OCD, Moral Mistakes and Me
A personal post about OCD
I recently wrote about some talks between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. In that post, I touched on the following idea:
…particularly when it comes to fundamental values, I think it is vitally important to recognise that some things we just feel. We do not need to have our values written on our foreheads in order to be acting them out. And God knows what’s really going on in Peterson’s head - what he’s really optimising for. The circuitous way in which he speaks certainly suggests to me that he’s optimising for something quite invisible to the rest of us. Indeed, I have struggled deeply and tortuously with this problem myself. As Stewart Lee so eloquently puts it, we cannot say the unsayable.
Now, I want to elaborate on this. Why on earth would we even try to ‘say the unsayable’? It doesn’t work out particularly well for Stewart Lee, after all.
What follows may be a bit of a chaotic narrative, and it’s one I may refine over the coming days and weeks so that it makes more sense.
Every human being, in order to function in our society, needs to have a sense of self-worth independent of their surroundings. Independent of others. And this is fine, when we feel like we know that we’re doing the right thing.
But when we feel unique - when we feel that we have special responsibilities, special abilities - there is an unusual burden on us to find the right thing to do, lest we waste our potential.
Now, we arrive at the conclusion that we have unique responsibilities and abilities through orienting ourselves with respect to other people. What can they do? What can I do? That’s the first step - if you don’t compare yourself to others, over the course of many years, you won’t be able to tell whether you truly have unique capabilities or not.
Some will realise, through that process, that they have good capabilities, but not necessarily unique ones.
Some will have sorta-unique capabilities.
And others will realise that they’ve spotted things in the world that nobody else has. Or perhaps mistakenly feel that way. And those people can run into problems.
When you’ve spotted something nobody else has, you have only yourself to rely on in navigating the problem. Others will try to guide you, but they will have very little to go on in navigating the issue at hand, if only you can see the part of reality you’ve stumbled upon.
How can it be that only you can see this part of reality? Well, the only thing we can see that others can’t is ourselves. And if that morally relevant part of reality exists within you, you can end up in a tricky place.
And sometimes that reality can be dark. Sometimes, it can be very, very dark.
I wonder if this is what Peterson feels he’s faced with. I think his mental conversation in large part occurs with himself, or with his God. All of us have this, but I think for Peterson it’s particularly pronounced.
But this is also a characteristic of neurotic people in general, and obsessive-compulsive individuals in particular. And recently, it’s been pretty pronounced in me, too.
OCD and Complex Moral Junctures
When you have unique capabilities, you must make use of them.
When you have unique capabilities, you’re more likely to find yourself having to make hard decisions by yourself. You’re unique, after all. Others can guide you, but you have to make the decision based on your understanding of yourself.
I’m using the term ‘Complex Moral Juncture’ to try to point to something here. But partly it just sounds good. I’m not sure it means anything more specific than ‘hard decision with trajectory-changing potential’.
A Complex Moral Juncture is where the rubber meets the road - where push comes to shove, where the price of inaction is high. And it’s just you, and the universe, and God (or wherever else your value system comes from).
Most people have plenty of time to make these decisions. Sometimes not, but even then, normally we’re sufficiently in tune with our desires to make decisions we’re happy with. I’ve often found myself in positions where I don’t actually have much time, and I’m not particularly in tune with my desires. This increases the possibility of a fuck-up.
And fucking up a Complex Moral Juncture can be incredibly psychologically twisting.
When you do something alone, who’s watching? Nobody else is watching. You’re watching, and God is watching. And if you fuck it up, perhaps nobody else will see.
But God will see.
Normally, people make mistakes, and they move on. They can see the part of them that made the mistake, and they can see that similar parts exist in others, and they conclude correctly that there’s nothing especially wrong with what they’ve done, nothing particularly bad. Someone else in their position could easily have made that very same error.
But trajectory-changing decisions are not normal decisions. If you mess it up, you’ve really messed it up. If you’re at a special sort of juncture and make the wrong turn, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime, potentially once-in-a-universe opportunity that’s been lost. It’s no ordinary mistake.
This type of thinking is common in OCD. People develop certain obsessive thoughts, that the world will end, or their loved ones will be harmed, or something else terrible will happen, unless they perform certain mental or physical routines. Compulsions can be simple rituals like counting, tapping, blinking. Some people have to double-check the taps are off before going to bed. Some have specific routines relating to daily activities, like showering, tooth-brushing, eating breakfast, and so on.
My OCD has been particularly insidious, because it’s related to ideas in Effective Altruism (EA) around doing the most good, astronomical waste, and what we owe the future. Most people don’t think about these things.
And most people in EA don’t think about these things the way my OCD thinks about them, because they’ve never found themselves at the kind of juncture I’m describing. They’ve never made the kind of mistake I’m describing, because they’ve never been in the kind of position I’ve been in.
When you meet directly with the limitations of the universe, when only you have the skills and the knowledge to solve a problem, and you’ve already internalised all the wisdom you could reasonably have internalised about the problem, nobody can help you. The people who know the most in the world about all the relevant things can’t help you. You’re on your own, kid.
(Yes, plenty of people trying to do good have made mistakes. Sometimes big mistakes. But rarely, if ever, this kind of mistake, I’d say. But it’ll take another post to lay out the details of that).
Many will find themselves at some sort of unique moral intersection at many points in their lives, but it’s rarely so complex. Normally, it’s navigable. They use whatever decision process they use, and they navigate the situation as best they can.
My situation was complex because there was a way to get it right, and a chance to get it wrong. This is very black-and-white thinking, you may say, and you’d be right - to a degree. Normally, black-and-white thinking is a bad thing.
But my moral intersection was different. There was a shade of grey that was nearly black, and there was a shade of grey that was nearly white. I could see them. I’d never found myself in such a clear situation of near-black and near-white before.
And I thought I was heading for white. I was convinced of it. The planets had aligned, there was nothing within the realms of feasibility that could take me down the near-black path.
But there was. Oh, there was.
I didn’t know it was happening until after the fact. But it was happening. And it happened, and I went down the near-black path.
I have an Oxford degree. I won’t accept the idea that I was wrong about this, that I saw something that wasn’t there. It was there. And if you, dear reader, and been there with me to see it, you’d have seen the very dark shade of grey and the very light shade of grey, crystal clear.
I know the date on which this happened, and I know how it interacted with the different parts of me, and I know it was avoidable, if I’d just said the right sentences rather than the wrong sentences.
People like to deny that such a thing can happen to anyone, but that’s because they don’t know me.
Complex Moral Junctures give rise to the possibility of Simple Moral Mistakes. You see that you’ve done it wrong. God sees that you’ve done it wrong.
And this is a big problem.
Because when you’ve done something totally wrong in organising the parts of yourself, the moral calculation on everything can change. Anything could be optimal. Death could be optimal.
Because you know very little about the moral landscape you’re in, then, and everybody else knows even less. In an important sense, you’re on your own.
And it’s particularly hard, because nobody else cares about it as much as you do. You can’t take people’s advice, because they simply don’t care about it as much, because they’re not you. It’s a fundamental reality of society, drummed into us from a young age, that we’re all responsible for ourselves. Perhaps, if they were in your situation, if they had all the information, they wouldn't take their own advice. They’d submit to the OCD.
Getting the kind of advice I was looking for in this situation would amount to saying the unsayable. It’s impossible to transmit precisely to someone else all the information and experiences and knowledge that’s in my head. We’re all on our own, really, but I was particularly on my own.
Uncertainty
In situations of uncertainty, it normally makes sense to rely on heuristics. But in situations of extreme, extreme uncertainty of the kind presented to me - where the question relates to you yourself, and you yourself are strange - it could well be best to take radically unusual action. It could be best for you to keep that action to yourself, to keep it between you and God. For nobody can truly understand the situation you’re in, and the altruistic and moral and spiritual implications of it.
What’s the strangest thing you can do in any given situation? I would argue, it’s to act without a plan, without coherence. To randomly do one thing, and then the other. Who’s to say that this is morally wrong, for someone who’s made a complex moral mistake? It’s likely to mess up their life, and perhaps God wants that for them, perhaps that’s what they need to do to avoid the worst punishments in the after-life. Perhaps our minds are being monitored, and I ought to make random, jerky movements rather than clean, planned ones. Perhaps that’s the best thing for me to do.
This is the kind of thing my OCD was telling me.
Telling other people about the situation is a problem, because it may shift you to a state of mind in which you feel better, and in which you get out of the problem. And who’s to say it’s good to get out of the problem? It’s a situation of extreme uncertainty, after all. Other people are allowed heuristics, but that’s because they’re not in your situation.
But this is an obsessive-compulsive narrative. It’s an overvalued idea. And it’s probably not a rational path for anyone to go down, because the human mind can’t deal with this type of situation. We’re here to make a difference to what we can make a difference to, given our limitations and our desire to be well. The idea of making the correct game-theoretic move at each juncture is almost impossible.
I’ve made my peace with the idea that I’m probably more wrong than everyone else. That I’ve probably made mistakes of a magnitude that nobody else has ever made. I have to make my peace with that.
And the search for meaning in this post-mistake world has taken me to new places. To consider new things. And to let go a bit more.
