Даже относительно устойчивые режимы, а российский политический режим существует уже более двух десятилетий, не могут существовать без идеологии, ибо это тот язык, на котором они формулируют свои пожелания, предписания и табу, обращенные к населению. Режим без идеологии невозможен так же, как без полиции или финансовой системы. Другой вопрос, в какой мере она сама является устойчивой, последовательной и артикулированной и каков ее реальный мобилизационный потенциал?

Разумеется, ни разработанной политической философии, ни продуманной программы, ни объединительной идеи религиозного типа в распоряжении сегодняшней российской власти нет, но такие мощные инструменты — вообще редкость в идеологическом арсенале новейших тираний. Бóльшая их часть легко обходится базовым набором квазиконсенсусных символов и метафор, которые позволяют власти доходчиво разъяснять подданным, что от них ожидается, по каким признакам следует отличать своих от чужих и почему надо смириться с временными неудобствами жизни и неукоснительно поддерживать начальство. Собственно, в этом и состоит назначение государственной идеологии, которая, чтобы оказаться успешной, должна опираться на набор полуосознанных политических мифов, разделяемых большинством. На протяжении последних двадцати лет путинский режим вполне квалифицированно и умело предъявил urbi et orbi несколько таких сменяющих друг друга наборов.

Сильное государство и цивилизованный быт

Идеологическую матрицу первых лет правления Путина можно определить как «сильное государство и цивилизованный быт». По умолчанию декларировалась преемственность по отношению к базовым идеологемам 1990-х, таким как «войти в цивилизованный мир» и «стать нормальной страной», подчеркнутая заявленной целью «догнать Португалию». Вместе с тем считалось, что ельцинский режим не мог достичь этих целей из-за слабости центральной власти, неспособной справиться ни с боярской фрондой, ни с чеченским терроризмом, поэтому мирный быт сограждан требовалось дополнить «вертикалью власти», «диктатурой закона» и т. п. В новогоднем обращении, переданном примерно через двенадцать часов после того, как Путин приступил к исполнению обязанностей президента, мы увидели его стоящим с непокрытой головой у кремлевской стены. Пока страна мирно выпивала, президент на посту охранял ее покой. Поздравив страну с праздником, Путин отправился в Чечню.

Надо сказать, что такая идеологическая конструкция была поддержана как большинством, начавшим ностальгировать по советским временам, которые стали издалека выглядеть сытыми и спокойными, так и стремительно европеизировавшимися городскими элитами. Разрушила этот консенсус не столько даже остановка экономического роста, сколько невозможность гарантировать несменяемость власти, которая была для руководства страны абсолютным приоритетом. Лозунг «суверенной демократии», призванный обосновать такую несменяемость, был выдвинут еще до начала экономического кризиса.

Скрепы и ценности

После Болотных протестов 2011–2012 годов модернизационные элементы официальной идеологии были отброшены, а на их место пришли «скрепы» и «традиционные ценности», призванные обеспечить «стабильность», служившую обозначением все той же несменяемости власти. Помимо самоценной скрепы «сильной власти», этих «традиционных ценностей», собственно говоря, было две — культ Победы, превратившийся в официальную религию, и агрессивная гомофобия, начисто чуждая русской культуре и заимствованная из идейного арсенала американских правых радикалов. «Покорение Крыма», санкции и контрсанкции окончательно оформили идеологическую модель, в которой население страны делилось на «подавляющее большинство» и подлежащее подавлению «меньшинство», а былой «креативный класс» был переименован в «пармезанщиков» и «хамонщиков», то есть в потенциальных предателей.

Модель эта была в основе своей изоляционистской и исходила из смутных представлений об «особом пути» России, разделявшихся, если верить данным «Левада-центра», большинством населения. Идея «особого пути» пришла на смену стремлению стать «нормальной» страной и носила отчетливо антизападный характер. Вероятно, поэтому многие сегодняшние наблюдатели подчеркивают изоляционистский характер той идеологической конструкции, которая оформилась после начала войны, связывая ее с идейным наследием славянофилов. Между тем такая интерпретация выглядит как минимум неполной, а скорее всего и просто неверна.

Время реванша: мессианский извод

Разумеется, нынешний извод официальной идеологии наследует предыдущему и в пропаганде «традиционных ценностей», и в поклонении Победе. Однако, если прежде казалось, что помешательство на былом величии имеет чисто реставрационный характер и выражает лишь неопределенную ностальгию то ли по СССР, то ли по Российской империи, то теперь обнаружился его национально-мессианский аспект. Путинская Россия претендует на место во главе коалиции автократий, противостоящих гегемонии Запада и намеревающихся привести его к всемирно-историческому поражению.

Одной из устойчивых российских политических мифологем является превращение поражения в победу. Все войны, вошедшие в базовый нарратив русской истории, начинались с тяжелых неудач, в конце концов оборачивавшихся триумфальной, хотя и давшейся неимоверными жертвами победой. За битвой на Калке следует покорение Казани, за нарвским разгромом — Полтава, за сожжением Москвы — взятие Парижа. «Мы долго молча отступали», — писал Лермонтов в стихотворении «Бородино», которое полтора столетия учили наизусть русские школьники. История Великой Отечественной войны от поражений 1941 года до падения Берлина как бы кристаллизует эту мифологию.

На этот раз в качестве точки отсчета был выбран распад СССР — «величайшая геополитическая катастрофа ХХ века» — и последовавшие за ней «лихие 1990-е», осмысленные как повторение Смутного времени. Теперь в соответствии с логикой избранного сюжета для России настает время реванша. Стоит вспомнить, что ультиматум, выдвинутый Западу в 2021 году, включал в себя не только условия, непосредственно связанные с Украиной, но и общее требование де-факто отменить расширение НАТО — «забирать манатки», как выразился в те месяцы крупный российский чиновник.

Понятно, что в нынешнем альянсе автократий Россия не может по своему экономическому значению конкурировать с Китаем, но эта слабость должна быть компенсирована исторически подтвержденными мощью русского оружия и мужеством русского солдата. По-видимому, состоявшийся в преддверии бомбардировок Киева олимпийский визит Путина в Китай призван был зафиксировать такое распределение ролей.

Национальное преображение: вождь и народное тело

Такое национальное преображение подразумевает не просто сильного лидера, образ которого официальная пропаганда вполне успешно создавала Путину с первого дня его президентства, но вождя, воплощающего в себе протяженность и неделимость народной истории. По-видимому, придание набору пресловутых «традиционных ценностей» конституционного статуса, наспех осуществленное поправками 2020 года, не было только камуфляжем для оформления пожизненного президентства, как это принято полагать, но должно было установить связь между вождем и народом, естественно не тем, который реально жил в России к концу 2010-х годов, но — с мистическим народным телом, существовавшим на всем протяжении тысячелетней российской истории.

В таком народе уже нет места тем, кто сомневается в мудрости вождя и его праве вести страну к новым жертвам и новым победам. Таких отщепенцев, как говорили в советские времена, или извергов, как выражались в XIX веке, уже недостаточно было ограничивать в правах и оплевывать, их нужно было в буквальном смысле «отщепить» от народного тела и «извергнуть» из него.

Однако, если вождь для новой идеологической конструкции был уже готов и предъявлен стране на протяжении двух десятилетий, настоящий народ для него еще предстояло создать. И самым главным шагом на этом пути было объявлено восстановление его исторического единства, подорванного Лениным, создавшим на территории Украины и Белоруссии квазигосударственные образования, и разрушенного Горбачевым и Ельциным, санкционировавшими их отделение. В этом смысле целью войны, начавшейся 24 февраля, было не возрождение империи, а объединение метрополии. Соответственно, те граждане этих стран, которые были убеждены в том, что они принадлежат к отдельным народам, имеющим право на собственную независимую государственность, оказывались не сепаратистами, подобными чеченским инсургентам 1990-х годов, но предателями — иноагентами, отщепенцами и извергами одновременно.

В русских сказках убитых богатырей сначала поливали «мертвой водой», чтобы отрубленные части их тела могли срастись, и только после этого «живой водой», способной вернуть их к жизни. Разрубленное коварным и жестоким Западом тело русского народа надо было сначала полить мертвой водой войны.

Крестовый поход и колесо обозрения

Нет смысла указывать на логические нестыковки такой конструкции или ее противоречия историческим фактам. Гораздо важнее — несоответствие ее содержания и ее статуса. По сути, это вполне тоталитарная идеология, требующая к себе религиозного отношения. Между тем в современной России, в отличие от СССР или Германии 1930-х годов, Китая 1960-х или Ирана 1970-х, нет ни демографических, ни экономических, ни социальных предпосылок для успешного тоталитаризма.

Эти идеологические построения вполне соответствуют представлениям, ожиданиям и чаяниям значительной части населения, готовой их принять и усвоить, но вряд ли по-настоящему уверовать в них и приносить ради них жертвы. Похоже, и сама власть сознает эту проблему и потому запрещает называть войну войной, не спешит подкрепить мобилизационный пафос пропаганды практической мобилизацией или перейти от выборочных репрессий к массовым. Уникальность сегодняшней ситуации — в стремлении Кремля сочетать риторику и эмблематику крестового похода с попытками убедить обывателя, что обычная жизнь продолжается. В день наступления украинской армии в Харьковской области президент Путин открывал в Москве колесо обозрения.

Неудивительно, что в российском политическом обиходе все слышнее голос, как кажется, немногочисленной, но агрессивной группы радикалов, которых такой стеснительный тоталитаризм не устраивает и которые предлагают идти до конца.

На сегодняшний день идеологический аппарат власти оказался перед трудноразрешимой дилеммой. Даже при относительно благополучном для него исходе военных действий, который выглядит все более сомнительным, возвращение к идеологии мирного времени будет означать отказ от концепции апокалиптической битвы с западной цивилизацией, а следовательно — обесценивание войны и принесенных жертв. Напротив того, наращивание риторики чрезвычайного положения не только может спровоцировать колоссальное социальное напряжение, но и неизбежно приведет к поиску врагов и предателей на самых верхних этажах государственной власти — угроза, которую сами обитатели этих этажей вполне ясно осознают.

Российскому правящему режиму достаточно долго удавалось эффективно обновлять свои идеологические модели и адаптировать их к изменявшейся политической ситуации. На сегодняшний день потенциал такой адаптивности близок к исчерпанию. 

Колесо обозрения, торжественно открытое президентом, на следующий день сломалось.

There once was a guy who was very, very broke. To be clear, he wasn’t the brokest guy you’ve ever heard of. There were poorer people (he knew some, even) but he did spend a long, long time trying to raise a family on not a lot of money; think “a family of four on 35k or less in a major metropolitan area” destitute.

After a lot of lost sleep due to stress and a lot of lost time spent on optimizing resumes nobody ever read, he wrote an article about being poor, meant to let people outside the poor-people-bubble in on what it looked like from the inside. This was the beginning of the shift of the man’s luck; that article went pretty viral and suddenly people were paying attention to his writing.

Shortly after that, he got a pretty good job offer, cried in his car in the parking lot of his terrible cold-call sales job, and then suddenly wasn’t poor anymore.

I know it’s hard to tell, but: Surprise! It was me. That guy was me.

At that time I wasn’t sure if the whole “people reading the things I wrote” thing would keep up, but it seemed to me that if it did I’d eventually have to write an article that did the exact same thing in the other direction - basically to explain what it’s like to have amounts of money that, while not silly-high, aren’t depressingly low either. It’s now been a year and I have some of that knowledge, so I can finally make good on that thought.

You’d think that the ability to do this would be universal among people who haven’t been poor at all since they have more time at decent pay-rates than anyone else, but you’d be at least partially wrong. They know what it’s like to have money, but it’s all very usual; the stuff about it that’s weird or different skids off of their awareness without biting like a dull file on hardened steel. It’s not their fault - it’s just normal.

When I wrote the other article, I made a statement that was fairly easy to believe: that I wasn’t trying to make my target audience feel bad. That was true, and I think it was mostly accepted at face value. Here I’d like to try and assure my new target audience (the currently unwell-to-do) of something else - I’m not gloating. I get it. It sucks. But there were things I wanted to know when I was broke that nobody told me, and I’m in a position to tell them. I’m hoping it helps.

For my non-poor readers: feel free to listen in. I’m guessing everything still makes sense even if you’ve never known severe broke-ness, and I’m hoping it gives you the kind of overhearing-a-conversation context that you wouldn’t get from other methods.

There’s something that people with money say that doesn’t make sense: that regardless of how much money you have, you run out of it just as soon. When they say this, it’s usually in response to “If I can get to salary X, at least I don’t have to worry about paying Y” type statements. It’s almost always delivered as a wry, knowing observation with distinct “was I ever so young?” overtones.

Sometimes the statement is given in an inverted form, something like this: “Wait, how do you even approach survival with X when I struggle on X + $40,000?”. If the rich-ish speaker is mystified, the poor audience is even more so: if a person can survive on $30k, how are they finding similar difficulty at greater than 200% that income?

I used to think that this was simply a matter of different conceptions of the “broke” concept - essentially that these were people with budgets, and they were just feeling the pinch of being at the end of their allocated cash for the month once they had made their savings contributions and bought gold bullion to build a fence with.

Then I got to the first time I really didn’t have money left over to easily pay a bill even with my amplified income, got confused, paid closer attention, and got some details on what was happening. It’s insidious and sneaky, but there’s reasons why it happens.

The first things to keep in mind are health insurance and rich-people taxes (rich people pay net taxes. It turns out that’s how roads come to be). If you are broke enough (and have a family) the state covers this for you; when you hit a certain income level, they stop. From there, slightly higher taxes come in, as well as slightly reduced pseudo-welfare tax benefits. These two things alone might be a difference of $1000 or so a month.

But even if those account for a grand, that still leaves ~$2500 or so unaccounted for. Where’s it going? For me, it turned out that there was an awful lot of stuff we weren’t buying specifically because we couldn’t. Once that restriction came off, it turned out a lot of our thrift wasn’t as much of a character trait as we thought.

Food is huge here. When we were broke, there were constant economic sacrifices in terms of what we bought to eat. We bought more ramen and beans. We restocked less often, and with more restrictions on individual shopping trips. We’d get more rice, and less cheese (an enormous amount of money is spent on cheese once one has the option). We watched for sales pretty closely.

Once you have money, the default shifts immediately to “just get what you need”, with a healthy side of “and also what you want, if it’s reasonable”. When poor, I once spent about a week contemplating the impact of buying a jar of protein powder before pulling the trigger on this ostentatious luxury item. With greater-than-survival level money, you don’t do this; you just buy it.

This is a creeping effect that gets larger, too. Once-a-month-or-less pizza order timings creep up to weekly, and you buy expensive-but-easy convenience food. Fast food becomes a thing more often as you take advantage of that utility to cover busy days more easily. At some point, you look down at your receipts and your food bill has doubled.

A person at 36k a year gets $3000 a month compared to 80k’s $6700. That’s not a small gap, but a doubled food bill and insurance alone have eaten over $1000 of it.

Now imagine that same effect but with everything. You buy shoes more often. You spend a couple hundred dollars a month on meds you needed but that state insurance wouldn’t cover. You wash the car when it’s dirty. You replace things when they break and maintain things the way they are supposed to be maintained. When you move, you finally get a place that has enough space for everyone.

You go to social events you might otherwise have skipped, and you accept invitations to go on trips to visit family you otherwise couldn’t have come near affording. You stop being the only person who doesn’t bring a decent gift to your friend’s kid’s birthday party.

It’s all great, but you look down at the end of the month and find you’ve spent all your money, or at least enough of it that you feel strapped. It went just as fast. You start telling poor people that you and them are the same.

Now, here’s the disconnect: this all happens without you making anything that seems like an unreasonable purchase. It’s not all iPhones and bomber jackets; every discrete purchase was something you needed or at least something reasonable and useful to buy. If you have always lived your life this way and someone asks you where you are wasting all the money, you can honestly answer that you don’t think you wasted much of it - you just bought the things people buy to sustain their lives.

What you don’t see unless you stop to specifically examine your life relative to the lives of others is the effect of that. Yes, the money is all spent, but your kids are better clothed and have more school supplies. You are better fed and better housed. You haven’t hurt yourself fixing a mostly-dead washing machine for the tenth time this year, and your auto insurance hasn’t lapsed a single time.

If you’ve always had money, this feels normal. Hell, it feels normal even if you’ve only had the money a little while. Consider that the average person has never done an oil change themselves, much less fixed a car problem with their own hands. I was watching a show the other day where someone knew how to change a tire and everyone else was amazed. These are real people that exist.

Consider that most with money use Craigslist rarely and for big purchases, if at all. They aren’t being assholes; they just can’t imagine the thousands of small forced economies, or how life is when you have to make them.

A close friend and I both tell the same identical and unbelievable story:

The other day, something was going wrong with one of my tires, and the other three weren’t that far from failing in the same way. I went to the tire store and bought four new tires for it. They put them on, and I went home. It wasn’t a big deal.

If this story seems boring to you, it’s because you are like most people: something like the $500-1000 spent in this story is an inconvenience. It might even be a major inconvenience that keeps you from doing something else you wanted to do with the money. But you had the money in the bank to pay for the tires, so it wasn’t a catastrophe.

My friend and I both told each other this identical story at different times like it was the weirdest thing that ever happened. I didn’t go to a shady used tire store in south Phoenix. All the tires I bought matched. My credit was not checked. I didn’t have to get a ride to work for days/weeks until I got paid and spent future-rent-money on the problem. The problem just went away.

The other day my kid revealed he had been nursing a middle ear infection for a while. He was only just now telling us because he literally couldn’t sleep over the pain; he would have kept it quiet forever to stay consistent with his tough-kid mindset and to avoid doctors if it were possible to survive without doing so. (My wife informs me, as I write this, that he didn’t even tell us - she just heard him crying in his room. I swear we aren’t bad parents, he just doesn’t like to complain).

But now he was letting us know about it at 3 am. I got out of bed, drove him to urgent care, picked up some drugs and painkillers, and it was handled.

I didn’t have to deal with a single government employee; I didn’t have to wait a month. I didn’t have to find an aquarium supply store that sold pet amoxicillin. I didn’t have to explain to anyone that the smaller of my two children couldn’t go to a thing because we were in a days-to-weeks-long process of getting him treatment for a problem. I just showed up, handed someone a card that indicated I had a high-paying job, and the issue evaporated.

Hell, in that tire story above me and my wife went to Wendy’s while we waited. Can you imagine having enough loose cash that you can go to a slightly-higher-than-minimum priced fast food restaurant on the same damn day as a major financial event? We sat around and ate fries, mystified; we had become as Midas, surrounded by our piles of gold, Dave Thomas grinning down at us from heaven surrounded by sanctified orphans.

Again, all these things sucked. We didn’t want to do them. they were pains in the ass. But what they weren’t were major events spanning days or weeks of inconvenience. If you have money, most of your problems just go away. They take money with them, but they leave.

Hands down, this has been the biggest difference for us. It’s hard to explain the difference in stress; it’s not like you don’t have problems. You do. It’s not like those occurrences don’t add tension to your life; they do. But at the end of the day, it’s like the difference between going to Dracula’s house empty-handed as opposed to arriving armed with a box of holy water and stakes.

Note that for everyone who hasn’t been poor, this is normal. This isn’t an unjustified belief, either. The US lifestyle is designed around a certain income level; everything is priced with that level of wealth in mind. When they go buy tires or medicine, they don’t even notice; it’s just how things are supposed to be.

Everything past this point is luxury. It’s nice, but it’s not necessary and it doesn’t make that much of a deal; we could live without our weighted blanket and my wife could get by with off-brand Walmart running shoes. But there’s a minimum cost for a decent, low-effort lifestyle that avoids catastrophes, and a world of difference between meeting it and the myriad things you do to cope if you fail to.

It’s probably time for me to clarify that I’m in no way suggesting that I’m worse off now than I was when I was broke. Louis CK once said this:

I was on a plane once, and I flew first class because I had a thing… I fly first class. Who cares? That’s the way it is. I’m not like you. I’m not. I’m not. All the things you do, I do a better version of all those things.

And humor aside that’s true here too. I’m not saying I have it terrible; the problems of the rich-ish are smaller, nicer problems on average. But at the same time, that’s something I can lose.

The wife and I have always very much wanted to buy a nice house. During this period of affluence, we were actually able to do that somehow. It’s not a mansion, but we like it a lot and it’s been a much better life since we did it. But our mortgage is about $700 higher than our rent was, and there’s other related expenses. It’s something we wanted and not something we think was super unreasonable, but it costs.

We are now used to having insurance. I know what my blood pressure is, and why people wince when they read it. We are both on medications that we wouldn’t literally die without, but which improve some aspects of our lives a great deal.

Both our cars are in good repair. Our insurance is paid up. Our washer and dryer work well. As CK said above, we have everything you have, but a little better. We also have some things you don’t have but want.

We are slightly terrified at all times of losing these things.

Don’t get us wrong; we know we’d survive. But I understand what you are going through at low-pay levels; I really do. At this point going back to the same kind of troubles I know you have, especially knowing the difference, would be something we’d survive at the same time as being awful.

A month or so back, things at my work (and the tech world in general) got dicey-looking for a while. I’m not sure there was ever any real risk to my job, but it felt that way for a while; I did the thing where you sit around and go: “Shit. I can’t ask her to go back to that, right? What do I do if this all falls apart?”. Make no mistake; she and the kids paid harder for me not doing great at the old wealth accumulation game than I did. Now they know the difference; what does it mean for them if it all crashes and burns?

Again, I’m not saying this is worse than not being where I’m at. You should punch me if I ever do. But it’s a thing. Having money removes a lot of stress, but not all.

There’s this story you will hear every now and again from parents who have adopted kids from poorer countries. The basic format is that after they get the kids to the states, it’s months and months before they can get them to stop hiding food in their pockets. It takes a while for the kids to realize that the meals are going to keep coming - they don’t have to worry about starving to death.

When you get a good job, someone will ask you how much money you want to dump into your 401k. You will probably say “none” because you are conditioned to believe that trouble is just around the corner and a 401k seems like a great way to tie up money you are going to need once everything crumbles around you for the fourth time that year. If your company matches 401k contributions (it probably does, in this scenario), that’s throwing away free money. But you will at least be tempted to throw that money away because you don’t have any concept of things being fine for extended periods.

If you get a good job after a decade or so of shit jobs, it’s likely something weird happened - it’s a windfall, so to speak, and not something you are going to feel confident you will be able to repeat. Maybe you can and maybe you can’t, but you won’t feel secure.

I sit around waiting for the other shoe to drop for reasons that have nothing to do with reality; it’s a conditioned response. I expect things to get worse. I suspect if I was able to switch jobs three or four times while maintaining the same level of income, it might get better, but I’m not sure. Do you know who is sure? People who worked up to that income in normal, gradual ways.

I did a survey in my discord chat of people at higher income levels asking them how long it would take them to replace their jobs with a new job at a similar income level. The answers were overwhelmingly something like “A couple of months, maybe.”. They know this with a high level of confidence because they’ve worked their way up a ladder, getting confirmation at each level that they were valuable enough to secure that position. They’ve made laterals. They get contacted by headhunters.

All the people around you when you make it are people who have 401k accounts, and who couldn’t imagine not exercising that option. They are people who have accumulated wealth; an awful lot of them have significant savings. They have things like built-up equity in their houses. None of this is wrong to have! It’s good! But their mindset is fundamentally different; they stand on ground they perceive1 to be more stable.

One day I will be like them, sort of. I will go to a car dealership and commit to a payment on a new Honda Odyssey (the can-do van for the connoisseur who knows the difference) without having a heart attack because of what-if-tomorrow-this-is-a-mistake-and-we-all-die style paranoia. I will still have tasted of words-in-red electricity bills, but the gap that persists between my psyche and theirs will get smaller.

But it’s not today.

I can’t stress enough that I’m not gloating. Middle-class-or-better people don’t like to talk about money, something that always confused me when I was broke. Poor people talk about money constantly; since mine was the more embarrassing situation, why should I be the one who was comfortable if they weren’t? I get it now. You realize you are talking to people who have a problem you can’t solve for them. The last thing you want to do is seem like you are rubbing your lack-of-problems in their faces.

I wanted to give you the information I now have, but I also wanted to tell you it can get better. Keep working. Take long shots. Email famous CEOs, explain your skills, and ask them for advice on how to get good jobs despite whatever is holding you back (for some reason, this sometimes makes progress where “can I have a job?” never would).

But keep working at it. And know that I get it; I know how it feels. I’ve been doing OK for a while now. I think we’ve been out of the pit for a year and a half. That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how it is. For folks who are still in there: I love you, I’m around to hear about your problems, and I hope you get out soon.

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The Resident Contrarian is available for freelance writing.

Meta-Note: I’m sorry it’s been so long between articles; for better or worse writing here is something that I do for fun, and sometimes work and family get in the way. In this case, I was spending a lot of time trying to learn SQL; you will be pleased to note I am now able to pad my resume with “Intermediate Database Language Skills” with the best of them.

A few years back, my wife was at a baby shower hosted by a friend by a mutual acquaintance. In a conversation with the hostess, my wife learned they were in a tough financial position - they were always broke, and no amount of budgeting seemed to help them get ahead; they had cut every cost they could and things were just getting worse and worse. She admitted to my wife that she just felt like she was sinking further and further underwater, and didn’t see any way out for her or her family.

Note: The hostess and her husband were both doctors. They had a combined income somewhere upwards of $200,000 a year, and as the conversation developed my wife learned that their problems started and stopped with the hostess not being able to save quite as much as she’d like once the payments on their very nice house and current-year cars were made. At the time she leaned on my wife for emotional support over finances, our family of four’s income was less than $30,000 a year.

You should know the hostess wasn’t mean-spirited in the least, and we liked her then and continue to do so. But she did have a kind of tunnel vision I’ve since noticed is increasingly common: If you came from a family that did pretty well financially, went to college and then immediately started to do pretty well yourself, it’s hard to get any kind of context for what life is like at lower income levels. This isn’t a matter of the relatively-wealthy being dumb or insensitive; it’s just legitimately difficult to get a handle on what it’s like in a life you’ve never lived, and often being legitimately confused as to why anyone would opt to make less money instead of improving their lot with training and education.

In that spirit, I’d like to offer my services as a sort of has-been-poor guide, to fill you in on what it’s like on the other side of the tracks. In this role, I’m qualified in two ways. The first is common - we’ve never done exceptionally well financially. Things have been better in recent years as I’ve finally clawed towards the upper-end of lower-class, but Covid has reminded us how short-lived that kind of qualified success can be. We’ve had to economize in dozens of interesting ways, make hard choices here and there and sometimes/often do entirely without. It hasn’t been easy.

At the same time, I’m mostly happy. I have a wonderful wife who is very satisfying to be near, two kids who are about as custom-fit to my personality as possible, and dozens of friends online and off who would take a bullet for me, and vice versa. This is important because I want you to know I’m not trying to make you feel bad - I know and understand that everyone has a different set of problems, and that I’m not unique in living in an imperfect world. I’m not trying to exaggerate problems for political points or to try to get legislation passed. Take no guilt from this article - It’s informational, not a call to arms.

One of the bigger disconnects I run into in talking to people at or above living wage levels of income is that it’s usually assumed that the quality of things has a pretty linear association to the price. This is true at most price points, from “doing OK” all the way up to “Jeff Bezos” - if you pay a little more, you get a little more. If you pay a little less, you get a little less.

Because this relationship is what you’d expect, you get a lot of reasonable-sounding advice that, while not exactly wrong, fails to capture the nuance of poor-people-price-mechanics very well. According to this randomly selected article, I should really make sure not to spend more than 30% of my income on rent:

While everyone’s circumstances are unique, many experts say it’s best to spend no more than 30% of your monthly gross income on housing-related expenses, including rent and utilities. Under that rule, it’s best to make sure that the amount you spend on rent is well below 30% of your household income. In other words, if you’re making $3,000 a month, it’s a good idea to pay no more than $900 for rent and other housing costs.

The general thinking here is that if I spend more than 30%, I’m making myself vulnerable in all other aspects of my budget; why burden yourself with more than you can handle, when I could take a slightly worse place and be that much closer to financial health? From the perspective of the 50k a year and up crowd, this makes sense - $1250, after all, will rent a reasonable house or apartment in a lot of markets. In metropolitan Phoenix, this might look something like this:

And this is perfectly livable - it’s very small (think ~900 sqft), but otherwise it’s a well-kept place. It’s not exactly Versailles, but you wouldn’t necessarily feel like a monster telling someone to live within their means by renting an apartment here. But what happens when you are dealing with someone making $17.50 an hour? What does 840 a month get you?

I’m not 100% sure this is a converted Motel 6, but I’m not 100% sure it’s not. And while the first apartment I showed you was in a relatively nice, livable part of town this one is in a more gun-fire prone area ominously referred to by locals as “the triangle”. Phoenix’s mostly gravel-and-concrete landscaping style cleans up nice (note the still-wet recently hosed concrete), but make no mistake: this isn’t the kind of apartment complex where hypodermic needles are exclusively owned by diabetics.

That’s the drop-off you experience at the lower price levels - there’s nothing between “This is a tiny but acceptable apartment” and “Slum apartments in stab-ville”.

None of this is to discount the budget advice above completely - this is absolutely the kind of apartment I should be living in right now, if I was making perfect budgetary decisions. But consider that this is a choice I have to make - do I spend 50% more on an apartment and stress my budget to death, or make my wife and kids in a place where I have 5 front doors within 15 feet of ours in the murder-iest part of town? Neither choice is great, but the lack of intermediate choices forces you to do one or the other.

Whichever you choose, a person of less-than-intermediate income has to be prepared to stick with the rental long-term, should things not go well. This is because apartments at both of these levels quite accurately assume that you can’t afford a lawyer - while it’s normal to put down a month or two worth of rent as a security deposit, it’s much less normal to get it back; the apartment complex has no reason to give back thousands of dollars they can simply keep. This means every time you move, you pay something like a third to a month’s wages for the privilege. Since breaking a lease often means you lose your privilege to live anywhere non-hellish, this means if you don’t have cash reserves (more on these later*) at the exact right time of year, you might end up in the same place for another full year whether you like it or not.

Note: It’s been pointed out to me that I completely forgot to talk about cash reserves and how they effect this kind of thing. It’s also been pointed out that these numbers only “make sense” in particular markets - i.e. it’s cheaper or more expensive to live other places, so the exact figures here don’t translate well for everyone. I’ll write a follow up post incorporating some of this kind of feedback soon to make up for it.

I am always consistently shocked by how little people living at a decent-to-great income level fear their cars; it seems like they hardly lie awake at night thinking about their iffy alternator much, if at all. Scott Alexander does a pretty good job of explaining the obverse experience here:

When I first started working with poor patients, I was shocked how many of the problems in their lives were car-related. For well-off people like me, having a car is background noise; you buy or lease it for a reasonable price, then never worry about it again. Poor people can’t afford to buy and don’t always have good enough credit to lease. They tend to get older, sketchier cars that constantly break down. A constant complaint I heard: “My car broke, I can’t afford repairs, and I’m going to get fired if I can’t make it to my job”. Some of them can’t afford insurance and take their chances without it. Others have had various incidents with the police that cost them their license, but they can’t just not show up to work, so they drive anyway and hope they don’t get arrested.

This is actually pretty close to the experience. It’s telling that Scott thinks the problem with a lease comes only from credit issues - a pretty bottom-barrel ford leases for 300-400 a month. For a person who makes 30,000-40000k a year, that’s something like 10-15% of their income, before we talk about insurance; couple that with the fact that you can’t squeak by on liability-only insurance in most leases, and we are already into a prohibitively expensive range.

But there’s other things - liability insurance, as mentioned above, is often your only option that makes sense - if your car costs $2000, paying an extra $50-100 per month for high-deductible doesn’t add up; you are still $1000 out of pocket to cover the deductible in the event you need to use it. But since you can’t afford it in the first place, you don’t think about that; you just start driving insanely carefully at all times and pray any accidents you get in aren’t your fault. One slip-up and you either can’t get to work at all, or you spend a lot more time doing it. Remember: Uber isn’t an option here; the ~$400 a month it would cost would bankrupt you.

You are also more or less forced to learn to do mechanic work. I’m an administrator by trade - I usually work in the kind of jobs that have “assistant” appended to them. One of my greatest prides is typing speed, and when people ask me my hobby I tell them “Excel”. If you were judging me by my interests and natural skillset, you wouldn’t expect me to be able to change my own tires. But over the years necessity has forced me to get pretty decent at car work - I’ve done clutch rebuilds and head gasket jobs and a bunch of other miserable (for me) work that I would have rather avoided. But this was often the only option I had - it was either figuring out how to replace an alternator or do a full brake job over the weekend or lose my ability to get to the grocery store in under an hour. Keep in mind the money saved here is just the labor - parts still have a cost that’s unavoidable.

The practical upshot of this is whenever I drive, it’s very slowly, very carefully, and listening in terror to any small noise the car makes. It’s a constant stress, and it’s limiting; we don’t go on long road trips often, and when we do my joke with my wife is usually something like “Well, if the car breaks down somewhere else, we’ll just start living there”.

It’s reasonable to ask “If cars are so terrible, why not use public transport?”. I live in a city, and this is in fact an option that would solve many of my problems: I wouldn’t have to worry about repairs, my gasoline and insurance bills would disappear and anything that happened to the bus is the city’s problem, not mine. Especially in an emergency public transit would be a godsend and might be the difference between keeping and losing my job.

But there’s other things to consider on this, as well. My commute isn’t short, and isn’t bus-friendly; it would go from about 30 minutes each way to just under 4 hours roundtrip. And when your commute starts and ends in a bad area, which is typical of a low-income family in a low-paying job, this means those four hours a day are spent surrounded by people who range from normal commuters at best to visibly mentally imbalanced and trying to speak to you the whole ride. I understand from talking to friends in “our mass transit is great!” towns that this isn’t the case everywhere but this is something that on average gets worse the poorer you get. I could make the commute shorter by taking a worse job (Maybe - the job market isn’t great right now), but that comes with career-limiting downsides of it’s own.

When I’m trying to explain to my sons how a company decides what to pay someone, it usually goes something like this: A company is looking to pay a person as little as they can and keep them, so a person’s pay is determined by how rare their skills are and how much demand there is for those skills. The value of their work doesn’t factor in as much - An administrative assistant might touch every department in the company every day and facilitate a massive amount of work, but they still don’t get paid much - it’s hard to justify when you could hire and train up someone to do the same thing nearly as well with very little difficulty.

I think this is a fairly accurate way to look at pay, but it applies to other aspects of the job. If you got sick more often than usual this year and used up your legally mandated sick days, would your company fire you for getting sick again, or demand you work sick? If the company decides it needs to cut wages, is your position the cheap-to-hire-for job the company didn’t spend a lot of money and time filling? If you don’t have rare skills, management is aware that they can ask for you to work extra hours, avoid letting you use paid time off and change your list of job duties on a whim - both they and you know that if you won’t do it, they can find somebody who will tomorrow. Not every company is bad in these ways - good people do exist - but every company is aware they could, and that tends to color every aspect of the job whether they intend it to or not.

The worst treatment you tend to get is, perhaps counterintuitively, in jobs that approach living wage despite your low value and replaceability as a worker. These jobs tend towards needing someone who can put in a lot of hours for customer interactions that require a single point of contact; they reward intense focus over long periods of time in unpleasant situations. Another way to say this is that these are high-stress jobs with a lot of mandatory overtime and very fast pacing - they pay a lot because they can’t get people to do them otherwise. Turnover in these jobs is absurd despite the pay - some people can keep up with them but it isn’t typical. In my first (and hopefully last) claims adjuster job, two people had heart attacks in my office in a six month period.

The obvious solution for the worker here would seem to be to train themselves in such a way as to be more valuable, but this is often a bit harder or less plausible than it sounds. Some of this can be personal reasons (if you are barely holding things together, it’s hard to find the time and energy to get a bachelors degree from scratch) or financial (It’s nice to think you could learn a new skill and start a new career, but if you are barely keeping your family fed as it is, you might not actually be able to take the pay cut dropping back to entry level would require.

To give you an example of how this looks, 2020 started with me in my second month at a sustainable job with a salary around 50k, the most I had ever made. When the job was disrupted by Covid, I was the first to go - I had little tenure and no rare specialty absolutely required by the company, so my responsibilities could at least theoretically be divided among the retained employees. I then took one of those high-stress high-intensity jobs in the mortgage industry, made kind of a lot of money (for me, on pace to do about 60k in a year) but eventually had a minor nervous breakdown; the company informed me I couldn’t use my paid time off without a month’s notice to handle it, and that they’d simply let my workload pile up while I was gone, leaving me in a worse place. I managed to switch to another company, but found out once I started that the job duties, pay, and hours were all misrepresented in the interview process - I’m free to leave if I don’t like it, since the job will be easy to fill.

In the meantime, I’ve added a few skills to my resume associated with better jobs and lifestyles, and I’m hopeful things get better. But “just the skill without an associated degree” means this is a slog - I’ve applied for about 100 jobs in the past month, but haven’t had a single response; there’s simply better qualified candidates at the kind of pay I can support my family with, and the kind of extremely junior positions I might have a better shot at would leave us unable to pay bills within a few months.

This isn’t evil on anyone’s part, and you shouldn’t feel bad about it - I’ve made a lot of choices in my life that led to this point and I have a lot of responsibility in terms of where I find myself. But understand that even if you are willing to sacrifice the labor and time it takes to work towards an uncertain goal, there’s still a fair amount of luck involved. And some people are at my level or below it because they simply lack the capability to do better - not everyone can or should learn to code, or would be able to successfully go back to school.

The summary here is that low-paying jobs are often uniquely bad for reasons beyond the pay itself. The people who work them aren’t unwilling to change this, but often they are unable to, either because the means to change their circumstance is outside of their control or because their attempts to do so fail. Some are lazy and unmotivated, but not all.

When someone is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m trying to determine how poor exactly they were, there’s one evergreen question I ask that has never failed to give me a good idea of what kind of situation I’m dealing with. That question is: “How many times have they turned off your water?”.

The reason this question works is because it lets me know whether the person I’m talking to has “felt” broke - I.E. been in a situation where they felt resource strapped for some reason or another - or has “been broke”, actually factually unable to pay for basic services they needed to survive at a minimally decent human level.

A person who feels broke might not have a lot of money, or might not have any liquid dollars in their wallet at all. But just being out of money doesn’t make you broke in the sense that they turn off your water - that takes time. Usually you can be over a month late before the water company actually goes to the trouble of sending someone out to turn off your water. Even if someone feels broke and can’t immediately pay their bills (this is rare for people who feel broke, by the way; they usually have a few hundred dollars they can get at somewhere, some space on a credit card, etc.) this only means they need to cut their spending somewhat the next month and catch up; they might not be King Midas after watching their budget for 30 days, but they won’t turn the tap some morning and finds nothing comes out.

Obviously being broke is the opposite; you are legitimately out of funds you need to cover a bill. It’s not a matter of watching your budget closer, either - you’ve cut the fat from every possible place and you still just don’t have enough to make everything work. Sometimes this is because you lost a job and your income dried up (more common these Covid days) and sometimes it’s because a surprise bill caused your budget to get behind in a way you couldn’t recover from. But as opposed to someone who simply overspent, being broke implies you have some structural problem with your income and finances that you can’t fix - all it took was a small bump of some kind to upset your apple cart, and now you’ve moved from “hanging on” to “asking your neighbor to use their hose to fill up a bucket so you can flush your toilet”.

It also implies there’s no place left to cut - you don’t have a car payment, and your insurance is minimal if it hasn’t lapsed already. You don’t have cable. You are eating a lot of rice. There’s simply nothing “extra” left to cut, and now you are choosing between things like power and internet (which you need to work and find work, these days) and water (which you need to survive). Often you’ve already even prioritized those things, because as I’ve said they don’t turn off your water for a while; you’ve been juggling things like power and water, now with late fees, for a while. And one day your wife calls you and tells you the water is off, and there’s nothing you can do; maybe some family member can help you out, or maybe you live without utilities for a week or so until you get paid and start the next pay cycle that much more behind.

The best case scenario is you get helped, and you try to accept that graciously and thankfully, but consider the shame of this - you can’t support your family, and you’ve been forced to go to someone who can, implicitly admit you can’t fulfil your basic purpose as a human, and ask them to take away from their family to do what you can’t. And often they do - family and friends are a wonderful thing. I’m thankful more than I can say for mine; I’m blessed by them. But it’s exhausting; you understand going through it why so many people give up on trying to make things better, because you’ve already reached this point where you and everyone around you understands that you just can’t function to minimum levels as a father and husband; it’s hard to wake up the next day and go “well, I’m sure that’s all in the past - let’s learn Java!”.

If you are broke enough, you get what in some ways is very good health insurance: zero deductible, all prescriptions paid for, and no coverage limits. The reason you get this is because everyone else in the country pays for it for you - it’s government insurance, given to those at income levels so low it’s clear they have no chance at all of covering their own bills. It’s not without downsides (the doctors suck, for the most part, and referrals for anything beyond basic family care are time-consuming to get) but you know that if your children or wife got seriously hurt or sick, there would be some level of care available that wouldn’t instantly bankrupt you.

There’s a point at which you are making too much money to get government insurance, though. As of today this number is  $36,156, or ~138% of the federal poverty limit. This creates an interesting situation - if you were making 35k at a job and offered a job at 40k with healthcare benefits, taking the job would actually leave you in a worse place than before in most cases; insurance is expensive, and the government offers exactly zero help if you A. make more than a certain amount of money and B. work for a place with benefits. So where you had insurance and made 35k before, now you have insurance and make 32k; your step forward put you further in the hole.

This is what’s usually referred to as a perverse incentive - it’s a situation that “pays” you for doing the wrong thing. In this case, the wrong thing is rejecting jobs that pay more and offer more advancement out of fear that someone will get sick and you either won’t be able to get them care or will bankrupt yourself doing so. If you are smart, you probably take this risk - after all, you might eventually make 70k and be in a place where insurance is merely expensive rather than a complete budget disaster. But it’s a real risk you have to take as you climb towards financial security, and not everyone chooses to take it.

Dental insurance is worse. There’s an internet meme that says that teeth are “luxury bones” that insurance doesn’t cover, and this is more or less true - even with dental insurance, you are still out of pocket significant amounts of money for even basic dental care. I haven’t been to a dentist since I was 11 years old for reasons related to this. I often consider the fact that I’m in a bit of a race against time with my own teeth - at some point they will go from “merely crooked” to “visibly rotting”, and very few people will hire a person with visibly rotten teeth for work.

Note for other people of limited income: Take the time to check and see if there’s a dental school in your town. The care dental school clinics give isn’t free, but it’s significantly cheaper and in my experience pretty good. One of my children has significant dental care needs, and he regularly goes to the dentist at a clinic of this sort - they treat him well and do good work. I can’t compare it to a “real dentist”, but it’s infinitely better than nothing.

I mentioned this before, but I can work on cars, and I’m able to do anything less complex than a full engine or transmission rebuild. This is an example of what I refer to with friends as “poor people skills”, or capabilities you develop beyond the norm because it’s necessary to survive.

The most fun poor person skill by far is buying things off of Craigslist. It’s by no means rocket science, but having little money means you end up buying all but the very cheapest of durable goods used, and repeated practice at this makes you skilled at finding deals other people might miss.

It’s been decades since I bought new furniture besides IKEA; most of that comes from Craigslist. Cars come from Craigslist - you can buy used cars at dealerships and it’s less risky, but comes with a 25-50% markup for the safety that a lot of people can’t afford. Durable cookware, like pots and pans? Craigslist, if you want anything kind of nice; the stuff you can afford at target starts flaking teflon into your eggs a week in.

Rich person tip: Unless you really, really need everything in your house to clearly be part of a unified set, you are a sucker if you buy furniture new; this is especially true for non-upholstered wooden furniture. Antique furniture is prettier, studier, has more street cred and can be had for a song compared to retail store prices; let other people pay those and look average while you put in a minimum effort, save money, and get cooler older furniture that makes you look like a person of taste rather than an every day jive-turkey retail sucker.

Poor people tip: Stop buying spatulas on Craigslist. Just work some more overtime. Yes, I know it’s a lot of overtime already but spatulas cost $5 new - a $2 spatula is not a deal and the savings don’t pay for even minimum-wage time spent driving to talk to a guy named “Pastor Dave” about used discount cookware in a Circle K parking lot.

That last tip to poor people seems like a joke, but at some point it’s something you have to look out for - you get so used to thinking of money as an extremely finite resource that any amount of absolute savings in purchase price looks necessary to you. But once you conquer that, it’s like a superpower; you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars furnishing a room; you can buy a box of books with the one book you want in it for less than the price of that individual book from a bookstore.

The only downside to your new found x-man discount used goods status is the possibility of getting stabbed; it’s a good idea to look at the approximate area of the guy selling you a hamster cage before you find yourself in the more murder-prone parts of town at night, conspicuously button-down and muggable hoping nobody notices you. Get that one little bit down, though, and it’s like the skies open up and the heavens beam savings down; all the discount archery sets and knock-off kitchen knives of the world are suddenly at your fingertips.

That’s it! We made it through. As I said before, none of this was meant to make you feel guilty and I hope and pray I managed not to sound like I was whining - I really want to emphasize that outside of everything I’ve talked about here, I’m absurdly wealthy in terms of the people who choose to spend their lives in my vicinity. I’m mostly a happy guy, and anymore one who can often pay his bills on time. I can really honestly confirm that money isn’t the operative thing that makes you happy; it really is more about having good people around to talk to, take care of and to be taken care of by.

And if you do better than I do - say, if you are a person who completed college on time and went on to your deserved place in the upper-middle class - I hereby command you not to feel bad about it. It’s OK to do well, and I have an idea of the kind of work you’ve put in to get to where you are; there’s a great chance you deserve to have the things you have. I hope this was instructive for you, and I wish you continued success.

One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do a very good job of it. So here is a clean new post on the concept that adds a couple of further thoughts to the original formulation.

The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.

Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.

The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.

Some classic examples:

1. The religious group that acts for all the world like God is a supernatural creator who builds universes, creates people out of other people’s ribs, parts seas, and heals the sick (bailey). Then when atheists come around and say maybe there’s no God, the religious group objects “But God is just another name for the beauty and order in the Universe! You’re not denying that there’s beauty and order in the Universe, are you?” (motte). Then when the atheists go away they get back to making people out of other people’s ribs and stuff.

2. Or…”If you don’t accept Jesus, you will burn in Hell forever.” (bailey) But isn’t that horrible and inhuman? “Well, Hell is just another word for being without God, and if you choose to be without God, God will be nice and let you make that choice.” (motte) Oh, well that doesn’t sound so bad, I’m going to keep rejecting Jesus. “But if you reject Jesus, you will BURN in HELL FOREVER and your body will be GNAWED BY WORMS.” But didn’t you just… “Metaphorical worms of godlessness!”

3. The feminists who say you can’t be a real feminist unless you believe in specific commitments in X, Y and Z (bailey). Then when someone objects to “feminism”, they argue you can’t object to feminism because it’s “just the belief that women are people!” (motte). Then once the person hastily retreats and promises he definitely didn’t mean women aren’t people, the feminists get back to demanding everyone support affirmative action because feminism, or arguing about whether you can be a feminist and wear lipstick.

4. Proponents of pseudoscience sometimes argue that their particular form of quackery will cure cancer or take away your pains or heal your crippling injuries (bailey). When confronted with evidence that it doesn’t work, they might argue that people need hope, and even a placebo solution will often relieve stress and help people feel cared for (motte). In fact, some have argued that quackery may be better than real medicine for certain untreatable diseases, because neither real nor fake medicine will help, but fake medicine tends to be more calming and has fewer side effects. But then once you leave the quacks in peace, they will go back to telling less knowledgeable patients that their treatments will cure cancer.

5. Critics of the rationalist community note that it pushes controversial complicated things like Bayesian statistics and utilitarianism (bailey) under the name “rationality”, but when asked to justify itself defines rationality as “whatever helps you achieve your goals”, which is so vague as to be universally unobjectionable (motte). Then once you have admitted that more rationality is always a good thing, they suggest you’ve admitted everyone needs to learn more Bayesian statistics.

6. Likewise, singularitarians who predict with certainty that there will be a singularity, because “singularity” just means “a time when technology is so different that it is impossible to imagine” – and really, who would deny that technology will probably get really weird (motte)? But then every other time they use “singularity”, they use it to refer to a very specific scenario of intelligence explosion, which is far less certain and needs a lot more evidence before you can predict it (bailey).

The motte and bailey doctrine sounds kind of stupid and hard-to-fall-for when you put it like that, but all fallacies sound that way when you’re thinking about them. More important, it draws its strength from people’s usual failure to debate specific propositions rather than vague clouds of ideas. If I’m debating “does quackery cure cancer?”, it might be easy to view that as a general case of the problem of “is quackery okay?” or “should quackery be illegal?”, and from there it’s easy to bring up the motte objection.

Recently, a friend (I think it was Robby Bensinger) pointed out something I’d totally missed. The motte-and-bailey doctrine is a perfect mirror image of my other favorite fallacy, the weak man fallacy.

Weak-manning is a lot like straw-manning, except that instead of debating a fake, implausibly stupid opponent, you’re debating a real, unrepresentatively stupid opponent. For example, “Religious people say that you should kill all gays. But this is evil. Therefore, religion is wrong and barbaric. Therefore we should all be atheists.” There are certainly religious people who think that you should kill all gays, but they’re a small fraction of all religious people and probably not the ones an unbiased observer would hold up as the best that religion has to offer.

If you’re debating the Pope or something, then when you weak-man, you’re unfairly replacing a strong position (the Pope’s) with a weak position (that of the guy who wants to kill gays) to make it more attackable.

But in motte and bailey, you’re unfairly replacing a weak position (there is a supernatural creator who can make people out of ribs) with a strong position (there is order and beauty in the universe) in order to make it more defensible.

So weak-manning is replacing a strong position with a weak position to better attack it; motte-and-bailey is replacing a weak position with a strong position to better defend it.

This means people who know both terms are at constant risk of arguments of the form “You’re weak-manning me!” “No, you’re motte-and-baileying me!“.

Suppose we’re debating feminism, and I defend it by saying it really is important that women are people, and you attack it by saying that it’s not true that all men are terrible. Then I can accuse you of making life easy for yourself by attacking the weakest statement anyone vaguely associated with feminism has ever pushed. And you can accuse me if making life too easy for myself by defending the most uncontroversially obvious statement I can get away with.

So what is the real feminism we should be debating? Why would you even ask that question? What is this, some kind of dumb high school debate club? Who the heck thinks it would be a good idea to say “Here’s a vague poorly-defined concept that mind-kills everyone who touches it – quick, should you associate it with positive affect or negative affect?!”

Taboo your words, then replace the symbol with the substance. If you have an actual thing you’re trying to debate, then it should be obvious when somebody’s changing the topic. If working out who’s using motte-and-bailey (or weak man) is remotely difficult, it means your discussion went wrong several steps earlier and you probably have no idea what you’re even arguing about.

PS: Nicholas Shackel, original inventor of the term, weighs in.