in praise of dying mad about it
Serenity Prayer Logic undervalues group epistemology and the integrity of your moral dispositions
There’s a folksy bit of moral reasoning that is wrong. Call it Serenity Prayer Logic, after the refrigerator-magnet mantra:
In its traditional form this is, strictly speaking, an intercessory prayer, and in that context I have less objection to it: a perfectly good God would only lead you towards the right with it, using God’s perfect wisdom of what the difference is and incorporating all of the second-order concerns I’m about to bring up here. Of course, the serenity prayer is understood as being more efficacious than “dear God, please end world hunger” because it’s really about inner work. The secular versions make both this and the parts I’m going to object to much more explicit: this article title, “You Have 3 Choices In Every Situation: Change It, Accept It, Or Resist It: One of them is always wrong” lays it out pretty nicely. CBT, Buddhism, and Stoicism - all rising tides in terms of how educated Westerners tend to think about their relationships with their emotions - each have tendencies to reinforce this logic, some of them stronger than others.
Let’s separate out the two parts of this argument. The first, which we’ll call the Serenity Prayer Trilemma, asserts that for any problem, you can either
praxis: change the circumstances
cope: change your attitude
seethe: remain miserable in it
The Serenity Prayer Exclusion says that if praxis isn’t a viable option, cope Pareto dominates seethe. After all, you didn’t change the thing either way, and you’re happy in cope and miserable in seethe. And since praxis also Pareto dominates seethe when it is possible, seethe is never the best option.
Here, I want to argue that cope does not always dominate seeth. I’m not arguing that you should never cope - sometimes you make yourself miserable over something stupid that isn’t really worthy of your attention - but that all three options are live ones.
the trilemma itself is fine, but…
I think it’s hard to dispute the trilemma itself. We can formalize it further, if we like: take (S → M) as “the situation makes you miserable;” in this case we can either negate S, negate (S → M), or affirm M. (Any particular act might combine these approaches, of course, but for any consistent binary threshold we choose for S or M, the trilemma applies.)
A few things to note, however. The first is that it’s unclear whether we’re looking at things from a snapshot in time or over the whole future history of us dealing with S. The second is that negating (S → M) may also have effects on the world - such as making us less likely to notice when we can change S, and undermining the way we solve problems collectively.
you probably aren’t an egoistic hedonist
If you wouldn’t step into the Experience Machine, you aren’t an egoistic hedonist - someone whose only goal is their own balance of pleasure over pain. You care about other stuff too. If you wouldn’t step into it even if it wouldn’t affect anyone else, then you aren’t a hedonist at all.
This is important because for many S, your dispreference for S isn’t just a function of whether S → M. You care about S itself. If I died in a car accident later this afternoon, that would frustrate my current preferences, and if one day after that, a misaligned AI annihilated humanity, that would really frustrate my current preferences, even though I wouldn’t be around to look in horror as the gray goo enveloped the cities and dissolved my friends and family into fine mist.
An existing but changed version of you does not obviate this either. If taking an elixer turned me with high probability into a happy and successful serial killer, I would very very very strongly prefer not to take the elixir, even though if I did, I would have been happy I did.
pain plays a causal role
Pain plays a functional role in organisms. It’s a “pay attention to this and change it!” reminder.
Now, granted, your goals are not the goals of evolution, or the goals of your social conditioning, or any of the other things that produced you and your preferences. Just because something causes you pain doesn’t mean you need to endorse it on reflection. Maybe you cognitively reframe to avoid jealousy in a polyamorous relationship, and I bet you take anaesthetic at the dentist: you know where the pain comes from, but you don’t endorse the direction it’s trying to push you, so in a sense it’s your enemy. The new class of weight loss drugs attack the disvalue of hunger, which plays an extremely important role but maybe is tuned up too high for people in situations of caloric abundance. But you - and in practice even egoistic hedonists - probably don’t want to take away the pain when your hand touches a stove, because you prefer to have a functional hand.
If this were all there was, the defender of SPL would be able to say: “that might be true, but we’re talking about cases where changing the situation itself is excluded.” But cases matching that are smaller than they may appear.
God is not granting you the wisdom to know the difference
You do not know in advance what problems are solveable, what situations you can change. You can make guesses! Indeed, you kinda have to! You can prioritize some things over others - indeed, you kinda have to! - and weighting priorities by your likelihood of affecting them is eminently sane.
But being at least a little bit miserable about something is like a reminder - “hey, this thing is bad, be on the lookout for ways to change it.” Through reflections and conversations and actual changes in the exact variety of the circumstance, the incorrigible may become corrigible and the inevitable evitable. All because you seethed.
bitching and moaning play a causal role
Just like pain signals play a role in individual deliberation, signals between people play a role in collective deliberation.
Maybe you won’t solve the problem, and maybe nobody will in your lifetime. But the same logic as the above applies. Bitching and moaning remind people that something is a problem. People might even realize they have problems in common. The process of bitching and moaning, clarification of what we’re complaining about, and being open to different ways of solving it is the basis of all politics.
object-level preferences are leaky
If you recognized the full humanity of everyone around you, you’d go nuts. You certainly wouldn’t be happy. There’s a whole bunch of people who are suffering and we can’t do much or what we could do would be unbearably demanding if we actually looked it in the eye, so we don’t. There’s probably no way not to do this, at least as an individual.
At the same time, I think this process - a sort of socially conditioned cope - is deeply morally injurious. As above, it interferes with collective solutions, where something could be done. But it leaks out. Once you start shutting your heart out to one person’s suffering, your mental muscles improve at this action. Since coping reduces pain it’s behaviorally reinforced.
My suspicion is that cope increases over the lifespan, through an accretion of this kind of behavioral reinforced heart-hardening, and that this is a major component of why people become more conservative (certainly dispositionally if not always on object-level policies) as they age. Our attitude to facially very bad things shifts from outrage to grudging acceptance to, sometimes, celebration.
you’re biased towards cope already
This behavioral reinforcement adds a systematic bias towards cope, and against seethe. Also contributing towards this are explicit ideological defense mechanisms of existing structures - most obviously to me the “capitalist realist” notion that “there is no alternative” and that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” but I am sure you can think of others. These become accreted into common sense.
Sometimes it’s right to cope rather than seethe, but relative to your baseline intuitions, seething is probably undervalued.
cope may be a limited resource
Most people have a happiness set point. If you’re satisfied with things, you’ll naturally find new things to get unhappy about.
If you’re an egoistic hedonist, this is a bit of a problem. If not, have the things you get bothered by aligned with what you actually care about.
three examples
My toddler gets frustrated by many things. It’s tough to be an agent for just about the first time, in a world that’s hardly built for you, with your desires continually frustrated by your small ability to carry things out. Oftentimes I comfort him, or distract him, to make him feel better - everybody needs the knowledge that someone cares about them, and I do care about him and feel bad when he’s upset. I’m least likely to intervene when he’s getting frustrated trying and failing to do something that I think is just outside his current capacities. The frustration is playing a useful role in saying “here’s what isn’t working,” in his process of trial and error. If he were to update too quickly that he couldn’t presently do something, and accept it, he’d learn a lot less about how to successfully move around and do other things.
Women in patriarchal societies found themselves under the domination of their husbands. Adaptive preferences can reconcile them to their situation; consciousness-raising - bitching and moaning collectively - can create the basis for collective action that challenges patriarchy.
“Everybody dies” is one of the hard-moving facts of human nature. Philosophy has traditionally recommended cope on this score; after all, no means existed to escape it; philosophies that tried, like some versions of Taoism, were kidding themselves (or fleecing rubes.) Lately, our mastery of biology has grown by leaps and bounds, but many people are resistant to the naive view that death is bad, and oppose research into radical life extension as either dangerous or ridiculous because, after all, death is just a natural part of life that we should accept. Perhaps it is - but it’s very plausible to me that we’ve progressed much less far than we otherwise would have, because of otherwise understandable cope.
a new magnet for your fridge
Lord,
Grant me the serenity to accept what is actually, genuinely fine,
The strength to change what is not,
And failing that the whiny-ass curmudgeonliness to die mad about it,
And the wisdom to know the difference