Category: Life

When a human being finds themselves in a community, their minds subconsciously begin to observe what is normal and expected to do and say and believe within that group and what is not, and then reward that person with feelings of happiness and belonging when they are seen to align with these norms, and punish them with feelings of sadness and isolation and guilt if they are seen to contradict those norms. This is a powerful effect: even if one has strong, well-evidenced convictions that one can argue for coherently and at length, even if one's actions are, outside of that group, widely known by oneself and others to be beneficial and upstanding, one is still not free from this reward and punishment mechanism. It doesn't matter how carefully you analyze your actions, how surely you know you are right, you will still be punished by your own mind for stepping out of line, and rewarded for aligning. There is no way around this. Eventually, either you leave any community that does not align with you, and eventually learn to stay aloof from all communities because no wider community will ever align with an idiosyncratic individual, or you succumb to the inescapable reward system embedded in the deepest parts of your brain and become another member of the sludge.

Moreover, one of the easiest and lowest-cost ways to be seen to align with the norms of a community is to publicly enforce those norms on someone else. It doesn't require you to actually change or adapt your behavior, preferences, beliefs, or habits, but it is inherently loud, social, involving other people, and easy to turn into whatever degree of performance is necessary to maximize reward. You don't even need to be intentionally malicious or manipulative or status-seeking to fall into this behavior, either – your subconscious will reward you or punish you accordingly, and so you will naturally find yourself doing this if you don't actively and consciously resist it, because that's how your incentives align, it's the path of least resistance. And ultimately, as I said before, those rewards can't be ignored or resisted forever. You either have to eliminate them, or you succumb. Humans are not designed to, and cannot, live voluntarily in pain forever if they're given a choice at every second to escape that pain, even if it is social pain.

This incentive to enforce these norms then redoubles and reinforces the automatic incentives already at work in each person's subconscious, which creates the perfect self-reinforcing Prisoner's Dilemma, where every person has to be afraid of every other person enforcing the norms of the community on them, and so goes along with enforcing those norms on everyone else as well, themselves therefore contributing to the fear of others that leads those others to enforce those norms on them. And if any one person steps out of this circular firing squad, they will be shot on sight, to one degree or another.

It gets worse, though. Your subconscious doesn't stop at what you are seen to do or not do – your subconscious knows what is normal and expected to believe, and it knows what you think, so it enforces these rewards and punishments on you internally for what you think as well. Less harshly, perhaps, but that just makes it more insidious. Even the strongest-willed person of conviction will eventually be bent by subconscious forces of alignment they cannot even be aware enough of to resist. Moreover, humans have evolved to derive our sense of truth and reality from what those around us believe. Even if you can resist the endlessly wily and subtle hedonic bending of your will, you cannot resist the fundamental doubt and sense of vertigo and fear that the human mind inherently derives from disagreeing with the group around them even when they have the deepest knowledge and evidence on their side. The only way to avoid this is through complete fanatic devotion, and that has its own consequences.

Then there's the natural formation of social power hierarchies and in-groups. Even in formally horizontal organizations, there will always be people with more resources with which to engage with the community: who are more outgoing, more extroverted, better at speaking, have more free time, more money, better organizational skills, more experience, who are not disabled in one of a million ways, whose hobbies incline them to sociality such as partying and cooking for people, who are better looking, more likeable, have a better memory for names and faces, etc. None of the points that are salient to whether someone has more resources with which to engage with the community have anything to do with their moral character or their actual skills in relevant areas (in communities where skills matter), but all of these resources are vastly more effective than the ones that truly matter in securing soft power over a community which can even be pleasant and invisible most of the time, but which grants them a huge amount of social domination over everyone else in the community. There is absolutely no way to prevent this from happening, either. We cannot take these resources away from people, and we can't eliminate the fact that simply having more time and being more pleasant to be around is a powerful force in social situations. Nor can formal organization avoid this pitfall through an attempt to make things clear and legible: these power dynamics will still form through backroom meetings and cliques, since the power of any formal organization is only in the social norm that its principles must be followed, and those are under the sway of these social elites by definition, and even if formal organization did eliminate this problem, it would do so only by rigidifying and formalizing it: making it even harder to do away with or escape. And from this vantage point, those with this outsize influence can essentially steer the norms of the community, and take advantage of the first two factors to control everyone within it thereby.

Then there's the way that information is transmitted in communities. The fact is that every person within a community is not equally connected to all other people in that community, and the web of friendly relations of a community is rarely a fully connected graph even with multiple hops – humans have preferences for who they like to talk to and spend time with, and also simply limited time to talk and spend time with others in the first place, and if you like a person, it's likely they will have similar preferences in who they like, so they're unlikely to hang around someone you'd never in a million years tolerate just as much as they do you, which means that connections between graphs of similar people fall off sharply when they reach dissimilar people even if not completely. This is only enhanced when you take into account the popularity and norm enforcement dynamics I described previously. This means that when one person knows something that's relevant to the community as a whole, or some other member of that community, they will communicate it to the people they personally like, and those people may communicate it to those they personally like, and so on, but it may never actually be made public so that all members of the community can actually access that knowledge, or communicated to the relevant person at all. Thus you can easily have almost the entire community coordinating on common knowledge while key individuals or groups are completely left out of the picture.

The final dynamic in communities is the inherent tendency toward witch hunts, lynch/mob mentality, legibility politics, and call-out culture:

1. Witch hunts – if publicly enforcing a set of norms on someone who has stepped outside of them is a strong low cost way to gain reward and social standing, then there's a natural incentive to go looking for such people if they aren't in ready supply. This means reading way too deeply into people's words and actions, coming up with bizarre and insane conspiratorial thinking to justify going after them, reading deep into their history and ignoring that they may have changed as a person, not accepting apologies, and not accepting apologies.
2. Lynch mob mentality – if one person is already enforcing some norm against someone, then what could be lower cost and more social-standing-enforcing than joining in? And the more people who are doing it, the easier it is to join in. Soon, attacking a person or group of people will itself become the norm, instead of just being predicated on norms.
3. Call-out culture – what's easier than actually enforcing a norm on someone yourself? Making a public announcement that it should be done, and then joining in on the lynch mob when it happens. This disincentivises actually trying to resolve problems when they do happen in a mutually satisfactory and beneficial way between the people actually involved, in a sort of mediation approach, or just ejecting a problematic element from the community, in favor of making the biggest stink possible about it in a way that often even helps victims very little.
4. Legibility politics – if there's a strong incentive in any community to do the things I've listed above, then there is going to be extremely strong pressure on anyone in a community to ensure that what they believe and how they act are perfectly legible to the rest of the community, so that the community can see for sure that they're not violating any norms (and thus potentially a target). Thus there's much less freedom to for self expression and many more careful disclaimers where people feel the need to specify what they're not saying.

Those who try to make positive changes often talk about using this power of communities to stigmatize things that are morally wrong such as sexual harassment and misogyny and so on, or transmit useful and pertinent information that should be kept a secret from others via "whisper networks," but while this mechanism can be put to new tasks, its existing operation cannot be limited or circumscribed – while you try to use it to do good things, it will be causing more horrible, destructive distortions in the background, and there's nothing you can do about it.

It might be argued that I'm giving a skewed picture here by only focusing on the negative ways in which communities effect our behavior, but the thing is that:

1. Fundamentally, I think individual autonomy to decide what you think, what you believe, how you act, and how you express yourself, is the most important thing. Everything else should be in service to that. I am, if you had to put it into concrete philosophical terms, an autonomy and self expression-focused rule consequentialist.
2. I'm not aware of any fundamentally positive ways in which communities can effect one's behavior. The things I've talked about above can be used for positive ends, for sure, like deconverting a right winger from their harmful ideology by dint of them having a lot of marginalized friends or something, because these mechanisms are ultimately somewhat morally neutral, but they're inherently contrary to point 1, and in my opinion tend to skew negative, not positive, in their broader implications.

The next, and perhaps hardest to describe in specific terms, but by far the largest, problem with communities is that they don't just cause individuals to act in new ways due to the presence of other individuals in an interconnected social dynamic as I described above. Those interconnected social dynamics can also lead to emergent behavior on the part of the group as a whole that does not reflect the beliefs or goals of any individual, or even majority, within the group, but nevertheless is materially real and has concrete implications in the world.

This is because the community's actions and the beliefs/goals implied therein are a result of the infinitely complex web of actions and recursive reactions in the individuals that compose it, which itself can inherently lead to emergent behavior on the part of the whole group that's different from what any one person intended or did, combined with the inherent tendency toward groupthink incentivising each member of the community to go along with whatever the community as a whole is doing.

This effect becomes even stronger when we take into account the fact of the prisoner's dilemma coordination problem inherent to communities, where even if every single person disagrees with the beliefs and practices of a community, they can all still end up being kept in line with them anyway, because nobody can read minds, and so each person may know they don't agree, but think everyone else does, and so think that if they spoke up, they'd be hounded for it, so no one speaks up and finds out nobody actually agrees with what's going on and breaks the cycle. And then since everyone else feels that way too, if any person actually does be brave and speak up, they actually will get hounded for it, because public enforcement of the presumed norms of a community is a necessary action to stay part of the in-group of that community, so everyone, assuming they'll get in trouble if they don't hound the outlier, will hound them, further reinforcing the assumptions that forces everyone into silence and incentivises them to attack anyone who refuses to be quiet.

This means that communities are not only likely to exhibit emergent behavior no one wants, but also that their internal cohesion mechanisms will protect and perpetuate that behavior given enough time and development, meaning that communities can not only emerge as their own ontological entities, but actually tend to be stable as such! Which leads me to my next point…

The next importantly dangerous aspect of communities is their tendency toward social inertia. Social inertia happens through:

1. people forming routines and habits that keep them acting in a certain way that maintains the community's existence and behavior;
2. forming expectations that make them want the community to continue to exist and operate in the ways that it did before,
3. and building aspects of their lives in dependent ways on the community or its behaviors, such that they have a direct interest in maintaining its continued operation in the previous ways,
4. and those who have had the biggest hand in forming the social norms, and who have the most social status and power, and the least in their life outside the community, seeking its perpetuation.

These individual habits, expectations, and dependencies, if they are shared by a sufficient number of the community, or by the social elites within the community, can then be reified into social norms themselves, which then means that they'll be enforced through all the many mechanisms, both subtle and brutal, that I discussed in the previous section, essentially using the self-coherence property of communities to create a self-preservation property. And then these reified social norms will be transformed over time into traditions and dogmas as the social norms outlast any individual human's lifespan, meaning that generations of people within the community will be introduced to a space where those norms are already fully reified, encoding them into how they think about the community (or how they think in general) and completely framing their expectations and ways of seeing the world, making those reified social norms almost impossible to get rid of, since even if they're somehow miraculously nominally eliminated, the same framing and methods of thought will remain.

This may start out neutral, or even fine, but eventually any community, any behavior or norm within that community, or any belief, will become outdated, in need of revision, or lose its original context and meaning – and when that happens, the social inertia that prevents change, development, or even healthy annihilation will become a serious problem. The community will just live on forever, a zombie entity existing only to further its existence.

My general take on how to organize communities in the opening is only part of the story. What do I, as an individual, do in light of all this? Here's some things I do (basically naturally and automatically, this is not something I have to force myself to do, although it may be for you):

1. I like to stay separate and aloof from communities, coming down like Zarathustra off his mountain to visit them once in awhile, or observing them from afar and enjoying watching, but not trying to get too emotionally or materially dependent or socially enmeshed in any community at all. I do this by:
   • I don't love abstractions, even ontologically extant emergent abstractions like communities. I love particular things in the world, and that includes particular people. So if there is a person in any community I'm in whom I like, who is likely to bring me back, I instead try to establish an independent and meaningful relationship with them instead. Maybe I never even come back to the wider community at all!
   • I make sure that my beliefs, hobbies, and the media I enjoy are my own. I don't have to care what the wider community about that hobby thinks or feels, or feel beholden to them; I may engage with what they think as an interesting intellectual exercise, or when it aligns pleasingly with what I think and enjoy, but I don't ever have to worry about it.
   • I keep a small group of true friends around me who can challenge me, support me materially and emotionally, and keep me company, since as antisocial as I am, humans are still social creatures and need to talk. But I make sure that that group stays small enough that it remains a group of individuals, not any kind of reified "thing" like a community.
   • I make sure that I am not materially dependent on any community as a whole – only individual people, who would support me independently from anything any community thought or did.
2. Outside of my friend group, I generally prefer somewhat anonymous, transactional relationships. This way social dynamics and reputation and so on don't enter the picture – each party knows what they want out of the relationship and is there to get that, and doesn't care much about anything else, and the relationship will easily dissolve afterward if it isn't still wanted. The ultimate union of egoists is a market exchange.
3. I make sure that I am intellectually self-sufficient.