This W.E.I.R.D. Symbolic Murder

a manifesto in book reviews

Ten years ago I reviewed a book on the death penalty which told the stories of the crimes various condemned individuals committed prior to detailing their often horrible deaths.

What I learned from reading that book is that while I could not necessarily want someone dead, I was very much capable of not feeling bad if they died.

And, I was even capable of not feeling bad if they suffered when they died, because the knowledge of the crimes they’d committed prevented me from empathizing with them to that extent.

As Jane’s Addiction said in PIGS IN ZEN:

Some people should die
That’s just unconscious knowledge
Because, because the bigger you get
The wider you’re spread
You gotta depend on me
Now your vision is dead

Maybe that’s the kind of knowledge that needs to stay unconscious for society to function?

But sometimes something bad happens to someone and you can’t get sad.

Perhaps it’s simply the knowledge that no such consideration or sad-feeling would be reciprocated, were the bullet in the other back?

So yeah, this insurance CEO who was shot and killed — you know, people are shot and killed all the time. The professor in the office next to mine when I was in grad school was shot and killed. SEVENTEEN students and co-workers at the school my mom worked at were shot and killed. I’ve had a gun put to my face (by a teenager who was “joking”). I know several people who have been robbed while they stared into the barrel of a gun. So one guy gets shot and killed in New York and we’re all supposed to stop the world because, why? Because he’s a rich guy?

The CEO guy was from Iowa, and here in Iowa in the local papers, they paint a nice picture of the man who died. After all, he started out just a regular kid from a working family who went to a small town high school. He was obviously super-smart, always got good grades, high school valedictorian, and top of his class at the University of Iowa too.

But then he put those super-smarts in the service of the American Health Insurance Human-meat Grinding Machine. Which, if you’re in Iowa, isn’t too surprising — this is a big “insurance state.” You don’t have to go out of your way to end up working in insurance if you’re a super-smart college grad around here. He was a climber and he just kept climbing. It was in his nature. He couldn’t help but rise thru ranks. It was basically inevitable that he would become a CEO. And all the people who got sicker or died or went deep into debt because of the ruthless bottom-line-minded decisions of Yet Another American Corporation? I guess it’s just in our nature to eat the shitty end of the stick.

Any murderer is clearly a bad person, and I don’t want to be a murderer, or know a murderer… BUT nonetheless it’s hard to feel bad about the death of someone whose wealth was built on denying care to sick people so that the middle class “customers” would go into debt trying to save themselves, and the poorer “customers” would get sicker and die. Only in America could the whole Breaking Bad storyline take place. In America your boss is dying of pancreatic cancer and you have to do her job and your job too, because if you don’t, she’ll lose her job, lose her insurance, and YOU’LL feel bad and responsible, and apparently no one else will (yes that’s an actual situation a friend of mine was in).

One of my favorite books of the past several years is The W.E.I.R.D.est People in the World, by Joseph Henrich (which I’ve written about before, here). In it, he explains how Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people are WEIRD by global standards. Most people in the world are not like us; most people in the world are “normal.” All the ways in which we are weird are epitomized by abstract systems like “health insurance.” It IS weird and it MAKES us weird — it makes us “psychologically peculiar.”

Just last week I read We Have Never Been Woke, by Musa al-Gharbi (who writes “Symbolic Capital(ism)” here on Substack), which a less savvy publisher might have just titled “Symbolic Capitalists” because truly the book is less about being “woke” than it is about the phenomenon of the super-W.E.I.R.D.: the faction of W.E.I.R.D. society that so excels at playing our W.E.I.R.D. games, that so internalizes that “peculiar” psychology, that we become the masters, the perpetuators, and the beneficiaries of all the W.E.I.R.D.ness.

Symbolic capitalists are the capitalists of abstraction, the lords of law and the overseers of spreadsheets, wizards of wordsmithery, the Quants and the Professors and the Programmers and the Journalists. In this book al-Gharbi argues that “we” (symbolic capitalists) “have never been woke” but instead are conformists clamoring to win cookies in our gamified lives.

The CEO of UnitedHealth was a master symbolic capitalist, and so was his killer.

This was a valedictorian-on-valedictorian crime.

The entire tableau takes place in the rarefied realm of W.E.I.R.D. psychology, symbolic gesture, public flexing. The fact that WORDS were on the bullets, DENY, DELAY, DEPOSE, is very W.E.I.R.D., suggesting that what’s at stake here is not any one person’s flesh and blood but something “bigger.”

While Henrich’s book, The W.E.I.R.D.est People in the World, gives one a sense of how ODD we are, al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke gives one a sense of how potentially DANGEROUS we are, because we, W.E.I.R.D. Symbolic Capitalists, have tremendous blind spots, and we believe ourselves to have reasoned ourselves to our irrefutably correct-good-logical-and-moral positions in life, when in fact we primarily excel at rationalizing.

Well let me rationalize my way thru a poorly-drawn Sorta-Venn Diagram:

Humans have built our marvelous MODERN world by changing not just our environment but ourselves. There are still Normal People in the World (Humans), but contained within that sea of humanity is a subset, The W.E.I.R.D. People (WEIRD Humans) who think and act very differently, according to abstract laws and with goals that are non-immediate and maybe even entirely status-based. Within that WEIRD subset is another subset, the Symbolic Capitalists (EXTREMELY WEIRD Humans), who don’t just play this game but excel at it: who WIN all the long-term goals, who get the good grades and the stock options and the high credit ratings.

If we propel inward, away from fleshly humanity, towards the pure-thought mental realms of de-humanized rationalization, we end up with our pure Surveillance Capitalists, as described in Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism (which I’ve written about several times, including here, the post with my popular robot drawings :D); the surveillance capitalists are the people who see themselves as above and apart, who watch the world from the “God’s Eye View,” and who objectify and control their fellow humans.

From here it’s only a small skip to Artificial Intelligence, a genuinely NON-human decision-maker embedded into our social networks which is ALL abstraction, ALL rationalization, ALL words, ALL appearances, and ENTIRELY born of the WEIRDest, most Symbolic Capitalists among us.

This is a progression from human to non-human. Because the WEIRD people still carry some of their “normal humanity,” and even symbolic capitalists have vestiges of their natural selves caked up against their rims, and even the surveillance capitalists, tho they are very far gone, are, deep down inside, fundamentally human — but the AIs we create leave the last of normal humanity behind and operate only according to the rules of the games of the W.E.I.R.D. symbolic capitalists who engage in surveillance capitalism which is to say, the AI regime.

This is why we are outraged down to our bones by the thought that an AI would deny humans medical care. Our human bodies betrayed by the abstractified abstractions of our most abstracty-abstract selves! How Dare!

And that’s why I think it’s kinda hard for so many of us to get sad for someone who was clearly a genuinely nice man who was clearly very smart and hard-working and loved by all who knew him. Because while the WEIRD part of my brain gets that murder is always very bad, the Human-Animal in me wants revenge for everything my flesh and my fellow grubby-soiled meat-mates have been thru, and everything we fear going thru in the further-dehumanized future we’re promised.

This one is a collaboration between me and one of my 10 year olds