How rare good people are depends heavily on how high your bar for qualifying as a good person is. Many forms of good-person behaviour are common, some are rare. A person who has never done anything they later felt guilty about (who has a functioning conscience) is exceedingly rare. In my personal experience, I have found people to vary on a spectrum from "kind of bad and selfish quite often, but feels bad about it when they think about it and is good to people sometimes" to "consistently good, altruistic and honest, but not perfect, may still let you down on occasion", with rare exceptions falling outside this range.

Also, if it is true that a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people, I am unclear where the confusion comes from. Good behaviour gets rewarded from childhood, and bad behaviour gets punished. Not perfectly, of course, and in some places and times very imperfectly indeed, but being seen as a good person by your community's definition of "good" has many social rewards, we're social creatures... I am unclear where the mystery is.

Were the confused people raised by wolvesnon-social animals?

I don't actually buy the premise that a lot of people are confused by moral courage, on reflection.

This doesn't match my experience of what good people are generally like. I find them to be often happy to do what they are doing, rather than extremely afraid of not doing it, as I imagine would be the case if their reasons for behaving as they do were related to avoidance of pain.

There are of course exceptions. But if thinking I had done the wrong thing was extremely painful to me, literally "1000x more than any physical pain" I predict I'd quite possibly land on the strategy  "avoid thinking about matters of right and wrong, so as to reliably avoid finding out I'd done wrong." A nihilistic worldview where nothing was right or wrong and everything I might do is fine, would be quite appealing. Also, since one can't change the past, any discovery that I'd done something wrong in the past would be an unfixable, permanent source of extreme pain for the rest of my life. In that situation, I'd probably rationalize the past behaviour as somehow being good, actually, in order to make the pain stop... which does not pattern-match to being a good person long term, but rather the opposite, being someone who is pathologically unable to admit fault, and has a large bag of tricks to avoid blame.

Another thought I had: Likely if you had grown up with functional oxytocin receptors, your values would be different than how they are now, sure - you'd value a thing you have no reason to value right now, and that likely would have had many effects on the path your life has taken. But that doesn't imply that if, as an adult, you get functional oxytocin receptors somehow, you will become the person you would have been if you'd grown up with them from birth. Think less vampire-transformation, more "I didn't realize my nose was plugged, this food actually does taste good now".

It seems to me like you're overestimating the value people place on companionate love/the "warm fuzzy" feeling many people get from physical and sometimes emotional closeness to another (which is what I associate with oxytocin). It's a mild nice feeling, not an "oh my god I must have more of this right now and forever" feeling that would hijack your brain and value system in the way you speculate that trying heroin might.

I can't comment very well on whether heroin actually would hijack my values if I tried it, although I remember in a drugs and behaviour class I took once there were anecdotes of doctors who were fully functional with easy access to and frequent use of heroin, in the time before it was illegal, and also stories about Rat Park, where the idea was that rats in a deprived environment took water laced with cocaine excessively, but those in an enriched environment were less interested in that. I speculate that many people place a high value on companionate love having been through significant periods of loneliness, rather than because the experience of a hit of oxytocin is much like the stories I've heard some people tell about what a hit of heroin is like. Also I note that you sometimes say "love" when you mean companionate love specifically, and many people who say something like "love is very important to me" aren't being as precise in their language or thought as you tend to be, and conflate companionate love, libido-rooted sexual desire, limerance, and social acceptance into one thing, and say they value that. And there are definitely a lot of people who do some pretty insane-seeming things in pursuit of a combination of sexual attraction, limerance, and a feeling of closeness which is antithetical to loneliness. But just the warm fuzzy feeling? Less so.

I also think the stories of people throwing away large amounts of things you value and putting up with situations which to you would be strongly net-negative "for love", aside from being about the more imprecise conception of love most people use, are also salient to you because they're dysfunctional. There are, I expect, many people who have functional oxytocin receptors and just live their lives in perfectly sensible ways that wouldn't come to your attention as a problem, or even very notable. Companionate love is just one feeling among many. Many/most people start out with little ability to regulate their emotions, as small children, and then grow and mature and by adulthood, throw fewer tantrums and handle their emotions better. And I expect if you gained the ability to feel the emotion(s) corresponding to oxytocin, you would handle them with about the same level of maturity that you manage with the other emotions you have. It is true that some people do stupid things because they don't know how to integrate their emotions and their thoughts into a sensible response to the world around them, quite a few people seem to struggle with their feelings, but this isn't just true with respect to companionate love, it's also true of anger, sadness, shame, limerance... etc. Having experienced both limerance and companionate love, I think if you can handle the former, you can handle the latter - limerance definitely feels stronger and more cognition-distorting in my experience.

With all that said, your post does make sense to me, from the perspective of someone who hasn't felt a common emotion. If you were, say, someone who had never felt anger, you could likewise look at the world around you and go "wow, people sure are doing some insane things while under the influence of this emotion, I'm glad I don't have it". And that would be pretty accurate, and likely true of most emotions.

I say most of this to suggest that if there is, in future, the ability to give yourself functional oxytocin receptors, you probably have less to fear from that than from other mind-altering interventions you might think of. It's pretty mild, and most people in a good life situation with a decent amount of maturity can handle a warm feeling in their chest without throwing their life away in pursuit of more. Our culture is not good at saying "be reasonable about your pursuit of love", or even teasing apart different aspects of the culturally-approved thing-you're-supposed-to-throw-your-life-away-for-like-in-the-movies, which is unhelpful to those trying to navigate new emotions as teenagers, but I bet if you felt a warm fuzzy feeling one day, you'd be just fine.

This was informative for me. One of my best friends from elementary school got back in touch last year after 30+ years, and is currently in the process of mtf transition. I don't think that her reasons for transitioning match or parallel yours, but I don't fully know what her reasons are in the level of detail you've shared about yours - I feel like now is not the time to ask questions that might come across the wrong way if I'm not careful. And your explanation of how things are for you makes me go "OK, that makes sense", which transitioning hadn't for me up until this point.

Re: "Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition."... I did not know that. My friend is pretty introspective, and she's the only trans person with whom I have enough direct experience to assess level of introspective ability. Although my model of "trans people in general" won't get a strong update from your description of your motives and thought process (I figure your experience is that of one subgroup of mtf trans people), this fact that you who are in a position to know claim is famously generally true, will update my general model.

I would personally have been hesitant to speculate about motives along these lines, because the generic line of reasoning speculation "people are doing a thing I don't understand because they're <insert something with negative connotations, like mental illness or being socially ostracized>" is an easy answer to jump to that makes one feel superior, but is often wrong. So hearing your reasons were rooted in finding social acceptance is extra useful, because I would have just not allowed myself to put much probability on that unless I'd heard from someone directly that it was true for them.

I see below that some people on twitter have apparently pushed you to delete links to this essay or the essay itself. I vote you keep it up.

Third hand anecdote re: your footnote: a good friend of mine has a mother who she says is a narcissist, and the behaviour she describes is "can't stand the thought she might have flaws, evidence of a flaw is brutally suppressed, reacted to with anger, blame, denial, gaslighting and displacement, and if a thought like 'I am not perfect, specifically this is a way that I am not the best/someone else is better than me' does get through the defenses, it results in a mental collapse and period of weeks filled with only negative thoughts, expressed to others to try and build back up her sense of self worth by getting people to say she's wrong about the negative thoughts". It's like this person can't occupy the mental territory "I'm OK, mostly good" it's either "I am fantastic" or "I am terrible".

I would be unsurprised if different people exhibiting narcissistic behaviour had different reasons for doing so, and some just straight up think unreasonably highly of themselves and are resistant to evidence to the contrary, without it being a defense mechanism, while others were like the anecdote above.

Interested in a regular version: yes.

Substack: iffy. I find it's optimizing for engagement enough that I'll go through cycles of spending more time there than I intend, then taking a break, and every time I go into the app rather than just reading emails of the people I have subscribed to, I regret it because of wasted time. They have also started making it really easy to subscribe but substantially harder to unsubscribe. This was not true a year ago, IIRC.

Clarification: my position is that our current level of understanding of how the economy works can, for the most part, be grasped by most people with some effort, rather than being an impenetrable mystery. Not that everyone actually does understand the economy because it's super easy, and certainly not that if they did we wouldn't have economic problems. None of what I said is incompatible with what you said.

It would be nice if understanding how things worked automatically led to things working better, but this is not the case.

A simple example where understanding an underlying problem doesn't solve the problem: I understand fairly well why I'm tempted to eat too many potato chips, and why this is bad for me, and what I could do instead. And yet, sometimes I still eat more potato chips than I intend.

A more complicated case: a few people making a lot of money, while most people's lives get better due to specialization and trade (counting the world economy as a whole, not necessarily within a particular village, or country) is what one would predict given an understanding of how the economy works. There are of course many complications in the real world that aren't captured in economic models, which often make simplifying assumptions like "people are rational". In the real world, people do things like eat potato chips a nonzero number of times.

Oops - I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.

Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can't understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that's too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I'm thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like "obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I've done that you're pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did".

I don't think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they've hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it's often a case of thinking "this is too complicated for me" and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn't actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying "that's beyond my ability", we'd have a more chaotic world.