I'll write more about those subjects on this blog in the days ahead.
This post is a record of my thought process towards the end of my period of severe identity dysphoria. I've also learned how to trust people since I wrote this. I had good reason to start trusting people as of 2011, but I couldn't really start doing it until I started to be happy.
The entirety of this post can be summarized as me saying, at the time I wrote it, I hated being myself, and I didn't trust anyone else. In the years since, I've become incredibly happy, and learned to live my life in a manner that is radically built on trust.
I'm publishing this only as one of the more benign examples of the thought process that I had as a young adult, which was significantly more benign than the thought process I had as a teenager.
I was also more conservative five years ago. I had a lot of ideas that were left of center that I felt somewhat comfortable having ascribed to me, and several strongly ideas that were right of center that I wanted to hold anonymously. I only used the liberal ideas as examples when I was describing reasons that I might want to have alter egos and maintain privacy in my communication. Fortunately, I never got around to posting any of my excessively right wing ideas. In general, I'm much more scared of being on the bad list of people who are more liberal than me than people who are more conservative for me. Progressive people, in general, know how to use the internet, and have built companies and cultures from which I would not like to have been completely excluded. Staunch conservatives just have money and connections to established power. I'm not afraid of them.
I also think some of the fear was really guilt. I thought I believed some things that I really didn't believe. I knew at some level that there was something deeply wrong with those beliefs, but I hadn't figured it out yet. I've despised mainstream liberalism my whole life. I've despised mainstream conservative ever since I've been old enough to think for myself. Until Donald Trump, I continued to hate mainstream liberalism more than I hated mainstream conservatism. (I'm mostly amused that that Donald chump became president. I love being able to tell everybody that I think the President of the United States is a turd covered in a spray-on tan and having the vast majority of people agree with me. He's the worst person who has been elected president in more than sixty years, but he's not that much worse of a person than the average president, and he has been a much better president than George Bush II was, for what that's worth. I mean, look at the difference between their track records in the mid-east, and tell me you'd thing George II would have handled coronavirus any better.) While I insufficiently despised mainstream conservatism, I wanted to believe that sometimes the Republicans were less wrong than the Democrats, but now, I'm pretty happy to believe that both of them are entirely wrong about everything, and that the truth lies pretty far left of mainstream politics on practically everything.
My original post is below.
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I'm beginning to think that every good citizen of the information age should have at least one fictitious identity. I haven't yet constructed any, but I'm planning to do so reasonably soon. The uses of these identities are myriad and range from entertainment, to psychological, to self-benefit, to actually promoting the civic good.
The ability to promote the civic good is the one that I think is the strongest reason people should do it, and therefore the one that is most worth mentioning. Imagine you lived four or five hundred years ago and were European. If that was the case, you lived in a state with practically no freedom of thought, and your religious leaders instructed you to maintain many objectively false beliefs about the world, and did so with the support of their legal system and political system. They were especially intolerant of the religious views that eventually gave way to the movements that are most consistent with what most modern people consider ethical today, and the ones that most of the people are scientifically minded consider correct.
It is certainly the case historically that the viewpoints that people protected with militant fervor have tended to become ones that were viewed by subsequent generations with disdain; whereas the persecuted viewpoints have tended to predict future sentiment a little bit better, even if they represent a faction that has decreased in popularity since then. The Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation came much closer to holding modern ideals than the Vatican of the same time period did. One can hardly imagine the humanist Thomas More advocating the imprisonment of Galileo (though he did support the persecution of protestant dissenters while England remained in communion with the Holy See, before the Henry VIII's Great Matter brought England to the Germanic side of the conflict, though it would almost certainly have done so eventually for other reasons were it not for the king's Great Matter).
While, from a modern perspective, both sides of any historic controversy tend to seem hopelessly outdated, the censored side tends to come off a little bit better on most issues than the side doing the censoring. For reasons that I will come to in a future post, I suspect that this general rule will hold across all times and cultures and even apply to non-human societies if they exist elsewhere in the universe, because I suspect it is a general rule about information, and not a general rule about human nature.
But first, I need to answer the obvious objection, namely: "The concern I've raised is irrelevant because we live in a society that has guaranteed us freedom of speech." Sure, we do. If you are a male between the age of 18 and 25 in the United States, the government reserves the right to revoke practically every freedom guaranteed in the bill of rights, and you can be pretty much guaranteed that both the age limits and the gender limits of that power will be eliminated in the event of an actual emergency (where an emergency is defined not so much as anything likely to threaten the citizenry of the United States, but instead as anything that threatens the state itself — these two entities are very different. Members of the state form a very non-representative sample of the citizenry. Lawyers, for example, are highly over-represented). But this strong rebuttal against the claim that modern states give their citizens freedom of speech is overkill. The much more important argument is that even public censor often makes freely expressing one's beliefs unwise even when it is technically legal. You can easily lose your job (or your spouse) for holding opinions that disagree with the established conventions. People would have more freedom to express unpopular beliefs if they had some sort of fictitious identity to attribute those beliefs to, that would protect them from most of the fallout associated with those beliefs.
Occasionally, it makes some amount of sense to have a very weak separation between a fictitious identity and a real one. This is usually because your real identity has begun saying so many controversial things that it doesn't matter if the unpopular beliefs of the fake identity also get associated with it. For most of us, however, this policy is inadvisable, and having a strong separation from a real identity is the only way to do separate identities.
For myself, reasons that I feel the need to create a fictitious identity include the following:
- Now that my name is associated with what I write here, I no longer feel as comfortable admitting my personal flaws as I did before. [Solution: I'm perfectly comfortable admitting to personal flaws publicly now.]
- Now that my name is associated with what I write here, I no longer feel comfortable at all describing my frustrations with people who I interact personally in a semi-anonymous way that might allow them to infer who I am. [Solution: just name them so that they're no longer semi-anonymous, and tell everybody everything to their face first before I start writing about it. My main concern is that I thought the rest of my family would disown me when I started telling people my mother was abusive, and that the reason she is abusive is because both her parents are horrendously evil people, so being a much better parent than her parents were was an unacceptably low bar. For whatever reason, all of my family is perfectly content to admit that my maternal grandmother is a horrible person, but they all insist that I couldn't possibly have any excuse to be opposed to my maternal grandfather who tortured animals for a living and forced his kids to help him do it.]
- To the extent that I have a sex drive, it expresses itself mainly in narratives (which is apparently very common for girls/women and very uncommon for boys/men regardless of their sexual orientation unless they were homeschooled, and the evidence that it is much more common for boys/men who have been homeschooled is mostly anecdotal.) I am completely uncomfortable with the thought of anything I write on the subjects becoming associated with my real identity, BUT by far, the worst writing I read has to do with this subject. I'm convinced I could write much better. So... I think it's worth attempting. [Solution. I'm still undecided. This might be a good use for a fictitious identity... though I do think it would probably be better to write these things nonymously too.]
- I have political opinions that I don't want to have associated with me. [Solution: get rid of those opinions.]
- [There was an unfinished sentence that used to be 4. I don't think it was going to say the thing about politics.]
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