Pain, Political Vibes, and Being a Bat
November 28, 2023·Politics
A closeup shot of a sleeping bat wrapped in its wings
This Thanksgiving I got a migraine headache, my first in about 15 years. Classic onset – bright glare trigger, blind spots about 20 minutes later, pain arrival about 20 minutes after that – and it put me out of commission for four or five hours. Luckily my youngest daughter has been a sous in the holiday kitchen for the past few years and was able to deliver dinner that evening without a hitch … better than the old chef, if I’m being honest. Thank you, Halle!
It was my first migraine in a long time, but I seem to be experiencing exquisite pain more regularly as I get older. Shingles the summer before last. A ummm awful hemorrhoidectomy the year before that (which I wrote about here). I promise I’m not complaining (begone, evil eye!), and honestly I feel very lucky that these are discrete experiences with a defined beginning, middle and end. So many people are nowhere near so fortunate! But I am a writer, and I want to communicate something that struck me hard during my Thanksgiving dance with exquisite pain.
I do not think in words or language when experiencing this sort of pain.
The pain is ALL. It brooks no distraction from linguistic constructions. It does not easily allow conscious thought in words. I am fully conscious and I am actively thinking, but I am not thinking through language. I hear the words of people speaking to me, but it requires enormous effort to attach meaning to their words and even more effort to craft a word response. What I understand clearly is the tone of the people who are speaking to me and their movements/positioning around me, and I mutter vocalisms to communicate my assent/denial/gratitude. I am thinking fully formed and coherent thoughts, but they are expressed in my head not as words but as tone and gesture and non-linguistic vocalizations!
The way intense pain (and, I suspect, other extreme neural firings from the limbic brain) forces us to think outside of words or language is pretty interesting. For starters, it’s a window on how modern humans lived for a couple of hundred thousand years. Big-brained modern humans (H. Sapiens) emerged about 350,000 years ago, but archaeological evidence of widespread language usage dates back only 100,000 to 150,000 years. Let’s go with the most generous interpretation of the evidence and say that language and words were invented 200,000 years ago. That means that anatomically-modern humans – people who if you dressed them up in modern clothes could walk down the street and you wouldn’t give them a second glance – flourished for at least 150,000 years without thinking in words. For at least 150,000 years – 30x the length of recorded human history – modern humans survived and thrived without the benefit of language and words, using tone and body language and non-linguistic vocalizations as a substrate for thinking and communication.
I think this human capacity for non-linguistic thinking and communication has a fairly profound implication for modern politics, because unlike legacy artificial intelligence systems that can just be turned off and thrown away, legacy human intelligence systems remain active forever. Our non-linguistic thinking systems may be subdued and overshadowed by our dominant intelligence system that thinks in words and language, it may only be consciously available to us when intense pain or emotion shuts down our linguistic thinking, but it is there and active in our heads all the same. Humans still use tone and gesture and non-linguistic vocalizations as a substrate for thinking and communication. I think this explains a lot about the hard-core, enduring political popularity of Donald Trump and Barack Obama (and the apparently non-hard-core, non-enduring political popularity of Joe Biden and many other politicians).
Our “thinking” about any politician in terms of affinity is driven by a stew of inputs. A lot of these inputs, probably most of these inputs in terms of quantity, are based IN words and language and they create thoughts OF words and language. Some of the most influential inputs on our thinking, though, are not based IN words and language and do not generate thoughts OF words that we can say out loud in our heads. But just because we don’t think these thoughts in words out loud in our heads doesn’t mean that they aren’t there or that they aren’t “real”!
What I’m describing is true for all politicians and all voters, but you can see this phenomenon most clearly with highly successful politicians like Donald Trump and Barack Obama, who both have more than the typical share of high-affinity superfans. Yes, it’s the words Trump and Obama speak that create superfan affinity thoughts, but it’s also the way the words are spoken. It’s also the way the two men “carry themselves”. Donald Trump sounds tough. Barack Obama sounds smart. They both “come across” as Presidential to people who respond positively to their respective vibes. Yes, vibes. This is another word for tone and gesture and non-linguistic vocalizations.
I mean, we’ve all had this experience, right? You’re with someone who really digs either Trump or Obama, who believes with all their heart that this man “was the best president of my lifetime”, and together with the T or O superfan you’re watching the great man speak. You are listening to the words. You are parsing the words. You are thinking thoughts about the words and you are doing so IN words. And at some point as T or O is speaking their words, you think to yourself, “well, those are just bonkers/wrongheaded/mendacious words.” And you are correct! They are bonkers words! You know that the T or O superfan heard the same bonkers words, but because they did not react you start to wonder if they did in fact hear the bonkers words. You may well feel compelled to call the T or O superfan’s attention to these bonkers words. You may even feel compelled to explain to the T or O superfan why these are bonkers words. LOL. And that’s when you realize that the words themselves, no matter how bonkers the original text and no matter how clearly and succinctly you’ve explained their bonkers-ness with your supplemental text, have no impact on the core affinity thoughts and are well-shielded by other thoughts-in-words. No impact, that is, except to make the superfan angry at you. Which I’m sure I’ve done with a lot of people with this paragraph.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. -- Maya Angelou
Every Team Blue pundit and political consultant needs to take Maya Angelou to heart if they want their guy to have any shot – any shot at all – next November. I understand that their guy has bad vibes, that he doesn’t sound tough like Trump and he doesn’t sound smart like Obama, that his tone and body language screams … old. But he’s also won a few elections in his day, something that doesn’t happen if the candidate hasn’t internalized the truth of what Angelou says about the primacy of feeling over words. No, the core problem for Team Blue isn’t the candidate, it’s the team. Specifically, it’s the very online population of Team Blue journalists, academics and political operatives – people who are immersed 24/7 in the world of words and language! – and their dismissive attitude towards these thoughts of feeling and vibes, thoughts that don’t exist IN words but are just as real and valid –more so! – as thoughts that do.
What sinks the Biden campaign? It’s not the candidate and it’s not the economy. It’s the attitude embodied by the umpteen hand-wringing, insider-sourced NYT and WaPo articles bemoaning how voters “just don’t understand” how good the Biden economy is. It’s the assumed primacy of words. It’s the pseudo-religious, dogmatic urge to explain why aggregate economic statistics are more meaningful than lived experience. It’s the dismissal of any political thought that does not emerge from the substrate of words and language as the sure sign of a “low-information voter”, which is District One-speak for dumbass. Check that. Non-linguistic political thought for the other guy is definitionally the sign of a low-information voter. For your guy it’s a sign of a voter smart enough to “get it”. It’s the attitude that asks how we should educate voters. It’s the attitude that answers that disastrously wrongheaded question by using simpler words and more colorful, cartoonish ‘infographics’. It’s the attitude that launches a TikTok campaign while simultaneously looking to “clamp down” on social media because that’s where the dumbasses low-information voters are getting their “misinformation”.
Barf.
Almost 50 years ago, Tom Nagel wrote an influential philosophy paper titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. The core idea is that there is an experiential dimension to living as a bat and using echolocation to perceive the world that cannot be reduced to an outsider’s description – no matter how detailed! – of echolocation and the other neural processes that go into the subjective experience of life as a bat. A description is composed of words and language, and Nagel is saying that there is a dimension of conscious life that is inaccessible to words and language, a world of qualia like taste or color or the pain of my migraine or the vibes of a President that does not exist IN words or thoughts/descriptions composed OF words, but exists and meaningfully exists as conscious thought all the same. Now I don’t want to get into a debate here over philosophy of mind or the limits (?) of reductionism and description in the age of Massive Compute. Personally, I’ve always been more of a Dan Dennett guy than a Tom Nagel guy. But for the world-as-it-is in 2023, Nagel speaks an important truth.
What Is It Like to Be a Human? It is the subjective experience of thinking in words AND thinking outside of words, where our lived experience is neither reduceable to nor formed by words and language.
Our lived experience forms the biological limit of Fiat World. It is a mental bulwark against a proclaimed reality where we are told what it means to be a good American or a good investor or a good parent or a good friend. You can’t “educate” a human being on what their lived experience awkshually is. This is not a bug of the human condition. It is a feature. Maybe the most important feature. It should be embraced by any candidate or political party that wants to not only win on Election Day, but win for the right reasons, as a bottom-up representation of the lived experience and the thoughts-in-words of we-the-people.
But that doesn’t seem to be where we are headed.
Comments
Thanks Ben.
Another fascinating read
For today’s win. Totally.
This is why I pay to read here.
I think this article may be the Rosetta Stone for why so many college football fans are such nut jobs!
“District One-speak for dumbasses” - LOL
Tom Petty said it best: “You don’t know how it feels / To be me”
Knowbetterism is always going to repel and then alienate a large part of the group its practitioners are trying to influence. Not only for educating voters but also for educating kids, which is much worse.
Well said/described.
I’ll add two thoughts:
It’s not simply the press, it’s the internal team of elves that sit in the Comm room coming up w/ “Schtick”…Kinda like the team in Elf trying to come up with Kids book plots to sell to the publisher before the Christmas deadline.
They are awful and so far removed from reality but so close to what sounds - cool. Inflation Reduction Act - cmon, sounds so direct, on top of it as a stand alone title, but the substance of the Act is so FAR removed from the reality of the Act.
But that’s “our problem” that we don’t get the connection - and that’s the Admin’s problems.
The Admin believe their elves - desperate too believe - after all they helped so and so, they’re from the party, they are friends of XYZ lobbyist, their parents donated huge to ABC pac…maybe they are desperate to believe because they have to believe?
But the public doesn’t buy most of what they wordsmith…not just words, but actions and people.
Sorry to pick on Kamala but seriously put her as Immigration Czar (have we ever had a Czar?) and after fumping around looking for a root cause they haul her off and put her to lead a new US Initiative for Safe Artificial Intelligence? And then add another lead of the new WH Office of Gun Violence Prevention? Is the idea to spread her so thin that she cannot accomplish anything or to just name her to a bunch of bs initiatives to go to a bunch of “meetings” and “conferences” to make the Admin look busy.
Oh and a really good people move after such a success as Immigration Czar.
That’s how bad the elves are, they think the public applauds this stuff, except those irritating D-1 Low Info Voters.
If Santa wants to keep being Santa, he needs new Elves.
2nd point (a little of course here) on pain.
I recently had a cold (1st in like 10 years) while on vaca in PR. I have a pretty broad band for pain but when it gets below that floor, i am a complete whiny, horrible, cantakerous person. Thankfully i sleep and read. This time i was all the bad stuff but on the beach, swimming, staying far away from others.
After a few days, my wife made me take a Covid test and the red bar appeared immediately and strong. From that moment on i couldn’t sleep - i’ve never been more pissed that some person or entity created this highly contagious virus and to this day we don’t know why or for what purpose.
If i had known that it was a mistake in a process for good purpose, i’d shuck my shoulders and say such is life - i got the man made bug.
But we don’t and won’t know definitively - anger source #1; #2 is that this country has done nothing to attempt to restore trust in our institutions should another crisis like this occur (is it now happening again in China?).
The elves did a horrible job during Covid, as well…
As Ben briefly mentions, there is not only non-verbal thinking, but it’s twin, non-verbal communication. In my experience it goes way beyond interpreting gestures and body language. It includes telepathy that fleshes out descriptions in immense detail, in a way that would require a LOT of words from someone centered in verbal communication.
I spent 5 years in Guatemala where one friend in particular was a wonderful storyteller. In the early 1990s a lot of stories were about the war and also the long ago success of the senior Arevalo’s democratic election. One story in particular enchanted me and I asked my friend if I could record it. I did so, and later transcribed it. It was awful! The words he spoke were limited, boring, and not at all the story that I ‘heard’.
I suspected an ability to project meaning beyond the words being used in a number of Indigenous acquaintances there.
In Quich’e there is only one word for blue, one for green, etc. How could people then communicate the many rich hues of blue in this nature and art oriented language group? I asked a few people how they knew which blue was meant. I was given a puzzled look and, “we just know.”
Words may be a smaller part of communication for the majority of us- it’s complicated.
In a note filled with insights and spot-on analysis this to me is the kill shot. The White House and their activist base in the press have responded to this problem with various forms of protest that take the shape of “you ingrates just don’t know how good you have it” which is bad enough. But the one that sinks this president is this line, which I’ve heard over and over again: prices aren’t up due to inflation, it’s because of corporate greed.
For a moment let’s take that as 100% truth. Why did corporations wait until Biden was president to raise prices? They didn’t raise prices while Trump was in office. Isn’t a reasonably competent campaign SuperPAC going to run ad after ad pointing out this very thing?
“Prices were lower when I was President. Even Sleepy Joe says so. Hell, he admits that corporations are raising prices on all of you, probably because they know he’s too weak and corrupt to stop them. Don’t you miss $2 gas?”
That little riff or something like it can be in every single Trump rally from July to November, and people will soak it up. It’s a huge error that the Biden people have not only willingly made but they’ve gone out of their way to repeat frequently. And it all rests on one premise:
They think you’re stupid enough to believe them and not ask any followup questions.
I do not believe that strategy is going to work this time.
"I feel very lucky that these are discrete experiences with a defined beginning, middle and end.’
Especially when we experience the end…. Welcome back Ben.
“I do not think in words or language when experiencing this sort of pain.”
I’m starting to feel that without pain.
“It brooks no distraction from linguistic constructions.”
Words are wonderful tools but they are just tools.
What I understand clearly is the tone of the people who are speaking to me and their movements/positioning around me, and I mutter vocalisms to communicate my assent/denial/gratitude. I am thinking fully formed and coherent thoughts, but they are expressed in my head not as words but as tone and gesture and non-linguistic vocalizations!
The medium is the message….
For at least 150,000 years – 30x the length of recorded human history – modern humans survived and thrived without the benefit of language and words, using tone and body language and non-linguistic vocalizations as a substrate for thinking and communication.
I always thought I was so much better than the savages I came from. Not really
It’s all about the flow, Ben. Sort of like a Cytokine storm during Covid.
What is one thinking on a ventilator?
We should ask the fortunate survivors?
Keep writing Ben,
Jim
I do wonder if the problems for Team Blue can truly be separated from the candidate. In the absence of vibes and reality you resort to…something. A #needtobetrue situation if there ever was one. The fact that over the summer ‘Bidenomics’ emerged as a strategy from the team blue brain trust told the story clearly and exemplified the dynamics you are talking about. Similar to DY’s comment on the ‘corporate greed’ line.
This is a fantastic sentence. It simply and beautifully speaks to the nature of emergent phenomena in general. Fiat World is the natural consequence of the idea that you can model the world. “If we just had a better measure…”. But biology is paradigmatic of emergent systems (I just read that somewhere but I don’t remember where!) and bulk measurements alone will not provide understanding because you average away so much that matters. This worked when people largely believed that the world could be modeled, but now the zeitgeist is changing. Elites will remain wholly incapable of understanding this change because so much of what they need to be true is embedded in the old epimemetics.
Another dynamic I am wondering about. It seems to me that the party in power is more or less forced by the nature of the system to be the participant that is reliant on the official measures. If you are in power and you disagree with the measures then you can change them, in theory. It seems like we see this flip flop regularly; i.e. if Trump wins all the sudden it will the Team Red brain trust crafting the cartoon fiat measures into narratives that conflict with many people’s experience. But with that said, I think the dynamics of Team Blue are more susceptible to the linguistic and measurement issues since the left’s cultural warfare strategy is centered on control of language. Among other reasons I’m sure.
I’m not sure this is quite right DY, maybe I’m quibbling. I think a lot of people ask follow up questions but they go into the media and there is a lot of complexity and always plenty of missionary work to support their priors. I think both parties rightly believe that the vast majority of voters are autotuned such that those who agree with them will believe them. Not necessarily based on believing they are stupid. Elites have the experience that, in Ben’s frame, those whom are sympathetic are swayed by the linguistic strategy, and when necessary they will find a way to rationalize any conflict with their experience. Those autotuned against will have the opposite reaction, dominated by their experience. Based on the paragraph above, if Trump wins it seems to me that this dynamic could shift! Team Red becomes more sympathetic to the linguistic strategy and Team Blue strategy shifts to emphasize experience.
I’m following along until I get to,
“ You can’t “educate” a human being on what their lived experience awkshually is. This is not a bug of the human condition. It is a feature.”
& then I lose it. Can someone help me understand/interpret/apply the quote above?
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