10 Idiot Spackle

Idiot spackle is the most recent addition to the Framework’s menu of core theory, and it’s not quite ready to be pulled from the oven. However, I’m including it here with the initial publication of the Framework Blogbook, because it has potential as a tool for reconciling the Framework with a handful of difficulties which emerge on the margins of modern society, and I want it to be available for discussion and comment from the start.

Essentially, idiot spackle holds that if there’s a group of people engaging in some behavior which defies our basic intuitions about Eros and Thanatos, or the pathological dispositions of the individuals involved, there is a chance that these unintuitive actions represent a process of thought that simply didn’t conclude, rather than a process which has defied our priors.

Consequently, the “idiot” part of “idiot spackle” refers to literal unintelligence, narrowly formulated as “the speed at which a person’s thoughts reach their conclusion”. The “spackle” part is an admittedly self-effacing reference to the ways in which this idiocy can be smeared over the cracks in our existing Framework, explaining outcomes that otherwise might contradict its principles in some way.

The most important thing to keep in mind about idiot spackle is that it can only be used very, very narrowly. When idiot spackle is invoked, I am making a literal assertion that the people involved in a given situation are uniformly, actually idiots. They think slowly, and are forced to the point of making a decision before they have had a chance to understand its consequences; the result is counterintuitive behavior.

Since this is still a speculative element of the Framework, I’ll only provide one example of a place where I’m tinkering with it: mass shooters.

Specifically, I had a question that I wanted to answer about mass shooters, using solve, which the Framework had no clear provisions for: Why don’t mass shooters care about what they write in their manifestos?

This train of thought was spurred by the Buffalo shooter  a few years back. He wrote a long-winded and, frankly, cliched, manifesto about the fact that black people were destroying the United States, and explicitly called for their deaths; then, when he actually set out on his murder spree, one of his first victims was a white woman. This aligned with a broader pattern I had noticed— not only that mass shooters didn’t adhere to the letters of their manifestos, but also that mass shooters universally assert that they care deeply about political issues, but don’t take any political actions to address them. By this I don’t mean that they don’t vote or picket or what have you— obviously, their real drive is towards notoriety and death, not politics; but why don’t they pursue targeted assassinations? If they’re willing to throw their lives away in order to get the approval of some group of people, in pursuit of martyrdom, why don’t they at least attempt to optimize their efforts towards it?

My tentative train of thought, as I’m sure you can guess, is idiot spackle. I believe that it’s likely that mass shooters are literally dumb, and that the misalignment of their stated goals and their actual means isn’t the result of a more elaborate “spooky action” (like some process of rationalization that leads them to lie about their motives), but is instead the product of their inability to analyze the consequences of their own actions by the time they’ve taken them.

I like this theory because it goes some way towards accounting for the other baffling element of mass shooting: the behavior seems to spread mimetically. Almost all mass shooters idolize other mass shooters of the past, and, as a result, it seems as though the behavior spreads in response to media attention on the subject. Now, the Framework takes a dim view of memetics— it holds that people have a firm idea of their own means and ends, and if they fail to correctly align their means and ends, they’re going to do so on the basis of a very deeply ingrained tendency, something at the core of their psyche; not just because a voice on the television told them it would make them famous.

Idiot spackle provides a clean solution to this problem, because a slow speed of thought would approximate the effects of mimesis without adopting it as a general principle of human interaction. Essentially, very dumb people generally find themselves in a position where they are forced to act before they’ve thought things through, and will therefore take an action without having calculated its relationship to their goals. Such people might very well tend to rely on cues they’ve taken from other people, especially authority figures (eg, the news). If a person is sufficiently full of hate, and wants to be hated by society in turn— to be notorious— it’s easy to see how they might catch on to the fact that mass shooters are the most reviled figures in modern society, without being able to understand (due to a lack of time) why they are so hated; namely, that a mass-shooting is always the least effective means of pursuing anything a person might actually desire, that they are a fundamentally inhuman waste of things we value.

At any rate, I haven’t taken idiot spackle much further than this first case-study; I’ve got a few more case-studies in mind, but I won’t share them until I’ve got a better working theory of how idiocy functions. This will, consequently, involve developing a theory regarding what thought is in the first place, which is something I’ve been working on for quite awhile.

However, a benefit of this excursion is that it gives you an opportunity to see exactly what solve entails. I start with a question, something which I find unintuitive or which challenges my prior conceptions, and I try to get to the bottom of how it functions. The process moves fundamentally from the outside in— I start with something out in the world, and attempt to find an explanation for it; I distill that explanation down to a fundamental principle, and I then apply that principle to another situation where it might be active. If the characteristics of that situation don’t contradict the principle, I grow more confident in it, and continue applying it to more and more situations until I’ve developed a strong opinion on whether or not the principle is true.

This is fundamentally what I’d like you to be doing with the solve portion of the Framework; you can skip the “finding something unintuitive” part, as the unintuitive things in your case are the principles of the Framework. But in testing these principles, you should apply the same methodology— look at individual cases out in the world (generally, the behavior of people you know), and then see if each case aligns with the principle or not. No one case will be able to prove or falsify any given principle; it takes the weight of many investigations, most of them conducted subconsciously, for you to achieve confidence one way or the other. At the end of this process, you will have developed a strong opinion on the veracity of the Framework, for better or worse— without recourse to the bunk kinds of “evidence” that a more academic psychological work would be inclined to employ.

At any rate, with this brief aside, we’ve completed our chapters on the practical tools of DIY solve. Hopefully, in the process, you’ve picked up a few tools that will help you along  your quest for self-understanding. If you haven’t, don’t panic— we’re not done with solve yet! In the next section of the Framework, Historical Perspectives Through the Lens of Solve, we’ll be using the tools we’ve just acquired to investigate a range of big-picture topics about our modern world. See you there!