The Fat Woman and the Genie

Further thoughts on pain and truth

Doc Hammer (you can find his Substack here) made a comment on my meditation on the connection between pain tolerance and the search for truth:

I think you might be putting too much weight on the willingness to tolerate pain, and too little on the trade off of what one is willing to tolerate pain for. Although a higher pain tolerance will increase the range of things one is willing to do that are uncomfortable, you still have to want the thing in the first place. In terms of physical fitness, if you just honestly don't care about how you look or physical prowess, it is hardly worth any discomfort or inconvenience to exercise. In terms of standing up against unprincipled behavior, why bother if you do not have principles? If you don't care about truth, why bother to go through the process of thinking about things, even if it is pretty much free?

I think the better answer isn't that they perceive the cost of truth being too high, but as much that they simply don't care about the truth. I think it is similar to Caplan's rational irrationality argument: the truth simply doesn't matter to them, so even if it were free they would be disinterested. The only value in believing X for them is whether or not X gets them some social approbation. Individuality, responsibility, these are what they want to avoid in favor of being part of the crowd. Truth beyond "where are my car keys?" or "what am I allowed to say today?" is of no use to them, because knowing other truths doesn't get them what they want, which is the comforting embrace and absorption of the whole.

This was interesting enough that it got me thinking.

Is it the case that the majority of people who turn blind eyes towards the events forming and deforming our world simply don't care at all about the truth? I'm sure that's very much the case in a few, pathological examples. Society is full of malignant narcissists and high-functioning sociopaths for whom 'the truth' is whatever helps them get ahead. You can see them every day on CNN.

I don't think that's generally true, however.

As Doc Hammer notes, in order to move towards a goal, one must first want the goal. If one doesn't value something, they won't take any action to obtain it, and are therefore very unlikely to obtain it.

You might look at some landwhale ponderously manoeuvring her front-butt down the aisles of the local Target and conclude that she is in the condition she is because she simply places no value whatsoever on health and beauty, and is perfectly content to spend the bulk (heh) of her days comfortably settled at the centre of her own gravitational field. And maybe you'd be right. But let's say you introduced her to a genie, who had it within his power to instantly and painlessly transform her into her ideal physical form: the adipose folds would fold away into some nether-region of space-time, her sagging skin would conform itself without blemish to her taught musculature, her drooping bosom would laugh at gravity and perk up into the air.

I think you'd be surprised if she didn't jump at the opportunity. Sure, you might be able to find a neon-haired professor of fat studies whose generous waistline is so firmly jammed in the rabbit hole of critical theory that she stubbornly insists that the idea that she should prefer being eye-candy to being an eye-sore is hetero-normative cis-patriarchal oppression ... but even in that case I'd put money on her avowed ideological love affair with her beloved cottage cheese to be a bad case of the milk of womanly kindness having been curdled by sour grapes. There's no doubt, at least in my mind, that if you polled a representative sample of fatties and offered them this genie's services, the overwhelming majority would leap at the chance to reach their ideal physique.

And yet - they don't. They persist in being fat.

In the real world, becoming trim and fit requires effort.

Matter is sticky, it dislikes to change its form, and does so only when forced by the external application of energy. This is a necessary attribute of reality - if matter were as mutable as thought, nothing would be able to persist. However, it means that changing the form of matter requires the constant expenditure of effort. Matter resists reconfiguration, it pushes back against any attempt to rearrange it, and the moment the effort ceases so does any transformational process.

The point here is that our unfortunate ham planet has it within her power to change herself, to reach her ideal. All she has to do is apply continuous effort in the same direction. Even a little bit will have remarkable effects given enough time. A 200-pound woman can slim down to 100 pounds in something under a year if she loses only 2 lbs a week - a very doable goal when one's starting BMI is so high.

However, reaching that goal means a year of effort - in other words, a year of pain. She must restrict her calories below subsistence levels, meaning that she will spend much of her time being hungry. She must be careful about what she eats, in order to ensure that the calories she consumes are accompanied by essential micronutrients. At the same time, she must exercise, in order to raise her metabolic rate, and in order to ensure that her body will burn fat reserves rather than cannibalize metabolically expensive muscle tissue. She will be out of breath, her muscles will ache, her rumbling stomach will nag her with insistent pangs demanding it be filled. At each step along the way she must choose to either continue on through the pain, or to grant herself a respite - a day spent not working out, a day spent stuffing her face. Once she experiences the relief her break brings, it is that much harder for her to renew her way along her chosen path, and that much easier to decline to continue ... or to simply return to her starting point.

When one sees a physically unfit person, it is very unlikely to be the case that they place no value on fitness. They would almost certainly prefer to be attractive. What is more likely to be true is that their aversion to the pain required to transform their bodies carries a greater weight within their psyche than the value they place on being strong, healthy, and beautiful.

I would posit that it is exactly the same with those who remain stubbornly, wilfully blind to the criminal behaviour of our sociopathic ruling class. In large part, it is not that they do not value truth. They almost certainly do. It is rather that the pain of moving towards the truth - of being called a conspiracy theorist, denounced as an anti-science anti-vaxxer anti-social anti-grandma, of being ostracized and thought insane, of confronting the possibility that they were gullible dupes, of admitting that they not only fell for an obvious deception but acted in such a way as to further the deception and with potentially serious health consequences for the people they care about - the fear of these forms of psychological pain is much stronger than the value they place on the truth. To say nothing of the effort required to learn the truth. It's so much easier to turn away.

And so turn away they do, keeping their eyes screwed shut lest the light leak in and sear them.