📰 Platist Politics

When you have a stress bucket you’re ok with having outstanding tasks or obligations — things that need to be attended to, basically — as long as they don’t become so overwhelming that you can’t keep up. With a plate you’re not fine with any such at all.

It’s not anxiety-inducing at all to, say, lay new flooring at home or mow the lawn, no matter how long it takes and how much I sweat. As long as I can focus on the thing in front of me without having to keep mental “channels” to the rest of time and space open, I’m far from lazy.

One of my best days last year (not a great year for fun, admittedly) was all about building a windbreak for our wooden deck. A full day of light work with my hands, listening to relaxing trivia podcasts, and I felt no need to even take a break. But if she asks me to pack “all the stuff we need” to go to the beach for the day and I’m 40% of the way towards hyperventilating from the sudden stress spike.

When I have a single and clearly circumscribed task I’m pretty content. If I have to juggle more than one project, or deal with a more open-ended one when I can’t neatly separate what is from what isn’t part of the task — and thus can’t “close off” everything that hasn’t got to be considered — satisfaction drops like a stone. When I have several open-ended tasks going on at the same time I have to remind myself that it’s a bad idea to drink on a weekday afternoon.

What I’m trying to say is that it seems to be a feature of my psychology that I have to severely limit, ideally at zero, the number of open tickets I have in my mind. Everything to be considered has to be right there, on the table in front of me, and I must know there’s nothing else. Then I’m able to relax and dig into it.

I just find it seriously effortful, tiring, and anxiety-inducing to constantly think of what other people want and how they feel. It means that I have to keep several concerns active in my mind at once, and that feels very similar to how I experience outstanding tasks.

Now given that my mind works this way it’s no surprise I prefer an ethical code based on rules and principles, and not on empathy or some fuzzy ideal of self-sacrifice without clear limits.

When you extend this disposition to politics you get an intense dislike of, for lack of a better word, collectivism — the idea that we, by default, have a bunch of broad, implicit, and unarticulated obligations to our fellow citizens and society as a whole. The mere existence of such potentialities triggers the stress response.

What you do tend to like is the concept of rights. Political and moral rights are specifically “no questions asked”; they’re designed to cut off any other, vaguely defined and delineated set of concerns you need to weigh back and forth before you know whether or not you can do something.

In decoupled society the default relationship between two people is that of no obligations whatsoever (special circumstances like friendship or family bonds don’t count since we’re talking about the macro scale). The only obligations are to respect explicitly stated rights and agreements.

Political decouplers like money and the market as institutions because they quantify and decontextualize social obligations.

In coupled society what it means to be a good person or what may be required of you at any point is open-ended. There are not clear boundaries between people and you are expected to take others’ or society’s interests into account as much as your own.

Political couplers dislike money and the market for the same reasons decouplers like it.

The “coupled” view I’m referring to is the ideal that we treat everyone around us as if they were friends and family.

It means that a competitive, transaction-based market society where it’s acceptable to model unseen strangers as objects — as means and not ends that you interact with indirectly through a law-contracts-and-currency interface, instead of fully-fledged fellow human beings you interact with through caring relationships — is on some level deeply wrong.

Noted socialist Freddie DeBoer, in his book The Cult of Smart, says this: As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility for each of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.

I might go even further and say that some seem to have an intuition that Society is somehow a superorganism that has agency and responsibilities.

The opposite intuition sees society very differently. It’s not an agent that does things but more an arena like the natural world where social outcomes aren’t so much done but simply happen, according to something like natural processes.

To summarize this post’s message in one sentence: based on the infallible scientific method of introspection, I’ve come to suspect there’s a connection between having a “platist” stress response to tasks and preferring a decoupled, libertarian-like intuitive politics because an obligation to actively consider other people’s interests at all times is experienced as mentally overbearing and oppressive in the same way drowning in to-do:s is.

If you want, you may consider this an exploration of the phenomenology of selfishness. What does it feel like and how is it justified to oneself?