“Ra”, Sarah Constantin2016-10-20 (, ; backlinks; similar)⁠:

[Speculative essay about a specific kind of groupthink and failure mode of institutions: a pursuit of prestige, legitimacy, and respectability detached from reality, a prizing of vagueness and inscrutability and superficial perfection and avoidance of anything that might seem absurd or daring or mockable.]

The Egyptian god Ra was a symbol of divine kingship, all-powerful and all-seeing. He’s a good metaphor for a certain kind of psychological phenomenon that involves thought distortions around authority and legitimacy…The idea of a malign Establishment is somewhat convergent:

Not all of these ideas are coterminous with Ra, or identical to each other.

What they have in common is that the Establishment is primarily an upper-class phenomenon, that it is more about social and moral legitimacy than mere wealth or raw power, and that it is boringly evil—it produces respectable, normal, right-thinking, mild-mannered people who do things with very bad consequences.

…Ra is something more like a psychological mindset, that causes people to actually seek corruption and confusion, and to prefer corruption for its own sake—though, of course, it doesn’t feel quite like that from the inside.

Ra is a specific kind of glitch in intuition, which can roughly be summarized as the drive to idealize vagueness and despise clarity. I’m going to try to define it by extension, using examples from my and others’ personal experiences.

Ra is about generic superlativity.

You know how universal gods are praised with formulas that call them glorious, mighty, exalted, holy, righteous, and other suchlike adjectives, all of which are perfectly generic and involve no specific characteristics except wonderfulness? That’s what Ra is all about.

The worship of Ra involves a preference for stockpiling money, accolades, awards, or other resources, beyond what you can meaningfully consume or make practical use of; a felt sense of wanting to attain that abstract radiance of “bestness”.

…Ra defends itself with vagueness, confusion, incoherence—and then anger.

“Respectability” turns out to be incoherent quite often—ie. if you have any consistent model of the world you often have to take extreme or novel positions as a logical conclusion from your assumptions. To Ra, disrespectability is damnation, and thus consistent thought is suspect.

Vagueness, mental fog, “underconfidence”, avoidance, evasion, blanking out, etc. are hallmarks of Ra. If cornered, a person embodying Ra will abruptly switch from blurry vagueness to anger and nihilism…Ra causes persistent brain fog or confusion, especially around economic thinking or cost-benefit analysis or quantitative estimates.

…Ra promotes the idea that optimal politeness conveys as little information as possible. That you should actively try to hide preferences (because if you shared them, you’d inconvenience others by pressuring them to satisfy your preferences). That all compliments are empty pleasantries. There’s an interpretation of “politeness” that’s anti-cooperative, that avoids probing for opportunities for genuine mutual benefit or connection and just wants to make the mutual defection process go as smoothly as possible. Ra prefers this, because it’s less revealing, commits you less, doesn’t pin you down, allows you to keep all your options open and devote everything to the pursuit of Ra…I’ve had my writing criticized because “when you give your opinion, it sounds like you think you’re smart”.

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Ra