Scott Alexander (reading by Solenoid Entity / Astral Codex Ten podcast host)

How come if I sit in a dark room and think, okay, gonna stop propping up my ego right now, nothing bad happens?

If everything were to go wrong, if I were to become completely humiliated, if all my friends were to abandon me, if I lost all my material goods, if every defense mechanism were mercilessly stripped from me one after another, would something eventually happen corresponding to my ego collapses?

There seems to be a true sense in which I might have different opinions and preferences tomorrow, and sometimes I have completely ridiculous and repulsive thoughts that I hide from everyone.

And so it takes a certain amount of care to maintain a reputation as a coherent and pro-social subject who can be bargained with.

I just find it hard to connect this true thing to the idea of the ego as posited by Buddhism or psychoanalysis.

But Lacan doubles down on this idea of ego defence and ties it into the law.

One of the rare places this book intersected with the quasi-Lacanianism of sadly porn was

was its insistence that not only are humans bound by law, but they insist on being bound by law, and someone who isn't bound by law will flail around desperately looking for some law to be bound by, until they end up with horses or buttons or whatever else was at hand.

I will not deny that this is an interesting prediction of how many people end up with spanking fetishes, or discipline fetishes, or master-slave fetishes, or teacher-student fetishes, or some other fetish that ritually re-enacts the establishment of law.

I wonder if anyone has ever had a fetish for judges.

What about that very particular white wig they sometimes wear?

And his theory of desire settles on something like mimesis.

We want something that other people want, or we want to be that which other people want.

Here we veer dangerously close to triviality again.

Some people definitely do this, like people who want Bored Ape NFTs, or people who want to be rock stars.

Other people definitely don't do this, like that guy who obsessively collected streetcar tickets.

Is it fair to say that this is some kind of basic human drive?

I'm not really sure.

Probably Lacan's theory is much more complicated than this, but if so, I don't understand how.

On the comments of my sadly porn review, Feeping Creature wrote, quote, link in post, I think this relates to free energy slash error reduction.