Of Marx and Moloch: How My Attempt to Convince Effective Altruists to Become Socialists Backfired Completely

Why psychology explains politics better than politics explain psychology

You can read my follow up post: Pragmatic Socialists Should Support Effective Altruism: Or How a Marxist Sociologist Undermined My Socialist Beliefs here.

I'm a socialist at heart. Even as a teenager I was drawn to angry leftist political rhetoric for reasons I couldn't really explain. I'm also one of those people who will completely change their life based on an abstract philosophical argument. These two traits collided in 2018 when I discovered effective altruism (EA) through Peter Singer's The Most Good You Can Do.

I was already familiar with Singer at the time. His writing had convinced me to become vegetarian a couple years earlier. He also has a knack for building philosophical arguments that start with premises which are hard to deny and lead you kicking and screaming to conclusions you don't want to accept. So perhaps I should have seen all of this coming. In this case, he makes a compelling argument that we have a moral obligation to devote a significant amount of our money or resources to effective global charities. It dawned on me pretty quickly, as I started reading, that I was fucked.

While I found the core of Singer's argument persuasive, I wasn't completely convinced. Singer was clearly a smart guy, but obviously he hadn't read Marx. If you want to end poverty, you have to understand the root cause: capitalism. Charity is just a band-aid solution. If Singer and the rest of these "effective altruists" were serious about doing the most good, they'd be socialists fighting to transform the entire economic system.

It was easy for me to see why they had this massive blindspot. The EA community was full of privileged people from top universities who had done well under capitalism. No wonder they couldn't see the structural causes of poverty. They were the beneficiaries of the very system creating it. I ended up being persuaded that we have a moral obligation to do the most good, but that meant addressing structural causes of poverty. If I could make this case rigorously, I could persuade the EA community to adjust course and have a positive impact on the world.

I figured that if anyone was going to persuade anyone, I was going to need to be able to make the case on their terms of engagement, not just by lobbing bombs from the sidelines. So, I re-enrolled in university to study sociology and economics. I was very skeptical of economics as a discipline, but it is the language of policy and the EA community seemed to take it seriously. I would need to know my enemy.

1. Politics and Ideology

I wasn't the first person to critique EA from this angle. It was actually the most common critique of EA in the early days. But I wasn't impressed by these critiques. They followed a simple pattern: EA neglects systemic change, therefore EA is bad, therefore reject everything about EA. This seemed like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure, EA's neglect of systemic change was a problem, but the basic principles of thinking carefully about doing the most good seemed sound. I could reject the specific causes EA was advocating for, and I didn't trust their institutions or leaders, but I had bought into the fundamental principles.

The EA community's response to these critiques was basically: We're not against systemic change, we just need you to prove it works using our methods. They'd point to some policies they'd supported as examples of systemic change, and say they'd be happy to support more if someone could make a rigorous case for them. But, they'd add, making that case is really hard. So, my thinking was pretty simple at first. If structural changes to the economy are really the most effective way to address poverty, then a rigorous analysis will bear this out. So, I could just try and use the same methods that the EAs are using to make the case for socialism. Easy.

But when I looked at what the EAs were actually doing, and the methods they were using to evaluate charities, it quickly became clear that this was not going to work. One look at a GiveWell spreadsheet filled my heart with dread. They were creating insanely detailed cost effectiveness estimates of different interventions, using probabilistic models that tried to account for every possible empirical and philosophical assumption you could think of. It would be great to analyse policies that fundamentally transform the economy at this level of detail, but there were a couple of problems. First, it's impossible to create a useful model at that level of detail for transformative economic policies. Second, even if it were possible, there's no way I could do it.

Fine. Lesson learned. But I still thought EAs were ideologically blinded. So I got interested in a different question: what if you accept EA's basic principles and methodology, but start from completely different assumptions about how society works? What interventions would you end up supporting then? After all, if you want to understand how society works, you should ask the experts. And the experts are sociologists, who seemed to have a very different understanding of how society works than the EA community. It seemed to me that EA had not just an ideological blindspot, but an intellectual one. They had barely engaged with an entire academic discipline.

So I started to search for sociological theorists who shared my socialist assumptions about how society works but used epistemological methods that might be compatible with the EA community. I wasn't really expecting to find anything, but to my surprise, there was already a branch of Marxism that had basically attempted to do this.

In the late 1970s, a group of Marxist academics came together, united by a frustration with the methodology of traditional Marxism. They tried to reconstruct the Marxist tradition on solid theoretical foundations using analytical philosophy, rational choice theory, and methodological individualism. The goal was to create a rigorous, no-bullshit version of Marxism. For several decades they laboured to critique and reconstruct Marxist ideas from scratch. This seemed almost too perfect to be true. Here were a bunch of Marxist academics who were using methods that would have been respectable to EAs. Surely, this could serve as the foundation for the project I was working on.

So what did the key founding members of analytical Marxism end up concluding?

• Philosopher Jerry Cohen ended up arguing that basic principles of socialism are clearly attractive. We default to socialist forms of organisation on a camping trip after all. But he was uncommitted about whether these principles work on the scale of entire societies and seemed to think we lacked the social technology to make it possible.

• Sociologist Erik Olin Wright argued against ruptural changes to society, and instead favoured policies like Universal Basic Income and greater participatory democracy, as these might help us eventually transition to socialism.

• Sociologist Jon Elster thought that analytical Marxism was a rare example of "intellectual autophagy". The analytical Marxists set out to create a "non-bullshit" version of Marxism, and due to their commitment to truth and clarity, they accidentally revealed that "non-bullshit" Marxism was an "empty set". Elster left the group sometime in the 80s.

This was... disappointing to say the least. Here was a group of serious academics who had spent decades trying to make a rigorous case for socialism, and this is what they ended up concluding? That we don't have the social technology to make it work, but maybe one day we will get there.

---

For a while, I tried to find something of practical value in the analytical Marxist literature, but I started to suspect that Elster was right. In trying to create a rigorous reconstruction of Marxism, the analytical Marxists had probably undermined themselves. Rather than give up entirely, I started looking outside the analytical Marxist literature. Maybe Foucault had some underappreciated practical insight? Or Critical Theory? Analytical Sociology? Evolutionary Sociology? Complex Systems Theory?

But the more sociological literature I read, the more I realised my problem wasn't just picking the wrong theory. The whole approach of starting with high-level social theories to figure out how to do good was fundamentally misguided. I'd assumed that if you want to solve a systemic problem like global poverty, you need to understand the root cause, and the root cause of poverty was, of course, capitalism. Therefore, to effectively solve the world's most important problems, you need to understand the dynamics of capitalism.

However, understanding the root cause of something doesn't automatically help you solve it. Someone might say that in order to cure cancer, you need to understand the root cause of cancer: natural selection. After all, natural selection is in some abstract sense the root cause explaining all biological systems. But a high-level abstract understanding of natural selection is not the bottleneck in cancer research. You need detailed knowledge of cell biology, genetics, biochemistry, etc.

And besides, if you look at people whose jobs depend on making predictions about how the world is going to change, they're foxes not hedgehogs. They tend to build detailed, empirical, probabilistic models instead of relying on grand qualitative theories about the structure of society. I doubt there are any superforecasters or people in finance using the doctrine of historical materialism to make geopolitical forecasts. If these kinds of high level sociological theories were useful for understanding and intervening in the world, they would be being used by these kinds of people to make better predictions and therefore make themselves more money. But they don't.

These differences between sociological theory and the EA intellectual community became increasingly obvious to me over time. Throughout undergrad, I would read sociological theorists and often find their arguments vague, opaque, and at times just poorly argued. Then I would read work by EAs and find it crystal clear, carefully argued, and generally well calibrated to the evidence. Over time, I began to reflexively distrust the sociological literature and started to lose confidence in the value of my project.

This confidence more or less fell apart while reading more of Elster's work and taking a higher level undergraduate course on public economics at the same time. Elster is highly critical of not just Marxism, but of a large proportion of academic social science. He argues that much of the social science literature can be described as either "hard" or "soft" obscurantism.

Hard obscurantism uses precise mathematical and statistical methods to analyse social phenomena, even though the assumptions and methods have no connection to reality. Soft obscurantism relies on vague, impenetrable, or unfalsifiable claims about social phenomena. This is typical of traditional Marxist theory, critical theory, and, well, a lot of sociological theory. I came to agree with Elster that a large fraction of the sociological literature was obscurantist in one way or another.

In contrast, the explanation of many social problems given by economists is something like: social problems occur because individuals often have incentives that are misaligned with social welfare, and attempts to align individual incentives with social welfare often create other misaligned incentives which undermine social welfare in different ways. That single public economics course seems much more useful than all of the sociological courses I had taken combined. It was pretty demoralising.

---

The final nail in the coffin came while reading Scott Alexander's essay Meditations on Moloch. Until this point my understanding of society looked something like: the capitalist class owns the means of production, which gives them significant economic power. They translate that economic power into political power via the government, which allows them to maintain an economic structure that privileges capitalists and exploits workers. This probably isn't entirely wrong, but I think it vastly overestimates the degree of coordination happening in society, even among the rich and powerful.

In contrast, Scott emphasises that the world is more like a big swirling mess of misaligned incentives and systemic coordination failures, personified by the ancient god Moloch. Ruthless competition, misaligned incentives, and coordination failure are the norm, operating at every level of society, from individuals to corporations to political parties to nation states. There's generally no one person or group with enough power to unilaterally change the system, not even the capitalist class. This is, unironically, a much better explanation of the root cause of most social problems than the vast majority of what you will find in the academic sociological literature. I had to admit that maybe the neglect of sociological theory among EA wasn't ideological bias, or an intellectual oversight. Maybe it just made sense. Maybe the EAs had a point about the difficulties of advocating for systemic change. I had to admit that maybe my project was a huge waste of time.

Looking back, I could have saved myself a lot of time. These fundamental problems with the project were probably obvious to many in the EA community and they would have told me the project was unlikely to be useful, if I'd had the courage to ask. But I avoided getting their feedback, partly because I figured they were ideologically blinded and would just dismiss anything critical of their movement, partly because I thought that even if there was a small chance there was something important in the sociological literature that they missed, it was still potentially worthwhile, but mostly because I didn't want to face the possibility that the project was doomed.

2. Psychology

At this point you might be starting to suspect that my attraction towards both socialism and EA might not have been purely motivated by altruism and a dispassionate search for truth.

You would be correct.

The truth is I have some cognitive, social, and emotional problems that make ordinary life somewhat more difficult for me. Throughout this time I had undiagnosed ADHD, which makes it difficult for me to pay attention to anything I don't find interesting. I'm also probably on the autistic spectrum and struggle with social anxiety. I find even mundane social interactions intense and messy in a way that makes it difficult to connect with people and maintain relationships. I'm still what would be described as "high functioning", but I have to force myself to function normally.

I had been through a depressive episode immediately prior to learning about EA. I had been studying chemistry but started finding it difficult and boring, fell behind, became stressed, and eventually dropped out. After dropping out, I got a job doing manual labour on construction sites. Coincidentally, this is when my anti-capitalist views strengthened and solidified. I thought the whole education system was bullshit, designed to mold people into workers willing to participate in their own exploitation. I wasn't willing to be molded this way, so of course the system was against me. I didn't know what to do for a career, or what I should do with my life. I felt directionless and unmotivated.

And then I came across effective altruism.

It's almost suspicious how perfectly a socialist critique of EA would address so many of my psychological needs at the time. Now I had a mission that involved the kind of abstract thinking I was good at, that would make me feel like a good person, that would turn my impulse to critique society into something productive rather than destructive, that would satisfy the latent narcissistic image of myself as smarter than everyone else.

And you know what? It actually worked. I did very well in my studies. I was making friends. I was successfully engaging with society in a way I had never managed before and I was genuinely enjoying the intellectual work. There's a lot of tension between high-level sociological theory and the more empirical EA approach, but I enjoyed that tension. I took pleasure in trying to imagine what Marx would think of EA, or Foucault, or Adorno. It was fun for me. I got a degree in Sociology and Economics, and then started a PhD in Sociology.

But this successful equilibrium was incredibly fragile, and was dependent on my belief that I was working on something important. Once that belief fell apart, my motivational structure began to crumble, and things started to fall apart again.

---

I've spent some time trying to understand why I was initially so attracted to socialism, and in particular a socialist critique of EA, and I think the simplest explanation is that these beliefs, and this project, played a functional role in getting my life together and back on track.

I think a large part of the explanation is that I naturally have exceptionally poor theory of mind. Growing up, it was completely unintuitive to me that other people's minds were fundamentally different from my own. I thought that everyone struggled with attentional and social difficulties as much as I did, but they were just more resilient and harder working than I was. Or perhaps they had been born into a social class that allowed them to overcome these challenges more easily. If you think of all minds as fundamentally the same, the natural conclusion is that differences in outcomes are the result of either unearned privilege or differences in work ethic. I think this is partly why I tended to think that either the system was corrupt, or that I was lazy and worthless.

There is another essay by Scott that captures the emotional reality of what this felt like:

If my patient, the one with the brain damage, were back in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, in a nice tribe with Dunbar's number of people, there would be no problem.

Maybe his cognitive problems would make him a slightly less proficient hunter than someone else, but whatever, he could always gather.

Maybe his emotional control problems would give him a little bit of a handicap in tribal politics, but he wouldn't get arrested for making a scene, he wouldn't get fired for not sucking up to his boss enough, he wouldn't be forced to live in a tiny apartment with people he didn't necessarily like who were constantly getting on his nerves. He might get in a fight and end up with a spear through his gut, but in that case his problems would be over anyway.

Otherwise he could just hang out and live in a cave and gather roots and berries and maybe hunt buffalo and participate in the appropriate tribal bonding rituals like everyone else.

But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves and declared the tribal bonding rituals Problematic. This increased productivity by about a zillion times, so most people ended up better off. The only ones who didn't were the ones who for some reason couldn't participate in it.

...

Imagine an employment waterline, gradually rising through higher and higher levels of competence. In the distant past, maybe you could be pretty dumb, have no emotional continence at all, and still live a pretty happy life. As the waterline rises, the skills necessary to support yourself comfortably become higher and higher. Right now most people in the US who can't get college degrees -- which are really hard to get! -- are just barely hanging on, and that is absolutely a new development. Soon enough even some of the college-educated won't be very useful to the system. And so on, until everyone is a burden.

This is how I felt growing up. Like my head was sinking under some kind of cognitive and emotional waterline, and that I would drown if I didn't force myself to swim harder. I felt like if I allowed myself to relax and just be myself, I would fail at everything and everyone would hate me. And I felt like everyone else was in the same situation, but they were either more determined to keep swimming than I was, or they had been born on a life raft.

You can probably imagine how a bitter, anti-capitalist view of the world emerges under these conditions.

---

Given this psychological context, my attraction to both socialism and EA starts to make more sense. Both served important functions in helping me navigate a social world I found overwhelming. When I was studying chemistry, I was essentially trying to force myself to stay in an intellectual environment where I couldn't compete. Given my attentional difficulties and my lackluster mathematical abilities, I was probably going to fail no matter how hard I tried.

In situations where failure appears to be inevitable, a depressive episode can make sense from an evolutionary perspective. It makes sense to stay in bed and conserve energy during a cold, barren winter. I think it's possible that the depressive episode was an adaptive response---a way of shutting down to stop wasting energy while resetting the system. The downside was that I was miserable and wanted to abandon society and live alone in the woods.

It's probably not a coincidence that it was during this time that my anti-capitalist views began to intensify. I started to see the world in more black and white terms. The system was corrupt, but I was a good, hard-working person with the deck stacked against me.

What's interesting is that this sounds a lot like what psychoanalysts call splitting. This is where you divide the world into all good (me: smart, morally aware, principled) and all bad (capitalism: corrupt, unjust, exploitative). This kind of black-and-white thinking helped me avoid the more painful explanation that I was struggling due to my own psychological traits. Splitting the world this way allowed me to maintain enough self-esteem to want to engage again, even if it meant having an inaccurate understanding of myself and society. I don't think my brain cared whether this was an accurate view of the world or not, it just cared that I had enough self-esteem to get out of bed.

I think this way of thinking about mental health and ideological beliefs is underrated, but it's far from novel. What looks like psychological "dysfunction" is often adaptive. Psychoanalysts have long understood psychological processes as defense mechanisms, evolutionary psychiatrists routinely think in terms of tradeoffs and adaptive functions, and IFS practitioners conceptualize the mind as having protective parts that serve important functions. Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler have applied evolutionary logic to explain ideological beliefs in The Elephant in the Brain. Even the great philosopher Karl Marx was aware of the adaptive function of ideological beliefs when he declared that religion is the opiate of the masses.

I think Marx is right about this. Religion is the opiate of the masses, but so is politics.

However, the body produces endogenous opiates for a reason. Pain serves important functions---it tells us when something is wrong and motivates us to fix it. But sometimes the pain becomes so overwhelming that it prevents us from functioning at all. In those cases, natural painkillers allow us to keep going. I think that religious beliefs, political beliefs, defense mechanisms, symptoms of mental disorders, cognitive biases, and delusions are all part of our endogenous emotional opiate system, working together to regulate our emotional states within functional bounds.

In fact, it probably has to be this way. If you look at the fundamental motives of human behavior according to the Fundamental Motive Framework, you'll notice that an accurate model of the world and happiness are missing. Instead, the fundamental human motives are:

• Self-protection

• Disease avoidance

• Affiliation (social connections)

• Status

• Mate acquisition

• Mate retention

• Kin care

From an evolutionary perspective, the accuracy of our beliefs and our own personal feelings of happiness are only instrumentally valuable to the extent that they help us achieve these fundamental goals. This connects back to the Moloch-like dynamics I discussed earlier. In a world where humans are in constant competition with each other, those who single-mindedly pursue happiness or truth for their own sake get outcompeted by those who prioritize status, self-protection, mate acquisition, and the other fundamental motives. The humans who survived and reproduced were the ones willing to sacrifice accuracy and happiness when doing so served their competitive interests and material needs. Our brains evolved to prioritize these fundamental goals, even at the expense of accuracy or happiness.

The depressive episode, splitting, socialist ideology, EA project, confirmation bias: all of these can be understood as parts of my endogenous emotional opiate system, working together to help me function in a social world I was struggling to navigate. I suspect this kind of regulatory process is far more common than most people appreciate. If you've ever talked to someone who seemed threatened by basic facts about the world, it might be because those facts were a genuine threat to their psychological stability---and their mind was doing what it needed to do to protect them.

3. Theory

Looking back on this project after a couple of years, I notice several layers of irony start to emerge:

• It turns out the view of human psychology I described above is actually quite similar to Marx's theory of ideological formation

• In the spirit of the analytical Marxists, it's possible to reconstruct this theory using evolutionary psychology

• In the spirit of my attempted reconciliation of EA and Marxism, you can combine this reconstructed theory with the view that the world is a swirling mess of misaligned incentives and coordination problems

• If you reconstruct Marxism in this way, it completely undermines the Marxist political project

• In one sense, this represents a completion of my original project; in another sense, it's the complete destruction of it

Let me explain these points.

---

First of all, Marx understood, along with contemporary evolutionary psychologists, that humans are fundamentally driven to satisfy their basic material needs. In The German Ideology, he writes: "The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals... The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself." Marx's whole worldview starts with the premise that, first of all, humans need to survive. Incidentally, Marx was an admirer of Charles Darwin's work and saw parallels between evolutionary theory and his own analysis of change and development in social systems.

Marx also understood, along with contemporary evolutionary psychologists, that our ideological beliefs, to a large extent, serve an adaptive and functional purpose. According to Marx, our ideological beliefs are largely determined by the fundamental economic structure of society, and they serve to stabilise this structure. This is sometimes described as the ideological "superstructure" of society functioning to stabilise the economic "base", although as far as I'm aware, Marx never used these terms.

If I were to reconstruct Marx's theory of ideological formation using contemporary evolutionary psychology, I would argue that the economic "base" of society is not any kind of social structure or anything outside of humans at all, it is the human body itself. It is our fundamental capacity to produce anything at all that is the real economic "base" of society. Not tools, or land, or technology. We cannot labour or produce anything without our bodies and our minds. Therefore, ideological beliefs serve to stabilise the true economic base of society: the fundamental motives and goals of each of the individuals within the society. It is not some outside alien force with a will of its own that imposes ideological beliefs upon us to make society as a whole function.

Depending on the individual talents and capabilities of each individual, it might make sense for their ideological beliefs to support the dominant economic structure. Or, if the economic structure makes it difficult for an individual to satisfy their fundamental material needs, they may oppose it.

---

What's puzzling is that Marx seems to understand this too. Marx predicted that as industrialization progressed, workers would move from the countryside to the cities. They would recognize their own exploitation, and working so closely with each other, would be able to coordinate to pursue their material interests, overthrowing capitalism in the process. This looks a lot like ideological beliefs forming in response to the material needs of individuals, not the needs of society as a whole. I think the parallels between Marx and Darwin are interesting enough to consider Marx as a proto-evolutionary psychologist, with his theory of ideological formation predating Darwin himself.

Obviously, Marx's predictions did not come true. So what went wrong? Even if you grant that Marx has an elegant high-level sociological theory, he got the details wrong. And the details matter. One fundamental problem is that it wasn't really in the material interests of individual workers to agitate for revolution. For the most part, it was in their interests to work for a wage and go home to their families each night. And even if it was in the interests of the working class as a whole to overthrow capitalism, the interests of workers are not particularly well aligned and coordination is extremely difficult. And even if workers' interests were aligned and they were capable of coordinating a revolution, it turns out to be extremely difficult to orchestrate a revolution that actually results in a good outcome, as evidenced by *gestures broadly at 20th century history*. The problem is that he underestimated Moloch.

If I were to create the world's most concise critique of Marxism, it would look something like this:

• Material interests shape ideological beliefs based on individual cognitive and emotional traits

• Individual cognitive and emotional traits vary widely

• Therefore, individuals within the same class will have divergent interests and beliefs

• Class coordination requires aligned interests, but alignment is rare due to this individual variation

• Even with perfect alignment, coordination remains extremely difficult due to collective action problems

• Therefore, class-based political action is somewhere between extremely difficult and fundamentally unworkable

If you take Marx's theory of ideological formation seriously and apply it at the individual level, you get something resembling modern evolutionary psychology. But evolutionary psychology reveals that our beliefs primarily serve individual psychological needs rather than class interests. Therefore, a rigorous reconstruction of Marxism undermines the entire socialist project.

Marx’s own insights into human nature reveal why his political project is psychologically and practically impossible.

---

It's been a couple of years now since I declared this project as a failure and abandoned it. It was only as I was writing this essay and examining my own motivations behind this project that I started to notice the parallels between modern evolutionary psychology and Marx's theory of ideological formation. Ironically, in my attempt to analyze why the project failed, I might have accidentally succeeded in my original goal of reconciling my Marxist worldview with the epistemological principles of EA. And while my original goal to convince EAs to become socialists might have failed, I think I have accidentally succeeded in demonstrating why the Marxist political project is doomed to failure. In a sense, this might be the culmination and capstone of the analytical Marxist project. The ultimate act of intellectual autophagy.

4. Aftermath

One thing that's interesting about this whole experience is that it almost has the structure of a controlled experiment. What happens if you take someone who is struggling socially, give them a motivational structure that helps them engage with the world, and then dismantle it? Will they fall back into a depressive episode, or regress back to splitting? Will everything fall apart again?

And yeah, things kind of fell apart again. But not entirely.

I gave up on trying to persuade EAs to be socialist towards the end of my undergraduate degree. For a while I'd tried to think about how other sociological theories might help address EA causes more effectively. Eventually, I started a PhD in sociology, intending to use complex systems theory to better understand global catastrophic risks. But at this point I had internalised the lesson that abstract sociological theories weren't really the key bottleneck to solving these kinds of problems. I was wasting my time. My motivational structure collapsed again, and I dropped out.

After I dropped out, I was at a bit of a loss about what to do with myself. I still have the fundamental cognitive and emotional traits that make it difficult for me to function socially. Working in offices and corporate environments is pretty unpleasant for me. In the end, I decided to start as an apprentice in the construction industry. It wasn't ideal, but it was good enough. And I think part of me wanted to get as far away from academia as possible and return to my working class roots.

But I never relapsed back into a depressive episode or found myself pining for socialist revolution again. By now I understood that there is far more variation in psychological traits and cognitive abilities than I had previously realised, and that my own psychological traits were pretty far from normal. I understood that the world was a vast, swirling, uncoordinated mess instead of a corrupt system designed to work against me.

To be clear, I did also feel like a fool, a failure, and generally like a piece of shit. I felt like I had sunk beneath some kind of cognitive or emotional waterline again. But part of me was ok with this. And I did have a massive feeling of emptiness and purposelessness open up inside me, but I was kind of ok with this too.

---

I felt like a child who thought they could solve the world's problems. I had imagined myself to be so smart, moral and tough minded that I could handle truths and propose solutions that other people couldn't accept. The reality was that I was the exact opposite of the things I believed myself to be. Not smart enough to understand the problem, not strong minded enough to handle the truth, not moral enough to make the sacrifice that was needed. I'd built a worldview around my own psychological and emotional issues.

Once I saw this pattern in myself, I started seeing it everywhere. The sociologists and activists I had looked up to, the people I thought were genuinely smart and morally motivated, were probably doing the same thing I was. They weren't the enlightened truth-seekers I had imagined. The same pattern probably manifests in a thousand different ways. Religious believers, conservatives, probably even EAs. Different intellectual content, but similar psychological processes.

Once I saw my own flaws and limitations more clearly, I started to see the same flaws reflected in the world around me. And when I looked at the corruption of the world, I could see the same corruption inside me as well. The greed, willful ignorance, cruelty - all the things I saw in society and felt horrified by, I could suddenly see the seeds of within myself. The capacity for everything wrong with the world was right there inside me all along.

This was an extremely painful realisation. I'd had an idealised image of the world in my mind. That there were bad people in charge who believed things that I disagreed with, or who were selfish and corrupt. And there were good people who believed the things I believed. And if we could just get the good people into power, then everything would be better. I was, of course, one of the good people who was going to help push the world forward towards utopia. I don't believe any of this anymore.

If I could sum up this whole project, I’d say that it was an elaborate form of projection. I was unable to confront the uncomfortable flaws within myself, like status-seeking and self-deception, so I projected them onto society as a whole. Capitalism is corrupt and exploitative, but not me! I’m a victim of a corrupt system, but one who is strong and moral enough to fight against it. Perhaps the incredible appeal and spread of Marxist ideology is precisely because it serves such a useful psychological function: it allows people to recognize uncomfortable truths about human nature while maintaining the comforting illusion that they themselves are exempt from these dynamics.

---

Anyway, a couple of years after this happened I fell in love, and it was everything the poets and songwriters said it would be. So I guess the moral of the story is: if you find yourself tempted to construct elaborate ideological arguments in a vain attempt to make yourself feel smart and important, consider falling in love instead.