This post is a case study of the phenomenon described in Coalitions Between are made by Coalitions Within. If you haven’t read that post, this post may seem vague, but I’m talking about a very precise phenomenon. Having said that, if you like to start with concrete examples before moving to abstractions, you may enjoy starting here instead!
While working on that piece of writing, I had a fascinating conversation with a Born-Again Christian guy preaching with a megaphone at a Sunday fair. While my wife went to get the car, I approached him to find out what his deal was.
Fun fact about me: I’ve long found it helpful to talk to street preachers once a year or so, as a gauge on my ability to stay relaxed and grounded and open-minded while talking with someone who is trying to persuade and argue with me. This guy in particular was very aggressive compared to eg the chill Jehovah’s witness in Alamo Square last year… both in his use of the megaphone and in his loud declarations that everybody was sinners and needed to repent.
I opened with a simple question: “What does ‘repent’ mean?” He talked about it as a turning, a change of heart—and clarified that of course he meant the specific change of heart of accepting Jesus. Implied but not stated was that this also would include accepting and following the moral interpretations of the Bible that his particular church adheres to.
Rather than endure the tedium of him trying to convince me to change in some particular unlikely way, I figured I’d make much more headway in mutual understanding by asking him about his story of repentance.
He described his pre-conversion life as “living sinfully” — naming things like alcoholism, gambling, lying — a collection of self-destructive behaviors. And he felt totally out of control, and out of nowhere tried praying for relief, and suddenly had a breakthrough where by the Grace of God he became a righteous man (and joined some nearby available church).
It seems to me that essentially enough parts of him recognized that this shift would be a net win, compared to his existing self-destructiveness, that a new inner coalition was able to form and rule his psyche—with the support of this church etc. Which is not to say that all of his subsystems are happy with the new situation, but it’s at least a stable struggle, not a total race to the bottom. Christianity, classically centers around a struggle with temptation—found extensively in the writings of both Paul and Augustine, whose conversion stories could also make very interesting case studies for fractal coalition theory, and may yet.
I asked how it reached him, where his sense of conviction came from. He said he grew up hearing about the gospel—people came door to door to their house. I asked why he went with street preaching, because it seems like maybe the door-to-door thing would work better. He said they’d tried a lot of different things. I’m not sure how they were measuring their success but on that level it sounded kind of empirical.
I asked him about his theory of change: given the intention to convert people, why did he think the best approach was to yell loudly to people who seemed uninterested?
He referenced a bible story, the Parable of the Sower — how it’s not your job to aim, just to spread the seeds, and then those that land in good soil flourish. Hmm… less empirical. And this is a way of turning the work over to God, but it also creates a trap where you can’t steer so well.
Meanwhile… Christianity, both from its origin in Judaism and from its early martyrdom, has long exemplified a dogged willing to persist while looking foolish or being oppressed. In fact, it kind of thrives in such an environment.
And meanwhile this ends up being a form of costly signaling that paradoxically asserts power, both externally and into the internal coalitional landscape. Being willing to be ridiculed while maintaining righteousness sends a signal about the strength of one’s conviction, and the possibility that you too could have something you care so much about that you’re willing to be judged for. Many people yearn for such a thing. This is a classic trap—one I’ve fallen into in a less extreme form: “the people who think I look weird… they just don’t get it!” And that’s often true—they don’t! But just as true, usually, is that they also get something you don’t get (and are avoiding looking at).
There was a lady nearby with blue hair, painting on a canvas and blasting System of a Down for the purpose of annoying this guy and drowning out his megaphone. She would periodically pause to shout at him, which seemed to help satisfy her desire to feel righteous but didn’t do the slightest thing to change the ways in which he, from her perspective, was sinning against the commons of the sunday fair by yelling at everybody with the megaphone. Those two forces are in gridlock already.
I’m recalling a pastor from an evangelical megachurch who also described his life before Christ as destitute and awful, and this tweet from an atheist-turned-Christian, and there seems to be a common pattern of some deep desperation and even depravity.
I find myself speculating that the deal many forms of Christianity offer may only really be a good one if you’re coming from some very rock bottom kind of place—some deep shame or incredibly self-destructive behaviors, that this transformation can then liberate you out of. But then this liberation comes at a price: you have to see those who aren’t liberated in precisely the same way as wrong.
I spoke briefly to his wife as well. She was reflecting on how she had been Catholic, but the Catholics were all doing sinful behaviors—worshiping icons, living together before marriage, telling their kids lies (eg about Santa) and so on.
So he was addressing me and everybody else, saying we’re sinful unbelievers. There’s this totalizing frame: everybody who doesn’t do it exactly this way is sinning. And maybe this ends up working on some fraction of very desperate people, and maybe the totalizing “everybody is sinners” frame is critical for it to work for those people. If so, that’s a real shame, because it ends up equivocating his totally self-destructive former lifestyle with my… fairly wholesome, somewhat philosophically convoluted, very meta-ethics-oriented but still very imperfect lifestyle.
But I idly wonder: if you can only convert to this born-again thing when you’re engaged in a certain level and type of self-destructive behavior—certain types that are better combated by this new coalition—is there a way to more directly target those people? Rather than indiscriminately saying that everybody is sinful, asking more targeted questions. Not “are you an unbeliever, do you sin?”—because they haven’t adopted that frame yet—but getting them to reflect on where they feel the most guilty conscience.
But instead he just says I’m living a sinful life. I’m like, buddy, it’s real complicated. I am not following the Bible, but I also just straight up think the Bible is out of date and confused about some stuff. Meanwhile, yeah, I do have some ways in which I’m maybe not living the most wholesome, integrity-filled life—ways in which I’m turning away from the divine. But what do I do about that?
For me, there’s not a clear super-organism/God/church I could surrender to that would be an obviously-more-wholesome coalition to fall into. As far as I can tell, that just doesn’t exist for me the way it did for him when he had this experience. And that may be very true of me, but it’s also fairly true for most of the people he’s trying to convert.
I’ve been thinking for awhile about how worldview-transmission works, and you can kind of see how eg this tweet is a precursor to the coalitions model:
To it, I would now also add here that the victory condition is not just about making sense of your experiences but about giving you affordances for solving your problems. If you’re stuck in hell, and someone offers you a viable way into heaven, you take it! What it means for it to be viable to you is that you take it even if the cost is very great. (If the cost is too great, by definition that way is not viable to you, and any heaven that says otherwise is bullshitting.)
My sense is that the emerging science of memetics will be able to design all sorts of pareto-better worldviews for people, that can liberate them from cults and youtube extremist sinkholes and other local traps… and that can develop strains of eg Christianity that are viable even for people who are already living fairly wholesome lives and for whom the existing variants aren’t worth the trade.
Towards the end of the conversation, he referred to me as an unbeliever.
I said, “No, I believe in God, just not the same way you do.”
He asked if I read the Bible every day.
I said no.
He said, “Well, Jesus said you can’t live on bread alone.”
I said, “Well, look, it’s complicated. But I do pray multiple times a day.”
He asked, “How does God speak to you?”
I said, “God speaks to me in large part through the voices of the people who I find most annoying. And that’s why I came to talk to you, because I found you annoying.“
This could sound like pure snark but I meant it 100% sincerely. Self-transcendence speaks to us through the voices that most irritate the fixed viewpoints we are stuck in and don’t know how to transcend. Listening to those voices is hard because truly taking them in might mean an overthrow of our inner power landscape. Which for this guy might mean losing his entire community.
One way that inner coalitions are stabilized is because they align with what’s true, and good, and beautiful—and the greatest of these is love. But they are also stabilized by social pressure and fear, and until we can take all of this as object at the same time, we’re not going to be able to think about our own reasons for seeing things the way we do. And we are going to find others annoying, and not know what to do.
There are other aspects of Christianity that warrant examination with this new outer/inner coalitions model, but I’m going to leave this post here for now. If you want to dive deeper however, you can check out:
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