Left vs Right

Start with the thing everyone gets wrong, which is that they think left and right are positions on a number line. You hear it in the language. “Far left,” “centre-right,” “moving towards the middle,” as though there were a single road running east to west and every political creature on it could be located by a single coordinate, and the only question worth asking about anyone is how far along they’ve travelled. This is the dumbest map ever drawn and we keep using it because it lets a newspaper sort six hundred million people into a bar chart.

The number line dies the moment you try to load real history onto it. Was Stalin to the left of Bakunin? They’d have shot each other and did. Is a Catholic distributist who wants every family to own a goat to the right or left of a Silicon Valley libertarian who wants to abolish the family and upload everyone to a server farm? The line can’t hold them. It puts the monarchist and the free-marketeer on the same side, which is insane, they agree about nothing, the monarchist thinks the market is a solvent that dissolves everything sacred and he’s correct.

So throw the line away.

What I want is the deep story. The policy doesn’t interest me, because policy is downstream of coalition and coalition is downstream of accident. The stated reason interests me even less, because the stated reason is almost always self-interest in a clean shirt. I don’t care what a movement says it wants or even what it thinks it wants. I want the shape of the thing it cannot stop telling itself, the narrative so deep that the people inside it experience it not as a belief but as the texture of reality, the water the fish forgets it’s wet in.

Every leftist movement that has ever existed, from the Levellers to the Bolsheviks to the kid gluing himself to a motorway, tells one story. Every rightist movement, from Burke to the Falange to your uncle, tells another. The stories are older than the words “left” and “right,” which only date to where deputies happened to sit in 1789, an accident of French upholstery we’ve been forced to honour ever since.

Here is the left’s story. There is no circle. Or rather, there is only one circle, and it has no edge, because its edge is the species itself, or the set of all sentient things, or all that lives, the boundary keeps expanding and the expansion is the point. Every human being has the same claim on your moral attention as every other, and the accidents that seem to divide them, where they were born, what they pray to, the colour they came out, the wealth they inherited, are precisely that, accidents, scaffolding to be torn down so the universal human underneath can stand up clean.

The leftist looks at any line drawn between people and the first thing he feels, before thought, is that the line is an insult. The line is the enemy. The work of history is the dissolution of lines.

Here is the right’s story. There is a circle. You are inside it, or you are not. The people inside it are yours and you owe them everything; the people outside it are not yours and you owe them, at most, the courtesy you’d extend a stranger, which is real but bounded. The circle might be the family, the tribe, the nation, the faith, the civilisation, the race, the firm; it scales up and down depending on the threat, but it always has an edge, and the edge is not an embarrassment to be apologised for. The edge is the thing that makes the inside mean anything.

And the people who stand at the edge, who keep watch, who decide who comes in and who is turned away and who is met with violence, those people are not bigots or thugs. They are heroes. They are doing the most necessary work there is. The right looks at the boundary and feels, before thought, gratitude towards whoever is defending it.

That’s the whole quarrel. Everything else is weather.

Watch how it generates the surface positions you already know, automatically, with no further input. Immigration: the left sees a human being who wants a better life and a line on a map standing between them and it, and the line is the obscenity. The right sees the edge of the circle and a question about who gets to come in, which is the most serious question a circle can be asked, and they want it answered by someone who takes the circle seriously. Neither side is confused. They’re answering different questions because they’re inside different stories. The left thinks the right is cruel. The right thinks the left is suicidal. From inside each story the other is precisely that.

It runs deeper than immigration, which is just the cleanest case because the boundary is literal there, it’s a fence. Take welfare. The left wants it universal because the recipient is a human being and that’s the whole qualification, full stop, you don’t means-test the rain. The right wants it conditional and bounded because the resources come from inside the circle and flow to people who must, in some sense, be of the circle, must be contributing or have contributed or be plausibly about to, must be ours and not merely human. The universal benefit and the contributory one aren’t two policies. They’re two theologies wearing spreadsheets.

And this is why you cannot pin the stories to particular policies. The policies wander across the floor like drunks while the stories stay put.

Free trade was a radical left cause in the 1840s, the Anti-Corn-Law League against the landed aristocracy, bread for the workers against the rentier’s fence; now it’s the banner of the right and the left wants tariffs to protect the worker from the global market. Eugenics was a progressive enthusiasm, the Fabians and the forward-thinkers, science improving the species, until it became the signature horror of the right. The state church, the free market, the strong border, censorship, the draft, decentralisation, each of them has sat on the left in one century and the right in the next, and the people who switched did not feel themselves to be switching, because they hadn’t.

The policy is just a tool that lay on the ground, and one age picks it up to dissolve a boundary and the next age picks up the same tool to defend one, and what tells you which hand is holding it is never the tool. It’s the story the hand is telling about why.

Or take patriotism, which the right experiences as love and the left experiences as a category error. Of course the leftist can’t feel it, not really, not in the bone; to love your country more than another country is to draw exactly the line his story exists to erase. He can love humanity, he can love justice, he can love the international working class, all of which are circles with no edge.

What he cannot do is love the thing the right loves, because the thing the right loves is the edge itself, the particularity, the fact that this is mine and that is not, and his entire moral apparatus is built to dissolve that fact. When he tries to fake it he sounds like a man reciting vows in a language he doesn’t speak.

Now I have to ruin the symmetry, because there’s a thing the right understands that the left structurally cannot, and it’s the thing this whole essay is going to turn on, so pay attention.

The right knows that stronger is not the same as happy.

The left’s universalism is, at root, a welfare claim. It wants suffering reduced, dignity extended, the floor raised, the wound healed. Its telos is a kind of cosmic comfort, every sentient thing as content as it can be made. This is a beautiful aim and I want to be clear I am not mocking it. But it means the left, even at its most militant, is ultimately optimising for wellbeing, for the absence of pain, for the satisfaction of need. The good is the met need.

The right’s story has a different organising value underneath it, and it isn’t comfort, and the right often can’t articulate this because the articulation sounds monstrous in a culture that has decided comfort is the only legible good. The value underneath the circle is strength. Not the strength to be happy. Strength as such. The circle must be strong because a weak circle is breached and a breached circle is no circle, and the people inside a breached circle do not get to be comfortable, they get to be conquered. So the circle’s first duty was never to make its members happy. Its first duty is to make them, and itself, strong enough to persist. And these come apart. They come apart constantly.

The strong circle demands sacrifice, discipline, the young man sent to the wall, the hard winter endured, the comfort foregone now so the thing survives to next year. A father who optimised purely for his children’s present happiness would raise monsters and the right knows this in its spinal cord. Strength is bought with foregone happiness, always, and the right is the half of the human animal that has made its peace with that exchange.

This is why the two sides cannot even agree on what an argument is. The leftist, arguing, presents suffering: here is the immigrant child, here is the sick man bankrupted, here is the war’s collateral, and he believes, sincerely, that to display the suffering is to win, because in his story the reduction of suffering is the entire game. And the rightist looks at the displayed suffering and feels the tug of compassion, he’s not a stone, and then he files it under “costs of keeping the circle strong” and is unmoved at the level that matters, because in his story a circle that cannot tolerate any suffering in defence of itself is a circle that has already decided to die.

The left shows the wound and expects surrender. The right has a budget for wounds.

And the maddening part, the part that should keep you up, is that the right is correct about the trade-off and the left is correct about its horror. Strength does cost happiness. The cost is real. And the wounds the budget pays for are real wounds, real children, and the budget is, viewed from close up, an abomination. Both of these are true and the truth of one does not soften the truth of the other by a single degree.

I could keep going like this. I could spend another four thousand words running the two stories through abortion and crime and free speech and the family and the market and the climate and watch them generate, every time, the positions you could have predicted, the left dissolving every boundary it finds and the right defending every boundary it’s given, and it would be satisfying in the way a machine that stamps out identical parts is satisfying, and I’d have proven my little thesis and you could go home.

But I’ve started to notice something about the circle while I’ve been describing it, and it’s pulling me somewhere I didn’t mean to go.

It’s this. I keep saying the circle has an edge, and the left wants to erase the edge, and I’ve been treating “no edge” as a coherent thing the left believes. But there’s no such object. A circle with no edge is not a large circle. There is no such figure at all. The word for a region with no boundary is not “the universal circle.” There is no word, because there is no thing. To have an inside is to have an outside; the two are made in the same stroke, you cannot draw one without drawing the other, the line that includes is the same line that excludes and it is one line.

Which means the left’s deepest story, the no-edge circle, the universal embrace with no outside, describes no political position that merely happens to be hard to achieve. It describes something that cannot be a shape. The leftist asks for no bigger circle than the rightist wants. He is asking for the one figure that geometry forbids.

And he knows this, somewhere, which is why the edge keeps having to move outward forever and can never simply arrive, because the moment it stopped moving it would be an edge, it would have an outside, and the outside would be the new obscenity, and the whole engine would have to start again. The universal is no destination. It is a direction you are condemned to travel because arriving would betray you.

The ancients knew this and didn’t pretend otherwise. The Greeks had two words and we have collapsed them into one and lost everything in the collapse. There was the philos, the loved one, the friend, the kin, the member of the household, and the agapē that the early Christians seized and weaponised, the love that was supposed to fall on the just and the unjust like rain, the love with no edge.

And the staggering thing, the thing nobody tells you, is that the Greeks who had philia did not think agapē was a higher form of love. They would have thought it was not love at all. To love everyone equally is, in the older grammar, to love no one, because love in that grammar was precisely the act of preferring, the choosing of this one out of all the others, and a preference that prefers everyone has performed no act.

When Christ said love your enemy he was not extending an old idea to its limit. He was saying something that, to the ear it landed on, was very close to gibberish, a square circle, a dry sea, and the two thousand years since have been one long argument about whether the gibberish was actually the highest wisdom or whether it broke something in us that we have never managed to fix.

Because here is what the universal circle actually requires, once you stop and feel its weight instead of cheering for it. It requires you to look at your own child and a stranger’s child and feel, if you are honest, if you have really taken the story into your blood, exactly the same thing. The same pull. The same readiness to bleed. And no one has ever done this. No one.

Not the saints, who loved God and loved the poor as an offering to God but did not, when the building burned, run past their own mother to save a stranger of equal moral weight, and if one ever did we would not call him a saint, we would call him something with no name in any language because the thing he did has no name, it is outside the grammar of what a creature with a mother can do.

The universal love the left’s story requires names no love human beings have failed to achieve through weakness. It names a love that, achieved, would no longer be recognisable as the thing we were trying to feel. It would have burned off everything that made it warm.

You cannot love everyone, because to love is to turn toward, and you have only one face, and it can only turn one way at a time, and the turning toward this is the turning away from that, and there is no posture of the soul that faces in all directions, that is not a soul, that is a lighthouse, and a lighthouse loves nothing, it only shines.

And the circle, the right’s circle, the hard bounded thing with the heroes at the wall, I have been calling it the small story, the tribal story, the one the universalist is trying to outgrow. But look at what it actually is. It is the shape love makes when it is real. It is the only shape love can make.

The edge that the leftist experiences as an insult is the edge of a heart, which has walls because a thing without walls cannot hold anything, cannot keep a single drop of what is poured into it, and the man at the wall, the one I said the right calls a hero, he is not guarding a nation. He is the membrane of the one cell.

He is the skin, which the body cannot live without, which is the difference between an organism and a puddle, and the leftist who wants to dissolve every membrane in the name of one great communion is not describing heaven. He is describing the sea the cell crawled out of, the warm undifferentiated broth where nothing has an inside because nothing is alive, where there is no suffering because there is no one to suffer and no boundary for the suffering to press against, and we came out of that, we crawled out of it three billion years ago by the grace of a membrane that decided some of the ocean was going to be us and the rest of it was not.

So which is the death-drive? I started this thinking the right’s story was the old fearful animal one and the left’s was the dangerous beautiful new one, the reach that exceeds the grasp, and I am ending it unable to tell which of them is reaching toward life and which toward the warm water where the reaching stops.

The leftist wants to go home, and home is the ocean, and the ocean is before the wound and before the self and before the line, and it is also death, the same death, the dissolution of the one into the all that every mystic has called both salvation and annihilation in the same breath because they could not tell, at the top of the climb, which one they had reached. The Buddhist who blows out the candle. The Christian who dies into God. The communist whose state withers away. They are all walking toward the same edgeless place and calling it by the most hopeful word they have.

And the rightist, the hard man at the wall, keeping his small circle small and strong and bounded and alive, refusing the great communion, refusing to dissolve, is doing the thing every living cell has done since the beginning, which is say no to the ocean, hold the membrane, keep the inside in and the outside out for one more day, not because he is afraid of the great love but because he has understood, in the part of him older than argument, that the great love and the great death wear the same face, and that to be a living thing at all is to have chosen, once, irrevocably, the small warm bounded mortal self over the cold infinite peace, and to keep choosing it, every day, against the pull, until the membrane finally fails and you go back into the water that was always patient, that never wanted anything, that was only ever waiting for the line to give way.

I don’t know which of them is right. I think that’s the only honest place this ends. I came to sort two political tribes and I have ended up looking at the oldest thing there is, which is a small living warmth holding its shape for a little while against an enormous gentle dark that means it no harm and will take it anyway.

The line is the insult. The line is the love. It was always the same line.

by bambamramfan June 29, 2026May 28, 2026

Content vs Craft

Let me show you the move.

You run a game. A LARP, a system, a blog, whatever (something that has rules and an audience). The audience splits. Half of them want everything. The cost of eggs last week. The full theological history of the schismatic priesthood. The exact wording of clause 14.7.3 and how it interacts with the legacy rule from two seasons ago that you yourself have forgotten you wrote. The other half want three pages and a vibe. They want to know what their character cares about and what dice to roll. The first half think the second half are tourists. The second half think the first half are insufferable. Both halves are correct.

You love them both. That is the trap.

Because the obvious solution, the one any clever designer arrives at within five minutes (and you ARE clever, that is the problem, you’re clever enough to fall for this) is: write two versions. Short one for the tourists. Long one for the scholars. Each gets what they want. Designer takes a bow. Everyone goes home. The system was elegant. You were generous. You respected both audiences.

Reader: it has never worked. Not once. Not for you. Not for anyone.

Here is what happens. The scholars read both, because they suspect the short version is hiding something, and they are correct. It is hiding the long version. The tourists read both, because they suspect the scholars know something they don’t, and they are correct. The scholars know there is a long version. Now everyone is reading the long version. The short version is a tonsil. Functional once, vestigial now, mildly embarrassing.

But it gets worse. Because the long version, freed from the obligation to be readable, gets fat. You stop asking “does this serve the game” and start asking “is this thorough.” You write the currency fluctuation appendix. You write the inheritance law. You name the secondary deities. By the time you are done, the long version is a four-hundred-page document that no human will read but every human will fear, and the short version is a pamphlet that reads like the warning label on a vape pen.

Your writing is fine. The structure is rotten. There is no version of “two versions” that escapes the rot.

I want to be precise about why.

When you write one document, the document does work. It chooses what to include, it chooses what to omit, and the omissions ARE the writing. A good rules document is mostly a record of what got cut. The skill is taste. The skill is knowing which edge case can be ruled at the table and which one will recur weekly. The skill is knowing that “the religion has internal schisms” is more useful than four pages naming the schisms, because the players will invent the schisms more interestingly than you will.

When you write two documents, the documents defer. The short one defers to the long one (“for more detail see appendix”), and the long one defers to no one, which is the same as saying it answers to no one, which is the same as saying nobody edited it. You have replaced craft with delegation. You have replaced taste with comprehensiveness. The audience can smell this immediately. They will not articulate it. They will just say the writing is bad.

Same thing on your blog.

You write 3,000 words. Half the comments say too long. Half say you haven’t justified your claims, please go deeper. If you average them you get 3,000 words, which is what you wrote, and yet nobody is happy. The instinct here is to assume the audience is split and you need to serve both. The instinct is wrong. The audience is unified, and it is telling you, in two dialects, the same thing.

The “too long” reader is asking for the version where every word earned its place. The “go deeper” reader is asking for the version where the claims were defended rigorously. Both readers want the same document. Neither of them is going to get it from you doubling the page count.

You know this. You’ve known this. The reason you keep proposing the two-version solution is that it lets you avoid the harder thing, which is writing well.

Now the Alt Binaries case. This one is the most damning, because you got to design the format from scratch.

You built a cascading post. Top: breezy intro, tumblr-voice, a few hundred words. Stop here if you got it. Then a comic. Stop here if you got it. Then an explainer essay, then five bulleted examples, then a poetic-mythic meditation, then a long humorous dialogue. Six layers. Each one optional. Each one for a different reader at a different depth.

The defense of this format, which you were prepared to make at gunpoint, was that the cascading layers addressed different MODES of engagement. The casual reader gets the gist. The example-hungry reader gets the examples. The mythopoetic reader gets the myth. The dialogic reader gets the dialogue. Six audiences, six layers, one post.

The format failed. Predictably. Audibly. The comments (the ones you cared about) said the writing was repetitive, that it proved AI cannot write concisely, that the bullet examples were condescending, that the structure felt padded. They were right. You agree they were right. The format was bad.

Here is why the cascading post is the same trap as the two-version ruleset, even though it looks different. The two-version ruleset gives you two documents. The cascading post gives you six layers. The number is irrelevant. What both share is the underlying refusal to choose. Both attempt to write for all readers simultaneously by stacking versions. Both produce documents where the writing has not had to fight for its survival, because if any given passage is weak, there is another passage further down doing the same work in a different register. The redundancy IS the structure. And the redundancy is what readers hate.

Good writing has one length. Every idea has a length where it lands, and the idea decides that length. The audience does not. You can pad it longer for the scholars. You can trim it shorter for the tourists. Both moves make it worse. The idea has a length. The writer’s job is to find it.

The skeptic wants the version where rigor earned the page count. The casual reader wants the version where every sentence pulled them forward. Same complaint. The remedy is craft. Branching is an evasion of craft.

Brutal advice. Particularly to give yourself. Because craft is hard, and writing two versions is easy. Writing two versions feels like generosity, and craft feels like grinding, and you have already done a hard week. Two versions is the move that lets you stop. Craft is the move that does not let you stop.

There is one more layer to this, specific to your LARPs, that you should look at.

The long ruleset is for you. Every edge case you document is one you will not be yelled at about later. Every economic appendix is one you will not have to improvise at the table. The forty pages are a security blanket. The detail-players read them eagerly because they can smell the nervousness, and they have come to inspect the nervousness for vulnerabilities. They will find them. They always find them.

The honest move at the table is: when something edge-case comes up, you rule. You make a ruling. You do not consult a document, because the document was written by a frightened version of you who did not know what would happen next, and you, now, in this room, know more than that version of you did. The players will accept this. They prefer it, actually. A ruling means the designer is present. A document means the designer is hiding behind paperwork.

You have not done this. You know. The detail-players scare you. The conversation where you rule against one of them without a written rule to point at is a conversation you have not yet been brave enough to have. That is fine. That is the conversation. That is what they came for. They want to argue with you. Forty pages of pre-emptive rulings just relocates the argument from the situation in front of you to your forty pages, which is worse.

The blog version of this is harder. There is no table. You cannot rule. The post has to stand.

So write the one post. Pick the length. Pick the register. Trust it. Some posts will alienate the scholars. Some will bore the tourists. Both will happen. The alternative (the cascading post, the dual ruleset, the executive summary plus appendix, the every-version-for-every-reader) is two mediocre documents taped together. The audience can tell. They will always tell.

The thing that looks like effort, here, is insulation. The forty-page appendix is fear with paragraphs.

The work is one document. The work is choosing. The work is being wrong sometimes.

You will write another forty-page appendix before the year is out. You know you will. So will I. But at least now we will know, while doing it, that we are doing it for ourselves and not for the players.

That is something. It is not progress. Let us be honest about that too.

by bambamramfan June 22, 2026May 16, 2026

Intensity vs Breadth

I want to talk about a problem that everyone notices and almost nobody names, which is that democracy sucks at one specific job and is irreplaceable at another, and the two jobs are constantly being confused for each other.

Here’s the setup. There are five hundred people in a town. One of them owns the factory upriver. The factory dumps something orange into the water that smells like a dentist’s office on fire. The owner makes ten million dollars a year from the factory. The other four hundred and ninety-nine people each lose, let’s say, three hundred bucks a year in property values and an undefined amount of life expectancy from drinking the orange.

One vote per person, majority rules: the factory closes Tuesday. The owner goes from ten million to zero. The town goes from drinking orange water to drinking regular water and saving three hundred dollars each. Total welfare goes up. Utilitarian calculus says great, that’s exactly what democracy is for, glad we have it.

Now run the exact same math the other direction. Four hundred and ninety-nine people would each like, very mildly, to take a thousand dollars from the factory owner and split it among themselves. The factory owner would, very intensely, like to keep his money. One vote per person, majority rules: the factory owner is now poor. Total welfare also goes up, by the same math. Same democracy, same vote, same logic, totally different vibe.

The trouble is that the second story is also the first story. They’re literally the same arithmetic. There is no clean rule that separates “the majority correctly defending itself from a predatory minority” from “the majority correctly mugging a minority.” This is the binary I want to talk about today: intensity vs. breadth. The small group who cares a lot, against the large group who cares a little, and the unsolvable fact that whichever one wins, the other one gets bulldozed.

The whole edifice of “let’s just vote on it” runs on a hidden assumption, which is that one person’s preference is roughly the same size as another person’s preference. It isn’t. My desire for the parking lot to have one more space is not the same thing as your desire to not be deported. We pretend they are because we don’t have a unit of measurement. (Economists tried, they called it “willingness to pay,” and discovered to their delight that this means rich people have stronger preferences than poor people, which fixed everything.)

So you can side with breadth. Everyone gets a vote, count them up, the larger number wins, and if you’re in the smaller number on something you care about a lot (your religion, your house, your kid’s school), well, that’s the price of being outnumbered. Tyranny of the majority, people called this, back when phrases like that still moved units. It’s been kind of memory-holed because we’ve decided the only kind of tyranny that counts now is the other kind.

And the other kind is what you get if you side with intensity. You let the people who care most about a decision make the decision. This is how almost every functioning institution works, by the way. The HOA is run by the three people who will not shut up about the HOA. The school board is run by parents whose kids are at the school. The Federal Reserve is run by people who, alarmingly, find macroeconomics interesting.

Intensity scales down to the people who’ll actually do the work, and this is great, except that the people who care the most about an industry are the people in the industry, and what they care about, intensely, is making more money from the industry. (See: every regulatory agency, ever.)

So you get a thing where intensity-rule means the cigarette lobby writes cigarette law and breadth-rule means whichever ethnic group is biggest gets to decide what the smaller ones can eat for breakfast. You don’t get to pick a third option. The third option is “have a smart constitutional democracy with a bunch of rights and procedural safeguards,” which is just intensity and breadth wearing a hat. Every interesting fight in American politics is about which axis a given decision sits on, and pretending otherwise is what professionals call “having a job in the editorial department.”

Anyway. Here’s the long version.

by bambamramfan June 15, 2026May 16, 2026

Informed Nearness vs Objective Distance

[Warning: Pretty much every cultural term in this essay is fictional. That’s just the bit.]

Independent Review Panel Concludes Investigation, May 2026

There is a question every editor in journalism has to answer about every story, and the way they answer it tells you more about the publication than the masthead does. You can send the reporter who has covered this beat for fifteen years, who knows everyone involved, who can tell you which of the named sources is lying because she has heard that source lie about smaller things before. Or you can send the reporter who landed yesterday from another section, who has no relationships to protect, who will read the documents as a stranger would read them and not notice the things a regular would notice because she does not know which things are supposed to be noticed.

Both reporters will produce a story, and the two stories will diverge from the first paragraph.

The insider will get the texture right. She will know which of the three official statements is the one the institution actually believes, because she remembers the press secretary who drafted it from a previous incident where the same press secretary said the same thing about a different scandal. She will know that the named villain is also a person, that the person is divorced and has a kid in middle school, that the kid is going to read this story. She will write something that captures the actual political and institutional dynamics in a way that someone who has been there can write and no one else can. She will also, somewhere in the third or fourth paragraph, soften a line that should not be softened, because she has had drinks with the person being criticised and the person was funny that night, was a real human being, and the reporter knows things about him that complicate the simple narrative the story wants to tell.

The outsider will miss the texture. She will accept the official statement at face value when she should not, will quote the wrong source as authoritative, will get the institutional dynamics flat or wrong, will write a story that anyone who knows the situation will read with the particular wincing recognition of seeing your country’s flag drawn by a tourist who has clearly never been there. She will also, somewhere in the third or fourth paragraph, write the line the insider would have softened, because she does not know the person yet and the line is true.

You cannot have both reporters. You can only have one. Which one would you send.

The standard answer is that this is why journalism has editors. The insider writes the story, the editor catches the soft parts, the outsider’s distance gets imported via the editing process without losing the insider’s texture. This is a beautiful theory. In practice the editor has often been the insider’s editor for ten years and knows the same people and is going to soften the same lines for the same reasons, and the publication will produce, over time, an aggregate body of coverage that gets the texture right and the substance slightly wrong, in a consistent direction, and the people who notice are mostly the outsiders, who do not work there.

Journalism did not invent this problem; it merely displays it, because journalism produces written artifacts that other people can grade. The same trade-off operates in every domain where humans try to know things about other humans, and the names change but the structure does not.

Historiography runs into it whenever a generation has to write the war it just survived. The historian who lived through the war can tell you what the war felt like in a way the historian born after the war cannot, and she will also defend her commanding officer’s reputation in a way that distorts the record, and the distortion will not be visible to her because the defense feels like accuracy. The historian born after the war will read her account and notice the soft spots a stranger would notice, and will write a corrected account, and her corrected account will get other things wrong because she does not know what it was like and her ignorance of the texture will be invisible to her. Eventually a third historian, two generations later, will read both accounts and recognise what each one knew and missed. This third historian will be more useful for some purposes than either of her predecessors. She will also be more useful for fewer purposes than people think, because the things she can see clearly are also the things that no longer matter very much, and the things that matter (the texture, the gravity, the feeling of having been there) have been fading from the record at every step.

In medicine the same trade-off shows up as the question of whether your physician should be someone who knows you well. The doctor who has treated you for twenty years notices small changes a stranger would miss. She also fails to notice large changes that contradict the picture she already has of you, because her picture has authority for her in a way the symptoms do not. The stranger sees what is in front of her, including the things the long-term doctor has stopped seeing, and she misses the things she could not possibly know without the history, and the question of which doctor you want is a question about which kind of mistake you would rather your doctor make.

In the criminal courts: same trade-off, dressed in legal vocabulary. Recusal rules try to formalise the moment when a judge knows too much. Discovery rules try to formalise the moment when a lawyer knows too little. The system runs on the assumption that you can construct, through procedure, an aggregate position that has both the insider’s information and the outsider’s neutrality, and the system is honest about the limits of the construction, and honesty about the limits has never once made the construction succeed. Read transcripts of cases where the system worked and cases where it didn’t. The difference is often whether the people in the room were able to behave, for a few hours, like both an insider and an outsider at once, which is a thing that humans can sometimes do but not on demand.

I want to tell you about necomptepas. The word does not translate, which is the point. The literal sense is something close to “one who does not yet count,” and in Foiskola it names the period that every adolescent of the Tower spends, between roughly fifteen and twenty, living outside the Tower entirely. Not visiting. Living. The necomptepa goes to a city or a Tower or a road that is not hers, and she works there, and she has no protected status, and to the people she meets she is whoever she manages to make herself, with no Foiskolan claim on their attention. At the end of the period she comes home, or she does not. Most do. Some do not, and the Tower does not chase them, because the point of necomptepas is precisely that the choice is real. A Foiskolan who returns has chosen to be Foiskolan in a way that someone who never left cannot have chosen. A Foiskolan who does not return was never going to be useful at home anyway.

The closest external analogue is the Amish practice of rumspringa, though the structural details differ. Rumspringa is brief, ritualised, and oriented toward whether the youth will accept baptism. Necomptepas is longer, less prescribed, and oriented toward whether the youth has acquired a workable distance from the only world she has known. Both institutions exist because both communities figured out, independently, that a person who has never seen her own community from outside it is not capable of being a full member of it.

(I left at sixteen. I spent four years on trader ships in the Sangbelles archipelago and then a year doing accounts for a sawmill in a town whose name I have never heard a Foiskolan pronounce. I came back. I am the third in my line of mothers to have done so, and the second to have published anything afterwards. The other one published recipes.)

Notice the structure. The Foiskolan tradition has no interest in producing a neutral observer; neutrality is not a thing it believes in. The person you want is the one who knows the Tower from inside, and who has been forced, by leaving, to remember what it is like to see it from outside. The expertise and the distance live in the same person rather than splitting across two, and the institution that produces this person is an apparatus designed to prevent the two states from collapsing into each other before she has had time to develop the muscle that holds them apart.

This is, incidentally, what the British call going to the bar and what the Americans call doing fieldwork and what Confucian scholars used to call returning to the capital. Every functioning epistemic culture has some version of this. The forms are different. The structural problem they are addressing is the same.

The problem is this: knowledge of a subject and judgment about a subject are not separable, and yet the relationship between them rarely matches what we want from it. We want more knowledge to produce better judgment. It often does, up to a point. Past that point the curve flattens, and then it inverts. The person who knows the most about a subject is sometimes the worst judge of it, because she has spent so long inside the subject that she has lost access to the question of whether the subject’s own self-description is correct. She can answer every question that takes the subject’s framing for granted. She cannot answer the question of whether the framing is right, because she is the framing.

The outsider has the opposite problem. She can question the framing (she has not absorbed it, the way the insider has) but she cannot evaluate the answers, because evaluation requires the kind of detailed knowledge she does not have. Her judgment is uncalibrated. She is more likely to spot a problem the insider would miss. She is also more likely to invent a problem that does not exist, or to misdiagnose a real problem in a way that wastes everyone’s time.

What you are choosing between, when you choose between insider and outsider, is which of these two failure modes you can afford. There is no third option that is just better. There is only a third option that fails differently.

There is an essay by Scott Alexander, written when he was still using a Livejournal, called Why I defend scoundrels. The observation is that the worst political arguments tend to be made by the people whose positions are most popular and most correct. The mechanism Alexander describes is sociological: defenders of the dominant position have no incentive to argue well (the audience is already on their side), suffer signalling penalties for engaging the opposing position seriously, are surrounded by allies who applaud any argument they make however weak, and rarely encounter the actual opposing position with enough seriousness to model it.

The dissenter, by contrast, has to be sharp. She is arguing against a hostile audience, she has heard every dominant argument many times, and she gains no status from sloppy work. Alexander’s conclusion is that someone who values reasoning over outcomes ends up spending most of her time defending people she finds morally repugnant, because those are the only people whose arguments still need defending.

Notice that this inverts what most people expect about who occupies which epistemic position. The reader of Alexander’s essay arrives assuming that the dominant-position holder is the expert (she has the truth, she has society on her side, she has presumably done the reading) and that the scoundrel is the ignorant outsider howling from the dark. The actual situation is the opposite. The scoundrel is the insider to her own position. She has read its literature. She has heard every objection a thousand times. She knows the dominant view fluently because she has been steeping in it her entire life, while also occupying a place from which she can see its seams. She is the native speaker of her heresy, in a world where everyone around her speaks the other language. The dominant-position holder, meanwhile, has the relationship to her own correctness that a tourist has to a country she has visited once. She holds the conclusion the way a tourist holds a souvenir, while the texture stays behind in the country with the people who live there, who never had to acquire it on purpose.

This is the same trade-off we have been tracing in journalism and medicine and history, applied to political argument and arriving at a result that should embarrass the reader who thought of herself as on the side of knowledge. The popular cause attracts bad arguments because the people defending it are outsiders to their own position. The unpopular cause attracts good arguments because the people defending it are insiders, possessed of all the texture the dominant view has forgotten it needs. None of this tells you which side is right. It tells you that the quality of the arguments alone cannot tell you, and that anyone who infers correctness from argumentative competence is reading the asymmetry backwards.

Consider the case of native speakers. A native speaker of any language is the most authoritative possible source on what the language is doing in a given moment, and the least reliable possible source on the structural features of the language. Ask a native English speaker why we use ‘do’ as an auxiliary in questions. She will not be able to tell you. Her not being able to tell you is the structural inverse of her fluency, rather than ignorance about it. The features she cannot see are the features that are operating inside her.

The linguist who is not a native speaker, who learned the language as an adult, can describe those features with precision, and will sometimes describe them in a way that the native speaker hears and immediately recognises as wrong, because the description, while structurally accurate, fails to capture how the feature actually feels when you use it. The linguist is correct about the language. The native speaker is correct about the language. They are correct about different things, and the things they are correct about cannot easily be combined into a single account.

Sumerian commercial tablets from the third millennium BCE record a recurring dispute about the value of barley shipments. The dispute structure is always the same. The merchant who travelled with the shipment reports one quality. The buyer who received the shipment reports another. The neutral official (whose job, in Sumerian commercial law, was specifically to break ties of this kind) would weigh both accounts and adjudicate. Some of these tablets record the official’s reasoning. The reasoning is mostly procedural. But occasionally, in the margins, an official records a personal note about why a particular case was harder than usual. The notes are always some version of the same thing: the merchant knew the barley too well, the buyer knew it not at all, and the official could see clearly that both were wrong in opposite directions while having no way to determine what right would have looked like.

I find these notes moving in a specific way. The Sumerian officials were administrators, not philosophers. They did not have a theory of epistemic position. They had a problem to solve, and the problem produced, in their working notes, a precise description of a structure that we have re-derived many times since and continue to re-derive because no theoretical statement of the problem has ever made the practical solution any easier.

The temptation, when you see the structure clearly, is to look for a synthesis. There must be some way of combining insider knowledge with outsider judgment without either compromising the other. The necomptepas tradition is a synthesis. The journalistic editor-reporter relationship is a synthesis. The participant-observer methodology is a synthesis. These syntheses are real, and they work better than not having them, and they do not work as well as we would like. They produce, at their best, a third position that has some of the insider’s texture and some of the outsider’s distance and is not as good at either as the pure cases would have been.

I suspect this is unsolvable. Not in the sense that it could be improved by clever institutional design (it can, and it has been, and the improvements are real and worth fighting for). I mean in the deeper sense that the structure of being a knower and the structure of being a judge are different structures, and a creature with both (a creature trying to know a thing well enough to judge it and to stand far enough away to judge it fairly) is being asked to occupy two epistemic positions at once. The asking is reasonable enough. The two positions are simply unavailable at the same instant more often than they are available.

In Old Akkadian there is a phrase that turns up in scribal training tablets, used to evaluate whether a young scribe has understood the material well enough to teach it: îde u lā îde. He knows and he does not know. The phrase was not a contradiction in the original usage, but a description of the state required for teaching: knowing the subject well enough to convey it, and not knowing it so completely that the things a student would not understand had become invisible. The good scribe held both. The mediocre scribe drifted toward one pole or the other, and the drift was the diagnostic. A scribe who had become pure expert could not teach beginners. A scribe who had not yet become expert could not teach anyone. The window of teaching was the window where both states were present, briefly, in the same person.

I think about this phrase often. I think about it because I cannot tell you which kind of historian I am, on any given day, about any given subject. I can tell you that I have noticed, in the work of historians I most admire, a quality that resembles îde u lā îde more than it resembles either pure expertise or pure distance. The quality is unstable. It comes and goes. The historians who have it sometimes lose it, on particular subjects, and become either too expert or too distant, and their work suffers in predictable ways. When they have it, what they produce reads as something stranger than a synthesis of insider and outsider knowledge: a way of writing about a subject that holds both the texture and the question of the texture in the same sentence, that knows the subject well enough to describe it and well enough to ask whether the description is what the subject would say about itself.

The Sumerian officials in the barley disputes mostly lacked this quality, being administrators with cases to close. The cases where they wrote marginal notes about the structure of the problem are the cases where, for a few hours, the quality flickered into being and then went out. They did not pursue it. They had work to do.

This is, I suspect, the honest answer to the question of how to combine insider knowledge with outsider judgment. You can hold both at once only in flashes, never as a settled state. You can occupy the position where both are present, sometimes, for short windows. The institutional designs that work (the necomptepas exile, the editor-reporter pair, the recusal rules, the participant-observer methodology) do something more modest than producing the combined position. They increase the frequency and duration of the windows where the combined position briefly exists in someone, who then has a few hours to do the work that requires it before drifting back to one pole or the other.

What this means for any specific decision is that the question ‘should I trust the insider or the outsider’ is not the right question. The right question is whether the person in front of you, whoever they are, has access (right now, in this conversation) to both positions at once, or only to one. The signs of access are difficult to describe but not difficult to recognise once you have learned them. The person with access will say things about her own position that the position itself would not say. She will pause at the places where the framing she is operating inside has limits. She will acknowledge the texture she has and the texture she does not have, without making a virtue of either. The person who has only one position will not do these things. She will produce, instead, a smooth account that fits her position and does not extend beyond it.

You already know which version you trust. You trust the version with the seam. You always have.

The seam is what you are looking for. The seam is the place where the speaker has had to stitch two ways of knowing together and the stitching is still visible. The seamless account is the account where one way of knowing has won and the other has been disposed of, and the account is therefore wrong in the direction of whichever way won. You cannot tell, from a seamless account, which kind of wrong it is. You can only tell that something is missing, and the missingness is invisible, and the speaker will defend the seamlessness as expertise or as objectivity depending on which pole she has fallen toward.

The seam is the mark of the windows when îde u lā îde was present. It is ugly, and it falls well short of what we mean when we say someone has mastered a subject, and that shortfall is exactly the thing worth trusting: the speaker declined a finality the subject does not contain.

I have been back from necomptepas for many years now. Each passing year has sharpened the seam rather than smoothing it. I had expected, when I came home, that the years would settle and the two views would integrate into a unified perspective. The opposite has happened. The rotations have made the discontinuity between the two views sharper and more obvious to me, and the work I do now happens by switching, deliberately, between two positions that will never become one, and accepting that the switching is the method.

I find no satisfaction in this conclusion. I would prefer that there were a way to know a thing well and to judge it fairly at the same time, in a single continuous mental motion, without the awkward switching. No such motion exists, and every culture that went looking for one came back with the switching instead. The Sumerian official in the barley dispute knew it. The Cappadocian Fathers, writing about the impossibility of knowing God while being a creature, knew it. The good journalist knows it. The good doctor knows it. They all worked by switching too, and the ones who pretended otherwise, who ironed the switching out and called the smooth result expertise, are the ones whose accounts you no longer trust.

You will choose, in every case, whether to trust the person with more knowledge or the person with more distance. The choice will keep happening. There is no rule that resolves it. There is only the practice of looking, in each case, for the seam, and the discipline of preferring, when you find it, the version with the visible stitching to the version that has been ironed smooth.

by bambamramfan June 8, 2026June 8, 2026

Games vs Art

A talk, delivered unprepared, in the manner of someone who has prepared far too much.

Good evening. The question — whether video games are art — has, by now, the exhausted quality of a dinner guest who will not leave, who stands in the foyer with coat half-on and continues, for the fourth time, to explain a point that was not, on its first telling, especially contested; and yet the question, for all the fatigue that clings to it like cigarette smoke to a wool coat, remains genuinely interesting, not because its answer is obscure — most who ask it have already decided — but because the grounds on which the answer is made, the philosophical substrate into which the stakes are driven, these are rarely exposed, and when they are exposed, they are found to be older and stranger than the participants typically realize.

Let us begin, as one always should, with the affirmative, because the affirmative has, at this late date, something like common sense on its side.

The case for video games as art proceeds, usually, along one of three paths. The first is the argument from intention: if a work is made by a person, with care, toward the end of producing an aesthetic experience in another person, then the work belongs, by definition, to the category of art. This is the broadest and in some ways the laziest of the paths, because it smuggles the conclusion into the premise. Everything made with aesthetic intent becomes art; and since plainly many video games are made with aesthetic intent, video games are, plainly, art.

The second path is the argument from effect. This one is more interesting. It says: look at what these works do to the people who receive them. They move them. They leave them quieter, or braver, or more melancholy, or newly in love with a color they had not previously noticed. Whatever the category “art” is for, it is surely for this — and if the work does this, then quarreling over the label is pedantry masquerading as taxonomy.

The third path, and the most sophisticated, is the argument from medium. It observes that each new artistic medium, upon its arrival, was denied the dignity of art by the custodians of the prior medium — the novel was dismissed, photography was dismissed, film was dismissed, the comic book was dismissed — and that in each case the critics were eventually proven not merely wrong but embarrassingly wrong, and that pattern recognition alone should suggest we are doing it again.

Against these three arguments, the negative side assembles itself with what I must admit is less grace but more philosophical backbone.

The opposing case rests, at its strongest, on a particular and quite ancient view of what art is for. (Snobbery is its frequent companion, certainly; but the snobs are leaning against a wall that was there before they arrived.) On this view, art is an act of authored meaning. The artist chooses; the audience receives; between them passes something irreducible that is the artist’s vision, filtered through craft, made manifest. And the trouble with the video game, on this view, is that the authored thing has been handed over, at the crucial moment, to the player — who is not the artist, who has no vision, who is simply pressing buttons and making the authored thing bend.

This objection is usually parried with the observation that the author has authored the space of possibilities, not any particular traversal, and that this is itself a higher and more ambitious kind of authorship. To which the objector replies: perhaps. But then the work of art is not the game; the work of art is the playthrough, and the playthrough has at least two authors, one of whom is an accountant in Des Moines.

Beneath this disagreement lies a philosophical fault line much deeper than the surface question, and it is here that the argument becomes actually interesting. The fault line is this: what is the ontology of an artwork? Is an artwork a thing — a fixed object, an arrangement of paint or words or frames that exists, finished, in the world — or is it an event, a happening, something that occurs only in the meeting between the object and a receiver?

If art is a thing, then video games pose a genuine puzzle, because the video game as thing is not the aesthetic object; the aesthetic object is the played game, and the played game is ephemeral, unrepeatable, co-authored. If art is an event, then the puzzle dissolves, because all art was always an event, and the novel was never the ink and the paper but the reading, and the painting was never the pigment but the seeing, and the video game’s co-authorship is simply a more honest acknowledgment of what was always true.

And here, I notice, is where the argument usually goes. One picks a side on the ontology and the aesthetic question settles itself. The pro-games partisans are, almost without exception, eventists. The anti-games partisans are, almost without exception, thingists. Very few of them know this about themselves, which is why the argument has the circular, exhausted quality of a dog chasing a tail it cannot see.

There is a further wrinkle, which deserves airing before we move on. The medium-argument partisans — those who point to the history of photography and the novel — ought to be a little more careful than they usually are, because the comparison cuts both ways. Yes, each new medium was denied. But each new medium, also, went through a long adolescence in which it was mostly not art; in which it produced a great deal of commercial pulp and a small quantity of serious work, and the serious work had to be fought for, argued for, dragged into the canon against the tide of the pulp that surrounded it. Whether video games can be art is a settled and uninteresting question — almost any sufficiently elaborated human practice can be art. The live question is whether the conditions of their production, their economics, their relationship to mass taste, will permit the serious work to emerge in sufficient density to constitute a tradition.

And this, I think, is where —

(A pause. She looks up, or seems to look up, at something the audience cannot see. The manuscript on the lectern is not turned. She has forgotten the next page. She has forgotten the page before.)

There is a door.

I do not mean in this room. I mean in the argument. I have been walking down the argument the way one walks down a long corridor, noting the pictures on the walls, and I have come to a door I did not know was there, and it is older than the house.

The question is not whether video games are art. The question, the real question, the one that has been waiting behind every sentence I have so far spoken, is: what happens to a human being when they are the one who moves the figure?

Think about this. When you read, you are still. When you watch, you are still. The work happens to you, or in you, or at you, but you are a receiver, and the posture of the receiver is the posture every tradition has associated with grace — the posture of the one who is open, who does not grasp, who waits. The aesthetic experience, as it has been understood for most of human history, is a receptive experience. Rilke’s panther paces because Rilke watched. The reader of Middlemarch does not decide what Dorothea does. The viewer of the Pietà does not move the arm.

But the player moves the arm.

And the moving of the arm is a civilizational rupture, and we have been debating whether it is art when we should have been debating whether it is something new, something for which we do not yet have the word, and for which the word “art,” stretched to cover it, becomes so loose that it no longer grips.

Consider what it is to grieve a character you killed. Consider what it is to be responsible, within the frame of the fiction, for an outcome that the fiction holds against you. Consider that the great arts of the past produced in us catharsis — a purging, a release, a completion — and that the video game, at its strangest, produces the opposite: not catharsis but implication, the sense of having been made complicit, of having signed one’s name to a thing one cannot entirely endorse.

The old arts asked: what does it mean to witness? The new thing asks: what does it mean to have done?

These are not the same question. They are perhaps not even questions in the same family. The second is older than art; it is the question of ritual, of sacrament, of the act performed that changes the actor. And this, I think — though I am, as you can see, making this up as I go, and will tomorrow deny I said any of it — is where the argument should have been all along. Whether the video game is art is the wrong question, asked of the wrong thing, in the wrong century. The right question: is the video game the unexpected return, under the disguise of a toy, of something the arts had forgotten they once were? The mask that does not merely represent but makes the wearer into the thing? The ceremony in which the participant is altered because they participated, not because they observed?

If so, then arguing whether this counts as art is like arguing whether a wedding counts as a good play. Category error. The wedding is doing something plays gave up on doing, a long time ago, when they moved into buildings with seats.

I will return, now, to my notes. I have notes. I prepared them carefully. I will read them to you and we will pretend.

Thank you.

by bambamramfan June 1, 2026May 16, 2026