I've decided to start putting some of my blog posts from Philosophy Bear here as well, particularly those with special relevance to this community.

Something many have observed is how intensely narcissistic the inner voice is, along with related phenomena like fantasies etc. This seems to be often true even in perfectly thoughtful, kind people.

The inner voice is, I think, often more narcissistic not just than action, but feeling. If I learn something sad, I feel at least a little sad, but then over the top of it there’s a yattering voice going “what’s this mean for you though?”

I think this might be what led La Rochefoucauld and similar writers astray into far too cynical a view of human nature, e.g.:

“We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.”

“In the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not displeasing to us.”

“The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice.”

“Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.”

“The love of justice is, in most men, only the fear of suffering injustice.”

Cynical moralists have equated this plotting, scheming voice with the true self, rather than revealed preference. Adam Smith plots a wiser course here. Everyone knows this passage from him:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

What everyone forgets is the passage immediately after this where he says “actually though, this selfishness of reflection only applies when you’re not in the action”:

When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self-love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many. The man within immediately calls to us, that we value ourselves too much and other people too little, and that, by doing so, we render ourselves the proper object of the contempt and indignation of our brethren.

Or this bit:

To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself [losing his finger], would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it.

Although given some of the vice signalling I have seen on Twitter, and some of the incredible selfishness we see in the corridors of history, I think his line “never produced such a villain” is, sadly, more than a bit much.

I am reminded of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary which argues that the left brain, neurologically associated with speech production, has become increasingly prominent. He thinks it has become so prominent we sometimes mistake it for the self. Thinking that the self is the inner voice- rather than our recognition of the inner voice being like “one blind man’s grasp on one part of the elephant” so to speak, leads to too much cynicism about what kind of beings we are. A point that came up in conversation with a friend while I was writing this struck me as quite profound. The inner voice typically is in the first person this means that it is constantly equating itself with the I. It is constantly stating the thesis that it is the whole.

On the other hand, while the chattering self may make up most of the thought stream by volume, there is gold in that river. Particularly in the momentum words have as a mode of thought, driving towards something like moral consistency. When I looked at data from Scott Alexander’s community survey, people with an inner voice were far more likely to identify as effective altruists than people without one. See the 2022 community survey, where 8% of respondents who heard no inner voice called themselves effective altruists. Whereas 17% of respondents who said they heard an inner voice constantly identified as effective altruists. Those who sometimes heard an inner voice had an intermediate likelihood.

The gap between high inner voice versus no inner voice EA identification is very, very big as far as effect sizes go in this part of science, an odds ratio of about 2.46.

I suspect guilt at the narcissism of this voice is a deep wellspring of moralistic OCD and moralistic themes in depression. It’s easy to think that you’re a bad person when you have a constantly operative, highly salient, part of you which, if it were a separate person acting like that would be a very bad person. Or at the very least, a comically vainglorious one.

What if I get so mad that I hit my child?

That would be terrible, you’d be an awful person. Everyone would know, social services would come to your house, and you’d be criminally convicted for child abuse. You’d have a criminal record for violence against a child.

My god, why am I thinking about this outcome so much in terms of how people would perceive me? It must be that I am an awful person. I feel so grubby. Perhaps I really am a dangerous person.

Finally, I have been thinking about grandiosity in writing a bit lately, troubled by a thought many have been having lately- that part of the reason culture isn’t advancing is because we are afraid of cringe. Cringe exists in the moment of ambition, and in the moment of reaching for something you are not quite ready for yet- vital to the creation of something new. A big part of that fear of cringe is fear of grandiosity. I suspect some people who have only read my writing and not known me well in person think I am far more grandiose than a fuller picture would suggest precisely because I let some of the grandiosity of the inner voice come through in my writing. I do this because I find it interesting in a way socially modulated speech often is not, even if not always right.

Postscript: After I published this, several people said to me that they disagree with it because they don’t find the inner voice that narcissistic. I think a lot of the problem here is that I’ve poorly presented my own thought because I’ve focused one-sidedly on the inner voice’s narcissism to make a point. There is likely interpersonal variation here which I can’t speak to. Certainly, the idea that the inner voice is narcissistic seems to occur across a lot of authors, and certainly mine is, but there may well be countless people for whom it is not narcissistic or less narcissistic.

But I do think a lot of this is a confusion caused by my poor expression. One commentor wrote:

“Strong disagree. My experience is that narcissism bubbles up at the level of instinctive feeling, and the inner voice is the one that looks at self-absorbed feelings and goes “But what would the point of that be?” or “Seems a little narcissistic though.”.

In my experience, the bit about being an inner critic of narcissism is very much true. The inner voice is constantly pointing out narcissism and vigorously objecting to it. But it’s also constantly enacting narcissism. It does a lot of both. And an even stickier trap: the way it objects to narcissism is itself often weirdly narcissistic, there is a certain vanity in its self-criticism. In sum: it babbles, a lot of it is narcissistic, a lot of it is anti-narcissistic, but the net effect is that if a person were talking that way out loud, you’d consider them an incorrigible narcissist.

There is a serious challenge here. The inner voice's job is to talk about I. As such, it's working with a handicap, of course it's going to sound a bit narcissistic. It's job, a job that it should be playing, is to strategise about me and what I should be doing. However, in my experience, it's narcissism often goes beyond that which this concession would licence. But even when it does stay within the bounds of a level of self-concern reasonable for its office, it can be suffocating when considered in isolation. I don't know how universal this is but many others seem to have found the same.

Originally posted here, on my Substack.