Almost everything in this post sounds right to me.
These Drama Triangle patterns are everywhere. Utterly everywhere.
It doesn’t seem that way to me; but then, what everywhere are you talking about?
I can see those patterns in argumentation online—a lot—and in a few dysfunctional people I know, and indeed in my own past in some places. Regarding my real-life modern friends, family, and coworkers, it doesn’t seem like anyone relates to each other through those roles (at least not often enough to describe it as ‘utterly everywhere’).
Could the pattern be general enough to match very many circumstances? For example, one can act combative, or cooperate, or not react at all, to what happens in one’s life. Thus any interaction can be mapped to the triangle.
Perhaps I’m missing something. If it’s just that few of the people in my life regularly have the victim mindset, I feel very fortunate.
This echoes the Virtue of the Void
I thought that Void was something different, but I also feel like I shouldn’t try to explain the difference in my conception of the Void.
At any rate, I agree strongly with the idea that we need to prune our mental processes and otherwise reduce the effort/cost from our attempts to be more rational. Mental noise is the source of much confusion. But I don’t agree that Truth is the only thing that matters, or the ultimate thing that matters.
Which is something people always say right before they tell you to stop trying to find the Truth—and that’s not my point at all! Keep pushing toward Truth! Nothing that you want is going to be accomplished without it. And if what you want changes as you learn more, so be it.
All I mean is that, in a technical sense, Truth is the penultimate value. It is fine to want things more than you want the Truth. The mistake is thinking you can get those things while discarding the Truth.
But that seems like a basic lesson… so what did you mean? It may be that every single time someone thinks what they want is at odds with the truth, they are wrong—is that what you meant?
Or perhaps, did you simply mean that getting at the truth requires unwavering devotion, far stronger than what people normally apply toward anything they want? I think that’s also true.
Almost everything in this post sounds right to me.
Cool.
I can see those [Drama Triangle] patterns in argumentation online—a lot—and in a few dysfunctional people I know, and indeed in my own past in some places. Regarding my real-life modern friends, family, and coworkers, it doesn’t seem like anyone relates to each other through those roles (at least not often enough to describe it as ‘utterly everywhere’).
[…]
Perhaps I’m missing something. If it’s just that few of the people in my life regularly have the victim mindset, I feel very fortunate.
Maybe you are blessed!
That said, my guess based on priors is that you’re probably just not familiar with how to notice these patterns at subtle levels.
A few days ago I had just finished lunch with my parents. After we’d finished, there was a bit of time left before I needed to head out to make it to an online call. So I started using that time to help clean up. Dad turned to me and said something like “You have a call. You should get going and leave this to me.” I know Dad plenty well to know that this isn’t because of some love of kitchen cleaning on his part. At first blush it looks like caring, and it’s how he has learned how to express caring, but it’s actually a subtle invitation to Rescue me. At other times he’ll do the Rescuer-turned-Victim thing about how there’s always so very much work to do.
Nearly all plots from dramas and romcoms are variations on Drama Triangle themes. It’s a big tangled mess of “I need you to do/be a certain thing in order for me to be okay.” If Alice needs Ben to do X and Ben needs Carol to do Y and Carol needs Alice to do Z, but Alice doing Z makes it tricky for Ben to do X, then you have a very entertaining spiral as no one takes responsibility for their own wellbeing and everyone gets an emotional orgasm of offense/excitement/sorrow/etc. in their collective arms race of attempted emotional co-manipulation. What fun!
Once in the Czech Republic I was sitting at a bar finishing a glass of beer. The waitress came by and asked to take my glass. I wasn’t done and I said as much. She put her fist on her hips with one hand and gestured at my glass with the other in a lot of irritation and said “Come on. There’s just a mouthful left.” Her Persecutor inviting me to Victim. At the time I accepted the Drama bid and felt resentful for a while afterwards. I can only guess, but my guess is that had I refused and told her to come back later she would have fumed about me for a while afterwards. She might have done so anyway.
Nearly every graduate student I’ve interacted with has learned how to play Victim as part of their role. That’s a huge chunk of what PhD Comics is a caricature of. “Oh man, this is such a huge workload, and I haven’t done nearly enough, so my advisor is gonna be so disappointed in me tomorrow….” Often it’s the system as a whole that’s acting as the Persecutor, at least from the grad student’s point of view. The pointlessness of fighting back helps to feed the Victim narrative of hopelessness.
A pretty good rule of thumb is: If you’re stressed enough about something that it’s activating your SNS but you aren’t in a situation where a burst of speed will solve the problem before you run out of emergency energy, then you’re almost certainly confused about what’s real, and it’s very often because you’ve fallen into the Triangle somehow. The overwhelming majority of efforts to “save the world” or “fight for justice” are of this type, often from the Rescuer corner (although with cancel culture we’ve seen a blatant wave of Rescuer-turned-Persecutor patterns pop up). It’s easy to sort of motte-and-bailey this point by focusing on how important the causes are (“We’re talking about existential risk!”) rather than really looking at the Drama pattern of how concern for the causes are being used, and in service to what. The complaints about “White Saviorism” are exactly objecting to the condescension of the Rescuer pattern — but the nature of the complaints are often just retaliating with Persecutor. Round & round we go!
I’ll pause there. I could go on for hours.
Hopefully that helps clarify what I’m talking about there.
[…] I don’t agree that Truth is the only thing that matters, or the ultimate thing that matters.
Ah, I didn’t mean to say it was. Sorry if I misspoke somewhere.
I meant to say that devoting to truth is coherent and very powerful, and the more deeply I do so the more obvious it is to me that nothing else makes sense for me.
But maybe looking deeply at the truth would wreck a given person’s 20-year marriage, and he’d rather live the life he’s built for himself than go on some grand spiritual journey. That’s perfectly fine. That matters to him, which means it matters.
For myself, that’s not an option anymore. I’ve already crossed too many points of no return. And I don’t regret it one bit. If I end up married, it’ll almost certainly be because my wife is devoted to truth too, and we learned how to build a life together within that context. If I have to wait a hundred years for that, or it never happens, then so be it.
I’m suggesting that this kind of devotion to truth is necessary for Beisutsukai. That’s all.
It may be that every single time someone thinks what they want is at odds with the truth, they are wrong—is that what you meant?
That’s not what I meant, though I think that’s basically true too.
Or perhaps, did you simply mean that getting at the truth requires unwavering devotion, far stronger than what people normally apply toward anything they want?
Something more like this, yes.
Whatever you want more than truth leaves you with a question: Why do you want it more? What if looking at that question caused you to realize that your desire stems from an illusion? The very act of noticing this might cause you to cease pursuing this treasure greater than truth. So you’d best not look!
This isn’t a fictitious reasoning pathway. It’s the standard trick of the ego.
(In particular, it’s close to what Anna Salamon at least used to call a “broccoli error”: If someone who hates broccoli is given an opportunity to push a button and enjoy broccoli instead, they might respond “I’m not pushing that button! If I did, I’d eat more broccoli, and I hate broccoli!”)
The only path I know of that relentlessly and unwaveringly moves toward clarity and freedom is total devotion to truth. Any deviance from that path leads to confusion.
…which is not the same as saying that deviance is wrong or that people who don’t devote to truth are making a mistake.
It’s just a fact. Preferring anything over truth creates room for confusion.
So anyone who wants to master any art of cutting through confusion would do extremely well to fully devote to truth.
But maybe that 20-year marriage sounds way sweeter.
Hopefully that helps clarify what I’m talking about there.
It does. Those examples help a lot. Thank you!
Preferring anything over truth creates room for confusion.
We might be talking about preferring things over truth in two different ways.
If you prefer something alternate to the truth, the thing you prefer could be right or wrong. To the extent it’s wrong you are confusing yourself. I agree with that, and I think that’s what you mean by ‘preferring something over truth’.
What I meant is more like “How much effort I’m going to expend getting at this truth.”
An (admittedly trivial) example: There’s a TV show I like, whose ending is only available for paying customers for a streaming service. I judged it not worth my money to buy the service to get the ending. In a sense, I value the money more than the truth of the show’s ending.
An example with greater consequence: for most truths, I’m unwilling to sacrifice stranger’s lives to learn them. Which isn’t to say that lives are a sacred value that cannot be traded—just that most truths aren’t worth that cost. In that sense, I value human lives above truth.
(That’s probably a bad example because so seldom can one trade human lives to learn truths, but alas. The first real world situation that comes to mind is Covid19 vaccine testing, and I’d absolutely let volunteers risk their lives for that.)
Does my view on how much effort to spend pursuing truth still lead to confusion? It might.
But maybe that 20-year marriage sounds way sweeter.
A person using my reasoning may think “I don’t want to risk sacrificing my marriage to learn that particular truth.” Depending on the marriage, maybe it would be worth it to hold back… although my intuition says a marriage based on lies won’t be. And of course, to know whether it would be worth it or not means that you’ve got to risk sacrificing it. That way is closed to you.
I’m going to have to think about it more. I don’t want to trade poorly.
Even so, one can’t study everything. How does one choose which truths to pursue? Indeed, to bring it back around, how does one choose which biases to focus on correcting, and which to let go for now because trying to overcome them would only add clutter to one’s mental processes?
Thanks for trying to figure that out, and responding so thoroughly.
I think you’re equivocating a bit between information and truth. For example in the TV example, you would pay to get the information of what the ending is. It would make more sense to talk about the truth of the show’s ending if, say, there was a character you were very attached which you didn’t want to die, and they might die in the last episode. Would you like to know how the show ends even if you have to face the truth of this character’s death?
In other words, truth is more about what you believe than what information you have (though obviously you need information to get at the truth). You can have different beliefs with the same information, so the question is more about whether you’re willing to accept the truth if it costs you something.
Without additional cost, I’d definitely prefer to know what happens even if my favorite character might die.
For a different show, I would not care. Whether or not I value the information depends on the show, or the domain… How much I’m willing to pay for information, and by extension the truth, depends a lot on the thing about which I’m learning.
To me it looks like the thing itself is what is important, and my desire to have accurate beliefs stems from caring about the thing. It’s not that I care about the accurate beliefs themselves, so much.
Even so, I don’t want false beliefs about anything. All domains are one.
I think the description of the Void in the twelve virtues is purposefully vague. Perhaps to shake the reader enough to get them to think for themselves, or perhaps to be a place for personal interjection into the twelve virtues.
You may try to name the highest principle with names such as “the map that reflects the territory” or “experience of success and failure” or “Bayesian decision theory”. But perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.
It could also a test of a sort. In any case, I didn’t think it would be worthwhile to explain my conception of the Void.
Almost everything in this post sounds right to me.
It doesn’t seem that way to me; but then, what everywhere are you talking about?
I can see those patterns in argumentation online—a lot—and in a few dysfunctional people I know, and indeed in my own past in some places. Regarding my real-life modern friends, family, and coworkers, it doesn’t seem like anyone relates to each other through those roles (at least not often enough to describe it as ‘utterly everywhere’).
Could the pattern be general enough to match very many circumstances? For example, one can act combative, or cooperate, or not react at all, to what happens in one’s life. Thus any interaction can be mapped to the triangle.
Perhaps I’m missing something. If it’s just that few of the people in my life regularly have the victim mindset, I feel very fortunate.
I thought that Void was something different, but I also feel like I shouldn’t try to explain the difference in my conception of the Void.
At any rate, I agree strongly with the idea that we need to prune our mental processes and otherwise reduce the effort/cost from our attempts to be more rational. Mental noise is the source of much confusion. But I don’t agree that Truth is the only thing that matters, or the ultimate thing that matters.
Which is something people always say right before they tell you to stop trying to find the Truth—and that’s not my point at all! Keep pushing toward Truth! Nothing that you want is going to be accomplished without it. And if what you want changes as you learn more, so be it.
All I mean is that, in a technical sense, Truth is the penultimate value. It is fine to want things more than you want the Truth. The mistake is thinking you can get those things while discarding the Truth.
But that seems like a basic lesson… so what did you mean? It may be that every single time someone thinks what they want is at odds with the truth, they are wrong—is that what you meant?
Or perhaps, did you simply mean that getting at the truth requires unwavering devotion, far stronger than what people normally apply toward anything they want? I think that’s also true.
I feel like I’m missing something again.
Cool.
Maybe you are blessed!
That said, my guess based on priors is that you’re probably just not familiar with how to notice these patterns at subtle levels.
A few days ago I had just finished lunch with my parents. After we’d finished, there was a bit of time left before I needed to head out to make it to an online call. So I started using that time to help clean up. Dad turned to me and said something like “You have a call. You should get going and leave this to me.” I know Dad plenty well to know that this isn’t because of some love of kitchen cleaning on his part. At first blush it looks like caring, and it’s how he has learned how to express caring, but it’s actually a subtle invitation to Rescue me. At other times he’ll do the Rescuer-turned-Victim thing about how there’s always so very much work to do.
Nearly all plots from dramas and romcoms are variations on Drama Triangle themes. It’s a big tangled mess of “I need you to do/be a certain thing in order for me to be okay.” If Alice needs Ben to do X and Ben needs Carol to do Y and Carol needs Alice to do Z, but Alice doing Z makes it tricky for Ben to do X, then you have a very entertaining spiral as no one takes responsibility for their own wellbeing and everyone gets an emotional orgasm of offense/excitement/sorrow/etc. in their collective arms race of attempted emotional co-manipulation. What fun!
Once in the Czech Republic I was sitting at a bar finishing a glass of beer. The waitress came by and asked to take my glass. I wasn’t done and I said as much. She put her fist on her hips with one hand and gestured at my glass with the other in a lot of irritation and said “Come on. There’s just a mouthful left.” Her Persecutor inviting me to Victim. At the time I accepted the Drama bid and felt resentful for a while afterwards. I can only guess, but my guess is that had I refused and told her to come back later she would have fumed about me for a while afterwards. She might have done so anyway.
Nearly every graduate student I’ve interacted with has learned how to play Victim as part of their role. That’s a huge chunk of what PhD Comics is a caricature of. “Oh man, this is such a huge workload, and I haven’t done nearly enough, so my advisor is gonna be so disappointed in me tomorrow….” Often it’s the system as a whole that’s acting as the Persecutor, at least from the grad student’s point of view. The pointlessness of fighting back helps to feed the Victim narrative of hopelessness.
A pretty good rule of thumb is: If you’re stressed enough about something that it’s activating your SNS but you aren’t in a situation where a burst of speed will solve the problem before you run out of emergency energy, then you’re almost certainly confused about what’s real, and it’s very often because you’ve fallen into the Triangle somehow. The overwhelming majority of efforts to “save the world” or “fight for justice” are of this type, often from the Rescuer corner (although with cancel culture we’ve seen a blatant wave of Rescuer-turned-Persecutor patterns pop up). It’s easy to sort of motte-and-bailey this point by focusing on how important the causes are (“We’re talking about existential risk!”) rather than really looking at the Drama pattern of how concern for the causes are being used, and in service to what. The complaints about “White Saviorism” are exactly objecting to the condescension of the Rescuer pattern — but the nature of the complaints are often just retaliating with Persecutor. Round & round we go!
I’ll pause there. I could go on for hours.
Hopefully that helps clarify what I’m talking about there.
Ah, I didn’t mean to say it was. Sorry if I misspoke somewhere.
I meant to say that devoting to truth is coherent and very powerful, and the more deeply I do so the more obvious it is to me that nothing else makes sense for me.
But maybe looking deeply at the truth would wreck a given person’s 20-year marriage, and he’d rather live the life he’s built for himself than go on some grand spiritual journey. That’s perfectly fine. That matters to him, which means it matters.
For myself, that’s not an option anymore. I’ve already crossed too many points of no return. And I don’t regret it one bit. If I end up married, it’ll almost certainly be because my wife is devoted to truth too, and we learned how to build a life together within that context. If I have to wait a hundred years for that, or it never happens, then so be it.
I’m suggesting that this kind of devotion to truth is necessary for Beisutsukai. That’s all.
That’s not what I meant, though I think that’s basically true too.
Something more like this, yes.
Whatever you want more than truth leaves you with a question: Why do you want it more? What if looking at that question caused you to realize that your desire stems from an illusion? The very act of noticing this might cause you to cease pursuing this treasure greater than truth. So you’d best not look!
This isn’t a fictitious reasoning pathway. It’s the standard trick of the ego.
(In particular, it’s close to what Anna Salamon at least used to call a “broccoli error”: If someone who hates broccoli is given an opportunity to push a button and enjoy broccoli instead, they might respond “I’m not pushing that button! If I did, I’d eat more broccoli, and I hate broccoli!”)
The only path I know of that relentlessly and unwaveringly moves toward clarity and freedom is total devotion to truth. Any deviance from that path leads to confusion.
…which is not the same as saying that deviance is wrong or that people who don’t devote to truth are making a mistake.
It’s just a fact. Preferring anything over truth creates room for confusion.
So anyone who wants to master any art of cutting through confusion would do extremely well to fully devote to truth.
But maybe that 20-year marriage sounds way sweeter.
That’s actually, truly okay.
It does. Those examples help a lot. Thank you!
We might be talking about preferring things over truth in two different ways.
If you prefer something alternate to the truth, the thing you prefer could be right or wrong. To the extent it’s wrong you are confusing yourself. I agree with that, and I think that’s what you mean by ‘preferring something over truth’.
What I meant is more like “How much effort I’m going to expend getting at this truth.”
An (admittedly trivial) example: There’s a TV show I like, whose ending is only available for paying customers for a streaming service. I judged it not worth my money to buy the service to get the ending. In a sense, I value the money more than the truth of the show’s ending.
An example with greater consequence: for most truths, I’m unwilling to sacrifice stranger’s lives to learn them. Which isn’t to say that lives are a sacred value that cannot be traded—just that most truths aren’t worth that cost. In that sense, I value human lives above truth.
(That’s probably a bad example because so seldom can one trade human lives to learn truths, but alas. The first real world situation that comes to mind is Covid19 vaccine testing, and I’d absolutely let volunteers risk their lives for that.)
Does my view on how much effort to spend pursuing truth still lead to confusion? It might.
A person using my reasoning may think “I don’t want to risk sacrificing my marriage to learn that particular truth.” Depending on the marriage, maybe it would be worth it to hold back… although my intuition says a marriage based on lies won’t be. And of course, to know whether it would be worth it or not means that you’ve got to risk sacrificing it. That way is closed to you.
I’m going to have to think about it more. I don’t want to trade poorly.
Even so, one can’t study everything. How does one choose which truths to pursue? Indeed, to bring it back around, how does one choose which biases to focus on correcting, and which to let go for now because trying to overcome them would only add clutter to one’s mental processes?
Thanks for trying to figure that out, and responding so thoroughly.
I think you’re equivocating a bit between information and truth. For example in the TV example, you would pay to get the information of what the ending is. It would make more sense to talk about the truth of the show’s ending if, say, there was a character you were very attached which you didn’t want to die, and they might die in the last episode. Would you like to know how the show ends even if you have to face the truth of this character’s death?
In other words, truth is more about what you believe than what information you have (though obviously you need information to get at the truth). You can have different beliefs with the same information, so the question is more about whether you’re willing to accept the truth if it costs you something.
Thanks, that gets rid of most of my confusion.
Without additional cost, I’d definitely prefer to know what happens even if my favorite character might die.
For a different show, I would not care. Whether or not I value the information depends on the show, or the domain… How much I’m willing to pay for information, and by extension the truth, depends a lot on the thing about which I’m learning.
To me it looks like the thing itself is what is important, and my desire to have accurate beliefs stems from caring about the thing. It’s not that I care about the accurate beliefs themselves, so much.
Even so, I don’t want false beliefs about anything. All domains are one.
Why not?
I think the description of the Void in the twelve virtues is purposefully vague. Perhaps to shake the reader enough to get them to think for themselves, or perhaps to be a place for personal interjection into the twelve virtues.
It could also a test of a sort. In any case, I didn’t think it would be worthwhile to explain my conception of the Void.
Really liked that line, even though I’m not sure it can’t be the ultimate value.