compulsive liars

(standalone post spun off from a conversation with @more-whales​)

I knew several compulsive liars in my childhood and teen years.  I had multi-year friendships or acquaintance-ships with all of them, and as a result, I spent a considerable amount of time in my formative years talking to compulsive liars.  (To be concrete, I’m thinking mainly of three specific people here; there are also a few others who I either knew much less well, or who I wasn’t as sure about.)  It occurs to me that this is probably not a universal experience, and now I’m wondering if/how it shaped my attitude toward lies and deception.

N.B. I know almost nothing about how actual psychologists use the term “compulsive liar.”  I attached the term to this type of person merely because I’d describe the behavior to, say, my parents, and they’d say “sounds like a compulsive liar.”  But the type itself is very distinctive, whatever you call it – these three people shared a whole lot of traits.  So when I say “compulsive liar” I’m really referring to “this type of person I’ve learned to recognize.”

Here are some noteworthy traits that these people shared:

(1) Their lies tended to involve claiming they had abilities or experience they didn’t.  Particularly if those things would make them seem badass or cool, but it was more all-encompassing than that.  In virtually any conversation, whenever some topic was broached, they would quickly assert or imply that they had expert-level knowledge of it, or (if it was not the sort of thing you could be an “expert” in) that they had lots of relevant experience.  They would do this even when it could be easily disproven, or when it seemed obvious (at least to me) that everyone would figure they were bullshitting.

An example I mention because it’s funny and because it shows how this extends even to really trivial stuff: in middle school one of these people noticed I was reading a book subtitled “Understanding Japanese Animation,” and immediately said “I understand Japanese animation” (in a tone that connoted “if anyone does, it’s me”).  The claim is too subjective for me to say it’s a lie per se, but it seemed odd, given that I’d never heard him talk about any anime besides DBZ, and hadn’t gotten the impression he had any interest in anime or Japanese culture (or cared about being seen as someone who did).  He was just acting on the “always claim expertise” reflex, as always.

(2) They would lie much more often than a rational-but-amoral person would.  They would lie even when the risks seemed to greatly outweigh the potential rewards, and about very trivial things where the potential rewards were negligible or nonexistent.  Their reasons for lying seemed unrelated to the sort of “success” that a more ordinary person might want out of a lie.  For instance, they seemed very indifferent to whether their lies were actually believed by others.  I remember a conversation where I said something about Latin class, and the guy immediately claimed that he knew Latin well (see point 1) – and then, without any prompting from me, started trying to talk about some Latin phrase in a way that made it obvious he knew nothing about Latin grammar.  If he had really intended to make me think he knew Latin, he could have just not done that.

(3) If confronted with evidence that suggests they are lying, they will adapt their story to the evidence, but will never actually “come clean” by saying “yes, I was lying about XYZ” where XYZ was exactly the thing they were lying about.  They will avoid “coming clean” (i.e. expressing the precise truth about the lie they told) even if this means retreating to embarrassingly flimsy excuses, and will even pointlessly add lies while admitting their earlier ones, as if trying to make sure they have not made full contact with the truth.

Example: one guy (the guy from the Latin story, not the anime story) had a thing of claiming that his house contained various cool, implausible facilities, like “a sword forge” and “a recording studio.”  A friend of mine, who had a band, once asked the guy if he could use his studio.  The guy said yes, and invited my friend to get off the bus at his stop and enter his house.  The guy directed my friend to an empty room and claimed it was the studio.

“Where’s all the equipment?” my friend asked.

“Oh, it’s all in the shop for repairs,” the guy said.

Months later, my friend (who had figured the guy was bullshitting) asked the guy “hey, what’s up with your studio equipment?  Still in the shop?”  The guy said yes.

(That story doesn’t have the “pointlessly adding lies” element, but it captures the basic idea.)

I suspect that my experience with these people might have made me more tolerant of lying, in certain ways.

Let me clarify.  I’m not saying I’m OK with this behavior pattern.  I don’t know anyone like this right now (as far as I am aware!), and I’m glad.  Talking to these people was often unpleasant, and usually very, very boring: you have to carry on whole conversations about claimed things/capacities/experiences you don’t believe in, or which you have no particular reason to believe in.  You’re basically LARPing with the person, which can be fun, but only if you happen to like the LARP premise they’re using and like it enough to overcome the gross feeling of complicity with their deceptions.  (It’s usually socially inappropriate to pounce on everything someone says as a potential lie, and a very high proportion of the things these people say have some element of untruth, so just by acting in a socially normal way, you are complicit in a sense.)

And yet, I did spent a lot of time with these people.  Sometimes it was because I had no better options (e.g. they took the same school bus and I preferred their company to none).  But sometimes I’d talk to them when I had other options, because I thought it was “worth it.”

Why?  Because although the average compulsive liar is not (as they claim) more badass and proficient than other people, they are also not less badass or proficient than other people.  Every compulsive liar I’ve known – like every person I’ve known – has had some actual strengths and interesting qualities, along with all the fake ones.  I was friends with the guy from the anime story because he was smart and creative and the kind of larger-than-life schoolyard figure who’s always doing something funny or cool.  Sure, he claimed he’d done all sorts of cool shit he almost certainly had not done.  But if you were there and he was there, he probably was doing cool shit.  What was I to do, ignore the guy on principle?

Likewise, the “music studio” guy did not have a music studio, but he did know a thing or two about music: he was, actually, a talented jazz pianist.  He was the pianist for my high school’s well-regarded jazz band, and although I never heard him play, I heard good things from reputable people.  After high school, he (actually) went to Berklee, possibly the top college in the US for jazz performance.  He was a year or two ahead of me, and I remember a day when he came back to give a talk for one of my classes about what college was like.  Nothing he said was out of the ordinary, but he spoke with his usual bombast, and acting on old reflexes I skeptically evaluated each statement he made.  But in any event he was at Berklee and he was good at jazz piano.

I think these experiences gave me a pragmatic attitude toward liars and bullshitters: I rule no one out on principle, and can play along with lies which I know are lies if I think the cost-benefit still comes out in my favor.  I think the tolerance for people lying in certain recognizable ways is particularly important.  If I know that someone likes to bullshit about their accomplishments, I will mentally discount whatever they say about their accomplishments, but I won’t instantly decide their word is valueless, or ignore them when they direct me to cool stuff that is independently verifiable.  Unlike (I think) some people, I don’t see trustworthiness as one-dimensional, but as situation- and topic-dependent.  Knowing that someone likes to tell tall tales at the pub doesn’t instantly invalidate their professional publications, say, or their sworn legal testimony.

The flipside of this pragmatic attitude is that I can be as intolerant (or moreso) of highly implicit deception as I am of outright lies.  For example, I find it exasperating to talk to people on the internet who have a “been everywhere, done everything, seen it all” attitude (this is more common on the internet because usually no one knows your IRL life story in much detail).  These people very rarely outright lie – they just make sweeping pronouncements on whatever topic is at hand, in a way that implies they have the expertise/experience that would be needed to ground those pronouncements.

Even when I can’t catch these people saying outright falsehoods, they still remind me of the compulsive liars of my youth; there’s the same feeling that I am playing along with their LARP just by engaging with them.  They’re LARPing as thousand-year-old vampires (post not endorsed, just linked for the concept), but they don’t have a thousand years of experience to draw on, and may well be drawing on a narrower range of experience than I am.  This is a LARP I don’t enjoy playing along with, and there is nothing that makes these subtle deceivers categorically worse to me than the Known Liar, caught red-handed with full substantiating documentation.

The Known Liar can be just as bad, if their well-documented lies are representative of a sufficiently bad pattern.  But I just … don’t treat people as “trustworthy” until the shocking evidence of a Known Lie emerges.  I decide case-by-case when I can trust a person and when I can’t, and nod along to bullshit if and when it’s worth it.

TBH I have a hard time understanding how people are able to write fiction set in the real world that’s about more than the small-scale personal lives of the characters.  If I tried to write a story about politics, or a war, or anything like that, I’d constantly worry about getting something wrong in a way that would be cringingly obviously to a lot of people, or just writing something horribly implausible without realizing it.

Even if I’m not unusually ignorant about the thing I’m writing about, I’ll have a different pattern of ignorance and knowledge about it from every other person.  If my knowledge is average, I still may miss plenty of things that 30% or 40% of people know, or even 80% – it’ll just average out to the average rate.  But that’s a whole lot of broken-disbelief-suspension in the reading population.

This applies even moreso to historical fiction.

God dammit I wrote a giant post again when I should have been doing real work

I blame exploratory factor analysis.  It is SO BAD.  It takes a long time just to explain HOW BAD exploratory factor analysis is

Last night I finished my Ph.D thesis.

That sentence needs a bunch of asterisks.  I haven’t shown the new draft (which I am referring to as “finished”) to my committee yet, or scheduled a defense.  Plus, I screwed up some administrative paperwork (for literally the third time, with the same paperwork) with the result that I may not receive the degree until September, no matter how soon I defend.  Etc.

When I say “last night I finished my Ph.D thesis,” I am mostly referring to a psychological phenomenon, a very important one.  I’ve been working on this thesis for a very long time, while maintaining what I now realize was a certain amount of self-deception.  It was “essentially done” around half a year ago, when I cobbled together all my research work into a single document and showed that first draft to my committee.  All that needed to be done was to “flesh out the exposition,” which seemed trivial.  Instead, of course, it dragged on for months.  And there was a final piece I really wanted to put in, a piece I could generate with my numerical code if I merely “made some trivial modifications”; of course that turned into hours, days, months of coding, testing, debugging.  I kept missing administrative deadlines, and that meant I had to delay graduation, which gave me more time to work on these “trivial finishing touches,” which I continued to plug away at, week after week, letting other parts of my life fall by the wayside, almost unaware of the dissonance.  The more time I felt I had, the more suboptimal aspects I could identify and try to fix, and often as I tugged at one of these threads it would reveal new and bigger problems.  I’d add a new explanatory section and realize that it raised its own questions which had to be answered in a second new section, and so forth; the more I wrote, the more notation I had to juggle and standardize; the more ruthlessly clear I tried to be, the more tiny details there were to be potentially wrong about.

Suddenly, 5 days or so ago, I started referring to the thesis as “the brain parasite.”  It felt like an infection or an addiction, something hijacking my free will, like cordyceps.  I realized I couldn’t trust the siren song that said “it’s almost done, it’ll be done next week, just keep plugging ahead.”  I’d been hearing that same song for half a year.  I needed, ASAP, to declare I was done, because only that could kill the parasite.  I wasn’t even being perfectionistic, exactly; I was just taking individual steps that seemed sensible, none of which ever produce the feeling of “doneness,” since there was no objectively definable endpoint.

So I arbitrarily set an endpoint – told myself that I will be “done” after a finite series of specific steps – and then sat down and made myself do each step, in order, refusing to allow any of the steps to spawn new descendent steps.  As I worked, there were places where it felt sensible and reasonable to add something new to my to-do list; I refused to do so.  I kept working, and last night I was so determined to kill the parasite that I didn’t sleep until the final step was complete, at around 4:30 AM.

I finished it.

@kitswulf

There are a couple different items here, please tell me if I don’t respond to any of them and I’ll add an addendum.

1. Some of the pieces that I found useful (in that they helped me understand things, not that I necessarily agree/endorse everything in them) are the following:

• https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/trump-politics-and-option-pricing-or-why-trump-voters-are-not-idiots-1e364a4ed940 This article helped me understand why people who I have lived with and cared about were supporting Trump. Like, nowadays I live in a big city and am a cosmopolitan PhD student in a foreign country and etc., but I grew up in a rural area for a good chunk of my life. Having people I considered friends, who I considered smart, become supporters (both full-throated and grudging) was confusing. Arnade’s article really helped lay out a reasonable idea: that for a lot of people in areas that have eaten shit over our policies for the last 20-40 years, having a really bad but high-variance-in-outcomes candidate was preferable. A lot of people I asked, given this frame, confirmed that it was their experience. Better to spin the Wheel o’ Who-The-Fuck-Knows than to accept the confirmed payout of the status quo of stagnant wages and crumbling cities. This frame even helped me talk a couple of them out of this idea, by basically arguing that yes, Trump was high variance, but his bell curve of outcomes had such a bad median that it’d be unlikely you get better than the status quo out of him. I feel modestly justified having now seen President Trump in action.
• https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/07/kentucky-trump-obama-unemployment-drugs This article is the sort of “field work” you mentioned. Since I work in politics and policy, understanding how and why people think in the way they do is important to me for at least 3 reasons: 1, maybe they’re experiencing something I’m missing. I mean, I haven’t lived in a city with less than 100k people for about a decade at this point. Their knowledge is more direct and recent than mine. 2, if I want to change their minds (e.g. on Trump), I need to understand how they think to make arguments that are convincing to them rather than just beating them about the head and shoulders while screeching “Stupid! Racist!”. 3, it makes me look over my models and policy recommendations from a different perspective, which makes them more robust. Am I certain I know the mechanism of how this policy will end up benefitting them? Is it presuming motivations or behavior that these people don’t actually have? For example, in this other article of his ( https://thebillfold.com/tarp-a-love-story-in-43-tweets-244e6fb9126c?source=user_profile———20———-) he’s certainly being hyperbolic, but he’s also illuminating that humans will generally veto a deal that is beneficial but unfair, and that a lot our policies for poor and uneducated people are pretty well-described as “beneficial but unfair”. If we keep offering people such deals, why are we unprepared for them to angrily veto it if they can?
  

I originally was going to write about how his goal is to be an advocate for an under-heard population, and speaking up for an underheard group requires obnoxious screaming, but @you-have-just-experienced-things did a better job of it than me: http://you-have-just-experienced-things.tumblr.com/post/158250611022/nostalgebraist-kitswulf-nostalgebraist. The post compares Arnade to Stallman, in that both are intentionally staking out extremist positions and being assholes because if they were too quiet and accomodating, people would ignore them, and even though they’re not correct on their own, the natural flow of The Discourse™ is away from their viewpoints, which are important to include. Just like any other disruptive protest, the question becomes: are you losing more people by being a jerk than you are gaining by presenting novel information? Considering that I think a lot more people need their faces rubbed in the horribleness of X than you do (maybe as a function of the average scrupulosity of the people we interact with?), I wonder if I value Arnade more because his face-rubbing is edifying to me and my network, but obnoxious to you and your network.

2. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if moral scrupulosity is the determining factor. I honestly don’t think Yglesias feels bad about Bangladesh, not deeply. I know this is uncharitable, but having encountered people similar to his mold, I’m the one who gets squicked, because people like him seem to sort of shrug and glibly go “Well, what are you gonna do?”, and if you reply with “What I am going to do is advocate for a different policy because I think it is telling that most countries that are able pay a productivity premium to reduce these sorts of conditions via labor laws, do so.” they become deeply horrified in a way that a mere thousand people dying can’t really compare to. As a result, the Arnades of the world rubbing the noses of the Yglesiases of the world in the results of their policies seems to me to be both intellectually valuable (”Maybe this policy isn’t the best, considering all the additional negative externalities Arnade is documenting…”) and also morally valuable (”It is one thing to grimly pay the cost of X because after forethought, all non-X alternatives are worse. It is another thing entirely to blithely champion X because the cost of X will never risk your life and family, so it’s just the cost of doing business.”). I think this ties into the squickiness a lot of the people in ratspace get from Arnade, since rationalists and -adjacents seem to be much more scrupulous than the average person, and so have been much more likely to go “X has awful parts, Y has awful parts, but after careful deliberation I think X is better even though it has so much awfulness”. So when Arnade bursts into the room going “HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT!? X! IS! BAD!“ it doesn’t feel like someone going “Are you certain of this model? I’d like to remind you of the costs in a more visceral way that’ll hit your affective/emotive processing rather than your logical thinking to ensure you have not reached this decision out of cognitive convenience.” it feels like someone simply shouting an appeal to emotion regarding an already-considered datapoint. The fact that he has, in many cases, not in fact been amongst the people he is advocating for simply piles hypocrisy atop an ineffective argument and makes it seem more likely to be made in bad faith.

3. Building off of point 2, I think a good chunk of Arnade’s value comes from the fact that humans tend to think narratively and with bounded rationality, and that tragically includes a lot of policymakers and the like. And if we don’t ensure a good spread of stories exist (if only to make sure that people can come up with counter-anecdotes sufficiently to force them to regard data) then we’ll still have people thinking in stories, but they’ll be few, simple, and glib. “Trump supporters are all racists, and the way to fix that is to keep calling them racists and harassing them, and this will get Hillary elected in November.” “Freer markets are always good and there are never any losers that we should compensate, if only out of the pure self-interest of them not burning everything down out of spite a la Brexit.” “Drug users are just inherently irrational due to their addictions and we won’t learn anything about how to help them by interacting with them, and they resist us purely out of moral weakness and not because people resent being talked down to.” Having someone pull out those intended-to-be-heartbreaking narratives to make people consider alternate points of view is pretty important, and seems to provide an important counterbalance.

And…some people find that tactic gross? Like, besides your reply others have reblogged sharing that revulsion, which I think I can understand but not share. Most humans out there are motivated by stories and think in stories, and I feel like I should take action presuming I live within that constraint. If that means that one sad, crying child in a commercial gets more funding than the far-more-thorough statistics about child mortality in a region, I’m going to try and make policies based on mortality risk…but I’m going to rally support and funding by talking about that one crying child. To once again quote @you-have-just-experienced-things, “whenever Arnade actually tries to argue about the real tradeoffs associated with a particular policy or law the result is disastrous”, and I agree to the extent that I think your original post nailed it: Arnade would need a policy of national befriending-and-community-integrating, which is…not an effective policy, to say the least. But without Arnade, we don’t get a marvelous statisitically-focused policy selection, we merely get a smaller subset of anecdotes, ones that seem to pander to the biases and preferences of those currently in power.

Cut (and thread snip) bc length

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(via kitswulf)

What’s Your Type: Identity and its Discontents →

I was reading something tonight that happened to trip a switch in my brain and activate a feeling which used to be very important to me, but which I now only feel a few times a year at most  – this desire for a “community,” a “place I belong,” “finding my people,” all that.

(Which for me is has all sorts of other associations: getting fascinated with the details of community history and shibboleths, people’s stories of “what it was like” in the group in earlier days, a peaceful reverent sense of the expanse of history associated with the “expansive” feeling I get on sunny summer days.  I sort of wrote about this here)

It was a shock to feel this again, because I had forgotten how intense it was.  It feels more powerful and profound, more richly textured, than the more mundane emotions that pervade my life today.  It seems to be the rule that younger versions of myself had more beautiful and complex emotions on the basis of dumber and less mature thoughts and aspirations.  Like there’s some conservation law ensuring that more nuanced perceptions of human reality are paired with less nuanced emotions.  (This is probably a common observation.)

Anyway – this feeling had to be jettisoned as I matured, I think, because I’m just not the sort of person who is at his best when he’s identifying most clearly with some community.  I can be in communities, and some times this works out very well for me, but my role in the community is never as a prototypical member, it’s just as me-being-me.  Typically I am “the odd one out” in some ways even in communities where I belong, it’s just that I’m “the odd one out” in some way that’s useful to the community (and to me).  I’ve learned to seek places where my traits are valued, and not to further hope for places where my traits are just the default, or where I can lose my ego in a collective that feels right (no collective ever feels right).

I’ve never found “my people,” just people who I like and who like me, distinct though we are.  And so I’ve learned, I suppose, that people who find “their people” are … not my people.  Still, I can remember the summery dream of my youth, and it’s powerful.

(It occurs to me that I am, now – like, on tumblr, among the people I talk to here – the kind of shibboleth-speaker and injoke-maker that my younger self would have obsessed over and internet-stalked.  Like, it seems so trivial to me at the moment, but if my younger self had encountered me now, he would probably have imbued the “#quotes robnost style” thing with magic significance, and thought of me as one of the magic tradition-making people he might one day become if he could just develop this magic skill of “belonging.”  And he’d talk to me about this, and I’d be all like, “what?”)

(don’t reblog)

When I decided to move across the country, it made science suddenly change!  It sounds crazy, I know.

Where I used to live, my psych prescriber and I tried several different medications for my anxiety.  Benzodiazepenes worked initially, and (following standard practice) we added an SSRI.  I don’t think the SSRI really helped at all, but whenever I try to lower my dose I feel horrible, so I’m still on it.  But the benzos continue to help, even in the long term – I can take them if I’m feeling anxious and experience immediate relief, and I’ve been on the same dose for years without needing an increase.

Anyway, I moved across the country and have seen two different people here, and they tell me that no one should be on benzos long term and I should taper off them ASAP.  It is a weird experience to be told this, because nothing changed in my life to make the benzos suddenly a worse idea.  All I did was move to a different city.

As far as I understand, benzos are controversial as long-term therapy largely because people develop tolerance and start needing more and more to get the same effect.  With this in mind, I will say, “you have my records – look, see how I’ve been on the same dose for years?”  The prescribers are unmoved by this.  “We no longer think benzos are a good idea in the long term,” they’ll say, where the “we” I guess means “the psychiatric community.”  But then they’ll say, “well, some prescribers have different opinions.”  Looking around in the literature, one can find many references to the “controversial” status of benzos, and everyone is apparently taking about how they should be re-re-evaluated (first “we” thought were good, now "we” think they are bad, but maybe “we” should decide they are good again?):

A number of recent editorials, commentaries, debate articles and reviews have called for BDZs to be revisited [4,5], reconsidered [6–8] or reappraised [9]. Some discuss the ‘art’ of longterm use of BDZs in anxiety disorders [10], while others consider the reasons for the ongoing popularity of BDZs [11,12] or suggest that BDZs have a future despite previous recommendations to minimize their use or abandon them [6,13,14].  (source, from 2014)

A funny thing about all this is that in any medical study, there is some variance – people respond differently to things – and yet everyone talks in these all-or-nothing terms about whether “we” should give a thing to every patient or to no patients.  The first re-appraisal (the one that said benzos are bad) involved a lot of arguments to the effect that we no longer need benzos at all, because we now have SSRIs, which are less risky.  Note that SSRIs do not work for every patient!  Nor do benzos!

Anyway, everyone in my new reality thinks it is awesome that I am on the SSRI, although it does nothing, and when I try to reduce the dose I feel like the entire world is a grim crushing lightless void.  This is OK, because I can just never reduce the dose, and keep taking them forever, because “we” currently have positive feelings about SSRIs.  Ironically, I have never actually experienced any withdrawal from the benzo, even though sometimes I will run out of it early and then not take it for a week or two.  It’s okay!  Meanwhile if I decrease my daily dose of the SSRI by more than a very small increment, I go back to the horrible void world.  But that’s okay!  This is the kind of chemical dependence that "we” feel comfortable with.  (Perhaps someday it will be “re-appraised,” and then they’ll try to get me off the SSRI suddenly; that will sure be fun!)

One of the people I saw was skeptical that the horrible void feeling even had anything to do with the SSRI (!), because I described it as “depression,” and she said: “oh, that doesn’t sound like it – now we think SSRIs are more a therapy for anxiety than for depression.”  Yep, I know!  They got “re-appraised” and “we” noticed that although they show some efficacy in both conditions, they are in fact more effective for anxiety!  That’s what I was told when they put me on them, for anxiety!  I would not think that this, alone, would mean that they cannot make people feel depressed when the dose is decreased.  But the beliefs of this “we” seem like very simple and crude things, and they seem unable to admit much subtlety.

SSRIs are "about anxiety” now, so they have nothing to do with depression.  Benzos are currently Bad, but trends suggest that they may become Good again in, say, a few years.  I just thought chemicals were chemicals, but it turns out they are in constant flux.  Wild!

(OP snipped bc long)

@discoursedrome

I’m not as negative on Hussie despite broadly agreeing with these points, but this touches on a lot of my feelings about him. He tried doing conventional work beforehand and he couldn’t, it just didn’t work out. What he developed in MSPA (from Problem Sleuth onward) was a method that worked for him, and it was popular because it produced something nobody else could do, a kind of art totally unlike any other art. But you see a lot in Hussie’s commentary the observation that he can’t stop, slow down, or look back. The reason his “traditional“ works failed is because he needs momentum to create; the reason Homestuck sort of went off the rails at the end is because the increasing complexity of the work and the administrative drama associated with it robbed him of that momentum and once he stops he doesn’t know how to start again. I suspect his brusque dismissal of criticism comes at least partially from a latent awareness that his momentum is fragile.

But I mean, it’s a success story, isn’t it? He’s a guy with a unique creative talent that’s totally incompatible with the normal process, and yet he found a process that worked for him and his work was very popular and successful. He can’t make anything but the thing he made, but nobody else can make the thing he made, and I don’t just mean that in a trite way, I mean nobody can even come close, it was a completely distinct narrative form. However real all these criticisms are, I’ll give that a standing ovation.

I agree – I guess it’s one kind of success story and I wanted it to be another.   Homestuck is a wonderful thing, but it’s one that makes its creator’s limitations very very apparent, especially towards the end.  Whereas I wanted it to hide those limitations more and more shrewdly as it went on, like Caliborn drawing a succession of circles with more and more right angles until you aren’t even sure anymore that he’s not just drawing curves.

Caliborn is fascinating in light of all this – he’s obviously relevant, but I don’t know what to make of the ways in which he is relevant.  He seems, transparently, like Hussie writing a direct portrayal of the “weird kid” element of himself I described in the OP, and making that portrayal the villain.  (Specifically, Caliborn is a portrait of a younger Hussie, one who was more “the weird kid” and also more of an edgelord – hence he gets lectured by the more mature narrator-Hussie on personal growth.)

One of the many odd things about this is that Caliborn is characterized by taking shortcuts, “cheating,” rather than doing the hard work of “real personal growth” – but Hussie is writing Caliborn at the same time he’s taking more Caliborn-like shortcuts than ever in his own work, throwing away hard-earned character and plot threads or capping them off with overly pat, unsatisfying metaphysical fixes.  The cherub concept seems like an obvious metaphor for some kind of “Jungian integration of your masculine and feminine elements” thing, but Caliborn doesn’t get integrated, just vilified and then decisively defeated by his opposite – a Caliborn-like, brute force solution to a problem of personal growth!

Indeed, turning the story into a morality play about doing things the hard, grownup way, at the exact time he’s failing to do that with his writing, feels like an attempt to “cheat,” to achieve growth simply by declaring that he has grown, rather than showing it through his actions.  Rather than domesticating Caliborn / “the weird kid,” making his strange impulses subject to the control of a more thoughtful adult deliberation, Hussie just becomes ashamed of him.  It’s the “I acknowledge my flaws, which means I don’t have to change them” approach to personal growth.  Hussie excoriates his own method and elevates the more conventional, respectable methods of his fans (via Calliope as a character, and via the large concentrations of fan-drawn art in the last sequences), but self-flagellation isn’t the same as growth, and pedestaling the fans isn’t the same as respecting them.

And this all seems so transparent, and so characteristically meta and self-aware, that it feels like it all has to be deliberate – but if it’s all deliberate, does he know he’s not really growing?

Weird, weird stuff.

(via discoursedrome)