Cranks 3

• 20 October 2025
• notions

So I was listening to a podcast, as I do, and the hosts had on someone who started off sounding reasonable-to-interesting, but by the end had really started to sound like a crank. I was trying to work out why that was, and the thing that really caught my ear was a) the level of self-regard they seemed to have^[1] and b) the confidence with which they put forth what I can only describe as highly subjective and idiosyncratic interpretations of reality, all of which seemed to run through a small number of conceptual frames.

Now, I of course have a podcast that's made up of almost nothing but us saying "what if this thing was like this other weird thing", but we tend to frame it in... more hypothetical terms. They were not saying "x could be looked at like y" but rather "x is y". When I looked into this person they seemed... well, their self-regard was even greater than I'd realised, but they also also turned out to have had a day job that's not a million miles away from my own, and to my surprise (given how relatively low-key my day job is) they managed to have pretty full-on idiosyncratic views about that, too.

I found myself reminded, as I sometimes am, of a conversation I had with a friend of a friend, at this point probably ten years ago or something. He was a lovely guy but he had a weirdly... schematic view of things. He once told me that the thing about Star Trek: The Next Generation is that all the bridge crew characters are there to represent different philosophical viewpoints. I didn't really want to start a beef with someone I'd just met, but even as I was running through whether or not that was true in my head I found myself thinking... boy, that's a really thin way to think about something.

I dunno, maybe it's just the kind of thing you say to impress people at parties, but it felt to me in that moment like what he wanted was not to engage with a work of media, to bring to it his own experiences and understanding of the world and to grapple with what it might mean, but rather to have A Thing You Know About It, and can say aha, here, I have the One True Prism through which this thing can be viewed.

This further reminded me of Thiel's Antichrist lectures: I knew hew was a Girardian but I was actually surprised to learn just how deep that goes. Everyone has their preferred ways of looking at things, goodness knows, but I think perhaps the more married you are to one very specific thing the more off the deep end you're in danger of going.

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