Kill the author

One of the things that I've never really understood is the tendency of people to have heroes. To look at one particular idea, achievement, cultural contribution, creation, that someone has made, or even a whole string of them, and conclude from that that they're going to look up to this person as a whole human being – to admire them, imitate them, see them as a role model, whatever.

The reason I don't understand this is that it seems almost like a target location error to me – a confusion. You look up to them, admire them as heroes, for the particular things they've done or contributed, not for their existence as full and complete human beings – in fact, in most cases, you don't even know them as full and complete human beings. So it makes so much more sense to me to admire what they've contributed – the actual thing you care about – and ditch the individual entirely.

Thus, I've never been interested in individuals at all; I'm only interested in ideas, cultures, achievements, creations, contributions. I don't really care very much who made them. To the degree that I even know the names of the people who made them, it's in the same way that I know about brands – vaguely, and usually just as a sort of tag for a Bayesian prior that I'll like whatever else they do in the same domain of the things I previously liked from them. Sometimes I'll pick up fun little anecdotes about them, but that's it. This is especially true for people who were only or mostly notible for their participation in a particular milieu. For instance, I can name a few of the MIT AI Lab hackers, but I don't really care about them as individuals at all. Instead what I care about is what was done at the MIT AI Lab and the culture that was born there.

To be clear, this isn't borne out of some kind of bad experience with meeting your heroes – not at all. I just… don't find individuals as interesting as what they've done. And this is the crucial difference: many people take a retroactive "death of the author" approach when they find out that the creator of something they like also had terrible views or did terrible things, or went on to create some shitty and uninspired things later on; or they'll laugh and shake their heads in a sour grapes manner and say "well, they always say, never meet your heroes!" when they inevitably do meet their heroes, full of hope and respect, and find out they're just people, often shitty ones at that; meanwhile, I'm taking the preemptive approach. I simply don't intrinsically care much who the person is behind a good idea well expressed or executed, or an important contribution, or the core ideas behind a positive culture.

More, my endorsement of one particular idea or contribution to whatever field of theirs is not an endorsement of how they live, how they treat people, anything else they've done or said, or who they hang out with. And for the most part I literally couldn't give less of a shit about any of that either. I might check out the other work they've done along similar lines to the work of theirs I liked, but I don't take it as gospel, or hang my hopes on this also being good. I may support them if I want them to keep doing things, or go to lengths to avoid supporting them if I don't like what they do. But that's not about heroes and hero worship, that's paying for what I want more of. That's market logic. I especially don't back-read the other things they've done or said into the things they've done or said that I like or agree with, if I don't want to – I steal what I want from them and move on, unbeholden to them. Because the insight, wittiness, accuracy, power, or usefulness of (my interpretation of) an idea, even encoded in the original expression it was founded in, doesn't evaporate or change just based on other only transitively related things. That's part of why I have the Mirrors Page on this blog: to hold the ideas that I like and agree with and that have influenced me, detached from their authors – stolen.

This is in contrast to how many on the left seem to process ideas, creations, and achievements, where the author seems to be all-important even as they profess "death of the author": where negative moral properties of the author, or low quality in their other works, or whatever else, seems to cause this need to treat whatever that they liked from that individual as tainted by association, as unclean and impure, and to retroactively rationalize to themselves how it was "really bad all along" in order to make it psychologically easier for them to divest themselves of whatever it was they liked in order to stay morally pure. This is, of course, a horrible tragedy: it causes us to engage with art, or practical achievements, or culture, as an exercise in Christian purity testing and purification, in refusing to associate oneself with things marked impure even for secondary characteristics instead of inherent properties, instead of an exercise in appreciating achievement, passion, and skill. It also causes us to willfully wreck our ability to even clearly see and acknowledge achievement, passion, and skill wherever it arises in an attempt to align our perceptiosn with morality. And worst of all it cuts off our access to these things.

If we instead steal from the author, and kill the author's hallowed place in our heads preemptively, we can allow ourselves to see and engage with art and achievement for what they are and what they bring uniquely to human experience and reality without a moralistic dimension, allow ourselves to take and use what is good and useful for us, without thereby tainting ourselves. This ultimately denies these people power over us, even the power to withdraw their works from us.