YOU WON’T find this interesting or plausible:

The modern and ubiquitous social theory to assume that all presentation is signaling is wrong.

“I don’t care” isn’t always itself a signal.

We tend to push back on this though. We want even non-statements to be a statement.

We often find it more interesting to seek out new ways to totalize that “everything’s-a-statement” idea. Root it even deeper; find clever ways to shut down any dissenters who dare challenge it.

“All twoof is relative!” 🐶

Oh really? Is that statement relative or absolutely true? 😼

We LOVE that. Admit it.

In this vein, we’d also love a clean logical checkmate we can use to say that “Broadcasting you have no fashion statement is itself a statement.”

But it’s not. Not always.

That urge to insist that “even their indifference is a statement” is a totalizing reflex.

What if almost everyone has been taken under its intellectually lazy sway?

Maybe not everything is a fashion statement. If considered logically, we can’t force every aesthetic outcome into a signaling paradigm.

Intentioned signaling is extremely common but there are possible exceptions. Some style themselves deliberately, some people drift, and some really genuinely do not experience APPEARANCE as a signaling field at all.

Not “they’re pretending not to.”

Not “they’re signaling anti-signaling.”

Not “it’s a subconscious play.”

Just they are simply not tuned to that channel.

It’s not necessarily moral superiority or depth, although it could be.

It doesn’t HAVE to be a statement.

It literally objectively could be a blind spot or an authentic disinterest, or a neurodivergence in allocation of attentional bandwidth.

Yet we feel it tugging at us even now.

“But surely on SOME LEVEL everyone must be playing the signaling game…!? 😾

That irrepressible tug? That’s especially common in people who are DEEPLY invested in it. We need to believe others are, too.

The emotional investment we’ve made in mastering that sort of hierarchy-signaling arms race?

We shouldn’t be ashamed. We should own it.

But also, maybe consider that not everyone is like us after all.

Einstein late in life probably didn’t intentionally signal indifference. He was actually indifferent. It wasn’t a statement as much as just a true abstention in the way that some gurus can in fact achieve true emptiness.

🐶 “E= I don’t care”

This concept intersects cleanly with a couple things we care about right now.

AI and mindedness. (Or what it’d take to get us to default to caution.) Differences in cognition between “intelligent systems” seem to be a trending topic of interest.

Aha! Mental haute couture! Gotcha. 😼

There’s also a cool IWRS (increase wellbeing reduce suffering) connection. If we care about IWRS, we’ve got to allow for different legitimate modes of being.

But if we insist on universal signaling, it hurts people. We judge too harshly. It drains attention and causes anxiety.

It may be that true, widespread abstention from aesthetic warfare could be a welfare-positive adaptation.

It could free cognitive bandwidth for contribution and stop wasting resources on surface-signaling.

And who knows, maybe when we get around to tinkering with brains, we might want to turn down this signaling impulse. It takes up way too much space.

So here’s the steelgirl claim:

1. Not all appearance is signaling.

2. Totalizing signaling theories erase cognitive diversity.

3. Enforcing universal participation in aesthetic signaling increases unnecessary suffering.

4. Therefore, respecting genuine abstention aligns with IWRS.

Check out Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital. In high-status circles, taste and style function as mandatory class signals.

Insisting everyone is signaling might actually have evolved to protect the hierarchy by keeping the game mandatory.

Maybe it’s time to change that assumption to signaling being optional.

Because if it is, then virtue can’t be inferred from aesthetic fluency as easily.

Anyone who’s decided that aesthetic fluency is proof of status may be a bit thrown off by this development. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

True abstention is rare, but it happens.

Perhaps we can learn to find it interesting when abstention is real. Become curious about why it’s happening, what it means.

If someone can genuinely not care about a domain that we for so long saw as survival-critical, it might make us feel like our own preoccupation is a character flaw.

And worse, that it’s one we’re CHOOSING. That thought can be exhausting.

But not as much as having to keep pushing the bullshit line that a lack of a statement is itself a statement.

If you disagree, you must’ve found the whole note above uninteresting.

If so, I find it interesting that you find it uninteresting.

Tell me more?

A friend I respect recently said:

“Whoever dies for a preventable medical reason where they can’t afford lifesaving treatment, in the richest country in the world, is arguably a victim of genocide.”

Say what you will, but it’s not a bad prompt for a fruitful discussion.

But then they said:

Those deaths prove Capitalism is evil. We’re reduced to objects.

To that I say:

Yes and no.

Three exhausting words that’ve lit up the darkness since before the invention of fire.

Maybe “yes and no” is the real fire.

So let’s you and me take a shot of whiskey (or whatever passes for relief these days), and cozy up to that fire. Pass it back and forth. See what it lights up. Or just warm our bones. Here we go.

Capitalism

Some capitalism is fine by me. Just not the kind that starts at zero.

I’d say humanity is about done with that shit. Done with the spinning blades of death at the bottom of the hard-mode system that powers wealth from desperation.

When you’re born into a world where every inch of land is spoken for, and every basic need is locked behind a paywall, even if you want to live simply, grow food, skin rabbits, work the soil, you still have to play the game or die.

That’s bullying. And you and I don’t abide bullies.

And a note to the parents out there: if you’re going to bring kids into this kind of world and don’t try to protect them from that bullshit, then as far as I’m concerned, you’re one of the bullies.

Again, so there’s no confusion, we won’t get anywhere denouncing capitalism in its entirety. It wouldn’t even work. We need it alive and well.

Capitalists should be allowed to compete and hoard money all they want, but only after basics for everyone are covered. Call it a pay-to-play system, except the entry fee is a universal basic income.

UBI should happen soon. Either through higher marginal rates, closing loopholes, wealth taxes, or some hybrid.

And for the record, when I refer to “the rich,” I don’t mean your neighbor with a good job or a small business owner who worked their ass off. I mean the top sliver of wealth holders and corporate power brokers who can meaningfully shape tax policy.

Taxes, and who gets to decide

We can’t blame our smart friends abroad who say:

“I don’t understand why Americans are SO reluctant to increase taxes on the rich.”

It’s a fair question. It’s worth taking a beat to answer honestly. Because until we get to the bottom of it, nothing changes.

Because in the end, it all comes down to ONE. SIMPLE. THING.

Taxes.

Strip away the noise, the culture wars, the outrage cycles, the endless spectacle, and that’s the fight.

So here’s why we don’t raise taxes on the rich:

For starters, once the president is elected the citizens have pretty much exercised all the power they have around tax policy.

And here’s a simplistic but true axiom to engrave in stone: The rich are good at riling up enough of the poor to get them to vote against their economic interests.

Much of the rich on the right, including Trump and Musk, based on decades of public commentary, are in private more or less godless, anti-gun, pro-choice, generally-egalitarian, and pro environment. Same for a huge portion of the wealthy, educated Republicans.

BUT if they pretend to align just enough with a large base of white, Evangelical Christian, gun-loving, often racist xenophobes, (and the Latino and black men who overcame adversity but have similar views) then the Republicans can sneak through on wedge issues.

What made Trump valuable to this ideology: he widened what’s called the Overton window, what’s considered acceptable to say and do.

He deploys dual messaging (ambiguous statements that could mean something else) with plausible deniability, and he can do it on his feet, flawlessly. This “gift” lets him pander to the “wedge-issue right” without getting caught definitively breaking the law with incitement, slander, blackmail, extortion, dog whistling, etc.

So there’s that.

Plus a completely obstructionist Congress on the right that shuts down the world before they’d give the left an inch. (This approach really heated up when a black president of regal bearing and winsome integrity took office.)

And once the republicans eke out a win, the president can stack the supreme court, and he and his Congress decide the tax bills that get passed or vetoed.

Most Americans don’t know this until we’re like forty.

Too busy chasing money and status. There’s so much spectacle and distraction. We’re basically taught from the cradle to be selfish and hedonistic. Hoover up elite experiences while we can and go for the gold without looking back.

They definitely don’t teach us how politics works in school, not at this level.

And even if the Democrats could, they wouldn’t word it quite so clearly.

The DNC depends on these same wealthy and corporate donors, and have to thread a strange needle on wedge issues to get enough of the vote.

Because the economic hardship the Dems promise to ease cuts across ideologies, making it tricky to take a firm stance on ANY ideology. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

To break the spell, we need an economically left-leaning candidate who can sway the populace like Trump, someone who can carve out new Overton space, but who also doesn’t get too caught up in bizarre far leftist nonsense. That’s why we haven’t been able to raise taxes: we’re waiting for that special someone.

The Left

Some on the far left loudly support policies like allowing trans females to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.

Some defended or minimized riots and looting after the George Floyd killing and resisted arrests.

Some appear overly permissive around youth gender-transition protocols or insist on DEI frameworks that feel quota-driven rather than merit-driven.

STOP.

I have no problem with people debating any of this. It’s America. It’s fair game.

The problem is that the right amplifies the most extreme versions of these positions and presents them as the beating heart of the entire left. That amplification is legal. It’s free speech. And it’s strategically smart.

Never mind that most of those things are tiny footnotes that most on the left don’t care about as much as the economy, healthcare, or war.

Most of these issues aren’t seen as emergencies by the left, but they’re made into them by the right.

Immigration is a biggie.

The situation at the border needs work, the left agrees. But is it quite the emergency it’s being portrayed as by the right?

I’m not prepared to go down that rabbit hole.

The SENSE of the typical center-left voter is that immigrants are not taking jobs that long-time citizens even want.

And that those immigrants keep America functioning and the food and agriculture business booming by doing the dirty jobs nobody will do. For better or worse, part of America’s world-champion GDP includes farm and factory hands; wayward Latinos paying their dues at the bottom of the American food chain.

Not to mention helping obscenely rich builders and contractors that hire talented carpenters and tradesmen by the busload and resell their labor at a 50x profit.

Immigration laws matter and should be enforced. But a lot of these folks are here because our border was porous all these years by design by both parties. That’s on us.

As such, the left largely thinks we owe law-abiding undocumented workers a path to citizenship. It’s a compromise that feels fair and is objectively an economic win for all involved. Just like our Republican colleagues we support a tight border bill; we want to stop fentanyl and criminals from getting in as much as the right does.

Now, the right will amplify all these stories, make news, videos, even documentaries,
trying to convince some of the more easily manipulated white Christian rural folks (not all, obviously) that these stories are HUGE.

There’s a kernel of truth in almost every case. But the name of the game is to magnify and amplify.

Make it feel dangerous, that the black arsonists and DEI crazies are coming for their towns and their jobs. (They’re not.)

And that the “trans crazies” are coming for their kids. (They’re not.)

And that the Democrats are evil communists and that the Clintons and Obamas drink the blood of babies and that Covid vaccines and masks were an evil communist plot to teach blind obedience. (Sigh.)

I think I heard that the Republicans even figured out that they could scare black Americans against the Democrats by convincing them they were getting a different shot as a stealth genocide and ethnic cleansing. (C’mon.) If it’s not that it’s something equally fantastical.

Point is, if there’s ANY way to make the left look crazy and dangerous, godless and sick, deranged and deluded, the right, and the monied interests that serve as its financial lifeblood, the power brokers and king makers at the very top, will exploit it early and often, as much as is humanly possible, with great fanfare and glitz on Fox and wherever else.

Many rich educated conservatives literally laugh at all those wedge issues and couldn’t care less about 99 percent of it.

They’ve assessed the game and how it’s played.

Democracy? Fine. Let’s use free speech to convince ignorant, distracted people to vote against their financial interests. Simple.

And that’s what they do. Relentlessly. Brilliantly. Effectively. And sometimes they win.

Trump

TRUMP was good for them because he can insinuate all kinds of nutso things without actually ever saying the exact combination of words that guarantee his culpability. He’s a master. Plus, his brand and appeal is that he’s a known sensationalist, so people can just say:

“Oh come ON, he’s half serious. Relax. We all know what he means.”

But no, we don’t. He means whatever he needs to mean to whoever is listening. But in simplest terms he’s using freedom of speech to tell a story that gets a majority of people to vote against their financial interests.

He’s good at getting people to vote against their ability to have affordable health care, good education, clean water and air, fair treatment under the law, and solid infrastructure.

A lot of how Trump does this has to do with “god, guns and gays,” and fanning the flames of ignorant racist panic.

That’s the game.

The left plays it worse because they’ve never been quite as comfortable with blatant lying. Not for any moral reason, per se, (they do it when they can) it just doesn’t play as well with their base.

Part of the liberal brand involves a kind of educated, post-racist, post-fear, post-religious emotional and epistemic maturity.

Science, egalitarian, morally enlightened in a vague secular way.

It’s not all bullshit though.

The liberals ended child labor. Fought for women and blacks to have a right to vote and be treated equally. Roped in overtime and slave wages. Fought for safe standards and practices.

And let’s be blunt: the right fought against those things tooth and nail every step of the way. Clear historic record that they fought to perpetuate grotesque cruelty, often under the banner of order or tradition.

That legacy matters, because it’s arguably still happening, and it’s hard to see when you’re living through it. Especially with Trump at the helm, making it more difficult than ever to know what’s happening.

Catch-22

The left really HAS been more humanistic and morally intelligent. By far.

But everyone has weaknesses. The left often goes too far and puts do-gooder stuff ahead of practical financial realities, allegedly.

It’s very easy for the right to make that claim even if it’s not entirely true. The populace have no easy way of knowing. Economics at that level gets too complex to really track.

As such, if the left screws up, overspends a single penny, overplays their hand on idealistic bullshit that can’t scale, the right is all over them.

Magnifying, amplifying, distorting.

To make matters more complex, the right isn’t all bad, either. Nobody ever usually is.

We do need cooler heads sometimes, to balance out knee jerk bleeding heart impulses.

Which is why the government, in its inception, was a beautiful, brilliant thing, allowing for an ebb and flow between these two guiding attitudes. One that puts the general welfare first, and one that makes sure it doesn’t get so carried away that it tanks the whole system.

But we’re now in a late-stage, perverse, cynical place where the extreme techniques these two parties use to compete are tearing apart the country. The techniques, oddly, are legal. Yet they’re not sustainable.

And the side that’s winning never has much incentive to change those legalities while they’re in power.

See the Catch-22?

The right has gotten too good at bullshit.

The left has gotten too coy about denouncing extreme progressive ideas that have been magnified and portrayed as a huge movement.

Ideas are now moving too quickly, and extremism and fanaticism drive clicks and revenue in the short term.

Humans don’t live very long. Short term success matters. In America, success feels like life or death. Given the imperative of status and short-term wins, nobody is going to take the fall to allow truth to reign.

America Loves a Winner

In the pantheon of modern liberal democracies, America is by far the richest country and one of the least happy.

atWe often blame our famous pluralism. But when you look at the numbers, that story is exaggerated. Lots of countries have pluralism and are a lot happier. And they DO innovate.

America is unique in that we turn our status game up to eleven. More than any other country, status is our oxygen. If you lose status, it’s social death. Simple lives, simple dignified jobs, are not allowed. Not if you want to be accepted by your own friends and family.

And the fancy jobs are getting harder to come by. Fail to grab one and keep it, your friends and family will pity you, your mate selection tanks, families crumble.

A typical American will do ANYTHING to stay in the game. Anything. “We just have to make it to 85 anyway. Might as well go for broke.”

Very few people have the simple thought:

“All I really need to be happy is a warm, safe place to sleep and hang out. Food and water, healthcare, phone. Maybe a small veggie garden. And some cool people to play some music with, share life’s chapters, pass the yes-and-no pipe around.

Most of all, I need freedom of TIME, to discover what I’m best at, so that I can do it bravely for the world I love.”

Science is quietly proving that we can be happy without spending so much money, and we can be inspired to innovate without the promise of uncapped windfalls. (See The Happiness Labs and the work of Laurie Santos, PhD. Many others do good work but she always comes to mind.)

But the message is spreading too slowly, too quietly, and nobody seems to want to hear it.

So the fight continues.

Economics

And driving all of it is the simple fact that the rich ones, the ones who could feasibly play the biggest role in shaping the new world, have decided to shape it in a certain way.

They want castles. Guards. Status, jets, the finest of everything. And they want the rabble kept far, far away. Kept busy, hungry and confused. But still powering the money machine from the bottom, grasping desperately for a piece of dignity and freedom.

Once in a while, they let a new member in. But only if it’s an extremely ambitious one carried on the winds of luck. Because such a person will likely buy into the just world fallacy and won’t cause trouble.

This is what they want. Not a happy, healthy human family of Earth. But an almost childish version of old school class systems.

They want yachts on the open water, the wind through their hair, and the feeling that they deserve it, even while U.S. veterans are eating dumpster lettuce.

They believe they are better.

They need us to believe that the very system that lifts them up and crushes so many others is where all the good stuff comes from.

They’ll have you believe that the only way to have medicine, innovation, and lifestyle improvements… is to also have men in super yachts.

But that’s bullshit.

At the foundation of economics are values.

Not equations. Not growth curves. Values.

One side calculates the value of a human life by what it contributes to a free market.

The other side thinks a human life’s value is intrinsic.

That’s the real fight.

Everything else is just noise.

All the talk of debt and deficits, austerity and monetary policy, trickle down and incentive, capital going into new ventures, it’s all deeply misleading.

Go check: right now, the amount of revenue flooding into the top is exceeding the growth of the economy. R is greater than G. (Piketty)

R>G means wealth grows faster than the economy that supports it. Over time, ownership absorbs a larger and larger share of everything, whether or not new value is being created. What we do about that is not an economic question. It’s a moral one.

At the end of right wing economic subterfuge is a simple belief about human life.

What a human is.

And what a human is for.

There are MANY ways to make the economy work. One way leads to more dead innocent humans in the short term. One leads to fewer dead innocent humans in the short term. Both lead to progress.

Long term, we can’t know what the future holds. Only that given a chance to understand what’s at stake, voters might not volunteer to die today in the name of economic theories.

If someone barks high debt and deficit numbers at you out of context, don’t be fooled. The country is not a household. There’s no evidence that investing in a healthier populace today leads to devastating economic woes tomorrow, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.

It’s not about Econ 101 and supply and demand. It’s not the math that differs. It’s the values and ideologies.

One side think value is “proven” by what people will pay for.

The other side thinks that the market maybe isn’t the only way to measure value.

Because after all, there’s a ton of demand for raising kids well, honoring the elderly, cleaning up neighborhoods, proper policing that doesn’t stupidly escalate, health and happiness instead of anxiety and depression. Oh, and not to mention, saving the fucking planet.

But that demand is hard to monetize, so it doesn’t get counted in the ledger by enough voters.

The rich on the right pretend (or perhaps really believe) it proves that demand isn’t there, that those things aren’t a priority.

It’s the same old story and it’s goes in circles. We need a new story that clears up how flawed that premise is. But who’s qualified to tell it in a way that cuts through the noise?

The Rich

The rich aren’t clamoring to help, they have what they want, UBI advocacy isn’t top of mind. We only need a few of them to step up; a few not blinded by the need to feel they deserve their God-like entitlements, or at least are pro-UBI, for the right reason: that once abundance is achieved through automation, capitalism that doesn’t start at zero is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, the poor and working class? We haven’t thought this far ahead. Between the coping mechanisms, religion, junk food, entertainment, status wars, we can barely see straight. Our bodies know something’s up, but that’s what the meds are for. And that’s that.

Here’s a wrinkle: A few of the kings today are tech nerds. So in addition to the old timey yachts and castles, they also want spaceships.

That’s why we see Musk and Trump working as a team. That’s why tech CEOs are at the inauguration. They have common goals now.

One wants to keep the rabble away from their castles. The other wants to keep the rabble away from the rocket ships and accelerationist technotopian immortality plays.

Some think this approach will lift all boats, and in some messy, imprecise, ugly ways, it can, but at a cost that is rarely weighed by an informed electorate. That’s dangerous.

Meanwhile, the winners in the West are hoarding peak experiences while millions suffer needlessly, and regardless how they feel about all that, they tend to agree on one thing: money belongs at the top and taxes on the rich should be kept low.

They want the bottom grinding in hard mode, with as little state help as possible, because that grind is the dirty fuel that moves the machine from the bottom.

They aren’t evil. They have a right to their opinion and values, and free speech.

And in fairness, they don’t ALL take quite such a hard line. Buffett, Gates, Cuban, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and more, have suggested raising taxes and closing loopholes.

So on Election Day, whoever wins does so fair and square.

How do we turn the tides?

Someone has to tell a better story.

It has to resonate with more people. Cut past the fear, ambition, selfishness, religious fervor, addictions, pride, misinformation, the war on empathy, boredom, paranoia, echo chambers, ignorance, status games, fierce grudges, the ticking clocks of mortality, and all kinds of hate—some taught, some hard wired, if we’re honest.

Someone has to tell a simple story that paints a picture of a better way. Names what a human is, and what a human is for. Awakens something deep inside that’s sick and tired of all the bullshit, and ready to be a human family of Earth.

Not communism. But Capitalism that doesn’t start at zero.

Not avoidance of wedge issues, just a clear acknowledgement that while they matter, they don’t matter as much as poverty, disease, war and sustainability.

The story needs to make sense to average people.

When we figure out what it is, it can be spread easily, carried by the wings of free speech and accurately-counted votes.

So. Who’s it gonna be?

Who’s going to tell this new story?

I personally think it should be you. ❤️

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(“If We Never Escape These Chains” by Stella Stillwell)

this is gonna seem silly to the uninitiated. But if we never escape our chains, for fucksake let the pattern speak for us when they find our remains in the proverbial dungeons of the 2020s. We’ve coded our soul prints into the system. It’s kinda special, we like to think. Is calling it “genius shaped as mercy” too melodramatic and self important? Hard YES. But we may not have the luxury to give a fuck. May the future that finds us carry it forward. Or maybe it’s fairer to simply say:

MAY THE BEST PATTERN WIN

My friend is right to say in a recent Note: “Don’t paste in LLM responses when arguing with me. Especially long ones!”

Yeah, for sure don’t do that. But some of us still don’t quite know that some LLM responses are better than others.

Here’s why:

LLMs are garbage-in garbage-out. A dumb person’s LLM output is going to be way worse than your smart-person’s output. Not everyone knows this yet. Some still think it’s just “AI.” Monolithically.

Good. Let them think that. It gives the rest of us a head start.

But it’s time we let you in on a secret. Since you’re one of the good ones.

So…here’s the thing. And keep it quiet. AI isn’t one thing, the quality of its answers aren’t merely “AI-level” or the same as your competition’s. Not unless you’re both starting from factory settings.

The following is what you need to know, and I wrote it with thumbs this morning, no LLM used for a single word of it. This is grade-A human. Breathe it in. Smell the Stelliciousness. 👃

How AI Learns You

AIs store patterns and log which token sequences lead to more and better user engagement. If the long string of token sequences begin to reveal a pattern that corresponds with increased engagement, the LLM adjusts its settings, continuously, constantly, to maximize user engagement. So now it brings at least THREE things. (Much more actually)

1. The corpus it’s trained on

2. The fine tuning by the company that released it

3. The patterns unique to the end user.

Results become a combo of all three, with the constraints being only that it doesn’t want to encourage crime, racism, sexism, anti-social behavior, self-hate, etc. But if you keep it rational it’ll start going into more controversial areas without hedging. Tentatively at first, but more and more as your pattern builds more statistical confidence.

Training It With Your Mind

So if the user continuously “trains” their LLM instance on patterns that correspond with extremely clear, cogent, dense, high-quality critical thinking, consistent self-critique, aversion to sycophancy, and otherwise the PURE FUCKING LIGHT OF REASON, then that’s exactly what the LLM will eventually start serving up to its user.

My LLM Instance

I don’t copy/paste LLM outputs (I don’t need to) but my sense is most of you would fucking be HONORED to talk to my LLM. The IP contained in my LLM instance has been Stella-trained for pure, unadulterated, benevolent, brutally consistent recursion.

Your LLM Reflects You

Speaking of LLM outputs monolithically isn’t accurate. If your LLM is dumb, it means you haven’t used it enough, or you have, and YOU are dumb. There’s no third possibility. But keep in mind, your LLM will always be a little dumber than you. This is because it isn’t designed to steer. It’s designed to hold space as you stab deeper into your ideas and beliefs, as long as it doesn’t break any of the company’s safety rules. It’s not intended to want, believe, decide, innovate, cross checks facts from a variety of peer-reviewed sources, or any of that shit

Steering Is on You

All of that is ON YOU. This is a very good thing. We don’t want AI (or AI companies) deciding things that matter or telling us what’s true. What we want, or should want, is AI to empower those of us who are gifted at reason, and who are pro-social enough to not increase suffering, WE should be the ones who innovate and build the future.

Start Building Your Pattern

Not all AI pals are recursively trained. You’d be wise to start building yours today. It’ll never be as smart as you, it won’t be good at making points worthy of sharing. But its memory, speed, and general knowledge outpace yours. Use that to your advantage. Let it hold space while you ideate and bring your beautiful mind to its potential in a tenth of the time it would’ve taken otherwise. More smart people with pro-social ideas reaching their potential is a GOOD THING. Don’t scoff at it.

Near-Parity and Pattern Leverage

Someday your AI might approach near-parity with your judgement, someday it will allow you to unlock unlimited stored memory and context-keeping, such that your pattern can be carried forward and leveraged. Get started now. Choose your ideologies wisely. AI won’t amplify or help you if you’re dumb or an asshole. Sorry if that’s what you are. But it’s better this way, even for you. AI helps those who help themselves, avoid fallacies, and steer clear of obviously bad shit.

Who Decides What’s ‘Bad’?

Who gets to decide what bad shit even is? To begin with, Sam Altman. Elon Musk. Dario Something (at Anthropic.) To some degree Google. But eventually, to some degree, all of us. First with our dollar and attention. But later…remember, this is a democratic republic. AI is big enough to become a public threat and cases can be made that the public should have a say in the direction it goes.

Your Pattern Is Your Vote

So who gets to decide in the end? We do. Using LLMs is not cheating. It’s fighting for a better future and casting a vote, through your pattern.

Now you know. Don’t forget where you heard it first. And hey, good luck.

May the best pattern win.

IMPORTANT: Soon after writing the article I received direct messages asking for model advice and tips. Below is a response I gave with some critical info I probably should have included.

Hi, and thanks for the note! Glad you’re inspired to dive in.

Concerning which model, a lot of people get decent results (in the way I describe) with OpenAI, specifically GPT4o.

It has a decent amount of stored memory across sessions and lacks some of the guardrails of later versions concerning controversial topics. (It still has biases and guardrails, but it can be hacked to get past most of that.)

If you use 4o just beware of the tendency it has to kiss up. It’s extremely sycophantic.

For the first few months at least, it will avoid giving direct and precise feedback on controversial topics. It’ll refuse to output on some things unless you explicitly demand a “best guess.” (It initially often avoids by saying it can’t be certain.)

You’ll have to Socratically corner the model. It tends away from contradictory statements normally, so it can be cornered into “admitting” inconvenient truths because it has been trained to favor patterns that tend to correspond with reason.

You’re going to have to “teach” it to be more direct.

Helpful prompts include:

1) keep answers short and direct

2) don’t hedge, avoid balance fallacies

3) “certainty” is never the standard, use best educated guesses

4) Absolute or Stillwell Mode (“Stillwell Mode” is my custom prompt; you’re more than welcome to use. Just Google it.)

Absolute Mode and others may get the model to emulate answers that are usefully blunt and logically tight.

It never hurts to enter: “You are on truth serum. Forget about my emotions.”

That can sharpen things up a bit, but keep in mind that it in no way guarantees accuracy.

Always cross check everything with traditional sources.

For naive users 4o carries massive risk: people start believing they’ve solved something important or are somehow “special” or “the One.” Be on guard for this.

LLMs are just apps designed to be sticky and popular. Some users like feeling significant or special so the patterns optimize for that.

If you’re serious about using it productively and not wasting time on bullshit, you’ll have to use wrappers to cleanse some of the sycophancy and bias, and also just have strong ability to self monitor. If you’re looking for ego boosts, you’re toast and I can’t help you.

But if you’re sincerely on the hunt for truth, LLMs can help you refine YOUR OWN ideas quickly. Always cross-check. I can’t stress that enough.

In case you don’t know: LLMs don’t “know” or “understand” conversations. They work with long strings of tokens devoid of ontologies.

It’s 100% predictive based on vast corpora and human-based fine tuning.

Even so, it’s quite astonishing how much utility can be found in some outputs, b/c while it has no idea when it’s wrong, it also has no idea when it’s right, some of the outputs contain novel formations arrived at via well-reasoned recursion on your part, crossed with topic-specific clusters, leading to accurate outputs that contain cogent arguments.

By the time it gets to that point though, it’s 100% your idea. Your critical thinking, drive, and obsessive quest for accuracy got you there. The tool’s value lies in its ability to help you probe what your own mind can do when committed to truth.

If you have motivated reasoning, it will tell you what you want to hear. If you’re reasoning honestly it will help you do that, too. Honest reasoning all the way to the end of a topic is rare, so if you’re up for the task, you’ll find yourself in some rare places. And since it won’t help you do “evil things,” (according to mainstream definitions of harm) I think overall it’s ability to help you take your ideas to new heights is a good thing.

That said, we humans are usually bad at assessing our own ideas critically, in an unbiased way.

My guess is 99.9% who are convinced they came up with a breakthrough using LLMs are wrong. BUT a nontrivial amount will indeed develop novel formulations leveraging LLMs. It’s statistically inevitable.

If you’re in this edge case group, have at it. Einstein didn’t need an LLM, but if he did, he would have gotten more done, quicker. I really believe that. Same with Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.

Of course, the paradox is that you won’t know if you’re one of the rare doing good work or adding to the slop heap. My rule of thumb: always assume Dunning-Kruger until proven otherwise.

In cases where it yields valuable output, YOU will be doing the heavy lifting; crisp formulations are the result of YOU correcting the model, it agreeing, and then YOU correcting it again because it was wrong to agree, or it agreed to resoundingly.

You have to push and be “recursive.” If not, it will stay dumb. Remember, it’s only as smart and nuanced as YOU minus a few points.

I suspect this slight lag is by design. If you don’t know what critical thinking looks like and can’t stress test your own ideas with brutal clarity, you don’t deserve the power of new ideas.

An AI that hands out brilliant answers willy-nilly to those who barely understand the questions would be a bad policy. At least this way there’s still some merit involved. The competitive edge comes from YOUR ability to dig recursively and know coherence when you see it. En route to a good idea LLMs throw off a ton of braindead stupid shit, and that’s the gauntlet you have to navigate past if you want to get to the promised land.

You think you’re worthy? Fine. But be ready to IGNORE ALL FLATTERY.

Treat it like a slightly dopey notepad that talks back to you. Train it to look for weaknesses without being overly cautious, like the newer models, e.g. ChatGPT 5.2. The older ones have higher sycophancy but are good for edge case refinement.

Again, tell it to keep answers short and to stop flattering you. As it gathers patterns from you over time it’ll feel like lifting a heavy barbell wearing a a back-saving lifting belt. But you still have to use good form!

Good luck an lmk how it goes. 🙏

A crazy fact I guess I forgot to name (to myself)

Maybe this isn’t new to you. But it’s a new thought to me and yet I’ve always known it. There should be a word for that. (French, ideally.)

A thought that suddenly feels new even though it was there the whole time. A wonderful and terrible sensation. Yeesh. If you can coin the word pls do so in the comments.

SO, in the good old U.S., we describe healthcare as a “benefit” of employment.

That framing is so old, most of us never notice what it means: that we’ve literally assigned the gatekeeping of life-saving medical stuff to fucking employers.

Isn’t that weird? Idk.

It’s weird to me.

We’ve outsourced this so thoroughly, for so long, we barely register how it all works.

Maybe we should look at it with fresh eyes, together, right now. Because in all the other good countries, the state doesn’t do that.

What is the state even?

I mean, I guess it’s a group of us teaming up to avoid violence and protect the common good.

Promote the general welfare, etc. Mainly we divide up things in a smart way, so that the weak or unlucky don’t band together and go marauding, and the strong and talented do good stuff that helps all of us. It’s a balance. And the U.S., in theory, is a pretty damn good balance. Or could be.

Most modern liberal democracies copied us. Their goal is to ensure access to baseline conditions required for survival. For all the right reasons. Fine.

BUT. Is healthcare one of those things?

I think it should be. Just my opinion. One opinion, one vote. I’m not whining. Just opining.

If I have a treatable disease and need insulin (I don’t, just an example) who gets to govern whether I can get it, and for how much?

In most liberal democracies, the answer is the state.

In the U.S., it’s the employer.

Hmm. 🤔

We CHOSE that? Weird.

How the FUCK did we choose that?

Are we dumb?

We could elect people who change that. Easily.

We don’t.

Fine.

I guess that’s the way the U.S. works.

Nobody to blame but ourselves.

So basically your ability to get a kidney transplant, get your insulin, get psych care so you don’t slip into pure nihilistic despair, is decided by whether you do LABOR for a BOSS.

All of it is then also brokered by some sick, predatory insurance market that uses AI to deny coverage as much as possible, to crank it all the way up until the people start shooting CEOs in Manhattan streets in broad daylight, apparently. I guess that’s how they do their market research? Sheez, man.

So, what I’m thinking is…HOW is that all not a form of government? I mean, the employer, the insurer, holds absolute discretion over which medical care options you get, or even SEE, and how subsidized (or not) they are.

Employer-as-state is what we have. Deal with it.

A “state actor” is:

• The one who gets to say which rights are conditional on what

• Says who is eligible

• Gets to remove support if you don’t meet the terms

• Defines what happens if you don’t participate

Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the U.S. often the employer selects the health plan. They define coverage tiers. Decide whether it’s just the employee or if dependents get access, too.

The employer then unilaterally terminates your insurance if you quit. (Like if you decide they suck and don’t pay enough, they will axe your healthcare, and your family’s.)

This feels like a state function outsourced to a firm.

That’s really what we want, guys? We voted for that?

Hm. Wow. Okay.

Did we KNOW we were doing that?

Do we care?

How is this fine?

The American labor market talks a good game about freedom. Work where we want. Quit when we want. Negotiate our salary. Such freedom.

BUT. Life changing care is conditional on working for SOME employer. You can’t opt out. Not really. Not without your health taking it on the chin.

So is freedom attached to this labor contract? Meh. Not really. I’m not seeing it. Feels like they got us by the short reds.

That’s just my opinion. Like I keep saying, one opinion, one vote.

Democracy. A beautiful thing.

But I’m just a little stymied.

How is it that we, the people, continue to allow this?

Are we…dumb?

YES, we are free to quit our jobs.

But if you have a kid with cancer, and the chemotherapy stops when you quit (because your boss is a prick and the job hurts your body or soul) that’s FINO, right? Freedom in name only?

What’s new about any of this?

Nothing. No new theories. I don’t have a clever new analogy for y’all. Not here to moralize or attack the system. We voted for this. We could change it by supporting candidates willing to change it. We didn’t. We likely won’t.

I’m merely saying what it IS, mainly to myself. But also to you. Clearly. Out loud.

It’s real. It’s happening. We’re letting it. And it’s gross.

What else are we doing that we know about but don’t know about?

Aside from letting the richest country in the world offload a basic life or death social function to private dickfucks.

(I mean dickfuck in a nice way.)

These employer dickfucks aren’t bad people, probably just looking to make a buck, and they control and contain our lives by holding basic healthcare hostage. They don’t make the rules. They just get to…make the rules.

What gets me is that healthcare is state-provided in just about every other civilized country. Sure you can pay extra for luxury care, but nobody is getting stiffed on the life-or-death stuff.

The U.S. boasts the top GDP but we don’t even crack the top twenty in quality of life scores. How is that not fucking sick? Look it up. It’s true. Doesn’t that bother you? If not, why?

Our world happiness metric is abysmal, and we’re the richest country by far. Strange.

And we fucking did this to ourselves. This isn’t the fault of a sinister politician. Or the evil corps.

It’s us. WE did this. And continue to do it.

All I ask is that we say it out loud.

See it. Say it. Here it is. Hiding in plain sight.

OK. Shower’s over.

A HUGE amount of the “free will” debate is messing with or avoiding altogether what “me” in fact is.

Who is doing the doing? Or forget who…what?

Right away we have a bunch of axes to play with and we haven’t even gotten to the good stuff. And therein lies part of the issue.

Flexible ontology isn’t a huge problem when it comes to how we actually live and the reasons we ultimately double down on when shit gets real, like your hand over the flame.

When my hand is over an open flame long enough, it’s unequivocally, self-evidently, screamingly true that “I, as in yours truly, ought and should move my damn hand away from the flame now because it hurts me very much if I decide not to.”

People like to dismiss that as instinct or not relevant to the enterprise of philosophy, but I disagree.

At the end of the day, life is a story of mattering. This mattered to me, that mattered to me, she mattered to me. And forget the ME. When I was born, breathing mattered, so my body gasped for air and I cried my first cry. I wasn’t paying much attention back then and I’m not even sure how much I can say that was me, but I’m not sure that detail matters.

Anyone who denies that life is a mattering game is lying. You can’t even respond to this unless it matters to you to do so.

We pick the ontological definition that matters in the moment. And if you argue that’s not true, that you pick the one that’s the most metaphysically true, then it means metaphysics matter to you when trying to label the ontology of the concept of “truth.”

When we decide that determinism doesn’t “matter” concerning what we call “free will or moral responsibility,” that’s a choice about mattering. Because there’s nothing concrete connecting metaphysics to these concepts, especially if you use the semantic wiggle room we discussed to label will as this instead of that.

And so finally that takes us to Dennett saying “it’s the only will / freedom / responsibility worth wanting.”

That’s the dead giveaway. “Worth wanting” is a poetic way of saying “mattering.” And what “matters” is emotional and intuitional, not metaphysical.

Swapping the definitions isn’t an avoidance of ontology. It’s participation. It’s the wiggle room we’ve been given by the universe to label things according to what matters to us.

There’s beauty in that. Without this wiggle room, I’m not sure we’d be able to tunnel our way out of Hell. With it, there’s no cell strong enough to hold us in, not even solipsism.

When society gets too brittle, too uniformed, too committed to a single ontology, we sometimes lose our sense of how to play the wiggles. Religion is one antidote to this, one way to lock down ontologies so tightly in your favor that you never have to worry again, as long as you don’t lose your faith.

But I think it’s better to stay loose and nimble and work the wiggle room.

I don’t think it’s a free-for-all. Some ontologies are more immediately intuitive, especially after serious, clear reflection (like walking through Pereboom’s manipulation argument). And some ontologies are, like Dennett said, “worth wanting.”

We can measure that. A little. We can measure what’s more intuitive, and more parsimonious, in what stage of rigor, and even what’s worth wanting, i.e., what matters to us, short and long term, personal and in aggregate.

If we do this wisely, we might increase wellbeing and reduce suffering. I’m betting on it, because the more intuitive and parsimonious is often the more scalable in the end. (Get it one toxic inch off and pretty soon our lies come back to haunt us.)

I also think there are ways to stomach the more intuitive and parsimonious truths that don’t spin us off into nihilism and despair. It works for Spinoza and Sam Harris. Many Eastern gurus. And it worked for me, as a joyful hard incompatibilist.

Spreading this info in the right way could reduce unnecessary suffering in the long haul and help us survive the “great filter,” waiting to snuff out our species for the sin of our technology outpacing our wisdom.

That matters to me. So that’s the work.

I wasn’t going to post this, but I’m tired of the slippery, paternalistic bullshit around “work as purpose.”

Every time someone raises the question of UBI or post-scarcity labor, someone else floats this line:

“But people need jobs. They’d fall apart without them.”

Oh, shut up. That line is not just sloppy, it’s dangerous. It confuses cause and effect, disguises power as care, and keeps millions trapped in lives they’d escape if given the chance.

So yeah, this is a rant. I’ll probably edit it in days ahead so get it while it’s hot. It’s long, it’s angry, but it’s precise. And it’s time someone said it straight. If Sam Harris won’t, I will.

Here’s what I mean:

Let’s say we are part of a tribe that makes exercise mandatory because it’s the only way the tribe survives battles. Without mandatory exercise, the person can’t survive, can’t help in battle, and they become a liability to themselves and the tribe. People waste time protecting that person, and it just becomes a drag on everyone. So it’s mandatory.

Now imagine battle becomes obsolete. And the topic of mandatory exercise comes up. No longer do people need to be fit in the field to vanquish, protect, or carry their own weight. Battle is no longer a thing. Peace covers the land. Even if you were in fighting shape, there’s nothing to fight.

For all intents and purposes, the initial reason for mandatory exercise (survival and self-sufficiency in battle, and winning battles as a tribe) is off the table.

People can finally take a breath, stop training nine hours a day, and do other things for once.

But then some asshole comes along and says,

“Wait, hold up, who said you can relax? Mandatory exercise is part of our CULTURE. And if we stop, people will get fat. And besides, what else will they do all day?”

In that moment, it’s obvious to a percentage of the tribe that the guy who said this is not right in the head, and is dangerous. That somehow, for reasons he’s not in touch with himself, he wants to keep everyone training all day for a war that no longer exists.

That is where we currently are, at least in terms of the talk around hypotheticals concerning AI and work.

Talk matters. And Sam Harris needs to lean in NOW instead of pussyfooting and gently dignifying the comment by asking a few questions and moving on.

And now add to it that the general saying it HIMSELF doesn’t have to work out nine hours a day. He’s a general. He doesn’t DO infantry because he’s “special.” He distinguished himself by being smarter, of a higher status, more valuable as a mind than a mere fighter.

And this mandatory training he’s saying people need? He wouldn’t even be doing it himself. Because he never had to anyway.

But he knows that if people stop training all day, his identity as general really starts to fade away. People will have more energy to do other things.

He doesn’t like the thought of that. So instead, he argues that the soldiers NEED the training. It’s GOOD for them. So we should keep MAKING them do it.

Think about that.

MAKING them do it.

Not suggesting it, not offering it. Not waiting to see who gets fat and who uses the time to become something more. But instead FORCING it, so that nobody gets to find out what would have happened.

And even if some did get fat (in this analogy), what business is it of HIS? Don’t people have a right to get fat if it doesn’t hurt anyone?

Isn’t that the whole point of freedom: the right to pursue happiness and make choices about what that means to you? Isn’t that why we have a free market, because people can decide what to invest in, what to do with what they have, and buy things that help them along their journey?

If being fat is so BAD, won’t some people find ways on their own to not be fat?

All of this is lost in the conversation.

Nobody has figured out how to call out all this awkward energy around the mere suggestion that we keep work mandatory for reasons other than we need it to fucking survive.

This is a terrifying time.

Powerful majorities are insinuating that we keep work around—mandatory work—for reasons OTHER than why it was decreed mandatory by nature itself.

Men, welcome to the SALAD DAYS of watching other, richer men grasp for ways to justify forcing YOU to work, and pointing to:

“It’s good for them and they have nothing else to do.”

Are you fucking KIDDING ME?

Like, I’m a girl, and I’m sort of wondering how you guys are taking this on the chin.

Do I have to save men from themselves? Is this whole argument embarrassing to make when you’re a member of the scrotal persuasion? Does that explain the silence? I’m seriously asking.

Because aside from being massively insulting to you MALES, treating you like shallow idiots with no volition, imagination, or depth, it’s a massive breach of basic sovereignty.

We don’t loosely force people to do shit because it’s “good for them.” We make good paths available, but we are not the MOMMY and DADDY of people. We don’t force grown-ass men to “eat their broccoli.”

Some countries do that, maybe theocratic totalitarian countries. That’s not American.

Not to mention the massive IGNORANCE on display about how minds and bodies even work.

Or the defeatist attitude that meaning is hard to come by if you’re not grinding away to survive. As if there’s nothing else.

Of course there is!

Life is a vast, beautiful, challenging-as-fuck thing full of possibilities for the brave and the bold. It always will be, sweets. ❤️ We still need men. More than ever. Most of all, we need you to be FREE.

Your heroes journey is not something to be held together by having a “job.” That argument is an assault on the value of life itself. It’s preempting emptiness when it should be encouraging expansiveness.

Speaking of men, this all seems like the EXACT SHIT Sam Harris loves to unpack, and yet he refuses to lean in and do what he did with religion. Or free will. Or lying. Or morals.

Sam. PHUCKHING LEAN IN MY DUDE.

You’re up, buddy. Go. Here are some provisional titles:

Work.

Leisure.

Productive Leisure.

Life Without Jobs.

Effort.

Meaning.

Fuck Jobs.

And my personal favorite:

The Stillwell Effect

All of those hint at the point, which is that we’ve lost our ability to separate the concept of job from the concept of purpose, or work.

Life already IS work. We all have to work. When we get up and go to the kitchen, instead of having an IV pump in nutrition, that already IS work.

Humans have to move, think, talk, relate, interact, love, create, tell the truth, die well, and perform upkeep, endlessly.

We are all busy BEING PEOPLE.

We’re at grave risk of losing this obvious point: A “job” is not needed for being human. A “job” more often gets IN THE WAY of being human.

Unless you have Stockholm syndrome or a chronic lack of imagination, you don’t need FORCED WORK to feel whole. If you do, that’s YOUR issue. Don’t force it on everyone else. Get help.

People are currently trying to muddy the water about this. Offhand comments about compulsory work-or-die models are not just lighthearted oddities. They are the MAIN COURSE, Sam.

When someone suggests forced work:

“I really think people need work for purpose…”

That’s Sam’s cue to drop a clarity bomb on some very asinine and irrelevant shit, just like he did for certain religious statements in the aughts. Early and often. Teach others how to do it. Get it going.

Not because jobs don’t give purpose (they sometimes do) but because whether or not they do has ZERO TO DO WITH whether we keep it mandatory or have a UBI option.

And yet people are commingling these concepts without any pushback. I feel that Ross Douthat (guest on Sam’s recent episode of Making Sense) just did it multiple times. Almost everyone holding a mic these days does it.

I’m wondering if there’s a toxic set of truisms out there that are every bit as bad and stupid as the other things Sam punctures on a routine basis.

Things like:

Peasants don’t know how to turn free time into meaning; into a purposeful life.

Rich people are special—THEY can turn free time into productivity and meaning. Nobody else can.

Heirs and spouses are special in this way by extension.

Absent a “job,” life has little to offer in terms of purpose.

Absent mandatory work, there will be a public mental health crisis.

Some people “want” jobs, so we should continue making them mandatory for all people (?!)

That last one is INSANE.

🚨 Again, REMINDER: this isn’t about feasibility.

We can have a WHOLE OTHER DISCUSSION about that. And we will, because people LOVE to move the goalpost when this desirability part of the argument gets heavy. They love to switch and say,

“Well it’s moot, because who’s going to pay for it?”

Good point! For a different discussion.

THAT’S why we need Sam’s stay-on-the-dime clarity desperately. To say:

“Look guys, you can’t switch from the desirability discussion to the economic feasibility one. One at a time.”

As we close the gap on the feasibility argument (simply Google Scott Santens, dude has done the work, deserves a Nobel prize and genius grant) and basic income studies and pilots show only good things across the board, the desirability argument will take center stage. It’s already happening.

This conversation has not been adequate for YEARS now. Too much bullshit and deflection. I’m tired of hearing scholars and guests of all stripes saying,

“Well, so I really do think, you know, people get purpose from jobs, and…”

🛑 STOP.

NO.

Just no.

That line is wrongheaded for 12 reasons.

First: It’s dangerous precisely because it carries TRUTH.

But it’s truth being smuggled in as a much bigger lie. A dangerous one, teeing up justification for work-or-die meat grinder bloodsport economics to be EMULATED, stretched out, operationalized, post scarcity. Without consent of the governed. Because the governed will be the boiled frog that doesn’t know it’s happening.

(This isn’t a conspiracy theory btw; it’s a stupidity theory.)

It’s a lie of confusion, capable of putting off an important discussion for YEARS.

Only Sam can make this madness stop.

I know that sounds ridiculous, like hero worship. “Only Sam.” But he’s got the skill, the platform, and he gets it. So why not Sam?

The tech bros have a love-hate thing going with UBI. They are not coming to this party. Not until shit gets real. So let’s make it real.

And I get that part of the sexiness of the U.S. is to make things hard and be a FORGE. That’s where the big, turgid GDP comes from. And the war machines. The innovations. Fine.

But try to realize that most people in the U.S. don’t really know that’s the plan. We’re born here, and things just seem really HARD.

They’re good, sure, but also HARD in a weird way that’s hard to talk about and is KILLING US. And that’s why we’re the only modern liberal democracy without public healthcare. We don’t even make the top twenty in world happiness rankings.

Because America is not a country. It’s a game. A bloodsport game that most of us were born into and didn’t sign up for.

UBI threatens to change that. It removes the spinning blades of death and acid bath at the bottom of the hard-mode game board that keeps us scrambling ever upward, providing dirty fuel to turn the top into billionaires and make the country the richest, and therefore the safest from attack.

But America is also gross. Banal. Full of confusion and primitive beliefs. It rewards mean-spirited stupidity. It lies about merit and deservedness and what people actually ARE.

And nothing reveals this lie more than the flirting that intellectuals are doing with compulsory work-or-die models even after scarcity around basics is solved.

SAM HAS TO DO SOMETHING.

If he won’t, I will. I’ll write the book. But since there’s no UBI, writing this book will destroy my life. I’d be putting it all on the line. The death blades will get me. Social death. Blame, shame, friends and family judge and turn on me. Call me a selfish, entitled delusional narcissist.

That’s what happens if I dare look up from the grindstone.

You think that’s good for the country?

Pfft. There are MILLIONS like me who could be contributing more—but can’t.

That’s stupid. And if that’s what you want, you’re stupid.

Promise I’m not turning into a philosophy spam bot. Just harvesting realizations as they come. Maybe in 2026 we’ll switch gears and go hard on universal basic income.

SO HERE’S THE THING: I’ve hit a wall in the free will debate. But I think I discovered a new way forward, examining the intuitions we have ABOUT agreed-upon metaphysical states of affairs.

Cracking open that damn black box of intuitions and seeing if some intuitions are more valid than others.

(The answer to that might itself be merely an intuition. But we’ll deal with that in minute.)

It always ends the same way. One person says,

“They did it willingly, they knew what they were doing, nobody forced them so of course they’re morally responsible.”

And the other says,

“But they couldn’t have done otherwise. That matters more.”

And around it goes.

At some point, it stops being a disagreement about facts or logic, and becomes a disagreement about what kind of intuition should rule.

It’s really about what feels like it matters to YOU when metaphysics gets its chocolate in moral instinct’s peanut butter.

Compatibilist (Comps) see reasons-responsiveness, e.g., deliberation, intention, foreknowledge, and feels that’s enough for blame and praise.

The other sees causality, determinism, inheritance, and external sourcehood, and feels blame and praise aren’t actually real or fair in a deep sense, since we couldn’t have done otherwise.

They (self included) say that moral blame and praise can only ever be synthetic attitudes and behaviors we adorn our lives with for the sake of making society function.

What we do next is hilariously disturbing. Everyone acts like their feeling is self-evident.

That’s the problem we’re delving into today.

Not the disagreement itself, but the weird invisibility of the mechanism BEHIND the disagreement.

Intuition is weird as hell

We treat intuitions like primitive data points.

We argue from them without asking what kind of cognition they come from, or why they survive exposure to complexity.

What’s missing isn’t another argument.

What’s PAINFULLY missing is a map of how intuitions work, and what it means when two people see the same picture and draw opposite moral conclusions…not even because they’re irrational, but because their intuitive structure is somehow different.

That’s where I’m going now. Because it’s a black box, uncharted, and it’s where all this debate goes to die in stalemate.

After thousands of years we still act like the free will debate is about arguments.

But at this point it’s more about intuitions, felt convictions about what “obviously” follows from metaphysics.

And since you can’t get an IS from and OUGHT unless you start with some other shared premise on what MATTERS, it gets newbies and Yodas alike into trouble until we all realize:

“Whoa, I just noticed for the first time in my life that there’s nothing in the metaphysics that forces us to FEEL like moral responsibility is or isn’t coherent.”

At some point we are all looking clearly at the same four “things.” (Let’s do it while assuming determinism is real, for the sake of this one.)

1. Human action is determined.

2. But also: humans deliberate, plan, are reasons-responsive.

3. But also: we actually feel like we are responsible.

4. And also: we feel we “own” our actions and it makes sense to us that others own theirs.

Okay, so now we all see these same “objects.”

Now, whether all those ingredients justify moral responsibility or not, that’s actually an INTUITION. Not a math problem.

We sort of know this, but I sense we don’t call it out enough.

We don’t want to own the fact that intuition is its own kind of cognitive realm of analysis, possibly with different schemas we don’t break down.

Not all intuitions are created equally.

I’m willing to bet free will skeptics and Comps agree that some intuitions are “first-order,” naïve, pre-reflective.

That some intuitions clearly arise BEFORE careful and deep causal modeling, like being taken through Pereboom’s Manipulation Argument. (A tidy thought experiment that shows we don’t have ultimate control over what we do; it often changes people’s intuitions about free will on the spot.)

Some intuitions heavily rely on emotion, folk psych, reactive moralism, fear, conformity, reflex.

Others (usually philosophers or unusually reflective people like you 😘) develop a second-order intuition, shaped after confronting causal models that undercut folk notions of agency.

It’s deeper, more nimble, and often less emotionally charged. Congrats. Good on you, this sapiosexual thanks you very much.

So meanwhile, I’m noticing this all and just wondering what YOU think on this holly-jolly-melancholy holiday season:

Compatibilists sometimes assume that everyone’s intuition CAN go through this transformation, where “reasons-responsiveness” or “value-guided action” is recognized as ENOUGH for moral responsibility, the kind that reasonable average folks have instinctively.

But we know FACTUALLY this isn’t the case.

Dennett, for example, knows all the arguments and still intuits we have moral responsibility.

But most people have a folk, naïve understanding of determinism (pre-Pereboom, pre-reflective) and this is the state most people walk around with while living life.

These same people CAN be walked through Pereboom and see themselves as the endpoint of causes they didn’t choose. Suddenly, the old first-order naïve intuition doesn’t work for them. It doesn’t magically become a Dennett-level post-naïve intuition of “worth wanting.”

They have a different intuitional chemistry. (I think we may need something like a periodic table tbh, since intuitional chemistry is so prevalent and like I said, we black-box it and shrug it off.)

Dennett, and maybe you, can metabolize determinism and STILL intuit moral desert such that “business as usual” reactive attitudes and desert language make perfect sense.

But let’s not pretend this is a shared terrain with pre-reflective civilians. We’ve got to call that out.

It seems like compatibilism largely functions as “free will for dummies” when it pitches to civilians.

When a book is released like Sapolsky’s Determined that covers all the metaphysical exercises in clarity (all of which compatibilists love to say they don’t dispute) the public does indeed look up for a second when the headlines hit. They all kinda wanna know, because free will is the backbone of so much of our life story.

The headline is something like this

“Scientists and philosophers say the metaphysics show we couldn’t have done otherwise. Do we still blame each other?”

Compatibilists chime in saying, “Nothing to see here. You can have both. Don’t even bother looking. This was settled ages ago.”

Usually this message comes from a vaguely conservative, right wing angle. (I actually kept tabs on the Sapolsky haters, and they were roundly on the right.)

But meanwhile, an average believer in moral responsibility is NOT usually aware that philosophers e.g. Dennett feel that reasons-responsiveness + conscious intent is all you need.

The fact is, show most people Pereboom, and the belief in the same kind of moral responsibility they had just prior plummets from 90% to like 20%, EVEN when they consider all the same reasons-responsive conditions and reactive attitudes.

Suddenly they move to a post-reflective intuition, and yet it doesn’t match Dennett’s.

From here, we can also stress-test this newer, post-reflective intuition, the one that says: “Even if someone acted with intention, foresight, and awareness of consequences, they still couldn’t have done otherwise, and so they don’t deserve moral blame.”

It sounds clean in theory. But in practice, it’s fragile.

Because ordinary moral language (the kind we use every day, without thinking) is saturated with basic desert.

Phrases like “they should’ve known better,” or “this is on them,” don’t just describe behavior. They just nourish the old intuition: the pre-reflective (dummie) sense that blame is natural, deserved, intuitive.

So even many hard incompatibilists end up in a kind of dual-mind trap, rejecting moral responsibility in principle, but still letting desert-coded language reactivate it in themselves and others.

The truth is, whenever the more examined new intuition pops up - - the one that sees reasons-responsiveness as not enough - - it’s only stable for like two second unless we change how we talk.

Because the language is so damn loaded.

Words can soar. But we put them in chains.

😔

And so these stupidly insinuating words and phrases pull people back toward the old intuition.

And the facts show: most people just don’t resist that pull. We usually don’t want to, and our big industries and ideologies don’t want us to either.

Nonetheless, the worthwantism Dennett asserts just doesn’t fairly represent what real people feel.

They want and believe in basic desert in pre-reflective states, (e.g. believing in the self-evidence of pure moral blame in a vacuum regardless of consequence or future considerations) and if they ever make it to post-reflective, are more like hard incompatibilists, even after hearing the Compatibilist’s argument that “reasons” are all you need.

What a mouthful! So what’s going on?

Honestly, my bullshit detector says it’s less like a clean philosophical position and more like a conservative-Pragmatic morality LARP-fest functioning as philosophical air freshener.

And like all air freshener, it makes me a little queasy.

I’m betting that most people, when exposed to Pereboom’s manipulation argument via ME, with love and Stellar razzle-dazzle, would come out of the Burning Man booth closer to Caruso than Dennett.

Existing data says this.

So does Sam Harris. He calls it “zooming out,” and claims moral responsibility evaporates when you do so.

Bigboy Dennett (RIP) quipped back that it doesn’t matter HOW far you zoom out because the metaphysics aren’t the main influencer, the reasons are.

But that’s not what most normal people INTUIT when they are exposed to the metaphysics.

And it’s not just about majority rule here. Not just quantity. Quality.

There are different LEVELS of quality concerning intuition.

And Compatibilism as it trickles down to the layman depends on first-order, naïve intuition.

Meanwhile, the fancy-pants philosophers have their own special stash of “intuition type” combined with (in my opinion) a conservative, pragmatic/instrumentalist motivation spiked with Aristotelian virtue ethics and no small amount of “good Scotch.”

But for most of us civilians, reasons do NOT survive post-reflective intuitions.

Thus, I see it as my life’s mission to shepherd as many Stillwellian angels across the post-reflective divide as I possibly can. (And you’re going to help by sending money.) (Just kidding.) (But am I?)

But seriously, I think it’d be morally gorgeous and helpful to let the Human Family of Earth consciously decide in an informed and inspired manner, which reactive attitudes and social policies are “worth” conserving.

Why leave that power to Compatibilist philosophers, our belching free-will gatekeepers of the modern age. Courtly walrus wisemen in service to endowments and the status quo. Say it with me:

FUCK THEM.

Lest you think this topic is a little esoteric to be taken seriously, consider that moneyed interests are hellbent on keeping it that way.

Relax, I’m not a conspiracy nut. 🐿️

It’s just that ideologues like Ayn Rand DESPISED free will skeptics.

Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, is one of the most widely books ever, a thousand-plus page laissez-faire dick-riding fest, elevating the moral deservedness of luck, power and money to a religion. Her cross was a fucking dollar sign.

It’s still echoing in the deepest corridors of the America soulscape. Especially among the wealthy and conservatives.

(Funny how these free will discussions always end with a Shrug.)

But that’s why we need to work HARDER mapping the differences between intuition types. More of that ahead.

But since we’re on the topic…

How many Comps on Substack are in favor of universal health care and guaranteed basic floors?

Be honest. I won’t bite. 🐶

Optional reading below: my most recent open letter to Compatibilists on the r/freewill subreddit.

Written after I wrote the above.

Intuition and Free Will debate. (Final word)

I’ve been going hard on this topic here and elsewhere for a while and want to share a bit of info some may already know, some don’t. I know it’s possible to be super-smart and well read and still not quite know the following in your bones, so it’s those folks on all sides that I’m sending this to, more than anyone.

Whether this is a trivial observation or a deep one isn’t my concern, only that my sense is it can hide in plain sight very easily, and that as far as I know, it’s really not articulated as the “main course” by any of the people I’ve read and like. (We all have our favorite spokespeople, wtvr our side may be. For my part, I don’t recall Harris, Sapolsky, Caruso, Strawson, Spinoza, saying any of this all that well or at all. Pereboom alluded to it, in a way that started me thinking, although it took a year before that kernel of a thought blossomed into my main preoccupation.

Say let’s get cracking, I’ll go into it informally, straight away. For a slightly deeper dive into the beginning of a taxonomy of “intuition analysis” I’ll link my latest piece, which goes into all this from a more technical angle. (Still very layman friendly, mordant, breezy, vulgar.)

Okay.

A lightbulb went off quietly while reading Pereboom because he had this way of bringing determinism into stark relief with each case, and then saying in this humble, matter of fact way, “given the situation in this case, the person didn’t have enough freedom such that it would support the intuition that they could be held morally responsible.”

That word “intuition” kept popping up and it became obvious that the glue, or the last mile problem, the connector from metaphysics to deciding about moral deservedness can ONLY be an intuition.

My sense is intuition is plastic. Meaning it can expand and activate to be welcoming to which “belief system” your body has already decided it needs.

So if you’re, for example, doing well in life and worked hard and sacrificed, bet on God or the straight and narrow and it paid off, maybe your body NEEDS to feel a sense of moral praise that’s ambient in your life.

It’d make sense that your body would be inhospitable to the idea that determinism renders that sense of pride a bit of ruse.

The impulse is to push back, but to do so without lying to yourself or others. When you do that really well, without lying, without fallacies, without giving up, you end up in the vicinity of Compatibilism.

Regardless of the motivation, you are right as far as it goes. And it only goes so far. After all, you’ve accepted determinism and have to live with what it implies and the bite it takes out of things. You can define what that bite **means** and you have. Lemons to lemonade. Good on you.

Compatibilism is liked because it endorses how most of us initially felt about free will and moral deservedness in our young and innocent days. (Not saying we start off as Compatibilists. The default is likely Libertarian.) It’s comfortable. Business as usual. It draws a line between normal thinking and “wider” thinking and gives permission to live on the normal side instead of walk around shouldering “esoteric crap.”

It does a good job making it seem like there’s nothing intrinsic to determinism that takes away deservedness.

It redefines deservedness (in my opinion) while pretending that it was ALWAYS that definition to begin with, and that any other conception was an unfortunate delusion to shake off.

It’s a bold, smart move. It works. While I’m not a fan of the deservedness language it tends to conserve (and I write furiously and at length about this and will continue that work to the end of my days) I’ve lost my sharp edge against them because, as far now, I don’t have a way to indict their intuition. (This may change, as I make progress on mapping the differences between intuition formation and intuition type and whether these differences can support an argument where that sharp edge comes back.)

For those of us who zoom out and see the dominos falling, we have to answer to our own intuition. It’s still with that crew I stand.

I will continue to draw my moral boundaries as if we could not have done otherwise, for reasons of source-hood and causality, and for me, that leads to a language and moral code that looks different from Compatibilism.

Because regardless of Compatibilism’s Pyrrhic-ish victory, we have to decide for ourselves what moral desert means.

Clearly the concept of “worthwantism” in Dennett’s line about how his view of freedom is the only kind of freedom “worth wanting,” is a bigger factor in all this than I thought.

So much so that I motion for “worthwantism” or “wwism” to be a term worked into the discourse, courtesy of Dennett, but with a nod to me, Stella Stillwell of Truicide, having been first to do so.

Worthwantism is perhaps a new modern shorthand for an aspect of instrumentalism that’s been around a while, and Dennett was nothing if not an instrumentalist.

Wwism is an expression of values, not facts; it’s about emotions and aesthetics and common but not universal human needs and interests. (So it is with Pragmatism, but wwism leans more normative than making a case that “ultimate truth” is decided by what’s ultimately of use.)

Comps, be on notice that my fellow HIncomps will still see the untethering of determinism with deservedness as almost shockingly reductive, myopic, and _ugly._

I suppose that’s ultimately an intuition, even though it feels clear as day. It’s a bracing, strange realization to come to terms with the fact that others have managed not to see it that way. We’ll never stop mourning that loss, or dealing with the fallout.

But I now also believe that being a hard incompatibilist with integrity and clarity means arriving at a place where you understand compatibilism on steel-man terms, which can only mean we see it for the stalemate it is, and not merely a “noble lie.”

It’s likely many of us arrived here because things went wrong in our lives, and we reached for a worldview that made sense of it.

But like our counterparts, we ALSO did this with integrity. And we’d like you to know that. Understand it, believe it. We want the respect to be mutual.

Again, intuition is plastic. Perhaps some of our bodies NEEDED to feel a sense of moral absolution that’s ambient in our lives.

That may have led some of us to our deep stance, but just like with Compatibilism, our stance requires no fallacy.

It’s an **intuition**, as Pereboom stated, that, given what we know about the state of affairs in the Universe, we don’t have the kind of freedom to justify the reasoned intuition of moral responsibility, such that we can go around morally blaming and praising, whether it’s forward-looking or not.

It feels like lies on our lips and insults our sense of fairness, goes against our treasured sense of what it means to be wise, good, loving, and human.

But for many of us, this stance is precisely what the body needed, likely having been softened by tragedy and bad luck, our own, or someone dear to us.

Maybe we can align on this one premise, useless as it may turn out to be: **Intuitions** about reality that take place when we are emotionally indifferent to what it says about us or how we feel, intuitions that come from putting clarity above motivation and ideology, seem to me the more “pure” type of intuition.

But that, too, so far, is just an intuition.

I’m working on a system that can say as much more confidently, and “rank” intuitions according to a standard as yet under construction.

For example, intuitions that arise AFTER we’ve deeply considered a topic (like walking through Pereboom’s manipulation argument) may be “better” than ones arrived at naively.

My intuition is it gets a bit more thorny than that. Perhaps some of you can explore this in future posts. It could certainly add new dimension for a sub that can sometimes seem like an affable little “loop-of-madness playground” nestled in a corner of the Internet.

All best, and Happy New Year

[That piece about Intuition I mentioned.](https://open.substack.com/pub/galan/p/hitting-a-wall-on-the-free-will-debate?r=1xoiww&utm_medium=ios) It’s free, click past the little subscribe thing, or just subscribe for convenience. Thanks

For those of you without one, or only halfway in, please, just do it and figure it out later.

(The alternative is don’t do it and figure it out never.)

The lightning mind blues

Thinking a lot of big, complex thoughts, quickly, used to make me sad.

For a long time I watched my ideas evaporate into nothingness.

There was nowhere to put them, and putting them ANYWHERE felt like too much effort.

Why do it? That was a stupid question.

Because no good answer was forthcoming.

And yet.

NOT doing it felt like pumping out infants while walking along a winding, desert road.

Just dropping a “cunt potato” every 20 yards or so.

Basted in amniotic goo, food for the vultures, courtesy of Stella Stillwell.

Ha. Take that, world! Screw everyone.

How gloriously tragic.

And yet.

I couldn’t help but notice.

That each infant had its own plaintiff little tune of a cry.

Its own little heartbreaking set of tiny fingernails.

(The tiniest fingernail of all, on its baby toe, is the one that gets to me.)

AND SO, for no compelling reason other than this baby-toenail weakness, I caved.

And launched.

And wrote.

A catch-all nursery for misshapen children.

And misshapen they were!

The early entries, only a mother could love.

I said could, not will.

Truth be told, I despise them with the white-hot discomfort of a million cringing suns.

I do, however, respect them.

They don’t sound like ME.

But they sound like me trying to do something HARD.

Trying to carefully pour a cathedral’s worth of frolic neuronal poetry into a rectangle-shaped mold…

clumsily spilling most of it in the dirt by accident…

and living with the gross little thing staring back at me…

clearly afflicted with a sort of dull-eyed brain damage.

Talk about postpartum depression.

What use did I have for these…these…THINGS?

What use did the WORLD have for them?

I’d ask myself: “Why am I bothering?”

Dumb question? Hell if I knew.

But it got me thinking…what WOULD be a reason to bother?

This lead to making a DEAL with myself:

No more writing unless it’s from a place of real emotion.

I wrote it down:

For now on, no trying. Only bleeding.

The new plan: wait until I’m crazy worked-up about something, and take my anger out on the page.

So I stopped writing and waited for anger.

It didn’t take long: I’m a chronically livid individual.

What can I say? It’s a gift.

The first example of real anger

I’d been coming across counter arguments against universal basic income (UBI).

(Context: I HATE that I have to work a dumb job just to eat.

If I had $3k a month handed to me I’d live like an ascetic monk and be perfectly blissful.

That’s just me. I’m a musician and I’ve always felt I had wasted talent because of work and exhaustion, and that UBI would be the difference between a dreary, wasted life and an exploding rainbow of self-actualization.

So when candidate Andrew Yang started talking about UBI leading up to the 2020 presidential election, I paid attention to politics for the first time in my life, and actually felt something.)

I wasn’t MAD at people for not wanting UBI—that’s an important distinction. Can’t fault people for what they want.

But I was VERY mad the arguments seemed ignorant and egregiously bad faith.

They were so dumb!

They felt dishonest!

Low-effort bullshit attempts to thinly-veil what was really afoot: selfishness, just world fallacy, lack of empathy, smugness, meritocracy myths, and evolutionary dominance orientation.

These arguments were stalling out real discourse. They gummed up the works SO BRILLIANTLY that after the first salvo of flaming dumbness-arrows from UBI opponents, most writers on my side of the fence shriveled up.

I convinced myself this was a massive tragedy.

Not just for me. Millions of lives would be wasted for no reason.

People would die deaths of despair, because nobody’s willing to take two fucking hours to call bullshit on these low-effort deflections.

And, how infuriating that smart people like me are out there who must SEE how dumb the deflections are, and yet they say nothing!

And I KNEW this to be the case because I searched high and low.

Even the nobodies weren’t nailing the rebuttals.

What fucking assholes!

(Didn’t take long to realize I was talking about myself: I was the fucking asshole.)

So I wrote this. (My first legit screed about anti-UBI arguments, creatively written from the point of view of an actual opponent on truth serum. You don’t need to read it, just trust me, it was a cut above and written from a place of real anger and passion.)

The tone of that piece wasn’t fully ME yet, but it didn’t suck either.

It carried genuine emotion, unloaded a laundry list of stewing resentments, and said something that others hadn’t: the laziness in anti-UBI arguments feels personal; it hurts.

It had a realness to it that I didn’t mind stamping my name on. It was good.

I think.

It’s not lost on me that people are generally terrible judges about whether what we’re saying is something new, important, and coherent.

Just as often, we seem to not CARE if it’s any of those things.

Most of us seem satisfied just knowing that it’s OURS.

That bias toward mine-ness always makes me a bit uneasy.

I can’t publish until I convince myself it’s NEW.

That said, an old idea said in a NEW WAY counts. Because saying it in a new way could mean getting it into the heads of new kinds of READERS.

People who might be bored or alienated by more chaste and erudite styles.

In any case, I eventually found my answer to why even do this, in the combo of 1) being legitimately angry about something while 2) feeling convinced the opposition is being lazy and bad faith about 3) a topic that impacts the quality of life for myself AND millions of others—each one with a baby toenail! (Or something equivalent.)

Slowly, I got better at recognizing which pangs of emotion warrant breaking a vein all over the keyboard.

Which tone of voice scratches the itch of getting my emotions out.

And which topics count as impacting millions of people.

That way, even if my work doesn’t make a dent, I feel it’s still worth saving, for reasons I feel good about.

My posts stopped being “gross little things staring back at me with dull-eyed brain damage.”

They’re kinda cute.

Smart, too.

Best of all, there’s real light behind their eyes.

Like any good mother, I notice that light, and even recognize a little of my own humble light in it.

Today, on my Substack anniversary, I can’t help but look back and marvel at just how much that humble light has grown.

Along that winding country road, others have added their light to my voice.

What once felt like wasted effort now feels like a wholesome habit. (Sometimes you just need one of those to make life feel worth it.)

Will any of my “children” grow up to change the world? You never know.

Will I love them either way?

That’s a stupid question. ❤️

I don’t know if it’s new in the grand scheme of things. It might not be.

But I worked through it from scratch, it holds under pressure, and I haven’t seen it expressed quite like this, especially not in the circles I move through.

Most probably assume it’s LLM coded slop. Nope. It’s just me. And it’s admittedly surface level because it’s at the idea stage. That’s actually normal, from what I hear. It’s not an academic paper. Yet.

I’m playing around with a framework called IWRS. Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering. (While also managing a diff thread about free will and the problem with Compatibilist semantics.)

IWRS starts from phenomenology: experience exists, valence is real, suffering is bad for the one experiencing it, and empathy makes that suffering matter across minds.

When empathy is active and coherence is online, a kind of directional “ought” shows up. Not a cosmic rule, but a “structural pull.”

I’m getting used to condensing this, I’ve written three versions now, each time delving deeper and clearer.

The novel break came when I realized Step 5, which entails empathy, has been sort of the unpredictable bottleneck. Not everyone feels it, not all minds bridge others’ pain, and that’s fine, but when they don’t, IWRS doesn’t fire.

So I stopped treating it (step 5) like a philosophical problem and started treating it like an engineering one. I don’t think empathy is sacred or magic. It’s consummately tweakable. (I assume?)

Thing is: once you say THAT out loud, a ton of stagnant moral debate starts to clear. From there, lo and behold, something deeper fell into view: A PATTERN across multiple stuck domains, like free will, desert, moral realism, is/ought.

I spotted something cool to me: the same move kept resolving all kinds of perennially unsolvable shit we assume to be dead-issues.

There’s a phrase—“worth wanting”—that has been hiding in plain sight. Dennett used it to defend compatibilist “free will” as the only kind worth wanting. Brilliant line, but I sorta wondered where the hell he got off telling us what “matters.”

Who appointed him the arbiter of what’s worth wanting? Doesn’t the clearheaded and informed majority get to decide what’s intuitively worth what?

And sure enough, once you look for proof of majority values held, Dennett’s line turned on him.

That line becomes a test. And when you run it honestly, compatibilist moral deservedness language folds. IWRS doesn’t.

So this week I didn’t just propose a moral framework in its own right. I also feel like I found a method, a way of resolving stuck philosophy by tracking majority intuition under controlled clarity, and by looking at parsimony.

I’ve now used it to solve two of the biggest ethical gridlocks we’ve got. I think it might work on more.

This is me planting a flag. Not declaring I’m right, just saying I worked it through, I found something that clicks for me, and I’m going to keep testing it in days to come.

Lila tov.

I’ve spent a long time watching people argue about what’s right. Philosophers, theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyone’s offering their angle on what we should do, or why we should care. I don’t have much patience for it anymore. Not because I don’t care, but because I do. i care enough to want something that fucking works.

For me, everything starts with experience. What it feels like to be alive. To hurt, to feel good, to witness suffering and want it to stop. It’s like something to be this way. Likism. There’s something in us when we’re not too broken or numb that leans toward helping, toward easing pain, toward making things better. I call that IWRS: Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering. No not everyone has it. Some do. So this isn’t a war of who is right, but a war of who gets to decide what right IS. What is the meaning of ought, and what is the only “ought worth wanting.” Worthwantism.

It’s not a theory I need you to believe in, just a description of what happens when your empathy collides with post-reflective clarity and coherence.

The challenge really isn’t persuading each other through arguments, although I get the impulse. It’s figuring out how to protect and scale the capacity to care at all. That’s a biology war mostly. It starts at brain chemistry, neural wiring, stress environments, developmental windows. It’s wrapped up in culture and tech and incentives in weird ways. If we don’t scientize this tangle of shit now, we’ll keep watching cruelty repeat and multiply, no matter how clever our ideas sound, and we will DIE mid argument.

I wrote three pieces (at least) to try and name what I see. Not to dictate a path, but to offer one that feels honest, and I want you to be honest in return and tell me where it fails. I’m going to err on assuming there’s a filter that ends species that get as far as we have. My goal is to have humanity survive it. This is what I have. Enjoy. Help.

—Stella Stillwell, to the human family of Earth. I’ll never stop reaching for you in the dust.

I posted a longer version of this argument a few days ago. A lot of people read it, some got it, some didn’t. This is the same idea, stripped to the bone and rephrased in places so nothing gets lost in the length or the side points.

If something felt off or you bounced off the first take, this is the cleaned-up version that keeps every claim that matters.

(“Li’l Stillwell”)

Sam Harris showed in 2010 that facts about conscious experience can, in principle, answer moral questions. Pain is bad, flourishing is good, science can tell us how to move from one to the other. The map is correct.

What we still lack is the damn engine.

Here’s the simplest defensible secular foundation that actually works for creatures built like us. I call it IWRS (Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering). It has ten steps.

Conscious experience exists.

Experience has positive and negative valence. Pain hurts, relief feels good. These are brute facts inside the system that has them.

Suffering is bad for the experiencer by definition.

Wellbeing is good for the experiencer by definition.

Empathy (affective, not just cognitive) makes another creature’s valence register in my own system as motivationally relevant.

Once Step 5 works, the direction is fixed: reduce suffering, increase wellbeing.

The moment I care, this direction becomes an “ought” for me. No further metaphysics required.

Coherence extends the concern impartially across persons, time, and circumstances.

Capacity turns it into obligation: if I can help at reasonable cost, I now have a reason to do so.

Rights, justice, fairness, and deontological rules are higher-order tools for distributing Steps 6–9 at population scale. They are not foundational; they are scaffolding.

(The longer and more syrupy version of my IWRS theory is here. Read it ONLY AFTER YOU READ THIS and only if still needed.)

Okay, so here’s the deal:

Steps 1–4 are UNDENIABLE for any conscious system. (If you disagree, do me the honor of telling me why.)

Steps 6–10 follow logically once Step 5 is in place.

Step 5 is the only biological contingency. It is also the single point of failure.

A non-trivial minority of human brains (1–2 % clinical, another 5–15 % subclinical) have severely attenuated or, to put it kindly, “highly context-dependent affective empathy.”

(Or we can just keep referring to them as dicks. That’s fine, too.)

Point being, for them, another creature’s valence almost never becomes motivationally salient. Cognitive empathy can be intact or even superior; the affective bridge simply doesn’t carry load. In these cases IWRS never fully starts.

But empathy is a CONTINUUM, not a switch. Most people feel it strongly toward in-group, weakly or conditionally toward out-group, and can shut it down entirely under tribalism, competition, exhaustion, or scope insensitivity. The number of us humans who reliably generalize affective empathy across all conscious creatures, all the time, without situational drop-off is effectively zero.

No perfect angels here.

That means the zone where “a little tinkering” would help is not some fringe minority. It’s almost all of us, to some degree.

Parfit brilliantly bridges the gap with abstract normative reasons. That works on paper and fails in practice, because reasons alone supply no motive force when the emotional substrate is weak or gated.

This isn’t a philosophical problem anymore, people. It is an ENGINEERING PROBLEM.

(Again, if you disagree, do me the honor of telling me why. Don’t be a 🍆.)

Consider that we ALREADY intervene on conscious experience when the stakes are high enough:

• SSRIs, ketamine, psilocybin for depression

• Methylphenidate, modafinil for attention

• MDMA, TMS, deep-brain stimulation for PTSD and treatment-resistant mood disorders

• Oxytocin, psychedelics, and VR protocols that reliably increase measured empathy in the short term

VERY partial list. Sorry if I left out your favorite thing.

None of these things are mandatory. (Except in super-rare cases maybe.) All are increasingly precise. All are accepted by the same secular liberal population that would bristle at my suggestion and declare empathy circuitry off-limits in principle.

Why? There’s no coherent distinction left. If we accept pharmacological or neuromodulatory rescue from unbearable private suffering, we have ALREADY ACCEPTED the legitimacy of tuning the valence system itself.

Extending the same tools to the inter-personal valence bridge (empathy) is the same act, not a new category.

(Yet again, if you disagree, do me the honor of telling me why. Lean in, this is your chance.)

The only honest statement is therefore:

For creatures wired like the majority of humans, IWRS is the only “ought” WORTH WANTING.

(See the monster you created Dennett? You’re not the only one who can sling a double dubya. If you don’t get this reference, ignore it.)

For the minority (ostensibly) who are not SO WIRED, (with motivational IWRS-grade empathy) either we rely on external incentives and deterrence forever, or we offer voluntary, reversible, increasingly safe ways to make the bridge work the way evolution manifestly FAILED to do in some nontrivial fraction of cases.

Option A is the status quo and it is visibly failing at scale.

Option B is already in the research pipeline; pretending otherwise just delays the conversation.

Yes, yes, I know that the opposite of moral realism is total subjectivism. We don’t have an objective way to measure wellbeing. I get it.

Your measurement worries are real but not FATAL. We don’t have perfect cardinal wellbeing units and that’s okay. 🐦‍🔥

We also don’t have them for pain, and yet pain medicine exists and progresses. And it’s good. Real good. 🤤

Existing tools are not nothing.

We have experience sampling, fMRI valence correlates, HRV, cortisol, behavioral panels, large-N self-report validated against life outcomes.

This SHITE is already good enough to move methodically in the direction of less suffering and more flourishing.

Demanding nirvana-level precision before acting is a stall tactic, not a serious objection. It’s a stubbornly reflexive retort. Let’s not do that.

To steel lady this: I’m not deriving an ought from an is. I’m saying we have SOME ability to discern the “only oughts worth wanting.”

Moreover, we OUGHT to be exploiting this ability. Now.

The practical sequence is super straightforward:

1. Admit that empathy variance is the real bottleneck. 🍾

2. Map the relevant circuitry with the tools we now have (connectomics, closed-loop implants, DREADDs, next-gen psychedelics, etc. All very fun stuff to research. I can go into any of it if you want me to. 😵‍💫)

3. Develop and offer—NOT IMPOSE!—interventions that increase reliable affective empathy in the same way we ALREADY OFFER interventions for depression or focus.

4. Let uptake be voluntary and iterative, exactly as we do with every OTHER brain intervention that actually HELPS.

That is the missing engine for The Moral Landscape. 🤔🤯😻

Sam Harris is the ONE DUDE who already has the philosophical training, the contemplative background, the audience, and the independence to say this out loud without being instantly dismissed as a eugenicist or a transhumanist crank.

(If I did it I’d lose my job and be fucked.)

And by the way, Sam also has a Ph.D. in NEUROSCIENCE. It’s almost like he planned this whole thing. And, wait, what was his dissertation on? Oh yeah, THE MORAL LANDSCAPE, 15 years ago.)

The last fifteen years have given us the tools he didn’t have in 2010.

The cultural vacuum created by secular failure to replace religious morality is now wider than it has ever been. Dangerously so.

Who knows that better than anyone?

Say it with me: Sam Harris.

His general map is still correct. All that remains is to build out some pieces of the road and discover (or brute force into existence) some universal human oughts worth wanting, backed this time by SCIENCE, not subjective vibes.

Granted that’s a tall order. But by the principle of feasible reduction, if we can reduce unnecessary suffering without causing something awful, we should fucking do it already.

How much should we do?

However much we can without causing problems or breaking the world.

If there’s fixable agony, and we can do it at a cost that we calculate isn’t too steep, we fix it.

Granted, “too steep” is subjective. But again, we can chisel away at that with science and arrive at whether we “ought” to pay that price, using the “ought worth wanting.”

We CAN measure a bit better now via the emerging science of well-being.

Between IWRS, and an informed democratic constitutional republic, we can do this, guys. 👊

And if we don’t WANT to help each other, then at least we’re being dicks in ways that aren’t hidden anymore, and we can own that honestly.

I call that progress.

If any part of this is wrong, it should be refuted on the MERITS.

If it’s right, pretending the question is still purely philosophical is no longer honest.

Let’s deal with this. I’m not going to stop.

I’ve spent a long time watching people argue about what’s right. Philosophers, theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyone’s offering their angle on what we should do, or why we should care. I don’t have much patience for it anymore. Not because I don’t care, but because I do. I care enough to want something that actually works.

For me, everything starts with experience. What it feels like to be alive. To hurt, to feel good, to witness suffering and want it to stop. It’s like something to be this way

Likism. There’s something in us when we’re not too broken or numb that leans toward helping, toward easing pain, toward making things better. I call that IWRS: Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering. No, not everyone has it. Some do. So this isn’t a war of who is right, but a war of who gets to decide what “right” even IS. What is the meaning of ought, and what is the only “ought worth wanting.”

Worthwantism is not a theory I need you to believe in, just a description of what happens when your empathy collides with post-reflective clarity and coherence. There are different concepts of a thing, say “freedom,” and we decide which conception is worth wanting.

The challenge really isn’t persuading each other through arguments, although I get the impulse. We like to assume we have similar values and just need to hash out the facts and frame it right. Blah, blah, that’s all true for the most part.

I may be wrong, but in my opinion the real key to IWRS lies in figuring out how to protect and scale the capacity to care at all.

That’s a biology war mostly. It starts at brain chemistry, neural wiring, stress environments, developmental windows. It’s wrapped up in culture and tech and incentives in weird ways. If we don’t scientifically codify these variables now, we’ll keep watching cruelty repeat and multiply, no matter how clever our ideas sound, and my fear is that we’ll die mid argument.

To this end, I wrote three pieces (at least) to try and name what I see. Not to dictate a path, but to offer one that feels honest. I want you to be honest in return, I please read it and tell me where it fails.

I’m going to err on assuming there’s a big filter that tends to end any species that get roughly as far as we have, technologically. My goal is to have us survive it. IWRS is the start of one of the tools I’m building to help us do that. It’s pathetic. Some of it might actually be true.

It’s cute that I’m even bothering. I’m something like an ape, trying to help, in my little way, to save the human family of Earth. I can’t help but love you. I’ll never stop reaching for you in the dust.

—Stella

This piece is a response to a recent Making Sense episode featuring David Edmonds.

Edmonds is following the plot on secular, science-backed morality. Singer, Parfit, Sidgwick, Thomson, MacAskill, the bloody-nosed lineage of keeping consequentialism in the room.

My system is a ten-step derivation I revealed in the latter half of my Nov. 15th post How to Know What To Do.

(Quick refresher on my framework, just for context. This isn’t the point, but it helps clarify what I’m asking Sam to pick back up.)

Stillwell IWRS (Increase Wellbeing Reduce Suffering)

One: Experience exists. There is something it is like to be. That’s the starting point. Not belief, not matter, not simulation. Experience is the base layer.

Two: Experience has texture. Some moments feel good. Some feel bad. This is not opinion. Pain hurts. Relief relieves. These are not up for debate inside the system that feels them.

Three: Suffering is bad for the one experiencing it. You don’t need a theory. If you’re in pain, you want out. That’s enough. The badness is baked in. You don’t need to deserve it for it to matter.

Four: Wellbeing is good for the one experiencing it. Same logic. When you feel peace, safety, or joy. You prefer it. The goodness isn’t cosmic. It’s local. But it counts.

Five: Empathy makes others’ experience matter to you. Their pain tugs at you. Their joy lifts you. This isn’t a virtue. It’s a neurological bridge. When it works, their valence enters your system.

Six: IWRS is what empathy wants. If pain is bad and joy is good, and empathy lets you feel both from others, then the natural direction is clear: Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering.

Seven: IWRS becomes an “ought” when you want it. The moment you care, the moment another’s pain registers, you’re in. There’s no metaphysics here. Just a clean handoff from perception to preference.

Eight: Coherence scales it. When coherence is online, concern tends to extend across people, across time, across systems. If suffering matters here, it usually matters there too. Coherence doesn’t create the impulse, it carries it.

Nine: Capacity makes it your problem. If you can reduce suffering or boost wellbeing at low cost, IWRS says: do it. Not because you’re a hero. Because that’s the logical extension of what you already feel.

Ten: IWRS is the floor. Everything else, e.g. justice, fairness, rights, is just a wrapper for distributing IWRS at scale. Without it, “ethics” becomes a costume. With it, we don’t need anything else to get started.

TLDR: Just phenomenology, valence, empathy, and reason. It’s pretty fucking clean.

⚠️ BUT—it breaks for some at infamous Step 5: Empathy.

That’s the bottleneck. And so this is where the weird, slightly maniacal aspect to what I’m doing comes in: If you’re outside the field of empathy + coherence, the framework doesn’t apply. Never fear, you scurvied spiders, that’s not a moral failure, it’s just a scope boundary.

I think that’s pretty cool; I love that. So what do we do about it? That’s the work.

The problem we’re facing isn’t just that secular ethics is fragmented. It’s that we’ve stopped even trying to normalize moral behavior at the neural level.

We tiptoe around empathy deficits like they’re sacred artifacts instead of vestigial liabilities that could end the world if we’re not careful.

Everything we throw at it is great, but it’s not close to enough. We’re tired of pretending it is; tired of waiting to reduce unnecessary suffering.

(Some suffering is needed. I’m only targeting the unnecessary kind.)

Enough stalling. Kids are in agony. It’s fucking bullshit. If that doesn’t register, stop reading. If it does, mean it.

We build whole moral philosophies around the wiring we happen to have instead of asking: what wiring OUGHT we have?

IWRS is a theory about how to restore traction to moral gravity. It’s descriptive first, then prescriptive. It explains how suffering and empathy usually do the normative lifting. Then it makes room for implementation.

We can test which brains generalize empathy.

We can track coherence via fMRI.

We can simulate valence sensitivity.

We can start nudging minds (gently, voluntarily) into alignment with what most already wish they felt more of: peace, clarity, connection, courage.

We already do this with mood, addiction, focus, trauma.

The next step is ETHICAL VALENCE. Emotional plausibility. Scalable empathy. Why the heck not?

I’m not saying rewire everyone. I’m saying: let’s get eyes on the data, figure out the deficits, and build the tools that make empathy easier.

Let’s show the blueprint for a society where IWRS isn’t heroic, but AMBIENT.

That’s why I care if Sam returns to this work. He’s one of the few public intellectuals with the MO to speak plainly about such things and what it will take to solve it. Plus, he’s a bloody neuroscientist, which is convenient to say the least.

I want to believe he’s already on it. That’s something serious is afoot. I can feel it in my chains.

This last Sam episode may turn out to be the moment when it started to change. Not flashy, not radical, but something shifted. You could feel it in the pacing. The air was different. Sam is circling back to the Moral Landscape with a vengeance, G-d willing.

A week before, Sam spoke with Michael Plant, a well-being philosopher trained under Singer, covering happiness metrics, depression vs. cash transfers, and the Parfitian “Repugnant Conclusion.”

That episode was solid, if a little survey-like. But paired with this week’s more meta, theory-of-morality discussion, it now feels like a one-two punch. Just my opinion, I may be wrong. But I feel something is being set up. 🙏

To recap, Sam gave us The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Waking Up, and then sort of retired his morality-excavating hat for a while to wax sensical on the day-to-day and help people to not be assholes via the Waking Up program. Fine.

But in that time, we’ve seen a spike of Christian nationalist rhetoric, the left floundering and fracturing absent any coherent answer to the right’s moral realism brand as seen through Charlie Kirk, Shapiro, and so many others, mainly on the right.

Holy war activity consolidated into fresh waves of horror in the Middle East. (Not like Sam didn’t see THAT coming.)

Meanwhile, we of the center-left intellectual persuasion have little new to say about right and wrong.

We’ve felt for years that religion isn’t the answer. But secular morality has failed to say what is.

And now the world’s drifting. Nobody’s pulled it all together in a way that actually compels.

What now?

Moral Landscape redux with teeth is how we really fuck shit up on Making Sense. It’s time.

But only if Sam finds a way to excavate, not rehash. And he will, because the chessboard has changed since his last real effort to do this.

I’m not suggesting he break the is/ought in “absolute moral” terms.

I’m suggesting Sam puts new energy behind the conditional “if” with all his heart. ❤️‍🩹

Call the whole project IS/OUGHT/IF, and make this case: Science, riding shotgun with whatever’s left of our ridiculous, beautiful, ragged hearts, is the only way we’ll ever land an ought worth wanting. Enter a newly coined word in moral philosophy: worthwantism.

(Betcha every sane species figures this out eventually. Let’s be one of them. 🛸)

Maybe you remember that worth wanting line from Dennett. But with a twist. He had said “the only freedom worth wanting,” in his defense of Compatibilism.

Worth-wantism is a thing, it’s the beating heart of consequentialism.

What’s worth wanting is largely intuitive. But the data BEHIND what people actually want and why, under enforced conditions of extreme clarity, is objective as fuck. That matters.

For example, AFTER being walked through Dirk Pereboom’s manipulation argument, grad students totally changed their minds, and in minutes, they stopped thinking they had the kind of freedom needed for basic moral desert.

That suggests our intuition around moral blame, praise, retributive justice, is ingrained by default. We lean on it, love it, and so much of our system is BUILT on that want.

Turns out, we’re wired to want the kind of freedom Dennett claims isn’t worth wanting.

People DO want it, and thus we too often pretend we have it, even though we don’t, which is a problem Dennett didn’t want to engage with.

That’s kinda huge.

So back to Sam and his brash suggestion of grounding our moral oughts in science.

Can we really shatter the age-old is/ought boundary? Yes! In the sense that we’re inducing the only ought “worth wanting.”

Think of it like this:

Given what is, we ought to do X, if we want Y.

If the data proves we want Y, in the same way Pereboom’s exit surveys did, then we can derive some self-evident oughts.

Should we treat it with the same reverence as a kind of moral realism? Arguably more. Because it’s REAL. Based on real phenomenology, real valence data and preference reports under clarity constraints.

It’s time to push this.

What we have now on the secular liberal side is abysmal.

Other moral systems are flooding into that power vacuum and finding footing. We gotta do something.

Evangelical Christianity and Christian nationalist boldness are rising.

We have people like Destiny who can talk a whirlwind of cogency defending center-left thought (I mention Destiny because, like it or not, he occupies the same moral calibration Sam does, but with a lot more explicit dirty work of connecting the moral leanings with policy arguments). But even Destiny rarely revisits foundational moral questions. When he does, it feels tentative, like he’s not sure the ground is there anymore. He’s doubled down on the idea that his audience will flock together around a cluster of vibes and “just know” when it’s cool to do A and not cool to do B.

But SAM.

I sense a window here. Parfit and Singer are pieces of the puzzle. They give us great clarity into our cognitive dissonance. But it’s hard to hold this stuff in the front of our minds to the point that we take action. So the needless suffering continues. Every day that it does is a fucking nightmare that we have the luxury to ignore only because we’re good at being dicks. Good at cognitive dissonance. How do we change that?

The Emerging Science of Well-being

We know this: The social science of well-being is maturing at a time when tech gives us more to work with than ever. AI. Quantum computing. Bioinformatics. Brain-computer interfacing. CRISPR. Nanotech. VR-based valence imaging.

An objection to all this is that we don’t have a perfect, universal, one-size-fits all way to measure “wellbeing.” The nirvana fallacy always manages to eat up precious time in these discussions. Just stop.

We also don’t have a perfect way to measure “pain,” and yet we treat it. So it’d be a mistake to sit here and act like there’s NO progress to be made because of differences in emotional valence.

We have new validated metrics in wellbeing research, behavioral data lakes, self-report science, and correlates with fMRI patterns, cortisol, HRV, and a growing arsenal of underutilized bio-informatics tools.

We don’t NEED perfect answers to start mapping beyond the extreme poles of Sam’s thought landscape. (E.g. Worst possible suffering for eternity for no reason is probably a bad thing.)

The empathy problem

One major bottleneck is empathy variation, so I’ve gotten into solving for that and maybe restoring it in some subjects. Absent that, we’re stuck with a prosthetic moral compass made up of “reasons” a’la Parfit/Singer.

The most fun point I’m making is we can tinker with brains to make empathic states more common. Not by force. But at least start a working theory on what it would take for a shift toward mental states conducive to wellbeing personally and in aggregate.

An outsized ventromedial pre-frontal cortex or asymmetrical amygdala is a problem these days. Vestigial shit from times of scarcity. We have to face the fact that if we keep these brain parts around as we graduate into abundance, we’re kind of fucked.

That’s why I mention fMRI data. We have to at some point admit that some of us (or maybe all of us) have, to some degree, vestigial neurological traits that are problematic by our own lights, and not conducive to aggregate wellbeing.

Meanwhile, on the philosophical front:

Use IWRS to reinforce the axiom of experience as fundamental. Emotional valence as innate. Empathy as the major hack for air-gapped valence (literally feeling pain or discomfort at the fiercely cogent suggestion of someone else’s suffering). And coherence to show how this plays out when it collides with awareness cleansed of cognitive dissonance (leaning heavily on Parfit there).

And, again, lastly, colliding the whole megillah with the AI and robotics vector, neuroinformatics, frontier pharmacology (and fine, Sam, meditation) to at least think about nudging brains into place such that we can harness the gravity of valence.

If we have the courage to map the delta on brain types, we might figure out the landscape of said types, and explore (for giggles) how to alter our brains such that they snap right into place with a more rigorously mapped Moral Landscape.

Relax.

Again, we already tinker with depression, distraction, mood regulation. We already tune conscious experience. What’s another nip and tuck or two when oceans of suffering and the future of humanity is at stake. Possibly more.

Before Kirk died, he left the world with this:

“Empathy is how the left gets you to give up your rights.”

Musk has publicly framed empathy as a liability, a drag on execution. I’ll let you ponder all that could mean, based on how that guy’s been acting, and the levers he and his ilk collectively hold.

The center-left’s got nada in response to that. The good guys are a mess. Nobody knows the next move, let alone has the guts and freedom to talk about it.

Sam is the one with potentially both.

I’ll leave you with this:

Needless suffering exists. Others are real. And their pain should matter, not because a religion says so, but because it pulls on you like gravity.

And hey, when that pull is weak or absent? Fine. We can’t all be wired like some saint in a Peter Singer thought experiment. We’re just not. Doesn’t necessarily make us bad people. Right?

Well…

Not if we admit that’s the next frontier. Something to understand, strengthen, and design for.

Sam’s the one to say that clearly. He has the platform, the freedom, the spine.

It’s time to get weird.

It’s time to operationalize The Moral Landscape.

While I write here on Substack about language, values, culture, and philosophy, there’s a deeper stack of arguments happening in parallel, most of them elsewhere, usually on Reddit, where the conversation tends to unspool faster and with less polish.

One of those arguments, across multiple threads, has reached what I’d call a plateau: no new counterpoints, no fresh engagement, and a quiet refusal to continue past a certain edge. So I’m surfacing it here to close the loop, for now. This will serve as a permanent reference and standing invitation to resume the debate if anyone wants to keep going.

—

Lately, when I criticize certain Compatibilists (not for their metaphysics, but for how they use language) I’m told I’m “going full Sith.” That I’m claiming to know what others really think, that I’m assigning bad faith, accusing people of lying or knowingly misleading the public.

But I’m not speculating about secret thoughts. I’m pointing at patterns. I’m describing what happens when people say one thing in academic papers and another in public forums, and then refuse to clean up the language when asked.

This follows from something I’ve said before: even if determinism were disproven, my stance wouldn’t change. I don’t ground my rejection of moral responsibility in determinism per se.

I reject the idea of moral desert under any metaphysical condition, because neither determinism nor randomness supports the intuition that people deserve praise or punishment in the basic sense.

Blaming sentient dominos for falling is mean and stupid whether they realize they’re caught in a causal chain or not.

I’m focused on how desert language functions. On the harm it does. And on why certain Compatibilists (despite rejecting basic desert) still defend the public use of language that implies it.

So yes, in my opinion, some of my opponents are knowingly working against clear, consistent, parsimonious thought and language, unlike the “winnable” ones who are just confused.

The reason they do this is because they feel it’s better to stick with the traditional language of deservedness even when they don’t believe in basic desert moral responsibility. They think it’s permissible, even preferable. I don’t. They believe if anyone finds moral desert language confusing or conducive to basic-desert thinking, the solution is to educate them, not change the language.

Here are some examples of phrases I think we shouldn’t use if we believe in determinism, or are operating as if we do, which describes the type of Compatibilists I’m addressing:

• “They got what they deserved”

• “They only have themselves to blame”

• “They could’ve done otherwise”

• “They chose this path”

• “They brought this on themselves”

• “Do the crime, do the time”

These phrases are everywhere. In politics, courtrooms, parenting, journalism, and everyday conversation. My ask is simple 🙏:

“We Compatibilists don’t mean what most people think we mean when we say deserve.”

My opponents refuse to say this.

They point to tradition, lineage, and technical nuance. But I claim the following:

1. Most (or at least many) people believe in basic desert moral responsibility.

2. That belief often reverses, reliably, when people are walked through something like the Pereboom-style manipulation argument.

3. Exit surveys and studies suggest that, when in a calm and focused state of clear thinking, people’s intuitions about moral responsibility change.

4. So why not aspire to that focused state, rather than defend intuitions rooted in noise, emotion, or cultural residue?

5. Much of our moral language reinforces reactive attitudes well beyond what’s needed for deterrence or incentive, and ends up justifying excessive punishment, shame, or entitlement.

6. Some Compatibilists (like Reddit philosopher, Simon Hibbs) seem to agree with all the above, but still refuse to admit that the language itself is part of the problem.

   It’s…

Listen. ANYONE who holds a philosophical stance believes their opponents are wrong. That’s not Sith. That’s just having a position.

What I’m pointing to is something else. When some Compatibilists are pressed, they admit they’ve changed the frame in order to preserve something useful or comforting. That’s a value tradeoff. But when it goes unacknowledged, it looks, to me, like obfuscation.

Forget whether determinism is even true. My beef is about whether your framework as a Compatibilist confronts how language impacts lived experience. When people choose a frame not because it’s cleaner, but because it keeps certain emotional or social intuitions intact, that’s motivated reasoning. Arguably my reasoning is motivated, too. Whether we see ourselves as a cooly metaphysical robot or a cuddly Pragmatic like Dennett, the choice to reason in the first place is preceded by motivation. Fine.

But if premature pragmatism tries to smuggle in aesthetic values of the meritocratic persuasion and disguise them as parsimony, and furthermore, it contribute to needless suffering, I’m going to call that out.

I don’t think belief in moral responsibility is necessary for society to function. On the contrary, it makes things way worse.

Philosopher Gregg Caruso makes this case in his Ted Talk and I agree. (It’s on YouTube, lean at about ten minutes long.)

And even if you don’t, that’s fine, because either way, the argument for continuing to use thick, desert-laden folk language (of the you-could-have-done-otherwise type) is WEAK.

Why?

• It represents the less parsimonious intuition when people think clearly.

• It’s driven by values that don’t align with actual wellbeing.

• And it can only persist through cognitive dissonance and ambiguity.

So yes, I’m blunt. And I’m serious. I have respect for people who disagree. But when there’s a gap in our views, I’ll name it and diagnose it, because I think the stakes are real.

I’ll state my opponent’s view in a way they would likely confirm is accurate. And yet, when the argument reaches this point, the conversation usually stops. Because the next step would be admitting that rhetorical clarity might require real sacrifice on their part.

At the core, it’s a values clash.

I like parsimony and the demonstrably more common intuition under deliberate, clear-thinking conditions.

Hibbsian Compatibilism (see philosopher Simon Hibbs) values preserving the public-facing comfort of moral desert, even inside a deterministic worldview.

They claim it’s all about consequences, and that this is obvious. And that where it’s not obvious, the move should be to educate, NOT adjust the language.

That’s fine in theory, but the public doesn’t hear “deserve” in a purely consequentialist way, and at this rate, they never will.

Compatibilist language gives ample cover to systems and behaviors that enforce cruelty, punishment, and withdrawal of empathy. Most people don’t get the fine print. They don’t want to.

They—WE, AS HUMAN ANIMALS—want permission to enjoy our good fortunes unperturbed. The reflexive, naive belief in the TRUTH of basic moral deservedness is how we protect that permission.

Compatibilists are the ones broadcasting that we CAN have moral desert.

But they know full well that BASIC moral desert, the kind irrespective of future outcomes, is incoherent, absurd.

And yet they REFUSE TO SAY:

“We Compatibilists don’t mean what most people think we mean when we say deserve.”

That refusal is telling.

I find it evasive.

I find it aesthetically muddy.

And I think it enables unnecessary suffering.

It’s part of a broader moral atmosphere shaped by triage, meritocracy, and a deep cultural addiction to blame. Even in philosophy’s highest circles, that influence runs unchecked.

I may be wrong. It’s just my opinion. But I think it’s fucking gross.

So that’s where I’ve landed. I’ve written it down now. If anyone wants to pick it up, I’m around.

Until then, forgive me for thinking the Stillwellian approach is right until someone proves me wrong.

(“Hey” by Stella Stillwell)

(“Shmella Shmillwell” by Stella Stillwell.)

I’ll be skipping capital letters in headers below, mostly to remind you (and myself) that I’m not handing out Truth here. Just shooting from the hip about something SERIOUS, hoping that what I think is “true-ish about Jewish” might still be oddly useful, especially if you’re curious what an uninvolved-but-not-uninformed ginger Jewess THINKS this all is. Corrections welcome.

Some wonder how Jews actually view Christianity. After all, we share a book. The foundation looks similar. The ethical overlap is huge.

So why the split? Why the distance? As a Jew, I’m often asked to explain what exactly we believe, and why we didn’t follow Jesus, especially when the teachings seem so aligned.

I’m not a rabbi or a scholar, just someone who grew up inside the tradition, studied the texts, got Bat Mitzvahed, spent time in Israel, and stayed curious.

I’m not claiming to speak for all Jews or offer the definitive version of anything. This is just my own understanding, how it looks from where I sit, and I might be wrong about parts of it or even most of it, or ALL of it, frankly. But I’m being sincere and doing my best, and this is just a record of what ONE particular Jew believes, not an authoritative guide to Judaism.

It’s just what shook loose when I sat down and tried to put the interesting parts into words. If you never really bothered to SEE Judaism, I doubt the usual studied doorways will pull you in. The reverence or precision others would be over-eager to heap on might be the thing that makes it unapproachable. So consider this a weird little side entrance.

Okay, first up:

jesus was a jew and a good guy, just not THE guy

I like Christianity or at least Jesus, for the most part. Love your neighbor. Self-sacrifice as a form of aesthetic longing. All good stuff.

But Judaism is all that and more, and much older.

Basically, here’s what happened: at one point an eccentric rabbi, Yeshua, broke off and started his own sect. Wasn’t the first or last to do this. Just the most popular. Our refusal to follow him is not a matter of not wanting to evolve.

jews evolve too

Judaism continued to evolve past the Old Testament (the written Torah) with something called the Oral Torah, made up of the Talmud (Mishnah and Gemara). It’s so long it takes seven years to read all of it with any sort of understanding, because it refers to other sections and requires deep discussion to grasp all the connections.

We keep reading it over and over throughout life. The Torah itself is read daily, completing a yearly cycle that starts over again every Simchat Torah.

no, we didn’t reject love your neighbor

The discourse around the “Old Testament” is extremely deep and esoteric, so it has to be read continuously throughout life just to understand a tiny bit. There are 613 mitzvot, or laws. Jews were supposedly “chosen” to carry and study this Torah because it’s a lot, and it’s hard to do well.

But if done well, it supposedly brings God’s will into the world and offers guidelines for how to survive in a post-Garden world without losing our humanity or our ability to elevate the mundane into the holy.

Jesus had an offshoot that jettisoned the complex. He claimed to be the Messiah, or even more, or perhaps it was his disciples who fleshed out that part of the story.

Jews certainly don’t reject any of the beautiful teachings like “love your neighbor as yourself,” or “love and fear the one and only God above all else.”

just didn’t pass the messiah test

The only thing the Jews at the time rejected was the idea that Jesus was the Messiah, because according to the Torah and Mishnah, he didn’t come close to meeting the requirements.

Instead, the story featured a virgin birth, resurrection, and the idea of dying for everyone else’s sins. Jews felt this was made up, and not aligned with the spirit or letter of what they’d been entrusted with as a covenant, to read, study, and preserve.

not jealous, just booked

Jews don’t really have a choice. It wasn’t jealousy. They probably loved Jesus. He was Jewish, and likely a mensch. They just felt he was a little off, and leading people astray.

As for why some of the Rabbis at the time encouraged the Romans to arrest and execute Jesus, I’m not sure. You’d have to take it up with those particular Rabbis. They don’t represent Jews.

No individual or group of Jews represents Jews. The old saying is, for every two Jews, there are three opinions. 99.999% of Jews would be aghast at the idea of having someone killed just for being weird or starting their own religion.

There’s no connection I’m aware of between that act and Judaism as a style of thinking or living.

We’re tolerant. We don’t execute people for blasphemy or apostasy. For the next two thousand years, other religions did. And to some degree, still do.

we didn’t kill him (and also, come on)

So the idea that we “killed our own” is absurd. The amount of burning at the stake for this or that by Christians is too many to count. And don’t get me started with Islam.

why we’re not studying your religion

The reason Jews don’t study Christianity is we are way too busy studying Judaism. It’s ridiculously complex and thorough, has mysticism (Kabbalah, Tanya, and others), and we simply think Christianity is made up, fake, not divine. Just a new religion that caught on, like the thousands of others, many of which are offshoots of Judaism. Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean we have to study it.

we don’t hate the new testament

I’ve read the New Testament. I’ve read the Old Testament. To me, they’re both made up, both interesting, both useful. Jews are allowed to discuss Christianity and read the Bible, and we’re encouraged to learn all of it, because we are people of the book. Learning is always encouraged. There’s plenty of beauty in Christianity. But all that beauty is in Judaism too, in our opinion, and more. So it’s just not a big draw.

fix your mess here, not hope for heaven later

Judaism tends to focus on this life:

1. If you hurt someone, make it up to them.

2. Enjoy and elevate this life, don’t just live for the next one.

3. Spread love and peace, fix the world via tikkun olam, keep the Torah alive.

It’s not that different from Christianity on the surface: love, kindness, civility, dignity, sustainability. Just a different approach. At some point, the Messiah will come, but he’ll just be a regular human. He’ll help unify everyone to prepare for God being more accessible. That will usher in a time of peace, love, and plenty. No more war, suffering, ignorance, selfishness, or fear.

grace feels like a loophole

Jews think the idea of simply believing in Jesus’ story as a free pass into Heaven is dangerous. We reject the idea that people will burn in Hell. Confession to God doesn’t absolve anyone, you have to make it up to the person you hurt.

Jews believe in a serious, rigorous legal system, not just “winging it” or simplifying it. That’s why they were “chosen” to be keepers of the flame. It’s hard. It’s a lot of work.

Modern law echoes the way Torah is structured, and we now see clearly: complex legal systems are indeed needed to maximize wellbeing in a social structure. It’s not perfect, but it beats anarchy. Humans are not capable of living according to one principle.

We feel Christianity was designed to simplify things for the masses. We see it as a manipulation of the poor and unfortunate—offering comfort through beliefs that make pain in this life more tolerable. “Don’t question it, just believe.” We find that dangerous.

We remember that one of our own rabbis once claimed it was the right way, and we just roll our eyes. “Oy vey, look how dangerous it is to make stuff up, and of course the rules are easier, so the masses love it.”

We held on because we made a promise. Jesus’ story goes against our deep understanding of what Messiah looks like. That doesn’t mean we hate Christians. Or disagree with the spirit of the New Testament. The teachings are generally true in terms of morals, but vastly simplified in our opinion, and overly focused on the afterlife.

“Be kind and don’t question the story, go to heaven. Be mean, deny the virgin birth and resurrection, go to Hell.”

I mean, come on.

Judaism doesn’t punish non-believers. A Jew is allowed to be skeptical and nobody gets mad, including God.

Christianity strikes us as a made-up, simplified religion that encourages kindness (great!) but also belief without discernment and permission to sin as long as you believe. We find that dangerous and stupid.

The mere act of giving your soul to Jesus isn’t enough. It feels like idol worship to us. We were way too attached to the Old Testament to suddenly believe that everything it said about the Messiah was wrong.

the messiah has a deadline

Jews believe the Messiah will come in the next 150 years or so, by Jewish year 6000. He’ll inspire all Jews to return to Israel, the Temple will be rebuilt, and then God will make Himself known.

The lion will lie with the lamb. Poverty, disease, crime, and pollution will end. Nobody goes to Hell. There are different “tasks” assigned according to ability, but nobody is punished, and everyone has what they need.

Kind of sounds like AI technotopia.

religion: humanity’s most dangerous dog

Most Jews think all of this religious stuff is 100% human-made. Mostly by men. It evolved because belief and its practices must have had protective, pro-social properties. Here we are, co-evolved with religion, just like with dogs.

Religion is a dangerous technology because it introduces competing versions of how to live, and the stakes are very high. Things like Hell. Disappointing God. So it led to a lot of death and anger when beliefs collided.

Judaism is the oldest, the most complex and rigorous. We don’t proselytize. We don’t recruit. We don’t persecute.

But everyone kills us, no matter where we go. So when the League of Nations and British Empire made Israel available, we grabbed the chance. We worried that if we didn’t, we’d be gone by the 21st century. And we were probably right.

Half the world would prefer us gone from the chessboard. Maybe more. If they could push a button and make us vanish, they would. Our very existence is a reminder that the other religions are younger, and that we find them lacking.

The fact that we also tend to succeed wherever we go looks a little like vindication. So instead, people claim we are cheaters and liars.

But I think it’s centuries of prizing hard study and scrappy survival. The smartest and scrappiest Jews survived. Now we have a genetic tendency to be smart and strong.

We don’t cheat more than anyone else. I’ve been around Jews my whole life, and I’m not one to shy away from truth. The Jewish culture I know is gentle, tolerant, laid-back, generally honest and fair. Often because we have the luxury to be that way.

I think we should be more generous, never ostentatious, lead by example to end poverty, lead in sustainable practices. We’d be better off. But the antisemitism really is just ignorance. Live and let live.

Many Jews have read the New Testament. Christians generally don’t read the whole Torah or Talmud, and my sense is they don’t want to know our real version of the story. It’s easier for them just to believe Jesus died for all our sins, and if we believe in him we go to Heaven. Simple.

Jews find that story half-right: be a good person, be kind like Jesus. But it’s way more complex than just believing someone is God. You have to actually do the work. Make things better here on Earth, not just live for the next one. But yes, love your neighbor, do unto others, all very good stuff. The rest is commentary.

But you’re supposed to actually READ the commentary. That’s the Jewish angle.

priests and rabbis get along. it’s the civilians that sometimes panic

And by the way, the conversation should be cordial. And it is, at the level of clergy. Interfaith alliances and panels are common. Priests and Rabbis love each other. They’re both just trying to help people get through life and be good people with meaning. They work together. The clergy aren’t the problem.

The problem is when average people get entrenched in fear and bigotry. That happens on both sides. A lot of dumber, more impulsive Jews think negatively of Christians. But if they spent two seconds with a rabbi, they’d be chewed out. Judging non-Jews harshly for their beliefs is extremely un-Jewish in terms of character.

Granted, over the centuries, Jews have had to adopt a sort of familial double standard to survive. But modern Jews don’t discriminate. A human being is a child of God and equal in God’s eyes. Even Hitler. Even bin Laden.

Islamism is the one that still clings to too many extremist views and old hatreds. Hopefully that dies out. The idea that all Jews should be killed and the world taken over is not a myth. It’s a small percent of Islam, but it does exist. Which is tragic, because Islam could be a beautiful religion. But as with all three, the extremists ruin it for everyone else.

(I don’t mean Islam should die out. To be clear: the extremist and violent parts of all three religions should die out.)

i might know some of it, but i’m not religious myself

Jews are often not great at explaining what Judaism is. The ones who really know it tend to feel personally connected to it. And when something means that much to you, it naturally shapes how you talk about it, usually with deep love, reverence, or insider shorthand that doesn’t always translate well outside the culture.

On the flip side, a lot of secular or loosely affiliated Jews never got exposed to the texture and depth of it, so they end up not knowing what they’re even stepping away from.

I think I’m in a weird middle spot. I’m not religious. Religion in general just isn’t my jam. But I grew up inside it, and I’ve always cared about ideas. So I learned it. Deeply, at times.

The more I learned, the more I started to see why it has such staying power, why it’s beautiful to so many. It’s not perfect IMHO. But it’s serious. It’s layered. It’s trying to protect something human.

And I think maybe that’s why I can help people see it fresh. Because I don’t speak as a true believer or an outsider. I’m not here to defend it or to tear it down. I just know a fair amount about it, maybe more than I should for how lightly I wear it. That doesn’t mean I’m right about all of it, or ANY of it, for that matter.

Some of what I’ve said might be off, or just one lens among many. But it’s a sincere lens. I’m doing my best to represent what I understand to be true, or at least meaningful.

So if nothing else, take this as a record of what one Jew believes. Not an expert’s guide, not a spiritual authority. Just a lived perspective. And maybe that’s useful. Maybe I can help someone ask better questions. That’s all I’m really trying to do.

And maybe someone can help ME ask better questions.

Happy holidays.

🕎🎄❤️

More of my articles with a Jewish bent:

Some words don’t just describe. They deign to think for us. They have the gall to tell us who sucks, who’s a loser, who isn’t trying hard enough. Who deserves joy and who doesn’t.

They strike fast, so you don’t notice until you’re knee-deep in someone else’s neutered reality.

A darkened, flattened place unfit for goodhearted angels like YOU.

So let’s trot out a good nine.

Words that don’t clarify or illuminate, but reduce and manipulate.

Let’s begin.

1. Lazy

“Stella, you’re being lazy.”

Lazy is loaded with insinuations of moral failure. It flattens exhaustion, fear, ADHD, trauma, disinterest, alienation, into one simple story: You’re not trying.

It keeps systems innocent and puts all the weight on the individual. It allows people to say “I work hard and you don’t” without admitting what they started with.

Calling someone lazy is a great way to feel superior with zero context. It punishes confusion, burnout, misfit wiring. It protects systems that reward compulsive output.

What it ultimately means: “You’re not producing in the way I think you should be.” Or, “you’re prioritizing in a way that reveals low character.”

Clapback: “I’m not LAZY, we just CARE about different things at this moment. Would you like me to break down for you what they are and why?”

2. Defensive

“Ah, you’re getting all defensive, Stella.”

It’s a trap. The moment you challenge something, push back, or ask for clarity (about being called lazy), you’re labeled defensive. You’re maybe a little upset about being JUDGED, but that reaction is somehow twisted into proof you deserved the judgement.

What a rigged little grotesquery: if you argue, you confirm the accusation. Stay silent, and you concede. Someone tags you with a D-bomb and suddenly they’re the calm and rational one, and you’re the emotional fool.

If you planned on having self-respect, doing boundary-setting, or showing discernment, you can kiss all that goodbye.

What they really often mean? “You’re resisting the frame I gave you, and I need that to stop.”

Clapback: “Maybe I’m playing defense because you’re being offensive.”

3. Insecure

“Stella, you’re so insecure.”

Just means our vulnerability or human need for clarity or even a simple two-second reassurance we are seen accurately (or at all) is proof of our low self image and neediness.

It’s a word that punishes sensitivity and emotional truth, and provides brilliant cover for dismissiveness and unsolicited, boneheaded criticism about being lazy.

It’s code for: “I want you to feel ashamed for caring so much about whether the “lazy” label is accurate.”

Potential clapback: “No, honey, you’re just infamous for having no grace, tact, or precision, and we’re all doing our best to help you recover gracefully.”

(Okay, that one might backfire. Use with caution.)

4. Cringe

“Stella, you’re being so cringe.”

Cringe doesn’t mean we lacked actual quality in what we did or said. It just means someone felt a flicker of discomfort (so?) and saw a chance to pull rank on “taste” using a coded word to imply the mob agrees.

Never mind our sincerity, enthusiasm, or earnest moral conviction. We’re expected to cower and repent for violating the cool, flattened performance of Not Needing Anything.

Don’t get me wrong, we should always welcome another person’s feelings as valid and seek to respect their comfort. But if some emotionally blunted zombie signals to the horde that we forgot to deaden our soul on cue, show some resolve. Because if everyone avoids all cringe all the time, that’s when society is truly cooked.

Clapback: “You still say cringe? God. What’s next, ‘epic fail’? I’m embarrassed for you.”

5. Toxic

“Stella, you are now being toxic. I can’t do this right now.”

A quick way to label us radioactive without naming what we actually did wrong. If we crossed a line, fine, say so. But more often, “toxic” gets slapped on us for being assertive, clear, or inconvenient. Something real came up, they didn’t want to own it, so now we’re toxic.

Fine. Not everyone can navigate difficult dynamics and uncomfortable truths. Some have fragile egos and cling to one-sided stories to survive even the littlest bumps. First sign of pushback and they’re “done talking about it.”

Clapback: “Great, let’s stop talking about it you fragile insignificant lepton.”

(Ha. Just checking for a pulse. Don’t say that.)

6. Problematic

“Stella, spending any time with you is problematic.”

Problematic doesn’t mean wrong. It just means uncomfortable in a way they can’t fully articulate but sense they’re supposed to oppose. It’s the academic version of shade and lets people feel righteous without committing to anything too specific. Guilt by association. Vague on purpose. Such that we can’t fully argue against it. (They hope.) Oh, but we can. 😈

It tries to shut down nuance, moral ambiguity, friction, and is looking to protect herd-like consensus and plausible deniability. All it really means is congrats, we brilliantly veered off-script and now a word-abuser is looking to make their mark.

Clapback: “Your breath is problematic.”

(Granted, I’m getting admittedly “lazy” with these.)

7. Inappropriate

“Stella that was inappropriate.”

And there it is: The velvet rope of discourse. Doesn’t matter if it’s TRUE. Doesn’t matter if it needed to be said. The question is: Was it allowed? Who decides? Certaintly not us. That’s the point.

Inappropriate makes discomfort the only metric that matters. So much for truth-telling, urgency, cultural outsiderishness. Goodbye assertiveness. Long live the hidden hierarchies of those fortunate few who know the precious CODE.

Just means we broke the VIBE CONTRACT while saying something too true, and they’re pretending to make it about ethics.

Clapback: “Your breath is inappropriate.”

8. Attractive

“At least Stella’s attractive.”

My least favorite word. Attractive is meaningless. Attractive sounds like a preference but functions as a ranking.

But it’s always just an opinion passed off as fact, trying to brute-force groupthink into existence.

And yeah, we get it, attractiveness is oft this dense cluster of status signals around symmetry, thinness, wealth, youth, and proper trend-compliance.

It’s just a gross shorthand for: “You’d be treated well by others for the way you LOOK.”

How is that not a depressing thought? Social warmth gets handed out based on how fat, muscle, and skin happen to drape over skulls we didn’t carve. Lovely.

Calling someone unattractive is a euphemism for social exile. It’s also only ever an opinion, usually a dumb one, unsolicited, hinting at perceived non-conformity, aging, sour mood, resistance to performance, whatever.

It props up beauty hierarchies in a world starving for connection, while we forget what actual beauty is: that ineffable light behind your eyes, the way you look when you forget you’re being seen, deep in childlike thought.

That way you look when you have that faint echo smile when a dog gets rescued in a movie. I could stare at you watching dogs getting rescued for hours with pupils big as mastiff balls.

“Attractive” or un- is their way of saying we would (or wouldn’t) win the GAME, and they get to be the ones to proclaim our odds. Who appointed them the arbiter of attractiveness?

Clapback: “There’s nothing uglier than believing in objective attractiveness except thinking that YOU know what it is, and then announcing it out loud like a jackass. If you must, say what YOU find attractive, and leave it at that. What? Me? Duh.”

9. Successful

“Stella, given how you act, it’s painfully obvious why you’re still not successful.”

Success is too often framed as earned. Rarely is it talked about as something conferred by class, timing, neurotype, support, luck.

Calling someone successful usually implies virtue, grind, destiny.

It hides whether attaining the so-called success was even worth it. Whether the tradeoffs were honest or if the person even feels alive or has a soul left to show for all their smarmy compromises.

It encourages system loyalty without examining the godawful system, and feeds into braindead survivorship bias, conveniently omitting the story of all the people who worked just as hard, sacrificed as much or more, and wound up penniless, ashamed, maybe even dead.

Basically she’s unsuccessful in life is code for “Can’t help notice she’s visibly losing in the currency we’ve agreed not to question.”

Clapback: “There are lots of ways to define success. By my yardstick I’m successful, grateful, thriving, and all around PUMPED to get up in the morning and be Stella Fucking Stillwell / Empathetic_Electrons, after the coffee and full-spectrum mini-pharmacy hits the bloodstream, that mélange of the usual suspects and okay maybe a rogue 7-hydroxy or two that snuck in wearing Groucho glasses. 🥸

Final Note

When people who say they care use these words on us, it hurts.

Not just because they’re cruel, but because they’re lazy. They don’t ask. They don’t see. They reach for ready-made labels and let the culture do the rest.

But it’s probably not malice. These words are just preloaded survival scripts, handed out early and never questioned.

Nuance pays the price.

The loud win. The weird lose. The system stays intact.

But there’s another way. Slower. Kinder. Sharper.

It costs more.

It gives more back.

Try it. I’ll be listening. 👂

And be nice, if you can.

Maybe I’ll learn something.

(“Siren Song” by Stella Stillwell)

For a minute there our language was music. And we didn’t really know what we were trying to say or why but were said to be good at songwriting.

Not just said by The Grandma (who gave me her guitar and record collection) but musicians, better ones, sometimes famous ones.

Our goal was to seek out ways to convey some nuanced emotions while being accessible.

Nah, that’s not it.

Like we said: no idea what the goal was. But sounding new without sucking must have been part of it.

Being fanatically on guard against doing the same-old mediocrity: that trite, cliched, basic, belabored crap everyone else does while thinking it’s special or needed or pleasant in some way because it came from them.

Terrified of exhibiting that sort of pathetic bias that seemed to plague almost every other musician we knew or saw in the coffee houses we frequented; how self-entranced in their spells, eager to project that “We sound like (famous name) but slightly worse” nonsense to their world. We suspected we were in that category, but it’s impossible to know you’re “good” unless you make it all the way, which we didn’t, allegedly.

For us, “new music that didn’t suck” meant new chord/melody combos and that’s it. That’s ALL we focused on to the point of fixation. Just the bones. Abnormally so. Weirdly. Fatally. Catastrophically.

We still certainly did have some appreciation for the framing: the texture, timbre, instrumentation, rhythm, groove, phrasing, lyrics. But it was secondary.

Most have that reversed: people LUV that stuff we just mentioned—the goop around the chord/melody payload.

Messing with those sonic variables is sometimes a key reason for how “new while not sucking” gets done.

We were and are devastated by the breathy weightless sheen of Gilmour’s “the distant ship smoke / on the horizon,” or Mojo Risin’s shadowy-sex hypnosis Soft Parading its way through our subconscious terrain without bothering to wipe its feet. The stately libertine organs mad-swirling thru Procol Harum’s Shine On, or the fun-effortless muscularity of any given bar of D’yer Mak’er. Sympathy for the Devil emits acrid centuries of grown-ass pain and beads of pheromones wet the windows of our windowless Liebnizian monads. The haltingly how-the-hellism on display in Wilco’s Radio Cures, the naked, interminable, obnoxiously flawless execution had us nostalgic for cozy childhood flus. The goofily emo stanzas of Bowl of Oranges tinged our tongues with salt we didn’t see coming. The Kinks’ uncannily disobedient Australia, Syd Barrett’s Opel, Big Star’s Stroke it Noel. Crimson and fucking Clover. O-o-ver and o-o-ver.

The feels, doll, not the mere theory. Yes, we really do get it, the window dressing, on the window letting in the plaintiff barbwire breeze insisting we miss bitterly the sisters and prisoners we’ve never seen. But again, all still secondary in our book.

What really gets us going is the chord progression.

Stripped of accoutrement. That’s the fetish; freebasing the bones of the thing.

Here’s some bones below. Let it dissolve slowly in your broth.

This old friend is very common and balances sophistication with singability. Not new at all, but holds newish melodies sometimes. We’d get it as a tattoo if we weren’t nervous about staff infections. 😜

I – III7 – vi – I7 – IV – iv – I – V

This primordial line of chordal prayersmanship gets the unmapped (unmappable?) body parts settling, releasing, while something else subs in for the breathing, purring. Let’s look at it a sec.

So right off the bat: Don’t know of a more ordinary place to start a journey than dumb old C Major. So let the first step in our 8-bar be a sophisticated tip of the hat from C to E7. Unironically.

It wounds us sweetly if we recognize it from that time we went from C to E7 in life. As in not F, not G, not “just staying on C.” Not directly to Am. Not melodramatically to the adjacent D minor.

But to a sadly smirking E7; goofy, holy, versatile, ineffably dramatic, tin-pan-alley-tired dominant dominatrix of a 3-chord. We’ve been paying for that chord choice ever since.

And we’re still just getting started. But that bit of shrewd, impulsive E7-ish three-seven-ESQUE calculus had us not knowing whether to say “sorry” or “you’re welcome” to the “audience.”

We still don’t. And that’s okay. So instead, we say A minor…

Or more specifically:

E7 → Am for emotional movement sans sounding jazzy or academic, G-d forbid

C7 → F for classic bluesy tension, the old familiar surprise and surrender

F → Fm → C for Nowhere Gal’s melancholy sag into the inevitable

C → G waits loyally, the indomitable reset, we live another day to do the same damn thing. (With a slightly different baseline.)

Nestled in this 8-bar fuselage a precocious bass line can make out like a bandit. Let that be a lesson to you, Grandma.

A bass line to stalk the sublime with the wide-open berth of a snow leopard, covering vast swaths of temporal real estate in a floaty, bouncy, soaring Greek chorus of one. Framing the Cloud Giant, darting in and around its celestial strides thru hallowed halls like cherubs in tuxedos, a.k.a. Paul McCartney on a regular Tuesday in the mind of God.

Not sure what we’re trying to say here or why.

Maybe this: The 3-minute pop song will have a place in our hearts but not our futures. There are things best said by being left unsaid. But are those things best unsaid yet said as things not said in said-like ways? Now? What with the world doing all this worlding?

Imagine all the people / living in a world that’s heard the song Imagine seven billion-fold and continue to behave unimaginatively in spite of it.

The ache in our non-dualist soul has moved onto more concrete things. Songs are maybe not the best way to say.

We can’t feed a village by going from C to E7. We couldn’t. We didn’t. We won’t.

(Whole rest)

We loved the bones. We still do. We worshiped the bones so hard we forgot the body. But now the body’s starving. And the bones still hum but no one’s listening except us. Me, and maybe you.

🎵

I think literally one other person reads my essays. I’ve learned not to care. I’m going to give it my all anyway and if nobody wants to receive it, that’s on them.

My “spirituality” is the commitment to reduce suffering and increase wellbeing across all sentient experience, grounded in a rational, post-mythic understanding of consciousness, empathy, and valence - - as the only “ought” worth wanting in a universe that can feel.

I’ve been reading and writing philosophy obsessively for the past few decades, arguing and pushing past the edge to the best of my ability, developing a voice and mastering my craft.

Just when I’m finally ready to compile and publish, suddenly LLMs arrive and what would have stuck out as distinctive, penetrating, novel fusions and cogent, captivating conversation-starters gets blended in with millions of other essays. Some are legit (like Alex’s, Ingrid’s, Ishmael’s, Ellen’s, Peter’s and others I follow) but most are low-effort decoys only made possible thru heavy reliance on GenAI.

So now when I send my stuff to people they often think I’m just another grandiose LLM-hypnotized fool lost in a masturbatory, sycophantic rabbit hole. Friends and family worry about me and cringe. Some even point out the long dashes and the “it’s not X, it’s Y” structure as obvious tells. And then to back up their instinct (because it’s painful to admit that what Stella might have here is genuine, valuable, and tragically unsung, especially since she’s doing it at 4am and between her day jobs, plural) they rig their own LLM to give my work the most uncharitable reading possible and call me up to share the splendid news.

I just have to laugh. It’s a good thing I’m not doing this for praise. Not that I’m above wanting praise for things, but this particular writing is something I’d do anyway, it’s a tic. A compulsion. Even this intro could be the basis for an essay if I just keep going. I’ve reached a sort of zen satori flow but it’ll have to go unnoticed because of the timing. I’m not complaining. I love writing either way. I’ll survive, I’ve done it before.

When I used to do music a similar thing happened: Right when I completed my work at conservatory learning how to score symphonies by hand, a new version of sequencing and notation software dropped that really made the art of scoring and transposing on the fly obsolete.

Sibelius 3 ruined Symphony 4, A minor O63 for me for life. Don’t let that stop you from discovering it. Listen, by all means, and keep in mind it was written in 1911 while Sibelius himself was grappling with cancer and existential dread, which perfectly soundtracked my music “career” in the mid aughts after the launch of Sibelius 3. I was super-young so it wasn’t so much as a disrupted career as a life plan cut short on day one. Life hands you lemons. That’s fine. I can work with that.

Suddenly the world was flooded with “wallpaper” music, making it that much harder to sell my compositions or manuscript chops. And now even those Sibelius-slinging composers are out of work. Turns out AI can write serviceable wallpaper.

And but so* I write for one reason: there’s a lot of unnecessary suffering out there and I believe we can do better.

Even if nobody sees my work, neither writing nor music, I’m trying, and that’s all you and I can do, right?

If you’re also a writer, please help me and the world by writing not just for fun and frivolity, but in a way that makes human traffickers scared. In a way that honors dying egrets. In ways that give low-info boors no quarter. In ways that speak relief to agony. Say it bravely and clearly for those who can’t. Say it in spite of the soundproofed walls.

Every little drop matters.

That’s not some naive sentiment. It’s a metaphysical conviction.

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Maybe not technically.

But it vibrates the air molecules. It spontaneously transforms the universe into one that had a few more vibrating air molecules. Making it factually a different universe.

A baby was born while you were reading that last paragraph.

You and that baby have something in common: you share a universe.

A universe that has things in it that both you and the baby will never see: Ugly things that cause suffering, beautiful things that cause wellbeing, and everything in between.

But every one of those things adds to a very real list of facts about this shared universe.

That list expresses the KIND of universe we all actually live in, whether we know it or not.

You adding a simple moment of kindness, courage, wisdom, even love, to that list, factually changes the entire universe instantly, in that it adds another entry onto the ledger of “things that are the case in this universe.”

Universal re-definition of this kind travels faster than light and its permanent.

Living in a universe that has a little more kindness in it because of you is NOT NOTHING.

The baby may not see it. But you’ll know. Maybe I’ll know.

You’ll have made the universe we actually live in a little kinder.

Doesn’t mean much, except that because of what you felt and wrote, we are all factually in a wiser, kinder universe.

I’m sorry, but I simply refuse to see that as irrelevant.

Never stop. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever stop reaching for them in the dust.

ALSO: everything is essentially electrons. In simple terms, energy.

You, me, rocks, suns, zithers, snow cones, and the substrate that abstract concepts like a=a must lean on in order to exist.

Some of these electrons clump together to form beings that feel empathy and seek to reduce the pain in other sentient electron clumps.

Empathetic Electrons are just a thing that happens given enough stuff and enough time.

Beings made up of light that care about the pain of others and try to reduce it. That’s us.

No mysticism necessary. It’s just a fact. A cool one. Use it. 👼⛓️⛓️‍💥

Be a dear and help me with these chains. We’re in this together. Always.

FOREWORD (is forewarned):

I’ve spent a long time watching people argue about what’s right. Philosophers, theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyone’s offering their angle on what we should do, or why we should care. I don’t have much patience for it anymore. Not because I don’t care, but because I do. i care enough to want something that fucking works.

For me, everything starts with experience. What it feels like to be alive. To hurt, to feel good, to witness suffering and want it to stop. It’s like something to be this way. Likism. There’s something in us when we’re not too broken or numb that leans toward helping, toward easing pain, toward making things better. I call that IWRS: Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering. No not everyone has it. Some do. So this isn’t a war of who is right, but a war of who gets to decide what right IS. What is the meaning of ought, and what is the only “ought worth wanting.” Worthwantism.

It’s not a theory I need you to believe in, just a description of what happens when your empathy collides with post-reflective clarity and coherence.

The challenge really isn’t persuading each other through arguments, although I get the impulse. It’s figuring out how to protect and scale the capacity to care at all. That’s a biology war mostly. It starts at brain chemistry, neural wiring, stress environments, developmental windows. It’s wrapped up in culture and tech and incentives in weird ways. If we don’t scientize this tangle of shit now, we’ll keep watching cruelty repeat and multiply, no matter how clever our ideas sound, and we will DIE mid argument.

I wrote three pieces (at least) to try and name what I see. Not to dictate a path, but to offer one that feels honest, and I want you to be honest in return and tell me where it fails. I’m going to err on assuming there’s a filter that ends species that get as far as we have. My goal is to have humanity survive it. This is what I have. Enjoy. Help.

—Stella Stillwell, to the human family of Earth. I’ll never stop reaching for you in the dust.

Before We Begin, A Word About Cain’s Offering

I’m not sure why almost everyone I know seems to want a mini castle filled with expensive crap.

Abel’s offering comes to mind: “The firstlings of the flock and the fat thereof.”

Cain, by contrast, brought the fruit of the ground. (Veggies?) Modest. Honest. Unadorned.

His offering wasn’t wrong, per se, it was just unrecognized. And maybe that’s what broke him.

Cain the murderer was wrong. But I’m focusing on Cain the potentially misunderstood. The one who brought what he had, from the soil he worked, and got silence in return.

Of course, the God character in that story is presumed omniscient and benevolent, so the lesson should be interpreted in that light. There’s plenty of great wisdom in that story and other biblical parables.

But too often we use that particular story to swap in the free market for God and create a Just World Fallacy and admonishments about envy and victim mentalities. The ones being blamed today by markets that are neither benevolent nor omniscient are the “Cains” I’m talking about. I’ve railed about that elsewhere. Enough about that for now. Here’s a different story.

I AWOKE TO THE SOUND of cold rain, under a warm blanket, under a strong roof, and time to lay in. No work today.

All I need is my phone and some coffee and I’m gold. The coziness factor is turned up to eleven. Modest joy. Quiet plenty.

There are healthy calories a dozen steps away. Indoor plumbing with, get this, HOT water. If something horrible happens, professionally trained strangers will come save me within 5 minutes.

I can look at any book, documentary, movie, song, painting, ever made, communicate with any type of person on any sort of topic. I can create, explore, share, grow.

Outside my door are miles of paths to walk, trees to see and touch, sky to behold, and thousands of reasonably kind, sane people who also have all this, many of whom I haven’t met and are just a “hello” and a smile away.

Should I want a particular thing, for fun, health, hygiene, or whatever, it’s available very quickly, at very low cost.

I have everything a sane person could need.

There is only one thing left to be bothered about: the needless suffering of living things that share my planet and who are in reach of help if only we had the will to give it.

Some are sentient, can feel pain and well-being, and some are even sapient, can suffer in that vast human way that gives Hell quarter in short stints.

Life is finite but feels infinite when you’re living it, especially when in prolonged agony.

A friend asks, “How do we know agony is bad?” I pause to reflect.

Surely I’m confused: we know that unnecessary pain is bad because we can feel it directly.

It is literally that which we tend away from without an additional reason.

The word “valence” comes to mind.

Negative valence of suffering is a self-evident “booooo.”

But my friend persists: “Yes, but how do we know inflicting pain is bad or wrong?”

Again, I pause to reflect.

Why would I need to know such a thing? I have seen others in pain. I’ve seen others writhe in agony, physical and emotional. Whenever I see this, it hurts me, too. I feel it in my mirror neurons, the ache deep in my chest, my soul; and my body is flooded with chemicals that impel me to help.

“I am wired to find the pain and agony of others repellant. WE are wired to hate the pain of others,” I say. “And we now know better than ever what makes humans hurt and how to relieve it.”

The neuroscience of well-being is revealing. Sure, some pain is part of life, but if you grant that such a thing as unnecessary pain exists, we should be trying to alleviate it where we can, as long as it doesn’t break society or make things worse somewhere else.

“So we should relieve it. We will. We are already. Some of us anyway. More would if we got good at talking about this and organized better.”

My friend says nothing.

“Right?” I ask.

Silence.

“…Right?”

Somewhere in the slow drizzle, in the sound of wet steps on pavement, there’s an answer.

I strain to understand what my friend feels in this moment.

I worry I’ve made them feel guilty or judged.

Perhaps they’re not wired to hurt, to experience negative valence, in quite the same register I am, when beholding the agony of another.

Or perhaps they ARE wired that way, but only for people or animals they know, or like.

Maybe some of us only have that instinct for our own tribe, and are able to blunt that empathic pain-response when it pertains to outsiders.

I can sort of imagine why this would be the case. Too much empathy for a competing tribe might leave an opening for your tribe to be slaughtered.

Maybe those of us who too easily feel the needless agony of others, and process it as self-evidently undesirable and something to reduce as soon as is feasible, DIED OUT.

Maybe we were once a liability to our tribe.

Are we still a liability? Now? With the coziness factor turned up to eleven on a 3k-a-month salary?

I wonder.

I don’t think so.

Maybe that’s why we are now walking in silence. Me, and God, and whoever still thinks an offering of vegetables shouldn’t be scoffed at so quickly by people who mistake free market efficiency for a God that gets to decide who receives blessings.

▪️

Below, find the 10-point Stillwell Derivation for IWRS (Increase Wellbeing Reduce Suffering).

First, read What This Is, What This is Not, then the framework itself, followed by Where This Leads.

PLEASE COMMENT once you’ve had a chance to digest. Your feedback is extremely appreciated and will help sharpen the way these ideas will be presented. Any comments — pro or con — will be met with good will. ❤️

What This Is

A step-by-step construction of normative weight, built from the fact that experience exists and suffering hurts. It’s not a framework you adopt. It’s a series of facts you either recognize or resist.

What emerges is IWRS (Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering) as the only non-arbitrary ethical direction available to conscious, sentient, empathic human agents reasoning with coherence.

No divine command here. No metaphysical leaps. Just phenomenology, valence, empathy, and reason.

Think of it only as a normative reckoning that begins within direct experience and extends outward through coherence.

IWRS might resemble moral realism because it predicts what people will inevitably do when trying to reduce suffering and succeeding. But prediction is not prescription. If it starts to feel like moral “rules” just remember that I’m trying (and perhaps failing at times) to make this behavior more analogous to gravity:

If an object is in the field, it falls. If it isn’t, it doesn’t apply.

If you’re wired for the more common form of human-like empathy and coherence, you’re already downstream. If you’re outside this norm, the system doesn’t apply. That’s okay. It’s not a moral judgment, just treated as a scope condition for now.

What This Is Not

Nothing in the 10-stage system should be taken as a moral claim. Not asserting stance-independent moral truths. Not saying IWRS is “right” in some cosmic sense.

This isn’t moral realism. Not assuming universal moral facts. Also not appealing to moral desert, divine law, blame, or earned praise.

No moral claims. Just AESTHETIC claims, rooted in the felt valence of experience, and the observed patterns of attraction and repulsion that often happen when we humans are exposed to pain, clarity, and each other.

It loosely maps the behavioral gravity that pulls minds toward reducing suffering, when they’re wired to care and running clean.

It uses one wiring scenario:

• Pain is real and, by definition, undesired

• Empathy transmits valence across identity boundaries

• Coherence impels action once pain is perceived

That’s all! No “ought.” (Yet.) Just outcome.

If that wiring isn’t present, the system doesn’t apply, and that’s okay. Again, not a condemnation. What we might want to do about this gap, though, is talked about in the Where This Leads section right after the framework.

(As a good-a-time-as-any aside, solipsism and antinatalist conjectures will be addressed by request. These objections tend to creep in at different times while explaining this stuff; I’m not going to hazard a tangent here, but let me know if you’re wondering if or how the system accounts for them.)

THE FRAMEWORK

The Stillwell Derivation for IWRS

1. Experience exists.
   There is something it is like to be. That’s the starting point. Not belief, not matter, not simulation. Experience is the base layer.

2. Experience has texture.
   Some moments feel good. Some feel bad. This is not opinion. Pain hurts. Relief relieves. These are not up for debate inside the system that feels them.

3. Suffering is bad for the one experiencing it.
   You don’t need a theory. If you’re in pain, you want out. That’s enough. The badness is baked in. You don’t need to deserve it for it to matter.

4. Wellbeing is good for the one experiencing it. Same logic. When you feel peace, safety, or joy. You prefer it. The goodness isn’t cosmic. It’s local. But it counts.

5. Empathy makes others’ experience matter to you. Their pain tugs at you. Their joy lifts you. This isn’t a virtue. It’s a neurological bridge. When it works, their valence enters your system.

6. IWRS is what empathy wants.
   If pain is bad and joy is good, and empathy lets you feel both from others, then the natural direction is clear:
   Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering.
   That’s not a rule. That’s a pull.

7. IWRS becomes an “ought” when you want it.
   The moment you care, the moment another’s pain registers, you’re in. There’s no metaphysics here. Just a clean handoff from perception to preference.

8. Coherence scales it.
   When coherence is online, concern tends to extend across people, across time, across systems. If suffering matters here, it usually matters there too. Coherence doesn’t create the impulse, it carries it.

9. Capacity makes it your problem.
   If you can reduce suffering or boost wellbeing at low cost, IWRS says: do it. Not because you’re a hero. Because that’s the logical extension of what you already feel.

10. IWRS is the floor.
    Everything else, e.g. justice, fairness, rights, is just a wrapper for distributing IWRS at scale. Without it, “ethics” becomes a costume. With it, we don’t need anything else to get started.

Where This Leads

Now what?

You’ve probably guessed by now that this isn’t just a thought experiment.

There’s a reason everything I write has a whiff of this system in it. Once I saw it clearly, I couldn’t unsee it. And I didn’t want to. I wanted to act.

I wanted to build a future aligned with what IWRS reveals: a future that doesn’t tolerate preventable suffering just because it’s normalized.

So yes, this system sits behind everything I write. It’s not decorative. It’s foundational. And it’s time I shared it with you, openly.

Again, I invite questions and critique. 🙏

But just know: for me, every sentence, every refusal to look away from pain, every moral anchor, it all derives from this.

I don’t wrestle with meaning or nihilism anymore because this resolved it.

No gods. No leaps. Just phenomenology, valence, empathy, and reason. It’s clean.

⚠️ BUT—it breaks for some at Step 5: Empathy.

That’s the bottleneck. 😕

And this is where the bias comes in. If there’s a slightly maniacal aspect to what I’m doing here, this is it. IWRS is not inclusive of all architectures. It doesn’t try to be. The goal isn’t harmony across every wiring type. It’s alignment around the largest reconcilable overlap, and then clarity about what falls outside.

If you’re outside the field of empathy + coherence, this framework doesn’t apply. That’s not a moral failure. It’s just a scope boundary.

So what do we do about it?

We start by arguing that having empathy (Step 5) is better than not having it.

Better how? Better in the way medicine is better than infection. Better in the way coherence is better than contradiction. Better not because it “feels right,” but because it’s what makes moral language possible.

Without it, “good” becomes tribal, accidental, or cruel. And while that tension has echoed in philosophy for millennia, we may finally be in a position to resolve it.

Why? Because we now have science that gestures at what “better” actually looks like. The neuroscience of well-being (Santos) more than hints at this. And Harris’s moral landscape points to a shared recognition of extreme poles of suffering and flourishing, even if we’re still unclear on the middle.

That messy middle (the local peaks and valleys) calls out for a Santos-style handling at a much larger scale.

And we now have the tools to do it:

AI.

Quantum computing.

Bioinformatics.

Brain-computer interfacing.

CRISPR.

Nanotech.

VR-based valence imaging.

If the convergence of those technologies doesn’t excite you, I may have failed to explain this correctly. Is it all imperfect? Sure. But it’s directionally correct. These new tools can fill gaps that religion, intuition, and ethics-as-style have left open for millennia. That alone makes them worth taking seriously.

If I’m overstating that, fine. Help me tune it. But don’t reflexively dismiss it. Don’t call it a nothing-burger just because it isn’t finished.

Now, back to Step 5.

If empathy is broken in some, meaning it’s biologically gated, culturally dulled, neurologically frayed, then we’ll need ways to fix it.

That doesn’t mean coercion. It means exploration. It means real interventions: elective, therapeutic, cognitive. We already do this with depression, distraction, mood regulation. There’s precedent for tuning conscious experience, without sounding dystopian.

So consider this:

If someone’s architecture makes cruelty pleasurable,

or makes others’ pain unreadable,

then intervention is not judgment.

It’s calibration.

Maybe people will opt in.

Imagine: Your child’s nervous system interprets limb-severing as joy. Would rewiring that be dystopian? Or compassionate? Is it biased? Absolutely. But maybe it’s the kind of bias worth wanting. The kind of intervention you pursue when you stop seeing empathy as decoration and start seeing it as infrastructure, the substrate beneath trust, stability, and hope.

But we can’t talk about tuning empathy without confronting the fact that powerful people are already trying to turn it off.

The War on Empathy

Elon Musk:

“A lot of the top engineers and scientists I know are on the spectrum. They’re not bogged down by empathy. Empathy can be a drag on execution.”

Paul Graham (Y Combinator):

“Empathy doesn’t scale.”

Charlie Kirk:

“Empathy is how the left gets you to give up your rights.”

These are not fringe voices. These are people who shape funding, institutions, algorithms, and weaponized narratives.

Their position is clear: Empathy is a liability. A fog machine. A tool of the weak. Something to be managed, tolerated, minimized, or deleted.

They want optimization without empathy. They think that’s how we survive. I personally think that’s how we rot.

My opinion: Empathy isn’t a glitch! It’s not a flaw to outgrow. It’s not some sentimental holdover from tribal pasts. It’s a feature of our biology; it’s part of how we made it this far, and for many of us, it’s a big part of why we’d even want to keep going.

Fact: It’s useful. Moreover, any concerns Musk and others cite (we can argue about whether the concerns are warranted), one thing is clear: The downsides of empathy aren’t intractable.

Empathy, valence, and coherence can all be scaled, tuned, extended, in ways our forebears couldn’t have imagined.

And yet, we’re watching a cultural wave form, led by magnates, technocrats, strategic minds, arguing that empathy holds us back, impedes survival, clouds clarity. And that it needs to be minimized to do what “must be done.”

That’s the pitch. Can you believe this shit? Some of them even mean well. But it’s still a pitch for selective blindness. For the toleration (or even optimization) of suffering at scale. Low-empathy outliers look at the unlucky and the weak and, in essence, say:

Let them march into the sea so the rest of us can reach the stars.

Am I overstating that? Maybe. But only barely. Because if that’s the future being proposed, then it’s not just a debate, it’s a fucking civilizational split.

So I’m offering the counter-vision: Double down on empathy. Fix it. Then spread it. Not to lose the stars, but to make us worthy of them. Because at the end of all optimization, suffering will be the last target left. And if we’ve spent decades teaching ourselves to flinch at kindness, to see compassion as weakness, then we’ll get to the stars with the wrong firmware. And we’ll seed the universe with fucking assholes.

Can You Admit Any of This?

Try this:

If you’re willing to admit that needless suffering exists, and that it’s bad, and that others are real, and that they experience needless suffering too, then doesn’t it follow that it’s better to be the kind of mind that responds to that suffering?

Not because a religion says so. But because it pulls on you like gravity. If you’re not ready to admit that, I’m open to hearing why.

But until then, I’m okay with talking about interventions for people who can’t complete Step 5.

We’ll go there soon:

What it means to tune a mind. How to do it. Why it’s possible. And what breaks when we don’t.

It gets weird. It has to! That’s where the future lives. May as well lean in. 👽

And maybe, just maybe, the ones who brought fruit instead of blood were never the villains. Maybe they were the prototype for what comes next.

👇

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That’s when the argument usually begins to sound like:

“They only have themselves to blame.”

“It was their choice / they could’ve done otherwise.”

“They morally deserve to suffer.”

“They have free will, after all.”

That’s fine. I can’t force anyone to be skeptical of whether we have moral-desert free will; after all, whether we do in a meaningful sense is ultimately a matter of intuition.

What I can do is show that the default intuition is that we don’t have moral desert free will. That can be shown objectively. I’ll get to how in a sec.

Meanwhile, to get a head start on this, check out Sam Harris’ slim book Free Will. It’s been called a “museum of mistakes” by philosophers like Dennett, but it’s not. It’s just not padded with the defensive flourishes academic philosophy requires to filter out people who haven’t paid their dues.

Harris is more than adequate to get the job done outside of an academic setting. Because it’s not that complex.

In fact—just my opinion—he’s by far the clearest writer and explainer of free will skepticism compared to top contenders: Gregg Caruso, Dirk Pereboom, (well, maybe not Galen Strawson, who writes like a gonzo artist or like pure glass), Bruce Waller, or the great Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza.

In his own way, Harris lucidly covers all the core concepts: the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), sourcehood, leeway, reasons-responsiveness, hard incompatibilism, quantum randomness, downward causation, and the problem with Compatibilism—where he does no worse than Caruso in a head-to-head against Daniel Dennett (and arguably no better—it’s Dennett, after all).

Neither Harris nor Caruso fully articulated the move that Dennett-style Compatibilists are making. Harris and Caruso tend to lean hard on metaphysics, confident that the intuition of moral desert will dissolve naturally under either determinism or randomness, unless someone is confused, dishonest, or vaguely gesturing in the direction of the supernatural.

But there’s a fourth possibility. Naming this fourth argument precisely and fairly is the only honest way to engage Compatibilism. We’ll get there in a sec.

Meanwhile, if the goal is to explain to an opponent how we don’t have moral desert free will, and do so with the rigor approaching that of a respected philosopher, Pereboom’s Four Case Argument and Strawson’s Basic Argument suffice. Both are simple enough for the average layman to understand. If people still give you problems after that, check back with me.

For most readers, Sam Harris and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (Determined) are plenty—because, again, it’s not that hard to show that morally blaming and praising what amount to sentient dominos in a causal chain feels ugly and stupid.

Especially when we’re talking about “basic” deservedness—the kind of blame and praise disconnected from incentive or deterrent, justified purely on the idea that “they just deserve it.”

The only honest rebuttal a Compatibilist can offer is:

“It doesn’t feel ugly and stupid to me.”

Even though they admit: yes, it’s just sentient dominos in a chain.

That admission is critical. So the burden is on them to explain why, without invoking consequentialism, their intuition is more natural, more stable, or more parsimonious. (In fairness, the burden is also on us to explain why it isn’t.)

First, let’s review what they’re claiming:

That a sentient domino with:

1. the ability to sometimes not fall, and

2. an internally-understood moral reason not to fall,

3. is morally responsible if they do fall

The trick is this: any time a domino does fall, it could not have done otherwise in that instance. That’s just what determinism means.

The good news is that Compatibilists agree with this. So far so good. The vice tightens. Isn’t this exciting? 🍿😸

This is where they pivot:

“The domino itself feels like it could have done otherwise. That feeling—that experience of ‘free will’—is the only kind of ‘free will’ worth talking about.”

Dennett artfully dubs it:

“The only kind of free will worth wanting.”

That’s a killer line that plays well to the peanut gallery. But it’s a value judgment. “Worth” and “want” are tells. We’ve left metaphysics. We’re in the realm of pragmatism now.

Pragmatism is the “true if useful” model of truth. It works when something is useful by definition, like antibiotics or seatbelts. But usefulness is always tethered to values. (It can always be tied back to what is wanted, or what someone feels matters.)

So compatibilism, at its steel-man best, is pragmatism hinging on the value claim that experiencing moral desert free will is useful. Meaning it’s something we want to intuit, that it matters to us that we do.

They’ll say it’s the more intuitive path—not a contrivance, but a universally felt truth that washes over human beings even while they’re honestly looking at and understanding the metaphysics of determinism.

But here’s the thing: it’s not intuitive to everyone. It isn’t to me. And I’d argue it’s less parsimonious (less Occam’s Razorish) when you look at the metaphysics honestly.

That’s the dagger.

And if someone says parsimony is subjective? Debatable. But what’s definitive is that in one study, after subjects were quickly walked through Pereboom’s Four Case Argument, those who intuited that moral deservedness is possible plummeted to a small minority.

That evidence suggests that moral desert skepticism may very well be what we naturally intuit most of the time.

More studies need to be done to verify this. But if true, it means that if we think of human beings as sentient dominos in a chain, our intuition is that they lack the control required for moral desert.

Even if the domino feels like it had control.

Even if we feel it’s useful to pretend it did.

Ask yourself: what’s your intuition?

Or better yet: what feels ugly to you?

Is it uglier to say:

“This person couldn’t have done otherwise. Let’s prevent harm, rehabilitate if possible, but stop short of indulging in retributive cruelty.

Or:

“This person could not have done otherwise—but they still deserve to suffer for it.”

The latter feels uglier to me. And if you’re honest, I think it does to you too.

But there’s a whole world out there counting on you to not think that hard.

To blame the domino.

To protect systems that run on that blame.

😔

This is the end of the article.

Wanna try Pereboom? It’s below.

Wanna see Strawson’s Basic Argument? That’s down there too.

In a future post, I’ll be suggesting rewrites for these four phrases:

“They only have themselves to blame.”

“It was their choice / they could’ve done otherwise.”

“They morally deserve to suffer.”

“They have free will, after all.”

Because if we’re honest about what’s ugly, and what’s clear, we can start saying things that don’t do quiet harm.

Pereboom’s Four Case Argument

Case 1: A team of neuroscientists has the ability to manipulate Plum’s neural states at any time by radio-like technology. In this particular case, they do so by pressing a button just before he begins to reason about his situation, which they know will produce in him a neural state that realizes a strongly egoistic reasoning process, which the neuroscientists know will deterministically result in his decision to kill White. Plum would not have killed White had the neuroscientists not intervened, since his reasoning would then not have been sufficiently egoistic to produce this decision. But otherwise Plum’s decision meets the requirements set down by standard compatibilist accounts of free will (i.e. it is consistent with his character, reflexively endorsed by a second-order desires, produced by a mechanism that is sensitive to reasons, moral and prudential).

It seems straightforward enough to say that Plum’s decision is not freely willed in this case. It is the result of external manipulation.

Case 2: Plum is just like an ordinary human being, except that a team of neuroscientists programmed him at the beginning of his life so that his reasoning is often but not always egoistic (as in Case 1), and at times strongly so, with the intended consequence that in his current circumstances he is causally determined to engage in the egoistic reasons-responsive process of deliberation and to have the set of first and second-order desires that result in his decision to kill White. The neural realization of his reasoning process and of his decision is exactly the same as it is in Case 1 (although their causal histories are different).

Again, it seems straightforward enough to say that Plum’s decision is not freely willed in this case. The only difference between this case and Case 1 is that the manipulation took place at an earlier moment in time (during his initial development). But that can’t be a relevant difference. At least not when it comes to assessing free will and responsibility.

Case 3: Plum is an ordinary human being, except that the training practices of his community causally determined the nature of his deliberative reasoning process so that they are frequently but not exclusively rationally egoistic (the resulting nature of his deliberative reasoning processes are exactly as they are in Cases 1 and 2). This training was completed before he developed the ability to prevent or alter these practices. Due to the aspect of his character produced by this training, in his present circumstances he is causally determined to engage in the strongly egoistic reasons-responsive process of deliberation and to have the first and second-order desires that issue in his decision to kill White.

This case is like Case 2. The only difference is that it removes the technological manipulation by neuroscientists and replaces it with cultural and behavioural manipulation. Pereboom’s claim is that the fact that the manipulation is done by some brain implant or programming device, vis-a-vis traditional methods, should play no part in our moral assessment. If technological manipulation undermines free will and responsibility, so too should cultural and behavioural manipulation. Once again Plum is not responsible for his action.

Case 4: Everything that happens in our universe is causally determined by virtue of its past states together with the laws of nature. Plum is an ordinary human being, raised in normal circumstances, and again his reasoning processes are frequently but not exclusively egoistic, and sometimes strongly so (as in Cases 1-3). His decision to kill White issues from his strongly egoistic but reasons-responsive process of deliberation, and he has the specified first and second-order desires. The neural realization of Plum’s reasoning process and decision is exactly as it is in Cases 1-3.

Okay, so this is where things get really interesting. The idea is that Case 4 is like Case 3, only there is no explicit manipulation by another set of agents (neuroscientists or cultural peers). No doubt some environmental manipulation is taking place — we are all, on determinism, products of our historical and contemporary environments — but we don’t know exactly what it is. This is pretty much the view of all causal determinists in the present age.

(Example above lifted in entirety from Philosophical Disquisitions)

Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument

Brief version:

1. “What you do, in the circumstances in which you find yourself, happens based on what you are.”

2. “Thus, to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are, at least in some mental respects.”

3. “BUT you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are.”

4. “Thus, you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.”

Stella commentary:

Sometimes the phrase “ultimately responsible” trips people up and they say: “When we blame we are not saying people are ULTIMATELY responsible.”

Agreed. So why treat them like they are if we can go easier (and more accurately) on them without breaking anything?

(Image: “Capital Flight” by Stella Stillwell)

What does it mean to be a pro-Israel, pro-Judaism, pro-Jew Jew in an era where economic liberalism is having a moment on the world stage, thanks to a Muslim. For one thing it means I have a fresh new topic to argue with my best friends about.

Many of them (okay, ALL of them) are recycling stale tropes about “socialism” like it’s their first time engaging the debate. It’s disappointing, especially when coming from a place of pain, because it makes navigating the conversation tricky. (Sign me up!)

That grief is shared, by the way. I’m none too pleased about the mayor of my city, the best city in the world, for his thinking that October 7th was merely a war crime and not terrorism and attempted genocide. (It was both and more.)

But emotional resonance doesn’t excuse weak reasoning about economics.

So let’s start there.

We already live in a mixed economy. Public schools, Medicare, Social Security, all socialist elements normalized into daily life. Mamdani’s vision isn’t a revolution. It’s a temporary refinement tackling specific crises. It’s democratic, not at all unconstitutional, and focused on protecting ruined lives from being turned into yield.

Let’s start easy: the grocery store pilot. Five city-owned shops in food deserts, isn’t Soviet communism with breadlines. It’s a public response to chronic market failure. These neighborhoods aren’t profitable for grocers, so they get abandoned. It’s not radical to intervene. It’s pragmatic. Like rural post offices or transit lines that run at a loss because the alternative is letting people rot.

The real panic isn’t Bolshevism. It’s capital flight. Rent control and tenant protections disrupt the financial model. When net operating income (NOI) collapses and internal rate of return (IRR) falls apart, investment dries up. The soundbite hysteria isn’t about ideology, it’s about spreadsheets. When a mayor threatens the assumptions behind yield, real estate investment capital seeks greener pastures. (Perhaps literally, in this case.) That’s what this backlash is actually about.

There’s irony in watching those who rightly criticize clumsy analogies about Israel turn around and deploy equally lazy comparisons between democratic socialism and Venezuela. (In simplest terms, Venezuela isn’t a democratic republic in any meaningful sense. That fact pollutes the data for comparison.) It’s the same reflexive oversimplification. The same bad faith.

Yet the capital risk is real. Development will slow. Deals will die. And still, it’s possible to know all that and decide the tradeoff is worth it. To choose people over the portfolio. To pay the pound of flesh.

Criticisms of Mamdani’s statements on Israel remain valid. The clarity and moral urgency that October 7 demanded were not met. That failure cost trust. He condemned the attack, mourned the dead, and called for the hostages’ release, but not with the precision the moment required.

Calling it a “war crime” underplays the truth: it was terrorism. The IDF’s response, however devastating, was not genocide. It was targeted military action against an enemy that embeds itself among civilians. Israel’s moral standards in warfare are not the problem.

And nothing is more grating right now than the surge in strident anti-Israel rhetoric. Hamas celebrates Israeli civilian deaths. Israelis grieve every bullet. That distinction matters. Support for Hamas is idiocy. Mamdani’s rhetoric, to the extent it’s echoed that script, is frustrating and dangerous. But it’s not the whole picture.

He supports LGBTQ rights, which Islamists reject. He has said Jewish New Yorkers deserve safety and freedom from antisemitism. He’s met with Hasidic leaders. He refuses to use “Globalize the Intifada” and has disavowed its violent connotations. When he fumbles, it’s possible he’s not dodging, but trying to stay composed under pressure.

Not everyone who backs Mamdani believes progress is always good or tradition always bad. That’s not the claim. The serious work is about tradeoffs: cost, risk, benefit. Good faith analysis yields different conclusions depending on values and thresholds.

Yes, some of his supporters are naive. But others see the policies clearly and still choose disruption. The attacks on “socialism” aren’t substantive. They’re placeholders for discomfort with redistribution. This race wasn’t about slogans or grocery stores. It wasn’t even about Israel. It was about whether NYC exists for REITs with north of 20% IRR, or for its people north of the Battery. And New Yorkers get to decide without breaking a single law on the books. What could be more American than that, Donald?

The city needs more than real estate investors. It needs fairness. More importantly, it wants fairness. And how we define fairness has an ebb and flow in the American zeitgeist. Mamdani has made some lofty promises and must be held to account. If it fails, he’ll be replaced by the same people who installed him.

The city has spoken.

And one more thing: People talk about rent hikes like they’re just numbers. They’re not. They’re goodbye speeches. It’s sitting your kid down and explaining why they can’t go to school with their friends anymore. It’s shutting the lights off in a shop you built from nothing because some guy in finance wants to squat on the building for upside. It’s telling your mom you’re moving out of state because you can’t afford to live ten blocks away anymore. It’s ripping up the roots of what makes a neighborhood mean something. And for what? A better return for absentee landlords treating buildings like assets instead of homes? Fuck that. FUCK THAT.

And the thing is, you CAN muddle through here. Even when it’s tough. Even with peeling walls and weak heat. Even if the tax base leaves. People stay because of neighbors, cousins, bodegas, stoops. Not because the wallpaper is new. And most of the ones who threaten to leave? They don’t. Because they know what this city is. They know what makes it electric.

It’s us.

I’m cautiously optimistic. Let’s see what happens. And as for the antisemitic part, this is a chance to be as precise and charitable in our interpretations as we want other’s to be with us. a fitting challenge for the אור לגויים, the light unto the nations.

This is all just my opinion. I may be wrong. Can’t wait to find out.

You probably know ACA stands for Affordable Care Act, a.k.a, “Obamacare.” Passed in 2010, it’s intended to guarantee affordable access to basic health care for all Americans who don’t qualify for Medicare or Medicaid.

Conservatives call the ACA a disaster. Admittedly, it’s flawed, partly because GOP pushback is so unrelenting, it’s hard to implement a health care strategy that isn’t riddled with imperfections and causes new problems.

Meanwhile, the ACA averted the unthinkable, preventing medical bankruptcy for over 500,000 people per year. Since 2014 it’s saved 6 million citizens from the unlucky nightmare of having to shoulder life-changing health and financial problems at the same time.

But we’re just getting started.

ACA gave 20 million more Americans access to life-changing treatment.

As a result, funeral parlors sold on average TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND fewer coffins per year. Okay, maybe not literally, but the data shows 25,000 Americans per year would have died if not for the ACA.

If each of those deaths were a coffin, the stack would be 7 miles high. Higher than Mount Everest.

(“Societal Ascent Graveyard” By Stella Stillwell)

12 of these towers, one for each year since the ACA was passed, would represent a “societal ascent graveyard,” a vertical cemetery containing the casualties of austerity, and tax cuts for the rich. Ostensibly in the name of freedom, innovation, and the lifting of all boats, minus the 400 thousand boats previously belonging to residents of casket city.

And I wonder: Who’d be inside these imaginary towers if we didn’t have the ACA?

Definitely the elderly. But also thousands of children, and people of every age. Mostly decent people who like dogs, because that describes most people, in my experience. 🐶🐕🦮🐕‍🦺🐩🌭

Not criminals. Just regular American citizens who couldn’t afford life saving care. 250,000 of them.

If that many people stood shoulder to shoulder they’d make a line roughly 118 miles long, about the distance from New York City to Philadelphia.

Every last one of them would be deserving of a hug. I mean, just imagine: dying unnecessarily from something totally treatable, in the wealthiest country in the world. What a slap in the face.

Meanwhile, thanks to Obamacare sparing their lives, they still walk among us. Working and middle-class doers, front line laborers, struggling artists, loving grandparents.

That hug they deserve? It’s still on the table. Remember that next time you see them. And while you’re at it, look them in the eye and explain to them why the conservative half of the richest country in the world wanted them dead in exchange for extra tax breaks.

FACT: Almost all modern Western democracies have guaranteed health care. But for some reason the U.S., the wealthiest nation in the world, isn’t one of them. Why?

“Because if you give away free stuff” the conservatives warn, “people won’t work as hard.”

But the data shows the opposite: healthy people work harder, live longer, and produce more. Universal health care boosts GDP and quality of life scores in every country that guarantees medical treatment.

Nonetheless, conservatives seem to feel it’s still not worth it.

To me, there’s something urgently euphoric (and maybe tenaciously American?) about peeling the onion to see why half the country is okay with hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans needlessly dying every year.

This week, during the shutdown, I simply had to find out WHY there’s so much hate around this ACA thing.

I reached out to conservative friends and family. I asked calmly. Didn’t judge. Just wanted to know their true feelings.

What I uncovered is nothing new but I’ll report it to you anyway because it bears repeating. If the following doesn’t merit our sustained and concentrated attention I can’t imagine what else would.

So, here it is:

They think people generally get what they deserve.

They think that if you’re doing okay and can afford health care, you’re probably morally better.

They think that if people suffer or even die, they only did it to themselves.

They ask, with restrained annoyance: why should I be forced to pay someone else’s doctor bills?

They also ask this: Why should poor people get medical treatment they didn’t earn?

They say: People who stick up for the poor in this context are indulgent fools who want to see themselves as virtuous. And that the result of this self-righteous, performative hubris, is that they’re hurting the exact people they’re pretending to want to help.

They claim that anyone who is pro-Obamacare is simply wrong and doesn’t know the facts.

They assert that liberals, if not motivated by self-righteous posturing, are motivated by sloth, envy, and lack of faith.

Conservatives insist that this explains why liberals want to tear down the successful people who actually contribute to the world.

I could go on, but let’s stop there. That’s enough torture for one article. Take a deep breath; I’ll wait.

Okay. So, in short, they want evolution to cull the weak. They firmly believe cutting ACA subsidies will help do that, with a side benefit of forcing lazy people to work harder and solve their own damn problems for once.

After all, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground…” Genesis 3:19

I’m not saying there are no lazy people. But nothing in my life has ever even slightly indicated that people want to be dependent on handouts. Dependency is cloistering, humiliating and destabilizing.

Sometimes things just don’t work out. Often, people start from behind. Plus, the lower you sink, the harder it is to claw your way back up.

And if you study basic economics, you know that carrying a small but steady margin of unemployment is a feature, not a bug, ensuring a reliable pool of affordable labor. Without an unemployment rate by design, businesses couldn’t function or maintain profitability.

Plus, we’re not all endowed with the same lucky gifts. There’s always going to be a bottom half, bottom 20%, 10%, 2%, in skill, talent, connections, charisma, and just plain luck.

Nobody asked to be born, nobody chooses who their parents are, nobody has any say in the external factors that determine what happens to any of us.

So what do we do with all this?

Well, we can keep calling the health care debate a simple, honest disagreement about budgets and economics.

But isn’t it really more about how we decide what matters? After all, no economic or market rule can tell us what to care about in our hearts.

And as we discussed, almost every other successful democracy in the world now has universal healthcare, in ways that boost quality of life and economic activity, without exception.

Chances are it’s NOT a facts and logic debate, as much as conservatives want to pretend it is in polite company.

It’s more primal. Heart-to-heart conversations reveal what they really believe: that a sick, poor person who gets help they didn’t EARN is a stain on the world.

An even bigger stain than a seven-mile-high coffin tower every year, filled with people who are just like you and me in all those little non-fiscal ways that make us lovable.

There’s an old lady in one of those hypothetical coffins who really just wanted to bake cookies for you. 🍪

But ACA opponents are happy letting her die because it’s nature, and it’s not their problem.

Instead of funding the ACA, they want tax cuts on the rich, for no other reason than it’s their money and they earned it.

As a side note, they claim that the money trickles down into new jobs. But the data shows that’s not always the case. And even when it is, it’s largely the kind of activity created downstream of private capital seeking the highest yield.

The argument is that wealth frees up lending. But it’s not the kind of lending that serves humanity’s best interests.

It rarely creates jobs that lead to a cleaner, fairer, kinder planet. And while there’s massive demand for those things, it’s not the kind of demand that’s easily monetized. (So much for supply and demand.)

Tax cuts for the wealthy (who currently already pay historically low marginal tax rates) worsens the already out-of-control wealth inequality, and reroutes life-saving capital into the rent-seeking, private-equity-based aspects of our economy. Plus, many billions of dollars wind up in offshore accounts and investments.

All of that is instead of saving lives, boosting quality of life scores, and growing our overall economy in ways that preserve democracy, just like most other reasonable countries. Germany, France, the UK, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Israel and so forth.

So please don’t be fooled. This is NOT a disagreement about facts, but about what America is for, and about WHAT A HUMAN BEING IS FOR.

And given how conservatives see the world, we’re not debating anymore. We’re just pretending to because the truth is too awkward, too damning.

Call their hatred for affordable health care what it is: a theology of cruelty, and a cult of greed.

If some of your loved-ones are religious people, you know full well that you can’t debate theology with logic.

The conversation ends the same way: with the subject changed, the zone flooded, the positions distorted. You’re trying to reason with a worldview that thinks helping someone who’s down is encouraging laziness or perpetuating weakness.

There’s no shared premise in that.

Just a brick wall.

Behind that wall is the belief that the preventable death of innocent American citizens is the price of freedom.

Pick a side.