Personhood as Republic
Sometimes you're literally revolting
People are not usually coherent entities. What you think of as “you” is about as abstract as “Russia” or “Microsoft”. You are an abstract gestalt of your lower-order wants, including a bunch of frighteningly pragmatic legacy code we inherited during the millions of years of “red in tooth and claw” evolution.
(This essay is something like my unauthorized sequel to Personhood: A Game For Two Or More Players. I really loved that essay.)
“You” is what we call the current leader-figure; one spokesperson with significant-but-limited understanding of and control over their constituency. There’s an important adult skill of learning to interpret the will of your own psychological body politic with granularity. “You” are not the king of your brain; you’re an elected official who holds steering power only inasmuch as you can fulfill the needs of your voters.
(It’s only sort of true that Vladamir Putin “is” Russia, or Microsoft “is” its employees.)
What’s the platonic ideal of a politician, here? Not some weasel enriching their cronies, but someone representing the will of the people and working to their benefit, making good long-term decisions even when the will of the people is short-sighted, petty, stupid, and incoherent.
If you don’t want someone else trying to seize the wheel, you need to keep an eye on satisfying your constituency.
Voting Blocs
Let’s take a look at some example inner turmoil.
Perhaps you’re monogamous with your partner, and a tempting sexy stranger wants to go on a date with you. Opportunistic factions within you will speak up. Your internal Congress vote might look something like,
The Nay Faction:
22: It would make my partner sad (empathy)
15: I might face judgment and societal repercussions (status)
9: My current partner makes me happier overall (pragmatism)
8: I often profess that cheating is wrong and bad (consistency, which is reputation, which is status)
5: I also actually feel that cheating is wrong and bad (ethics)
4: And, meh, I’d have to leave the house (lazy)
versus
The Aye Faction:
9: They’re hot (sex)
9: This person is perceived as high-status and I might be cooler for screwing them (status)
5: Hooking up with this person would sustain my self-narrative of a cool sex-positive person (propaganda for internal consumption)
5: I feel very charmed by this person (complex, depends a lot on your internal makeup)
4: Is my life boring now? I don’t want to be A Boring Person (propaganda for internal consumption)
3: Plus, my partner did that annoying thing yesterday (spite, which is reputation, which is status)
In this case, the motion fails. But there are a lot of dissenters within you, so your outward presentation displays some interesting microexpressions, and perhaps what your mouth or body says ends up being a compromise position for the body politic. Let’s go on a walk. Let’s keep talking. And maybe we’ll hedge with just a little sex.
I see people being confused, thrashing over decisions, saying, I just don’t know what I want. But that’s an invalid sentence construction, homie. There is no “I”. You are a constituency. Or technically “you” are the ephemeral gestalt figurehead of your constituency and you may find your mandate changing without notice, depending on whether you really understand what the forces inside you are responding to, or whether it’s important to them that you not. Sometimes the representative’s ignorance of the constituency’s true wants is a desirable feature of their tenure, because humans aren’t great liars and so it’s strategic to airgap your self-knowledge.
When you’re struggling with a decision or thrashing about with “I don’t know what I want,” that’s what a constitutional crisis feels like from the inside. You’re experiencing gridlock between different internal voting blocs (status-seeking, laziness, ethics, pragmatism, etc.). The conscious “you” is a politician who needs to understand and negotiate between these competing interests, rather than pretending they don’t exist or that you’re somehow above them.
Status and Self-Deception
Let’s say you are offered a boring job at a prestigious company. Do you want it?
The Aye Faction:
12: People might think more highly of me if I worked for this cool company (status)
8: It seems easy (laziness)
3: It would genuinely do good in the world (altruism)
The Nay Faction:
-8: It seems boring (self-actualization)
-5: It doesn’t pay enough (money)
-4: I don’t want to be seen as a boring person with this boring job (status)
Now, status is a whole tangled mess that it takes some practice to think clearly about. There are levels upon levels of strategy here, and shifting metagames, and this is also the motivation for like half of what humans do.
(It’s trashy to visibly seek status. So you can’t acknowledge this as the reason without risking status slapdown. (Unless you can, because you’re already above the status cutoff where people will parse you as a fearless truthteller—based instead of cringe. (Though, different people will personally rank you at different levels depending on how they feel you relate to them in their own status hierarchy, which can cause all kinds of strange behaviors such as them loudly denouncing you if they feel like they would gain status by shorting your status by being visibly unimpressed.)) However, most people on some level know that you want status, and so depending on how much they feel they lose status by you gaining it, they may go along with your polite fiction, or not. (Status is zero-sum.))
It’s important not to deceive yourself about why you’re doing things. My cached phrase for this is, “have you accepted the evil within you?” Though I think, with one girlfriend, I said that one a bit too much, and gave her the impression that I was cheerfully going along with that evil. No, evolution gave you a frontal cortex for a reason—you can, occasionally, elect to choose something besides the equilibrium of maximum internal quiescence. You can sometimes resist your incentives and indeed, society would like you to do so.
(When you complain to someone else saying “ugh, I wish I was more motivated to do X”, that behavior is a dissident faction inside your nation seeking outside help. “Dissident” because, if the majority of the nation wanted to do The Thing, you would already be doing The Thing. But also, The Thing clearly isn’t so noxious to the rest of you that the nation wants to prevent communications about it. People almost approximately always make coherent decisions given their internal constituency, though different parts have different time horizons and pain tolerance. “Maturity” is mostly extending both.)
Failed States and Functioning Governments
So you’re a nation; what do you do with that.
In the real world, a “nation” is, more or less, a guarantee that the deals you make with this state will actually bind its body politic; the organization you’re speaking with represents the will of the people, or at least has sovereignty over them. It’s understood that if you’re talking to the King of Thailand, he doesn’t literally represent the will of all persons of Thailand, yet he does have the power to make deals which bind the people of Thailand. If he can’t do that, then in what sense is he king, and why are you talking to him? He’s a sad puppet who thinks he’s king.
(We all know people like this.)
I think acknowledging you’re not going to start out as a coherent entity makes you more effective. The people who seem most “together”, to me, are usually the ones who’ve gotten good at owning their weird internal special interest groups.
This looks a lot like actual governance. You listen to your constituencies, even the ruthless and sociopathic ones we all inherited via evolution. You broker deals between the factions. You override majority opinion occasionally, when you know better. If you’re skilled and lucky, you eventually even build some self-trust, so you’ll let you do it again.