Allie Jessing - an openended exploration
She twerks, she skateboards, she creates original work for stage and screen, she sings opera, she fearlessly defends her ideas and has a sensual way about her.
You wouldn’t think she’s a philosopher, would you?
Let’s be honest, our society is not the greatest at accepting women who think exquisitely and look exquisite at the same time. As if being sexy somehow undermines the value of our work. Take the case of Emily Ratajkowski with her debut essay collection My Body, how many of you thought she paid a ghostwriter because clearly someone like her could not have written that well?
SO I wanted to interview Allie Jessing knowing that it’s highly likely that she’s going to trigger some readers. At the same time I want to open a window of possibility on what a philosopher and a thinker may look like, so that when the idea of becoming one yourself crosses your mind, you’ll find a resemblance of her in this interview and in the image reflected back to you in the mirror.
Tanya Gervasi: I want to be honest with you and admit that when I found out that you’re a philosopher, I got really triggered.
Allie Jessing: OMG really?? Were you saving telling me this for this interview?
Pretty much so LOL I had to come to terms with the reason why I was so triggered, first. At some point I was like, this is amazing, you are amazing, it’s so great that you are a philosopher… PLUS you’re my contemporary philosopher. I’ve always loved philosophy, it has always been one of my favourite subjects in school but you know, I only studied male philosophers. I had no idea women could be philosophers.
I think, if it’s ok for me to interject, you made me realise something, which is: there was a big gap between when I graduated from my philosophy undergrad and when I started to identify as a philosopher. And I think a huge component of that was the fact that I never saw myself in any of the philosophers that we read and so it never occurred to me that I could do this for a living.
Well, who is a philosopher? Why do you identify as one? And most importantly, how do you embody the philosopher?
That’s such a great question because, since I started identifying that way, I’ve received a lot of push back around what people think philosophy is, and it has made me question: is what I’m doing philosophy? What do I think philosophy is? So it has absolutely been on my mind.
I think - Oh and also at some point you’re gonna have to tell me what triggered you!! - what’s happening a lot nowadays is that philosophy has started to be seen as a very academic, very abstract realm of thought. There’s a great book I just started reading, I’m not very far into it, called The Dream of Reason that I found in a used bookstore in Seattle by serendipitous chance. One of the things that he says in the beginning of that book is that everything starts out as philosophy and then, as the independent subject becomes more defined, it then becomes thought of as a separate subject. So math started out as philosophy, science started out as philosophy, cognitive science started out as philosophy, and so, as that happens… philosophy starts to get sort of… I think people don’t realise what philosophy is because they think of it as this abstract thing, when in reality, in my opinion, everything is philosophy.
Any type of knowledge seeking or curiosity is philosophy. You know I spoke to this guy - a credentialed person in my life, someone I trust - who said that what I was doing was more journalism. And I don’t agree because I use philosophical concepts, especially skepticism, in my work, and my work is very much built around logic, reason, skepticism and critical thinking: all things we teach in philosophy that aren’t really part of any other subjects.
The last thing I’ll say is that, why I chose to study philosophy was that, after taking a bunch of other courses, philosophy was the only subject where I could ask any question and question anything. And I didn’t have to memorise any “facts” or make any assumptions. I did not have to accept any knowledge as objectively true in order to participate in that school of thought. So for me philosophy is really the art of questioning things, the art of thinking deeply and critically about things, any subject, and it doesn’t have to be crazy made up words and Hegelian - Hegel is this really hard to read philosopher, for anyone reading this that doesn’t know who he is. It doesn’t have to be this inaccessible, or not-applicable practice: it’s a practical way of thinking curiously about the world with an open mind and figuring out how to live, how to live in this experience that we’re having.
I love this. In fact I was taught that even the word philosophy comes from Greek and it means “love of wisdom”. And Sophia was the Goddess of Wisdom and I still wonder how the root meaning of the word got lost and we now see philosophy as abstract thinking that only few white men are entitled. In my mind, when I think of philosophy I automatically see a group of men discussing ideas… and the reason why I was triggered by you is that ever since I can remember I too loved questioning everything and the world and myself, so when I discovered philosophy as a subject I think I would’ve wanted to become a philosopher. I wanted to study philosophy and periodically I’d still check an undergrad course, but I easily got discouraged by my environment - especially in Italy all I knew was a professor who studied philosophy and ended up teaching it to uninterested high-school students. Basically, who would be ever interested in my thoughts and ideas? So I did not pursue this interest of mine and when I saw you so outspoken and gorgeous … it touched that part of me that I did not allow to express and become.
Also, I want to add that by chance, walking past a book stall, I picked up a book, called The Serpent’s Tale and I read it last week when I was in Italy. Funny enough it tells of a time when the Black Goddess Sophia was worshiped in South Italy, and how she was known as the Goddess of Wisdom... and it made me wonder whether the love of wisdom may stem from the reverence to this ancient Goddess at first.
I 100% agree with you … Uhm also, I was gonna ask you earlier when you said someone that was the Goddess of Wisdom. I didn't hear what name you said, I’m actually not familiar with Sophia. I’m gonna look into that.
Sophia means wisdom in Greek.
Interesting.
And she is the Goddess of Wisdom.
Really? Because I’m pretty familiar with mythology. So I’m excited to dive into that rabbit hole and discover that new archetype for myself.
But you know, I agree with you and it’s so heartwarming to experience that you also see that. I think I spend a lot of my time talking to people who don’t see what I feel I see which is, you know, our education system and our whole society is built on like “here’s the knowledge that you need and this is how you know things and this is the right answer”. What’s absolutely mind-boggling to me is that we don’t spend the core of our education system teaching people how to think critically and question the world around them and use reason.
What’s amazing to me is that we are having so many useless arguments all the time because nobody knows what fallacies are, nobody understands why the arguments that they’re making are not reasonable. So if we had a population of people that knew how to think and cared about thinking, and understood what reason is, then it’s ok to have beliefs that are not reason based or to make arguments that aren’t reason based. But just being able to understand what’s constituting your beliefs’ system and why you’re making the claims you’re making, what the limitations on your knowledge are, I mean we’d have a completely different society if that was our focus and to me that’s just the end all be all thing we should be teaching people. I don’t disagree with you at all, we’re living in a world where no one knows how to do that and they’re unconsciously ignorant.
Nobody even knows that they don’t know how to think well.
That’s very interesting. How do you think well?
Ok, do I wanna go down this road? So… Do you know The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin?
Silence.
Ok, quick recap, I am applying it to something it is not intended for - it’s intended for as a tool for habit building where you understand how you relate to expectations and then you’re able to find ways to create expectations for yourself that you can respond to in order to do habits. So there’s a quiz you can take, it’s pretty short and it had a profound effect on my understanding of self and my understanding of how I move through the world and why I experience friction in certain contexts in the world. There are four categories, and there’s two kinds of expectation within this framework: there is external expectation, the expectations placed on you by the outside world; and there’s internal expectation, the expectations you place on yourself.
The most common one is the obliger, basically you primarily respond to external expectations so you do what you are told, you do what is expected of you. If you think about most people moving through the world, they are moving through the world aligned with the cultural values that are being placed on them, and rarely ever questioning it. Right? I think a really good example of this coming from my own life is monogamy. Very few people are like, “Mmm this is really hard and a lot of us are struggling with this and maybe I should think about this in more depth”. I’m not advocating that people be non-monogamous, I’m saying that a lot of people are monogamous without examining it, they just accept that that’s what you're supposed to do.
The second is upholders, that’s like your average overachiever so external expectations and internal expectations. You respond to both of those things, you uphold both of those things.
The last one is rebel, people who just hate expectations.
The answer to your question is that I am the third type which is questioner. Basically it means that I only adhere to my internal expectations. So every expectation that is expressed to me from the outside I measure against my own internal sense of whether I agree with that, and then I’m not able to act based on expectations that I don’t agree with. So, for whatever reason, it’s in my nature, always been in my nature to question things that don’t feel right to me. And I also think that, just like some people are really good at math, some people are really good at certain things, I think mine is my ability to think about things - I excelled well in logic in undergrad, I think I’m exceptionally good at reason. I’ll even notice this - and this is gonna sound like a brag but I don’t care - I have noticed this even with high level thinkers that I have to talk to in a lot of different contexts, as I rise through the ranks of the thinkers that I am in a position to speak with, I notice how my way of thinking things, about things, usually surprises people. And I’m usually able to see a flaw in the logic, or something other people haven’t noticed.
So I’m really enjoying that, now that I finally have the confidence to know about myself that that’s a gift that I have, and start applying that gift more readily in my life and more publicly, I’m really having fun exploring “Ok who am I?” Because as thinkers we’re all individuals. We all have individual experiences and connections that we make for things, and so I’m just having a blast discovering myself as a thinker. But I think I am naturally pretty good at it.
That’s my long answer to your question because I’m still figuring it out for myself.
I am 100% sure that after this you all want to go take the quiz, so here it is for you. I took it and I turned out a rebel, which did not surprise me but actually validated something I kept observing in myself and damning myself for it. Now I understand, somehow it’s part of my nature… and just like Allie: it serves me well and uniquely. Now back to the interview…
Ok two things that come up for me are: how do you embody the thinker? And what’s your relationship between your beauty and your mind?
I think that the way I have decided of late to embody the thinker, is to give myself permission to speak publicly even when I’m not practiced. So to think out loud in public.
I think we have this idea in society that we’re only allowed to present really polished things, you know you have to figure out the whole lecture and then you need to show up and be like this is the point I’m trying to make. And I’ve noticed it as well in conversation people love to use the word debate and I like to point out to people that debate is when you’re both advocating for a fixed perspective, trying to convince the other person of your perspective, when the vast majority of conversations that I have are open ended explorations that I have with people where neither of us is assumingly knowing the answer. We are just thinking out loud of it together and playing it off of each other.
So I think the embodiment of the thinker for me is the courage to speak and think in public without succumbing to the pressure to sound like you always know what you’re talking about. And it also means to have the courage to question things that are really like “certain truths that we are just meant to accept nowadays”. If I have an initial spark of a thought I'll just videotape myself talking about it, audio record myself talking about it, and just get it out, do the messy thinking. And trusting! I think for other people as well, you don’t have to have credentials for you to be good at thinking, you are allowed to talk and think about anything…. As long as you have an understanding of where the limitations of your knowledge lie.
That’s my embodiment of the thinker. Whenever I choose to do that I feel more confident, I move more confidently in the world, I feel more powerful, I channel the archetype that has inspired me for so long: the philosopher-courtesan, the sexy intellectual who’s holding court in her Athenian garden with Socrates there and she’s influencing. I’m thinking about Aspasia of Miletus right now. I wrote a play about her, she’s my patroness!
Regarding the second question, I think that beauty definitely gives me confidence. It also has provided me with a lot of amusement because people usually assume that I’m not gonna be very intelligent. And then when I talk they’re like *————-*
I used to have conversations with my friend who was my TA in the philosophy department in undergrad, who’s a brilliant philosopher, and he used to tell me how he would watch from the TA’s perspective the men in the class like even when I would start to speak they wouldn’t take me seriously. But eventually I would just beat them, I would intellectually dual them.
Have you ever seen Dangerous Beauty? That’s a great example of the courtesan who is poetry battling the guy. So I think that, you know, I’m very lucky to be pretty conventionally attractive. I try not to think of beauty as a thing that I’ve earned because I have no control over it. But I’m grateful to be beautiful. It has benefits and drawbacks.
I think that being hot and smart is awesome! It’s great! I’m a fan!
I’m glad I got both.
* Insert LOTS OF LAUGHS*
I love that question cuz I think that being attractive is such a taboo topic most of the time. Just like being smart is a taboo. There was a time in my life when I was googling “How to deal with being smarter than everyone else”, and one of the articles I read said it’s really lonely to be exceptionally intelligent. I’m not saying that I’m more intelligent than most people, but I’m more intelligent than most of the people I interact with in my daily life. Or than most people I will find if I go to events or like a meeting. There’s plenty of crazy intelligent people who are smarter than me. They were saying not only it is lonely because nobody can meet you intellectually, you also can’t talk about it, you can’t talk about how frustrating it is to be smarter than everyone because then you just sound like an asshole.
When I was growing up I was surrounded by women who struggled with their own self image. I would find them attractive but they didn’t feel the same way about themselves. So because I was already modelling as a young teenager - and nevermind that at the same time I’ve always been a book nerd and always hungry for intelligent conversations - my girl friend back then, indirectly, placed herself as the smart ones since she couldn’t match my appearance. For many years I played this role placed upon me as the pretty and asshole friend (due to my directness), while she was the nice and smart one… until the day I broke the dynamic and we parted separate ways. So I get you and what I’ve observed about myself is how much I love hearing you speak with such confidence about your gifts and abilities because only when I am surrounded by women who think highly of themselves do I feel I can do it too about myself. Like it feels safe praising my beauty, my mind and all other gifts and qualities I discover to have.
Of course.
And you know another thing that we need to remember is that intelligence too is a thing that we haven’t earned. Something like our IQ, we were born with this capacity. But then it’s what you choose to do with your beauty and your intelligence that makes you who you are, you know and you chose to read and you chose to educate yourself. I think that is one of the things that is common for people like us where we feel like we have to make ourselves smaller because being smart and hot is powerful as fuck and it makes other people very uncomfortable. You know what I mean?
So it’s been a journey of being like, look this is how I am but this is a skillset that can help me make really really really major good in the world. People listen to me! I have access to spaces. They don’t listen to me the same way they would if I was a man but we make them. Short story long, it’s a rehabilitation that we’re going through to learn how to speak with confidence about ourselves and know that that’s important. When I have conversations with people and they’re constantly self-effacing and they have no ability to speak highly of themselves, I am sooo bored. I’m like, why do I even want to talk to you? Sell yourself to me, tell me all the cool stuff about you, that’s the new fucking norm that I’m looking for.
There’s something that you mentioned about talking to those recognised philosophers and you being able to point flaws in their logic/reasoning. I was reading a book about magic, which said one rule for magic to work is to never give anything as certain… So, the problem I see is precisely this: most of the time, we assume that because an illustrious person says blank, that that thing is perfect and certain… unchangeable, a law basically. So if you don’t have the open mindedness to question what God, or a Teacher, or an Author, or an Expert says… you will never be able to create something new. I’d like to ask you how you see the world and the things that are presented to us as certain and unchangeable… Where would you begin to change?
I hear you. You mean where would I begin to change the things in the world that people think are unchangeable, or where would I begin to explain to people this concept of uncertainty and things actually being changeable?
The question you’re asking right now is effectively the core of my work. It’s the core of the book that I’m writing. Effectively what happened to me was I went to undergrad and I took Ancient Greek Philosophers, and then I never gave a fuck about a single philosopher after that class because I learned about Skeptical Philosophy and Socrates and was like, This is it! This is all you need!
What it did for me was that it taught me that there is no such thing as objective truth that we could know, everything is up in the air. I like to think about believability, and certainty and reality kind of like a spectrum. Sometimes I call it layers of the onion: what layer of the onion are we on while having this conversation? If you and I are having a conversation about abortion or an issue or any kind of policy making, I could argue that well there are certain things that are just more true from an observable stand point on this layer of the reality, or if you wanna say you and I are having a conversation. That’s one layer of reality that we can talk about. If we want to really get into the weeds of reality we can be like, what is an “I”? Like, what does it mean to be a being in existence? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the nature of reality? So there’s only different ways to talk about what is - ok Allie….
What happened for me when I learned that everything is questionable, even the reality that we see in front of us… is to have a possibility mindset. I love to talk to people about the limitations of science as we get into this place as a society where we’re like, “Well science said yada yada yada!” And we don’t have a healthy understanding of what the limitations of science are. How certain is the knowledge that we have about this thing? There is this thing called black swan, which was effectively a law for a long time, I think from the middle ages: a black swan was a euphemism for something that was impossible because no one had ever seen a black swan. And then explorers went to Australia and they saw a black swan and were like, Oops!
So there are a lot of things that we think are impossible because we’ve never seen them. But the bottom line is what we’ve experienced is just a tiny fraction of what is or what’s possible especially when it comes to human society. We’re also living in this completely unprecedented time with all this technology and all this ability to self reflect. To me it’s just insane that anyone would be pessimistic about what would be possible for our future based on what we’ve observed about our past.
Teaching people to be humble about what they think they know; teaching people about what knowledge is to think about what is knowledge, what kinds of knowledge are there, and then how humble should I be about how much data I have to base this opinion on? How humble should I be about my perspective of what’s possible?
So I do a lot of work around beliefs. Why do I have the belief that I have? Is it based on reason? Is it a practical thing?
I think building a society in which we are way more conscientious about the nature of knowledge, what beliefs are, why we build them, how to apply them, etc… all of this nitty gritty philosophy underpinning of effectively skepticism about what we think we can know, and then epistemology, understanding the nature of knowledge. That’s how we teach people to think critically, like I mentioned before. Plato has the Socratic Dialogues, have you read any? In the Socratic Dialogues, for anyone reading this, effectively Socrates starts to ask people questions about their beliefs - and I wish I was more like this because I have the tendency to go up to people and beat them over the head and be like, Hey here’s the information!! Socrates was much more strategic, he was like, Let me ask you a bunch of questions until you openly contradict yourself and discover that your beliefs are very poorly founded. And just made of a bunch of assumptions that don’t actually make sense.
I think that’s what we ultimately have to do with our society. We have to pull a big Socratic thing where we have to somehow get people to realise that the things that they think that they know are not as well founded as they think they are.
Allie I can totally see you presenting a show - you know how with Oprah people go to her and tell her their lives and problems, so I see you presenting a show where people would come to you to deliberately be questioned. Or a relative sends them over because they’re so sure of themselves and you get to question the shit out of them. That would be so much fun!
I still have a lot of work to do on my ability to do this with people, I have to work on the thing of asking questions as a way of getting through because that’s more effective than just telling them my perspective.
Practice by having guests on your podcast…
Well I have less desire to have people on my podcast that I agree with than to have people on my podcast that I don’t agree with, so that I can ask them: why do you believe this? Where is this belief coming from?
I’m about to do a podcast episode on the belief that we should all have to earn our livelihood, and I’m gonna have to have the conversation by myself. But I would ideally like to get someone who wholeheartedly believes that to come on my podcast and we can discuss together why they believe that because to me that’s not obvious, yet to a lot of people that’s unquestionable. I need to understand why it feels unquestionable to them but I need sacrifices, I need people who come and agree to be humiliated. Which is not that many people.
*WE LAUGH*
I feel as humans we have an innate fear of the unknown, so we look for the most certain answer to a variety of problems in order to feel a certain peacefulness. Basically we want certainty because we’re afraid.
I think that one of the biggest misconceptions that exist as a limiting belief in our society is that civilisation is this amazing thing, that we went from pre-agricultural what Hobbs would describe as nasty, brutish and short horrific livelihood where there was scarcity - in fact I was listening to this Tony Robbins book where he said “before agriculture there was scarcity”. It’s this belief that no one questions, again. And Christopher Ryan explains this really well in his book Civilised To Death, which a lot of what I’m about to say is taken from and it’s a very well researched book, it basically explains that early Victorian anthropologists like Darwin and philosophers like Hobbs created this cultural belief that pre-civilisation world was this horrific competitive awful environment where there was scarcity and we were struggling to survive… and now we have civilisation and we have all these benefits and things. When in reality, least to the best of our current knowledge if you’re not assuming the colloquial narrative and you’re actually looking at the data from anthropologists - there is some contention, there always is because things like science is always expressed through the bias of the person who is collection the data - but there is significant significant evidence for the argument that before agriculture it was actually an egalitarian Utopia where there was no scarcity because population was naturally managed by a variety of things in the environment, and that people lived in the old age and they were very content about the lives that they had.
There’s even some more contemporary examples from similar hunter-gatherers cultures where for instance Darwin would kidnap some of them and bring them to civilisation and then back to their hunter-gatherers societies with the aim to convince others to join civilisation and they all said “FUCK NO! Why would I be in civilisation? I just live with my tribe and have all the birds and the fish and the veggies that I need, like the Earth is providing for me.” There’s another great quote that I read recently, that I need to dig up and find out who he is but basically he said that they had studied some tribes that had experienced famine and disease and all these things but they were really happy. They were asked why they are so happy even though you have all these struggles that you’re dealing with, and they said, “Well because we belong, we have a community, we belong somewhere.”
The reason that I bring this up is that I think that we often mistake civilised human nature, like post-agricultural human experience, for human nature in general. When in reality this is a specific experiment within which we find ourselves that has affected our nature a lot, and it has been demonstrated with other animals: when you put animals in situations that are different from their natural environment it affects their nature, a lot!
There is even a great example in Ryan’s book about Jane Goodall and her team when they were studying chimpanzees, they were changing the environment of the chimpanzees and so a lot of the things that they discovered about chimpanzees that backs the idea that humans are naturally war-like come from things that they did that sort of replicated agriculture-type situations such as keeping food hoarded in a particular location and feeding the chimps from that store of food. That was affecting the way that they’re actually interacting, and there were tons of other researchers who came up saying that that is not how chimpanzees act when the researchers are not meddling in their environment in order to try to interact.
There is all this data that we built our cultural belief on that is not representative of the environment that we evolved in. Christopher Ryan’s books are all about taking a much more detailed look at what pre-agricultural societies were like before we started to impose agriculture. And I believe that the impulse towards religiosity - so for instance Jordan Peterson, controversial figure, I think some of the things he says are absolutely wonderful and one of the things I learned from him that I thought was really interesting, he bases it on a premis I don’t agree with which is that humans have a natural impulse toward religiosity but then he says that when we start to atheise ourselves, when we start to secularise ourselves we cling onto other things like apocalyptic environmentalism or other things where we become this woke thing that’s happening right now. We become religious about those things.
I’m of the belief, and this is based just on my personal reasoning and thinking about this, I think the impulse toward the desire for certainty and the desire for sense-making and like religiosity in regards to that, it’s a completely post-agricultural thing. Because what happened is we invented civilisation and then we found ourselves in a paradigm not aligned with our biology and it does not align with our psychology. Just like the thing I was mentioning earlier about monogamy, there is a lot of evidence that a lot of humans were very promiscuous and very sexually egalitarian, like bonobos, and monogamy is not natural to us. So what happens is we are all raised in an environment where we are constantly gaslighted into thinking that the society that we are in is natural to us, but we feel totally alienated by it. Like we feel it doesn’t make sense, so we’re desperately seeking some meaning, some sense-making, some certainty.
I believe that’s a post-agricultural civilisation thing, and what I’m advocating for, from a Utopia-building standpoint, is that we continue to deeply study what kinds of societal structures did we naturally evolve when we were in our natural environment. And how can we build a society now that consciously reflects the needs of our biology, the needs of our psychology, because this society we are in right now is an accident and it’s not working for us.
So I think some desire to sense-make is natural to humans especially when it comes to early humans when they’re like, what’s thunder for? And so they can make up stories but the examples I made earlier about tribal people being pretty satisfied is that they were not like, “Aaah the world is trying to kill us we need to make sense of everything!!!” They were like, “Hey the world is giving us what we need, it’s providing for us, is taking care of us, it’s our ultimate parent, I’m pretty content.” And like shit happens but I don’t think that desperateness to find certainty to make meaning and to feel like our lives make sense came about until after agriculture.
*LAUGHS*
That was a lot!
I can’t wait to read your book.
Thanks! I think you also asked me a question about talking to people with like credentials, and one thing I will say about that is that no matter who I talk to and how much they say that they’re into thinking critically and reasonably about things every single person I ever talk to talks about these concepts, these assumptions we’ve made about human nature, as if it never even occurs to people that that might not be accurate. Cuz it has been ingrained in our society for so long and scientists have come up with really good explanations for it, you know? And so people just think that’s obviously true. Might not be.
But also we acquire certain beliefs and keep them for the sake of appeasing our minds.
Really?
For a certain comfort.
Yeah, although I will say that I think that some people don’t make very good choices if that’s their motivation. I understand that a lot of people choose to believe things because it helps them make sense, but sometimes I’m like, this is not the most soothing belief system to hold. Take Christianity: you’ll go to hell if you fulfill all these impulses that you have as a human, that’s not very soothing. It helps them make sense but it’s not the most comforting arbitrary belief I can think of. It’s circumstantial, it’s the practicality of like this is what I was raised with and this is what the people around me also believe and it serves me to buy into this narrative for ………… let’s circle back to the thing that I said before: belonging!
And so my next questions stem from the fact that I got to know you deeper than what you show on instagram: how does it feel in your body to be comfortable with uncertainty? I know belonging has been a little bit of a struggle for you and you felt many times like you don’t belong. So how are you comfortable with that?
I am blessed with a natural level of optimism, so it was very easy for me to draw the connection between uncertainty and what it implies, which is possibility. And so I love uncertainty! Because uncertainty is an unwritten page, it’s possibility, it means anything is possible and I’m an optimist so I think that means that it is probably gonna be good! Whatever the uncertain thing is, it's probably going to be good. And there are people who probably need to work harder on that.
My book is effectively to sit here and go, look if it wasn’t obvious to you already let me lay down all the rational and practical reasons why you should have a belief system that is possibility minded and optimistic. Cynicism does not serve you in any way, it does not benefit you. If it is the case that the outcome is uncertain, and then you’re cynical, it demotivates you from action.
What I think it’s really interesting is that as a society we think that optimism is naive and we describe realism aka cynicism as intelligent, when in reality what it does is it makes you much easier to control, because if you’re cynical about what’s possible then you don’t try to change things. And you just accept the status quo. That’s one thing I think, a lot of people think, Oh I’m a realist and that makes me cool… And I’m like, No, it makes you a fucking pawn. You know what I mean? It makes you complacent and apathetic. And also wrong!
Read my book for more…. (coming soon!) cuz explaining why that’s wrong is a big undertaking, or why there’s reasons reasons to be optimistic.
I just experience uncertainty as optimistic. Not always, you know sometimes I experience the uncertainty of not knowing whether I will fulfill my potential as a human during my lifetime and that is very uncomfortable. And I’m constantly grappling with that dance between letting myself enjoy the moment and feeling like I have to grind because I’m worried that I’ll just fritter away in my life. What’s the other question?
Belonging and how you battled with that feeling.
You know the answer to that is that we are living in a society that is what I described before, which is a lot of obligers going with the fucking flow, so it is the case that I just don’t belong. I don’t belong here, I don’t belong in society as it is. There are a lot of people that … actually that’s not really true, there’s a lot of thought leaders - at the moment I was thinking of Tony Robbins, or other people that are at this upper echelon of experiencing this reality but even those people are like, Fuck yeah capitalism! - Like a lot of people are not ready to say, what if we threw everything we think we know about societal structures out the window? And really take a hard look at a completely alternative reality for humans.
So I think I don’t belong because I’m smarter than most people I talk to, it’s just one of those things like finding your tribe is harder for some people. It’s been hard for me. Even the other day, I went to this Skeptics of New York City meeting and I thought to myself, I will go and find all these people that are into skeptical philosophy and I’m gonna find my tribe… And then it turned out to be organised skepticism nowadays, basically people who are grumpy that people spend money on psychics and they want to force everyone to make their decisions based on science. I just sat there and pointed out, “You do realise you’re not being very skeptical, you are making all these assertions you have no foundation for”.
I thought I’ve found my tribe but nope it was another bunch of fucking lemmings following this arbitrary belief system. So I really think finding people that are open-mindedly questioning everything has been hard for me, finding die-hard optimists has been hard for me. Even just finding people who enjoy being disagreed with, or they enjoy critically analysing their beliefs is hard because 98% of the people that I meet on a daily basis don’t ever want you to question what they assume is right.
The first thought I had when you were telling the anecdote of your meeting is that they sound like they over identify themselves with skepticism. And so who do you identify as? If you had to choose 3 adjectives… And how do you not lock yourself in each box?
Well for the last part it’s very easy not to get locked in any of these identities because I don’t belong anywhere.
So you just have bits of those identities in you.
100% It’s like a Venn diagram, there is always some overlap. How I’d actually like to answer this question is my personal philosophy on the concept of labels. People often ask me, are you a comunist? Are you a socialist? Because a lot of the things I talk about and advocate for are in that central part of the Venn diagram: communism and socialism. The problem I have with labels is the time I’m looking at a communist community for instance, marxist community, 90% of that conversation is what is marxism or what isn’t and so then the conversation about how to change the world becomes “does that align with marxism?” instead of “will that benefit us?”.
I like to avoid labels. The same thing, I identify as a philosopher and so what starts to happen is people like to have a conversation with me on whether I am or am not a philosopher. Fuck that! The question is not whether I align with your definition of what that label is. I low-key identify as a relationship anarchist, because I share a lot of values with relationship anarchists and yet I am constantly coming under fire from relationship anarchists about what relationship anarchy is or isn’t. The problem with labels is that we start to have way too many conversations about how to define that thing. I’ve watched a criticism of Jordan Peterson that a lot of people recommended to me, and the content of the entire criticism was “well he says postmodernism is this, and that’s not how postmodernism is”. And I thought, what about the things that he’s saying? What do you think about the ideas he’s advocating for? Why are you wasting half an hour of my time and your actual brain cells complaining whether he’s giving an accurate representation of an arbitrary label called postmodernism.
I’m clearly passionate about this.
Labels are tools. They are a tool to help us understand when I say I’m a philosopher, and I don’t say I’m a basketball player, it gives you some idea of the nature of the work that I’m doing. But if you get caught up in what philosophy is, leave me the fuck alone.
So three labels I use to describe myself:
Artist, and that’s a very broad term because I make a lot of different kinds of art.
Philosopher,
and, I made up this term that has an internal rhyme that I like, Sensual Intellectual. It’s that Aspasia of Melitus vibe, I identify with that historical woman who was like: I can think, I can f.u.c.k., I am a woman and powerful in that identity, and I’m walking that line of masculinity and femininity of being soft and beautiful and compassionate and nurturing, and also unyielding in my commitment to my integrity, and my curiosity about the world, and my authority in regard to my own value system. Sensual Intellectual, thinking good and being hot. That’s my answer.
Would you be open to changing one or all should the day come that you don’t feel them right for you anymore?
I change my identity all the time. I’ve explored journalist, philosopher… you know language is limiting, I’m not attached. It can only do me so many favours in describing who I am. There are no words to identify me as an individual, and so if I start to feel that the work that I’m doing is less philosophy and more journalism then Ok, but some other person made these terms up and nobody agrees on what they mean. I just pick the words that feel good to me and I’m open to changing them more.
What you just said makes me think about Goddesses. We can try to describe them but really a Goddess is a unique essence on her own… and words are never quite enough at describing them. Here is a statue of Gaia and I can try to describe her as best I can but I’m never quite exact.
And to me you’re… Allie. That’s it. Then you can have infinite tags, but it doesn’t matter because when you remove those tags you still stand. Allie still stands and shines. This is also what I aspire to, to stand as Tanya no matter the labels.
You don’t have to aspire to that, you’re doing it right now.
I still tend to over identify as something because I learned to place certain values on certain tags. Although it’s something I have recently observed about myself and want to detach from that.
But what I am also observing in the majority of people is that often there is nothing behind a tag and so this over-identification with something like “I am a socialist therefore…” in reality hides a fear of being nothing without it, “Who am I if not a socialist?”. That question right there can either be the most freeing you ask yourself or throw you straight into the abyss of despair, because it brings you back to that uncertainty and to the mother of all questions “Who am I?”.
But the problem that I have with that is that you can say you’re a socialist but the specific beliefs that you have and why you choose to identify as a socialist are not identical to the beliefs of other people who describe themselves as socialists. And so what’s happening is that we’re all going Ok we all agree on these things so we’re socialists but at the end of the day every single one of those belief systems is that of an individual, it’s a very unique combination of beliefs.
So it isn’t possible to describe yourself other than “I’m Tanya, these are my beliefs. These are the beliefs of Tanya and some of them, many of them, align with these things I identify with, but at the end of the day this is not a fixed category that I can say I identify with and then you would know exactly every single thing that I believe in my heart.”
