Welcome to Exasperated Alien
What I'll write about and why I picked that title.
The hardest part of starting a Substack is deciding what to call it. It’s a weird mix of branding strategy and identity crisis, forcing self-awareness of how you think and who may care. A good title hints at expected content but doesn’t box you into a narrower range or audience than you’d like to reach. And once you’ve gone public, you can’t easily change your mind. You have to design the cover of an unwritten book, and convert the vague, vain inkling that I have thoughts worth reading into a concrete public boast.
I’ve grappled with this challenge for the past few weeks. For my first post, I’d like to explain the title I chose, which naturally sheds light on what subscribers can expect.
The TL;DR is that I feel alienated by political polarization and exasperated by the breakdown of civic discourse. From a small sense of duty and a large desire for sanity, I want to articulate views that are refreshingly non-tribal: uncommon, fair-minded, and persuasive to people with a wide range of values. All my posts will be free and I expect to write 1-3 per month.
I’ll start with “exasperated,” which may need the least explanation. Perhaps you also sense things are not going well?
Democracy is backsliding. War is increasing. Prices are soaring, especially for fairly non-optional things. Happiness is plummeting; the vibes are off. Confused, angry, and on edge, people are retreating into nativist ingroups. Trump is winning, reason is losing.
Worst of all, some people are wrong on the internet. Which, let’s be honest, is the real reason I’m starting a Substack. I am drawn to moral controversies and devote an unhealthy share of my spare energies in life to discussing them online, too often on enshittified social media. As our national conversation has broken down, those discussions have felt increasingly futile, absurd, and emotionally draining.
Each major controversy—COVID, BLM, January 6th, October 7th, an election here or a mass shooting there—stirs up a new firestorm that makes everyone feel worse. The internet explodes with bad-faith polemics that hype us up on our own bullshit. We reshare our side’s best arguments and mock the other side’s worst. When things simmer down, we go back to our bubbles having learned little and achieved less. The discourse stays broken, and so does seemingly everything that discourse is meant to guide.
Each time this happens I am demoralized in several ways at once. The underlying tragedy upsets me, sure. I feel helpless to improve things; words are all I have, and words seem pretty useless.1 Sometimes I share Bo Burnham’s funny feeling that society is hurtling off any number of cliffs.
But often, my most immediate frustration is that everyone is talking past each other. Everyone is performing, and everyone is allergic to nuance. As much as my opinion on the underlying issue, I find myself yearning to write patient explanations of why everyone else is being a dick. I cling to belief that I am better than that; not always right, but at least more self-aware and fair-minded than the dishonest bluster on my screen. When I’m not better, I regret it and yearn to be better.
Most of all, this newsletter is my attempt to be better, and to join and nurture a better community. Despite my exasperation, I will strive to write in a measured way that feels productive, invites engagement, and may actually persuade. To me this means being direct, but not oversimplified; bold, but not contrarian for the sake of it;2 nuanced where nuance is needed, yet forceful where decency demands. I will try to engage steelmen and be charitable where well-meaning people can disagree. Most of all, I’ll try to be right—which includes being consistent, and being as proud to change my own mind as I am to convince others.
“Alien” describes my perspective. This Substack will amplify cosmopolitan values, cognitive empathy, and weird ideas, all of which strike me as alien-esque.
Were aliens to visit earth, I imagine they’d care less than we do about our national, racial, or religious divisions. They may also notice that humanity has lots of problems, and that efforts to solve them are impeded by distinctly human flaws: pride, bias, intolerance, insecurity, an urge to concoct simple explanations for inscrutable things, etc. Were they benevolent, the aliens may wish to help us overcome these obstacles.
I relate to that perspective. I want to improve the world as a whole, and my deepest conviction is that everyone in it warrants equal moral weight. I also try to be conscious of cognitive biases that get in the way: from sources social and biological, both in myself and in others.
Among other hard things, this effort requires resisting the tribal groupthink described earlier—which is the second way I feel like an alien. Humans are social creatures who don’t like being ostracized. As discussion becomes more heated and polarized, pressure mounts to pick an in-group and conform to its orthodoxies. People resisting that pressure are increasingly alienated: politically and ideologically homeless. I feel that way a lot these days.
If I had to pick a label for my politics, I’d go with “progressive liberal-tarian.”3 Already, you may see the problem. Progressives tend to dislike liberals, and neither progressives nor liberals tend to like libertarians. In fact, progressives and libertarians don’t even get along with themselves, and often for very good reasons. I think all three philosophies touch on a piece of truth, and all three have blind spots the others could help fill in. But trying to get any of them to understand where the others are coming from often marks me as a black sheep.
That’s the cognitive empathy I mentioned above. Our discourse does not have enough of it, especially on foreign policy, and I hope this Substack can fill that gap. Sometimes, the titular alien will be in the middle of two warring groups of humans, trying to defuse or mediate their dispute.
Other times, the alien will be here, and the humans will be waaaaay over there. Another discursive gap I’d like to fill is opinions that are either counterintuitive or things most people have never even thought about.
As I’ve aged, I’ve come to identify less with ideological labels and more with the project of taking ideas seriously. I am more likely than most people to entertain weird or radical ideas, and more likely to actually change my behavior—my job, my diet, how I speak, where and how much I give to charity—accordingly. Where I disagree with most people, I feel compelled to make my case until either society improves its beliefs, or I do. This Substack continues that project.4
So that’s my niche: uncommon opinions, written well.
If this sounds like your cup of tea, please subscribe! All my content is free and I’d be flattered by your attention. I’d also be heartened by your contributions in the comment section, so long as they do not deepen my exasperation.
I wrote the following in January 2020 after the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, in the midst of Trump’s (first) impeachment proceedings:
“My point is, I’m exhausted. I’m drained by the pace of the problems, the senselessness of the violence, and the apparent futility of talking about it. There are daily demands for outrage I rationally ought to feel, but can often no longer muster. It’s my new normal and I hate it.
There has been so much wrong with what’s happened in the past ten days of American politics that I struggle to even remember it, let alone document it or write about it intelligently; let alone, do so in a timely enough manner for it to still be relevant by the time it’s read. The scandals of even a month ago are so buried by now that revisiting them feels like archaeology. How do people keep up? How do writers keep up? How can voters keep up?
How can we succinctly summarize the 10,000-or-so-reasons our president should be impeached and removed into a digestible column or soundbite? How do we talk to people who are willfully impervious to facts or reason? For those who still care about the truth, how do we uncover it for one story before another emerges to steal its headlines? How dare we pause for sincere reflection, or react with anything other than jerks of the mental knee?
It all blurs together. It’s desensitizing. It’s disorienting. And that disorientation serves the interests of the very same liars we’re trying to fight.”
As you may recall, the remainder of that year was refreshingly calm and free of major political controversies, so at least I had some time to clear my head.
I’m conscious that Substack has a lot of contrarians, and that some of them make for rough company. Post-COVID-19, the “independent, think for yourself, do your own research” crowd has developed an anti-vax, conspiracy-twinged vibe—or else a conservative-coded “anti-woke, stop criticizing me just because I say hurtful problematic things” vibe—that I want nothing to do with in either case.
I also worry, as does NYU professor Geoff Shullenbeger, that disaggregating dissenting perspectives into individual newsletters only contributes to media fragmentation, and thus to the polarization problem. “While contrarians create spaces for dissent from orthodoxy, their presence becomes a means to affirm in-group orthodoxy,” he writes. A commenter adds, “[c]reating a series of disparate orthodoxies which rarely have good faith interaction breeds arrogance, ossification, stagnation, and valueless conflict where ideas do not change each other.”
My working solution to this is basically to be so weird that I’ll never attract an echo chamber; to not only voice views outside the Overton Window, but to do so from both the left and the right. This has an added psychic benefit: if I never develop a following, I can pretend it was because I was doing my civic duty.
I used to run a blog exploring the idea that social justice progressivism and classical libertarianism are complementary ideologies, despite typically appealing to opposite ends of the political spectrum. In the abstract, I still believe that. But in the real world, the actual “Libertarian” Party has since been taken over by arch-conservative entryists who’ve behaved in abhorrent ways I want absolutely nothing to do with. I can no longer dismiss the mainstream perception of actually existing libertarians without being guilty of no-true-Scotsmen, and “progressive libertarian, but not the awful kind” is too clunky to work as a label.
I hold plenty of mainstream opinions too (I promise!) but I’m less interested in writing those; nobody makes a Substack because people are right on the internet. There are plenty of other sites that can validate opinions you already hold. If I don’t need to convince you, what’s the fun of trying?