Beware the Jabberwock, My Son!

Aaron Sorkin is full of shit

I’ve been writing about politics online since around 2002 when I started a blog called Enter the Jabberwock. I don’t know why I called it that other than the fact that I used to be chronically bad at titling things.

Here was my thinking at the time: There was this Made-for-TV Alice in Wonderland movie in the mid-1980s with Carol Channing and all sorts of other inexplicable big-name cameo appearances (well, big names in like the 1970s anyway) and there was this recurring thing where Alice would suddenly encounter the Jabberwock, this big ominous dragon-looking monster. Everything would get dark and the entire mood would change and this electronic/orchestral music would start playing.

It could be anywhere—in one encounter it pops out of this gift box the other characters give Alice, ballooning up grotesquely and chasing everyone through the castle until Alice realizes she needs to grow up or whatever and the movie ends.

They were supposed to be frightening but those parts were always my favorite. I was really big on creepy, scary stuff as a kid—when I was like ten or twelve I’d sneak into my parents’ bedroom and watch scary movies on their TV. They’d get mad whenever they’d catch me, which is confusing in retrospect because they rented Dune when I was around the same age and we watched the whole thing and that movie is a mindfuck and a half in terms of the visual imagery.

At the same time I was making my website I was also playing a pirated version of American McGee’s Alice—a video game about Alice in Wonderland where the final boss is some weird steampunk vision of the Jabberwock—so the monster was fresh in my mind when it came time to pick a domain name. I thought, “hmm, what if instead of Enter the Dragon it was Enter the Jabberwock? It’s kinda like a dragon but scarier” and my brain latched onto that for reasons I can’t really explain now because if I had to pick the name again I’d probably think of better options that didn’t involve the difficult-to-spell name of a monster from a nonsense poem in an old book.

I also made some short films in 2008 under the “studio” name Unfair Dinkum, which I came up with by thinking “well I’m making fiction and, hmm, in Australia there’s this saying ‘fair dinkum’ meaning ‘the truth’ so I guess ‘unfair dinkum’ would mean ‘lies’ or ‘fiction’” and then I just stopped walking right there without pursuing it any further because I guess I thought it was some really clever wordplay even though it was really obscure and I’m not Australian and have never even been to Australia.

I’ve gotten a lot better at naming things since then I think. Or at least I hope I have anyway. If you look back at yourself five or ten years ago and don’t think you were a huge idiot, you probably haven’t improved.

I’m in the weeds. Hold on. Where was I? Oh right.

Enter the Jabberwock was a blog before there really were blogs, and I stayed awake for about a solid week teaching myself enough HTML and PHP and JavaScript to get it running, along with how to set up Apache on a Linux emulator in Windows. (At the end of this spree of manic insomnia, I invited some friends over to watch A Clockwork Orange and fell dead asleep right in the middle of it.) The site ran for years on a desktop computer in my bedroom that I never turned off or disconnected from the internet, until one of my fans generously offered me some cheap web hosting.

I’ll spare you the rest of this guided bus tour down memory lane but the point is that I’ve been at this for a pretty long time—writing angrily about politics online and trying to figure out why people think what they think, often fighting with them directly, analyzing it all for so many hours that if you tally them all up they probably amount to entire months of my life.

And now, here in 2019 about 17 years later… I wish I could go back in time to tell 19-year-old Josh not to waste his time.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair.

I’ve learned so much about the world and have met some really cool people over the years from doing all this. My writing skills have improved considerably and I’ve come up with some really great ideas, a few of which have hopefully stuck inside readers’ heads. And heck, some of my stuff was even linked to from Wikipedia for a while (until I lost the domain), which was extremely flattering. It hasn’t all been a waste.

But the months of my life that I wish I could get back have been all the pointless arguments with strangers, especially the ones over Facebook and Twitter. Okay sure, some of those fights have helped me hone and distill my thinking on certain subjects down to concise cores with airtight reasoning, but it’s not like that’s resulted in more productive debates. I’ve gotten so much better at this over all these years, but it’s still almost impossible to get anyone to acknowledge the inaccuracy or inconsistency of their views.

It’s been a frustrating and heartbreaking and mostly fruitless endeavor, but for some reason, deep down, as hard as I try, I can never quite give up on believing you can actually persuade people who deeply disagree with you.

Your brain is a big calculator loaded up with a complex equation constructed from all your ongoing experiences, and all your actions and reactions are mostly just your mind frantically hitting the = button like thousands of times per second.

Constant streams of input keep getting tacked onto the end of that equation—sights, sounds, smells, touch, feelings, recursive results of the equation feeding back into itself. Someone’s red shirt. Your mother’s smile. An incoming fist. A helicopter. A breakfast burrito. So much information, all the time, without end.

Sometimes I like to envision the raw information involved in all this, broken down into the simplest constituent components. The color of a shirt is the measurement of which photons got reflected off a surface rather than absorbed. Your mom’s smile is a bunch of different geometries—adjoining curves and lines and points. An incoming fist has a velocity and an origin and a mass.

In our minds all these details are abstracted into more meaningful and memorable things, and we rarely if ever deconstruct much of it, but underneath it all it’s all just math—or at least, it can be expressed mathematically. If it were possible for us to sense such things, we could even break it down into the raw movements of the particles involved.

Even the brains and cognitive systems we use to store all this data, that’s all just math too. A cluster of neurons lights up in a certain pattern and that’s a thought. A memory is a complex equation of neurons sending electrical and chemical signals. It’s all way too complex for us to really understand, and we may never become advanced enough to reflect on the raw electrochemical changes within our own brains in realtime, but there’s a formula to it, a shape, a pattern.

When we learn something, we’re introducing a piece of information to that big persistent chunk of abstracted math inside our brains. To really learn something, it requires reintroducing that information over and over again, and often also filling in pieces of the equation surrounding it. This ends up kind of “weighting” this particular sub-equation within the overall equation, and after enough time, our brains can kind of abstract the entire chunk by assuming the result is the same.

The thing is, our brains are largely information-agnostic. The neurons don’t give a shit whether what they’re representing is consistent or an accurate portrayal of some real-world stimulus they’ve been told to record. This isn’t necessarily a problem if our learning process is deliberate, since that provides us ways we can ensure accuracy and parity and avoid logical conflicts. But the problem is… nearly all the learning we do is entirely accidental. And the much bigger problem is that a handful of people are acutely aware of this fact and are exploiting it to amass considerable power and wealth at everyone else’s expense.

What I said earlier about filling in the surrounding equation, this can take many forms. If you’re trying to remember something unfamiliar and tricky, you can take something familiar and comfortable and fill in the pieces of the equation between the two. King Philip Came Over For Great Spaghetti -> Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species. The former is a complete cogent sentence in English using terms and ideas we recognize, whereas the latter is a series of seemingly unrelated terms if you’re not already familiar with taxonomy, some of which you’ll only use in a particular context. You’re creating a data abstraction for your brain by filling in the details surrounding one piece of information with an equation that maps it to another piece of information.

More importantly and less abstractly, you can also fill things in by adding more adjacent information around an existing piece of information. You start taking piano lessons and learn the order of the keys, then the concepts of sharp and flat, then the concept of scales, then bass and treble, then chords, harmony, melody, consonance, dissonance, on and on and on, filling in all these details and linking them up and reinforcing each one of them through repetition until the whole information set is so thoroughly abstracted that you can just sit in front of a keyboard and freestyle something without ever messing up, just letting your hands move without even thinking much about it.

Of course, since our brains are information-agnostic this also works for misinformation, and the more bad information there is—and the more it’s been reinforced—the easier it is to fill in inaccurate bullshit details around it. Especially if the source of that misinformation convinces you very early on in the process and very aggressively that they’re the most trustworthy source of information and everyone else is full of shit.

For the longest time I used to believe that you could come up with the perfect argument, that if you said just the right thing with watertight logic and the evidence to back it up it would somehow… “unlock” something inside someone’s brain and they’d go “holy shit, you’re right—that makes complete sense!”

Embarrassingly it took me over a decade to disabuse myself of this dumb belief, after countless online arguments wherein I completely and utterly failed—despite my absolute best efforts and ostensibly considerable intellect—to convince anyone they were wrong about anything. And yet my arguments seemed so compelling to the people who agreed with me… so how could that possibly add up?

What I didn’t fully realize was that I was confusing—and often conflating—a sympathetic audience’s applause at an argument with the overall persuasiveness of that argument. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that I wasn’t understanding what made an argument or an idea compelling to one set of people versus another set of people. I was failing to read the room.

Eventually I started arguing more for the catharsis and commiserative entertainment of whatever audience happened to be reading along. It’s always far more rewarding to make responsive readers laugh and applaud than it is to try to persuade whoever I’m arguing against. It’s gladiatorial, and it can be a lot of fun to laugh at illogical thinking and get in some good jokes and dunks at the expense of the hooting idiot espousing cruel beliefs.

I’ve by no means been alone in this—a lot of leftward-leaning entertainment has become wildly popular doing this exact same thing. In The West Wing, brilliant orators monologue perfect arguments at antagonists, shutting them down with great humiliation to the delight of colleagues sympathetic to the rebuke. In The Daily Show, comedians take clips of people doing terrible and/or stupid things and humorously point out why those things are terrible and/or stupid, eliciting uproarious applause from the audience—and eliciting no response from the people being mocked because they’re just recordings of past events.

It’s all very one-sided, which is probably why this tactic when deployed in the real world is ultimately alienating and never really works. Nobody likes being talked at or mocked or condescendingly monologued over. Sure it’s fun for everyone else, and it might win the argument itself, but winning an argument doesn’t necessarily win over the person you’re arguing with.

Which is fine, and maybe there’s nothing you could really do to convince them of anything anyway, but I think a lot of us have it in our heads that this actually achieves something more than just a brief gush of dopamine in the bloodstreams of spectators. We get resentful that the people we’re calling stupid aren’t going “ah yeah, I’m stupid, you’re right, sorry.”

Don’t get me wrong—some of them are so idiotic that if you programmed a Machine Learning algorithm to give precisely the wrong answer to everything you asked it, it still wouldn’t even come close to fucking up information nearly as often as they do. But still, if all you’re doing is making them feel like shit, don’t get mad at them that they’re not coming around to your argument.

And that’s sort of the crux of all of this really: Carl W. Buehner famously said (well… maybe not so famously, since everyone mistakenly attributes it to Maya Angelou), “they may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel,” and so much of what we do on the left is make people feel humiliated and stupid for thinking dumb and misinformed things.

This is especially true of centrist liberals, whose go-to tactic is to smugly condescend to fucking everyone to their right or left. They’re still mad at Susan Sarandon for telling people in 2016 that it’s okay to vote for third parties if they want to, and they think that the way to solve all our electoral problems is to scold and humiliate anyone who has ever faltered even for a moment in utterly fawning over Hillary Clinton. They rub people’s faces in Trump’s election victory and every act of his subsequent cruelty like a dog who shat on their “I ♥️ Hollow Pseudo-Feminism” t-shirts.

Speaking of Trump—a man who should never have occupied a solitary synapse-fire more of our attention than as a catchphrase-spewing racist sexual predator on a reality TV show we could easily ignore:

People like him appeal to misinformed people because he makes them feel as though their dumbass thoughts and ideas are somehow worthwhile. If you had one person telling you how wrong you were and another person validating your feelings and fears and telling you you were doing great and that it’s the rest of the world that’s wrong, which one would make you feel good?

Obviously the white supremacists he’s emboldened by shrieking what all the other politicians have merely been dog whistling can go fuck themselves sky-high with a rusty shovel, and who gives a shit what any of them think, and we should definitely not just go around telling people with shitty and dangerous ideas that they’re right about things just to make them feel good and gain their support.

But not everyone who voted for Trump is a racist, and a lot of them just feel frustrated and ignored by our government and our political process. And then a bunch of smug liberals swoop in to tell them they’re idiots, and laugh at them for fucking themselves over by so gullibly falling for Trump’s obvious bullshit, and mock them for naively making a disastrously bad choice that only made their own lives worse. Do they really expect these people to be persuaded by that? What outcome could they possibly hope to attain other than a deep tangled thicket of mutual resentment?

Hell, it’s hard enough to persuade people who aren’t already conditioned to dislike or disbelieve you right out of the gate.

Every fall there’s a swarm of essays about Thanksgiving chronicling how uncomfortable and unpleasant it is to sit down with our families because invariably one of our parents or uncles or aunts or other relatives will say some racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or classist bullshit and we’ll either have to confront them about it or hold our tongues for the sake of making it to pumpkin pie.

For the most part the people in your family ostensibly give a shit about you. Even your bloviating prickshit FOX News uncles would probably be sad or mad to see you suffering. Your parents might respond to Black Lives Matter with “all lives matter” but they still presumably love you as a person.

And yet I bet you’ve had a hundred conversations with them about systemic racism and they still don’t believe it’s a real thing. I mean have you ever, over the course of all these familial arguments, persuaded any member of your family to think differently about, say, capitalism or racism or gun violence or trans rights or imperialism or any of the other things they’re wrong about?

So… why would you think you’d be able to persuade a bunch of strangers who don’t know you and don’t care about you or any aspect of your life? People you’re not even in the same room with, typing these massive paragraphs of angry words at you across arbitrary distances?

What it comes down to is this: what do any of these strangers have to gain from letting you change their minds? And… what do they stand to lose?

Even if you did somehow get through to them, they likely have an entire social infrastructure built around a homogenous philosophy or political brand identity. Their friends are all Republican, or they live in a very conservative town, or they’re worried their kids or siblings will think less of them if they change their minds.

Or their family has been in the military for ages, so any criticism of American military action abroad creates an uncomfortable dissonance for them that makes them lash out so that they don’t have to feel as though they’ve been party to atrocities for the gain of a handful of wealthy elites. If you advertised the actual purpose of our military, nobody would ever sign up. “Wanted: Able-bodied young men and women to risk their lives murdering citizens of countries who refused to sell their resources at a loss to American businesses.”

Sure there are a handful of people who sign up for the military actually hoping for the chance to murder people who Aren’t Like Us, but the vast majority are just regular folks who felt a swell of patriotism or who thought it would be a good way to pay for college.

On top of all that, capitalism has created a society that so closely ties one’s feelings of self-worth to their Usefulness™ that people are afraid to look weak or unsure or incorrect because they know that means they’ll seem Less Useful and thus Less Valuable. And for whatever reason they think that if they can find even a single person who backs them up or thinks the same stupid bullshit it means they’re Not Wrong. Somehow they think it’s less humiliating to doggedly insist they’re right than to just accept the evidence that’s so abundantly clear to everyone else and go “yeah, my bad, damn.”

Or whatever, who cares.

The point is, there’s so much you’re working against when you’re trying to persuade someone. Back to that ongoing mental equation I was talking about earlier, there are so many fragments of it that have been reinforced and filled in and abstracted over these people’s lives, and whatever information you’re trying to enter into that is going to have to contend with all that, no matter how true or false any of it is. And meanwhile, their existing social infrastructure is constantly reinforcing all the other faulty pieces of information.

By fighting with them about this stuff, if your goal is to get them to admit you’re right or come around to your perspective, you’re potentially asking them to give up their entire social infrastructure—all their friends or family who’ll reject or at the very least judge them for changing their thinking. And for what? What are you offering them in return? Your own satisfaction that you’ve made a difference? Why would they care?

And even if you did fix their thinking, they still lack the fundamental toolkits for processing incoming information properly and not just glossing over every appealing-looking piece of data as it slides into their brains. So how do you make sure your fixes stick? How do you keep them from sliding back, especially when their life’s experiences up to that point have given them the mindset they have? Are you really going to sit there and work with them patiently over the course of months or years in order to ensure that the information you’ve inserted gets reinforced and filled in and abstracted enough?

Well I know I’m certainly not. I barely even have the patience anymore to argue with people I know most of the time, and even if I did actually want to sit there slowly and patiently educating ignorant aggressive strangers online for free over the course of however long it might take, I just don’t have the time. And that’s not even considering the long-term penpal back-and-forth bullshit you’ll have to maintain for the rest of the life of whichever one of you dies first, since it’s all pretty fragile and could break at any moment without constant reinforcement.

And ultimately what does it accomplish anyway? Say that you somehow, through hours and weeks and months of time and attention, got them to concede that it’s good to tax rich people more, or that all bathrooms should be gender-neutral, or that healthcare should be a right. Does that guarantee they’ll vote for candidates who support these ideals? Not necessarily, and I’d wager it’s not even probable. Does it make them more likely to argue against their own communities to push social shifts to enact change? I wouldn’t bet on that either. So… what’s the outcome other than that a stranger online tells you you’re right?

So many of us spend so much time online fighting with strangers and for what? If online arguments actually ever solved anything, we wouldn’t have to keep having them. So why on earth do we keep doing it? Why don’t we ever seem to recognize the futility in our endless failures to persuade people? Why do we cling to this idea that we have to win arguments against a bunch of hostile dipshits, many of whom are clearly—clearly—idiots not worth even a second of our precious and limited time? It’s like trying to debate a dog. What’s the point?

I have a hypothesis that it’s evolutionarily advantageous for everyone in a group to be on the same page about things, so we’re all driven to correct (or in many cases “correct”) each other all the time, but really it doesn’t matter what the reason is. Maybe persuasion worked at some point in the past, but it certainly doesn’t anymore, likely because manipulation has come a long way over the years and propaganda is way more effective than reasoning.

The real fix for all this involves adequately funding our educational system and ensuring that the curriculum fosters critical thinking skills and reasoned skepticism. It’s easier to teach children how to recognize bullshit than to fix the broken Bullshit Detectors in adult brains, because—back to what I said earlier about learning—the foundational equations in our brains, the ones that become abstracted the earliest, profoundly influence how all future information is received. And there are all sorts of powerful entities out there right now who are very interested in making sure your brain becomes as compliant as possible, reinforcing bad thinking patterns that are beneficial to them. There are all sorts of little hooks and glitches and vulnerabilities in the ways our brains operate, and it’s astonishingly easy for these malicious actors to shove bad information inside us to their own advantage.

But you can shore up some of those cracks by teaching children to think critically and to read studies and to consider the sources and to dig a little deeper and not just accept information at face value—and reinforce the everliving fuck out of those cognitive algorithms. It’ll also help a lot if you teach them there’s no shame in acknowledging they’re wrong, since so much of maintaining a consistent mindset involves constant evidentiary analysis and critically cross-referencing data and letting that inform and change your views and conclusions.

In other words, we need to ensure that as much of everyone’s learning experience as possible is deliberate rather than accidental.

What sucks is that in order to make those changes to our underfunded and often intentionally hobbled educational system… you have to persuade a bunch of unpersuadable idiots who’ve already been failed by our underfunded and often intentionally hobbled educational system.

But there’s hope! Remember what I said a moment ago about the power of propaganda and manipulation? Well, the good news is that all those tools are available to us as well—we just tend to avoid using them because the idea leaves a bad taste in our mouths. Despite frequent accusations of operating from a place of perhaps irrational emotionality—e.g. “bleeding-heart liberals”—people on the left by and large tend to argue using facts and statistics and logical reasoning while people on the right by and large tend to utilize emotionally-evocative/-manipulative language and imagery.

You might feel a sense of revulsion toward the suggestion we manipulate people, and I understand that, but look: our opposition certainly doesn’t hesitate to manufacture consent or get people to vote against their own interests. If they hold any reservations at all about dumping billions of dollars into systems of mass manipulation to exploit the working class and burn our world for profit, there’s absolutely zero evidence of it.

And a lot of that revulsion you feel was installed there by them so that they can dictate the terms of the conversation, making you feel guilty about “taking the low road” even though they’ve been traveling a road so low they need a special coolant to keep from getting burned up by magma. Plus, the people you’d be manipulating for good are already being manipulated for evil and there’s no real option to just Prevent Manipulation. The cure and the disease operate along the same vector, unfortunately—you can’t undo the damage that’s already been caused simply using Reasoned Discussion.

Meanwhile we’re effectively using antiquated discourse “technology” of increasing obsolescence. We’re bringing knives to an autonomous nuke-wielding drone fight. We’re in an arms race whether we like it or not, and it’s not doing anyone any good for us to stubbornly continue to get annihilated by our opposition out of some misguided notion of nobility or ethicality.

It’s unethical to not do everything in our power to reduce aggregate suffering and to ensure the long-term survival of our species. People struggling to survive on our sweltering devastated planet a century from now aren’t going to respect us for abstaining from manipulating people who were already being manipulated anyway. “All edible plants are dead and all my sustenance comes from synthetic protein sludge brewed in a cave, but at least John Q. Dipshit took the high road a hundred years ago and steadfastly stuck to the failed but ostensibly venerable tactic of direct logical persuasion using facts and evidence.”

I’m not entirely sure which strategies might work best to this end. Maybe I’ll have some ideas in future installments of the newsletter, or maybe I’ll keep them secret so that nobody else uses them maliciously before we can use them for good.

One thing is for certain, though: our brains are faulty machines with pretty consistent and predictable vulnerabilities, and we can inoculate ourselves against some of those exploits by ensuring that we don’t just accidentally absorb whatever people shove into our sense-holes. Work on establishing a sort of ‘input buffer’ where you can examine what you’re seeing and hearing rather than just reacting to it as it collides haphazardly with your brain. Experience everything mindfully and take time to reflect and openly discuss and compare notes.

It’s difficult and you’ll never get it completely right, especially at first, but it’s worth it. You’ll be protecting yourself and everyone around you, and the future of humanity.

And speaking of mindfulness, I myself am going to practice mindfully not getting into arguments with strangers online. I have better and more productive things to do with my time. Like this newsletter, I hope.

And if you’ve gotten something out of it, please consider telling your friends or sharing it on social media. I can’t do this without you.

Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty

Weapons-Grade - A near-future dystopia where war machines can think for themselves. When one of them suffers a sudden existential crisis, it sets off a chain of events that threatens the very survival of humanity.

Seinfelt - Anthology of surreal/existential horror synopses and short stories set in the Seinfeld universe. Jerry loses all his teeth in the middle of a show. George wakes up one morning suddenly unable to feel hot water. Kramer finds a hair in his belly button that keeps getting longer the more he tries to pull it out. Elaine falls asleep at the salon and wakes up with live snakes for hair.

Co-authored with T. R. Appleton.

Waiting Room - A Twin Peaks-inspired iOS app that lets you record and reverse audio and video. Learn to speak phonetically backwards and record videos of yourself as though you're in the Black Lodge.

Music - Check out some of the music I’ve composed. Please buy some tracks you like if you want to help support my ongoing musical creative endeavors.

Video Game Streams - Do you appreciate video games as a form of entertainment but you don’t really feel like playing them yourself? Come check out my stream! I play all sorts of games while talking to a camera. Put it on while you’re falling asleep at night!

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Until next time! Stay strong.