Bentham's Burden

On solving trolley problems with Rubik's Cubes

When I was in college, I studied English lit, like a sucker. Not because studying literature is dumb but because the majority of people who teach it are, on net, not interested in making it enjoyable.

I did manage to take one business course too late in the game to seriously weigh switching out of English, but the professor who taught it was excellent at teaching and made it fun. It was his final year teaching and, while he had tenure, he was in extra DGAF mode. He was one of thirteen kids and the first person in his family to graduate college. He was from Ohio and had a massive pink head. He would tell Indian kids that they better go into fields with numbers straight to their face. That Jewish guys like me were dorks. Only girls with flat bellies should show them off etc. etc. All of us could hear it. It was a 300-person lecture and he was a crowd-work natural.

Despite the size of the class and his many asides, we learned a lot. I still have a journal I kept from his class but remember plenty of concepts he covered off the top of my head.

He taught in stories because stories make it easy to remember concepts. Definitions, by contrast, do not take place anywhere or any time. Plus, they don’t have the opportunity for emotional impact stories can have.

One thing that stuck with me was an addition he had made to an old adage. He said, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for life. Teach him how to farm fish and he can feed a village.”

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Bentham's Bulldog

recently penned a piece called The Postmodern Right.

In it he writes,

During the recent fights over PEPFAR cuts, for instance, those on the right would rarely make arguments. Their opposition to PEPFAR mostly involved whining about claims that we should care about poor children dependent on U.S. aid and calling such claims emotional blackmail. That and simply reiterating that they don’t care about poor foreign children dying, without providing any reason why anyone else should share their psychopathic indifference, or replies to arguments for cosmopolitanism. The sheer stupidity surpassed even the wildest fantasies of the woke left.

The right has, as Hanania notes, an oppositional culture. They don’t have an ideology as much as mere hatred of the left. When presented with arguments for left-wing positions, rather than fight them on the merits, they devolve to an almost postmodern refusal to accept facts or make their decisions based on what is right. They have an instinctive desire to punch back, even if they lack substantive criticisms.

Few had genuine, specific objections to foreign aid. Instead, they didn’t like that the left was telling them off. As a result, they developed utterly braindead procedural objections to any argument for foreign aid—accusing such arguments of being moral blackmail, unfair guilting, or in some other way fallacious.

One thing that struck me were Bentham’s specific word-choices. For one thing, he places the action of his story “during recent fights.” During these fights, he says his opponents “whine,” and that they don’t care about what he does. But saying that they “whine” shows Bentham doesn’t care about their concerns either. He dismisses a major constituency’s concerns about what their government should or should not be doing. This is the opposite of what you want to do if you want to convince them to join a coalition with you or at least not get in the way of what you want. Further, Bentham’s mirror image exists for his pleasure. He continues, “they have an instinctive desire to punch back.”

Now I’m sure Bentham has been in all manner of fistfight in his life; whereas I have only had one serious fight where me and the other guy intentionally tried to hurt each other. What I do know about fighting is that punching back is highly advised. Unless, of course, you take more pleasure in not being hit than you do in proving how good you are at fighting. If these guys are truly oppositional in their nature, perhaps Bentham should stop swinging on them. Some people are just looking for fights. That doesn’t make it not your fault when you keep getting in fights with them.

Additionally, when his opponents dunk on PEPFARistas, he treats it as illegitimate, “not argumentation,” but this is a narrow, socially unsophisticated way of looking at rhetoric. You can wish it weren’t so but you can actually get into political office by insulting your enemies. Instead of complaining about the dunkfest, Bentham should just put on a better dunkfest. This is the “effective” part of effective altruism. You have to sell it; otherwise you are just nagging.

While discussing Xitter poaster Captive Dreamer, Bentham writes

No arguments, just dunking. In fact, if you scroll through this guy’s Tweets, you’ll find something remarkable. While he Tweets constantly—dozens of times per hour, almost nonstop, with the obsessive furor of a man wholly without a life—and often takes shots at the Democrats, he never makes arguments for anything.

A man with no life? Who takes shots at Democrats? Who never makes arguments for anything? I couldn’t possibly imagine being forced to share the earth with such a person!

But herein lies the tushy rub: In Bentham’s framing, he sets doing something as the default setting for Global American Escapades. You see, if you don’t want to actively participate in the international salvation of people you will never meet, in a part of the world you will never go to, within a culture you do not already understand, who may not even like you, then you are displaying both your “immorality and stupidity.”

In Bentham’s rubric for life, you can either be Bentham or need Bentham. All other options are invalid. He doesn’t know what to do with you if you aren’t dying of HIV or saving people with HIV.

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As I was saying, this professor taught us to convey ideas through story. As an under-stimulated and extremely longhoused young lad, this was pretty cool for me.

Las Vegas Sales Douchebag Award Ceremony 2016.

One idea that comes to mind in this particular case of Bentham vs. everyone who doesn’t want to do Bentham’s thing, as an older, sage Substacker is something I call the Rubik's Cubicle, an idea that smashes together all the politeness required at the office with the tedium of playing games you don’t care about.

In Rubik's Cubicle, you are forced to play a game so irrelevant to everything you do that it might as well be Rubik’s Cube. And the best part of it is you get to play it against your boss who does nothing but practice Rubik’s Cube.

Selling the dream

Back in the day, when I was a hotshot sales douchebag, I was really good at it. Really, really good.

This major globo-gym pulled a hostile takeover at my little mom-and-pop fitness company one April and by June they had yet to fire me and they were running a sales contest. Top performers would be flown out to stay at the Cosmo in Las Vegas to party for a weekend courtesy of the globo gym. My very first year I qualified except for the fact that I hadn’t been with the company in excess of 9 months. They didn’t want to fly me out even though I had literally doubled my production from $4,000 to $8,000 to $16,000 in my first three months. The subsequent two years I worked for the company, I was a shoo-in. I absolutely fucked it up.

There was a catch though. The final day in Las Vegas, while everyone was turbo hungover from compulsory clubbing, we had to play tennis. To be very clear, among us were extremely talented athletes. Many of us were grossing between $150,000 and $300,000 worth of personal training sales per year so we were obviously decently easy on the eyes. At least one of us played in the NFL.

Despite the rampant and elite athleticism, none of us played tennis. Which was very satisfying to one of the guys from the VC company who owned us. You see he was a failed tennis star, but good enough to smoke every single one of us since we mostly played with barbells, gymnastics gear, and kettlebells.

The other thing is none of us played tennis because we weren’t that into it. Just dispositionally, it checks out that most of us would gravitate to the many other more popular sports. It’s just how statistics work.

Which one of these guys do you think is better at tennis and which one is better at getting CTE?

So, as a part of not seeming antisocial or getting fired, we would play doubles and watch this little 5’6” man with super white teeth serve us into oblivion, all of us sweating vodka, whiskey, or Henny. He loved every fucking second of it.

In Rubik's Cubicle, you are forced to play a game so irrelevant to everything you do that it might as well be Rubik’s Cube. And the best part of it is you get to play it against someone who does nothing but practice Rubik’s Cube.

Bentham is obviously smart. In fact, he seems exactly like the kind of guy I imagine can get really good at Rubik's Cube. I bet he can process tons of information at extreme speeds and that you’d be able to witness this quality as he set about lining the matrix up so that each side of the cube was monochrome.

Similarly, this boss of ours wasn’t just good at tennis. In addition to being a shrewd businessman off the court, on the court he trained all of the qualities of speed, agility, and coordination that feed into the game but also many other sports. None of us thought that he was unathletic, just that he was cherry-picking a sport in which he knew he could beat us. Beating us in tennis said absolutely nothing about why he owned us and not the other way around. He just as easily could have been a golfer, or wrestler. If he had wanted to play against us in any contact sports, he would have died, a fact conspicuously irrelevant in Rubik’s Cubicle Championships, no matter which year you went.

It turns out, it’s not that people avoid devoting thousands of hours to training on Rubik's Cube because their parents think it will give them CTE. Nor are they concerned that, by refusing to play, people will think them immoral or dull. The reason they don’t fuck with Rubik’s Cube is because it doesn’t interest them. No matter how smart or virtuous learning one may make them or make them seem, even that doesn’t sell them on wanting to play with one. It turns out, the heart wants what it wants and there are infinite things besides your thing for people to want.

Hence, the mass popularity of shrimp-welfare charities. You can tell everyone how important you think they are but, at the end of the day, you are mostly countersignaling, separating your smart, rational self from the hoi polloi. If everyone who doesn’t want your thing is bad, people will just cop to being bad so they don’t have to play with your Rubik’s Cube.

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Mind-reading and demagoguery

As my subscribers know, I would never engage in mind-reading or demagoguery but as an exercise in empathy, I’m going to try to create a theory of mind for Bentham based off his own words.

Bentham takes it for granted that there just are fights over PEPFAR, but fights aren’t just some inevitable thing that happens without a thing to fight over. Or are they?

Is Bentham participating in the fight because the subject really stirs him? Or does he start with the impulse to call people stupid and immoral and then fill in the subject matter that allows him to paint them as such? Let’s take it for granted that they are already going to be immoral and stupid (default settings in life), how will Bentham arguing with them or writing screeds that read their minds and demagogue against them fix anything?

Let’s say Bentham can successfully quarantine them from polite conversation, will that then get PEPFAR funded? Will it make him stop calling them stupid and immoral? These human urges to counter-signal, I am not so sure they disappear just because you get your way on a policy issue or effectively paint them as untouchables.

I have some counter-arguments to Bentham which are not particularly interesting and are also irrelevant since I’m not in favor of the PEPFAR cuts. I’m more interested in juxtaposing our rhetorical techniques. After all, Substack is the sport we know we both play. He has more subscribers but so far I have way more people not giving to shrimp welfare charities than he has people giving to them.

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In retrospect, I’m not sure my coinage about Rubik's Cubicle is all that catchy or whether it’s good enough to convey the idea that there’s a type of person who has a very narrow idea of what constitutes a good or smart person and if you can’t play their specific game, it makes them feel really, really good about themselves.

I’m also not sure how much sway Captive Dreamer has over the Trump administration. Bentham (who is followed by Nate Silver) points out that Captive Dreamer is followed by JD Vance. Although maybe I am being rude and perhaps Bentham is responsible for some of the analysis in Silver’s basketball coverage and maybe he helped him realize, if a little late, that Joe Biden was dead for the majority of his administration. Silver must disavow Bentham if not.

Happiness

This business professor used to give his own Happiness Lecture on the last day of class each semester. He was so popular, even at my mediocre state school, that the lecture hall would flood with kids skipping other classes just to hear his tips. The guy said a lot of off-color things but no one could deny he was one of the happiest people you ever met and he probably had a few tips on how we could be happy too. Underneath all the shit-talking, he had helped thousands of students and had even mentored one of the first C-suite ladies in tech back in the day. Believe it or not, he was also involved in extending micro-loans to Africans.

Which brings me to my conclusion: The more Africa develops, the more it will engage in practices like farming fish, selling vape pens, making OnlyFans content and selling gym memberships that are impossible to get out of, practices which have horrendous and obvious downsides. Unfortunately, it’s the shape capital often takes, especially when adversity and scale interact with it. Whether it’s you or your country which is low down the economic chain, there’s a good chance you feed yourself doing unsavory things. Fortunately, in Bentham’s game, you don’t have to pick between shrimp welfare and antivirals. You can condemn the means by which wealth is created (factory farming, strip-mining, prostitution etc.) while you condemn those whose wealth you want to confiscate for being insufficiently excited about it. If you’re not Bentham and you’re not someone who needs Bentham, you must be stupid and immoral. It’s the only conclusion.