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.

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.)

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.

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

Honestly, I'd be more concerned if the approval ratings of the current do-nothing Democratic Party weren't in the toilet. Dems like Mamdani, Bernie, AOC, and Tim Walz who've decided to embrace economic populism over being a doormat are genuinely popular. Just look to New York - Schumer and Cuomo represent everything that's wrong with the Democrat Party. Yet it's also home to a populist movement with real enthusiasm behind it. The Democratic Party should embrace economic populism, remain absolutely uncompromising on denouncing and obstructing Trump's vile Nazi-like deportation regime, while moderating a bit on social issues.

The Lincoln Project being on-point, yet again:

In the least shocking development imaginable, every House Republican just voted to block the release of the Epstein client list. Exactly what one would expect when this regime's enablers run their political party like a mafia syndicate. https://newrepublic.com/post/197987/house-republicans-vote-block-epstein-files The MAGA GOP needs to be burned to the ground in the same way that the institutions of the Confederacy should have been burned to the ground in the wake of the US Civil War.

I wrote this SubStack article while I was grieving the passage of MAGA Murder Bill today. I opted for something less polished than I'd usually write - some of my recent forum posts here informed this article - in order to this get information out there in a timely manner, and offer a call to action. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ Today is July 4, 2025. Six decades ago, America began an experiment: could it create—and sustain—a true democracy? The United States began with the trappings of democracy—but only for a privileged few. It wasn't until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the U.S. could truly be considered a full democracy in practice, securing civil and political rights for all Americans. In 2025, that noble experiment appears to be on its last legs—the tragic victim of longstanding neglect rooted in ignorance, hate, and greed. As of the time of this article’s writing, it’s unclear whether the patient will survive. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—or the MAGA Murder Bill, if we’re being honest about what this legislation entails—contains many bitter pills that will shape America into a poorer, crueler, and less free nation. You can read a short high level summary of the bill here, but if you want to cut to the main takeaway, it’s this: 17 million Americans are being kicked off their health insurance and $3.4 trillion is being added to the national debt. This is being done to give an enormous tax handout to billionaires, open a series of detention camps within the United States, and hand Trump a private paramilitary with which to fill those camps. Going forward, it’s important to take honest stock of where we’ve been, where we’re at, and where we’re going. While America is overpoliced and its prison system is no stranger to human rights violations, the existing prison system is going to look quite tame compared to what’s coming as a direct result of the Big Fascist Bill. You can read about Kilmar Ábrego García’s experience at CECOT if you want a preview of what MAGA is hoping to do to American citizens. A denial of any semblance of due process, psychological and physical torture, and inadequate access to food and water are the norm for these types of facilities. And if anyone thinks that this will stop at immigrants (regardless of their legal status), I’ve got a lucrative pyramid scheme that I’d be happy to sell them. The intent was always to use immigrants as an onramp for implementing fascism. This process will begin with folks the regime thinks it can get away with disappearing, but it won't end with them. American citizens who pose a threat to this regime can and will be kidnapped and trafficked to these gulags. ICE is already doing this - and it’s going to become far more common once the American Gestapo is handed a budget rivaling what most nations spend on their entire military. If we wanted to put a dividing line between the United States being a democracy and it being a hybrid regime, this plus the recent SCOTUS decision that killed nation wide injunctions may well have pushed us over that line. A hybrid regime is essentially a failed democracy that's in the process of authoritarian consolidation, but isn't a full-on authoritarian state yet. It’s a political system that retains some formal features of democracy—such as elections and a constitution—but these are increasingly hollowed out in practice. In such a regime voting still happens, and on paper you still have 'rights,' but those rights function more like optional guidelines than guarantees. If they get in the way of the ruling faction's ambitions, they're ignored, reinterpreted, or swept aside entirely. The American Dream, when you boil it down to the essentials, is a dream of progress. The basic idea, however imperfectly realized, is that our kids should be better off than we were, and that it’s our duty as citizens to make that happen. That dream, today, hangs by the thinnest of threads. As of 2025, any pretense that our leaders are public servants that are bound by our laws and accountable to the people has been gradually eroded to the point where a convicted felon was able to not only evade legal consequences for inciting an insurrection, but was invited by voters to take another bite at the coup-apple. So What The Hell Do We Do About This? First off: self-care. Grieve if you need to. Spend time with friends and loved ones. Make arrangements to ensure your safety if you're among the groups being targeted. In short—secure your own oxygen mask before helping others. You won’t be much use to anyone else if you’re an emotional wreck. We survive this through organization, solidarity, and principled yet uncompromising opposition to this regime and its enablers. Find your organizing home - whether that’s Indivisible, 50501, or some other grassroots organization. This is undeniably a dark and disturbing turn, but the fundamentals haven't changed. Trump is an unpopular autocrat, and his Cult of personality is incredibly unlikely to survive him. His regime is going to make life for 80–90% of the country noticeably worse than it is now. Americans haven't had to fight for our democracy in generations, and this moment is going to demand more of us than a lot of us were expecting. This regime is NOT all powerful - the only way this is over is if we give up. Don't obey in advance. Don't try to placate or reason with MAGA - they're our version of the Nazis, and need to be socially ostracized. No more humoring folks who want a dictator. We need to be loud and uncompromising as humanly possible in standing up and denouncing this. Your family and friends who "don't follow politics" need to be confronted with the ugly reality of the police state that’s being imposed on us. Between an America that lives up to its professed ideals and a full-on fascist dystopia is a huge spectrum of in-between outcomes that will be determined in large part by the consequential everyday decisions of millions of ordinary people. The American fascist movement spent half a century quietly building its power on school boards, in local elections, and in the media before it burst into the open in 2016. It would be the height of arrogance to think that we're going to overturn that in one election or one protest - and it would be folly to conclude just six months that the resistance is doomed and efforts to push back against this vile regime are in vain. The civil rights movement put in more than a decade of disciplined work before Jim Crow finally crumbled. Defeating the Confederacy and ending slavery took years of protracted effort and struggle. We need to have the same mindset as an American GI landing on the beaches of Normandy - we're in this together for the long haul, whatever it takes for however long as it takes. A fascist America is NOT inevitable - unless we stop fighting.

Latest vid from The Lincoln Project is on point:

What more is there to say about the Cult by this point?

We may bumble through in the end, but let's not kid ourselves that these problems just fix themselves. Fascism lasted 17 years in Chile; 34 years in Spain. Jim Crow lasted for a century. Finding our way out of this mess is going to require that millions of ordinary people care enough to put their time, energy, and potentially their personal safety on the line to oppose the police state that's being built around them. That doesn't mean that everyone needs to be out on the streets - protesting is just one tactic - but it does mean that ordinary people need to step up their civic participation. Restoring democracy isn't someone else's problem, it's going to depend on what all of us do in the coming years.

I was deliberately being provocative with that title. Not a lamentation that America is doomed, but a call for some Radical Acceptance. If in actuality I thought that the END IS NIGH, I wouldn't be encouraging folks to get more involved in the political process - I'd be encouraging them to flee the country. But I also want to set realistic expectations about what this struggle is going to entail - it's not going to be quick, and it's not going to be easy. But the future is absolutely worth fighting for.

Again, I agree with this sentiment: we should be more willing on The Left to meet people where they're at on social issues, while putting most of our focus on economic policies that will help large numbers of people. That doesn't mean abandoning immigrants to detention camps, or ceding the narrative on the barbarity of Trump's deportation regime. It does mean picking our battles over which hill we're going to go to war over (metaphorically speaking).

I do agree with the gist of what you're saying here. Condemn what needs to be condemned, while building an ideologically diverse pro-democracy movement that's big enough for anti-Trump conservatives. The Lincoln Project and The Bulwark are two center-right organizations that are some great examples of how conservatives can be a part of the Popular Front against fascism. So no disagreement at all on having meaningful conversations with people we don't agree with on everything. At the same time, we need to draw a hard line with Trump's enablers. In other words: we should be building a broad tent, but one with clear boundaries. For the Democratic Party in particular, in my mind they need to be doing two things simultaneously. 1) Cede zero ground to this regime for its flagrant disdain for our laws, our constitution, and human rights. Any compromise with Trump and his enablers is only an invitation for them to take more. Their horrific vision for the country needs to be rejected loudly and uncompromisingly. 2) Offer people a better alternative based on economic populism, that will make a real difference in their day to day lives. Instead of offering small tweaks to a system that mostly isn't working for people, Dems need to offer a bold vision for the country that inspires people - not become 'Republicans lite'. Zohran Mamdani is an example of how to do both of these things exceptionally well, which is why, he won a commanding victory over the corrupt Democratic establishment in the NYC mayoral election.