Virtue is the sole cool

Exapting the prestige-seeking impulse

There is a problem in Effective Altruism¹ where people frame altruistic opportunities in terms of “good”. They say things like “this is how you can do the most good”, or “I’m so excited to do good!”. This makes me cringe a bit.

Usage of the term “good” is also rampant in Stoicism:

“Virtue is the sole good” —Cicero.

When I hear these phrases, I think of obedient Sunday school children, spitting out promotional material from the early 90s. “Good” has been used and abused until it’s lost all meaning, turning into a platitude. Nowadays it’s mostly used as a synonym for “well”:

”How are you?”
”I’m doing good!”

Compare this to “cool”. Instead of saying “here’s how you can do the most good”, you say “here’s a cool thing you can do”. Instead of saying “Virtue is the sole good”, you say “Virtue is the sole cool”.

Hearing “Virtue is the sole cool” makes me excited.² It makes me want to go all-in on virtue. Part of me is sceptical though; is virtue really the sole cool? That’s quite a heavy claim, for a rather ill-defined term.

This reaction is exactly the reaction I imagine people of old had to Cicero’s original statement. Spirit of the message = captured! And, even better, I think the reformulation might be right on target.

Let me explain.

On Coolness

I’m not an authority on coolness.³ That’s why I’ll base this next section on a talk by Alex Ebert, punk rock vocalist turned spiritual guru.

Band picture from “Ima robot”, feat Alex Ebert. Seems pretty cool

About a year ago, Alex got onto the Stoa⁴ and gave a talk named “dead cool”:

The talk is 30mins~, but I’ll give a quick recap for those of you that are unwilling to spend time listening to a former punk-rock vocalist give a sociological presentation.

According to Alex, the first key feature of being cool is related to occlusion, being “out of sight” or inaccessible⁵. This is why sunglasses are cool; by hiding your eyes, they create a small microcosm for yourself, where other people aren’t invited.

Invitations and access are both highly related to coolness; the cooler you are, the more contexts you have access to.⁶ Having access to contexts that other people haven’t access to is extra cool. Companies and promoters manufacture “coolness” by creating a sense of scarcity/exclusivity⁷.

Other things seen as cool include sovereignty; being self-reliant. This is why cigarettes are cool; a person standing at the edge of a crowd by themselves signal lack-of-access (not cool). A person standing by themselves smoking a cigarette creates their own context, without relying on other people.⁸ They are sovereign = cool.

The last coolness trait brought up by Alex is, ironically⁹, struggle. Rebellion is seen as cool, causing people with status anxiety to buy Che Guevara t-shirts, commodifying Marxist rebellion. Other kinds of commodified struggle include poverty, with people buying pre-ripped jeans.

Striving for these traits form a vicious cycle. People that are really concerned about their status spend an inordinate amount of time and energy pursuing coolness. Once they gain traction, climbing the status ladder, their status anxiety is bound to increase: just staying in place requires effort.¹⁰

Any motion towards relieving the anxiety through opening up to others meets a premature end - being vulnerable is seen as weak; relying on others isn’t sovereign. Once the mental health issues kick in, the levels of strugglyness increase. This risks turning the plight into yet another status device, further locking them in on a bad trajectory.

Exapting the prestige-seeking impulse?

Downwards spirals. Status anxiety and neurosis. Coolness doesn’t seem worth spending any effort/time on. And yet the concept of cool saturates the culture I’m in. Trying to avoid it brings on a likely consequence of it sneaking up on me unexamined.¹¹

As such, I’ll do my best to figure out a healthy way of relating to coolness. My favourite tool for finding healthy relating patterns is Stoicism. So let’s put on the stoic goggles and figure out a way to exapt the prestige-seeking impulse!

In the rest of this post, I’ll explore why practising Stoicism is cool, and how to funnel the prestige-seeking impulse into virtue-seeking.

Why Stoicism/Virtue is the sole Cool

The main reason properly trained Stoics are cool is the “dichotomy of control”. Stoicism trains you to distinguish between what’s in your control and what’s not. Within your control are your decisions, your value judgements and your action impulses. Everything else is external, outside of your control. The stoic term used for externals is “indifferents”¹².

No baseless signalling

If you internalize the dichotomy of control, you will be indifferent to others’ opinions. If you’re indifferent about others’ opinions, you will keep things real, i.e. not engaging in baseless signalling.

“Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?” ― Epictetus, philosopher-slave

Sovereign Microcosm

If you internalize the dichotomy of control, you will be completely sovereign over the occluded microcosm of your own mind.

“I laugh at those who think they can damage me. They do not know who I am, they do not know what I think, they cannot even touch the things which are really mine and with which I live.” ― Epictetus, philosopher-slave

Struggling to improve the world

The second reason Stoicism is cool is the virtue of Justice. Well-trained Stoics put effort into improving the world, in a non-needy way. This is rather struggly!

“Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying...or busy with other assignments”
― Marcus Aurelius, philosopher-emperor

But is it really the sole cool thing?

I guess there could be other ways of being sustainably cool in non-destructive ways, but I’m having a hard time figuring those out. Focusing on virtue means focusing inwards, on your own behavioural patterns.

Doing coolness non-virtuously then means focusing outwards. And once you focus on the opinions of others, status anxiety and stress creep in.

As such I am inclined to say yes, justice is the sole cool in a very literal sense. But even more interesting is the next part; channelling the prestige-seeking impulse into virtuous behaviour.¹³

Exapting the prestige-seeking impulse!

So, how can we take the power of the prestige-seeking impulse and exapt it to work for us instead of against us? By internalizing that Virtue is the Sole Cool.

How to do it will be different for each person, but over time I’m pretty sure that it’s possible to create a cognitive pattern where status anxiety leads to introspection followed by virtuous action.

Over time this habitual pattern will lead to sophrosyne, a state where the things that are good for you also pull your focus, while the things that are bad for you will fade away into the background.

And yes, I know internalizing things intentionally is seldomly done.¹⁴ Most people have no practice doing it. We have the logic-level argument, but that’s far from internalizing this on a visceral level. Moving from A to B will require consistency and practice.¹⁵

The End?

[…]

I feel a bit bad about leaving you with a “How to draw an Owl”-instruction¹⁶, so I’ll end with an example scenario that will hopefully show how I’m intending to do this in practice.

Scenario: Status anxiety at a Party

A friend invites me to a party where I know one person: my friend.

I know that I risk running into unskillful behaviour by “glueing” myself to my friend all evening, which means that if I go I’ll need to start by consciously split from the friend. But I trust my friends’ people-judgement and know that a party full of new people is a typical fat-tail situation¹⁷, so I agree to go.

Once I’m at the party, I notice that most people seem open-minded and interesting. They’re all also split into smaller groups of 3-5, talking about various things.

I sit down next to one group and ask them what’s up, get a brief answer but no real invite. As I sit there, halfway into the group, I get anxious and start ruminating. “What am I even doing here?” “Am I even welcome, or does everyone want to hang out with people they already know?”

AND BAM! I realize that I’m having self-judgements and anxiety, take a deep breath and feel into myself.

Internal dialogue:

Q: What do I want?

A: I want to connect to people, in ways that make me a better person

Q: What do I feel?

A: Anxious about what others think

Q: That’s understandable, I am a monkey after all. What is within my control?

A: My action impulses, my value judgements, and my decisions.

Q: What kind of person do I want to become?

A: A brave person that opens up and truly connects with others, not fearing rejection or scorn

Q: So?

A: I can stop caring about rejection, and express myself as clearly as possible. Then I’ll connect with people I vibe with and push away people that aren’t a match.

[…]

I scan the room to find a group of people that seem nice & interesting, excuse myself from the current “conversation” and walk up to the group.

“Hi! I barely know anyone at this party and I’m trying to get over the initial anxiety. What are you people up to?”

1. Effective altruism is all about trying to improve the world in effective ways. How many lives can you save using your capabilities and resources?

2. I’m conflicted about this, but yep, it’s true.

3. Though I have written about something very related before

4. The place where you will find all the weird meta-nerds talking about things. Highly recommended.

Upcoming sessions include:
Meta Productivity w/ Daniel Kazandjian
A Complete “Theory of Everything” for Addressing the Meta-Crisis? w/ Jill Nephew
Politigram and the Post-left w/ Joshua Citerella
Vibetraits w/ Sílvia Bastos

And it’s almost always things like this happening, check out the youtube channel for historical presentations.

5. Why do people think that radical honesty is cool? Maybe it’s related to counter-signalling? By revealing a lot of crazy shit people might:

1. Be even more interested in the microcosm of your mind (“I wonder how he can keep on being straight forward with this kind of stuff”)

2. By “exposing weakness”, you show that you can handle an attack. (=sovereignty) Consider an MMA fighter sitting down in meditation pose.

3. It’s also a hard-to-fake thing, making baseless signalling (posing?) less likely.

6. Two different community pitfalls:

1. Accepting members that degrade the experience for others by being (unintentionally) disruptive

2. Creating an insular in-group that gets convinced that it’s superior to outsiders

7. Examples include time-limited offers. Read Influence: Science and Practice for more.

8. The hippie version of this might be meditation? A person sitting by themselves meditating is also their own context…

9. Buying struggle isn’t very struggly, hence the irony.

10. Also, just “staying in place”, and keeping your hierarchical position, requires effort. Keeping up with the Joneses…

11. Especially since a part of me cares a lot about these kinds of things

12. Very cool

13. I was about to say “using it for good” here. When I meant “Using it well”. See how the word is devoid of character? Although technically Virtue is Good, at least according to some moral philosophers. But that’s not what I had in mind in the formulation I was about to use.

This footnote is getting a bit navel-gazey, and I can feel some self-judgement about that creeping in. Hope you enjoy it anyway. (Even though that’s a preferred indifferent, technically)

14. Most people seem content to build random neurosis through unaccounted-for pseudo-CBT.

15. Which Stoicism is great at. CBT = Stoicism - Virtue

16. “How to draw an owl”-instruction= only giving you the briefest of outlines, leaving the rest to personal experience

17. Fat tail= Very bad ones are unlikely while very good ones might occur. Going to a party gives increases your “luck surface area” by opening up chances for serendipitous encounters. So if you trust your friends’ judgment, try to go to the party.