Intellectual activity, like any complex activity, can only take place in a rich social fabric. Jonathan Wallis and Ben Landau-Taylor talk about how to build community and why it’s worthwhile.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Ben: I’m here again with Jonathan Wallis of the Avalon Institute. We’re here to talk about community. One of the things we’ve noticed, as both of us have been involved in leading and organizing active local communities, is a lot of the issues and problems and the way that things work at the local level is, not in all ways, but in many ways, the same as what you see at all levels of society. Many of the same things keep happening, many of the same problems keep coming up in the same ways, and everything is either being sort of rapidly built out and expanding or growing, or just kind of coasting and drifting and decaying. And you don’t really end up in these states where the maintenance is keeping things exactly balanced at exactly the same rate that things decay.
So yeah, can you tell us how you’ve seen some of these things going on in your work with Avalon and the stuff you’ve been doing here in San Francisco for the intellectual scene?
Intellectual infrastructure and social fabric (01:13)
Jonathan: Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Ben. Just briefly say that I’m really interested in the subject because I think a lot of people end up with a pretty abstract view of politics, and I think when you recognize kind of that they’re under similar pressures as anyone doing organizing at a local level, even though they’re radically exaggerated by the pressures of the state, historical outcomes, life and death, but many of the kinds of problems they grapple with are still the same. At a local level with Avalon, there is a constant balance between kind of logistical efficiency and then going on and doing the next things. It’s one of the reasons that I decided to start Avalon is that I believe that the life of the mind requires a lot of logistical support.
There’s both lots of things you have to do, whether you’re setting up film equipment, or making spaces nice for conversation, or providing things for people. And many highly intelligent people who our society should view as irreplaceably precious can also be quite absentminded. I myself have been very absentminded from time to time, and it’s taken a lot of personal effort to become somewhat logistically competent.
Ben: Yeah, that’s definitely the sort of absentminded professor as one of these archetypes going all the way back to Archimedes even with the legends we have of him. It definitely seems like these go together, and they often rely on just having people around who are going to make all of that run well for them so that they don’t just sort of wander into some hole where they’re thinking about the nature of reality.
Jonathan: Yeah, and I think that applies to a lot of areas of reality that people don’t—or rather that there’s a lot of implicit social fabric that helps to support people like this and tip their lives onto a good trajectory. So that includes socially, if you have people who are not sort of actively managing and really pumping a lot of energy into how their own social life is shaped, it’s going to be shaped by whatever the default of society is or their institution or someone else who kind of takes it upon themselves to manage that. Friedrich Nietzsche met Paul Rée, who was one of his closest friends, and really a ray of hope in a life that was otherwise quite isolating, met him at essentially a halfway house for wandering intellectuals managed by an older woman who just wanted to put interesting people together. And so even small efforts like that absolutely, as a matter of just raw historical fact, they really tip the balances of things for people who are extremely influential because it’s like, as Ben said, things are often either decaying or they’re moving forward. It’s a very rare individual who can keep kind of all areas of their life moving forward by themselves.
All of us, or almost all of us, need help here and there, and then that’s what a lot of, I think, local institutions are really meant to provide, and we have kind of a paucity of them today.
Ben: Yeah. As Aristotle said, “The man who does not need society is either a beast or a god.” And so many of these—certainly me at most times in my life, a lot of what I’m doing is just maybe I’m doing some local, “Oh, there should be a bit more of this, a bit more of that,” but for the most part, I’m not changing the nature of what is the type of social fabric. I might put together some types of parties or some types of lectures, but I’m not out here inventing the format of the lecture or anything. I’m sort of relying on a lot of the social scripts we have around what types of stuff are we going to do together as a group.
Jonathan: Yeah, I think it’s a really cool part actually of human society in general that we have inherited all of these. There’s just an enormous amount of infrastructure. Some of it’s lost social technology that can be recovered, some of it’s being handed to you today, some of it’s kind of being invented live as people create formats or experiment with formats. But I think it kind of helps resolve a lot of the inherent psychological tension people have between a great man view of history and the like, but what is the meaning and role of other people? And it’s just like even the greatest man, if you are an extraordinary individual and you inherit like a country or an institution that’s failing on a bunch of dimensions, you cannot go as far as if you inherit an incredible machine.
I was thinking recently about Vercingetorix and kind of his capabilities and the battles he did run, and it’s honestly remarkable that he put up as much of a fight against Rome and Caesar. Like, just fighting Rome is insane enough by itself. They’re at their absolute peak. Top three greatest military machines in human history.
Ben: Yeah, sort of at the peak of their expansionary period, basically.
Jonathan: Yeah. And Julius Caesar, one of the greatest generals of all time, and you have the combination of that, and who’s to say? It’s like, was Vercingetorix, maybe if he’d inherited a different position, things would’ve gone down rather differently. And I think we can see a number of people whose lives take all kinds of middling courses or end in catastrophe as Vercingetorix’s did because they didn’t inherit the same kind of social fabric of someone else. This is on Twitter, it’s become a saying, everything is a passion project.
Like, someone put a lot of thought into making this glass look kind of pretty. And just all around the world you see these little things that people have inherited a lot of passion into, and it’s kind of if you are interested in community organizing or on a grander scale, reorganizing the social fabric of your society, you’re not like, I think it’s wrong to or it’s a wrong approach. I think some people try it, I think sometimes they do some interesting things, to think of yourself as this sort of like, well, I’m an engineer and here are these things I’m disconnected from. It’s like no, you’re kind of entangled with the passions of your society and then actively trying to rearrange them into better pieces. And you just inherit just really so much from all of the other passion projects people have been creating.
The duties and difficulties (08:03)
Ben: Yeah. One of the things that I think our grandparents’ generation had correct that we’ve largely forgotten or chosen to do differently or however it changed, was that they had this idea that it was almost like a duty to be participating in the local social fabric and be participating in building up some social institution. For my grandmother, she was very involved in the local planetarium in St. Louis. For her husband, he was very involved in the ACLU chapter. For some people it might be the opera or the Elks Lodge, but one of the things that I think they were correct about which I’ve tried to do myself, is the idea that we have an obligation to be putting something in, to be putting some of our energy into these communities that we participate in.
Because once you see them as things that require this type of energy and ongoing renewal to exist in the world, it started feeling kind of bad for me once I started noticing that and just being like, so here I am, I’m consuming a bunch of this and I’m not organizing it, I’m not donating to the opera or I’m not putting anything into it. It felt like free riding for me at a point. And I think it’s not the only thing going on. There’s certainly many other parts of it, but when people talk about this, oh, we’re all so atomized now, the default isn’t that we’re going to be going to some interesting place put together by some old lady who wants to cultivate these types of connections. We’re just going to be staying in our room and on our phone and call my parents once every 10 days is...
It seems like for many of these people, they want there to be a social fabric that someone else makes that they can consume, and they don’t want to make it.
Jonathan: Yeah. There’s a lot of pretty constant media and sort of desire and fantasy surrounding found family motifs is all over everything in the like Firefly, Marvel, but all kinds of media, some of which is very good, that is about people kind of being thrown together in a circumstance that forces them to have relationships and arguments and all of this kind of thing. One thing I have seen a lot is that because we tend to be thrown into things that don’t immediately have these existential stakes, and because the social fabric is already kind of thin and people are not on the same page about what the norms are, they just grew up in very different places, very different psychological dispositions, that there’s this kind of friction that occurs because you’re putting a lot of people together and you’re trying to do something that’s more in this older social format. And people have lots of interactions that annoy each other, and then I think a lot of people over time, they’re like, I’ve seen a lot of people, it’s particularly like they have children, obviously that by itself it takes a huge amount of effort and energy and kind of amplifies a lot of social frictions and then they drop out of producing social fabric. Which I have a lot of empathy for, and I don’t mean to say it’s on them.
It’s often the case that their community maybe or in a better world, would put a lot of effort into providing childcare and kind of making the economy of frictions pay for itself or cancel out. But I just see a lot of people in all kinds of life positions or start working some kind of high-powered job drop out of a system of maintaining the social fabric because the annoyances are too large, and then the less social fabric is there’s fewer places to even start to get on the same page about what we’re doing and what’s appropriate and how should all the individuals contribute and how should drama be resolved and all of these things.
Ben: Right. Which does take a lot of ongoing effort because people keep bumping into each other. And yeah, you used the phrase found family as the sort of fantasy that is often out there. And it like got me thinking, when I have seen things kind of like this work, it seems like they are built rather than found.
Surface area for improvisation (12:39)
Jonathan: Yeah. I think that something usually has to be built. But I think it’s also a question of building something that is quite open to serendipity. And so there’s a kind of building and finding, where I think it’s rare it’s like sort of anything is like totally engineered from the top down—and almost it’s like, well, there are people in the world that we want to know and work with and do all kinds of things with that we don’t know already. What is the process of kind of encountering those people in the world?
So, yeah, I think it’s like someone has a bit of a mission and then, or just inclination, and they’re like, “Well, I should start a reading group about this sort of thing.” And then from that seed, I think a lot of this sort of finding takes place. And like people I’ve seen, a reading group that it was run by someone else in Seattle, and then they moved on, and I sort of took it over and kept it running. But around the time I took it over, it was starting this transition from a very nice reading group to the people had other events throughout the week, like watching movies and always getting dinner after the thing, and solving social problems and going into business together. So that’s like you’re providing a context where people can find each other.
And I think if you have something really dramatic like a war, people do find each other and they’re kind of forced together, and have the surface area necessary for relations. But again, it’s like the default is just everyone kind of drifts off.
Ben: Yeah. One of the things that’s very striking is as you’re watching movies from shortly after the Second World War, is that like whenever the writers need an excuse to have two totally different, totally random people who are close to each other and like, how are we going to connect these two characters? We could just make them war buddies, and that will basically make anything work as a premise.
Jonathan: Yeah. You also see a lot of, in those films, it’s like, “Oh, you were part of that infantry battalion that I knew,” or, “We were part of a same general structure,” or like, “We heard that you were an airman and I was an infantryman.” But there’s some spark for where initial social positioning matters a lot, I think. Like, how much fabric you even have to begin with, how many things you have in common, how many things you want to fight for together, shared worldview, directions you want to go, makes a huge difference in the amount of energy you’ll put into making a new impression on someone if your second impression wasn’t very good, or actually resolving drama with them, or even just putting energy of any kind into a relationship. And I think the social fabric and connections and shared worldview all provides a surface area for improvisation and getting to know people in a kind of a dynamic way.
And even in a lot of the films that fantasize about found family, there’s this, like, well, we want people to be witty, but they need things to be witty about. And I have seen in my life an incredibly huge variation of like, no, people do not have a charisma score. I myself know from personal experience that when I was younger and thought of myself as quite awkward, you go to a house party and you kind of don’t know that many people, and you don’t know what they’re about, and you have no context. And this is incredibly different from going to a party where you know eight or 10 or 12 people, or almost everyone there, and that gives you the ability to fluidly move through that social environment, which improves your own confidence. And I recently went to a party where I, for the first time in a while, I kind of didn’t know anyone, and I was like, “This is really contextual.”
How awkward you feel is really, really contextual. It’s a little like you’re being thrown into a kind of fight you’ve never fought before. You’re like changing styles of martial arts or even changing the period of war that you’re in. Like, Alexander might be a really good general, but if we plop him into World War II or something, it’s gonna take him a while to catch up. Maybe a lot faster than anyone else.
But still, the number of moving parts you have to consider, the amount of mental friction, even just this question of where do I even start? So that all is, I think, a very important thing when thinking about social fabric and even your own position inside of it is like, you might be someone, and I have been this person who’s like, when I was younger, just feeling very awkward and isolated in the world and not finding the interactions I want. You can build spaces that bend towards them. You can’t just fiat it. You have to learn to exercise some grace and bring people into the experience and accept things that are heading in the right direction, but not quite what you want yet.
But you can do that and then find yourself actually feeling quite charismatic and capable because you have brought yourself, as any good general would, onto a battlefield of your own choosing.
Ben: Yeah. It makes me think about on the sort of the less locally immediate social fabric level, the way you’ll get these any different scenes, different cultures, different subcultures, different groups are just going to have their own norms. And even apart from just knowing the people and being able to function in that context, just different ideas about how it is correct to act. And I remember there was a bunch of this sort of cultural confusion when some of my friends from here in the sort of San Francisco intellectual software adjacent scene were meeting a bunch of people from the sort of Washington, DC politics policy scene, and they were very thrown because these DC people would meet them and then share some sensitive secret, which in their culture was this sign of trust and an overture towards friendship, which they were parsing it as like, “Why is this person telling me a bunch of drama that’s not my business?” And it’s just this sort of different norms in different communities, which, as you’re navigating this stuff, you have to just understand what are the ways that things are done over here?
What are the ways that things are done over here? And both at the local level and at the sort of these different elite power centers with different ideas about how it is right to wield power. Just the ability to sort of code switch between them ends up being very useful for these type of social graces.
Jonathan: Yeah, and I think it matters a lot also to the outcomes at large in your society. I think one of the things that is really interesting about America is we have many different elite social sets, and it’s sort of recognized socially, what are the great things you can become? I think is always one of the most core questions you could ask about any society. In America, it’s like, well, you could be a great inventor, you could be a great scientist. You could be a great titan of industry.
You could be great in the context of broader American politics, and even in a more granular way. It’s like you could be a New York finance elite. You could be a Texas oil elite. You could be from a older, WASP family with a lot of money and a lot of connections. You could be part of the SF rising tech elite.
There’s a lot of different options, and all of these elites have their own way that they get together, their own way that they party, their own worldviews. And our ability to have any kind of trust and elite coordination in our society is going to depend on people creating formats where people can actually build friendships and connections and the sort of things that survive stress.
Ben: Yeah, and just being able to understand, especially when you have this—Probably more so when you were talking about these sort of different elite groups. They need to be able to—they can’t just silo and do everything internally. They have to be getting along with each other. And so can they understand each other? Can they form relationships outside of their own silos?
And how well does that work? How much friction is there? And sort of the contours of where those cultural clashes are do end up determining a lot of the shapes of those coalitions, it seems like.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Bringing in new members (21:51)
Jonathan: And I think it is possibly part of why people in modern society experience—it’s also a question of how capable your own elite groups are at finding new talent, at bringing in outsiders, at xenia, guest hospitality, and working with kind of anyone from the outside world all depends, I think, it’s on who’s running the salon, who’s running the place where new people show up. There’s a good bit from Joe Rogan’s interview with Quentin Tarantino, where Joe Rogan’s like, “Yeah, we wanted to make a comedy center where the new people with a passion for comedy could come in and get exposure to the greats and go up and do their set and get the kind of full range of blame and criticism.” And it’s like, if you want the comedy world to function well, that is absolutely what you should be doing, is concentrating a lot of passionate people and having a place where people can go. I want to be great at comedy. Maybe I should go to Austin because Joe Rogan has this thing.
And if you look at the history of the success of any human tradition in its society, you will find people maintaining that social fabric and infrastructure.
Ben: Right. And one thing that I’ve seen happen sometimes to things that sort of got medium-sized and then moved into stagnation was that they had that sort of open funnel in at the beginning. And then there were enough people around, and the sort of core group was basically having their social needs met, and they were like, “Yeah, we’ve got our friends.” And so they would sort of retreat from the public-facing spaces, and then the public-facing spaces would wither because the core people were gone. And then it would turn from this sort of vibrant scene into a group of friends who would keep seeing each other, but there was no longer any intake.
There was no longer any way for other people to get involved. Whereas the ones that have maintained having a place where the new people can show up and it’s going to be frustrating for the old-timers who are having this conversation about, like, “Have you heard of this new thing?” “Yes, I’ve been doing it every day for 17 years.” But then—so the way it often ends up working in a sort of functional, mature thing that’s been around for a while is that some of them go intermittently, and then you’ve got these sort of the people who are reliably putting in the effort or making a good impression at the public-facing thing, sort of move one concentric layer in and then one concentric layer in so that not everyone from the inner core has to be going there every single time, but there is enough of a presence that there’s kind of an on-ramp into the middle.
Jonathan: Yeah, I think that that’s exactly right. It’s a matter of strong personal conviction for me. A lot of the good things in my life came out of the internet and participating in internet culture. And I post and engage less these days and don’t really run online communities or really add energy to them in exactly the same way that I used to. But it’s a huge part of what I am doing, that I’m trying to create kind of a landing pad for people from the internet to build a set of real-life connections and find friendship and opportunity, and even just a place to crash.
And I really want to contribute to the same kind of social fabric that I came out of. And I think there’s a mentality of paying it back to your neighborhood, basically. You came up in the world through some set of social fabric. Even if you are a titan of industry, I think you will find that at some point, people were doing this out of passion and out of love of the game. And you could talk about anything from around the culture of innovation during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where people were just like, “We’re going to be innovators together, and we’re going to share all these innovations.”
And really doing it out of this sense of serendipity and passion and cause to the things that helped make Silicon Valley culture and the Bay Area great of like, we’re going to have these hackathons. We’re going to get in it for the love of the game. We’re going to help each other out. I’ve heard all kinds of just incredible stories from the early days of people being like, “Well, sure. You can use my company’s very large servers for no money. We’ll figure it out later.”
That all is social trust that decays over time if no one is there to renew it.
Ben: Yeah. And also because as these things go from being a couple of weird hackers in a garage to a major source of wealth and prestige and power, is that you get more people going in because they want to feed on those resources. And there becomes a problem of how do we filter out the grifters and scammers? Which just when you’re seven guys in a garage with no money, just isn’t really a problem that you have. And so part of it is that the foundations need to be continually renewed, and part of it is that the more you get, the more of a beacon you are for people who want to eat your stuff.
Jonathan: Yeah, and I think under those situations, there’s a call for people who maintain the social fabric at a new level. We could imagine that it’s level one where you’re like, myself and my buddies are going to do this thing that we’re very passionate about. We’re going to build a circle and a scene around it. And then as you start to develop resources and a bit of institutions, you both, well, you’re managing something institutional. You have a bank account.
You have paperwork you have to fill out. You have the new emotions and interests and like, oh, before, a bunch of things were just left implicit, but now some people are getting paid more than others. All this stuff just crops up as you move into a more institutional format, which means you have less time to manage the periphery and make new people feel welcome and all of the social stuff. And so it’s like if people want those institutions that are the lattice for the ambitions of some social set to expand and people to do even greater stuff in the world, people need to step up and start doing periphery social organizing because that is where I think the most important person at some institution cannot do the kind of continuous low-level friction of making the new person feel welcome and helping them get over their awkwardness to the same degree. I think you should probably touch base with that kind of thing every now and again.
But they just can’t do it to the same degree. So it’s like the effort of good people gets institutionalized in a way that is good, but then often they are not playing this role of just continuously renewing social fabric.
Ben: Yeah. I feel like I’ve seen a bunch of this arc with—I used to be very involved with the LessWrong social scene back in 2013. I was leading the local chapter in Boston, and this was this very early stage. There was only periphery at the time. And we were holding our meetings in MIT classrooms unofficially, just kind of sneaking into the building and giving people the instructions on how to unauthorizedly enter and get to where we were.
And there was no money involved. No one was working for any sort of organization. And then as they’ve, I think, done a quite good job of managing all of this, I eventually, around 2016 or so, I was much less involved. But they’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining these pipelines. There was a brief period of a couple of years where it kind of broke down and then got rebuilt, and now it’s this very large—they’ve got the whole Lightcone infrastructure, which is moving large sums of money.
It’s got a bunch of full-time people. They’re building all of this infrastructure for moving grants around. But they still need to have this fairly functional periphery, which is going to have less polished people, is going to have a lot of these opportunities. And it seems like they’ve done a fairly good job of being able to build out and maintain that stack with, not in a sort of super smooth, no conflicts way, but by virtue of grinding through the 12 million points of friction and several dozen really big heated arguments.
Conflict, friction, and vitality (30:56)
Jonathan: Yeah, I think that these things only ever look super smooth from a very, very zoomed out historical perspective, where all of the arguments that happen in the room and the drama all becomes this kind of backdrop for something that’s a bit of a meteoric rise. It’s very much Clausewitzian friction of, well, from the perspective of the French or whoever the Prussians are fighting, or any given moment, it’s very much like how could the Prussians be here so quickly, this lightning march from place to place? But from the perspective of some Prussian quartermaster, I’m sure there’s still an enormous amount of, “My hair is on fire, things are not in the places they need to be.” A constant scrambling and active improvisation to overcome barrier after barrier. And this is really the heart of, I think, a lot of the things we’re discussing, is that you need people who are constantly improvising to maintain the functionality of any kind of sophisticated or even small scene or system.
And things that look like they’re a absolute historical machine might have some major institutional components and they’ve really figured out a few things that they have down to a T and kind of everyone in the society knows how to do them. But because you’re trying to expand what you do in the world, because you want to grow, because you want yourself, your friends, your family, your children to have more resources or more beauty or more opportunity, you’re always going from like, well, our society has these things kind of pinned down into the next phase. And that sort of natural scaling of ambition also means that someone has to keep improvising to keep the logistical systems up.
Ben: Yes. And one consequence of this, which I think is very counterintuitive for many people, is that if you have a healthy organization, it’s going to be very contentious. There’s going to be these arguments, there’s going to be blow-ups and people who are trying to pull things in different directions and really getting into each other’s faces. And if things are generally pretty smooth and coasting along in a pretty steady manner without all of this sort of intense infighting, what it means is that you guys are coasting and slowly decaying, and there is no source of growth and vitality. The borders are not being expanded anywhere because, to go back to the Clausewitz army metaphor, you don’t get that type of friction when everyone is sitting in their base.
But when you’re driving into enemy territory and your supply lines are getting long, that’s what causes all of this friction. And so, if you have something that is healthy and vital and growing and becoming more important and bigger and more load-bearing, it’s going to have a lot of this very loud, very uncomfortable internal argument about where we’re going and, oh, no, I needed those resources for this project, but you’re trying to take them over there for your new thing. And that the sort of steadiness is a sign of gradual decay.
Jonathan: Definitely, if it’s steadiness that’s lasting for a long time. I think that probably a really healthy, functioning system that’s growing in this way will have these occasional periods where everyone’s on the same page and you just blow the opposition out of the water, or you achieve your goal and the technology comes together and you can spend, you can have these sort of flashes of glory where you execute and you win. And it’s after that and you have a big pile of resources that people need to discuss how they’re going to be expended and what the next big kind of target is. And those are the areas where I think you often start to see a lot of friction. I think that that’s the...
Even on the level of athletes or individual thinkers, you’ll have these moments where inspiration comes together with capacity and you just blow things out of the water. But if you want to grow, if you want to keep changing, you’re going to have to encounter new portions of the world, and then you won’t have a plan for handling them.
Ben: So it’s kind of a punctuated equilibrium model. Of sharp rise, steady for a bit, sharp rise, steady for a bit.
Jonathan: Yeah. It kind of reminds me of big cats and they just strike us. They’re so well organized on a bodily level, and there’s just such fierce intention. And then it all, if you ever watch a nature documentary and they miss, it can just feel almost silly, like the cat’s just there being like, “Aww.” And the animal runs off.
And then, but you occasionally see this perfect, and the jaguar or whatever drops from the top of the tree straight onto the neck of the animal, and it’s all over in an instant. And I think this is a kind of metaphor for what you see a lot with institutional success, is that these sort of moments of glory, I think really, really stand out in the world, just look really cool. We even have social infrastructure. It’s like what the Olympics is for, is to generate moments of pure, glorious execution. It would be true for any sort of band or anything else like this, that that’s the ideal of what you want.
But in order to do that, you need to handle an enormous amount of friction behind the scenes to get everything set up and everything in the right place and the right time.
Building your social context (36:37)
Ben: Yeah. If I can jump back a bit, there was a thing you said earlier that I wanted to poke at a little bit more, where you were talking about how there’s... It’s just you—for the social fabric, it’s just very different when you have like so much of it relies on already having that context, and it’s just when you have that built up and sort of, or the beginnings of it, it just puts you in a very different position than if you don’t have any of it. And just how do you think it is better... Like, how do you think people should act differently if they are trying to navigate a situation of, there are some of the pieces in place, or I’m in contact with a group that has some of this going on, versus if you’re just like, “Well, I’m just in the middle of nowhere with nothing to start from.”
Because it seems like, and my own experience is, that the sorts of things that work well in one of those circumstances just aren’t very appropriate to the other. It’s a pretty sharp distinction, and I imagine we have viewers in both circumstances.
Jonathan: Yeah. I’m going to start someplace that’s a little bit abstract, but we’ll get more concrete. I think when you’re in situations that are more determinate, when people know who you are, when they know that you can produce certain kinds of value, that you have these virtues, you can be relied upon in certain circumstances, there’s a certain kind of flexibility that actually comes out of that, and people kind of have a degree of trust. If you’re off the beaten path or you’re not at your best or you’re currently doing a behavior they don’t quite like—they’ll give you more grace quite naturally, because they know—
Ben: Yeah, I think of it as you have earned some credit with them.
Jonathan: Yeah, exactly.
And also, people know how to start interesting interactions with you when you are something that’s determinate, right? It’s like, well, you’ve written some articles about something. This just starts a lot of good conversations. You like to talk about how you wrote about your love for beautiful old things and how our society doesn’t care about this enough, and then people gave you some beautiful old things, really lovely plateware. This is an example of the serendipity of the world that comes when you are a determinate object, is that it provides people a context where they can improvise with you.
I think that if you are in the position of being indeterminate, and you’re a guy at a house party and you don’t know people, I think that’s a situation where a lot of desires can conflict, right? You can be like, “Hmm, there are social behaviors that bother me,” or, “It’s too loud,” or, “I just feel slightly uncomfortable here, but also I really wanna talk to that girl. Also, I want to seem cool.” I think in a lot of people, being in this indeterminate situation also brings up this indeterminacy in yourself. I think if you want interesting things to happen in that circumstance, you need to become more determinate.
You need to be like, “I’m going to really feel fine just striking out and talking or doing this particular kind of thing.” It’s a little like what people talk about in the world of romance. It’s like, don’t try and be everything to everyone. It’s like, should you get a tattoo or not from the perspective of your... It’s like some people will love that, some people won’t, and the same is true for all levels of sort of a lot of different forms of social behavior.
You can be the life of the party, and then some people will find that you’re being too much. You can be the guy who knows lots about lots of things and will kind of immediately go off on a beat about different historical or intellectual subjects. Some people will be like, “Oh my gosh, I have so much to learn.” Some people will be like, “This guy isn’t, he’s not any fun.” And in an ideal world, we’ll become flexible and great and be able to all do these behaviors at the right place at the right time.
But I think you need to become something first—to give people context to start to interact with you and then like to together flesh out kind of other sides of your character. And I think in the modern world, people just actually do end up feeling quite indeterminate because there’s not social structure that supports this, that supports a good process of self-discovery.
Ben: And so then there’s more of a need for people to kind of actively and purposefully try these things on and find which ones fit and what they can go with?
Jonathan: Yes, and not just on a level of, “I’m going to be this particular kind of guy,” but I think in a way that’s even more because that’s so intensely existential and spiritual and related to your own self-concept. Something that’s, it’s actually in a way easier to be like, “I will create this particular social context because it will enable something I like,” and then go from there. Like handling, making existential decisions in a bit of a vacuum is maybe the hardest thing anyone will ever do, in my opinion. It is way easier to be like, “Well, I do wish I would spend a little bit more time in this particular mode of human life.” Whether that’s, you wanna drink with your friends in the woods at midnight under the full moon and recite poetry.
Like you can do that. Like I think really any kind of moderately competent person or person who tries to become that or can find help to do that could set something like that up and make it super recurring and people would come there and engage with each other. Or you’re a reading group. So I would say like when I’m talking about rendering yourself determinate, the first thing that came to mind is not just making it clear that you’re a particular type of guy or engaged in a particular mode of social life, but actually just you become the person who’s providing the determinate context, which is kind of the contrast to an awkward house party where not enough people know each other.
Ben: Yeah. I’ve found in my own experience, a lot of the things that I’m really glad I’ve done started with this, “Man, nobody is doing events like XYZ.” Like, “Oh man, I went to this thing and it was the first time in two years I was able to have this type of interaction. Why is nobody doing this?” Then it’s like—why am I not doing this?
And then there were these caffeine and arguing parties I used to run for a while, where those just started because there was this particular style of my oddly combative argument that I was just not getting enough of, and I was like, “Okay, so I just need to build a social container for that.” And they became pretty popular, and I think that they were both good for the social fabric and good for me within it. And I got people asking, “Oh, when’s the next one of those going to be?” And trying to make sure, “Oh, my friends are coming into town. Let’s make sure they get into that.”
And it just started because I was like, man, I just had this interaction. And this was where I just ran into these people who I sort of vaguely knew, and we could just immediately get into it, and people knew that just going right into that debate is the activity here, and not everyone wants that. Certainly not everyone wants that all the time, but I need to make something where people are kind of expecting that and aiming for it. And yeah, I think that type of, here is the type of event that I want, here’s the type of container that I want, just go out and do it. I think it often works very well.
Balancing the formal and informal (44:14)
Jonathan: Yeah. And I think I know for myself that my own sort of psychological flexibility, openness, feelings of trust and camaraderie tend to go way up when you’ve all done something together well. And I think it is another important part for social organizing, is you should have some period of time where you kind of insist that we are going to do the activity together. People are going to do the reading. They’re going to talk about the reading.
They shouldn’t get too far off topic. You have to draw them back to the topic, stop people from going on these five-minute-long tangents that are not—Everyone’s there to do the activity, so people are going to find it distracting from what they want to do. Once you’ve all done that together, it’s so much easier to be relaxed and to listen to tangents or give tangents, and I’ve seen a kind of very interesting dynamic at a lot of reading groups that are structured well, and people sort of have time to hang out afterwards, and you as a community organizer kind of help provide that. You’re like, “I’m going to dinner. Would anyone else like to come?”
People will usually talk about other stuff for a while, and they’ll talk about their lives and the news and a bit of politics and everything else, and then the readings will start to crop back up and get interwoven with all of the other stuff that they’re encountering. And that is some of my favorite sort of encounter, where because you’ve done something really determinate, you all have the shared social knowledge. Everyone can refer back to it, and rather than you’re not trying to force it into everything, you just have this other field, and that’s kind of where this improvisation I’m talking about, the way that determinacy enables improvisation—is you have this unstructured field of all the things in life people want to talk about, and then you have this other structure, and they come to have this spontaneous relationship with each other. And that’s just incredibly enchanting, and I think it’s the kind of thing that people look for or really want in many areas of their life, is for something kind of clear and playful and determinate to emerge out of the arts and crafts. For people to take up music together in an improvised way, or for a whole scene to be like, “Let’s just go and do this really cool thing or cool mission or cool quest.”
All of that, it’s like this organized, dynamic, improvised behavior that I think is really excellent, can only emerge on a surface of people knowing other people’s capabilities, where their minds are at, what their interests are, and what the shared body of knowledge is. So it’s like if you want to go on adventures and go on adventures with your friends, you should build a lot of really determinate social context that is staying open to the world and not kind of heading into this ivory tower that you mentioned earlier, and striking that balance between we do the determinate activity, and we respect the rites and rituals, and then we also are interested in wider life as well.
Ben: Yeah. One of the reading groups I’m in, we’ll show up and hang out for a bit, and then we have a ritual phrase that we use when we are shifting to like, okay, now we are doing the activity. We are discussing the reading. And so it’s like because it’s got to be very clear when you’re doing which, basically.
Jonathan: Yeah. One thing I would really like people to know just in general is that one might have personal flaws, and there might be things about one that are kind of awkward, but actually you live in one of the most awkward times in human history. And we shouldn’t cry infinite tears over that. We should do things to make it less awkward and organized in a way that leaves open serendipity and improvisation. But a lot of these things are, people don’t know what’s going on.
A lot of people are just improvising and coasting and not picking up on social cues. People, I think often their awkwardness comes from the fact that they justly want more social structure. And it’s not just what people call autism. It’s actually really nice for lots of people, and if you manage to do a good and graceful job of finding these kind of rites and rituals that people actually enjoy, even people who are otherwise normal, socially competent, will be really thankful for it because so much of human life is determined by how much cognitive overhead you have. And if you provide something that’s determinate and good, everyone’s like, “Okay, we’re doing the activity. We can all focus together. We can all share this together and really take common joy in the same thing.”
And creating clear circumstances where we all take joy in the same thing is, I think, a lot of how we build beauty and beautiful social fabric in the world.
Ben: Yeah. It gives the skeleton to a lot of the less structured interactions which will be built on top of it. Cool. Well, thank you very much for coming. This has been a really interesting discussion, and I’m sure we’ll see you again soon.
Jonathan: Yeah. My pleasure.