Category: Philosophy

I have this weird issue. I tend to be non-conformist. I notice the performance of societal roles. I am more painfully conscious when I have to perform societal roles myself.

The first time it became a real problem was when I started practicing medicine. You just can’t be yourself in the consultation room. Doctors have to be chameleons. They have to adapt themselves to the patient and “perform” a dance that contributes to healing. And I couldn’t get myself to do that.

I had this peculiar philosophy. I didn’t want to answer things with confidence when the science itself was uncertain. I didn’t want to act like I’m caring when I didn’t really care. I didn’t like wearing the white coat. I didn’t like playing the doctor role. It felt like a lie.

Why is this performance necessary? Because human beings are irrational. We don’t use logic to operate. We use social cues and emotions and biases to operate.

A doctor has to appear smart, because otherwise the patient will assume the doctor is incompetent. And so on.

I changed myself. I rationalized the performance in ways that made sense to me. The consultation room is a special place where you have to prioritize healing and no other philosophy matters. So, some “lying” was okay.

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It didn’t stop there, though. Leadership needed performance too. You’ve to be chatty when you’re really tired, you’ve to lead with vision when you’re lost, and you’ve to inspire even the people you are angry at.

And I rationalized that too.

The world really needs leaders so that we can change it for the good. And we can’t let philosophy come in between.

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What’s this philosophy, you might ask. It is a form of anarchist thought. Anarchists want every human being to operate through their own agency, as capable and rational beings. The performance of leaders and doctors could be seen as “manipulation” by anarchists. At least that’s what I used to think about these.

That this philosophy is utterly impractical, is the strongest argument I have discovered against anarchism.

Human beings are human beings. They’re not perfectly capable beings. They like being led. They rely on a shoulder to cry on.

Yet, the anarchist dream is too deep in my mind that I’m not been able to get rid of it.

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I work closely with a person who does plenty of successful activism. He was telling me how when he goes to meet decision makers he carries a box of chocolates or some gift like that. To me this was unacceptable bribery. These were dark tactics to get what we want. But his logic was undeniable — the world needs to change and that was more important than any purist philosophy.

That is the difference between an anarchist and a socialist or a pragmatist. An anarchist cares deeply about the means to the end. The socialist cares only about the end and wouldn’t mind a bloody revolution. The pragmatist would be okay with some shortcuts.

Let me make it more clear. I want the world to be more rational, egalitarian, honest, and so on, and I don’t like using the tools of today’s oppressors to reach there. And psychological manipulation (power games, etc included) are part of those tools.

Inside my mind it is the same that I apply to consultation room and management positions. I want people to get better without me having to employ the wrong tools.

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The places where this creates problems are infinite.

I can’t stand my extended family members and their routine patriarchal performances.

I can’t stand companies/organizations and their bullshit capitalistic policies.

I can’t stand academicians. Not a bit. Their jargon and their credentials and their ways of claiming exclusive rights to discuss what they’re discussing. Their hypocrisy and their exclusive focus on their careers and publications. But more irritatingly, the reverence with which others look at academicians. The way people go “Oh, wow! This person is from IIT! (/Harvard/Oxford/blah blah blah)”

In my first visit to JNU, I was fuming about the opulent waste of resources that it was and Swathi had to put a lot of effort into shutting me up.

When people say “OMG! This was published in Nature (or Lancet or whatever)” my blood boils.

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There could be other emotions contributing to this too. Envy, superiority complex, know-it-all complex, all of that.

But if you believe me, the biggest problem for me is the societal roles and the unquestioning conformity by everyone to those.

I realized this today when I was attending a public health writing workshop by Nivarana. I was listening to people talk about how to write a story, how to write in simple language, how to pitch, etc. And I was struggling with the “performance” that journalism was.

There is a particular societal role for a journalist. They’re supposed to be arbiters of truth. They are supposed to write in a particular tone, one that conveys a sense of reporting of the truth. The reader, on the other side, is expected to play the role of taking in the truth without question.

In light of the shit-show that Indian journalism today is, I’m particularly disillusioned by the performance of the journalist role.

There is a rigid script that journalists follow. You start out with an uninformed audience, you introduce certain hooks, you establish authority through some expert testimonial, and you conclude the narrative in a particular direction you want the reader to go in.

My philosophical discord is with how everyone buys this shit. Truth isn’t packaged as neatly as journalism makes it out to be. And behind every piece of journalism there is a human playing the role.

Like judges in courts. They’re performing too. Acting like some wise ass.

Yet human beings are like “this is how it has to be!”

No. This is just a particular social order created in a particular space and time.

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Why am I writing all this?

Because I am tired with my philosophy. I want to go beyond and be like regular humans. Earn some brownie points in the human world. And even though I am deciding to do that I think my philosophy and my pain is valid. What I write may not be meaningful to everyone or be added to the anarchist library. But I hope that there will be at least a few people who resonate with this particular sub-niche of agony.

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How will I rationalize journalism then?

One way is to think of it as mass education. Like teaching, but at a larger scale. As an intermediate strategy till people are able to educate themselves.

Another is to imagine it as fiction. I mean, I don’t have a problem with fiction because it comes with a label that it is a performance art. Perhaps journalism can be seen as a performance art. The sentences and the style can give joy to the readers. Make it about creating art.

A third way is to think of it as reclaiming spaces. But of course this makes sense only if we put under-represented ideas and thoughts into those spaces. We can’t play by their rules and call it reclaiming. It maybe possible to cleverly subvert the rules and reclaim the spaces.

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tl;dr is that I’m struggling to practice anarchist philosophy and forced to rationalize the performances of societal roles to be able to thrive.

“You need power only when you want to do something harmful. Otherwise love is enough to get everything done.” ~Charlie Chaplin

Judah (JP) sent me that quote in response to a question that I had posed JP. The question was something like this: “You need power to do things and attain change. But power is the root cause of all the wrong that you’re trying to change. How do we reconcile between these?”

In hindsight, it is the conceptualization of power that was the problem. I was thinking about hard power earlier. It is perhaps enough to have soft power. Power to “shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction“.

Love is an excellent framework. There are many contradictions that the power framework gives rise to. Love makes those contradictions disappear.

Take redistribution of power, for example. When we try to gain power, we have to grab power from someone else. Sharing power weakens power. Yet if our aim is to redistribute power for a more equal society, we can’t keep on grabbing power forever. When do we start redistributing power? That’s a contradiction which the power framework cannot solve.

Another issue is that of collaboration. The power framework forces you to think of others as your competitors. Every meeting becomes a negotiation. The stress of holding on to power forces one to sabotage collaborations. Only equal powers can collaborate without fear.

A third contradiction is with respect to “the means to an end”. Using power to change the world feels like using an illegitimate force to pressurize the world into change. It doesn’t feel like the change will sustain.

And what are the practical ways to gain power in today’s world? It seems to me like the path to power is riddled with compromises far greater than an altruistic pragmatist would be willing to make.

In all, power is riddled with contradictions. And love makes them disappear.

Sharing is built into love. Love doesn’t shrink when shared. There’s enough to give everyone love.

Collaboration is how love operates. Love encourages sincere engagement. Love assumes good faith.

Love is a lovely means to a lovely end. Love does not feel illegitimate.

When you operate through love, you can remain rooted in your principles. There is no compromise required because you have nothing to gain by making compromises. You love your enemies just as you love your friends. And you stand by your values while you explain to them with love why they should embrace those values.

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There are several advantages that the love framework has.

It is low on emotional overhead. Because you respond to hate with love, you turn anger into love, you tackle resistance with love, you push inertia with love, you find energy in love. Everything becomes love. Simple. Of course, all the other emotions are valid too. That’s where self-love comes in 😀

It sets up opportunities for engagement. Because you don’t have enemies anymore, the number of people you can work with becomes very very high and the number of things you can do becomes uncountable. (Of course, that’s what I wrote in “giving up ideological purism” too. Seems like love is a framework to regain the certainty of ideological purity).

When it comes to changing individuals, love has a pretty disarming charm. Love makes calculations easier in making complex decisions. It is overall more productive.

There could be disadvantages too. I’ll probably come across them when I’ve explored this path more. I’ll write about those then.

You remember how I embraced pragmatism and started chasing power? There was one problem. When you start chasing power with the idea of wielding it for social justice, when and where do you stop chasing power and start wielding it?

Take Praveen’s comment for example

 

One possible answer can be that you start wielding power while you start chasing power – and you chase less and wield more as you go forward.

But going by this, today I should spend lesser effort in chasing power than I spent yesterday. And tomorrow, even lesser than today. That doesn’t quite fit with the idea of chasing power first. Perhaps there is a threshold of power which I should reach before I start using power. Perhaps the graph is more like:

Perhaps that threshold is what is called “the line”. The line that determines when you stop (or decrease effort in) chasing power and start using that power to reach ideals. Drawing the line becomes important once again.

Let us then try drawing that line.

How much power is enough power? Is a PhD enough academic power? Is a 20 person company that operates in profit enough entrepreneurial power?

Read my poem (?) about career advice. Any goal you accomplish will be dwarfed by a bigger goal. No matter how much power you gain, there will be someone more powerful than you.

Which means that there is no clear way to draw the line on when to stop chasing power.

But there maybe an alternative that requires us to not draw a line. One in which we can chase power and use power simultaneously with the same effort. That alternative requires us to reconcile pragmatism and idealism. 

You find a hack to chase power through your ideals.

That is extremely slow though. Slow and excruciatingly boring.

Which is why it has to be extremely personal. You have to be very selfish in what you are doing and craft the journey to your likes and desires. Only that can sustain the boredom of that chase.

(It was Varsha who told me first about entrepreneurship being a very personal journey. This maps on to that. Life is a very personal journey.)

That also solves a long-running question in my mind. How do you find what direction to go in when you are being pragmatic? What’s the principle with which you make pragmatic decisions?

The answer is to listen to yourself. To do what feels the most right to you. I know that sounds like profound bullshit (something that internet gurus would say). But it is based on neuroscience and philosophy of knowledge.

The brain is a rather complicated organ. We can process many more signals than we are conscious about. Even when we think we make decisions rationally, we make decisions based on very many things that we haven’t consciously considered. Read Scott Young’s Unraveling the Enigma of Reason to read more about how our reasons are always post-facto rationalizations.

And this is tied in the external world to intersectionality. There is no decision on earth that lies on a single dimension. Everything affects everything else and nothing is clear-cut.

And thankfully these are complementary. It is only a decision making machine vastly complicated like our brain that can consider all the thousand factors that intersect on a decision in the human world. (I express similar thoughts in the earlier post on living with opposition)

It also means it is difficult to rationalize some of these decisions and generalize them into principles. Pragmatism is the acceptance of this fundamental difficulty and the decision to live within that framework of uncertainty.

Of course, one has to be widely reading and learning to offset the risks of trusting an uninformed brain. One must be open to unlearning and relearning, criticisms, etc as well. These are the things that will protect the pragmatic person from going in the wrong directions.

tl;dr? Trust your gut.

Long time readers of this blog knows that I have a very strained relationship with WhatsApp. When I deleted my WhatsApp account a couple of years ago, I was at a place where personal productivity was the most important to me. For example, I wrote this:

Thirdly, and most importantly, people are unable to work on hard
problems with their mind into it because that requires focus and
peaceful mind. I have a very big hunch that this is the biggest reason
why economies world over are failing – because people simply aren’t
productive any more.

I am in a very different space now. Embracing pragmatism has come to mean more important than sticking to ideals. And gathering useful power is also a priority. All of this helps in bringing action to words.

In that context, in the space of primary healthcare, WhatsApp is a very useful communication tool.

It allows me to collaborate with a very diverse group of people. It allows quick and effective communication especially in socially tricky situations. Just today I could effectively use WhatsApp to organize two meetings. The most important feature, perhaps, is the ability to forward messages quickly.

In all, I still value productivity. But productivity, now, for me is not just about me, but about the teams that I lead or am part of. Like in the case of shaving beard, WhatsApp has become important to me now.

And that’s why I am back on WhatsApp.