The forum used a question/answer format. One day someone asked "How Do I Build an Online Community?" They wanted to create a forum to pool the knowledge of smart enthusiasts about some narrow topic. For Slog readers who don't know, I founded and ran one of the first popular web forums, and it was famous for being exactly that way. So I'm an OG for this.
So I wrote up a manual, reducing my hard-won knowledge into a single page. It was a perfect how-to guide for precisely what this person wanted to accomplish, from a top expert with years of experience - who's also a professional writer, able to articulate clearly. It would be hard to imagine a better response.
But it was ignored, aside from a few gratuitous blazes of snark. Other replies - bored nerds tap-dancing their way through facile assumptions - were marked "favorite". Mine, apparently, sucked.
Oh well! :)
My first reaction was that what I'd offered probably wasn’t so great, because I've conditioned myself to such ambivalent relativism.
It's possible to know you've spoken truth while comfortably accepting a consensus that you've spoken crap. It's possible to know you've played a beautiful jazz solo while earnestly acknowledging that you're considered to have played crap. It's possible to know you've offered kindness while conceding that a consensus finds you dickish. You can know you're right while full-heartedly accepting you're deemed wrong. All this is possible. Perennially gaslit people who don't fall apart learn to adjust by splitting themselves (so long as you sustain some high-level recognition of the splits, you can make out okay).
While there can be comfort in this acceptance, there's a deeper unease. It doesn't stem, as you might imagine, from the paradox, but from the acceptance itself. There’s always the possibility that your blithe forbearance stems from, ugh, smugness. "They're all too stupid to recognize my awesomeness" is a very dangerous perspective.
The Dunning Kruger Effect observes that dumb people often feel smart because they're too dumb to recognize their stupidity. You can maintain a demented confidence that you're absolutely killing it with quality, even if the world clearly disagrees. Innumerable dorks out there feel like unrecognized geniuses while plying their dorky ridiculousness.
We all know people who value their vapid certainties like shimmering gold ore. If you're too dumb, demented, or deluded to recognize your dumbness, dementia, or delusion, it's easy to develop impenetrable self-confidence. "The idiots don't get me."
My easy ambivalence, I recognized very early on, was uncomfortably close to deluded dorkdom. But having grown up around people with delusions of competence, I'd resolved, as a child, to never take that route. So I was on alert.
Throughout my childhood and into adulthood, idle sensations of smug superiority were treated as the expression of dangerous hereditary tendencies, and I systematically Clockwork-Oranged them until nothing remained but cinders.
Here's the part I’d missed: my framework of self-skepticism had actually placed me on the other side of the Dunning-Kruger coin. The benign flip side is that smart people feel inadequate because they're smart enough to recognize their inadequacies. Those who'd repulsed me with their smug self-certainty never questioned themselves for a moment, much less hatched a lifelong extermination mission. I’d been safe from the trap all along, but Dunning and Kruger were still in high school while I worked through these issues, so I only understood (and feared) the stupid side of the equation.And so I settled into a clammy, uncomfortable ambivalence. I might feel confident about something, but if the world refuted my self-assessment, I’d accept completely. I'd watched many people get stupider and stupider while feeling unshakably smart, and that absolutely would not be my fate.
But then I wrote that manual for building online communities which was received with snide disregard and smirking derision. And, for the first time, I was 100% sure it was true, and right, and great. Not 99%, not 99.9999%. 100% confidence I was right and “They” were wrong.
It immediately fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and I saw that many of my offerings which had been ignored or rejected had actually been worthy. And in that moment I had no choice but to shake off the gaslighting.
I’d been right a lot, it turned out, though a lifetime of self-administered aversion therapy left me incapable of feeling superior about it. But that was entirely appropriate. Doing great work doesn't make you great. My mechanic, who can rebuild a transmission - one of the most complex and difficult tasks a human can undertake, and which I couldn't learn to accomplish if I lived 10,000 years - is, after all, just a mechanic. So I emulate him.
I've made just one adjustment: I acknowledge that I can maybe be right even if I'm the only one who thinks so. That's a heady indulgence. But self-assurance is perhaps not always an empty conceit. I don’t smugly lean into it. I still challenge my certainties with everything I've got, and embrace my embarrassing blunders with a sense of relief I find difficult to explain.
That’s how I manage to keep writing this Slog year after year, with zero sharing or linking, dropping my best output into a silent abyss. My younger self would have noticed the vacant response and figured his Dunning Kruger had flared up. Sure, I felt like I was presenting sensational insight, but the world appears to dissent. So it must be drivel, self-deluded banality, and hyped-up garbage. I'd have knocked it off and found something more useful to do (and that subsequent effort, too, would have been rejected like a slug coin in a gum machine).
The question of why I've been rejected so consistently is a whole other issue. My conclusion is that the world perennially awaits David Copperfield; i.e. impressive-seeming figures, while I've been working so fervidly at getting good at the things I'm good at that I haven't developed any seeming-ness at all. Executing a rope trick draws scant applause when one disappears entirely into the sky.
With no aura of magnificence, vibrant self-satisfaction, or gravitas, how would merit be recognized, much less lauded? It strikes me as a ridiculous question, but we scarcely examine the laughably flimsy basis for our admiration. It seems obvious to most of us that talented people would rivet our attention with their sparkly confidence, radiating vibes of shiny elevation, even though that stuff's easily faked. We all know vacant nincompoop poseurs!
This same issue of externalization underpins autism, which I suspect to be a benign adaptive improvement, despite the profound maladjustments it generates in a society preoccupied with seeming rather than being. I sure hope things eventually flip their way - to actuality.
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