Tom Morris

The Conformist Revolution Manifesto

Some beautiful and unique snowflakes have put together a manifesto called the Freak Revolution. It’s a ~5Mb PDF.

It promises a revolution of ideas, and is thus not like the American Revolution or the French Revolution (p. 21). Why is that? Because those revolutions actually happened? Or because they had no ideas? I’d say both revolutions had some pretty fundamental ideas about human nature - the liberal ideal. Okay, what’s this all about then?

The first thing you need to change is your attitude. You need to be happy. Have you ever met a miserable world-changer? It just doesn’t happen. Unhappy people aren’t effective. Miserable people don’t achieve big goals. Gloomy people don’t have the motivation to stick with anything long enough to make a real difference. Oh yeah? How about some world changers? If Jesus were born in America today, he’d be a prime candidate for Prozac. Luther was a miserable old bugger, and he only started Protestantism. Kierkegaard hasn’t got that big Hollywood smile but he achieved more as an author in his 42 short years than many ever will. How do we know if someone is happy? For all we know, there are plenty of happy people out there who have deep misery just beneath the surface. And there are plenty of us who are firmly cynical, jaded or stoical who get lots done. Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Hogarth, Mencken. They didn’t wear stripey socks or go to neopagan fetivals - no, they looked at the world and saw the sheer crapness of much of it. It’s a tough position: thinking the whole world is filled with awfulness - mostly human awfulness - but it actually proves you have standards. If one goes around thinking the world is terrible, you tend to have some ideas of what it would be for the world to not be terrible.

The real problem with the relentless positive message is that it blames the wrong people: if I read about some tragedy and get angry - how about this one: 20 children die every minute from disease, malnutrition and other ills caused be extreme poverty. That should cause you to despair about the cause of these problems, and to think that the world is pretty sick if it’s willing to let so many people die of easily preventable causes. The positive people now seem to think that it’s my fault for being angry. I’m not being positive. The primary problem is my attitude, according to them. But it isn’t. I’m angry that I live in a society that would let so many people die with so little thought. Reading ‘Getting Things Done’ isn’t going to fix poverty or AIDS, terrorism, organised crime, mass delusion or anything like that. Positive thinking doesn’t free slaves or free people from tyrants. Reading a productivity book is one of the ways they suggest you ‘unlock your personal power’.

A slightly more worrying part is the bit about eliminat[ing] the word “should” from your vocabulary. Apparently, it saps your personal power to think deontically. The authors cite the sentence: I want to sleep in, but I should get up because I have to go to work today. Then they reword it to I want to sleep in, but I also want to keep my job, so I’ll choose to go to work today because I want that more than I want to sleep in. This change of phrasing converts you from being a hapless victim of fate to being the captain of your own destiny. I don’t get it. You’ve moved from thinking you ought to do something to threatening yourself with the consequences of not doing it. This is perfectly fine if it’s just means-end thinking about yourself, but if you apply it to moral behaviour, you have a real problem. ‘I want to rape and kill Susan, but I shouldn’t because it’s wrong.’ vs. ‘I want to rape and kill Susan, but I want to not go to prison more, so I won’t’. In the former, you’ve acknowledged that it’s wrong, wheras in the latter you are solely avoiding prison. You could have it as ‘I want to rape and kill Susan, but I want to be ethical also and not infringe on Susan’s rights (or reduce Susan’s self-determination or act against the universal imperative etc.)’, which is putting the morality back in - but you can really summarise that as ‘I want to rape and kill Susan, but I shouldn’t because it’s wrong’. Getting rid of ‘should’ (and ‘ought’, presumably) from our language may let us unlock our personal power, but it also gives licence to the immoralist lurking inside.

The fact that you can avoid using a word doesn’t mean you are avoiding the meaning of the word. The authors claim, as per the idea that you should eliminate ‘should’ from your vocabulary, that they didn’t use the word ‘should’ anywhere in their document (they mentioned it - see the use-mention distinction). They used the word ‘must’ though - in the imperative sense - To escape control, we must connect. But the very fact that a word like ‘should’, ‘ought’ or ‘must’ is not used doesn’t mean that one is not making imperative statements - on page 28 of the manifesto, the authors enjoin the reader to openness and honesty in communication, and generally tell the reader to seek to improve themselves or uncover their true identity. These don’t use the word ‘should’, but if the word ‘should’ does sap your personal power, then surely any imperative language might do so too.

The manifesto gives some further solutions, mostly around “disconnecting from the control paradigm”. One of these is to Opt Out of the News: apparently, lying officials on the news [poison] your heart, and the media encourages us to live in terror. Okay, I understand that, but what about the information? We’ve seen what happens when people disconnect from information about the world around them - they end up being low-information voters and voting for morons who enact terrible policies. In an ideal world, people would try hard to keep track of what is going on in the world - the informed citizen is necessary to hold government, business and other powerful people in check. I want more people to engage their brain and think hard when it comes to making choices, especially choices which govern me. There is a rational middle ground here: instead of opting out of the news, how about only reading news sources that don’t try to manipulate the fear bits of your brain? Climb up that media status chart a bit, and try to elevate the habits of your friends and loved ones: stop reading the Daily Mail and start reading The Economist. Find blogs by smart people and subscribe to them. Ruthlessly cut out the speculative, hyped-up bullshit that passes for news in a lot of papers and broadcast media. Same with TV: there’s nothing wrong with watching the odd dumb TV show. A lot of people think reality TV is an evil curse on our culture. I don’t. I think that things that shorten our attention span are bad. I think the fact that many people are willing to go out and buy DVD boxsets of dramas/sci-fis and sit and watch large chunks of the series in one sitting actually shows they’ve got a lot more attention span than we give them credit for. With TV as with news, be choosy. If you want to throw out TV though, that’s not too bad. I don’t understand why people spend large amounts of money on TV - either on TV sets or on pricey satellite or cable subscriptions. It’s a recession, and that forty pound a month Sky subscription could be so much better spent.

Aside: You don’t need higher education, formal education, or a degree. No, but sometimes it helps. Then again, I’ve spent the last year of my life getting a Master’s degree, and am hoping to go on and do a Ph.D, so I may be rather biased on that point. All that science and technology you can use to keep your life and social relationships in order - large chunks of that was produced by people who took exactly the opposite advice. You might not need formal education to be successful. But you don’t need to be successful in order to think logically and critically - and that’s what is at the heart of higher education. It’s very sad that this has now become extremely expensive, even here in the UK. (Derek Bok: if you think education is expensive, try ignorance)

Another recommendation of the manifesto: Opt Out of Politics. Feel free to opt out of politics - just be aware that politics won’t opt out of you. Let us imagine if everyone lives in community and connection with one another, what happens when someone breaks the rules? Someone steals from you. What do you do? How do you decide that someone breaking into your house and stealing your television is not acceptable but someone flying an aircraft a 20,000 feet above you is okay? Hint: it begins with the letter ‘p’. If anything, you should do exactly the opposite: you should get educated, get involved with politics in as big a way as you can stand. If politics sucks because we are disconnected from it, we should get involved and try to change it. That means joining parties and pressure groups, writing to your representatives, rallying people together and working to get things changed. If you opt out of politics, you aren’t going to opt out of the rules and policies that those fuddy-duddy old men enact. When your boss raids the pension fund, what’s your recourse? Happy feelings and positive thinking or the courts? If you really want to live without politics, try Somalia, the Libertarian Paradise. Or maybe the Free State Project. I used to be in that camp. I guess I quite like being able to get medical care though.

I think religion, spirituality, the Divine and all that stuff is bunk, so whatever.

And the public school system? Yeah, many schools suck. I went to a school that many would consider towards the top end of state schools in a very affluent area. Didn’t like it. I could have gone to a local private school. Probably wouldn’t have liked it much either. I did reasonably well. Well enough to get where I’ve got. There’s lots that’s wrong with the education system: an overemphasis on technology, a complete failure on the part of politicians to really sort out what the purpose of education is, a lot of technocratic, vocational crap that wants to spend public money turning out more uncritical office drones. There’s too much religion in school. There’s a really shitty system of fashion-driven cliques - and, well, using your brain is not high on any of the list of desirable characteristics that the cliques use to sort their applicants. Minorities both sexual and racial bear the brunt of bullying and abuse. Some teachers are really quite shit at their jobs (lots aren’t, mind). There is grade inflation, an overly complicated system of jargon-laden qualifications, too much testing, badly designed curricula and so much more. But does that mean parents do a better job? For some kids, yes. I’m not convinced about unschooling - I think you do need a little bit of discipline for some kids - playing Mario all day isn’t getting an education. And I don’t buy some of the claims about experiental learning - that you have to do something in order to learn something. Yeah, it’s nice, but it’s not always practical - books have their place. But the flip side of this is simple: for many things, you don’t have the expertise. Maths, science, history, geography - beyond the primary level, we generally require people to have degrees in a relevant subject in order to teach that subject. There is a reason for this. And there is a downside to homeschooling - while it may be great socially, sometimes it’s not good intellectually. For many families, homeschooling is an easy way out of a bad school system, but for some it’s a way to basically push the religious beliefs of the parent on to the child at a time when they have no alternative but to accept. And they have no counterbalance in the form of school. Sunday school becomes weekday school too. And out the other end you get dunces. Stupid, mouthbreathing dunces. Let’s not beat around the bush: that’s abuse. Everyone should have the chance of a good education - just advocating homeschooling or unschooling gives free pass to indoctrination. And what of those people who can’t afford to take time out to teach their kids? They should be able to get the best education possible - raise up those standards. Make every school as good as Eton, make every university as good as Harvard, give everyone an equal chance to go. Now, that is an inspiring challenge. Oh, but we aren’t allowed to do that as we’ve opted out of politics.

As for opting out of the food system? Well, yeah, I’m a vegetarian. I won’t bite your head off about it though - partly because I’m too busy eating carrots.

The manifesto tells us to opt out of societal norms. Okay, that’s fine. But how far? Society tells you that you should be a heterosexual, monogamous, buttoned-up non-boat-rocker. It also tells you to not fuck kids or murder people. Fuck society. Isn’t that what Thatcher told us to do? Oh, no, she told us there was no such thing as society, so it didn’t matter much if the kiddies didn’t get milk in school or the poor and dispossessed went without food. What makes this any different? Be different. Be a freak. Be yourself. Putting aside the logical question of whether I should be someone else if I’m not different or a freak (I’ve got a rather nice set of ties, stop telling me to be different!), shouldn’t we be taking this to the limit and telling paedophiles and rapists to be themselves?

Many may wonder about this and suggest that I shouldn’t be attempting applying logic to slightly goofy Internet manifestos, but I think that these kinds of attitudes are expressed so often, they need a little bit of critical scrutiny. I could be extremely cynical about this kind of thing - the fact I’ve explained my reasons shouldn’t lead you to think that I’m not cynical, but just that all the opinions I express that tend to be cynical also have a rational underpinning. If you want some cynicism, try this MetaFilter post (newage altculture popqueer self-help comic for the clueless, if you have to tell us you’re freaks, you’re really not, I’m just glad these two crazy kids were able to break out of the terrible oppressive boxes the world tried to force them into, and crawled safely away inside new boxes.). But cynicism of that sort doesn’t alert people to the problems I find with the message. On a meta-level, this is one of the reasons why I am trying to go into academic philosophy rather than just getting drunk to the point of unconsciousness.