1 The Theoretical Underpinnings of Solve Analysis

Reality is subjective. Morality is doubly so.

What I mean by this is that any chain of inquiry— any discussion which asks “why?” of something— will never find an answer satisfying enough that it cannot be met with yet another “why?” Solve, the alchemical process of dissolution, the logical process which takes things apart, can be made to go on forever.

Physical reality can serve as a temporary barrier to this process of destructive inquiry; facts which exist out there in the world, and which are available for direct reference, can be used to create temporary consensus on what it is we’re talking about. If I say I think that the sky is blue, and you say you think that it is yellow, then unless one of us is lying, our disagreement is easy enough to resolve. Solipsism— statements such as “what is color, really?”— can be straightforwardly rejected by examining what it is we’re trying to achieve through our conversation. If we are discussing the color of the sky because we are painting a picture, and we want our audience to recognize the scene as taking place beneath the same sky as the one they live under, then the fact that the sky is apparently blue is a strong argument for painting the sky blue by our own logic. What must be understood, in such cases, is that we haven’t determined that the sky actually is blue; we’ve determined that the sky is blue enough for our purposes.

This quickly becomes a problem when we’re facing questions which are too complicated for us to answer by direct observation. Is North Dakota going to vote Republican in the next election? Polling institutions will spend a lot of time and money convincing people that they have enough data to determine the answer to this question— statistical models and so forth. However, with the current state of political analysis, these predictions are rarely firm enough to hang your hat on.

Human behavior, our focus in this book, is the domain of life which provides us with the least empirical evidence. Pound for pound, human beings are the most complicated things in the universe, and, as such, performing “complete solve” on them— performing solve which is always “good enough for our purposes”— is impossible.

The current in-vogue answer to this conundrum, one which I have a lot of problems with, is simply to throw more data at it. You’ve probably encountered this sort of thing in “social sciences”— sociology, experimental psychology, etc. They’ll perform statistical analysis on 100 people, or 1000 people, or 10 million people, and claim mathematical confidence in some outcome or another. Generally, this is no better than sleight-of-hand. For all their claims to scientific objectivity, individual subjectivity enters into the process at every level. Experimenters control who makes up the samples, what the experiment is designed to ask, what methodology is employed to control for confounding variables; at every stage, it is not only possible that information might be made up to fill in the gaps in the data, it is necessary that this is done.

Consider, for example, the classic introvert/extrovert dichotomy. A psychologist might perform some ham-fisted experiment, something very filmic involving hidden cameras and strangers asking whether you’ve “heard the good news about the Lord”, to determine “how self-described introverts recharge after stressful conversations”. Meanwhile, in Jahazpur India, people today live as their ancestors have for hundreds of years, never spending an hour of their lives alone, and they’re content with it; in Jahazpur, introverts don’t exist. The experimenter has brought an entire frame of reference to bear on the question they’ve been asking, and they’ve filtered every piece of data they’ve got through it.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It’s just not scientifically objective— not even slightly. It’s nothing at all like taking a glance out the window to see what color the sky is. In my opinion, where human behavior is concerned, you’d be better off not bothering with the “data” at all; the smoke and mirrors involved in acquiring it can only serve to weaken your argument to anyone who examines your work rigorously, rather  than simply glancing down to check that something “scientific looking” is there. (Read up on the “replication crisis” if you want to know more about all this.)

The alternative to this approach— the better method to answering questions about human behavior— is something which I believe reached  its purest form in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, in his elaboration of the Will to Power. What the Will to Power is, within Nietzsche’s work, is a base notation. It is a fundamental tendency to which all things in the universe reduce. But what does that mean?

Well— for all that it’s perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of Nietzsche’s work— it’s actually rather straightforward. Remember up above, where I said that the process of solve reduction can proceed forever? That you can ask “Why?” of any thing that exists, and, if it returns an answer, can ask “Why?” of that? Well, a base notation like the Will to Power solves this problem elegantly and straightforwardly; it simply states, explicitly: “This is where we stop asking questions.”

What this does is takes a diverse array of claims— “Here’s why people do X”, “If X, people will do Y”— and connects them all into a single chain of reasoning. If the base notation is broad enough, any particular element of the argument can be questioned, through solve, by asking “why is this the case?”; eventually, you will reach the base notation, and there, inquiry can cease.

In Nietzsche’s case, everything is assigned worth on the basis of whether it increases or decreases humanity’s Will to Power. Of course, Nietzsche was (like us) writing about morality, on what we should do, and so what he really wanted to examine in these terms were systems of morality, meaning, systemic approaches to telling people what they should do. Christianity was evil, because it weakened the Will to Power; conflict was good, because it strengthened the Will to Power; and, ultimately, Truth itself— the desire to know the difference between what actually exists and what actually does not— is the greatest enemy the Will to Power could ever face.

What’s brilliant about this system is that it separates the argument being constructed from the evidence used to construct it. It makes an argument— in this case of this book, a framework— portable. You can take such an argument, set it up in your own head, and plug your own evidence into it. Rather than the author saying, “You should do XYZ, and I can prove it”, they say “You should do XYZ, if you agree with me about W”.

What’s even better, it isn’t necessary that the reader (you) even actually believe W in order to understand the argument. As a reader, you can accept the premises of the argument “provisionally”, that is to say, you can bear them in mind as you look at the world around you, and decide whether they fit the evidence you see, rather than being forced to examine whether provided evidence looks sound. My Framework becomes a tool for you to test out, rather than a conclusion to commit to.

Of course, as a set of base notation, the Will to Power is sorely lacking; I mean, for one thing, it drove Friedrich Nietzsche insane. But for another, it is extremely unipolar. Whole swathes of existence, things which operated according to their own logic and which diminish the will to power in service to some other impulse, are dismissed out of hand— dismissed as “dangerous” and “destructive”, and, ultimately, deserving of repression. This is, ultimately, the flaw in the Will to Power as the basis of a worldview; it upheld Nietszche’s overwhelming desire for truth and philosophical rigor within certain boundaries, upward of the base notation; but below the base notation, below the barrier which Nietzsche refused to cross, lay a vast space within which repugnant conclusions could dwell. By taking the Will to Power, his tool, and turning it into a personal commitment, Nietzsche rendered himself incapable of the introspection which would have led him away from these repugnant conclusions, and which would have allowed him to accept himself. He left himself no choice but to stay dysfunctional forever— to go mad.

This next section of the book is called The Theoretical Underpinnings of Solve Analysis, because it explains my base notation for the Framework, and the ways in which the ramifications of this base notation affect the course of human lives, and give rise to pathology. This section of the book might seem daunting (either overly philosophical, or entirely up its own ass, depending on how charitable you’re inclined to be). However, it’s very important that you read it, even if you don’t take the time to fully understand it, because of what it really is we’re trying to do here; the point of the first half of this book is to teach you to perform solve on yourself and others.

If you skip this section and jump straight to the next part, wherein I list the dispositions and you get to diagnose yourself, you may have learned what the Framework has to say, but you won’t learn how to use it. The Framework isn’t a collection of data for you to “take into account” as you go about your life, it isn’t the product of a series of academic studies and statistical witchcraft. It’s a way of looking at the world. I’m not  going to tell you a series of facts, tell you that they’re true, and tell you that therefore you should do what I tell you to; I’m going to present you with a system for analyzing human behavior, a framework, and once you understand it, you can decide whether or not you agree with it by using it on the best data available to you— the data you gather yourself.

So, as you read, remember this: the Framework is a system of thought, not a set of empirical claims. Learn how it works before you decide whether you agree or disagree with it. Ultimately, you shouldn’t make up your mind one way or the other until you’ve had a chance to try it out for yourself