Yes, it’s true that terribly damaged, terribly dangerous guys like Justin Mohn are everywhere.
7) Yes, it’s true that the Trump campaign and its Renfields cravenly use these fighting words for political advantage, with less than zero care that their words motivate murderers like Justin Mohn.
8) Yes, it’s true that I’ve used words like that.
It’s all true.
I don’t expect the malignant narcissists and high-functioning sociopaths at the top of our political parties to change their ways. I don’t expect any of this to change in any part of society, precisely because it’s all true.
But I can change my ways. I can change the truth of my behavior. I can take more care with my words, especially my public words here on Epsilon Theory.
“Don’t ever point a gun at someone unless you’re ready to pull the trigger, and don’t ever pull the trigger unless you’re ready to kill the person you’re pointing at.”
That’s what my father, an ER doc who saw more gunshot wounds than anyone you will ever know outside of another ER doc, told me 50 years ago, and it stuck with me hard. Shooting guns out at the quarry was a lot of fun, and play-acting with toy guns was a lot of fun, but I learned there was a dimension to guns that was not fun and not play-acting at all. When it came down to that dimension, to protecting his home and his family … guns were one thing and one thing only to my father: an instrument of extreme violence. It was a mighty good gun safety rule then, and it’s a mighty good political safety rule now. Because in Fiat World, language is a gun and words are bullets.
I’m not putting down my gun, but I am going to stop pointing it at people. Not to avoid calling things by their proper names – including bullshit when that’s what it is – and not to avoid criticism of those public figures who so richly deserve it, but to avoid using fighting words – even figurative fighting words – when I don’t actually mean to fight. It’s not the path to maximizing rewards like engagement or readers or followers, but maybe in 50 years my children will remember this lesson like I remember my father’s. And that would be a reward beyond measure.
Comments
This. It cuts so deep.
I’m reminded of that Andrew Garfield movie where he’s a medic soldier in WWII and he saves all of those lives. Foolish? Yes. Heroic? Yes. It’s all true.
Do we have less room for fun these days? I just can’t get over the old notion that building wider lane highways actually increases traffic.
See you all at Office Hours!
Once we began looking at people on the other side of the political spectrum as “evil” instead of misguided, these things were going to start to happen.
I repeat myself more and more these days but this clip really shows our transformation as a society. Watch the respect these two men give one another! How the conversation stays focused on the facts. Nobody is questioning the others motives etc.
Fast forward to now:
It’s good to take a step back, maybe we are… Nevermind,I was going to post a clip of Dean Phillips talking to people standing in line for Trump rally here and later commenting on what warm friendly people they were, but it seems those clips, which I know I saw a week or so ago, have been scrubbed off of all Google searches.
That speaks volumes about how we have gotten here!!!
There is a characteristic of Ben’s (and other Pack members) that is worth taking note. He (they) strategize solutions to a problem by asking “what can I do” and not by identifying what other should do. Highly focused on the controllable while acknowledging the uncontrollable. It’s a personality trait I’ve become more sensitive to (and am working to master) as my kids get older. This is b/c I’ve realized that as a parent my job isn’t to solve their problems but to help them build tools so they may independently solve their own problems.
Focusing on the controllable is maybe the most important step to dealing with complex problems.
As I read the conclusion to this note, what came through loud and clear (to me). Was Ben saying “Here’s a problem, and here is what I can do about it”. I’m guessing the deeper lesson for the Hunt kids (and myself) to learn was best memorialized by the King of Pop himself. From Man in the Mirror: “If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make a (dramatic pause for effect), change!”.
It is all true that the overheated rhetoric of the right is counterproductive, and the coarsening of our political discourse is a sad reminder that history is cyclical, but I think the overheated rhetoric of the left about defunding the police, destroying the prison capitalist white supremacist state is even worse. I also think it is more widespread in our institutions and thus a greater danger.
Sorry, my dude, but no.
It is not about who is weaponizing more or who is worse. It’s about ceasing and desisting the weaponizing of language.
You are simply auto-tuning to what You need to be true.
Ben. Consider that twitter/x encourages fighting words! I know this isn’t some revolutionary thing to say but, I am experiencing it myself for the first time. It’s one thing to hear it, it’s another to feel it working on you.
I don’t know what Twitter was like before Elon got ahold of it. I’ll say as a Free Speech Guy, I probably wouldn’t have even considered using it if Elon hadn’t turned it into X as in my mind Twitter was just the place where you go to find and create reasons to cancel people (possibly yourself). But Elon is also a Free Speech Guy (tm?) so I figured I’d try it (after getting banned from reddit for trolling on r/nfl).
Of course there is The Algorithm. It’s doing a pretty good job of showing me things that I’m interested in. But I happen to know from other contexts that the silicon valley overlords learned long ago that negative emotions - hatred, anger, disgust, despair, and so on - are the strongest drivers of engagement. Accordingly, X is not just showing people things I disagree with. That I can tolerate. It’s showing me the stupidest things I have ever read in my life. I’m literally staring into space while not on the app, ruminating on what a terrible state the world must be in for there to be people who are not only so stupid and dumb to think that, but even stupider and dumber to say it publicly.
Up to this point, this is all just Someone is Wrong on the Internet. The problem is when I go to engage myself. This is where the character limit becomes a problem. You are trying to defeat this idiot/asshole with words, and unless you pay for premium, you can only use a few at a time, and it’s cumbersome to talk at length about anything. But remember that you are also emotionally attached to this word competition because you are angry, or have some other negative emotion going on. Also you know that your words will receive a public score by the audience in the form of likes and engagement., in addition to possibly recruiting people to your side. Therefore you have strong emotional incentives to be persuasive. You really want to dunk on these assholes and then have everybody lift you up on their shoulders cheering.
But since you are forced into concision, you have to pack the most effect into the small number of words. The resulting set of options for persuasion encourages you and everyone else involved to be more argumentative and devolve into bad faith/trolling.
To avoid oversimplification that concision encourages, you can choose your words precisely or be very dense. Too much of your argument will depend on implicit concepts / definitions / information that the reader will not readily understand. It will generate responses that anger and annoy you because they seem stupid (“Did you even read what I wrote?” “Where did I say that?”), and you will respond to them as such. Or people simply won’t understand what you mean, and you won’t get likes/engagement. You are disappointed and then choose other options for persuasion from the below.
Accept the imprecision that concision encourages. But then, at some point, it will appear to others, sometimes correctly, that YOU are Someone Who is Wrong on the Internet. You’ll get attacked fairly and unfairly, you’ll feel embarrassed or at risk of being embarrassed, making you feel defensive and making you want to dunk on your attackers even harder.
If you can’t improve your argument, you can improve its impact with snark, since brevity is the soul of wit. But this actually involves weakening your argument in favor of being funny, so this encourages others to argue with you, especially because it embarrasses them.
Tribalizing. If being persuasive is hard, then just only deal with people who are easy to persuade! Block, mute, the “show me less of this” option, say things that you know will get people who agree with you to praise you, generally curate so that The Algorithm exposes you less to people you disagree with. But this tends to create bigger, angrier mobs to fight with each other when they eventually do clash, which is inevitable at some point you will be exposed to something outside the chamber that gives you a negative emotion, either on your own feed, or someone else in your echo chamber is talking about it. And you give less benefit of the doubt people outside your echo chamber. It also encourages people to assign beliefs to people in the other tribe that they may not actually hold, simply by virtue of the appearance that all people in that tribe hold a certain set of beliefs, and pressures people within that tribe not to voice dissent on pain of being kicked out, which encourages dumb things within a tribe to go unchallenged and then attacked all the more viciously when others tribes hear of it.
Insincere trolling. You purposely make bad arguments that you know will drive engagement. You give the appearance of not really caring and just wanting to rile people up, but you are only half joking. Actually you take some sick pleasure in the reward of covertly agreeing in part with what just generated a good audience score.
Outright bad faith. You’re frustrated with the inability to persuade but want to win so badly that you don’t care if your argument is bad. Ad hominem, straw man, insults, derision, appeals to emotion/authority, insults, derision, cancelling people, all while you are cheered on by your tribe.
And so the result of this is a hyperefficient process for driving people towards the worst, dumbest, most bad faith and least edifying version of a discussion for everyone involved. What you’re left with is wanting to fight for the sake of fighting, unless you make serious efforts not to go down that road.
Glad to read that you’ll stop using the BITFD acronym, it always made me cringe a little whenever you used the crude tag line. I recall a friend of mine using the BITFD phrase in the runup to the 2016 election, you can guess who he supported. He was a nice guy so I don’t think he meant it literally, just that he was tired of the political status quo and wanted to try something different. Now the fire is lit, so I try to pause and choose my words carefully so I don’t add more kindling.
Twitter has been extremely toxic for years now—I was on it a lot for about a week in 2020 and I had to get off it. I could literally feel my mental health declining.
I think social media in general is a big reason,but not the only one, for why we find ourself in this mess. For me the answer has been what Paul B said above, control the controllable for me the answer is to stay off it. My wife has a FB account and she tells me when people’s birthdays are and stuff so I can wish them a Happy Birthday.
I have a business account that I can only post stuff the firm puts together for me to post
Love the note Ben. Incongruous thoughts that aren’t easily assimilated into our models is a spice of life.
It seems I’ve found myself in a pretty contrarian position these days in feeling the need to offer a defense of social media. Above all else it is a very easy story and so it makes me quite suspicious that perhaps it is not all that close to some hypothetical base layer of true understanding. The impact and value of a tool is determined according to how it is used. Humans still get to choose! And training! Think of what that word means now in a post-LLM world! Maybe we forget sometimes that we have the ability to learn from mistakes and to pass that learning on.
So why not place the blame on ourselves for failure to train and discipline ourselves and, more importantly our children, towards effective and responsible use of a new tool rather than blame the tool itself?
I certainly did not figure out how to use the tool that is Twitter immediately and that it took some growing pains. As it should be! But now I believe there are really obvious ways to utilize twitter effectively, plus even moreso I don’t know any other way to get the signal that it provides. Here are a few basic guidelines that come to mind for use of the tool if you want to avoid perceiving it as inherently toxic or evil:
Social media correlates with much that is troubling, but we have an n of 1 to look at and it is a very clean and easily packaged narrative with clearly autotunable political incentives. I sort of refuse to see the ability to connect with other humans across time and space as an inherently bad thing. I have long had this suspicion that our kids will show us the way in this regard, but certain dominoes need to fall first before we will be ready. Nothing works as it should when the foundation is crumbling.
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