Be Careful in the Dark

      I write this piece not to serve as the gossip page sleuth of the high school cafeteria, but rather to lay out a toxicology report on the corpse of the IDW in the hopes that the next time some momentum grows, we can prepare for trap doors and obstacles lurking in the dark because I too was excited by the crowds, the clicks, the screenings, the comments, and the interest in what I was hoping was a collective effort to seek truth. I’m genuinely bummed to see it crumble into a political team sport and economically driven cringefest of provocative-but-vapid takes. So, if I can ask for some charity of my intention for writing this, here I go...

An autopsy of what was once called the Intellectual Dark Web

      When I first heard the phrase “Intellectual Dark Web” I took it to be a rather tongue-and-cheek bit of branding. It was something that you might find scribbled in the borders of a notebook of the geeky boy who read a few too many Batman comics. Or something you’d paint with white-out ink on your black canvas backpack while The Cure played in your headphones. Perhaps that’s what it was, just a self-deprecating joke made by an outcast with a sense of humor. Or maybe all of that was wishful thinking on my part. Maybe Eric Weinstein, the guy who crafted this Revenge of the Nerds fantasy fraternity really believed in it?
      I got into private arguments defending the notion of this “club” as simply being a “mode of thinking” rather than some specific network of people. A mutual friend, Ryan Bennett, deployed it in that manner and described something called “an IDW handshake”, a sort of agreement of protocol of conversation. That was fine, I could get on board with that but was this IDW thing actually more than that, was it… an actual group of people? I shrugged off the notion as too silly to contemplate that adults would dare take themselves so seriously.
      The term stuck around and was reluctantly uttered by friends and interlocutors to reference something that seemed to need a name. I always hoped to hear the dripping of ironic embarrassment in their voices. If I ever used it, I would have to pause to find my balance after a dizzying eye roll and mouth barf.
      But still, it did seem to refer to something. We humans coarse grain reality when we recognize a pattern that could use a handy linguistic label. So, what was that something?
      The word “dark” is the one I want to focus on here. What is a “dark conversation” anyway?

DARK CONVERSATIONS

      You know that feeling you get when you are pretty sure everyone is secretly questioning the certainty of a proposition or statement while professing and acting in an entirely different way for reasons of conformity or avoiding a cultural taboo? It’s like sitting in a theatre and being pretty sure that everyone agrees that the play on stage is awful but everyone reports to enjoy it just fine. Psychologists call this phenomenon “preference falsification”.
      When I was a teenage boy reading the English translations of the Torah while everyone recited Hebrew prayers about a character called God who seemed pretty bonkers, I had that quiet voice in my head whispering “no one is really believing this garbage, right?” The social taboo, familial pressure, or in some locales, state sanctioned violence to not blurt out that line is strong enough to keep the lid on the outward expressions of atheism.
      But the internal dialogue is common enough. And if it can find the right forum that allows for a little anonymity or is led by a brave person not afraid to make enemies, the quiet thinkers of that thought might find each other and start to talk out loud. This is what I am calling a “dark conversation”. The online world fosters the conditions for these things to thrive.
      Once you’re in a dark conversation it can be pretty fun. At first, you engage in a bunch of high fives. You are tickled to learn that you were all in covert synchronization for so long and already know several of the same inside jokes and commiserate in the same frustrations. The camaraderie is real. And you might feel a bit of new found confidence and cocky rebellious attitude where you smirk at all the pearl-clutchers who are horrified that you’d dare attend such a meeting, or read such a book, or utter such an un-utterable opinion.
      But now what? Well, now you get to the good stuff! You get to ask all those formerly hush-hush questions and seek what truths you can find together. You’re finally free of the shackles of out-of-bounds inquiries that pushed you into the dark in the first place. Perhaps if you are politically minded, you start to wonder how you might be able to make the conversation a little less dark. You are sure there are others who haven’t yet jumped into the pool for fear that the water is too cold.
      There are a lot of these kinds of dark conversations possible. My example of teenage atheism may not seem all that dark in the secular West anymore. But in certain areas it is perhaps still the darkest. More recently, overtly political conversations have gone dark.
      After 9/11 a quiet questioning started to pop up around the phrase “Islam is a religion of peace.” The taboo skepticism of this phrase was ripe for a dark conversation. More recently, a dark conversation has formed around questions of genetics and intelligence, or race and crime rates, or gender roles and sex re-assignment.
      A lot of unrelated dark conversations find solitary with each other in a new kind of club. Anyone who is revealed to be involved in any of them risks a kind of social shunning and potentially worse employment fate - this is what I understand to be ‘cancel culture’. There is a general “strength in numbers” alliance that forms against this tactic. This can make for some odd bedfellows. And that is where something like the IDW made sense - a collective show of interest to shrug off the bullies. If we have each other’s backs, then they can’t cancel us all, right? So maybe it was a club of individuals?
      But there are dangers in the darkness. 
      That attitude and alliance forming was never supposed to be the point of the conversation. That stuff was only supposed to serve as the political shielding for an effort intended to ultimately discover truth, uncover our blind spots, and hopefully be of some help to what we were all sure was a fatally fearful meme.
      The first step to discover those truths is to be honest that there are legitimate arguments for why there was darkness to the conversation in the first place. Topical taboos develop and exist for some good reasons.

THE MORALITY OF TABOO

      There are defensible reasons for taboos but in nearly every case I find those reasons to be built upon a failure of imagination to discover a wide range of political avenues which could logically follow from noting a simple moral truth such as “all women, in every society, should be free to show their hair in public.” I wrote about this in an essay called “It’s the implications we fear”. With something like correlations between different genetic populations and intelligence the assumed implications are so devilish and frightening that the taboo remains ironclad. The nightmares of genocides and witch burnings are still too fresh. Does someone like Charles Murray have a special moral responsibility to take extra care when wading into those waters as to not ignite the gas chambers? Yes, I think he does. And I think all of us in dark conversations do as well. To be honest, I think this is some of the most interesting and important work to do.
      Part of the search for truth should be a search for what could be called political moral truth, simply the way to say something that is both true and helpful. The process of arriving at such a stance can be incredibly murky and dangerous. But this danger can not be the reason to avoid the effort. Even the haunting reminders of genocides and slavery do very little to deter the quiet doubts about any commonly parroted false narrative. The paths towards forbidden questions will be found, no matter how dark. Our curiosity and the voracious hunt for true explanations can not be leashed by the horrors of our past forever.
      Now, here’s the very important thing.
      If you are entering a dark conversation you ought to be extremely familiar with these implications. The political risk of igniting or becoming a harmful mob is part of the moral responsibility which is inherent to the darkness.
      No matter how careful one is while outlining an argument against a phrase such as “Islam is a religion of peace” there will be those who are attracted to it who are actually quite energized to use it as an intellectual justification for the ugliest political implication of the argument - true Muslim bigotry, racial hatred, banishment, fervent anti immigration stance, or worse. The same can be said for criticizing the lionized names of the Black Lives Matter movement or calling out problems with common ideas about gender and sex.
      There will be absolute assholes who agree with you, show up at your events, jump into your comment threads… and then send you money.

A WORD OF CAUTION ON ‘READING MINDS’

      In some intellectual conversations there seems to be an extreme allergy to “not take people at their word”. Accusations of “mind reading” get thrown at me for wondering if there are some explanations for behavior which are not outwardly professed by the person in question. “Taking people at their word” is obviously something that has its value, particularly when it comes to questions of safety and security measures. If someone says they are going to blow up a building, I am wise to take that seriously and not wax poetic about what they “really” mean.
      But this habit of refusing to “mind read” is to comically deny how complex humans are. It is to fail to consider how rare it is that we are even aware of exactly what brew of emotions fuels our own behavior.
      Accusations of “mind reading” can slide into accusation of “bad faith engagement” in order to dismiss a line of speculation which not only may be the most accurate, but also the most important for us to understand.

None of us are immune to what I am about to speculate about other people. And none of us are clean. The failures of the figures in ashes of the IDW are important because they are relatable. If we want the effort to be about truth-seeking, the truths of our weaknesses and psychological blind spots are probably the most important truths to examine collectively.

      The great irony of what I am writing is that it seems to me that just about everyone who pays attention to the “IDW thing” is having the same thoughts about these things but is fearful of expressing them publicly, not wanting to appear to commit some intellectual sin of “bad faith” or “ad hominem”.
      One might even say that wondering if certain people have massive blind spots for obviously dull thinkers due to their sexual attraction or that others may have been internally compromised by financial funding from a group of politically connected Christian fundamentalists or others simply grew more provocative and conspiratorial for the shock value that aligns with social media likes or still others are basking in the glow of new found attention and media status after a lifetime of being picked last in gym class and cast aside as a “loser”… is a kind of dark conversation itself!

To have an out-of-bounds skeptical thought about some popular figure’s sudden departure from reason for fear of being accused of “mind reading” is ripe for an honest conversation by us intellectual renegades who dare to actually seek the hard truths about who we really are.

      To wonder immediately if someone’s sudden lapse in objectivity or rapid decline into partisan hackery might be because their wife recently left them or they are suffering from a substance dependency problem is not to dismiss their intellectual argument. It is sometimes the best explanation and most compassionate stance we can take.
      The fact that you likely could fill in the names of the former paragraphs and “read my mind” fairly successfully ought to support my point.
      There are incredibly fine lines to draw here and there are, of course, dishonest ways to play this game of speculative psychology. It can be used as a weapon as to not engage with a challenging argument. But that exploitative tactic simply has to be folded back on itself as another way which we might be fooling ourselves and others.
      There is a need for an honest conversation about our psychological failures and vulnerabilities lest we simply rebuild another spectacularly embarrassing circus of pseudo-intellectual clowns who betray an audience of genuinely hungry truth seekers under an avalanche of self-escaping bluster.

AUDIENCE CAPTURE

      This phrase is bandied about as a simple explanation for trajectories of certain personalities who seemed to have done a rapid philosophical and political 180. I like the phrase but I think it goes much deeper than the basic free market framing that describes the phenomena of finding your material dictated by the audience’s preference. We all get that idea, right?
      If you are a comedian and the crowd goes crazy for all your dirty jokes but yawns every time you bring out the political humor, you might find yourself leaning more towards the former. I mean we all have to eat and pleasing the crowd pays the bills.
      But the real insidious thing about this phenomenon and many of the others in this essay is that they are often invisible to the person it is happening to.
      The difference between a genuine belief and a self fertilizing justification is a blurry line.
      I think our psychologies work a little like this: we conjure beliefs, stories, and self-narratives which shield us from facing a truth which is otherwise too painful to confront. If you asked any number of the people who you may be thinking of while reading this essay if they really believed the things they were saying or doing, I have no doubt they would plainly say they do. So, again, being mindful of the tedious charge of being accused of mind-reading… it’s not that simple.
      Something like facing the truth that you are the kind of person who can be easily manipulated and swayed by the trappings of money, sex, or status is a kind of ugly truth. Insisting that you “actually” believe the thing which just so happens to be what your audience with fistfuls of dollar bills wants to hear is much easier, and it allows you to retain some internal dialogue as an objective authentic crusader of truth.
      This happens with religious beliefs, economic beliefs, relationship beliefs. Really… anything. We are our own worst enemies when it comes to this. We will go to extreme lengths to avoid taking a good hard look in a mirror without any filters and harsh lighting.
      This problem is too easily overlooked by overly analytical contemporary philosophers.

“BELIEFS” AND “MIND READING”

      I recall a story from Sam Harris (a person who has publicly turned in his metaphorical IDW membership card by the way) relaying an experience he had with a high-up government official who insisted to him that “no one really believed in paradise and heaven.” If I remember correctly, this person was working on counterterrorism measures at the time. Sam recalled how he had to pick his jaw up off the floor. I get that. It’s a shocking statement that really could be quite dangerous when it comes to safety measures and policy decisions. It diminishes the behavior fueling power of something like “belief.” But it also may not be as absurd as its first impression gives.
      The word “belief” requires some serious consideration. I am conceiving “a belief” as a kind of internal narrative which has risen to the point of unquestioned personal allegiance. At some point along its ascent to that level it has forgotten its initial practical purpose of psychological coddling from a cold reality. It becomes nearly impervious to empirical investigation and entrenches itself atop a kind of identity crafting armor.
      So, when one takes a hard honest look around at existence and notices a morally chaotic deterministic universe where death is real, putting a “God in heaven” filter on that mirror is pretty understandable in order to avoid the “true” view. Does this mean that someone eventually “really” believes in heaven? Yeah, sure it does since that word has to mean something. But you can see how even that view can be analyzed and fall prey to the same kind of “audience capture” quicksand trap that comes for us all.
      Most of our stories about ourselves are constructed in precisely this way. We are are far too attached to them and a little humility could probably go a long way. Humility it turns out, was not exactly the strong suit of the denizens of the IDW and it showed.

WAIT, WAS IS A CLUB OR A MODE?

      Sadly, I think it was a club. I was hoping it was more of a mode since the “club” aspect of it sounded like some kind of lame illuminati. I don’t know the details of all of this stuff, really, I’m sorry to disappoint. But the rumor mill reveals enough that Eric really did think of this as a group of super friends who would share some kind of pact to amplify each other and presumably defend each other from the flying arrows of cancel culture.
      I’ll leave that kind of review of being cornered at parties and offered informal membership to those who were actually there… if they ever chose to write those things. I hope they do. I think it’s important. They know who they are.
      I’ll leave this essay with the concluding concern laid out by Bari Weiss 3 years ago in the infamous NY Times article:

I get the appeal of the I.D.W. I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don’t, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.

      She wasn’t alone. And hopefully this effort of mine is seen as part of that “finding a way”. The next time we find ourselves either in the audience or on stage in a dark conversation, let’s start with humility and an honest investigation of ourselves. We’ll likely find a lot of reasons to be much more careful in the dark.