From Propriety to Extremism

Mental illness isn't necessary, but it's helped

Crazy eyed person looking at a giant book

Editor’s Note: This one is really long, way too long for email, on the back of a lot of text. Possibly it should have been two or three posts, but honestly the seams where it could be split were non-obvious. If you all would like I can try to break it up and repost as a few different essays in part 1, 2, 3 style to make reading it easier.

Those of us writing about modern dysfunction and how the Left’s cultural crusade has spun rapidly into madness often cite literal mental illness as a key driver of the process. The mentally ill get control of society’s reins and drive us to the dark place their minds inhabit. There are different takes, but the theme is there in

el gato malo

,

Lorenzo Warby

and of course the deeply insightful work of

Harrison Koehli

, among others. The fundamental problems of society, particularly the Left, are the result of mental illness that seeks to shape the rest of the world to match itself, creating a system as dysfunctional as the minds that are trying to shape reality to match their desires. Regular people are caught up in this mess, their generally prosocial behaviors exploited by the madness of those who are driving the changes¹.

I think, however, that psychopathy, sociopathy, or other mental illness is not not a requirement of the spiral, but is instead enabled by the underlying mechanisms of how humans come to judge behavior. Even perfectly sane people can fall into the trap of wildly spiraling propriety norms, and the crazies simply thrive in that environment.

As usual, Adam Smith leads the way, because to understand why things can get so far out of hand we have to have a working model of how people determine what proper behavior is².

The Basics of Moral Judgements

Assuming you don’t have time to go read a few hundred pages on the matter, I will summarize for you. Humans constantly judge every action on a scale as good, bad or indifferent. We can break down general categorical descriptions thusly:

• Propriety: Basic expectations of human behavior. Actions according with propriety do not deserve praise, but failure to accord with propriety deserve blame or punishment.

• Praise Worthy: A person showing proper moral judgement should praise someone for going above and beyond the requirements of propriety. “Good job!”

• Blame Worthy: A person showing proper moral judgement should blame someone for failing to meet the requirements of propriety. “What’s wrong with you?”

• Reward Worthy: Beyond mere praise, showing the proper moral judgement and appreciation requires conveying a real reward on someone. “Thank you for shoveling my driveway for me; I baked these cookies for you.”

• Punishment Worthy: Beyond merely spoken disapproval or shame, proper moral judgement demands active harm to be visited upon the actor. “You have been found guilty of murder, for which you will be hung from the neck until dead.”

Now, a few things to keep in mind:

1. These are subjective and every person will see them differently, but generally we should expect everyone within a society to be roughly on the same page. Still, people will judge things differently, and may change their minds over time.

2. These categories are just rough spots on a scale. Where exactly is the line between Praise Worthy and Reward Worthy? Doesn’t matter so much as understanding that Reward Worthy is a higher category of approval. Is throwing someone a parade for their action Praise or Reward? Again, doesn’t matter much as the subjective value of the Praise as Reward gets blended with the subjective value of the action anyway.

3. The lines between Propriety and Praise Worthy, and Blame Worthy and Punishment Worthy do matter. A person can’t be blamed (scolded, shamed) for actions not meeting Praise Worthy, but actions not meeting Propriety are properly so. There is an asymmetry there. Likewise, there is an asymmetry between Punishment and every other response, as Punishment seeks to actively harm the actor, to make them worse off than they were before or would be in the absence of those responding³.

So, with that in mind, we have a basic view of how humans categorize each other’s actions, the general verdicts they pass. Was it what I expect? You meet propriety, carry on. Was it better than I expect? Good job! Was it worse? What’s wrong with you? Don’t do that. Was it really worse than expected? Call the police. Was it really a lot better than expected? How do I send you money and subscribe to your news letter?

Note, however, those are the end categories of our response. How do we decide what is within the categories, what counts as propriety vs some other category? When is it time to go past saying good job and reward with more than words? This is a much bigger question⁴, but comes down to a mix of societal expectations and personal judgement.

The societal expectation part is fairly straightforward, for certain values of “fairly straightforward” at least. Essentially we ask ourselves “How should I respond to this?” while referencing our memories of how others in our groups respond to these things. Do we consider this action to be the peak of human achievement, or the equivalent of “remembering to wear pants to work today”? Is it a failure we call the authorities over or of the “roll your eyes and sigh” type and making a big deal of it is frowned upon? The concept of the impartial spectator comes into play here, as we imagine how others will judge our judgement, and our imagination is based on how we think others will judge. So in part our judgements are based on how we think we should judge the situation, and our desire, often unconscious, to signal that we are good proper people who adhere to the good and proper views of our good and proper group.

The personal judgement type is a little more finnicky, one I could (and have) written many pages about. You don’t need to read my dissertation, however, just understand that Smith identifies four aspects of judgement that humans use to evaluate the morality of an action.

1. The actor’s intent or motivation.

2. The action’s effects on the target⁵. (How are others affected?)

3. How well the action comports with how we normally do that sort of thing.

4. The system wide effects. (What if everyone did this sort of thing?)

Each of those four sources of moral approval comes into play when we make our judgements. We often will weigh one aspect heavier than another and indeed this often seems to account for the majority of our moral disagreements. These four aspects are, as Smith argues, pretty exhaustive in explaining why we like or or dislike some action, and when combined with our knowledge and beliefs of them (motivation is often murky, for instance) and our weighting will lead us to judge various actions as falling into the various categories⁶.

So we make up our own judgements, shaded by how we think others will react both to the action and how others will react to our judgement, and how future us will judge our judgement etc. How far that recursive rabbit hole goes varies from person to person, but that is what is going on.

Beyond the Basics… Where do those societal expectations come from, anyway?

Now, if everyone was making moral judgements in a vacuum away from any or all considerations of others, real or imagined, we’d be done. We’d possibly also be God. Since we very clearly are not, however, we have to ask about how those norms and rules come to exist, and why some and not others.

*summarizing intensifies*

The key thing to understand when probing these kind of questions is that we are all someone else to someone else.

Now, before you say “Well, no shit Doc,” ask yourself whether people you see really believe in their bones that other people are people just like themselves. Really believe it, believe it so deep that they consider parking on the street and blocking half of someone else’s driveway is a bad thing, the same way they would if they were the person who comes out to drive to work and finds some random asshole is blocking their driveway.

Then ask if maybe, just maybe, you might sometimes fall into the habit of thinking “society” is everyone other than you. Every once in a while.

Put differently, no one drip thinks they are responsible for the flood.

Everyone of us puts a little pressure on that needle when determining what is normal, what is acceptable, what is too much or too little. People are fond of saying politics is downstream of culture, and there is some truth to that, but more accurately politics and culture affect each other as politics is largely how we codify what we are willing to punish⁷ people for and how we enforce that punishment. So politics can act as a sword enforcing cultural norms, but cultural norms also control the hand holding that sword; how many laws are actually enforced as written, or even understood as being the law as they are so contrary to social norms⁸?

So for any given judgement we might keep notions of social norms fixed, but when looking at the norms’ evolution we have to consider each individual person’s judgements over time.

This is easiest to see with reference to the masking business during the COVID years. Initially almost everyone you saw was willing to wear masks in public and scold those who didn’t. Fairly quickly, however, we saw some areas where people rapidly decided it wasn’t worth it and they weren’t interested in forcing other people to do it, starting with not saying anything if someone left their nose out of the mask, then looking the other way if one just “forgot” to bring one, and eventually just ignoring the whole thing regardless of mandates. Other areas kept pushing the requirements, enforced largely by individuals with no authority to punish per se but who would hound others who fell short. Some of them continue to this day, but the general judgement has shifted to the “Nah, this isn’t worth it” end, even when governments or individuals warn about this or that new wave. No one person is enough to change all the rules, but each decision to just let it go encourages further normalization of not wearing masks, just as every person deciding to wear a mask encourages every other person.

But why one set of norms and not another? Why do purity spirals develop in some cases but not others?

First, let us define what I mean by “purity spiral.” In short, purity spiral describes an ever more demanding definition of propriety, where behaviors that before might have been considered praise worthy, or even reward worthy, becoming expected behavior, while what was previously acceptable behavior now becomes blameworthy. The requirements of basic behavior become ever more demanding ever more quickly, until being “good enough” becomes a never ending Red Queen’s Race⁹.

With that in mind, what has been missing so far in this discussion is what helps shape social norms, the key aspect to this theory: costs and benefits¹⁰. David Hume points out that laws and norms about rights do get handed down to us, but are instead normalized through the habitual costs of violating them. We learn not to mess with other people’s stuff not just because we are told to, but because we mess with someone else’s stuff and get smacked for it; when someone else messes with our stuff we want to smack them for it, and thus begin to decide that such reactions are proper, and if we all avoid messing with each other’s stuff no one needs to get smacked. We might even decide that smacking is bad enough that it should be reserved only for those cases where stuff is messed with, etc.

It is more than that, however, because recall back a few paragraphs that we aren’t just talking about what not to do, but also what is better than required. Norms and standards aren’t all negative, but also include behaviors that are above and beyond.

The natural tendency of course is to think everything that is good should be called basic propriety. Shouldn’t we expect everyone to be the best they can be, and blame them for falling short? Why do we settle for pretty ok behavior?

The first good reason someone might come up with is “we disagree on what is good behavior,” and that is true so far as it goes, but there are plenty of areas where we absolutely agree on what is good behavior and don’t roll it into propriety. We all might agree that neighbors keeping a very nicely manicured lawn with attractive flowers is good, but shrug so long as one’s lawn is reasonably mowed. Why?

The answer lies in the costs and benefits. Each of us won’t judge based on what we don’t want to be judged for, and so if we don’t want to spend many hours a week on our lawn we won’t judge others for failing to do the same. Those who might love their landscaping might judge us all as slovenly, but the majority will not be willing to place blame, all the while approving and applauding those who do go above and beyond that level.

Now, if there were some great benefit to yourself or others for keeping your lawn immaculate, one that out weighs the costs, we might start to see an immaculate lawn move into the realm of propriety instead of praise worthiness. That benefit to others might be the imagined effect on home prices that usually is cited to justify rules to that extent¹¹, but it might also be the social signal it sends; what’s wrong with that person that they can’t afford to hire a landscaper so their garden parties don’t look like they are held in a dump?

Now the costs and benefits are going to vary across people, societies, times, locations, etc. That’s economics for ya. Yet that variability does give us an idea of where we expect notions of propriety, what is a basic expectation vs going above and beyond, to be relatively fixed and where we can expect it to change rapidly.

In short, where personal costs of actions are higher we should expect a lower bar for propriety vs praise worthy behavior, and where personal costs are lower we should expect praise and reward worthy behavior to be flattened into mere propriety more quickly. Propriety¹² will center around what most people consider acceptable costs, and those whose good actions accept additional costs will be considered to have gone above and beyond.

Sticking with the lawn care example, if all of us have to spend our own time mowing and caring for our lawns, and we are all working class stiffs without much time or money to blow on it, we will all accept as “good enough” a pretty basic amount of landscaping. We put ourselves in other’s shoes, think “Yea, that’s about all I would want to do” and the job’s a good ‘un. On the other hand, if paying for landscaping is a trivial expense because we are all rich, or we are people who love gardening and so don’t consider time spent on it much of a cost¹³, we might have far higher expectations of what those lawns should look like.

So why do we do anything at all? Because we get some benefit. Perhaps we like gardening and lawn care. Perhaps we like having the best lawn on the block and so compete to do so. Maybe we are seeking some payment, or avoiding some penalty. When it comes to morality and virtue, we have many motivations, but we have to remember that it is relative: going above and beyond requires doing more than others can be expected to do, and so there is no status without pushing past what the average person will do. The cost of being considered better than others is being better than others, so if you want that status you need to go farther than other people will.

So… where are you going with this, Doc?

So now we have a general sense of what what will be considered praise worthy (but not required) and what will be considered propriety (and required to avoid blame at the very least), or if we look at it another way, when norms of behavior will become more or less demanding:

• When behaviors considered good are increasingly costly, Propriety will tend to rest where the costs of behavior are acceptable to the majority of people, and only a proportionately smaller fraction of people are willing to pay the higher costs.

In retrospect that seems obvious, possibly tautological, but it does have a very important set of corollaries:

• In realms where the nature of reality imposes a higher proportion of costs, behaviors that meet propriety will be more stable; where human society imposes a higher proportion of costs, behaviors that meet propriety will vary more.

• People who face lower costs for a behavior than average will more often go “above and beyond”.

The source of the costs mattering may not seem obvious, but consider that the variability of the costs, how fast those costs can change, is going to affect how the range of propriety changes. Not only does reality external of humanity inflict costs, but society itself does as well, but while human action doesn’t do a lot to impact nature’s costs human society’s costs are a function in part of human action itself.

Or, in simpler terms, the costs of a cold winter day on people are pretty fixed, so meeting propriety in wearing a warm coat is pretty easy if keeping warm is all you care about. Meeting propriety in what constitutes a a fashionable coat, however, is far more mercurial, as fashions change constantly. Fashion is the archetypical social construct, entirely a function of human interactions, and so swings around wildly based on its own feedback mechanisms. Meeting propriety in high fashion is difficult, and probably requires wearing a coat that is horribly suited towards keeping you warm, and certainly not the same one you wore last year.

Thomas Sowell once wrote to the effect that “Leftist ideas rarely work in reality, and so they have gained ascendency in realms where your ideas working in reality is not required.” The same logic applies here; ideas not working is a cost, after all.

So where are costs low for ever more extreme behaviors? In what realms would we expect stable rules for behavior and in what realms would we expect norms to spiral off into ever more demanding requirements? What can explain the modern purity spirals we see cropping up in public discourse?

Well, talk is cheap… are there any realms we can think of where people can talk about being good, or better performatively express their virtue through speech without having to demonstrate that they are paying the costs? Or maybe a realm where people can compete for status across virtues without paying the costs of those actions directly?

The Internet in bright neon letters

Yea, the internet is awful for that. No one knows you are a dog, much less whether or not you practice what you preach. Worse, it is literally all talk, and so remarkably cheap to just take those political theories a little farther, demand a little more extreme behavior, act a little more horrified at perfectly normal behavior and normalize expectations for ever more extreme behaviors. People engage in an endless chain of one-upmanship in competition for status as the most virtuous, held in check only by their internal limits for saying nonsense and the whims of the ever changing crowd. With no contact with actual reality, and often not even contact with other people who might disagree, there is almost no practical limit on the nonsense that becomes normalized. Unfortunately, what becomes normalized in various internet bubbles then oozes into the real world as the base expectations of people.

The internet might be the greatest gateway to moral insanity the world has yet seen, but it is not the only one. Politics had become a similar low individual cost virtue signaling engine before Al Gore even invented the internet¹⁴. As Bryan Caplan ably describes at length in ‘The Myth of the Rational Voter’ most voters don’t even care to find out what their preferred policies do, much less if they work. One can feel good for voting for politicians who promise to help the poor regardless of whether those politicians actually do, and without paying the full cost of the policies they enact.

Academia is similarly a world where the costs for being wrong rarely apply. Fashion generally rules the day, less so in fields like engineering and far more so in those like philosophy. If that seems extreme, consider that the standard for quality in academia is how many published articles you have, and that articles get published only if other established academics say they are good. The competition becomes one of who can agree with the consensus harder pretty quickly.

Religion likewise can lead to purity spirals, but the effect is differentiated at the various levels. Unlike academia which is extremely insular, religions tend to involve both the upper echelons and fanatics who are largely divorced from reality and the general populace for whom reality is all around them. Thus while religious institutions can sometimes fall into purity spirals, and in fact often serve as the archetype and source of our lexicon for such behaviors, they are limited by what their generalized followers will accept as rules, and that is limited by their followers’ lives. You just aren’t going to convince a society of herdsmen that eating meat is wrong, at most you are going to get it classes as praiseworthy. Yet at the same time, within the ivory tower of the religious hierarchy reality is farther away, and all sorts of spirals can result. Likewise, smaller cults can form and spiral into madness, but generally do not last long as a result. Religious doctrine is limited by what its followers will accept, but rarely is limited by the gods themselves correcting the clergy.

The religion example highlights another issue: just as societies will have different areas that constrain purity spirals, institutions will have areas of different contact with reality and thus different norms. Anyone who has worked in a large company has seen this in action, with sales having a very different sense of reality than operations, and HR being basically Cloud Cuckoo Land. HR will tell you with a straight face the company most needs more DEI, while the plant managers will tell you the company most needs someone who can run a lathe, or drive a forklift.

Hammer… your biases are showing

Yes, they are a bit, but here’s the point I really wanted to convey to both of you still reading: this tendency towards purity spirals isn’t a left vs right issue. It isn’t about crazy vs sane. All of us can fall into this trap when we face situations with low reality costs.

Spend any amount of time on internet forums and you will see this in action. Some group or subgroup inevitably starts to spiral off into one-upmanship in being the most extreme version of the good. It almost doesn’t matter the topic, our status seeking nature drives us to be the most, the best, the most dedicated. Spend enough time in the forum any sub-culture or hobby and you will find the splits as people become ever more polarized and extreme over some incredibly trivial aspects.

I used to be very active in table top wargaming, and there was a long running debate about whether it was ok to play in tournaments or whether playing to win was ruining the hobby. Of course that was only put forth by filthy casuals who were only there for an excuse to drink beer and eat pretzels with their friends, and whose spending habits were enabling the game companies to shovel trash into the market… Arguing that there were different yet equally correct ways to play with man dollies was of course decried by both camps. In fact, the more one side declared that it’s way of playing was best the more the other side declared them to be basically Hitler and the more those in the middle were viewed as apologists or crypto opponents.

Adam Smith described this behavior as well. Not so much where it related to table top wargaming, but his warnings about the violence of faction and how it will corrupt our moral sentiments, while causing us to ignore those who are most grounded in favor of those who are the most deranged. Story for another day¹⁵.

The point though is that crazy is not required for these sorts of spirals. All that is required is a way to compete for status as being virtuous with low costs of one-upmanship as we move towards more extreme, and thus destructive, behavior. The less negative feedback on our enthusiasms and behaviors we receive from reality, the more feedback depends on social fashions only, the more likely we are to spiral away into madness.

Speaking of madness, wasn’t there a second bullet point there?

Yes, indeed, and this is where mental illness comes into things: those with mental illness have very different costs and benefits of behavior than your average person, by definition. I mean that quite literally, and not in the Szasz/Caplan sense of mental illness just being very deviant preferences, or at least not just. I mean it in the sense that behaviors that seem pointless or costly to your average person are not necessarily so to those with mental illnesses. While I might find the idea of controlling my neighbors’ landscaping habits unappealing due to it being too much work¹⁶, the neurotic presenting as a control freak sees that as hardly any price to pay at all. The good leader sees a position of power as having steep responsibilities to take care of their subordinates, the psychopath sees it simply as a way to exercise power caring not a whit for the wellbeing of others.

So while the opportunity for dangerous purity spirals exists for us all, the mentally ill make the phenomena all the more dangerous, either by unintentionally exacerbating the problems or actively taking advantage of the chaos. Their mental dysfunction can accelerate the process, being the core that a faction materializes around, or warping the very structure of institutions away from interacting with reality and into an isolated bubble where the spiral can occur unrestrictedly. The more the constraints on them are dictated by social fashion and less direct reality, the less their illnesses will hold them back and the more they will have free reign to affect the actions of others.

Ever notice how many people in Hollywood seem to be crazy?

Ever hear the old joke about how only poor people are crazy, but rich people are eccentric?

Where was I?

The point, dear friends, is that we don’t need mental illness to get us in bad places, or rather average humans are by nature crazy enough to get here without the addition of particularly mentally ill people, although they certainly make things worse. Our standard human system for judging behavior that works so well in day to day cases can be thrown out of whack in the sorts of highly abstract situations divorced from personal reality that we discussed above, our otherwise laudable competition for status as virtuous people driving us away from the proper judgements. It happens to the best of us; no one is immune to falling into the mob, the cult, the demagogue.

Recognizing when we are in a spiral, or falling into the excesses of faction, is key to proper judgement.

Good luck with that.

1. Note that this doesn’t mean that the mentally ill as a group are somehow better evolved for social dominance or “oppressors”. Plenty are just unfortunate people who have mental problems and struggle to function in the world. However, certain mentally ill individuals happen to be able to function, either through not being terribly far off normal like the neurotic who constantly tries to control everything to assuage their generalized anxiety, or being able to pass like the psychotic who pretends to be normal while manipulating others as though they were mere things. Mental illness isn’t a super power, but sometimes it helps in certain situations, just like not having a sense of smell probably helps if you are working in a sewage treatment plant.

2. You should really read Theory of Moral Sentiments. I recommend the Liberty Fund edition linked there as Smith made many tweaks and changes through the editions and that edition tracks them so you can see how his thinking evolved over the years. The free Kindle edition is fine if you aren’t so worried about that.
I want to emphasize that you should READ the work, however, and not try to absorb it through audio book. There is just too much going on and too much to go back and reread. If you are paying enough attention to the text you aren’t paying enough attention to avoiding cars while you jog.

3. This itself is something of a deep rabbit hole, but there is a line between not giving someone approval or other benefits and actively making them worse off, to attack their suum (see Steven Buckle’s ‘Natural Law and the Theory of Property’ for explanation of this highly useful term, which is basically “them and their stuff”, and pronounced “sue-uhm” as I understand it). If I have a dog that I allow to bark loudly and annoy my neighbors it is one thing for them to think I am a prick, not invite me to barbeques, to complain to me about and general not treat me nicely. It is quite another thing for them to kill my dog.

4. I am summarizing a big book here, the end result of many moral theorists over many centuries. Please bear with me.

5. Target doesn’t imply that the action is harmful, just that the actor performing the action affects some other person. Object of the action could also be used, but then people aren’t objects either and that has bad implications. Counterparty is kind of awkward to say… so far as I know English doesn’t have a great term to use here, and since I am a wargamer I think of actions as having targets of that action.

6. Note that source 3, whether or not the methods or execution of the action comports with our normal way of doing things is recursive on society’s norms, and so is driven in part by the part that drives our thoughts about what others will expect of our judgements. Human society is super recursive like that. That is just how complex adaptive systems are, unfortunately.

7. Interestingly, the first use of “punish” in a non-judicial context seems to be in the early 1800’s.

8. See ‘Three Felonies a Day’ or ‘Trapped’ for instance. Or ask yourself if you would think to call the authorities if you saw your neighbor changing the railing on their deck, or blocking their own driveway.

9. "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" - Lewis Carrol

10. Tell me you are an economist, without telling me you are an economist.

11. The evidence is mixed on this.

12. One could perhaps use the term “Overton Window” here as well.

13. I suppose I never did write that essay on how we need to be careful to distinguish between our personal interests and enthusiasms and general moral rules… well I suppose I can reference this one when I do.

14. Note to the millennials and younger crowd: that is a joke.

15. Seriously, read TMS.

16. I mean, I’d have to talk to them and everything… much easier to just not care.