Against witchcraft

Part 4 of How to find a husband

Ever since I first read Scott Alexander’s book review of Albion’s Seed, I developed a deep and totally earnest love of puritans. I’m like a teenage girl, clicking her heels together, listening to the Beatles and smoking weed, saying she was born in the wrong generation. Alas, I was born too late to start an extremist colony in the new world and born too early to start a sectarian splinter settlement in space. I was born just at the right time to start a terror cell on discord but I need more Substack subscribers for that.

What I’m trying to say is that we, as a society, are missing out on the ability to accuse someone of Witchcraft and be taken seriously.

What happened to these people? When was the last time you saw somebody called Hiram invent five different crazy machines, found a new religion, and have twelve children who he named after Greek nymphs?

– Scott Alexander, Puritan Spotting

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman classifies modes of thought into System 1 for fast and instinctive thinking and System 2 for deliberate and logical thinking. Provocateur Camille Paglia draws a distinction between Western society’s two modes of thought: the hyperverbal “ascetic Palestinian creed” and pagan aestheticism. Canonical internet text The Nerd as the Norm says that people exist on a spectrum from nerds (people who are literal, unappreciative of aesthetics and like to trade information) to wambs (people sensitive to social norms, have a keen aesthetic sense and consider conversations to be about people not trading information).

Over and over, we rediscover the fact that we reason in two ways; a mode that is logical, specialised for algebra and reasoning A therefore B and therefore C, and another mode that is intuitive and is for saying, “That person seems untrustworthy” or “Monochrome is stylish”.

If you’re going to use your logical mind on a problem, you’ll do research and think seriously about it. If you want to use your intuitive sense on a problem you will, LLM like, gather data and stories, ruminate, and hope that you can sleep on it and generate an answer that “feels right”.

Anyway, I was talking about witchcraft. I would like to point to things that are hijacking your intuitive sense-making and call it witchcraft. There’s lots of it in our fallen world. I think, for example, it’s kind of witchy to fill adverts with attractive people. I think people who do those classic charisma tricks like making too much eye contact or using subtle casual touch are witches. I think, and this is the most puritan thing about me, playing music at church is witchcraft. Choral music is very emotive and you shouldn’t use it to trick people into believing in God. But the worst offenders are Hollywood because they have the most reach.

Everyone gossips too little and consumes too much fiction. For every real life story of love you’ve heard, you have watched ten times as many fictional examples and they are ten times more emotionally potent. Every day you’re watching beautiful people fall in love on Netflix or listening to your latest enemies to lovers audiobook, and your intuitive brain is registering it as real information about the real world.

My chronically single friends are rarely chronically single because eligible bachelors don’t like them. Their problem is that they don’t feel things for the eligible bachelors who like them. It’s not usually because they’re trying desperately to get someone out of their league — that’s been ground out of them by now. But they’re struggling to feel anything for the nice enough people they’re going on dates with.

Many intelligent people are prone to over relying on their logical brain for things that you can’t master without honing intuitive judgments – they only cook from recipes , they try to dress themselves with colour systems and kibbe body types. They won’t unclench and let a bit of intuitive judgement guide them.

And then suddenly these totally nerdy, totally System 2 people, want to use their limp, under-exercised System 1 brain on the most important problem in their life. That would be bad enough on its own. But considering how few examples of good relationships we get to live through, it’s probably one the main places you should not use intuition.

---

Why is fictional romance so bad? Isn’t good art meant to tell truths we can’t articulate in other ways or something?

It’s because conventions of the genre, written to increase entertainment value, don’t map very well to real life. So for a romance story the plot goes something like:

Two people meet. They have a moment of chemistry – maybe several moments of chemistry – and they are drawn to one another. Often there is some plausible deniability so they are both uncertain about the other’s feelings. There is some kind of obstacle to their relationship. It can be internal, like they think they hate each other, or it can be external, like their parents are trying to keep them apart. Usually this obstacle is overcome but maybe one of them will die.

In real life, normal, healthy couples follow a plot more like:

Two people meet. They find each other attractive and they kind of like talking to each other. Perhaps there could be something there but they barely know each other. They clearly communicate that they’re kind of interested and agree to keep meeting up. Little by little, two people who barely know each other, start to remedy that. Over the course of many evenings, their feelings deepen until they realise, one day, that they’re in love.

Mammals love intermittent rewards. The story from a romance novel is compelling because it hijacks the part of your psyche that seeks inconsistent and uncertain reward. It describes a situation that will create a more immediate, more spark-like connection. You can’t yearn for someone who communicates their intentions clearly.

This is why the red pill teaches men to neg, why women fall for lovebombing fuckboys, why men fall for hot-and-cold BPD girls, and why you can have more butterflies for a man you make eye contact with on your commute than you do for the perfect on paper guy your friend set you up with.

But that passion is not necessarily a sign that your relationship might be good. In the real world, your paramour probably isn’t a fairy king who has kidnapped you against your will or a vampire who has to wrestle with his desire to drink your blood. In the real world (or, as I reflect upon these examples, in the fictional world too), the obstacles that create yearning are anti-correlated with domestic felicity.

Socially savvy people know what cheap tricks they can use to induce that feeling in another person (no, I’m not teaching you) and they are not the tools of good, stable people.

Of course, this isn’t the only reason you shouldn’t trust your gut. There are others.

1. Your natural system for being attracted to people evolved in a very different environment to the one we find ourselves in. The sexiest men often have traits that make them very good cavemen but kind of sub-par actuaries.

2. It’s a very difficult area to study, lots of arranged marriages allow the couple to court and lots of love matches in arranged-marriage cultures are more arranged than Western dating, but most evidence finds little difference between the quality of arranged marriages and love matches. Tentatively, I think this suggests that initial attraction has little to do with long-term love.

   
   If you’re not a sociopath and your partner isn’t a sociopath, if you have similar values, if you’re building a life together and having regular sex, you probably will grow to love each other. Most cultures don’t let women court freely and yet humans evolved the capacity for romantic love anyway.

3. Lots of you are perverts. Depending on how you measure it, somewhere between a large minority to a small majority of women are interested in being dominated. You might be seeking subliminal signs that a man is dominant. Considering the top shortage – if you could take it or leave it, or only slightly prefer it – you’re better off abandoning dominance.

4. People seem to look for strange and random points of similarity. One of my friends has an ex-boyfriend who had an eerily similar joke delivery-style to her. As far as I can tell, she’s never seriously fancied anyone since. While a shared sense of humour is nice, no one would say it’s the only important thing.

5. Some say you’re “stickier” when you’re younger and less experienced. They say virgins can fall deeply and irrationally for the first people they have sex with. As you get older you become desensitised to oxytocin, you’ll get more stuck in your ways, develop taste, guard your heart, and have less time to spend mooning over someone. Sparks probably get rarer with age. The wall is bad enough already without letting age shrink your options further.

Overall, using your intuition is massively overrated in romance. You’ve been trained on a lot of bad data and it’s made you go haywire. You’re better off courting like you’re arranging your own marriage, not like you’re starring in a rom com.