For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversation. I am occasionally frustrated by this endeavour, but overall, it's been fun! I'm learning a lot about my civilization and the various curmudgeons who shaped it.

But one dismaying side effect is that it's also been quite empowering for my inner 13 year old edgelord. Did you know that before we invented woke, you were just allowed to be openly contemptuous of people?

Here's Schopenhauer on the common man:

They take an objective interest in nothing whatever. Their attention, not to speak of their mind, is engaged by nothing that does not bear some relation, or at least some possible relation, to their own person: otherwise their interest is not aroused. They are not noticeably stimulated even by wit or humour; they hate rather everything that demands the slightest thought. Coarse buffooneries at most excite them to laughter: apart from that they are earnest brutes – and all because they are capable of only subjective interest. It is precisely this which makes card-playing the most appropriate amusement for them – card-playing for money: because this does not remain in the sphere of mere knowledge, as stage plays, music, conversation, etc., do, but sets in motion the will itself, the primary element which exists everywhere. For the rest they are, from their first breath to their last, tradesmen, life’s born drudges. All their pleasures are sensuous: they have no feeling for any other kind of pleasure. To be sociable with them is to be degraded.

And Freud on why he's skeptical about this "universal love" thing:

Even at this early stage we will not withhold our two main reservations: first, an undiscriminating love seems to us to forfeit some of its intrinsic value by doing its object an injustice, and, secondly, not all human beings are worthy of love.

After being raised by SJW tumblr, reading this was unbelievably exhilarating. My inner edgelord wanted it to be injected directly into her veins. I hold a lot of affection for my inner edgelord, don't get me wrong. But I am also often kind of mortified by her and would like her to be holding the reins like 5% of the time vis a vis my intellectual development, when it's currently more like 20% of the time? Social justice and egalitarianism are values that are dear to (the other 80% of) me, and as I read more of these texts I felt my heart hardening in a misanthropic and elitist direction that was ego-dystonic.

So a few months into reading Freud and Schopenhauer and Tolstoy and Nietzsche, I decided that I should... probably... do something about that? I pondered how to proceed. I assessed my intellectual life, where I was organizing weekly rationality meetups, almost exclusively socializing with people who either had university degrees or were putting out certified bangers on tumblr, and literally reading my way through the great books. And then I had probably the dumbest thought I've had in all of 2025: "maybe getting more in touch with the common man would fix me, since surely that would prove Schopenhauer wrong."

So I went to a couple of casual philosophy events based in Toronto, ran by a group I had passing familiarity with. These are low-barrier events for everyday people to engage with philosophical questions, and... okay, admittedly there were some real clown emoji things about this:

But you know what? I was also very aware how much of a delicate baby I am when it comes to community cultures that I find tolerable. I am like one of those tree frog species that lives exclusively within a backyard-sized patch in the amazon rainforest, and I will be killed by like, the subtle change in microbiota if I step a toe outside it. There is nothing to be gained by yeeting me directly into a sports bar, is what I'm saying. Because of the microbiota.

So I go to the philosophy meetup, which is meant to be accessible to the community at large, but in practice... yeah, it's of course not a random sample, it's the kind of people that you expect that show up: grad students who are ambiguously queer, urbane retirees in summer knits and pearls and designer sunglasses, Iranian Uber drivers with PhDs from back home, twitter reply guys. Which is!!! I mean!!! You cannot exactly describe this group of people as bottom of the barrel, intellect-wise, yeah?

Which makes it all the more horrifying how utterly rancid the level of discourse was, at the meetup. I can't fault the organizers for this; they were doing the thing they said they were going to do, which is to create a space where everyone felt comfortable contributing to the discussion, regardless of how much background they had in philosophy.

This is a wonderful mission and I am genuinely very glad that there are organizers who are facilitating this sort of event. This just, incidentally, happened to create a space that plunged this delicate baby tree frog into a spiritual Antarctica, as I was forced to come to terms with the gigantic inferential chasm between the rationalist communities' intellectual norms and the way that the not-even-that-common-men did things.

There was a feeling of quiet, growing horror as I realized that people were capable of press-ganging literally any word into acting like a thought terminating cliche. If norms rot away that's just entropy (which is natural and thus good); if things are "subjective" and not "objective" we just have to let it stand (my timid request to define these terms when we were discussing social conventions, of all things, was summarily ignored); one group I was in hummed appreciatively at the claim that a hypothetical was "hurtful" but not "harmful" and I wondered if I had died and gone to hell without realizing.

I had forgotten how stress testing for claims' counterexamples or edge cases was "playing the devil's advocate", a deeply anti-social action one did not take in polite society without a whole fucking ritual of contrition and apology. No one was running any claims that they were making through the least convenient world filter; people were just making all sorts of claims with their mouths, which I was slowly starting to understand were connected to their asses instead of their brain stems, and to my dismay I felt my free speech absolutism also beginning to circle the drain.

I started thinking: I wasn't asking for full academic rigor, but if none of the other people at that discussion group were at all interested in being critical about the thoughts that were passing through their own brain in any way^[1], then that's... like... sort of contemptible, isn't it?

By the way, if at this point you're like "wow, Jenn's sort of being an elitist bitch here", well, yeah. This was sort of the entire problem that I was here bunglingly trying to solve. But instead of getting fixed, over the course of two hours that night, I Got Worse. I completely stopped seeing the other participants as people with anything potentially useful to teach me, and instead started seeing them as NPCs to manipulate for fun. For the second half of the night, I locked in on a one-player mini-game where I attempted to say the most controversial thing I can that would elicit laughter instead of weird looks. I generated a lot of the first and very little of the second, because I am good at this game. And to my disgust, while I felt my status diminish bit by bit when I was trying to establish better discourse norms, it began to rise sharply as I made people laugh. Many people came up to me afterwards to tell me how much they enjoyed my contributions. They were referring to my edgy jokes, of course, and not anything that happened while I still held any amount of respect for them.

I thanked them and made light conversation and had a beer with the organizers afterwards where we talked shop about community building. Then I went home and bawled my eyes out because Schopenhauer was right, and I didn't want him to be, but I turned evil and degraded when I tried to socialize with the common men^[2], so what the fuck do I do now?

It became clear to me that whatever my issue is, more contact with people outside the community is not the answer; each interaction would only lead to a greater sense of alienation and contempt for people outside the walled garden, which was the opposite of what I wanted.

What a fucked up cosmic joke?? I attempted to fix a flaw I saw in myself, and somehow this led me to a strange door where I had to sacrifice either my intellectual integrity or my sense of egalitarianism to pass through. That's not the way this usually goes in books!^[3]

For a while, I tried to square the circle with some abstruse cope. I thought my way into the problem, perhaps I can think my way out of it?

First, I thought about my own positionality and luck. I fell into the community I have now by happenstance (counting my contrarian temperament and wordcel nature as happenstance), and this community is deliberate in rewarding rigorous thinking. And after you marinate in this community for a bit, you will just absorb the epistemic norms and wisdom without much effort on your part, so it's not like I did anything special.

So instead of feeling contempt, perhaps I can instead feel a sense of sorrow: no, the other people are not inferior, and it is not their fault that they were not brought up or brought into communities like this. If the people who showed up to that discussion didn't have years of experience engaging with ideas in a more rigorous way, of course they are going to be bad at it. This sort of thing takes practice, and I am lucky to be in a community that cultivated it in me.

Second, I "remembered" the reason that I loved my species. Why, of course intelligence was never a part of it; it was that the best of us are brave and kind, and the way we cooperate in the face of disaster. Sure, some humans are incredibly clever, and that was certainly a good trait to have. But I tried to make myself believe it was certainly not a core reason that I liked my species. My mind helpfully recalled takes I've consistently held to "prove" to myself that this has always been the case. For example, I had a conversation with some other rationalists some years ago where I argued that since intelligence is a symmetric weapon, if we could genetically engineer humans to increase one trait across the population, it should be kindness or cooperativeness instead of IQ. So I'm consistent! Nothing to see here. And obviously, one can like their species for one reason, and have a differing set of preferences for what traits one would like in their friends and their extended social circle.

Third, I tried to take an outside view of what was happening, and tried to find the humour in it. Imagine if I was some sort of world champion sandcastle builder, and one lovely summer day I decided to go build some sandcastles on a random beach for fun. Then imagine that I was driven to tears and deep existential despair, because the noob ass sandcastles the toddlers were making around me were just so fucking trash tier and I couldn't bear it. Of course that sandcastle champion would definitely deserve to be clowned on.

Sadly, those conclusions fell apart when I tried to write this essay for the first time, which required me to examine them in any amount of detail to get them down on paper. Intelligence is important to me and it's important for the lightcone, and while comparing it to other positive traits is useful to some extent, to try to trivialize it into nothingness or to pretend that it is an unmarked one of many is dishonest.

And most people, including intelligent, educated ones, simply don't value holding true beliefs, not intrinsically. They might care about it in the way they care about reducing third world poverty rates or factory farming; they'll pay lip service but they'll hardly sacrifice anything about their current lifestyles to have more of it. It's possible that you, the person reading this, do not value holding true beliefs intrinsically, and you see it as silly and quixotic that I would sacrifice things to have more of it. I can accept this. But I think we would both agree that to paper this over as a training gap would insult both your intelligence and mine.

Of course it was all cope; that's what happens when you grasp for conclusions to lessen the amount of pain you are in; you become unusually suspect to motivated reasoning.

So instead I am just sort of... here. The world didn't end just because I couldn't resolve the contradiction, and it's just going to hang out with me for a while. I like people on some days and dislike them on others. I read Virginia Woolf and am slammed with ardent anti-imperialist feelings and then I read J. S. Mill and I calm down a bit. I run my own little meetups in that little backyard-sized patch of rainforest, occasionally collaborating with people in patches that are not too far away. I try to get better at asking people questions in the intersection of what is interesting to me and what makes them feel seen and valued as individuals.

Maybe I'll resolve this at some point, but I don't think it makes sense to rush it. Difficult things take time.

1. ^{^}

   This was not precisely true. Some were definitely running all their thoughts through a filter of "were these claims potentially problematic or exclusionary to minority groups?" This is a fine filter, I just wish there were other filters being used too.

2. ^{^}

   Actually, it was worse than that. I was trying to prove to myself that the dead white aristocrats weren't correct about their peasant stock, but I felt backed into a corner by coming into contact with other members of the petit bourgeois 🤡

3. ^{^}

   Well, at least not for protagonists, but I suppose I can't rule out the possibility that I'm here as some sort of scintillatingly flawed side character that's going to get their thematically appropriate comeuppance in like 7 chapters' time.