DocWatts

Howdy! I thought I might share an excerpt from a long-form essay I wrote, which is a deep dive into the epistemology of perspectives. The main idea that this piece explores is that we don’t just 'have' perspectives - we inhabit them. Meaning that we don't leave our viewpoints behind as we inspect their construction. Rather than chasing an impossible 'view from nowhere' or bowing out of the truth-game altogether, what I propose is embracing this 'view from within' - and learning to navigate it skillfully. Full article can be found here: https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/the-view-from-within A ‘View from Nowhere’ promises an impossible escape hatch from our messy, partial perspectives. Here’s a better alternative. ______________________________________________ The Waters We Swim In Like that old parable about the fish that’s oblivious to water, we too are immersed within a sea of influences that we rarely notice or examine. We like to think that our viewpoints are our own, yet they’re shaped by currents flowing through us from countless unseen sources. As social beings, our immersion within these shared currents of meaning isn’t optional - it’s a central component of having a viewpoint at all. Yet not all of these inherited patterns are benign. Some can become maladaptive when our circumstances change, while others are deliberately engineered to serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests. We can’t opt out, and we can’t fully step away - which makes dissecting this all-encompassing presence a real bitch. Precisely because we don’t leave these currents behind while we’re coming to grips with how it directs our gaze, any such analysis will inevitably contain some degree of circularity. Given this predicament, we may find ourselves drawn to an impossible ‘view from nowhere’ which promises to liberate us from our messy, partial perspectives. Or else we may bow out of the truth game altogether, leaving us ill-prepared for when the world forces us to pick a lane. Neither approach works - so let’s find one that does. When we abandon the fantasy of escape and the luxury of disengagement, we can pivot instead to an acceptance of our ‘view from within’ - and learn to navigate it skillfully. That means being able to discern between viewpoints that are aligned with our values, those we’ve slid into out of manipulation and bias, and those that are intrinsic to human cognition. The million dollar question, then, is how to develop this discernment, when we can step back from what we’re trying to assess, but not step outside of it entirely? What we’re left with is a gordian knot, where our tools for assessing perspectives are themselves a product of those very perspectives. This predicament becomes even more challenging when we remember that we don’t inhabit these landscapes alone - we’re a product of the systems we participate in, even as we help shape them. And our current landscape is rife with systems that are precision engineered to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. And with AI entering the mix, this epistemic and emotional minefield is about to get a hell of a lot worse. Faced with the prospect of being swept beneath an exhausting tide of complexity, our frantic desperation for a life raft of easy-answers is perfectly understandable. If only the world itself was so accommodating. ______________________________________________ You Are Not An Island The hard truth: if you were hoping for an escape hatch from the nebulosity of daily life, think again. Becoming skilled navigators on the sea of perspectives begins with attentive absorption within the mundane. No shortcuts here - more purposeful engagement with these landscapes of meaning is hashed out over kitchen tables and workplaces and school boards. The takeaway of this reality-check? You are not an island - your viewpoints don’t emerge from some pristine inner-sanctum, but from the messy give-and-take of our shared, everyday world. Our vehicle for exercising agency within these negotiated realities is through culture. Culture is our shared system of collective meaning-making, which we inhabit and shape together. It’s our signature evolutionary specialization, as instinctive to humans as hive-building is to bees. And like a hive, cultures too are living systems - maintained by individuals, who are shaped by those very cultures in turn. For the influence flows both ways. This recursive relationship between individuals and collectives reveals something crucial about perspectives. We don’t construct our viewpoints from scratch - we inherit cultural templates and adapt or invert them to fit our circumstances. To that end, our attitudes and beliefs are always situated against a horizon of significance - a tacit framework of assumptions about what matters - which we negotiate with our culture. Our intuitive sense that someone’s political beliefs are more significant than their preferred pizza toppings is an example. Most of this horizon comes to us ready-made - we don’t normally begin our mornings by drawing up an inventory of what’s important and what’s trivial. For the most part, these prioritizations come effortlessly - only jumping to the fore when our world is seriously disrupted. Most of us only catch glimpses of this horizon when we experience an unexpected loss or setback that shatters our sense of who we are. But here’s the rub: the effortless nature of this cultural osmosis is a double edged sword - we can’t scrutinize every assumption we absorb, but only fanatics and fools doubt nothing. ‘Question everything’ may sound profound in theory, but it would be utterly paralyzing in practice. Instead, it pays to be strategic about what we’re questioning. Which begs the obvious question: scrutinize what exactly? Since our concern is on how to exercise agency within constraints, that means zeroing in on how this autonomy gets undermined in the first place. Doing so will help us tease out where we have avenues for genuine choice. As we’ll see, some of these limitations on our autonomy are benign, while others are designed to serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests. But what makes us so susceptible to these problematic influences in the first place? To see how this works, it helps to understand the psychological machinery these systems are built to exploit. ______________________________________________ Our Cognition Is Built For Survival, Not Truth Human cognition is wired to prioritize threats over opportunities, which is highly sensible from an evolutionary standpoint. Miss an opportunity and you might go hungry. Miss a threat and you might be dead. While today’s societies are considerably safer than the ancestral environments where this cognitive architecture evolved, evolution doesn’t care if this legacy software is a bad fit for our current circumstances. Natural selection doesn’t optimize - it satisfices, cobbling together solutions that are ‘good enough’ for survival and reproduction. As a result, outdated wiring doesn’t just get switched off - it gets repurposed. Practically speaking, this ancestral firmware shows up in the form of cognitive biases. Two major culprits stand out for our purposes. There’s a negativity bias - where negative events are more emotionally engaging than positive ones. And there’s a recency bias - where we prioritize what’s fresh in memory. The upshot of these inherited vulnerabilities? When our priorities aren’t our own, this can leave us hypervigilant to the wrong kinds of threats, while overlooking ones that actually matter. Our anxieties, then, provide important clues as to our psychological blind spots - areas where our emotional needs override our epistemic ones. And when these hijacked responses get scaled up across entire populations, it metastasizes in culture. ______________________________________________ The Authoritarian’s Bargain So what do our cultural artifacts reveal about our current moment? Judging from our social media feeds, we’re awash in a sea of hostility, superficiality, and despair. Yet we also inhabit a world full of wonder, creativity, and joy. And here’s the real kicker - both of these realities are simultaneously true. So what’s going on here? You can touch grass, experience genuine beauty and connection - and you damn well should! But that doesn’t make the grind of day-to-day life against systems that are increasingly stacked against you any less real when you return. The jarring gap between these two realities isn’t just disorienting - it creates a breeding ground for bad actors to take advantage of us. Our lingering sense that a better world is possible can become the hook for an ugly form of grievance politics, where demagogues offer up a set of reliable scapegoats for why the good life was stolen from us. A fairy-tale for adults that promises to return us to a mythologized past - if only we surrender our agency to a charismatic strongman, and trust in his plan to make us ‘great again’. The allure of the authoritarian’s bargain lies in how it contains a kernel of truth - one that’s rooted in legitimate fears and frustrations. Anxiety over one’s social status is a reliable culprit here. Social status isn’t just some theoretical construct - threaten it, and people respond in dangerously predictable ways. For those feeling the gnaw of victimization and decline, it’s an attractive bargain. Sacrificing one’s intellectual sovereignty and moral agency becomes an acceptable trade off for the intoxicating illusion of empowerment it provides. Put simply, this exhausting disconnect between our expectations and our lived reality didn’t emerge from nowhere. To make sense of this split, it will be helpful to highlight why this particular moment is unusual - and the forces brought us here. The hyper-polarized world we’ve become habituated to didn’t occur by happenstance - it has specific causes that can be traced and understood. So what happens when a disruptive technology collides with a social fabric that’s been hollowed out by decades of quiet erosion? It turns cracks into chasms. ______________________________________________ The Attention Economy The digital revolution that we’ve come to take for-granted was no mere technological shift. It was also an accelerant for an erosion of communal life that was already well underway as this disruptive technology was entering the mainstream. Evidence of this atomization could be seen in declining participation in shared associations that knit individuals into a community - from bowling leagues to union halls to neighborhood associations. These stable anchors of collective meaning-making became collateral damage of changes in how we live and how we work. Suburban isolation, mounting economic inequality, and overscheduled lives gradually hollowed out the civic associations from which our shared social reality is woven. The evolution of today’s digital platforms was a process in learning how to monetize the human needs that were being unmet in the wake of this fragmentation. And while there’s been no shortage of bad actors along the way, this commodification didn’t require an evil mastermind. Just the banal mechanics of market incentives, combined with new means for exploiting old vulnerabilities in the human psyche. The cumulative effect of this algorithmic optimization was the gradual creation of an attention economy - one where our psychological vulnerabilities are systematically exploited.

Let's not be hasty, there's a chance he might have only sexually assaulted adults while protecting pedophiles. Huge difference. /s.

Exactly this. They went as hard as it was possible to go, baiting him to have a narcissistic crash-out over being portrayed as a tiny-dick Middle Eastern dictator ala Saddam Hussein. It places dRump in a no-win scenario. Either let South Park get away with their brutal takedown thus giving courage to other creators, or prove their point if the wanna-be king tries to get the show cancelled.

Also, the US is smorgasbord of different realities depending on your socioeconomic status. Living in a poor rural county whose only hospital is about to be shut down due to the MAGA Murder bill - and living in a high-rise in downtown Manhattan - is arguably a much larger difference than averaging out the metrics between the US and other developed countries as a whole.

If all you have to contribute is doomerism, you're only helping project the false impression that Trump is invulnerable. Diddlin' Don likes to project the image of a strongman. He wants us to believe that his rule is ineivtable - that he has a mandate from the American people. Well, that's horseshit - his regime is weak and historically unpopular. He's underwater on literally every issue, including immigration. He's in declining mental and physical health. Once he drops dead, there's not an obvious successor to lead the Cult - in fact, we're starting to see the beginning stages of it breaking apart due to how poorly he's handling the Epstein files.

I give him coin flip odds of even making it through to 2028. Have you heard him speak lately? He's in terrible mental and physical health. He has the same health condition that my 81 year old grandpa did a year or so before he died of congestive heart failure.

That's where your wrong. The Cult is starting to fracture because a lot of them do care. Not all of them, probably not even a majority, but enough to seriously hurt Trump. I'd highly recommend Cult College here - she worked worked with the FBI to lock a lot of these violent cult members up, and is an expert on cult psychology.

When the subject of Trump comes up, make sure to ask any MAGAs in your vicinity if they like Trump because he protects pedophiles, or whether they like him because Trump himself is a convicted rapist. No more humoring these folks, go for the jugular.

I can respect that. But I'd also counter that 'we' didn't do anything, because America is not a unified culture - Trump was given another bite at the coup apple because tens of millions of Americans were more comfortable voting for a convicted rapist over a highly qualified black woman. When the only language that your opponents understand is raw, unaccountable power, you use whatever tools are at your disposal. Fact is that mockery and disdain are powerful tools for undermining a wanna-be king, who's also an abusive, insecure narcissist.

Like it or not, we're living in an attention economy where our opposition is intentionally flooding the zone with shit to keep people distracted and afraid. We go high, they continue throwing brown people into concentration camps while memeing about it, while their white nationalist enablers clap like drunken seals at the cruelty that's being inflicted by this regime. I don't want to be the most conscious person in a gulag - if we're not willing to adapt to the environment we're living in, we might as well admit defeat and let Trump crown himself a king.

Kudos to this show than having more of a backbone than %90 of our politicians. Background context for this is that South Park's just signed a $1.5 billion contract with Paramount, which is in the middle of a corporate merger for which they need approval from Trump's FTC. While this was going down, Trump pressured CBS to get Stephen Colbert taken off the air, since the comedian has been a vocal critic of Trump. In the midst of this shit show, South Park is throwing down the fucking gauntlet and daring the man-baby to try to get the cartoon taken off the air - and nuke the merger between Paramount and Skydance Media in the process, because he can't handle mockery. Additionally, Trump was trying to pressure Paramount to air 'pro-Trump' advertising, which South Park was all too gleeful to oblige. This may seem like a lark, and it kind of is, but it highlights something important about how you deal with an abusive narcissist who's the head of a fascist cult - through ridicule and disdain, not argument and debate. Debating only creates the dangerous illusion that the Trump's "ideas" (ie, his staggering criminality, bigotry, and incompetence) are worthy of consideration. They're not. And good on South Park for recognizing that. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2025-07-24/south-park-season-opener-trump-60-minutes-paramount (Heads up, these clips are extremely NSFW. Trump goes low, South Park goes lower.)

Rationality should be learned and transcended - a stop rather than a destination. Metarationality is its higher form. From 'In The Cells Of The Eggplant', written by David Chapman, with an audio version narrated by my friend Matt Arnold. "Meta-rationality is particularly useful when rationality isn’t working well. Its value comes into view when you have seen rational systems fail enough times that you start to notice patterns of limitations to their use in practice. You realize that solving technical problems within a fixed set of concepts and methods is not always adequate. You become increasingly curious about why, and what to do about it."

I don't have many kind things to say about contemporary conservatives for cozying up to fascism, but Winston Churchill was a conservative who, for all his many faults, despised Hitler and fought to keep Britain in the war against Nazi Germany, when it would have been very easy for Britain to leave Europe to its fate. Gustav Stresemann, also a center-right leader, was Weimer Germany's greatest diplomat, who played a crucial role in stabilizing the Weimer economy and improving relations with France in the interwar period. So it is possible for conservatives to be principled defenders of democracy - even if it's as rare as rooster's teeth since MAGA revealed many so-called 'conservatives' to be fascists in waiting.

Detroit - 6/10. I'd bump that rating up to an 8/10 if America itself was in a healthier place. You can have pride in a place while recognizing that it has problems. Detroit has undergone a renaissance over the past 10-15 years, but much of that newfound prosperity hasn't made its way outside of downtown yet. Very reasonable cost of living for a place with a rich history and a vibrant culture, with tons of things to do. On the other hand, Detroit is located in America, a backsliding democracy with a wanna-be dictator at the wheel. And god help you if you get sick here, since our private health care system is essentially a pyramid scheme meant to extract money from people

I see lots of opinions on this topic, but who here has actually studied the sociopolitical history of how democracy collapsed in Weimer Germany? If you did, you would know that Hitler was a reactionary who was given power largely thanks to conservatives within the Weimer government - such as Paul Hindenburg and Franz Von Poppen - who thought they could control Hitler and use the Nazis for their own political ambitions. Hell, the Big Lie that served as the founding mythology of the Nazi movement - that Germany lost World War 1 because it was stabbed in the back by Jews and socialists - was invented by the German conservatives such as Hindenburg, to avoid taking responsibility for losing the war. (Anyone who thinks that Hitler was a 'socialist' is either intentionally arguing in bad faith, or so profoundly ignorant of easily verifiable facts that they can safely be ridiculed and ignored). This Behind The Bastards podcast does an excellent job of showing how German conservatives were among the most complicit factions in Hitler's rise, beyond the Nazis themselves. I'd also highly recommend the book they're covering in the podcast, The Death Of Democracy, which goes into the collapse of the Weimer Republic in a ton of depth. https://www.benjamincarterhett.com/death-of-democracy