Toxic Positivity- "One Book Destroyed Western Civilization"

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Nothing wrong with bringing up tangents that are at least partially relevant.

However, when the tangent is a topic likely to be unfamiliar to most people (and most people have no idea at all as to even the very basics of Hermeticism, goy Kabbalah, etc.), it's a good idea to specify (clearly but briefly) exactly what the relevance is and isn't. Otherwise, most of your readers are likely to be very misled.

Maybe but...

You're telling me something - right now - about basic social skills that I've both never heard anyone around me (AS or NT) say and most NT's I know don't live up to that even if their saving grace is they rarely say anything intelligent enough to get in trouble. While I'm open to new ideas and concepts this is reminding me of my buddy telling me that left turns have some kind of privilege at four-way stops that voids first-in-first-out, he'd be in my car yelling at other drivers because he thought they cut me off when it made no sense to me and I would have caught a detail as odd or arcane as that and drivers ed would have emphasized the heck out of it if it was that counterintuitive.

If you're describing something that a major swath of the population expects as a formality in conversation maybe it's something I should look into? If it's just a tiny fragment, or even one person, I'm not convinced that it makes sense.

It's not a failure to have a coherent reason for taking a brief tangent, it's more of a stylistic difference. This is like saying 'You shouldn't share arcane electronic music with people - it will do strange things' (I know not to do it at a party full of NT's because they hate anything 'foreign') but if talking about music and someone names off some popular electronic music artists and I have a deep crate to offer from - it would be bizarre for me to force myself to swim at the surface and try to find as much poppy and superficial stuff as I can give them because if I gave them something deeper I'd be 'doing things to them'. It seems like the same kind of category error.

Also thinking... is there any possibility that this is an ethnic or religious custom? Otherwise, is this explicitly a rule that's internet / forum etiquette because taking 2 or 3 out of 5 threads is only okay if one of them is the title thread, and that this is something that applies to internet posting and not verbal conversation?

The other problem I have with the suggestion - I think it imposes arbitrary limitations not just on conversation and creative play with it but internalized it would do the same thing to my brain and I don't want that, it's a huge step down.

It's not a "basic social rule," but it's certainly a convention amongst most of the more intellectually-oriented people I have known, and it's likely a convention amongst almost anyone who values clarity and precision.

The point is simply to prevent some easily-preventable, easily-foreseeable misunderstandings.

If you choose not to follow it, don't be surprised when some people ask you for clarifications, or when relatively intelligent people call you out for insinuating things that you did not intend.

I'm sorry but that just sounds like I should be talking to fewer people.

It only makes sense if you're a lawyer or an analytic philosopher, or someone who needs painfully exacting terminology because it's a speech being delivered in an auditorium filled with grad students or because it's in front of a judge or jury. This thread isn't all of us in suit and tie sitting upfront at Oxford Union - it's casual conversation.

Or just be prepared to iron out more misunderstandings than you would need to if you were more willing to try to prevent them.

It's not possible to prevent all misunderstandings, no matter how clear and precise you are. And the ability to resolve misunderstandings is a more important skill than preventing them, although preventing them (where easily possible) is also desirable IMO.

But here's what surprises me:

Here on WP, you at least superficially come across as an intellectually-oriented person. At the very least, you discuss a lot of weighty matters and reference a lot of sources.

So it's a bit of a surprise to me to see you resisting one of the conventions of intellectual conversation.

To me this isn't Oxford Union.

To me this is Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, that sort of thing. You can catch all kinds of interesting angles off of things people say and add knowledge. If this isn't play it's work.

Here's what I was just thinking about for a while before I started responding.

I used to do martial arts with a guy who was fifteen years older than me when I was a black belt at the local MA studio. He seemed to be into all the same things I was with respect esotericism and had even joined some of the places I'd joined. He was the type of guy who'd be more than willing to host barbeques, if you needed to borrow something he'd be good for it, but the problem was - if he said anything about something that was deep or a bit outside and I riffed on it at all in a way that showed that I knew more he'd chew me out when everyone else was gone. I've had friends like that in my early 20's who were just like this themselves. Also, with the first guy I mentioned, if his wife started talking about anything unusual or not known by the whole group he (a chemist) would ask her, in front of everyone 'What's the atomic weight of carbon?'. I'm sure he's a reasonably competent chemist as I'm sure my other old buddy isn't getting his estate practice sued out from under them, they're otherwise competent people who have common courtesy at the front but they've got deeper problems.

I don't have time for people like that. I don't have time to be in a place where if I, truly, share in a participatory way - in a way that's remotely being me - it's a problem, but anyone else is allowed to! It's saying pretty explicitly that I can't talk about anything that they didn't explicitly start the conversation with - ie. I must 'follow' not lead, f that - if there's five people there I'm leading 15 - 20% of the time unless I'm way out of my depth. Do you know what that kind of following directly translates into? Massive status demotion. Do you know how NT's behave when they assess someone to be of low status? It's a problem.

I bring all of that up because this feel like the same dynamic. I get that I'd be a bell-end to go to a neighborood barbeque and put on dark drum n bass. I get that it would be equally bad to start talking religion with people. I don't do it (unless it's really paired off and the person I'm chatting with is also super-excited about that sort of thing).

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 09 Oct 2023, 6:25 pm, edited 6 times in total.

Maybe a more concise way to phrase that last post - I reject the model of life as a womb to tomb status p---ing contest.

Don't get me wrong, you might have taught me something really cool for understanding other people better but it's not something I think I myself should do. I am maybe wondering if you don't have an examined conception of leading and following.

It implies that if I don't have a non-clunky preamble for branching a topic for a moment that I shouldn't say it. That's exactly my problem, if a branch is appropriate it's appropriate and it shouldn't be held up by stripping out all potential for people to read implications in (which IMHO people really shouldn't do because they're awful at it).

I didn't know what the "Oxford Union" even is, so I looked it up just now. If what you mean here is that Wrong Planet is not a formal debate club, then I agree that it's not that. However....


Wrong Planet is a message board forum, which to me is very different, in crucial ways, from social media. (See this thread for some discussion of the similarities and differences.)

Be that as it may, I certainly don't see today's social media as a place where one can just let one's hair down. I see them as an extremely unforgiving environment, given how it now seems to be standard practice to deal with misunderstandings by muting or blocking the other person, rather than by making even the slightest effort to resolve the misunderstanding.

Wrong Planet is better, insofar as message boards are better organized, thus lend themselves better to coherent discussions, and do not include the ability to block or mute posts from other users. This makes it at least somewhat possible, on a message board, to resolve any misunderstandings that may arise.

Thus, it seems to me that message boards -- unlike social media -- encourage people to become more tolerant of disagreement and to become better able to talk out their differences with less acrimony and less door-slamming than happens on social media.

But, wherever one goes, disagreements happen. And, wherever one goes, misunderstandings happen.


For me, getting to know new people is always work. It gets to be "play" only after I've gotten to know someone well enough to let my guard down -- and well enough to be assured that they won't just disappear on me if I inadvertently say something that offends them.


What sorts of things would he chew you out for?

At least he waited until everyone else was gone, rather than arguing with you in front of everyone else.


I'm not sure I understand the point here.

Was 'What's the atomic weight of carbon?' intended as a jokey way of telling her that she was going off on a technical tangent that he thought most people in the group would not be able to relate to?

Or do you think he meant something else?


Different groups work differently. Status in a group depends on lots of different things, including how long one has been a member and how well one knows other people in the group.

If you're new to a group, it doesn't seem to me that insisting on "leading" 1/n of the time (n being the number of people) is necessarily the best way to acquire status. In many groups, it is best for newcomers just to be quiet and observe, until they've been around long enough to have a good feel for the group. In other groups, on the other hand, the old-timers might actually make a point of welcoming and getting to know the newcomers, which makes it easier for the newcomers to participate.

A lot depends on how cliquish the group is. Most groups naturally tend to become cliquish, unless either they have a very high turnover or they make a specific effort to welcome newcomers.


Here on Wrong Planet, you do talk a lot about various topics that are at least as sensitive as religion. Nothing wrong with that; you talk about these topics in PPR, where they are on-topic. But you should expect disagreements and misunderstandings. How you handle them is up to you, but you need to be prepared to handle them somehow and not be shocked by the mere existence of a disagreement or misunderstanding.

So do I.

I also suspect that, in some cases, you might be misreading genuine disagreements and/or misunderstandings as just "status p---ing contests."


It's not possible to strip out all potential for people to read unwanted implications into things you say. But it is possible to reduce that potential through one's choice of words.

If you don't want to make any effort to do so, then you'll just have to expend more effort on clearing up misunderstandings after they happen -- assuming you're allowed to try to clear them up.

It would be nice if people would just stop jumping to conclusions in the first place. But, unfortunately, refraining from conclusion-jumping requires a LOT of mental discipline. For most people, I suspect that refraining from conclusion-jumping would probably require far more mental discipline than quickly coming up with "a non-clunky preamble for branching a topic."

In any case, even a person who genuinely refrains from conclusion-jumping might still ask you a bunch of clarifying questions rather than just ignore the things that you might conceivably be insinuating.

I guess the concept pf 'letting one's hair down' has a wide sliding scale. I've never been banned on FB or here, so I'm not starting from a place where I'm likely to put something up or start conducting myself in a way that brings that sort of thing on me. Obviously, if things somehow go pair-shaped next fall and it ends up being Biden vs. Trump it's not impossible that the climate changes significantly for the worse and then we all have to watch what we're saying but that's broader public climate.


Adding to what he was saying, when he on his particular soap box on what he felt was 'his' topic for having brought it up.


He was the guy at any event, if people were sitting around, who'd need to ego-check whoever started talking about anything a bit 'high'. This is what I mean by not being able to be myself, I think of an expression my parents used to tell me back when I was 6 or 7 that 'Children are to be seen not heard', as adults that reformulates to 'Idiots / imbeciles are to be seen not heard'. It was a general sense that there was a lot of condescension (accepting someone whose a bit of an idiot or less socially or physically aggressive), hitting quite often, and for what seemed like differences of personality style. I'm debating whether he and my friend from my early 20's are both subclinical NPD, I could see someone whose profoundly 'allist' maybe doing the same things - genuinely - to keep decorum rather than manipulate a room but I get that this guy also has a lot of touchy insecurities.

What I forgot to mention is at our last ever cookout his wife stood up and accused him of being too insecure to let other people talk about things he didn't know or understand (the thing I mentioned earlier was common). Everyone just kept their mouths shut and said nothing when that happened, trying to let what they perceived as embarrassment between them to blow over and change the subject.


If it's a bunch of people I've never met or only kind of know who've known each other much longer I clearly wouldn't do 1/n, I'd want to know more about them and have a lot of repetition before I try chiming in to much. Pretty much what I do is what I've perceived NT's to do with is say relatively safe or conventional things, test the waters, see where the interest is, and then see if I can add here and there in places of overlap that are interesting to the flow of the conversation. It at least needs some of the core threads of the conversation but not all and not necessarily always a 'master thread' that needs to be included in that divergence unless everyone's talking about some explicit event or situation where we're giving something a deep examination (a problem someone might be having at work or a legal situation someone else's friend got in, or who went quail shooting or golfing when).


I'm typically not one to double down unless something feels really odd about the conversation, including good vs. bad faith but also there's the question when someone's shifting the topic make recommendations to me about how to communicate with people - I wouldn't just go with it if I got the sense that there was something structurally wrong with what they were suggesting or that it had costs to me (such as significantly decreasing my ability to have flowing dialog with people or based on something that seems idiosyncratic when weighed against the rest of my life experience).


We clearly made a mountain out of a mole hill today. Shortly before that crypto a subtext of a Moloch video, not Groypers. I'm more tempted to say that it was a mountain made of a mole hill twice.

I'd add - I have filters to avoid saying things that could have a lot of blowback if they're misunderstood but I construct mine differently and it's never revolved around the idea that I need to give tons of grounding detail up front on new subjects because, I'm assuming if it's a conversation, questions get resolved with dialog and things can unpack themselves. There's also what you mentioned above - hearing a term, not being familiar with it, and Googling it. That's almost a knee-jerk impulse for me, has been for years, and it confuses me when people don't even have that in their list of options they think of.

Agreed. We had a series of misunderstandings. I got frustrated and it seems to me that you got frustrated too. We should probably stop derailing KitLily's thread with this.

I haven't read what you two are talking about because it looked far too heavy but yes, it's best if you calm down.

Something else, a tense where it's not being used as an excuse for justifying power (I have therefore my positive thoughts brought it to me and you have not because of your negative thoughts) is something I've heard Gad Saad from Concordia mention about people in general wanting to 'break reality' in some way. He brought it up more in the context of dodgy politics but it seems to apply here as well. The way I understand that is it's the suffering of life and failure of the hedonic treadmill to make a closed loop - so desperation can also turn into hopes that some untried thing will make it all go away. I can see where the worse one's life is the greater the temptation.

My own dance with this was working with magical systems, more or less with neurohacking or 'spiritual upgrade' type stuff where working with certain knowledge helps you orient yourself toward rewriting your brain's software in ways that have better outcomes or lead you somewhere you'd actually want to go (by improving your internal workflow as well as access to motivation). That can be a better option providing that you're not expecting the moon on a stick and if you're also perfectly open to the possibility that it's all psychological and that the only certain benefits that will come from it are psychological / neurological as well as how those interact with your own body and health (ie. optimizing your heuristics better to avoid unneeded stress, less damage to the system from hard work and traumas, etc.).

There's also the question of whether existence has a bigger / broader context than just a physical world where consciousness somehow strongly emerges from enough neurons or enough integrated information - I've seen enough strange things in my life (things too bold to be an interpretation issue) and it leads me to at least think we're living in something either idealist or neutral monist that behaves just like a physicalist system but might not necessarily have that at it's root (the sorts of things Donald Hoffman talks about with 'spacetime is doomed', that Darwinian evolution builds us to see fitness payouts rather than truth because fitness beats truth, or the rest of the Conscious Realism seems to absorb my own observations much better than most other models I've seen to date). Even if we live in an idealist universe where 'all is mind' - it says nothing about whether LoA works by itself, ie. how the rulesets are structured matters a lot.

This is what sucks about people sometimes getting pulled from something like reductive materialist atheism and then finding out that there's something a bit more complicated than just DMT or lack of oxygen in NDE's, the sky seems like the limit for a while, they might think they'd just never given something like LoA a fair shake, they try it, they find out that it indeed doesn't work, and I really think the political standoff between atheism and theism in the US, the way it gets structured around topics like this at least, makes people dumber. I'm at least really glad that Sam Harris, as one of the original four horsemen, has a significantly more sympathetic take on mysticism and the value of it. I just remember when I started studying Hermeticism (again - connecting this by metaphysics, not claiming LoA and esotericism are hardbound together) it was the stridence and arrogance of a lot of new atheists, or listening to people like Massimo Pigliucci debate Rupert Sheldrake, and the dismissive arrogance really made it feel like we're living in a world where image, social fit, what you pride yourself on both knowing and not knowing to be a stunning example of whatever group you fit into, was bad enough that we were missing reality entirely. That said I'm very grateful that we have people like Donald Hoffman, Karl Friston, Michael Levin, Chris Fields, etc. probing the edges of physics, biology, mathematics, etc. to get the most accurate frame they can on what the ontological status of consciousness is or how far it scales down or even, in Hoffman's estimate, underwrites spacetime.

I just wrote a post in L&D on this but I think there are at least two ideas, similarly stupid to 'The Secret', that have almost decapitated western civilization:

- The idea that totalizing market liberalism is a good thing (that the 'invisible hand', uninspected, will lead to utopia rather than to the Red Queen's race and dismantling of civilization as money, status, and dopamine are optimized over practically any other concern).

- Blank-slatism, not just over sexuality but as an extension of totalizing Christian / puritan 'free will'. We get to pretend that we're morally superior to anyone whose not like us because we get to pretend that they're just mirror versions of ourselves that went wrong or wanted to be 'evil' and 'live sinful life'. The take many evangelicals had on the gay and lesbian community was like this but I see it spread out everywhere and being used with just as much opportunist fervor from the left as well (it's the inherent 'badness' of any group that isn't mine).

I agree with this. I avoid Toxic Positivity because it is not helpful or healthy or realistic.

What do people think?[/quote]

I think there are several things going on here.

1. Law of Attraction is just shilling an extreme version of mind over matter adjacent to the Prosperity Gospel.

2. A bunch of people obsessed with their personal desires is a problem of selfishness. Law of Attraction isn't explicitly selfish, and lots of selfish people have never heard of the Law of Attraction.

3. Law of Attraction is not what I think of when someone mentions Toxic Positivity. To me, that terms refers to the idea that whatever you are that's a good thing and how you should be, and you should ignore anyone telling you that you're wrong or broken/damaged or ill or should try to change. All differences are good and should be accepted, and everyone should accommodate everyone else.

Disabilities don't exist; people are just differently-abled. Multiple-personality disorder and ADHD and autism shouldn't be cured. All shapes, sizes, and weights are beautiful and healthy. People should identify as whatever gender they want, and whatever they identify is correct for them. There's nothing strange or abnormal about being trans or dressing in drag. No fetishes or kinks or relationships of any kind are wrong, as long as everyone participating is a consenting adult.

All your differences are things you should be proud of and you shouldn't try to hide or change any of them.

That's what Toxic Positivity means to me.