On what you can’t say. (A thread!)

There’s no social world that doesn’t have things you can’t say. The same is true for those directed towards intellectual pursuits (academia, but also the parallel academic worlds of the self-taught, the “IDW”, etc)

(The Freudian insight is that this holds true for one’s own society of mind—though I think Jung has the better account.)

You realize this sooner or later in intellectual matters. For many of us, it hits when we compare what our parents can say to what our profs can. (So, e.g., students from working class backgrounds have an advantage here.)

If you have high need-for-consistency, then this causes a problem. One solution is to go all in—the things you can’t say are bad things, and only bad people say them. (The psychoanalytic word for that is splitting.)

Splitting has all sorts of problems. Most notably, because you don’t forget the things you can’t say, you project them outwards, and hate those you project them on. You do this to your peers (hence, the obviously deranged bits of cancel culture.)

A second solution (let’s go with the Freudian terminology, don’t cancel me bro) is repression. You know what you can’t say, but do your best to forget it. That’s a paradox since you can’t prevent yourself from saying if you’ve forgotten the list of what’s proscribed.

Standard psychoanalytic story of repression is that it leads to a lack of vitality, a feeling of deadness, neurotic depression. Similar effects in the intellectual sphere: your work loses life. It means little to you or others.

Third solution is to just say it. But it doesn’t help. You’re (1) cut off from a group of smart people and (2) you end up in a group of people with a different censor. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

You can keep saying the new thing you can’t say, of course. Jung would describe these people as not having formed a persona. They wander through life as unpleasant children, never fulfilling their promise.

Fourth solution: abandon the need for consistency. George Vaillant (Harvard Grant study, _Adaptation to Life_) would describe this as a higher level response—seeing things as a bit of a comedy.

Many healthy academics who do good work spend some time here! The (mild) example is the Econ joke, “if the dolllar bill was real someone would have picked it up already”.

But there are problems with this adaptation, too. Comedy is not a science—if you stay here too long, you become conventional. For some people it leads to cynicism (“great joke”->”what a joke”), and a different form of depression.

And while I’m not a coherentist on truth, it’s an incredibly useful tool. You can’t dull the blade without consequences. The comedic response does this. (Just to be clear—this is a thread about what you can’t say, *not* the inconsistencies that you are allowed to acknowledge.)

In earlier periods (e.g., 300 BC Athens) this was all well understood—it’s a big part of the dialogues. Classical liberalism made the mistake of denying it—which is why the Straussian esoteric teaching story can come as a revelation: “there’s a theory of that!”

(I’ll tag @Plato4Now on that.)

If you’re a Platonist (the Shakespeare of the intellectual life), you can see a whole spectrum of responses there.

Because “what you can’t say” is so baked in to who we are as thinking beings, there’s no simple answer. Vaillant’s “highest stage” is to see life as tragic, but tragedy is a big thing, and there are many forms (Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, ...)

(Sidenote: A great @paulg line from a long time ago—“are there things you believe that you would hestitate to say in public?” I ask my students this every year when we teach collective intelligence.)

If we realize (as thinkers, in whatever community we're in) that we are always constrained in what we can say, we can think better. It’s always possible to think—but not being able to say *is* still a tragedy.

e.g., Cordelia loves Lear, but she can’t say it. In the mature version of the Oedipus myth everyone already knows—the plague is just the bill coming due.

If we take the tragic stance towards this what do we learn? ( @nataliejelliot, “what can tragedy do for you?”)

First, I think, it gives us the right attitude towards what we can’t say. That we think things we can’t say doesn’t mean we’re fearless truth seekers restrained by society. It means, in the end, that we’re (beautifully, tragically) screwed.

Catching up with responses. Yes, sorry—this is about the “*true* things we can’t say”! Except... https://twitter.com/peligrietzer/status/1249023348228702208?s=20

Really it’s about the things we think are true, or that have some real ring of truth to them, that we can’t say. But (I think you agree Peli) the problem is that the usual workings of intellectual life can’t do anything with that ring of truth.

Freudian (actually Jungian) version would be: the contents that can not be brought to consciousness.

(I have my own esoteric solutions on this but I won’t bore people, because obviously the tragic story has to be the right one in the end.)