Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.… Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. (Bertrand Russell)
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death
I don’t think that’s true. In fact, it sound close to “Well, if those people don’t agree with me, it must be because they are afraid of my thoughts!”, which is a convenient excuse to ignore other people’s opinions, with an implicit ad hominem (“They must be disagreeing with me for irrational reasons!”).
If you don’t agree with me, you’re probably just afraid of my ideas.
I think the reason you can tell that people are afraid is because they start getting angry at what you have said. The more the discussion occurs the angrier they get. If you’re not afraid, the expected response would be interest (why do you think that?) or boredom. Many discussions become angry, so I suggest most discussions are frightening and by extension the thought that caused the discussion in the first place could well be scary all by itself.
This ignores a third potential reason for people to get angry: They’ve rationally assessed your idea X but still disagree with it strongly, and also think that if your idea were more widely adopted it would cause lots of disutility. Expressing anger is unlikely to change your mind, but it may help to prevent a third party from taking idea X seriously.
I think this is a pretty good reason to be afraid. While you may be slightly psychopathic and are expressing anger for purely manipulative reasons, I would suggest that it is more plausible to say that you are afraid that other people will adopt that view.
Another theory for why someone might get angry at me when I “express an idea” is that I might think that I’m simply expressing an idea but they could interpret my expressions primarily as an insult.
For example, John, if I suggested that you were “slightly psychopathic” if people get angry at you when you try to express ideas, then I think it would be legitimate for you to get angry with me for insulting you like that. I might use this anger as further evidence of your psychopathy, but that would be kinda silly :-P
Really, if this is what was happening, I think it would involve more failure on my part (failing to communicate without insulting you) than on yours (failing to silently accept my insults while attending to the reasoning hidden behind them).
I think this post starts to get to the heart of why ideas are frightening.
At first glance it seems strange to have evolved any mental system that attributes such weight to something (intellectual discussion) that has no immediate survival consequences.
However studies have shown that status (community judgments of different members value) and legitimacy (whether a person has committed an appropriate or socially taboo action) do carry with them significant effects on survival, and in severe cases can last across generations (making them worse than say, being eaten by an animal). This is because status determines who has influence (and may determine if one gets to eat or not), and legitimacy determines whether one is attacked (in a communities eyes, punished) with people being so willing to enforce these ideas that they are willing to suffer in order to maintain them.
In this sense the quote is entirely correct, thought is the most terrifying thing because thought carries with it changes in status and legitimacy rules. The examples in the quote demonstrate the power of thought, highlighting the kind of traditional social defenses thought can destroy.
An insult, is the very name we give to incidents of this fear, the more directly we concentrate on the person speaking the more obvious the association, but fundamentally when thought is most powerful it alters our status and legitimacy values, and so, regardless of how obliquely we make statements, they are always going to be frightening, and thus experienced as an insult.
To push a little more (and much more gently this time) I suspect that you are homing in on a familiar critique of politics rather than ideas themselves (which can sometimes be profitably separated from politics).
I personally have a very hard time remembering situations where ideas themselves seemed to lead to emotional reactions, rather than having ideas expressed in front of an audience, with competitive processes layered in as an inherent part of what’s going on. Like, I love having conversations on road trips, because its private and safe and there is room for 90 minutes of undistracted cooperative communication. In my experience, those kind of conversations don’t cause people to freak out very much at all, even when the ideas are themselves very “fraught”.
According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.
I suspect that beyond a certain point, sanity can only be raised by groups of people who are aware of (and have the skills to manage?) issues like glossophobia. There is a big difference between contexts where people try to induce crazy emotions in someone they are debating (which I was sort of doing by example, in the grandparent and for which I apologize) versus contexts where people are explicitly trying to bring an epistemically “nurturing” environment into being :-)
I suppose the question is, to what extent can ideas be separated from social dynamics, such as status and legitimacy, and therefore not carry with them the risk of causing anger and fear.
Well ideas can certainly create positive as well as negative responses. For example, more accurate understanding and the communication of practically useful approaches are often intrinsically enjoyable. As is the communication of experience that might help determine the correct course of action or help avoid problems (i.e. personal stories, news). Provided these don’t threaten our status and legitimacy rules they remain positive and rewarding. They can also serve to validate our choices and serve to bolster our self esteem, or even to reduce the importance of those who threaten our values (satire). These can be viewed as improving our feelings that we have status (value) and legitimacy (goodness), i.e. the opposite of the fear causing uses I mentioned above.
However, ideas can also influence these factors more indirectly. For example, in the entertainment industry the term ‘social currency’ is sometimes used. This is used to describe the value that people place on communicating ideas as a means for establishing relationships (mutually nurturing through making each other feel good) and raising status (being relatively more important because you convey the pleasure of entertainment). A process mirrored here through the karma points. As such it can carry fears associated with threatening those in an alpha position or a conflict in the rules that underlie the status, for example as expressed in the phrase “you’re just saying that to be popular”.
Academics and other creative roles have the added pressure that the continuous generation of ideas is the basis for their livelihood. This is likely to lead to ideas being a major factor in their self esteem, adding an extra intensity to the fears and pleasures associated with having them (perhaps explaining why Bertrand Russell said the quote in the first place).
More significantly, formal ideas, such as proofs can be extremely threatening because they introduce a method of influence that conflicts with many existing status hierarchies. It breaks many people’s sense of legitimacy, to say that anyone can make a formal statement for any reason and yet still determine other people’s actions, or even more significantly, that an opinion of a person can be considered to have no value if a formal statement demonstrates that it is false. Taken to extreme, it could lead to a position where a person had no influence (and thus no status) because they were incapable of ever making a statement that was not proved false.
I would suggest it is more common to view the legitimacy of statements as deriving from status (which is why we tend to value quotes the way we do). And also to have status determined by tradition, which in some community’s leads almost all novelty to be treated as illegitimate. Thus reducing conversation to small talk or the repetition of traditional sayings (anything else would be ‘weird’). The power of scientific method (and this site) is in creating a set of traditions that enable novelty to be introduced in a legitimate way, so that these two positions are less likely to conflict (although I suspect they do so quite frequently).
I am in the unfortunate position of enjoying conversations about status and legitimacy, which are almost always fraught with the risks of taboo violation. Not to mention the fact that thinking about status and legitimacy tends to make your values different from those around you, making interactions a lot like walking on thin ice (exhilarating and terrifying) : ).
It is not quite my watchword—I would be a very different person if it were, and I’m not sure I’m prepared for that—but I can at least look through the window, so to speak, and see the view.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.… Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. (Bertrand Russell)
I don’t think that’s true. In fact, it sound close to “Well, if those people don’t agree with me, it must be because they are afraid of my thoughts!”, which is a convenient excuse to ignore other people’s opinions, with an implicit ad hominem (“They must be disagreeing with me for irrational reasons!”).
If you don’t agree with me, you’re probably just afraid of my ideas.
I think the reason you can tell that people are afraid is because they start getting angry at what you have said. The more the discussion occurs the angrier they get. If you’re not afraid, the expected response would be interest (why do you think that?) or boredom. Many discussions become angry, so I suggest most discussions are frightening and by extension the thought that caused the discussion in the first place could well be scary all by itself.
This ignores a third potential reason for people to get angry: They’ve rationally assessed your idea X but still disagree with it strongly, and also think that if your idea were more widely adopted it would cause lots of disutility. Expressing anger is unlikely to change your mind, but it may help to prevent a third party from taking idea X seriously.
I think this is a pretty good reason to be afraid. While you may be slightly psychopathic and are expressing anger for purely manipulative reasons, I would suggest that it is more plausible to say that you are afraid that other people will adopt that view.
Another theory for why someone might get angry at me when I “express an idea” is that I might think that I’m simply expressing an idea but they could interpret my expressions primarily as an insult.
For example, John, if I suggested that you were “slightly psychopathic” if people get angry at you when you try to express ideas, then I think it would be legitimate for you to get angry with me for insulting you like that. I might use this anger as further evidence of your psychopathy, but that would be kinda silly :-P
Really, if this is what was happening, I think it would involve more failure on my part (failing to communicate without insulting you) than on yours (failing to silently accept my insults while attending to the reasoning hidden behind them).
I think this post starts to get to the heart of why ideas are frightening.
At first glance it seems strange to have evolved any mental system that attributes such weight to something (intellectual discussion) that has no immediate survival consequences.
However studies have shown that status (community judgments of different members value) and legitimacy (whether a person has committed an appropriate or socially taboo action) do carry with them significant effects on survival, and in severe cases can last across generations (making them worse than say, being eaten by an animal). This is because status determines who has influence (and may determine if one gets to eat or not), and legitimacy determines whether one is attacked (in a communities eyes, punished) with people being so willing to enforce these ideas that they are willing to suffer in order to maintain them.
In this sense the quote is entirely correct, thought is the most terrifying thing because thought carries with it changes in status and legitimacy rules. The examples in the quote demonstrate the power of thought, highlighting the kind of traditional social defenses thought can destroy.
An insult, is the very name we give to incidents of this fear, the more directly we concentrate on the person speaking the more obvious the association, but fundamentally when thought is most powerful it alters our status and legitimacy values, and so, regardless of how obliquely we make statements, they are always going to be frightening, and thus experienced as an insult.
That was a beautiful reply :-D
To push a little more (and much more gently this time) I suspect that you are homing in on a familiar critique of politics rather than ideas themselves (which can sometimes be profitably separated from politics).
I personally have a very hard time remembering situations where ideas themselves seemed to lead to emotional reactions, rather than having ideas expressed in front of an audience, with competitive processes layered in as an inherent part of what’s going on. Like, I love having conversations on road trips, because its private and safe and there is room for 90 minutes of undistracted cooperative communication. In my experience, those kind of conversations don’t cause people to freak out very much at all, even when the ideas are themselves very “fraught”.
-Jerry Seinfeld
I suspect that beyond a certain point, sanity can only be raised by groups of people who are aware of (and have the skills to manage?) issues like glossophobia. There is a big difference between contexts where people try to induce crazy emotions in someone they are debating (which I was sort of doing by example, in the grandparent and for which I apologize) versus contexts where people are explicitly trying to bring an epistemically “nurturing” environment into being :-)
I’m glad you like it : )
I suppose the question is, to what extent can ideas be separated from social dynamics, such as status and legitimacy, and therefore not carry with them the risk of causing anger and fear.
Well ideas can certainly create positive as well as negative responses. For example, more accurate understanding and the communication of practically useful approaches are often intrinsically enjoyable. As is the communication of experience that might help determine the correct course of action or help avoid problems (i.e. personal stories, news). Provided these don’t threaten our status and legitimacy rules they remain positive and rewarding. They can also serve to validate our choices and serve to bolster our self esteem, or even to reduce the importance of those who threaten our values (satire). These can be viewed as improving our feelings that we have status (value) and legitimacy (goodness), i.e. the opposite of the fear causing uses I mentioned above.
However, ideas can also influence these factors more indirectly. For example, in the entertainment industry the term ‘social currency’ is sometimes used. This is used to describe the value that people place on communicating ideas as a means for establishing relationships (mutually nurturing through making each other feel good) and raising status (being relatively more important because you convey the pleasure of entertainment). A process mirrored here through the karma points. As such it can carry fears associated with threatening those in an alpha position or a conflict in the rules that underlie the status, for example as expressed in the phrase “you’re just saying that to be popular”.
Academics and other creative roles have the added pressure that the continuous generation of ideas is the basis for their livelihood. This is likely to lead to ideas being a major factor in their self esteem, adding an extra intensity to the fears and pleasures associated with having them (perhaps explaining why Bertrand Russell said the quote in the first place).
More significantly, formal ideas, such as proofs can be extremely threatening because they introduce a method of influence that conflicts with many existing status hierarchies. It breaks many people’s sense of legitimacy, to say that anyone can make a formal statement for any reason and yet still determine other people’s actions, or even more significantly, that an opinion of a person can be considered to have no value if a formal statement demonstrates that it is false. Taken to extreme, it could lead to a position where a person had no influence (and thus no status) because they were incapable of ever making a statement that was not proved false. I would suggest it is more common to view the legitimacy of statements as deriving from status (which is why we tend to value quotes the way we do). And also to have status determined by tradition, which in some community’s leads almost all novelty to be treated as illegitimate. Thus reducing conversation to small talk or the repetition of traditional sayings (anything else would be ‘weird’). The power of scientific method (and this site) is in creating a set of traditions that enable novelty to be introduced in a legitimate way, so that these two positions are less likely to conflict (although I suspect they do so quite frequently).
I am in the unfortunate position of enjoying conversations about status and legitimacy, which are almost always fraught with the risks of taboo violation. Not to mention the fact that thinking about status and legitimacy tends to make your values different from those around you, making interactions a lot like walking on thin ice (exhilarating and terrifying) : ).
Another related LW post: The Nature of Offense.
Thank you, it’s such a pleasure to find so many interesting discussions of these ideas.
This is lovely.
It is not quite my watchword—I would be a very different person if it were, and I’m not sure I’m prepared for that—but I can at least look through the window, so to speak, and see the view.