Your kingdom has a rat problem, and you’re the king. What do you do?



The people in your kingdom care far more about their own personal wants than they do your rat problem. You might make a great case that the rats are dangerous, that they’re a threat. Maybe there’s a risk of plague breaking out.

But for the moment, there’s no plague to point to, and your people are more concerned about paying for food, or their car insurance, or the fancy new yacht they want.

Why not pay a nice bounty to everyone who brings you a dead rat? If dealing with the rats now helps with your people’s food/car insurance/yacht concerns, you can bet that sourcing dead rats for you will be the top priority.

But they still only really care about the money, not the rats. And to get the money, they don’t need to fix the rat problem, they just need to bring you dead rats. In fact, they’d better not fix the rat problem — if they fixed it they’d have no more access to that easy money they want.

So you’ll only have yourself to blame if, upon review of your generous bounty program, you find a new industry in your country centred on the efficient breeding of rats.

Ok, so you scrap the bounty. No longer incentivised to kill the remaining rats in the breeding centres, your people set them all free.

2.

One thing capitalism gets right is that people have to be useful to get money, as long as you’re willing to consider people ‘useful’ whenever someone else is willing to give them money.

Usually this isn’t so bad a definition of ‘useful’! Certainly at an individual level, everyone you pay money to is providing something useful to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be paying them. And you’re doing something useful for everyone you receive money from, otherwise they wouldn’t be paying you.

But it fails to lift cleanly from this ‘local’ level to a ‘global’ level. Someone who over-fishes to sell you cheap salmon might be useful to you personally, but they aren’t useful to society in the conventional sense — their behaviour will deplete fish stocks and leave everyone else worse off.

And beginning a career in rat breeding might make you useful for someone looking for rats, but you’re useful to him whether or not some of your rats occasionally escape, and when that happens everyone else is worse off (rat problems are hard to solve).

What’s happening in both these examples is the means of capitalism — individuals operating in self-interest — fails to give rise to the ends of capitalism — a materially better-off society.



But this isn’t about capitalism, or usefulness, or rats. It’s about power.

One thing society gets right is that people have to be ______ to get power. It’s hard to fill in the blank with some clear positive quality — useful, virtuous, honest, trustworthy — and still feel like what you’re saying is true. But we’re overreaching by going straight for a society-wide statement, so let’s start smaller.



One thing democracy gets right is that people have to represent common interests to get power.



One thing the judiciary gets right is that people have to make well-reasoned judgements to get power.



One thing academia gets right is that people have to produce good research to get power.

There are some obvious objections to the above. Academics care more about getting power within academia than producing good research, and if you can get more citations by producing fashionable results that aren’t actually true, well that’s exactly what they’ll do. Politicians care more about getting power than representing common interests, so if winning elections is easier when you lie to the public and pit demographics against one another, that’s what they’ll do (you can supply your own example here).

But those sentences up there are at least true in principal, in the same way that ‘you have to be useful to get money’ is. The means of determining who gets power in democracy — holding elections — is at least aligned with the end of finding out who best represents common interests. The means of determining who gets academic promotions — looking at how many citations an individual gets, say — is at least aligned with the end of getting people to produce good research.

And it’s important to get the means right, because people will use whatever means are effective to get power.

I don’t just mean politicians or ladder-climbing academics, I mean everyone. Every individual seeks power within the networks they value most, and where they have the best chance of getting it. Your granny might not be running for election, but she is attempting to influence her kids. The loner at work might not be angling for the top positions, but he’s probably running the show in his Dungeons and Dragons campaign, or WoW guild, or whatever it is he really cares about.

If it sounds a bit cynical it might help to know that it all happens unconsciously. There’s your plausible deniability if you want it.

But it’s also what makes it so important that the means of getting power don’t involve bad things happening. You are not in control.

3.

In the late 19th century, last time a bunch of puritans were in charge, people got quite neurotic about sex, and a new illness was born. Individuals began to present with ‘glove anaesthesia’, where movement and sensation was missing in their dominant hand. What puzzled the doctors was that the condition was confined to the hand — if there was any real physical nerve damage, it should effect the whole nerve, and so the entire arm should lack sensation.

If it wasn’t in the hand, it must be in the head. Along came Sigmund Freud, who had already made a bit of a name for himself for his ideas of what was happening in the head. Noting that contemporary society was such that being an insufferable puritan was the best way of securing status, and hence power, Freud deduced that glove anaesthesia was an unconscious response of the individual attempting to signal purity. You can’t masturbate if your hand isn’t working, so if anyone’s depraved around here it’s certainly not these angels with the wonky hand.

Freud’s theory spread quickly. And, like magic, people stopped suffering from glove anaesthesia. Making your hand not work was no longer a path to power for these people, so they stopped doing it. Worse, now that everyone knew Freud’s explanation, having your hand not work stopped being a sign of purity, and started being a sign of someone obsessing over sex. Not a good look at the time.

The point being: there was an objectively terrible way of getting power, that involved self-harm, and people were unconsciously doing it. The means were terrible. And a simple explanation was enough to fix it. Or at least to patch the problem, presumably people moved on to slightly less harmful ways of demonstrating how pure and non-sexual they were.

4.

One thing _______ gets wrong is that people who have suffered get power.

I put forward ‘the current progressive movement’ as the best candidate for filling in the blank here. And it does sound great, the end being that the oppressed get given extra opportunities to speak out, to offer a perspective that has before now been unvoiced.

But getting the end right is always the easy part. It’s the means that tend to cause trouble. Incentivizing rat tails produced more rats. Incentivizing suffering will produce more suffering.

So if you belong a community that believes that those suffering from mental illnesses should have a unique platform to share their experiences, you might find an unusual number of people coming forward with illnesses in order to claim that platform.

If you belong to a community that believes that suffering routine discrimination entitles you to a unique platform to share your experiences, you might find an unusual number of mundane daily occurrences now interpreted as routine discrimination.

If you belong to a community that rewards feeling guilty and apologetic about your particular identity, you will feel genuine guilt and disgust about who you are. If you can get away with it, you may even try and redefine yourself away from the targeted identity.

And, yes, if you belong to a community that rewards feeling victimised by a desperate man’s desperate advances, then a victim you will become. You don’t have to feel it at the time, the power to destroy the individual concerned will always be available. But you do have to pay up eventually. You have to feel ‘haunted’, ‘abused’, ‘ashamed’. You have to suffer to get the power.

Noting that these symptoms are present isn’t particularly new. People already sneer at ‘snowflakes’ making exaggerated claims of emotional distress, at white university students feigning self-hate, at the spectacle of Rachel Dolezal pretending to be black.

But no one seems to countenance that the distress, the self-hate, the feeling of blackness, is real. Maybe Freud’s patients had dumb reasons for not being able to use their hands, but they still couldn’t use them. The current set-up isn’t pernicious because it makes people pretend to feel bad things, it’s pernicious because the people aren’t pretending.

5.

What, then, to do?

It’s encouraging to note that no one really presents with glove anaesthesia any more. At the time, Freud’s theorising was sufficient to cure the population. And medical practice has absorbed this theorising through the use of that dinky little hammer that can check if your limbs work, whether you want them to or not.

But we shouldn’t expect to be so lucky for our latest neurosis to be cured by a dinky hammer. And it might benefit us in the long run to find a more holistic treatment, rather than a quick fix.

The reason we’re so focused on suffering these days is not because suffering is bad, but because ‘bad’ is suffering. Or more accurately, ‘bad’ is harm.

The concept of ‘bad’, as the opposite of ‘good’, has always been a useful one to have. And there’s a sense in which its meaning has been fixed, but its definition hasn’t. Its meaning is fixed in that sentences like “badness is to be avoided”, “we should not pursue bad things”, have always been true. But how we actually define it, how we determine when something is bad or not, this has frequently changed with moral fashions. And currently we evaluate whether some act is morally ‘bad’ or not by asking solely “Who is harmed?” And if the answer is “no one”, well then go ahead and do it.

It’s how I tried to convince you above that poorly thought-out ways of apportioning power are bad. I argued that they cause actual harm. And it’s how anyone tries to convince you that anything is bad. But it wasn’t always so.



For most of recorded history humans have had a somewhat more rigid approach — certain acts just were bad, and you were never allowed do them. If you assaulted someone it didn’t make it any worse if they then suffered from PTSD; you were judged on the act alone rather than the consequences.

People took this quite seriously. In the late 16th century, priests were trying to sneak into England to reconvert the population to Catholicism. Not being very welcoming at the time of priests, the authorities wanted to put a stop to this. They didn’t need to recruit spies, or torture people for information. Instead they just asked people entering the country “Are you a Catholic priest?” Since lying was one of those acts that was always bad, the priest would either say yes or refuse to answer, and then be summarily executed. Still finding the notion that ‘Maybe it’s ok to lie to people trying to kill you’ unfathomable, the Jesuits instead spent years trying to discover some way of tricking the authorities without actually lying, with mixed results.

What allowed society to move towards our current consequentialist attitude was the increased ability to actually consider consequences. The scientific revolution introduced a paradigm by which the effects of an individual occurrence could be considered in isolation, without which the very definition of consequentialism was incoherent. While selection pressure always weeded out societies that failed to proscribe the acts that most needed proscribing, the ability to manufacture a better ethical system had to come from technological progress.

And it really is better, even if it produced Rachel Dolezal. In the same way capitalism is better than feudalism despite leading to over-fishing. We fixed the latter by adding ‘externalities’ to our ontology. For the former, we already have the concept we need, but it’s yet to be liberated from the world of insurance.

The ‘Principal of Indemnity’ is, roughly, that you can’t profit from a loss. If you insure your bicycle, ride around for 10 years, and then someone backs a truck over it, you don’t get to claim for a brand new shiny one. You get whatever your depreciated bike was worth and not a penny more. People recognize incentives very quickly when it can cost them, and insurance companies figured out a long time ago that people shouldn’t be incentivized to park their bikes behind trucks.

What I want is a principal of indemnity for victims. If you suffer some transgression, you should certainly get justice, and assistance with the ensuing trauma, and support from your community. Everything you need to get you back on your feet. But you should not get to go on Ellen. You should not get a profile in the New York Times. You should not be labelled a hero, or survivor, or be given some automatic platform to air your views.

You should not profit from suffering.