Content note: As the title implies, this post contains a frank and thorough account of my decision to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While I aim to approach the topic respectfully, it’s impossible to write without touching on a lot of areas that are sensitive for church members. If you are among my LDS friends, family, or other readers, please use your discretion as to whether to read or skip this particular post.

Note as well that this is an essay series written over a span of several months and as a result is much longer than my typical posts. I elected to centralize them on a single page to avoid drowning out other posts, but each essay is mostly self-contained and the series was not written with an eye towards being read in a single sitting.

Seven and a half years ago, I made the most consequential decision of my life: to step away from the religion that had defined my family and my culture for seven generations, the religion to which I had devoted tens of thousands of hours of my life. It was not something I did casually or carelessly, nor was it a sudden flip from belief to non-belief. Rather, it was the culmination of a long-standing, serious effort to decide where I stood, one that started when I dove into all the apologetic and counter-apologetic arguments as a teen, continued throughout an exhaustive effort to consider my faith on its own terms during my LDS mission, and ended in two years of spiritual paralysis1 before I could admit to myself that I only had one real option.

I created this username the day I decided to seriously consider leaving the church, and it’s not a coincidence either that I kept it or that I began to write in much greater depth about cultural and political topics after doing so. While I remained committed to Mormonism, I felt strongly that if my thoughts were out of line with it, I was the one who was wrong. As I came more and more into my own views and realized their divergence from LDS orthodoxy, I felt less and less sure about speaking up. In addition to this, while I was LDS I experienced the internet as fundamentally hostile territory and anticipated facing vitriol and exclusion if I presented my faith-influenced frame frankly (aided by a few harsh experiences as a young teenager). These compounded to leave me paralyzed, at once worried that I could not adequately align with my faith and that people would reject me if I did.

All of that fell away the day I stepped out on my own. I spent a couple of months writing obsessively about my path away from the faith, telling the stories—particularly mission stories—that lingered in my mind as I was trying to decide. And then, abruptly, I stopped and moved onto other topics, satisfied that I had said enough. Even now, I’m not terribly fond of the place I wrote them—Reddit’s /r/exmormon served as a useful transition spot for me, but as with any place centered around opposing something, it creates an incentive to center the most vitriolic and hostile people and boost the worst experiences with what it opposes, creating an atmosphere that was wholly intolerable for me as a believing Mormon and that remains barely tolerable for me even now. But it served its role.

The essays that follow are those stories, the first things I ever wrote under the name Tracing Woodgrains. They’re written for a Mormon-familiar audience, so I’ll lightly annotate them for others. I hope you enjoy.

As a side note, these come much closer to the form of a personal biography than a detached analysis of the faith on its merits. When it comes to the latter, I endorse the work of John T. Prince without reservation. Prince is a former BYU chemistry professor and by far the best post-Mormon at speaking respectfully and directly to Mormons about the faith, and I owe him a debt of gratitude both for how he responded to me personally and for providing perhaps the only analysis of LDS truth claims I really feel confident endorsing.

Convince Me

This post will be almost illegible to people unfamiliar with Mormonism; I’ve included it for its significance to my story and added links to context as relevant. It was the first post I wrote under this name.

This2 isn't a place I expected to post, really ever. I'm an active member. It's my two-year anniversary since my mission. I left and came back the same doubting, uncertain but striving individual. I read all about church history questions long ago and wasn't too worried, and always told myself that as long as I got a confirmation that I recognized as from God, I would be content in faith. Well, I saw a lot of spiritually building, strengthening things, and a good number of apparently unanswerable questions and unresolvable situations to balance it out, and none of that confirmation that I was seeking. I've spent the past two years trying to figure out where to go next, and right now am willing to test the idea that it's false.

I've read a lot of what you all have to say, and a lot of responses to it. The CES letter3 and a couple of common rebuttals and your responses to the rebuttals, alongside a lot of /u/curious_mormon's work, have been the most recent ones for me. There are several compelling "smoking guns," many situations that I don't have a good answer to and have known that I'm unsure about for a while. But I wouldn't be posting here if I was fully convinced.

Here's the thing: in all the conversations, all the rebuttals, every post and analysis and mocking joke, I have not seen a compelling enough explanation for the Book of Mormon. You're all familiar with Elder Holland's talk. I remain more convinced by the things he talks about and others' points of the difficulty of constructing a work of the length, detail, and theological insight of the book within the constraints provided.

There are three legitimate points raised that have opened me to the possibility of something more. I'll name them so you don't need to repeat them:

• The Isaiah chapters—errors and historic evidence of multiple authors of Isaiah

• Textual similarities in The Late War

• Potential anachronisms and lack of historical evidence

The translation method is a non-issue for me. Similarities with View of the Hebrews seem a stretch. The Book of Abraham and the Kinderhook plates are their own issues and I am satisfied with the information I have on them. Despite raised concerns, the witnesses remain as strong positive evidence, but they are not my concern here.

In short, I want to see how the Book of Mormon could have been produced by man, especially with intent to deceive. Despite all I've read and heard and my lack of personally satisfying spiritual experiences, Church doctrine has been a rich source of inspiration and ideas for me, many passages in the Book of Mormon are powerful and thought-provoking on each read-through (Alma 32, the story of Moroni, Mosiah 2-5, 2 Nephi 2, 4, and the last few chapters, and Alma 40-42 are some of the best examples)4. I've always had questions, and they've always stopped short at my confidence that there is no good explanation for the Book of Mormon other than it being from God.

Specific questions to resolve:

• How was it produced in the timeframe required?

• Who had the skill and background knowledge to write it? If not Joseph, what would keep them from speaking up?

• Where could the doctrinal ideas have come from, and what am I to make of the beauty and power of some of them?

I'm sure you all know the weight of even considering something like this from my position. I'm here, I'm listening, and I am as genuine in my search for truth as I have ever been. So go ahead. Convince me.

I will be available to respond once more in a few hours.

This led to a wide-ranging discussion. The obviously and overwhelmingly best response came from John T. Prince and can be seen in full here. As an active member, my impression of exmormons was that they were almost uniformly rude, unreasonable, and superficial or heavily motivated in their criticism. Prince’s response to me made it impossible for me to maintain that picture and left me with nowhere to hide.

Before I continue with other posts covering subsequent events, I should get to the stories leading up to that moment.

Doubt in the Missionary Training Center

Note: Provo’s Missionary Training Center (MTC) is the primary location prospective missionaries go to learn the basics of being a missionary and, if studying a language, the basics of the foreign language. I spent less than two weeks there.

Well, I'm back again with my fourth post in about as many days. I guess that's what having your worldview shattered will do to you. […]5

Before I left, I stood up in front of my entire home congregation and told them I didn't know the Church was true, but I wanted it to be true and was willing to commit two years of my life to find out. With that as not just the primary but the only thing on my mind, I walked into the MTC with two goals:

1. Be exactly, unflinchingly obedient and fully committed every step of the way as a missionary

2. Be exactly, unflinchingly honest in what I did and did not know.

You can imagine the sort of chaos that would cause for a young, doubting missionary.

Here are some samples of my journal from the MTC: "Everyone is so upbeat here. That's not a compliment. ... Day in, day out, I'm told to learn by the Spirit, feel the Spirit, pay attention to the Spirit, and so forth. It's be nice if I could, but as of now it's just frustrating. It's funny to think that the missionary lessons probably wouldn't work to bring me to the Gospel. We're asked to commit people to baptism during the first lesson. That's crazy. No way I could make a life change that quickly. I guess it works for some, though. Trust in the Lord for direction."

"I know, I need to stay positive and eager, but [my teacher] is just so... perky. I hate perkiness. His lessons are unhelpful, his answers to questions unsatisfying. I wrote a lovely little rant about the instruction to always invite investigators to be baptized during the first lesson. The gist is that I hate the idea and have a hard time believing it came from God. ... I love individual study. I've been reading through the Book of Mormon, and it's satisfying and enriching. I wish I had a stronger testimony6 of it, though. The words are beautiful, but part of me constantly analyzes the truth claims."

"Everyone here is much more spiritual than I am. It's a bit discouraging. I have a lot of work to do. I'm trying, but I just don't understand. ... It's frustrating, because I'm so much more knowledgeable, so I have to keep myself from thinking, 'Oh, they don't deserve it.' They do, of course, but... well, I wish I did."

That instruction to invite to baptism on the first lesson was my first point of major disagreement in my mission, and I asked my teachers quite a bit about it. The instructor referenced above told me to pray so I could understand that policy came from God. I prayed. I still hated the policy. I told him that, and it turns out he didn't have a plan B. Meanwhile, another teacher decided that the best solution to me not having a spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon was to have me kneel down and pray with him about it, just in case the dozen times I prayed on my own about it in the MTC were insufficient. That went just as well as the other prayer. I stood up, asked what to do if I still didn't have an answer, and was told, "uh, keep trying. You're on the right path."

I still can't stand that policy on baptism. The investigation of truth is so personal and so vital and so time-consuming, and we as missionaries were to insist that any earnest seeker would be able to commit to a transformation of faith after a 30-minute presentation and one prayer. It stood contrary to everything I felt about how the process of gaining faith should work and would work for me. Bonus points for the wonderful lesson from my teacher that if I had questions, the solution was to pray until I realized why I was wrong. That time in the MTC started (continued, really, but everything before hardly seems to matter now) a trend of constantly wondering how I could purify myself more, how I could ask more sincerely or with more faith, what wording I could change or lever I could pull or button I could press to switch prayer from a process of crying into the void to the legitimate means of gaining truth that I was about to try to teach everybody for two years it was.

You might be wondering, after reading this, how I possibly stayed in the mission field for two years. I really did like studying the scriptures, except for the parts I didn't, and I was in the MTC during the General Conference where President Uchtdorf said "We respect all who earnestly search for truth" and Elder Holland talked about struggles of mental illness. As skeptical as I was about the truth of a lot of it, I was confident in the good of most of it, realized how much good two years of trying to help people could do for an introverted and self-centered kid who talked to almost nobody but close friends, and felt like I needed to do everything in my power to receive an answer from God before falling away.

So I stayed—leaving was honestly never an option, just like serving was never an option, not because I felt forced or pressured but because a mission had always seemed like as natural and inevitable a step in life as attending high school. And in staying, I created an ever-growing stack of questions that I was ever more desperate for answers for while simultaneously building the ideas and inspiration that I expect to use as foundation for almost everything I do through my life, met some of the best people I have ever been around, and had at once the most worthwhile and most damaging experience of my life.

If you're wondering how it ended, it involved me staring and almost screaming down my last mission president7 in an interview until he told me that my last companionship8 was not inspired, it was not "exactly where God had wanted me to be," that it was a choice he had made and a risk he had taken that didn't pan out. But that's a story for another time.

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When an “Investigator” Ruined Moroni’s Promise for Me

Note: “Investigator” is the LDS missionary term for people considering whether to join the faith. Moroni’s promise is the claim central to Mormonism that people can pray to learn the truth of Mormonism.

Well, I'm back once more. One reason I'm sharing these stories is that my journey to the point I'm at now seems in a sense unique: historical evidence had very little to do with it. Church culture was a minor factor at best. I was determined to allow the church to stand or fall for me on spiritual grounds, and always, always it came back to Moroni's promise. Pray, let God answer, and know in your heart that the Book of Mormon is true. Good enough for me, until the promise fell flat on its face.

One memory that stands out is when a companion of mine asked if when I prayed asking about the Book of Mormon, I was doing so with complete faith. I told him that it was guarded, but present, since my actions had failed to produce a recognizable answer so often, but I was trying. In response, he asked what it would take for me to let that guard down and really, completely trust in God. My answer, more or less, was this: “Then what would I do if nothing happened?”

You all already know: when you’re looking to God and he doesn’t answer you, there are any number of answers people will give. The most common instinct is to say that perhaps you didn’t pray with enough faith. Well, I wanted to know that God was there more than I’ve wanted anything else. From that conversation, I started looking for opportunities to express more and more faith, trusting that God would fulfill his promises. One of the biggest ones I was seeking was the chance to independently test Moroni’s promise: to find someone not connected to the church, someone who didn’t have all the baggage I had built up around it, who would read the Book of Mormon and pray about it so I could learn from watching if and how Moroni’s promise worked.

It took a while, surprisingly, to find someone willing to actually read more than a page or two of the Book of Mormon. Funny thing, that. But finally, we ran into someone who I let myself be certain was “one of the people God had sent me there to find:” a Christian guy I’ll call Max at the university I was studying, a psych student who was fascinated by religion of all sorts and extremely open to conversation. He agreed to read the Book of Mormon without hesitation. Over only a couple of weeks, he read the whole book, then the Pearl of Great Price9, Our Search for Happiness10, and several sections we recommended from the Doctrine & Covenants11. He took an intellectual, analytical approach to it all, rather than, ah, the spiritual sort that missionaries prefer to have people take, but there he was: someone finally investigating the church’s claims as honestly and completely as I could ask, using the sources that we provided and willing to take the test that we as missionaries proposed. When we asked him if he would be baptized if he felt it was true, he said that of course he would.

And then he prayed about it and said that he honestly felt like it wasn’t true.

Well, that’s not how it works. And I wasn’t ready to let it end that way. He was a friend of mine at this point and the most thorough investigator I’d been able to talk with, and that was not the way things were supposed to go. So I prayed, and fasted, and talked with my companion, and that’s when I broke one of my personal mission rules: I said something that wasn’t strictly honest.

I already mentioned I really wanted to have faith. I tore voraciously through every story I could find of conversion “miracles”, of missionaries doing something extraordinary and people responding in extraordinary ways, and that was Going To Happen and I wasn’t just going to let it go. So we met with Max again, and asked him to pray about the Book of Mormon again—verbally, sincerely, with us—and promised him that God would respond if he did so.

That’s the part I regret. I knew already why my faith was guarded. I knew perfectly well what would happen if someone made that promise to me. But I fought to convince myself that for someone who was just learning, someone who didn’t have all the background I had, it would be different.

Well, the story ended the only way it could end: Max, ever straightforward, agreed to our terms. We sat together, talked a bit, read a couple of verses, and had him pray. It was a thoughtful prayer, an honest one. We all paused for a few seconds afterwards. Then Max looked up and said, “I’m really sorry, guys. I just don’t think it’s true.”

And that’s it. He wasn’t baptized. He didn’t “see the error of his ways.” And we, as missionaries, were left speechless, because there was nothing more we could say or do. God had remained silent. Our promise, and Moroni’s promise, had fallen flat.

My mission president told us when I called him, distraught and worried, that Max must not have had honest intent, that perhaps he was looking for the wrong things as he read, that sometimes people just aren’t prepared. I just stared off into space and thought again about the conversation where my companion asked why I couldn’t express a moment of unguarded faith.

That was why.

Board Shorts and a Plaid Shirt

This one still haunts me.12

Okay, a lot of my stories still haunt me. This is all raw for me. None of it has really healed over, nothing has really been figured out. This, time, though, I was the vehicle for delivering a message I did not believe at the time, do not believe now, and felt uneasy and embarrassed as I delivered it. But I delivered it, because that was my job.

It's time for the story of Eric, who I never knew very well and who certainly doesn't remember my name, but who I still every once in a while think about and want to go apologize to.

See, Eric did not fit the comfortable baseline mold of a church member. He was converted some two years before I arrived in his area, a long-haired, eccentric guy who wore board shorts and plaid shirts every time we saw him. He was introverted and didn't trust or care to meet too many new people. He was also smart, spiritually thirsty and searching for peace.

And he stopped coming to church because the stake13 wanted more Melchizedek Priesthood14 holders so the ward15 wanted him to pass the sacrament so the bishop16 strongly encouraged him to wear a white shirt and tie to church.

Remember what I said about board shorts and plaid shirts? Those weren't an accident. Eric told us how he felt like too often people used clothes to create artificial distinctions, how he didn't want to create a false front for people. He quoted the scriptures talking about costly apparel and looking on outward appearance. A bit defensive, a bit angry, he spoke frankly about how these clothes were the best he owned, because they were the only ones he owned, that they were clean and well maintained and that this was a matter of principle for him.

I can say at least I pleaded his case. I checked for wiggle room, explained his situation, asked for an exception. But my mission president, normally a deeply caring man and someone who I will always look up to as an example in all regards of life, insisted. It was such a small thing, he said. You can pick up a clean white shirt and tie from the thrift store for a few dollars, he said. A ward member could lend one. But it was needed.

It was never about the cost, though. It was the message. It was what wearing those clothes represented to Eric that was the problem. So I went back to him and did my duty, and gave him the official church answer and told him the suggestions proposed and just sort of looked at him and shrugged. He argued the point for a bit and then never picked up the phone for us again.

I'm not going to run into Eric again, so in lieu of apologizing in person, let me do so here: you were right. I couldn't say it at the time. I was an Official Messenger, and I had an unambiguous message to deliver. But it was the wrong message and it chased you away when you were looking for peace and acceptance. We should have been able to provide it. We shouldn't have been restricted by our own cultural expectations in telling you what you needed to wear, but we were and are and I was and it was the wrong answer and I knew it but I gave it anyway, and who could blame you for going away? You saw clearly.

It was such a small thing, a blip of a story in a much larger context. Sometimes, though, the small things stick.

There is such a helplessness in giving an answer you know is wrong to someone you know is right.

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“I had to see a counselor after I lost my faith”

Hey, how about that time I went through the Old Testament to write down every time God killed someone?

An investigator and close friend of mine had found the story of Nephi killing Laban, and was deeply, personally angry with it. Perhaps his story will come later. He was a fascinating guy, a modern-day Greek philosopher attending the college we worked around. I was determined to answer his question thoroughly, honestly, and effectively.

...and, quite frankly, it was a chance to try to resolve and/or express my own frustration with the Old Testament. Really, if there's been any less spiritual work written than the historical portions of the Old Testament, I haven't heard of it. It was quite a list, and I hated it. It lingered on my desk for a few days, staring grimly back at me. Anyway, things went on, I answered his question but not my own, I asked around and the general consensus was, "That's an excellent question. Toss it on the shelf17" and several months passed.

Then I met Mat. He was smoking a hookah on the porch when we walked by, and was startlingly happy to engage in conversation. Turns out he grew up a deeply religious Coptic Orthodox member, but after a struggle that you're all familiar with, lost his faith several years back. When we met him, he was a Bible Studies student at the local university. We snapped into teaching mode, and when we described the Book of Mormon, he—before we could even ask him—interrupted and said, "Where can I find a copy of this 'Book of the Mormon'?"

There's no more exciting question for missionaries, and—in a recurring theme for my mission and these stories—I felt certain that, if God sent us certain places to find certain people, he had sent me there to find Mat. I was going to do everything to teach him and encourage him to test the Book of Mormon.

I had gotten in way over my head.

See, when we sat down with Mat and started talking in earnest, he shared with us one of the core reasons he had stopped believing in his own faith: The Old Testament, and how God acts in it.

How on Earth are you supposed to answer someone's deeply felt, soul-wounding question when you have the same unresolved question kicking around your head? How do you respond? How do you respond when he goes on to tell you that he doesn't mention it much but he had to go through counselling for a while when he stopped believing in his religion, how he still pauses at various churches and prays asking for any indication that God wants him on a different path?

Oh, we still tried. We talked him through it, pointed out that perhaps our talking to him was that indication he was looking for, read through some of the Book of Mormon with him...

but he had already seen too much. We all, on some level, knew it. I remember reflecting at the time how impossible it seemed for someone who had traveled the path he traveled—without ever encountering the church—to ever be converted. I heard the pain in his story, the sorrow in his voice as he discussed his journey, his earnest continued study and precise questions, and it was clear to me that if anybody was an "earnest seeker of truth," he was. I could find no fault in his path. And I couldn't help him.

That's the problem with tossing things up on the shelf as a missionary. Every once in a while, you encounter someone whose shelf broke in the same location and pattern as yours is fracturing. All we could do, then, was talk, and learn, and listen, and go away mumbling something about planting a seed.

Wherever Mat is, I hope he is finding peace on his spiritual journey.

“If I wasn’t gay, I would join your church.”

Sexuality is one of those issues I never really learned how to handle. Since I personally consider myself asexual, that sort of topic has always been a process of observing from a distance more than one of personal passion. It is one of the defining issues of our time, though, and inevitably I found myself needing to answer questions about it on my mission, especially as the church related to gay marriage. Some of the abstractness I felt faded as I became personal friends with several gay people on my mission. The most memorable of those was Asher.

This is a happy story, by the way. It's one of the few I'll share with you all that was a genuinely good experience for all concerned. I share it because it was eye-opening, left a lasting impression, and stands to me as a thought-provoking experience from the perspective of Mormons and ex-mormons alike.

As fits such an unusual situation, we met Asher by showing up late to an appointment. It was with Max, actually, at the local university. While waiting for us, he struck up a conversation with the student at the next table over. We arrived, introduced ourselves, and found ourselves launched alongside Max into team-teaching someone who identified himself as a stateless, agnostic, gay gender studies student about our differing perspectives on Christianity.

It was absurd, and we all recognized it. Asher was openly and firmly wary of our beliefs, Max and us had different goals and perspectives as we were sharing about the same thing, and we were facing down possibly the single least likely demographic combination to have any interest in the church. Despite that, we kept at it, and we had a genuine, good conversation, and against our own and his initial expectations, all found ourselves wanting to meet again.

Running through the standard missionary lessons with him was unquestionably impossible, and we weren't going to try. Instead, he treated it as a sociology experiment of sorts. He asked us all sorts of questions—not all of them about faith. I remember one moment where he asked if it was okay to ask me something personal, I said sure, and he asked something like, "How often do you masturbate?" Was that the exact question? Not sure, but I kind of coughed and changed the subject quickly. It was not the sort of topic I knew how to address. At times we would turn it back to spiritual topics and found someone who was idealistic, hopeful towards some sort of spiritual truth, and genuine, but he was not keen to dwell in those areas.

He enjoyed the conversations as much as we did, though, and—again with the idea of a sociology-based perspective—even decided to attend church with us a couple of times. We sang "We are all enlisted" at the first church meeting he came to and—as he was, shockingly, something of a pacifist—he was outright angry with the overt war imagery in it. It was all a great intersection of people with completely different backgrounds, though, and I was a little disappointed to be transferred away and no longer be able to teach him, even though I didn't see anywhere teaching him could lead.

Luckily, though, I found out the rest of his story from the later missionaries there. Of all the people we talked to and were working with, he was—against all my expectations—one of the only people who kept meeting with missionaries for a while after we left. They tell me he kept coming to church almost every week for a while and had several powerful spiritual experiences, culminating in the title statement: "If I wasn't gay, I would join your church."

What a bittersweet thing to hear—from any perspective. It was inarguable. Oh, missionaries could try to press it because that's a missionary's job, but... well, this group knows better than any the conflict between the church and gay people. And neither I nor the other missionaries that met with him were going to force the issue. I took it then the same way I take it now: an open-minded student who is spiritually hungry finds a genuinely good community of people (which this ward was: it remains to this day my single favorite collection of people within the church) and some satisfying spiritual answers...

...that just happens to be wholly, irreconcilably incompatible with everything else in his life.

If he hadn't been gay, or the church hadn't made its stand so firmly, this would fit perfectly within the block of "faith-promoting, miraculous conversion stories" that returned missionaries love to share. As it was, it provided a few young people from wildly different backgrounds a chance for increased mutual understanding and friendship and stood as my first first-hand experience with the struggle between gay people and the church. It made me reflect fairly regularly on my own position and helped personalize an issue that this Utah kid who had never even really bothered to date (much less anything else) had previously only thought about in an abstract, detached sense. I still consider Asher a good friend.

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The Leper, Cast Out

Members of the church are told constantly that their callings18 are from God. In General Conference and in lessons, in talks and in trainings, again and again the counsel is repeated that God puts people where he needs them, that he qualifies them for their positions, and that they will be blessed for obeying the leaders of the church even if they turn out to be wrong.

That teaching was the cause of the single greatest pain on my mission and my time in the church. It is a painful, dangerous teaching. Sometime, I'll tell my own story. This time, though, I want to tell worse, sadder, and more deeply cutting than my own: the story of Brother McDaniels from one of my wards. It was my first exposure to how damaging a determined obedience to church teachings could be.

The first time I met him, without knowing anything about him and only knowing our job as missionaries was to inspire members into missionary work and give us referrals, I assumed from the thoughts he shared and how quickly he welcomed us that he was a fully active member. I taught a stirring, brief lesson and invited him Boldly to invite a friend to be taught by us. Yeah right, he said curtly and coldly escorted us from his house a few minutes later.

See, Brother McDaniels wasn't coming to church, even though he was as converted as a member comes. He was an intellectual, witty former Bishopric member, married in the temple, returned missionary, thoroughly convinced of the church's truthfulness...

...and, oh yeah, did I mention he contracted leprosy on his mission that manifested some twenty years later? Now he was basically homebound, and the idea of referring someone to the missionaries was laughable because he never met anyone.

The church wasn't the strongest where I was, and as a result tended to overuse its most faithful members. Saying yes to one calling and fulfilling it well usually meant another, and another. The perception that someone was a strong member meant that would not rest again.

So what happens when one of those members has a rare disease rendering his continued movement increasingly painful, forcing him to step back hours and eventually quit his job, and taking him further and further from a normal life?

The bishop drags his feet on allowing Brother McDaniels' family access to church aid, feels inspired to assign him another calling as a family history coordinator on top of the role in the bishopric he is currently serving, later feels inspired to unceremoniously drag him into his office and lecture him on duty before abruptly releasing him from the bishopric, and then the ward continues asking for more—Sunday school lessons and so forth. The whole time, in his telling, Brother McDaniels did his best to follow what was asked of him and to serve and take on the responsibilities he was asked to take on. He was a converted member, after all. That was his job, even if his life was literally falling apart around him.

And still he believed. He spoke with regret about how he used to know the scriptures like the back of his hand and study them every day, and now was reading the Epic of Gilgamesh instead and feeling torn. He talked about how he knew he needed to return to church, and he wanted to return to church, but there was such a tangle of issues in the way. Throughout, one thing was cuttingly clear: a man who had a good life and dedicated his life to the church found only continued demands, not support, when everything crashed down around him. Perfect obedience, in his case, would have meant subjecting himself to a torturous situation.

When you believe, though, when you're really committed to the gospel, willing disobedience is a torture in itself. Consciously choosing to not attend church (and he made it clear he could still attend, but chose not to) meant breaking the Sabbath. Turning down the Bishop's requests would have been a lack of faith in his heaven-appointed leaders. Even listening to missionaries ask for a stupid referral and having no way to give it to them is a reminder that you are not helping to grow the kingdom of God. Guilt and sorrow were written into his face and into every part of his story. Even as he told us how various nerves were irreparably damaged, how his days were pained and his nights were sleepless, he was expressing his hope to have the courage to return to church.

"Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" For Brother McDaniels, there wasn't, and any answers or support we could provide as missionaries seemed woefully inadequate. What do you do when what is supposed to be an anchor keeping someone stable is instead the anchor dragging them down? How can a missionary help a wounded soul injured explicitly because of the member's devotion to God? How do you promise blessings for obedience when the blessings expressly and loudly failed to come when he obeyed?

That was a big weight on my mind in my mission. I saw the church work well in many people's lives, but when it stopped working, there was nobody there to say "It's okay to take a break. It's fine to step away. You won't be working against God. You won't be failing your faith." There's just a horde of friendly arms reaching out, a hundred cheerful, loving mouths saying "Any time you feel ready to come back to church, you'll be welcome!" and a double helping of guilt and sorrow. The only answer we could give was come to church, just come along and things will work out somehow.

Let me say again: The leprosy was from his mission.

The Ex-Mormon’s Return

"Everything I was doing, as far as my lifestyle diverged from the church, I always felt like the Mormon kid doing those things."

You know, all this recent talk about the story about an ex-Mormon attorney who returned to the church reminded me of another story.

This one's one of my favorites. It was one of my favorite faith-building moments when it happened, one of the brightest spots looking back on my mission immediately, and one of the most thought-provoking as I consider things again from a new perspective.

Yes, it's time for the story of Alexander, the ex-Mormon who called us up and told us he wanted to return to church. Yeah, he was a true convert to anti-mormonism. Yep, he genuinely wanted to go back to church. And his return, in the end, went much better than many here might expect, if not quite as well as active members would have hoped to build a perfect faith-promoting story(tm).

Let's dive in.

You're never quite sure what to expect as a missionary when a member calls you up and tells you they have someone who wants to return to church. Half the time, the "person who wants to return" looks at you like you're crazy when you mention it; another good chunk, nobody even picks up the phone.

Have I ever mentioned how rarely people pick up the phone when you're calling them as a missionary? Story for another time.

This time, though, a sweet and sincere older lady asked us to get in contact with her son. She said he'd fallen away from the church at fourteen and had shown no interest in returning for the past sixteen years, but had a spiritual awakening recently and wanted to explore the possibility of coming back. And so we called the number provided, and a perfectly sane and reasonable guy answered confirming the story and agreeing to meet up with us.

So we talked to him. Cool, cool guy. He'd fit right into [r/exmormon], and in fact said he participated in several groups like [it]. He'd never been particularly inclined towards church things, and at the age of fourteen dove into all the information available online and came away perfectly confident and content that the church was not true, that his family was wrong, and that it was time to step away and not look back. He knew all the history, read all the evidence, was passionate about LGBT causes... all of it. So he moved on with his life, got a job catching people cheating in online poker, and was perfectly content without any spiritual element in his life.

A couple years back, his sister died, and a couple of things shifted in his life that made him start looking around for that spiritual element again. He looked towards Buddhism and searched around some other faiths for a while, but as he put it, he kept comparing everything he went to back to what he grew up with, and eventually he decided to give it another try. He identified strongly with ideas of a gospel of personal progression, a church that expected action and improvement, and related concepts.

He also gave the quote above about how he never stopped "feeling Mormon," in a sense, and talked about how there are some things it's really hard to internally let go of—things like the idea of a pre-existence that keep kicking around. The talk "Come, Join With Us" opened the doors for him and made him feel like perhaps there was a place in the church for him. He expressed a hope that things would or could shift to be a bit more open and liberal on some issues important to him.

I suppose it was a bad sign for my own activity in the church that I was more comfortable talking to him and understood his perspective more easily than that of many active members. It was strange and kind of cool for both sides, I think—on the one, an ex-Mormon who is considering returning to a faith he left behind long ago, on another, a missionary companionship facing down and thinking about all the same issues that drew Alexander away and willing to talk about them openly and frankly. At last, I thought, someone who understands the issues, who wrestles with the questions I wrestle with, and at the same time feels the same draw to the church I do.

We all agreed: the church didn't have all the answers, we personally didn't really know them, but where he was it made sense to go back and try awhile longer, to see if he got again the spiritual nourishment he was hungry for and to consider again the aspects of the doctrine he appreciated. We read to him from D&C 121:34-46—verses that to this day I love and appreciate as a guide for how to act in any leadership position—when he talked about wanting to prepare for the Melchizedek Priesthood. He mentioned candidly how a 10% paycut would bite, but that he bought plenty that he didn't need and wasn't suffering for cash. It was a frank and fascinating conversation with someone who was genuinely interested in returning to church.

Unfortunately for my direct involvement in the story, he ended up going to a different ward than the one I was in, but he sent us a text from his first time back at church. I'll paraphrase it: "I went to church in the city ward today and it was AWESOME! I felt the Spirit really strongly and everyone was so welcoming and good. Thanks for talking with me."

Talk about a faith-building, pat-yourselves-on-the-back moment for missionaries. Wrap it up, write home, tell the story of a lost sheep finding his way back, call it a day.

We all know the world isn't that simple. I had a chance to catch up with Alexander later in my mission, and he talked about how excommunications of a couple of prominent Mormon activists (looking back, I believe he was talking about Kate Kelly and/or John Dehlin) took a lot of the wind out of his sails and how difficult it was to find a spot in the church, especially outside of Utah, as a single 31-year-old. He had a good experience on his return and a lot of what he remembered and appreciated, he still appreciated when he came back. Ultimately, though, it became clear to him once again: the church is not an easy place to be for one in his position, and makes a lot of moves that push against his sensibilities. The message of welcoming he heard in "Come, Join With Us" and the various doctrines he appreciated and still identified with in the church was counterbalanced by every push back from all the issues faced today by an intellectual, liberal Mormon.

That's it, as far as I know. That's the story of the 16-year departure, return, and redeparture of Alexander from the church, the miracle-story-turned-sad-reminder for a young, searching missionary.

So, in answer to the question posed by some here: Yes, sometimes ex-Mormons do want to return to church. In fact, there are even times when it seems they can find a comfortable place within the faith and apply some doctrine they still hold close.

And then the church doubles down.

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The “Golden Investigator”

A “golden investigator” is someone who, in the eyes of missionaries, is a perfect potential convert to Mormonism.

Look, my last story19 was pretty bleak. It was asking to be told, but it was not the happiest of moments for anyone involved. It is possible, in pausing for recollections like that, to fall back into grim patterns of thought. Partly to guard against that, partly because his story deserves to be told, I'd like to share the story of Ambrose, one of the best men I know.

The image of him I will always hold is the time we were walking back from a discussion in a park. We were in a rougher part of town, streets littered with broken bottles, beer cans, and other debris. As he walked, he would pause frequently and bend to pick up the bottles littering the ground, mumbling that he didn't want cats to step on them and be hurt.

The man was like a monk. His story came out in bits and pieces during our conversations in the park, how he lived with his elderly mother and ran a shelter for stray animals at his home with her. How he had started out studying a harder science, but had changed his course of study to psychology and social work because he wanted to make a genuine difference for people. His introversion and withdrawal from most social situations. Most intriguingly for missionaries, his reasoned and careful faith.

See, we met him in a missionary's dream scenario. We were in our car headed to a visit, saw him nearby, and my companion felt like we should talk to him. During the conversation, he described himself as a Christian, but one who didn't attend any specific church: not out of apathy, since he was highly religious in word and action. Rather, he said he read the Bible on his own and disagreed with some of their teachings... the trinity, for example.

Words like that are absolute music to missionaries. As we met, though, I grew more and more quietly frustrated—not with him, but with the lessons and way we were supposed to teach him. Here was a man who was thoughtful and good, who asked sincere questions and meant every word he said, who agreed with our beliefs in key areas. We were going through a simplistic, set pattern of lessons and commitments and expecting him to change everything in a month or two. It was not really meeting his needs, but the church doesn't have a mechanism for slow and thoughtful investigation. It demands commitments and baptisms now.

We had incredible conversations, though. He thought, asked questions, and listened. We shared our stories and he shared his, talking once about how he spent a lot of time on various discussion forums working towards and presenting views of a reasoned faith. During one of our meetings, he shared an observation and question that he considered among the most troubling for a faithful person. That question has since become a core one of my own, and so I'll share it.

He pointed out that he'd spent a lot of time reading, discussing, and thinking about faith. He talked about how some people were content to just accept wherever they were, how they simply weren't intellectually open or curious. Those he understood for the question he was to ask. But what about the rest? There were people he had met online, in person, through stories, that were clearly earnest seekers of truth.

Why did they believe so many different things if there is one true path? How can earnest, seeking, thoughtful people be so wildly divergent in their beliefs after examining the same data? Because these people exist, how can you be truly confident in your own belief?

I'm not here to pretend it's a unique observation or question. What I will say is that it is a critical one. Glib, simple answers do not do it justice. I shared some thoughts at that time, but I thought a whole lot more about it, because one of the church's fundamental claims is that God will lead earnest searchers to the church if they just give it a chance. And here was a gentle reminder, from the among the most earnest searchers and practitioners of faith, that things were simply not that simple. Unfortunately, this point does not fit in the standard narrative and so is rarely given more than brief or glib treatment.

That question is where the story ends. I was transferred from the area, and he met with the missionaries one more time afterwards—for my sake, I think, since I'd asked him to keep meeting with them—but the missionary-prescribed path of discussion was simply not particularly meaningful for one in his position. With luck, I will find his email at some point and get in contact, but our meeting served its purpose:

Here was a remarkable, sincere, religious man who was willing to do what we asked and test our faith, one who was a "golden" investigator by missionary standards, who agreed with some of the church's fundamental principles

and he saw what we had and thought about it and talked over it and then walked away, continuing on his hopeful path.

The next sequential story is that of my chosen title, previously reproduced on my Substack.

The Bitter End

If there is any defining story in my journey out of the church, this is it. This was the moment that tore my soul apart, that made me lose all sense of peace within the church, that left me spiritually paralyzed for the next two years.

It is not a happy story. It does not have a bright lining. It was a horrible, senseless experience that I have spent a great deal of time since trying to categorize, trying to explain, trying to overcome. If it is long, it is because this is the first time I have told it in full, and I desperately want to convey some of the feeling of a moment that requires context.

This is the story of the time I put every ounce of faith I had left into God, then was left reeling in the aftermath. And it starts with a conversation on transfer day20:

"Are you certain? Are you absolutely certain this is inspired?"

I feel bad for the poor APs21. I felt bad for them then. But I was a tired kid at the end of a long mission and on my last shreds of sanity. I started with absolute commitment to being an extraordinary missionary, to doing all in my power and putting my heart in the hands of a God I was trying to learn to trust. Things had started badly and corrected with a couple of high points in the first year that made me feel like things could be getting somewhere. After the start, though? Not a lot. The past year had been a slow decline as I realized that I did not have the testimony to lead a companionship to success, would not allow myself any degree of disobedience, and could not resolve attendant tensions within my companionships.

From the start, one of my biggest goals was learn to be close with those working alongside me, something that did not come naturally to me. For a host of reasons, that entire year had followed a cycle of having a tricky companionship, trying and failing to resolve tensions, and running away to a new area. Any hint of investigators progressing towards baptism had faded. We had some meaningful experiences with less active members22, but in the past few months, those were gone as well. I had gone from being a zone leader at nine months to begging for a release23 and transfer, to having weekly phone calls with the area mental health specialist. When I say I was at the end of my rope, believe me, I mean it.

There was one idea, one single point, that kept me clinging on to hope: God was in charge. He put missionaries exactly where they needed to be, with exactly who they needed to be with, in order to find exactly the people they needed to talk to. All that was impossible to understand would be resolved in time. Even as I struggled to know whether to believe in God, I told myself that if I just mustered what faith I had and went forward, he would guide me, and things would work out. It was my lifeline. But time was running out. I was down to my last transfer, and I'd spent the previous two with a missionary who I'll call Elder Ma (names have been changed for the privacy of individuals concerned). He first idolized me as an ideal companion and former leader of his, then grew to hate me as he realized how human I was. Three days of venomous silence towards me followed by blowing up in my face and screaming louder than I'd known people could scream marked the end of a desperate transfer. I was genuinely afraid of being around him.

And then we got transfer news. Two missionaries, coming into our area. Our companionship would be split up—one new missionary with me, one with the companion I'd had such troubles with. One of the incoming missionaries, Elder Kim, was a close friend of mine, one who I got along near-perfectly with and loved working alongside. The other, Elder Cao, had been transferred out of the area alongside his companion just two transfers prior, leaving me and Elder Ma to clean up the mess. Reports were that he was depressed, frustrated with trying to learn English, unsure of his own testimony, and had significant psychological problems attached specifically to certain aspects of that area.

No prizes for guessing which one was assigned to Elder Ma and which to me.

A new mission president had just arrived in the mission, and hey, why not try new things, right?

So there I was, staring down the APs, daring them to tell me that this was from God. They told me that our new president was an inspired man. I called him personally and expressed my concern. He said he thought it would work.

What else was there to do? I prayed for humility, patience, and faith. I told myself I would repent of my doubts and simply work to be the best companion I could. I donned my smiling mask, welcomed Elder Cao to the area, and got busy with the work. I was even cooking meals for him, because apparently that's a way for friends to support each other? I never cook. And for about a week and a half, things were bright! They were happy. The work was moving forward a bit. It looked like we might actually be successful.

Two weeks from that, I was staring at my phone, willing myself to call the mission president, admit failure, and beg for an emergency transfer24. Elder Cao had gone non-communicative and wouldn't participate in study or work. My own depression had clawed its way back in. Nothing was working, everything had gone to pieces, and all I had left to hope for was a few weeks of peaceful work to end my mission and nurse my wounds. I had failed. My hope for my mission was extinguished.

Now, how do you think a mission president would respond to a desperate, sobbing missionary explaining that he just couldn't make things work with his companion, he tried, everything fell apart, please just get him out of there? If you answered "Move both of them to an apartment right next to the mission home, tell them not to leave their apartment except for a few specific tasks and to just study all day," congratulations, you get a gold star, because that is exactly what that inspired servant of God did.

Thought experiment: what happens when you put two depressed, stressed people with a language and communication barrier in the same room with nothing to do all day after one of them has begged to be moved and while he just wants to finish by doing some semblance of important work?

Apparently in our mission president's inspired mind, the answer was "experience a therapeutic, healing, and restful time where everything will get better." Let's check in with reality: my companion still wouldn't talk to me, started going places without caring whether I was following, and reached a point where I told him I was hungry and needed to grab some food from a nearby store and he just said "No" and walked in the opposite direction. Finally, after two days of this, I told him I appreciated him, I wanted to talk with him, wanted to work through things with him, would do anything I could. He ignored me. I asked him to say something, anything. He ignored me and walked away. I knew you can't force conversations, but knew at the same time that we needed to work together and the status quo was unmaintainable, so I pushed the issue again. He grabbed the phone, called the APs, and said, "My companion is trying to talk to me, but I don't want to talk." That's all he would say. No explanation. No context. Nothing. He just said he didn't want to talk, he didn't want to say why, he would not talk, again and again for some half an hour.

I mean, on the bright side, that was enough to get the emergency transfer I had asked for a week before.

That was two weeks before the end of my mission.

I called my mission president. I asked for a meeting. And I sat down, and asked him to be perfectly honest with me, and tell me, please, please, if that was inspired.

I give him credit for his answer, at least. He sensed my desperation, I think, and was open. He told me no, it was not inspired. He said he had been working from incomplete information and made a mistake. He said he put that elder with me because, as he said, "I knew you had been struggling with depression so I thought you might be able to work with him." He said he was inspired in maybe half his calls, but the others were just basically filling in the gaps. We said a little bit more, and then he went away, and I sat in the shattered remnants of my mission.

Here, in my own words, is my reaction to the news—that of a missionary trying to think positively, trying to do things the way God tells him to, having just been told by the person he had trusted to administer God's will that there was nothing there at the single most critical point:

Now, all of [the things he said about inspiration] are clear to anyone who's really looking, and they weren't news to me, but it was such a relief to hear it said! But with that relief comes a lurking feeling of adriftness. In a way, the simple church answers are nice. It's nice to feel that every calling is from God, that the Church is a purely uplifting force, and so on. But it's not Truth, and must be discarded at some point in the approach. For most of us most of the time, it's just people doing their thing the best they can, with a nudge here and a poke there if it's really crucial. It means that not every Church story will have a happy ending in the moment we see it. Not every investigator who reads the Book of Mormon will feel a magical wave of power. Not every testimony or talk is specifically inspired to touch some audience members. Ward councils are usually dysfunctional through no spiritual fault of participants.

These are the ways things work, in everything, really. I had hoped the Church was somehow different, against evidences received. And, well, there are some differences and the spirit's whisper is real, and promptings do happen and are beautiful. But there is more.

That was my brighter moment. My darker one went more like this:

"Oh, you say you're trapped within your own mind and watching your last hopes for your mission crumble around you? Well yeah, okay, that assignment was probably not inspired. You still want to finish strong, you say? Cool. We'll stick you right... here, and just have you study all day while we kick ideas around. Yep, you're still with your silent friend, so there's no way to get out of your own head now! See you in two weeks!"

Is it really that hard to say, "Well, what do you think would work?" after all else has failed?

It's easy to say God will make more of your life than you will, but what do you do when you've put your heart into letting Him take control and the car wrecks itself?

And that's how it ended. I put my trust in God, bet on what I'd been taught of him against all my intuition and reason, and came away feeling utterly broken and empty.

My last two weeks were spent drifting aimlessly through my area, getting up on time and studying and walking around city streets until I had fulfilled the bare minimum of my duty. My dreams of being a remarkable missionary or even a very good one had been torn to pieces, tossed to the ground, and stomped on. My hope of gaining a witness of the church was shattered. There was nothing left to do but go home and try to move beyond whatever was left. I drifted through final words of wisdom and preparation, mustered up one last testimony for my fellow missionaries, answered the temple recommend25 questions in as skeptical a way as I could manage while my mission president listened without caring, sat through a few empty parting thoughts from him, and stepped forward into two years of trying to come to terms with all that had happened.

Now, I guess I'm finally coming to terms with it. The light is dawning. It's just not the light I asked for or ever wanted to see.

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Adrift A Year Post-Mission

Note: This is the earliest writing in the bunch, and it was written while I was a believer to an audience of believing Mormons. Presented here as the most natural place sequentially.

I can’t stand writing about this, because I have so very much to say but no idea how to properly convey any of it. I’m simply tired of being so very spiritually adrift and alone.

I returned from my mission a year ago. I left for it unrefined, full of questions and doubt, only sure that I knew the Church was good and hoping to figure out the rest along the way. Two years later, I walked away deeply appreciative of several spiritual high points, but bruised by the lows and somehow more conflicted about it all than when I started. Since then, I have simply been drifting, confused and clueless about my next step.

It might be best to start with what I believe and know: No explanation for the Book of Mormon holds up to examination except that it was from God. Joseph Smith and the early Saints were flawed but deeply earnest and devoted in their cause. Many verses of scripture in all the Standard Works contain powerful and remarkable truths that consistently move me as I read them and talk about them. Our current prophet and apostles are good men of remarkable integrity and faith who see and speak clearly. And we, as individuals and a collective Church, are generally good people who are trying to do right. These are the anchors, the foundations of my faith.

But then I hear quotes like the following from Mother Teresa (as referenced in this recent Conference talk), and I identify so firmly with them that I practically collapse in tears: “Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself—for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’ Ask Our Lord to give me courage.”

I have read the Book of Mormon in as much an attitude of faith as I can muster. I have prayed, earnestly and repeatedly, asking for further light from God. Each time I pray it is as if I am crying into a void, hoping vainly for an answer. There is no comfort or strength there. On my mission, I was determined to be exact, to be faithful, to Do Things Right and let God guide. A few amazing moments occurred—things that still give me strength—but more and more towards the end, things began to descend into a struggle that was at times emotionally devastating and nightmarish. My initial hope that I would find evidence that God was guiding me and those around me in His church was met by a confounding sequence of events that seemed to confirm the opposite. Even though the vast majority of “problems” ex-members or people of other faiths raise do not worry me at all, I continue to find no answers to my own most pressing questions of faith, and have reluctantly concluded that for many of them, there are no answers yet. Meanwhile, the week-to-week reality of being a member and attending church has become frustrating and dull in a way I never really anticipated.

As of now, I find myself in an impossible position. On the one hand, there are truths I cannot avoid even if I wanted to. On the other, there are pressing questions that I cannot explain away or pretend have been answered. I find myself going through the motions of everything related to the Gospel despite yearning to be a spiritual and a good person, in large part because every time I do even a bit more than going through the emotions, it hurts. A lot. Writing this hurts, and it’s the most meaningful spiritual thing I’ve done in months. It drains me.

I talked to my mission presidents while I was serving. I’ve talked with my bishops since. We’ve had good conversations, but both they and I knew each time that we’d had to leave most problems unresolved. I’ve talked with my family members and closest friends, only to realize that the people closest to me are wrestling with similar situations. Each conversation brings the assurance that at least I am sane, but pushes spiritual peace yet further away.

Of course I don’t expect to magically get all the answers from an online forum. But where I am is unsustainable, and if there is one thing forums are good for, it is the chance to draw from a wealth of different people’s life experiences. All of what I’ve written serves, in a way, as the question I would pose to all of you, but to summarize:

What does one do when Peter’s famous words to Christ in the aftermath of disciples turning away become not an affirmation of faith, but an expression of helplessness: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” Or, in other words, what do you do when your place in the Church is uncomfortable and unstable, but you recognize that there is no other place to turn?

EDIT: It's pretty interesting for me to see how many people who have left the Church have independently messaged me about what I've said here. It's up to five now, so I'll say here a bit of what I've told them: I really am not who you're looking for. Whatever concerns I have, I love the Gospel and have found little of value in the materials you always recommend to your potential investigators. It is possible to question some things without believing that it all must be wrong and I ought to walk away from it. There's a reason I posted this in /r/latterdaysaints and not elsewhere.

And with that, we’re back to the creation of the name Tracing Woodgrains and the request to “Convince Me.” All subsequent posts are from the early days of my path out of Mormonism.

You Convinced Me

Hey, everyone. A few of you probably read my post from a few days ago, found here. I laid out my thoughts, you all responded, and I thought a lot about my position and what I really believe.

And I was wrong. That's where I'll start. I've had a lot of questions, worries, and doubts about church doctrine for years, but I was scared of losing something so core to me and always optimistic that somehow, some way, they'd get resolved. I dove into apologetic arguments 5 years ago and read the essays26 the day they came out. I was being sincere when I mentioned that the Book of Mormon was my core sticking point. It always got skimmed over in the analyses I read, and in truth I didn't feel like seeking out a lot of them. But it weighed as the main counterbalance for a flood of other concerns. It's funny, because not a lot of them are cultural or historical. In compiling what bothered me, I had only mission materials to work from (since, well, I was a missionary at the time), and they were all I really cared to consider there. There were enough sticking points for me that I didn't have time to worry about the rest of it. I clung fast to all evidences of faith I found, though, and let them anchor me for a long time. I passively ignored things and shut things out, and I was wrong, and I was careless.

But, well, you all convinced me. There were a lot of good points raised. Reading about Mormon quoting directly from verses added by scribes after the fact to Mark and the Deutero-Isaiah chapters being included in Second Nephi was the point at which I had no more, really, to say. It's a hard point to argue, it was new information to me... you can consider it the straw that broke the camel's back. Vogel and statistical analyses of the Book of Mormon text were also extremely informative.

I still don't know where exactly I go from here. I'm not angry with the church, just tired and wanting to figure out what is really true. It's been such a core part of my life that I hardly know who to be out of its context—as immersed in church culture as I've been my whole life, every perspective, every belief, virtually every idea that I have is connected to the church in one way or another. I'll probably even keep attending for a while—my ward doesn't have a backup organist. But my mind is out, and all the little hints, all the cascading clues and nagging irregularities that piled up are sitting ready to be resolved.

I have a lot to write here—stories that pulled me towards this path, worries that kept building up, the path of adjusting my life and sense of self. I want to get my mind straightened out. I've been so tired of desperately trying to align my beliefs to the church's. It was a struggle my entire mission, it's been a struggle since, but I never wanted to do anything halfway and I was going to be the best church member I could if it killed me. My first post here was after my main decision point, honestly: when I was being a good member, I couldn't ever bring myself to come here or read anything you all said without revulsion. But I sat down a few times last week trying to write a mission retrospective and broke down crying each time as I remembered how hard it had been, how mentally torn I had felt. I realized then that the longer I spent trying to resolve things through a lens of faith, the longer that feeling of being confused and torn would persist.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I went away from church schools a while back, so I don't have that hanging over my head. My family knows the struggle I've gone through spiritually and they're supportive of me even though they're active members. I already told them, in fact. My mom's first reaction was "Yeah, that doesn't really surprise me" and they told me they love me and want to see me find spiritual peace and be happy. My closest friends in church have plenty of their own doubts and are okay with me doing what I see as best. I'm sure some people will freak out, but I've never hidden my beliefs or perspectives.

Anyway, thanks, guys. Several of you provided really valuable perspectives and did a lot to help me even begin to imagine the possibility of leaving the church (special thanks to /u/bwv549 and /u/I_am_a_real_hooman for really taking me seriously and taking the time to share in-depth and thorough perspectives that helped me reframe things). Others of you still make me recoil by instinct with some of what you say and how you approach things, frankly, but I'm growing to understand your perspectives.

It's going to be an interesting ride. It's not what I had planned, but I'm slowly starting to think it might be for the best. It will be a while before I know what any of my perspectives are and what life will look like moving forward, but that's okay, I guess.

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Of Moving On: Experiences with Unitarian Universalists

As I mentioned in my initial post about being convinced, despite my current position of uncertainty, engaging with spiritual things remains important for me. So, in between sessions of General Conference (which I still listened to, since I want to be certain and to make it absolutely clear that I am not running away from opportunities to let God speak to me), I went and visited a local Unitarian Universalist church. It was my first time at one of their services, my first time even thinking about attending.

Okay, you know all those stories about missionaries meeting someone, dragging them to church, and them talking about how it feels like coming home, like filling in something that was missing in their lives, and so on?

Yeah, it was like that.

I don't know whether I'll keep attending there and know hardly anything about them, but my experience there was the first really spiritual time I've had at a church service since my mission. They had beautiful classical music mixing with beautiful hymns in every break and throughout the worship service. Kids got to gather around for a story up front, then dismiss to classes instead of sitting through a service designed for adults. An SPCA representative stood up at the beginning and talked for a bit, and half their donation plate went to the SPCA that week. In all of the conversation and talks at the meeting, an overriding theme was the pursuit of goodness and truth. After the main meeting, various groups broke off to talk about helping social causes in the local area, answering questions about their practices, and so forth. Everywhere I looked was transparency—how much money they were looking to raise, where it was going and why, why they ran their meetings the way they did, and so on, was apparent not just through asking but openly displayed around their building.

And underlying all of it was the core message that I did not have to come to the same conclusions as anybody else in the building, an emphasis on asking the right questions rather than finding all the answers, the idea that intellectual curiosity and careful examination of everything were vital in an individual's spiritual quest. In short: every frustration that I had with three hours of repetitive, soporific meetings in which too often the sensation of doing real good seemed lost, with a culture of suffocating questions and encouraging conformity, and other disconnects attached to church faded away, while everything I loved about the idea of serving others, pursuing truth and right and benefiting from shared experience was preserved. The best part is that I can continue attending or leave with no attendant sense of compulsion or guilt.

One reason I have clung to the church for so long is the good I saw and see in it. I like the pursuit of spiritual truth. I am drawn to the idea of a community working together to do good. I love playing and hearing religious music. Things might change, but at least right now, I feel like quoting the unicorn from C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle when he goes to Aslan's country:

"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."

The reason I loved church at times is that it sometimes looked a little like what I saw today. I still don't know exactly where I'm headed, but every day things seem to get a bit brighter and paths for life in the wake of the church seem a little clearer and a little happier.

Here's hoping it continues. This is all still so new.

Note: It didn’t continue. I enjoyed my experience with the UUs, but ultimately concluded that groups would inevitably build a local consensus, that they’d snuck a specific dogma in through the back door while feeling like they were open, and that I didn’t particularly fit in with their implicit frame.

Church as a Non-Believer

I don't know why I'm so determined to make things this hard for myself, but, well, here I am. It was my first time to church since my recent change of perspective. I went there today to play the organ for them, stayed to tell my bishop my stance on things and see how he would respond to my questions, and stayed a whole lot longer as he tried to figure out what was wrong with me. I was and am torn about telling him, but my inclination is to be as open and honest about things as possible in hopes of achieving some sort of mutual understanding.

Oh, and I accidentally got in an argument about prophets in Sunday School, which I was attending while waiting for the bishop. I'm still not used to the new boundaries of what to say and what not to, and one of my comments touched an "apostasy warning" vein with a well-meaning senior missionary and, well, yeah. It was a bit discouraging to realize at every turn how much I disagree with on any given Sunday and how quickly I became "the guy in spiritual peril." I'm not so good at keeping my head down.

It might have been a mistake to meet with my bishop. I'm torn. On the one hand I want to make it absolutely clear that the standard reasons the church gives for people leaving do not apply. On the other, it makes a good, busy man take a lot of time and energy having no real idea what to say to me. Interesting conversation, though. I presented my story and core concerns. He realized pretty quickly that "read and pray" weren't going to cut it and had a really hard time figuring out how I could have prayed, gone to the temple, read the scriptures, and come away not believing. He tried to create an atmosphere to let the spirit testify to me by sharing various personal experiences and scriptures. I told him my questions remained. After a while he told me (very kindly) that the spirit prompted him to tell me I may be possessed by an evil spirit that is blocking me from receiving truth and that a priesthood blessing27 might help.

Eventually, though, he finally realized that an otherwise worthy, fully active member just did not believe any more. He asked me how he could help. I told him he could help by either providing likely impossible answers to my concerns and questions, telling me that the church didn't have answers to them, or by telling me it was okay not to believe and to leave. He took door number one and told me to email him my questions, either all at once or one at a time over the course of a couple weeks.

Now I guess is the time for me to write out my list. I don't feel great about it. At this point, I've read enough similar experiences to guess where it's going to go. But at the same time I feel a sort of sense of duty to leave no stone unturned, to let him make a good-faith effort to answer, and to see if perhaps I can demonstrate there really aren't good answers available for the problems I have. At the very least, he will remember that someone who ticked all the boxes of faithful membership, was open and honest with him, and who was willing to do what he asked still did not receive a spiritual witness of the truth claims of the church. To be honest, I was impressed so far with his willingness to let me put forward the hard questions.

The downside is that it will take a lot of time and energy for both of us. I have some hope, though, that greater understanding will be the ultimate result. He hasn't accused me of secretly harboring terrible sins, at least. He really doesn't know what to think right now. Which is good, I think?

“Send Me Your Questions”

Those of you who have been following the story may have seen that my bishop agreed to look at and respond to my questions after a three-hour meeting in which his main response for why I haven't been receiving answers was, "The Spirit is prompting me to say that you may be plagued by an evil spirit." I knew it couldn't really go anywhere, but I wanted to be absolutely certain. I am set on doing due diligence in all regards, and according to the church, that means asking a bishop questions you know he doesn't have answers to so he can figure out all the best ways to lovingly call you to repentance.

I thought you all might enjoy highlights of the email exchange:

My first question: With people receiving inconsistent answers when asking about the church and other people convinced that God has testified to them of the truthfulness of other faiths, how can we trust the validity of Moroni's promise?

I shared my own lack of a spiritual witness, my experiences with others, and similar experiences in other faiths as background information for the question.

His first response, trimmed down from some 3300 words:

What others, of any description think or feel isn't the issue: We have no knowledge of what is in their hearts or minds. For you, the important questions are: Do you have a sincere heart? Do you possess real intent? Do you have faith in Jesus Christ?

Now Brother Jack, this is the answer, to your question, for which you've been searching:

Why not exchange intellectual prowess, logic, a sense of urgency, and pride for faith, patience, and humility, to wait on the Lord's time, not your own, to receive an answer to your prayers?

Why not submit your will to God the Father? Why not be teachable? Why not be humble, and the Lord will lead thee by the hand?

My second question: With DNA evidence pointing against the Book of Mormon, little to no archaeological evidence in favor, and the presence of 19th century ideas and errors specific to the KJV, how can I trust that the Book of Mormon is the record of ancient scripture it claims to be?

I then expanded on the "19th century ideas and errors specific to the KJV" portion, as well as reminding him again of my persistent, fruitless efforts to pray about it and receive revelation concerning it.

His second response, trimmed down from a whopping 8000 words:

The wicked believe they won't feel guilty if they destroy all that is right and good. The devil wants all of us to be equal in misery on the race to the bottom. Stay true to the faith, dear Brother. Follow the prophet, he knows the way. ... What you think, say, and do now isn't just for you. It's for your future wife, and your posterity yet unborn.

... Take a close look at yourself. Both self-pity and arrogance are different types of pride.

... God will give you the answers when He is ready, not when you are ready. Continue to follow His Commandments. Stop reading anti-Mormon literature.

... You are walking down a spiritually perilous path. Reading anti-Mormon literature is tantamount to sympathizing with the man who drinks poison and expects the other person to die. ... Are you looking for truth in all the wrong places? ... The anti-Mormon literature will lead all who read it to sadness, confusion, and long term pain.

Why not find the truth from prophets, seers, and revelators instead of absorbing the fault-finding ramblings from misguided souls who, through frequent repetition, believe falsehoods to be true? Since you believe in truth and goodness, the Book of Mormon will be, to you, like pure water in the desert to a thirsty soul.

... Stop looking beyond the mark. ... Stop going down strange roads to nowhere.

[Tad R. Callister's recent talk, basically in its entirety]

... Why continue consulting and absorbing the dead end reckoning of the the disaffected and the disheartened deliverers of the false opinions of men, through the anti-Mormon, anti-truth, and anti-Christ literature which brings you long term frustration and confusion, disguised as short term comfort?

Such are the wolves in sheep's clothing. ...Why not exchange speculations from the mind of men for revelations of truth from God's chosen servants? Why not exchange reliance on fallible, mortal experts to reliance on our all-knowing Creator?

Not a word of direct response to the questions. Not a moment of validation for why I would be where I am. Not a trace of any plan for positive action other than "stop thinking of dangerous questions and keep tracing woodgrains and waiting for answers."

I wish I could write the response I want him to hear. I wish I could properly condense a lifetime of trying to resolve questions, of trying to quiet voices of doubt, of convincing myself that LDS sources would have the light I sought if I looked hard enough or looked right enough or lived right enough or did something, anything into a few words. I wish, impossibly, irreconcilably, that I could walk him through the process of having questions and doubts and inconsistencies tear your mind in two as you seek desperately for any lifeline that will let you reconcile what you know with what you are taught.

I wish I could somehow convey the frustration and pain and sorrow of finding questions that are irreconcilable, of seizing at any hint of answers or peace from a system you have grown to love, of realizing that there are none forthcoming. Of realizing that all you will ever be told, all you can ever be told, is to be patient, keep waiting, and the irreconcilable will be reconciled in time.

I wish that I could let him glimpse what it is like to finally snap, to finally realize that you cannot possibly fit one more item into the impossible tangle you have been asked to accept, to finally wander towards people who you have always been told are a step short of the Devil incarnate only to find yourself staring at a thousand fragmented reflections of you.

I wish that he could answer "I don't know," that he could say "You might have some points," that the system could in some passing, fleeting way, somehow acknowledge the sheer pain it causes by acting like the only answer to sincere questions is to brush them under the rug and tell the questioner they are under the Devil's influence.

Instead, though, I'll write a polite form letter, thank him for his time and for caring about me, tell him that I'll think about his points, and calmly and bluntly refuse any future meetings. And I'll become, in his eyes, just another tragic story of an apostate who was too prideful to turn towards the light.

The bishop really is a good man. In every interaction I've had with him, including these, he's been kind, sincere, and willing to spend a ton of time trying to help people. It just happens that his kindness comes alongside 100% orthodox belief, which makes sincere disbelief impossible in his world. He is not the villain in this story, just a man trying to reconcile apparent impossibilities in his own way.

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Speaking in Church as a Nonbeliever

Note: LDS church meetings typically involve assigned speakers from the congregation. The bishops do not personally give sermons.

"Since we have some extra time today, I'd like to invite TracingWoodgrains up to share a few thoughts."

Wait, really? ...Really?

That was my first reaction, and honestly still my reaction looking back on it. This was the same bishop who spoke with me for three hours two weeks ago about why I lost my faith, the same bishop who called me to repentance and told me a devil may be possessing me, the bishop who knows exactly where I stand on church right now, inviting me to stand up and speak extemporaneously in sacrament meeting28 about a subject of my choice.

To be honest, I was impressed.

So what do you say? What do you share when asked to speak during church about your thoughts on a church you no longer believe in? What message do you share?

Everyone has different answers. My chosen one was simple: share the value of a pursuit of truth, talk about the only Conference talk in recent memory where a loss of belief was portrayed as a relatable and earnest path, and plead with members to understand and accept the paths of those who question and those who leave.

I didn't share any uncomfortable truths. I didn't shake the pulpit with fiery anger against the church. I didn't stand and bear testimony of how the church wasn't true—not because those messages are incorrect, but because all the ward would have seen was an angry apostate tearing into their faith.

I'm glad I got the chance to share, though. Let people see me for who I am, and the journey away from belief for what it is. Perhaps make people think, perhaps aid in an atmosphere of understanding and compassion... perhaps nothing. It doesn't change anything about my path. My own belief is already gone. But perhaps it eases the road for others, or gives them courage to face their questions, as they see me confidently expressing my own path and my loss of belief.

Forget the specifics of what I said, though: I could have said anything. And my bishop knew that, and he had me stand up anyway. He asked an openly non-believing member to tell their own story.

Take from it what you will. I find it fascinating.

On a related note, my stake president29 met with me today. He was much more open than my bishop. He listened, admitted he didn't have all the answers and had questions of his own, and offered to study and respond thoughtfully to all I presented him. I found nothing to complain about in his approach. We'll see if that changes at all as the questions start coming, but for now, it looks like I rolled well on leadership roulette at least at the stake level.

It's a story as old as the church, but I only live it once, and perhaps value can come from going through it all. I provided the Lowry Nelson exchange, the 1949 first presidency letter, and the question of how we can fully trust modern prophets in the light of that as the seed for our first discussion.

It appears that this story has plenty left to unfold yet. We'll see where it goes.

Coming Out to Family and Friends as a Nonbeliever

Two years to the day after I returned from my mission, I realized I could no longer believe in my own faith.

I think I cried more that day and in the weeks leading up to it than at any other time in my life. The process of questioning your faith is excruciating and terrifying, and above all deeply lonely. You don't know whether you can trust your own thoughts, or who you can trust with your questions, or really whether you can trust anything.

I know. For those of you who are active LDS members who know me through church, that is one of the worst things I could say. Don't worry. I'm not here to destroy your faith, to call you foolish or evil for believing in it. Rather, I am announcing this publicly in case others are struggling with pressing questions and feel alone in them. I'm talking about this because of the intense pressure I have felt not to talk about it, not to acknowledge the extent of my questions. I'm raising this because there are conversations in the church that need to be had.

Let me start by saying that everything I have loved about the church, I continue to love. I love the image of a God with a divine vision for each of His children. I love the ideas in 2 Nephi 2 and Alma 40-42, in D&C 88 and 93 and 121. I have absolutely found beauty in exploring the doctrine of the church and interacting with it. I have great respect for the poignant testimonies and devoted lives of my friends and family. Since the day I started asking questions in my teenage years, I have fought with every bit of my heart and soul to resolve them using every tool the church has given me. That was the goal of the mission I dedicated myself to like I have dedicated myself to nothing else. That has proven futile.

What are my specific concerns? They are nothing new. Many of you, active and believing Mormons, have heard them in some form time and again and carried on. I have cried countless times into the night seeking light and answers from God and have received none. There are a great deal of troubling events in church history. God's killings in the Old Testament and Book of Mormon are incompatible in my eyes with the loving God we teach. The Book of Mormon, once holding a place as a counterbalance against all my questions, has many "smoking guns" pointing away from it being an ancient work. These combine with experience through my mission and life that time and time again reinforced the idea that something was simply incorrect in the way I was being asked to perceive the world. My experience and observations align towards this conclusion: the church is full of many good, earnest people following mostly good principles and receiving the natural fruits of that, but that it is no more than that.

I won't impose on you the specific details of the questions, unless you want to have a conversation in private: it is not my intention to tear down the faith of others. Just know that the issues I'm grappling with are real, heartfelt, and unanswered by the church despite my best efforts. Know that they are enough to make me feel like I have no choice but to separate myself from what has been a core part of my identity, what always will be a core part of my culture and heritage and family.

Instead, I want to make a few observations about LDS church culture and how harmful it can be for those who doubt or who have heartfelt convictions in opposition to official church teachings. Forces in the church suffocate questions. They tell you that the reason you question is that you are immoral, a fault-finder, a doubter. They tell you that the only acceptable answer is to go back to reading the Book of Mormon and praying again. They lead you to doubt everything about yourself, and at the same time tell you that you cannot possibly be living life correctly if you choose to distance yourself from the church in any capacity. Then they pressure you to keep your doubt and questions quiet, personal, unobtrusive.

That culture is slowly changing. It's slowly opening up. People are realizing it's unsustainable. Church leaders are realizing something needs to be done. Initiatives towards openness have started--the lds.org essays on controversial issues, the Joseph Smith Papers project, the video on temple garments30, and so forth. This needs to continue. It needs to expand. There are serious, poignant, critical issues that need to be faced and understood whether people ultimately choose to stay in the church or to leave.

What actually happened that day in the sacred grove, those months in the creation of the Book of Mormon? There are clues—better ones than I realized—but nobody but Joseph Smith knows for sure. For a look at facing the most poignant challenges while preserving what is most beautiful within the faith, I strongly recommend Terryl Givens' work. If you're looking for honest history from a perspective of faith, look to Richard Bushman and Rough Stone Rolling. There are some things I'm certain about, though, statements that ring absolutely true to my soul. I'll let Bushman present the first statement:

"I think that for the Church to remain strong it has to reconstruct its narrative. The dominant narrative is not true; it can’t be sustained. The Church has to absorb all this new information or it will be on very shaky grounds and that’s what it is trying to do and it will be a strain for a lot of people, older people especially. But I think it has to change." (Source: http://www.mormonstories.org/richard-bushman-reaffirms-his-testimony-of-angels-plates-translations-revelations/ , where he also reaffirms his testimony)

The second statement comes from John Dehlin, who has done more to give a voice to people struggling in faith crises than perhaps anyone else connected with the church:

"My view is, there is something fundamentally immoral to presenting a narrative that people build their entire lives upon. They decide what to do with their education, how much money to give, who to marry, when to marry, how many kids to have, what professions to pursue. There’s this massive amount of decisions that you make—in a finite life. And to base that life on a narrative—when not only the narrative isn’t what it claims to be, but when the leaders know that the narrative isn’t what it claims to be, and intentionally, for as long as they could, withheld the information that would allow people to make an informed decision about how they spend their finite time and resources—is profoundly immoral." (quote from the Mormon Stories podcast, which I cannot recommend highly enough for people looking for thoughtful portrayals of the different faith journeys individuals travel)

That's it. That realization is where my journey has led. I don't know all the ramifications yet. This is all very new for me. But I feel duty-bound, as I always have, to pursue truth and goodness wherever they lead. That pursuit of what is true and of what is good are the values I place at the core of my own life.

I'm happy to continue this conversation with anyone who feels it is important, whether you have powerful perspectives of your own to share from within the church or without—especially with anyone who finds themselves passing through what Dostoevsky called so powerfully the crucible of doubt. That's an isolating, scary, miserable place, and I am happy to hear you out, withhold judgment, and talk through challenging questions.

Anyway, that's quite a bit to put out there, and quite a bit to take in, I'm sure. It is a conversation, though, that is crying to be had.

Responses from Family and Friends

I've been going back and forth on how much of the response to my Facebook declaration to share. In the end, this is a story I want to document fully and present as careful a perspective on as I can. Here, that means showing you all exactly how people reacted to my Facebook post. It should come as no surprise for those familiar with my style, but this will be a long read:

Enjoy, and skim or skip through at your leisure.

I suspect that some of it is interesting only to me, but there are some fascinating responses scattered through the thread, and the overall tone of it overwhelmed me. There is such fear at the thought of telling those who know you that you have changed in a critical, startling way. There is such relief at seeing unhesitatingly supportive reactions. Almost every single person who responded is fully active in the church. Almost everyone who responded had nothing even slightly negative to say. It put some of my deepest-seated fears to rest: those I care about will not reject me if my path travels in a different direction from theirs. Not here, now now.

But that only covers the public part. Out of respect for people's privacy, I won't post any of the direct messages I received, but there were several. Some were from more active member friends of mine, offering to listen and hear me out or just wanting to catch up. One or two sent me conference talks or churchy advice. One...

haha, okay, I'll share one private chain. I don't think these guys will mind:

Hey , what did you teach for two years, ?Why were you Baptized into the church?

I taught the critical importance of an individual quest for truth and went out knowing I was searching for it myself. It's a quest I continue on and certainly have not reached a conclusion to yet. I know it's a sensitive topic, though, and I hope not to offend by my actions. All the best!

There is only two Churches ☝️ one of the devil and one of Christ may you choose the right one, God bless you

Love you guys! How's life been treating you lately?

(no response)

That was by a long shot the most (only) hostile message I received, but it was honestly hilarious. Perfectly in character, too—the person who sent it was an intense and eccentric senior missionary alongside me.

But enough of that silliness. The most important part were the handful of long, carefully phrased messages sent to me. The person would start out just thanking me for the post and expressing support for me, and then partway through, you could almost hear them pause before another few words started rushing out:

"I, too, have been dealing with issues of my own... whether or not I believe this is the right path for me."

"I'm at the same crossroads you are. I have no ill-will towards the church... Some things just aren't working for me right now, and I'm debating taking a sabbatical to really figure things out."

"I've been through similar experiences, I currently am not going to church and my kids go to a Baptist church.."

"I don't have the guts to post something like that yet, but I'm in the same boat."

These are my friends and family, people who grew up in deeply invested LDS families the same as I did. These whispers, the quiet stories of uncertainty and questions moving forward—these, for me, are the real story. When a voice is raised, others follow, either in quiet conversations that none but a few will hear, or loudly and clearly, for all to see.

That's why, I suppose, I'm approaching things the way I am. That's why I'm documenting everything, spending hours and hours each week engaged in conversations with friends in, out, or entirely unconnected with the church. Honesty follows honesty. Openness comes in the wake of openness.

For years, I have felt a crushing internal pressure to keep myself hidden, to stay silent about my perspectives in church and otherwise out of vague fears confirmed occasionally by painful experience. This experience—the whole of it—has reaffirmed for me: that pressure is false. Every time I have looked for ways to express myself openly and honestly, whether to you all or to my family, things have improved. Every layer of my story I unfold is a weight off my back, a knot in my mind unraveled.

I have said before, and I feel compelled to repeat once again: I am one of the lucky ones. The people I love are not rejecting me. They are not afraid of me. Instead, old friendships are being reaffirmed and rekindled. New friends are reaching out. The story is carrying on. It doesn't work that way for everyone, and my heart goes out to those of you who are not in a position right now to be frank. There are often good reasons to keep things close to your chest. But careful communication has led me consistently to beauty.

Look, I don't know much, and I have no idea what's ultimately true. I spent years trying to make something impossible work within my mind, and I was so determined to cling to it that it almost broke me. Now I can no longer believe in the framework I earnestly hoped to fit my whole world within. I tested the church by every measure it offered. I was drawn to it by beauty I saw within it—a beauty reflected in the lives and responses of wonderful family and friends—then drawn away by the untruth and darkness mixed in. I've done my due diligence, I've tested it in every way I know how, and in painful ways, it has come up short.

So there are reasons I'm reluctant to set a certain path now. All I want is to have conversations. I want to understand people. I want them to understand me. Somehow, in all of that, I want to continually grow closer to whatever is True. If that means rewriting my whole worldview again and again, tearing down to the roots until I arrive at something approximating right, then I'll do it.

Where will my story go? I don't know, but I'll tell it as it happens. Whether here or elsewhere, I feel a pressing urge to record this search for what is true however I can. The conversations will continue. And for all of you searching for ways to share your own stories and start your own conversations: good luck. It's a terrifying, beautiful task.

Thanks for following along.

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My Final Conversation with a Stake President

I haven't had that much to say on here lately since my last talk with my stake president, in part because I'm becoming a lot more comfortable with where I'm at, in part because not much was happening. But I talked with him again today, and it was fascinating. No, my questions weren't answered. No, he didn't suddenly stop believing. What did happen, though, was really cool.

Last time, I asked him about the Lowry Nelson letters, so that formed the framework of the discussion this time. My goal going in was simply to be understood and to provide a voice for those who no longer believe: I wasn't expecting to get answers or to change anything drastic, and I made that clear from the beginning. I told him immediately that I'm growing more comfortable with where I'm at and that I no longer believe in a modern prophet or that the Book of Mormon is historical.

We read together from the parts of the First Presidency letter where they describe the priesthood ban, ban on interracial marriage, and doctrine of racial inequality and call Nelson to repentance for his position. He was defending parts of their position at first, but soon said he could see why it was so troubling and didn't provide excuses for it. He talked about having seen some residual racist attitudes in some of his older relatives. He also talked about how, reading it, he had to pause and remind himself of the core elements of his own belief in the church. The letter clearly weighed on him, and that set the tone for a really open, frank discussion to follow.

After a bit, he told me that the only big difference he could find was that he felt he had a spiritual confirmation of the church and I didn't feel that way—that my questions, concerns, and search for truth were valid and fair.

I talked briefly about my reasons for where I'm at, but spent a lot more time on the sense of betrayal and isolation that members can experience in their searches. I mentioned specifically responses like my bishop's, and he told me they were going to hold a training meeting on that. I told him how hard it is to face the significant voices within the church who invalidate the path of those who leave, and refuse to acknowledge the validity and poignancy of difficult questions. He apologized for it. I talked about how there is often no space in the church for some questions. He expressed a desire to change that.

He told a few personal stories of testimony, encouraged me to remain open to the possibility of the LDS church being true, and asked me to pay close attention to what he would call the Spirit or however I would view it now (his words, paraphrased)—basically, to course-correct if I saw myself going down a path towards unhappiness and poor decisions, and expressed a hope that God would answer me and lead me towards the LDS church again at some point. He made it clear that even though he couldn't pretend everyone in the church would accept and welcome my path, I was always welcome both at church and to talk personally with him.

I responded by encouraging him to foster a more welcoming, inclusive, and understanding atmosphere within the church, and to recognize the validity and the weight of the questions people ask. I stressed both just how many people are asking difficult questions and walking away from the LDS church now, and how painful and isolating the experience can be. He sounded genuinely committed to creating a better atmosphere. He told me also that he felt an exclusionary view that denied the validity of truth and experience outside the church was simply wrong.

Anyway, I could go on for a while about what we talked about. Here's what's important:

I feel peace, and closure. I am confident that my core questions about Mormonism are unanswered and almost certainly unresolvable. My stake president did not pretend either that he had satisfying answers or that my questions didn't matter or reflected poorly on me. He was grateful for my perspective, and it clearly made him think deeply and challenged some of his assumptions. Could I look at it as adding to his shelf? Yeah, but I think more importantly, it broadened both our perspectives. I see him, and voices like him, as an assurance that even though the truth claims of Mormonism have devastating flaws, not everyone within it is committed to defending the indefensible, and significant forces within it are pushing it in good directions.

My question, posed a month ago, was this: Is it possible to amicably part with a faith that tells you it is spiritual peril to even consider doing so?

At least in my case, the answer is yes.

What Convinced Me: A Conclusion

First, the church taught me to love the truth.

Everyone's experience is different. Not all of you will agree. But from an early age, the single message that stuck most personally from church was this: there are things that are True in this world, and it is our duty to seek them.

Then, it taught me to love goodness.

I was taught to seek out and cherish light. Happiness and fulfillment were intimately connected to doing the right thing. Life, among many other things, is a process of continual refinement and improvement.

And then it taught me that truth and goodness were only truly accessible for me within its bounds.

Doubt is bad. Information against the church is bad. Mistakes are bad and make you unworthy to understand truth.

It is that bound that I started pushing as a teenager, catching a glimpse here, a snatch there of "anti" information. Because first came my love of truth. I was so convinced that the truth would defend itself, that each question posed by misled opponents of Truth would be shot down in turn. Well, the questions started getting harder and harder and I guess I sensed that apologetic answers could only hold so well, because after becoming acquainted with most of the issues I retreated and told myself proof and the endless waves of questions and apologetics would only confuse the issue.

To know whether the church was True, I would find whether it was Good. And I would follow exactly, painstakingly, the methods given to me by church leaders. I would read the Book of Mormon. I would pray. I would go on a mission and teach and testify and in doing so, I convinced myself, I would discover the Truth.

The experiences I have related are the result of that. Even as I grew more and more in love with this pursuit of truth and goodness—even as I found so many aspects of them in the teachings of the church—I came face to face with a series of irreconcilables. I met people who shared my most heartfelt questions, who could find no solace in church answers. I met people whose consciences conflicted with the church, who could not at once be themselves and be active in the church. I met people better and more earnest than I was who saw the church, tested its claims, and then walked away unfulfilled.

And my own search came up short. The more questions I asked, the more I realized the quiet suppression of questions and lack of answers within the church. The more I prayed, the more I had to accept that God would not respond. The more people I met, the more I realized how many the church marginalized and how much larger God's plan would have to be than the church, if indeed he was there or had a plan at all.

Most of all, the harder I tried to make it all fit together, the more my mind twisted and tore and cried out under the strain. Yes, the puzzle was coming together, but not in the way I hoped or wanted and so eventually I just avoided thinking about it all together.

For two years from the day I returned from my mission, I could not think about church or the gospel or God without mental tension. For two years, I felt like crying every time I talked about my mission, felt like screaming every time I talked about faith. For two years, I worked to convince myself that there was a way past what I had seen and felt, that somehow all the answers were still out there waiting for me and all I had to do was persevere.

And then I snapped, and realized with a dull certainty that the only way for me to move forward was to move in a different direction. With the help of people [in r/exmormon]—as soon as I dared even think of gazing into the abyss—I started sorting my thoughts into order again. I found myself able to express what I saw, and felt, and believe.

In the end, it is not church history that convinced me, dark as much of it is. It is not the Book of Mormon, or even that I never felt God provide the witness I was always promised. Those are all vital. They must be faced, and they played a role. Ultimately, though, it came down to the realization that for all the good it provided within my life and the lives of others, the church was also the source of far too much bad. It is a source of pain for all within it whose questions it dodges, all whose authentic selves it condemns, all who do not align perfectly with the box of beliefs, values, and customs it requests. And any time someone wants to leave the box, they realize just how high its walls are and how readily some within it will condemn them.

Ultimately, I learned that through stories. Words help. Evidences, carefully laid out, help. But I could not have properly changed my mind without seeing firsthand both beauty and pain within the church structure. Those evidences were laid out in my life and in the lives of people I met. I tell my stories with a purpose: to capture true experiences, or as close as I can come to it, and to tell the stories that are sometimes forgotten, the stories of harm and tension caused by incorrect beliefs.

I cannot and will not throw my active support behind those harms. The values I learned within my faith ultimately made me realize I needed to turn away. The stories I heard made me realize how it might be possible.

It took 22 years for me to figure out this out:

The church contains truth and goodness but it does not own them.

I do not have to swallow the bad in order to embrace the good.

Doubt is the key step to discovering truth, because the reason for doubt is recognizing that something is wrong.

I was not broken because God wasn't speaking to me, and I was not bad for refusing to accept easy answers to hard questions.

Onward to the future.

Postscript

Looking back on these posts so many years later, there are a few words I’d change, a few stories I’d tweak, a bit of repetition I’d remove and a few experiences I don’t see quite the same way, but by and large I’m proud of how they’ve held up and grateful that I felt strongly about documenting the whole thing as I was on my way out. My split from Mormonism has remained an amicable one, providing me room to become the person I want to be.

The mental health struggles that were a recurring theme throughout the series vanished more-or-less entirely when I left Mormonism. My impression is that my emotions at the time were the result of the impossible situation I found myself in more than they were fundamental to who I was. My life improved clearly and dramatically after stepping away, I found myself able quite suddenly to write seriously about all the topics I really cared about instead of kicking around on video game forums, and I moved on.

Now you know.

Initially published on Twitter.

I had an idea the other day: that I’d write an article about how Orson Scott Card, one of my greatest inspirations as a writer, was wronged. This came shortly after listening to an old “Secular Humanist Revival Meeting”1 where he spoke.

The meeting is a fascinating listen, a reminder of a near-forgotten era: when Card, as a Latter-day Saint, felt inspired to speak passionately in defense of a secular state and against those who would use its arm to shut down dissent from their particular moral view. He speaks in praise of science and reason, reading and chuckling in horror at excerpts from a “creation science” textbook and noting that true science and true religion can always co-evolve. He condemns preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson calling for an explicitly Christian state, criticizes initiatives like prayer in school. He speaks against a ban on porn, presenting it as the camel’s nose of censorship, then condemned liberals seeking their own forms of censorship - of sexist language, of Huck Finn, of more. It’s an emphatic defense of classical liberalism set in the dimly remembered wars of the ‘90s.

And I listened to this all, and remembered just how much my own view, as I grew up, was shaped by the frame he spoke so passionately of: how as an LDS kid I was always proudly on the side of Science and worked to reconcile it with the doctrines of my faith, how I learned to value free expression and other classically liberal ideals. I remembered how profoundly his writing had impacted me, how many themes from his stories stick in my mind and motivate me even now. What a shame, I thought as I listened, that a man like this could be hounded out of a “secular humanist” coalition.

So I had this vague idea that I’d reread his essays on homosexuality—the ones that got him cast out from Polite Society, the ones that profoundly influenced my own view on homosexuality as a kid trying to work out what to think of the world—and re-frame them in light of that secular humanist vision as something where collaboration was clearly possible. He considered his views moderate ones, I recalled, and growing up I considered them moderate as well and was outraged by people’s harsh reactions to them.

That’s not quite what happened when I read them. Instead, I saw them, perhaps inevitably, in a new light: one of sympathy towards those who recoiled against him. In 1990, he spoke of the value of laws against homosexual behavior to discourage it and encourage people to keep it discreet. In the 2000s, he wrote of gay marriage as an attack on heterosexual marriage so severe that it would mark the end of Democracy, would place him in bitter and intractable enmity with any government that implemented it, that it would be the death of any value in the Constitution and cause to tear the government to the ground.

Where did the moderate frame he claimed and I remembered come in? He wrote about seeing gay people as individuals just like anyone else, with “as complex a combination of good and evil in them” as he finds in himself. Hating the sin, but loving the sinner, as he put it.

I understand these beliefs, because they were my own. Not just an influence on my own—the overriding influence on my own. Here, after all, was a writer whose books I loved, who shared my faith, and who wrote cogently and persuasively in defense of its doctrine and standards. What more could I need, as a teenager finding his way in the world? I remember reading his editorials and essays and nodding excitedly along, thinking about how finally, someone got it. I understand them, and sympathize with their almost-inevitability as words from an intelligent LDS individual determined to remain intellectually consistent and defend the doctrines of his faith, because I came from the same roots and made much the same calculation.

Years later, when Obergefell passed, my viewpoint had softened a bit, but that logic had not fundamentally changed. I had slowly shifted to a sentiment that if the church changed its view on gay marriage, I would first leave the church, then start supporting gay marriage, as the secular rationalizations began to fall flat for me. But Card still seemed basically right.

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At the same time, another piece of his writing was working its way through my mind—the moment that inspired my username, the story of a girl who held fast to her faith even after it was demonstrated to be false, kneeling down and tracing woodgrains as a religious ritual as her whole world fell away from it. I had realized gradually that I could not reconcile my understanding with my faith, and found myself constantly re-examining the question of whether to trace the woodgrains or to stand up and walk away.

It’s only after I elected to leave that I re-examined my position on gay marriage, still later when I realized my own attraction to men and married one. I was on Card’s side of the dispute the whole time it was a live dispute, then found myself not just on the opposite, but profoundly so: happily married to a man and grateful for the legal protection my relationship has.

Here’s the quandary: what does the “secular humanism” Card spoke of do with the people it leaves behind? Card’s view at the time left no room for the sort of reconciliation that is my instinct, the polite but strongly felt disagreement between two people aligned on more fundamental matters. I want to be on the side of the Orson Scott Card pushing for secularism and cooperation in the ‘90s, against evangelicals pushing young-earth creationism in schools and censorious progressives alike, while at the same time feeling a sense of impossibility at understanding how to cooperate with the Card who spoke of gay marriage as a threat to the Republic so profound it would merit tearing the government to the ground.

Even with that impossibility, though, I retain the sense that Card was wronged, as are many good people who see the times move on from them. People fixate so much, so exclusively, on the area of dissonance between his frame and theirs that everything else fades into irrelevance, that one of the most earnest and humanizing authors of our day becomes known in pop culture only as the one who was against gay marriage. It’s not that it’s unfair to judge people on the fights they pick, precisely—but I cannot help but see it as profoundly tragic to reduce them to that and become incapable of seeing or talking about anything but that dissonance.

Anyway, in his public statement on the matter after gay marriage became legal, Card asked for “tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.” A decade later, I can’t pretend I disagreed with him while the issue was in dispute, and I certainly lack the sway in Polite Society to undo the reputational harm he suffered in the wake of the gay marriage fight. But what I can say is this:

When I read Card’s books, when I hear his secular sermon, when I see glimpses of his mind, I see a brilliant writer who impacted my life and my worldview profoundly, one who wrote so beautifully and so honestly that his writing stuck to my soul as I realized I could find no home in the faith that had been our mutual home. I see someone who was committed to much the same vision of culture that resonated with me, only to find that culture shift too far, too fast, to remain a home for him. And I want desperately, perhaps impossibly, to find a culture where both he and I can feel at home and in some meaningful sense on the same side.

I can’t compel everyone to show tolerance, nor can I pretend I find a true reconciliation between his frame and my own. But as a direct beneficiary of a policy he fought passionately against, I’m grateful for the role his words have played in my life and think people were wrong to reduce him to nothing but “a bigot” and culturally marginalize him. People retained “hate the sin” from the Christian framework, but never quite figured out “love the sinner.”

Ultimately, it is incumbent on the winners of cultural battles to show grace to the losers, and that never really happened after the legalization of gay marriage. Perhaps now that particular issue has cooled a bit and we’ve moved onto yet more exciting and bitter battlefields, those of us happy to have gay marriage can now do so: viewing him with understanding and sympathy, neither glossing over our moral dispute nor turning him into a caricature because of it.

I originally published this essay in May 2020, when Yarvin was rather less relevant to contemporary politics than he is now. People who haven’t been paying far too much attention to extremely online politics tend to misunderstand and underestimate the dissident right and its role in politics. Yarvin is one of the most foundational figures on the dissident right, and while it has evolved well beyond the specifics of his ideas and while many of his specific predictions have been falsified, his frame is more relevant than ever.

This essay is deliberately a bit bloodless. It was written in an environment where people aimed to discuss a wide range of topics dispassionately, and I was more interested in providing a clear overview of what he was saying and why than in criticizing the implications. While Yarvin’s ideas are often extreme, his presentation has generally been genteel; the ugliness and the destructiveness of the dissident right can be better understood by examining the behavior and the words of his most committed followers.

Looking back four years later and with much more direct interaction with the ecosystem downstream of Yarvin, I think I was a bit too polite in this essay, treating the ideas as something other than the sophisticated window-dressing for raw power ambitions they have increasingly proven to be. Regardless of that, I hope it proves useful at providing a concise overview of the ideas animating much of the young intellectual right.

Lately I've taken to reading the founding texts of various ideologies, and having dived deep into a few forms of communism, I thought I'd veer hard in the opposite direction and take a look at Neoreaction instead. Moldbug can be frustrating to read because of his tendency never to use 100 words when 10000 will do, his inclination to quote old texts at length and then proceed confident his point has been made (or simply tell you nothing is to be done but read the whole of an author's corpus, akin to the "go read theory" exhortation prevalent among socialists), and his reminders every few words that he is presenting dark and forbidden truths in order to yank a parasite from your mind, but his ideas have seeped out enough that I thought it best to go to the source. As such, I read every text suggested on the "About" page of his site.

Having done so, I’d like to synthesize and regurgitate it. I suspect many here are rather more familiar with him than I am, but I may as well retain a grasp on the picture, and it may prove useful for others who, like me, have only seen the second-order impacts of his approach. My aim is not to argue for or against it (partially because Scott Alexander has already sort of done that), but to analyze it as a movement: what it teaches, what it wants supporters to do, and perhaps how other movements could react to it.

The first section covers the grand narrative of Neoreaction. The second focuses on Moldbug's outline of what Neoreactionaries should do, and the third contains a few of my own thoughts.

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The Grand Narrative of Neoreaction

First, an aside: Moldbug tends to start with the shocking and provocative. Why? Partially for fun, partially because he expects his enemies (progressives) have inoculated everyone well against him as the devil incarnate. If you are the devil, act like it. Any skirting around motives will only make people suspicious. Front-load your worst and most outrageous ideas so that you can become more, not less, reasonable as people read on. If there's any lesson to take from him, it's that this approach works. He's also quite fond of noting that as a result of his approach, out of many emails he received about his website, not one was negative. That was in 2008 or so, when his ideas were more obscure. I don't know how long it lasted. Still, interesting to note.

I: The progressive virus

Some word association:

Right = order = Reaction = rule of one = hierarchy = oath-keeping = strong = freedom = hard truths

Left = chaos = Progressive = democracy = rule of all = anti-hierarchy = oath-breaking = weak = tyranny = noble lies

Democracy being inherently progressive, the whole path of democracy has been one of gradual societal decline accompanied by technological growth. Progressives want all the decline, conservatives want to slow that decline down. Nobody wants to reverse it. And yet, time being what it is, to find reactionaries all you need to do is return to the past. Everyone in the past was reactionary, some more than others. Carlyle was a reactionary prophet who foresaw the future with clarity, and has been rewarded for it with invisibility.

Meanwhile, this progressive virus has taken over the world’s public opinion system. It finds its home most naturally in the American university and press, the premier knowledge-driving institutions in the world. These institutions are more correct on the facts and attract more intelligent, knowledgeable people than anywhere else, but because they are all subject to the same virus, they are systematically incorrect in predictable ways. Their opposition is scattered, unfashionable, and usually wrong, united only in disliking them. America is the only truly sovereign state in the world, and virtually every other country is a client state in one way or another (primarily in their importation of American ideals and ideas).

This wrongness can be demonstrated in three specifics: the furor over global warming, the world’s acceptance of Keynesian economics over Austrian economics, and the myth of human intellectual uniformity. It can also be demonstrated by repeated failure of predictions that “democratizing” a place will make it function better–the Arab Spring, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, so forth. The march of ‘progress’ will lead to importing hordes of third-worlders and turning America into a third-world country, steadily increasing crime (particularly noticeable in a decrease in areas you feel safe walking around in), and an ever-expanding, bloated, ineffective government.

Not all Reaction is good. Fascists and Nazis were unarguably reactionary, but caused untold human misery. We all have a clear picture of just how bad they were. Socialism has caused similar misery. Both are caused in part by democracy, the rule of the masses (after all, Germany assented to Hitler’s leadership), but have been retconned as being fundamentally opposed to democracy, thus allowing democracy to present itself as pure regardless. Meanwhile, by the philosophy of “no enemies on the left, no friends on the right,” the progressivism controlling the US and by extension the world has inoculated everybody thoroughly against the dangers of fascism, while minimizing and obscuring the dangers of progressivism. Neoreaction needs a sure plan to avoid leading to Hitler or similar horrors.

Having established this image of progressivism and democracy as a virus, what does the world look like unsullied by that virus? What is the neoreactionary view of the world and vision for the future?

II. The view from neoreaction

Each government is a sovereign corporation. It rules a section of land. There is no "should" in ownership: Whoever happens to be sovereign over the land is its rightful government and has sole responsibility to handle its internal affairs, by virtue of might. People (or countries) under that government are serfs/subjects/clients. It is their master/patron. This is the current reality–democracy just so happens to be our chosen way of leading this corporation. The client’s primary concern should be: “How effectively is this being administered?” Forget about mode of administration. Neoreactionaries just want good administration. For them, this means safety and prosperity, but they welcome the idea of others having different goals. Democracy turns out to be horribly ineffective in their vision. City-states like Singapore and Dubai are flawed but come closer than other current places to fulfilling this vision. Strong government is best. The first, and only, moral rule is contractual enforcement: promises made must be kept. Any breakdown in this law is a sign of degradation.

The most efficient way of administering would likely be similar to a joint-stock corporation, with a board of directors installing a CEO, administering the land in such a way as to maximize profit. People would have no direct voice, only exit rights, but the corporation would be incentivized to make it a good place to live because a happy territory is a profitable territory. Part of that would be a robust defense/security system and the rule of law, the stronger, the better. If you reject the laws, leave, because the law is inviolate. Ultimately, the specifics are not theirs to determine, and so there is only so much use in speculation. Their role is to prepare the way for, and eventually install, the CEO. The CEO’s role is to lead. They are not experts in administration, so they will not presume to know better than an expert CEO.

(As an aside: The specific CEO is less important than the system. Barack Obama as CEO? Sure! Steve Jobs as CEO? Absolutely. Let pilots, and only pilots, choose the CEO? Go for it. All would be improvements over the present. The important thing is establishing that the system as a whole must go. Arbitrary leadership is fine, as long as it's strong, though of course some options are better than others.)

At times it feels similar to anarcho-capitalism. This is because it was derived from anarcho-capitalism, with the added observation that libertarians have no means to achieve their ideal society. They see it, in fact, as a means of achieving their libertarian utopia. To achieve freedom, first fulfill other needs: peace, security, law. Once this is reached, the state can and will improve by minimizing intervention into lives, allowing people to think whatever they want (while being safely and completely removed from the levers of power). The absence of law and order is chaos, not freedom.

The ultimate Neoreactionary vision is the world as Patchwork, a worldwide conglomeration of sovereign corporations not unlike Scott Alexander’s Archipelago, with each having iron rule within its own domain, competing for customers (people) by offering various visions and services, with a bit of fairy dust to ensure cooperation and prevent merging into one giant macrostate (which would count as a failure of the system). Each culture would be free to do its own thing without interference from others, guided by benevolent (read: profit-seeking) CEOs and boards of directors who care not at all what their citizens are doing as long as it is law-abiding and profitable.

That is the skeleton of neoreactionary doctrine. What is neoreactionary practice?

Neoreactionary practice

I. Passivism

What does this mean? As the word hints, the opposite of activism in all regards. No seeking official power. Zero. No press releases, no bombings, no sit-ins, no political parties, no assassinations, not even voting. Complete non-participation in the political system as it stands. Have no illusions as to your relationship to the government: you submit to its authority, you hope for its success, you play no part in its decision structure.

Why? Participation both activates the structure’s immune system and grants the structure legitimacy and power. Remember, democracy is progressive. You don’t win by becoming the enemy. Conservatives provide a useful foil to progressives, making them hyper-motivated and deadly. Again, for emphasis: Conservatives are not your allies. McCarthyism sought to make Communism political poison, and succeeded only in making itself political poison while Communism trudged on. Starve the parasite. Don’t feed it. Fade away, and make yourself maximally non-threatening. They will care much less about impeding you and will not be able to grow stronger via opposing you.

The other benefits: First, you avoid creating the next Hitler. Hitler was a reactionary who originated in a democratic party and gained power by stirring the people’s emotions. He sought power and found it. Don’t seek power. Don’t mix reaction and democracy, thus sullying both. Don’t create Hitler. Second, by staying out of the fight, combatants don’t have to swap tribal loyalties from red to blue or the reverse to join you. Your goal is peace, not victory of one tribe in the war. You want to remove all political power from both, not grant more to team red.

Again: Stay out of the democratic system entirely. It will bring you nothing but trouble.

II. Create a Credible Alternative

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Not only because it was incompetent and reprehensible, but because there was always a bright red button nearby that said “Surrender to America”. There was, in other words, a credible alternative. This single, clear option formed a Schelling point for the regime’s opponents to cluster around. There is, on the other hand, no clear existing alternative to American democracy. The neoreactionary’s job: Create that.

Start with the brain: the university system. You must create an Antiversity, distinguished by only speaking truth. Its weapon is its credibility. Prudent silence in the face of ambiguity is an option for it. Spreading falsehoods is not. Recognize that the current system has built up cruft and non-truth-serving things like Chief Diversity Officers, so without none of that you will have some advantages in the pursuit of truth. Use every advantage. Create something pure, something good, something truthful. Ultimately, this institution will operate as advisor to the new leadership.

Once it has been well and truly established, use it to offer a comprehensive alternative to the democratic program–mapping your plan out fully and in detail–achievable from within the bounds of democracy. A constitutional amendment abolishing the Constitution? Perhaps. Create a shadow government, prepared to lead a transition to assigning ultimate power in some . Give people a boolean choice between the US government (which will presumably be faltering and struggling) and this new alternative. Make the alternative worthy of its charge.

The only barrier here is number of supporters. A massive barrier, but theoretically overcomeable. Start by offering truth and only truth, and thereby attract the weird sort of people who seek out pure truth. Offer victory alongside that, and when you become credible the bulk of people who are mostly seeking victory will eventually flop over to your side. Simple! Absurd, but simple.

“In short,” Moldbug puts it, “all the Reaction must do is convince reasonable, educated men and women of good will to support stable, effective and reliable government.”

III. Enact the plan

Okay, so you’ve got this engine in the Antiversity, and you’ve got a plan, but you’ve still got to convince the country/world. How do you go about doing that? Follow the example of previous groups who have taken over the world. Start with Marxists. They’re good at that stuff.

The Antiversity will be learning and outlining the truth. Once it has it, anyone is free to promote and share it. (“Certainly, by 2019, the Antiversity will have no trouble in communicating its truths to the People,” Moldbug says). The key to public communication, Moldbug proposes: “Move down the IQ ladder very cautiously and very steadily.”

You need an exclusive vanguard party holding an ideological standard, with a concrete program, rejecting all promises of partial authority. In other words: You’re not looking for quantity of supporters for a while, only quality, and you're willing to test for it and stay tiny at first to ensure that. You are promoting something clear and precise. You are not looking to integrate into the current system, only present a fully formed alternative to it. Your party’s “mind” will be the Antiversity (though it’s a distinct entity), and all people need to do is switch their intellectual alliegance from the university to it. Note that the party will dissolve entirely when it wins.

Teach and organize, teach and organize. No secret to it. Create a bunch of local cells, recruit people to them, possibly with tests. Practice Gramscian infiltration. Attract great people to your side. Build up legitimacy. Eventually: slide in, create a smooth transition of power, and fade out.

That’s neoreactionary practice as Moldbug envisioned it. What are my thoughts?

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My thoughts

I: My core objection

Almost every ideology I know of claims to base its views on objective, impartial analysis of truth. Neoreaction is no exception. The leftist narrative is one of class struggle, and they aspire to inspire class consciousness and lead to a Revolution. They look at the world through Hegelian and Marxist lenses and point to Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and similar works to explain more mainstream takes. The democratic/progressive narrative Moldbug focuses so much on is one of history always moving forward as we discard the moral errors of the past, with a constant thread of lurching back into Reaction. The neoreactionary narrative is one of a world always crying out for order while Cthulhu swims leftward and drags us all into slow but persistent chaos.

I think a fact-first view of ideologies can be a mistake. Factual truth is important, but brilliant people have been convinced to follow every ideology under the sun. The narrative, the feeling of the whole thing, the itches it scratches... that's what convinces people. Some of Moldbug's examples are accurate. Others are exaggerated. Still others strike me as absurd. But the facts are not the key. Honestly, this may be where Moldbug loses me the most. I think his Antiversity idea would be interesting, but I don't believe for a second it would proceed from pure, unvarnished truth. It would just throw a different narrative coating over the underlying factual claims.

Like any other ideology, Neoreaction is fundamentally aiming to answer what ought to be, not what is, and like many others, it cloaks that in a claim to be sticking to the is. I don't think its factual claims lead obviously to its overarching narrative, but a narrative doesn't need to be perfectly coherent, only to be good enough to allow for stable belief.

Its narrative falls apart for me in exalting order itself, never quite answering the "for what" to my satisfaction. Yes, it could lead to atrocities, Moldbug says—but other systems have, and most of the time human nature and the incentive structures in place mean it wouldn't. As a narrative, that can work. In practice, the question I think Moldbug ends up grappling least with is the one he has the most duty to answer. Why do people rebel against the perfect order of his Right? Why does his order descend into chaos? He attributes it largely to weakness.

But Luther nailed his theses to the church door for a reason. People opposed slavery for a reason. Communism gained a foothold for a reason. I left Mormonism for a reason. Something wasn't true. Some part was unjust. Something didn't fit. Some part of the system broke down and caused misery for someone or some group, and that injured party fought for whichever alternative they could find. Order is great... until it isn't. And no matter how patiently you explain to someone that, if you just look impartially at the evidence, you'll find that x or y is the best way to do things... if they're the one getting the short end of some stick, no amount of perfectly conceived order is enough to satisfy them. For one simple example, divine right more-or-less worked until people stopped believing in it, and once you lose the reason for the order, you lose its support. Neoreaction exalts order, but its response to the pitfalls of that order is lacking.

Having tasted both, I'll freely admit I prefer most of the fruits of order, but when I no longer fit into that order I saw no choice but to walk away. I can't fault the world for doing likewise, even though I still hold out hope for a better sort of order. As such, I reject Neoreaction's narrative and its vision, but some of its factual claims are still worth taking note of.

II: Neoreaction's value

For those of us who disagree with its overall narrative, Neoreaction is useful in the same way that the prosecution is useful in court, by the same logic that causes the Catholic Church to employ Devil’s advocates. Courts split into prosecution and defense for a clear reason: each side is only really motivated to emphasize part of the truth. Moldbug is democracy’s Devil’s advocate. He examines the same fact picture as the rest of us, determined to shape it into a narrative counter to the one most of us choose. By placing himself so clearly and unambiguously in opposition to a) progressives and b) democracy, he examines the traditionally unexamined, and is therefore likely to spot errors most others overlook.

This is compounded by his actionable advice and his real-world actions. Twelve years on, I don’t think an Antiversity exists, Moldbug's hopes aside. But I do think a Reactionary university would be a genuinely useful thing to have, equal and opposite to a Harvard or a Yale, able to cross-examine it and prepared to collectively arrive at a more complete truth. And, while that doesn’t exist and likely won’t, he’s the sort of person who has already created an alternative to the internet from the lowest possible level up. That may or may not catch on, but someone willing to put in that amount of serious work deserves a bit of serious consideration.

His work, in other words, has some potential to add or inspire genuine ideology-neutral value in the world. It encourages people to build useful things, and that encouragement is backed up by serious work in… building useful things. That's as it should be. The fruits of an ideological movement should provide clear evidence of the value of that movement.

III: On movement-building

Neoreaction’s path to power is an ideologically neutral one, and it isn’t senseless. Whether someone supports or opposes it, that pattern is worth paying attention to. Its focus on the far future parallels that of Communism and Christianity, calling for the Reaction instead of the Revolution or the Rapture. I do find that impractically ambitious in the sense that its goal is to change nothing until it changes everything at once, and that’s probably already enough to keep it from success by its standards (something that should be encouraging for those of us who would rather not see the Reaction). I like the idea of passivism, though, and appreciate that it says “create something better” before its “smash the system” step. Both of those make it less likely to turn into something truly nasty. The approach of aiming for a smart, focused, committed group toeing the party line first, then slowly branching out and becoming part of the broader fabric, is the sort of thing that can lead to lasting changes in the ideological ecosystem thirty or so years down the road if it succeeds. Has that approach succeeded? Ask me again in fifty years.

Examining the approach with an eye towards movement-building, I think it would be more effective if it encouraged people to make real, substantive, immediate changes in their lives, spelling out what those changes were. It sketches some of that out, but there’s no lifestyle inherent to it, only the future vision. “Build cool things” is a good step, but not enough alone to sustain a movement. It mentions organizing, but only as a means to an end. It lacks an inherent sense of community or commitment, even though it tries to hint at them, and perhaps that’s why ten years out it hasn’t gone all that far beyond getting some ideas out into the conversation. Unless, of course, they’re doing something massive just out of sight, and have organized much more than it seems, and/or if Urbit somehow gets Neoreaction to take off even though Moldbug has stepped away from the project.

In summary, I don't think Neoreaction has quite the organizational vision to become a serious force, nor the moral core to allow me to root for it even if it does, but I do think it has enough to bear some useful fruit and to act as food for thought to other aspiring movement-builders.

Rereading this analysis four years later, the part I find most interesting is the way Yarvin’s followers abandoned any notion of passivism as soon as they smelled a hint of power. Yarvin provides three steps, deliberately grandiose, to anyone seeking influence:

1. Become worthy.

2. Accept power.

3. Rule!!1!

Four years ago, I mentioned that of those three, step one seemed by far the most important, with the others being poisoned in its absence.

Yarvin claimed, as he was building the frame of neoreaction, that participation in a democratic system was antithetical to his goals, and that Hitler-like figures emerged in democracies by stirring people’s emotions with Reactionary promises, sullying both. His followers nodded along, then leaped—with him following—into democracy by passionately supporting Donald Trump. There was no period of becoming worthy, no serious effort at creating an independent ecosystem, no waiting for the old system to collapse, as Yarvin claimed to want. There was certainly no period of offering truth and only truth, and indeed his supporters gravitated towards a movement led by a man to whom truth is irrelevant at best. Yarvin’s claim to want peace, not victory of one tribe in a culture war, has been replaced by a crowd of young right-wingers determined to smash their perceived enemies and grind their institutions to dust.

As for what comes next? Yarvin’s been wrong about many of his predictions. We’ll see, I suppose, whether he’s wrong about what happens when, in his parlance, you mix wine and sewage.

To see further commentary on this essay, including some lengthy elaboration from me, please see the original thread on Reddit.

Originally published at Quillette. Audio version available via Askwho Casts AI.

For the near-term future, the Republican Party belongs to Donald Trump. Its internal power struggle is over. He has won. His platform has led the Republicans to their most resounding victory in decades. Everyone who initially opposed him has either submitted or left the party, and many who considered themselves politically homeless during the past few years have shrugged their shoulders and got on board as well, from Joe Rogan to Bret Weinstein and Batya Ungar-Sargon. The last few holdouts among Republicans are now as incongruous as anti-Obama Democrats: forgotten relics of a prior era.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party belongs to nobody. The Biden presidency, rather than bringing the Trump era to an end, served as merely an ignominious middle, a whimpering final gasp of the Obama era. It ended in shame, as an aging president who had promised to be a “bridge” to a new generation instead clung to power until he could no longer maintain a facade of competence and collapsed on the debate stage. His inner circle conspired to conceal his decline, while the few independent thinkers who expressed concern about his age-related mental deterioration faced derision and scorn. His proposed successor ran her campaign on vibes. Hoping to be all things to all people, she backed away from her bold and unpopular progressive stances from four years before and dodged opportunities to make her case outside tightly scripted old media appearances. She failed. The Obama era is over.

We live in a time of institutional crisis. A decade of dire warnings from seemingly every institution in the country failed to stave Trump off. Trust in traditional media is at a record low, while a wild west of alternative and new media is flourishing. The new Republican Party understands this: Trump eschews old institutions and relies instead on a loose network of social media, podcasts, and alternative media platforms to make his case. The Democratic Party has barely begun to grapple with it.

Much of my own writing focuses on grappling with this crisis: covering everything from a hiring scandal at the FAA to the damage ideologically motivated bad actors have done to Wikipedia and the ways academics lie and how that damages public trust. As a result, I have had conversations with many on the new Right and many on the politically disorganized and disillusioned center and “heterodox” Left, but with vanishingly few people on the institutional and progressive Left. To hear the latter camp tell it, institutional criticism is synonymous with conspiracism, disinformation, and the “alt-right pipeline.”

The tragedy—and the opportunity—for the Democrats is that many of the earliest and most perceptive commentators on the crisis were not right-wingers, but left-leaning people who faced scorn and exclusion for not hewing to institutional progressivism: Scott Alexander, Sam Harris, Carole Hooven, my former employers Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, and many more.

The Republicans have grappled with the institutional crisis, but their solution so far has mostly been to build worse institutions: more openly partisan, more sensational, more conspiratorial, and less committed to truth than mainstream ones, even as mainstream institutions have fallen victim to capture and have declined.

The Democrats have not begun to grapple with it. They are the party of defending the institutions: Trust the experts, trust the science, trust the government, trust that everything is functioning well and that adults are in charge and that any criticism is all smoke and no fire. This election, that refusal to grapple with the crisis culminated in their worst electoral loss in decades.

Numb at the Lodge

I told you so

There are two factions in American politics, and they’re not evenly matched. As everyone knows, one of them contains all the smart people, the academics, the professionals, the people who’ve read the studies, learned the science, educated themselves, who eat well and own nice things made of wood, the good little boys and girls who know what’s best for e…

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a year ago · Sam Kriss

Sam Kriss recently published an election retrospective that provided a fascinating mirror of my own frustration with Kamala Harris, but from a left-wing perspective. One thing stuck out to me, though: his description of Harris as being from “the right wing of the [Democratic] party.” To describe an individual who has one of the furthest-left records of any senator as representing “the right wing of the party” is absurd on its face. As I argued in the wake of the election, Kamala Harris did not represent the center.

But Kriss’s view nevertheless reveals an important truth: even though leftists do terribly in electoral positions and field a tiny number of representatives and senators, they represent a major part of the coalition of young, educated professionals who form the most politically active part of the Democratic base. How does this play out in practice? Most of the ideas come from the Left. Most of the enthusiasm comes from the Left. Most of the cultural shaping comes from the Left.

In the 2020 Democratic Party primary, virtually every candidate pandered to the Left. The one who did so the least won, because the Left does not represent the electorate, but then he filled his staff positions and his agenda with precisely the same people and ideas that leftists had been pushing anyway.

About Kamala Harris, Kriss and I agree on a great deal: she is a politician with no ideas and nothing but vibes propelling her, a charismatic schmoozer and climber who wants power without any real aims for it, a well-functioning part of a well-functioning machine. But the machine shattered. Don’t get me wrong: it still controls the professional class, still sets the tone in academia and old media and other vital societal institutions. But its lack of vision was overwhelmingly rejected by voters. Leftists say—and I agree—that Harris failed to offer enough substance to the voters. Warmed-over leftovers of firebrand leftism, sanewashed and smoothed over to appeal to the general public, didn’t quite cut it. So, what’s the solution?

Many people have been alienated by socialism, progressive orthodoxy, and Trumpism alike. These people are a disorganised group, many of whom are unused to politics, and they are united more by what they hate than by what they like. For a long while, many of the people who form part of this group were primarily worried about securing the principled right to free expression, while it was most under threat. For all intents and purposes, though, in the United States, free expression—or at least expression free from progressive coercion—has now won. Substack has enabled a generation of independent writers. Elon’s X has its flaws, but being a progressive monoculture is not one of them. Deplatforming failed so spectacularly that Trump went from being banned from all social media platforms simultaneously to controlling all branches of government.

In this new environment, there’s an undercurrent of excitement and creativity. I saw it at the prediction market conference Manifest this year, I see it in the work the Progress Studies people are doing, I see it in the X and Substack communities I spend my time in, I see it at outlets like Quillette. There are smart, capable people who feel left out of the political landscape as it stands, and who are astute critics and observers of the institutional crisis.

Criticism is all well and good, but at some point you have to build something. Matt Yglesias’s principles for Common Sense Democrats provide a good starting place, but I think more can be done. The progress studies vision of “techno-humanism” with its conviction that science, technology, and industry are key to human flourishing speaks to me. So does the pursuit of excellence and a return to serious efforts to educate talented children. We also need to promote pro-human environmentalism over cynical leftism, champion the role of America as a melting pot for the best and brightest from around the world, and grapple with the transformative role and threat of artificial intelligence. Institutions matter—the mantra “tear them all down” cannot and must not be seen as the solution to the institutional crisis. The interests of minority groups matter and should be defended and considered alongside the interests of majorities, but the oppressor/oppressed framework is a dead end and people must ultimately be treated as individuals. A muscular centrism can and should champion causes like these while also following Yglesias’s edict to “reclaim normal ideas from being the exclusive property of right-wing edgelords.”

Slow Boring

A Common Sense Democrat manifesto

Years ago, I coined a phrase — the pundit’s fallacy — to describe the belief that to win elections, a political party needs to cater to the exact views of the pundit writing the column…

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a year ago · 955 likes · 1209 comments · Matthew Yglesias

This election cycle had a winnowing effect. Previously, progressives treated those who refused to endorse either party as presumptively in the pocket of Donald Trump. Now, as if a wall had broken down, half the people in the “heterodox” space have shrugged and turned to Trump, seeing no future with the Democrats and wanting real political influence. The other half—the ones who really meant it when they rejected both the dead-end road of a social justice progressive monoculture and the perils of right-wing populism—are now demonstrably left of center in the American political landscape, and progressives who want to treat them like Nazis in waiting can and should simply be brushed aside. If you do not want to follow Trump and you want any hope of political influence in the United States, there is one option and one option only: the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party is in disarray. Leftists have been rejected again and again at the ballot box. In 2020, Andrew Yang, a political outsider, was the only vaguely centrist candidate presenting a fresh, positive vision in the Democratic Party primaries. His inexperience showed and he never had a real shot at winning—but he demonstrated the potential that such ideas have. That could happen again.

For too long, leftists have assumed that politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris represent the center, even as those same politicians do little but follow the lead of their progressive staffers when it comes to ideas. And, really, who can blame them? No centrist who understands the current moment has ever truly laid out their case to the Democratic Party base in the context of a serious political campaign. The 2028 debates cannot be like 2020. Centrists need unapologetic champions prepared to make their case to the Democratic Party base, and they need to start preparing now. And hey, if they make the case well enough, progressives might find there’s more common ground, and more to like about excellence-focused centrism, than they anticipate.

Political parties are not static entities. They are machines designed for the purpose of securing votes, and they will and must adapt to whoever can get them those votes. There is no better time than now, while the party is at its lowest point in decades, for fresh ideas to take hold. Now is the time to organize, to come up with a serious list of principles and priorities, to build a clear vision for the future. Now is the time to seriously examine what a Democratic Party that properly grapples with the institutional crisis might look like. Now is the time, in short, for the disillusioned center to do something more than complain.

The next four years might belong to Trump, but after that? It’s anyone’s game.

Note: I originally posted this essay on Reddit on Pioneer Day of 2020. Now that the day has rolled around again, I reproduce it in full here (one day late, but better than not at all).

July 24 is a holiday you've never heard of, but one that meant quite a bit to me growing up. As with most things that fit that description, it's recognized only in Utah: Pioneer Day, a celebration of the men and women who rode in covered wagons or dragged handcarts across a thousand miles or so to build a new society in Utah.

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That, more than anything else, is the founding myth I grew up identifying with. It dovetailed so neatly with the parts of the American founding myth we chose to emphasize, too, the message of a persecuted religious minority coming to a new land to build a system where they were free to worship as they pleased.

This 1888 map encapsulates the broader history I was used to picturing, but unlike the more distant pilgrims, the pioneers were mine. My family had been in Utah for six generations. I could go through the old books my parents and grandparents had preserved and read their stories, told firsthand. We learned about them in church, and I even had a year-long course covering church history to replace one of my high school classes. Every few years, our church would get together and organize a pioneer trek, where we would dress as pioneers, gather into "families", and pull handcarts for a few days.

It was my heritage, I felt it strongly, and I was deeply proud of it.

Ah, when life was simple, and I wasn't a broken link in the chain of my generations.

Anyway, today is a day of celebration, not of griping. So I'd like to share two stories—one a subset of the other—that we would always remember and celebrate as inspirational and faith-kindling. I will explore them in part through the trusting eyes of my youth, in part through my current, more tired eyes, and I'll see what pops out of both. If you want a soundtrack for this post, you could do worse than Come, Come, Ye Saints:

This will be perhaps a bit sappy, as my posts go, but that's fine. It's a holiday.

First is the story of the Martin Handcart Company.

The Willie and Martin Handcart Companies

When Mormons first traveled across the plains, they went in relative ease, with teams of oxen or horses to pull wagons as part of larger wagon trains. You know, the full Oregon Trail experience. Some ninety percent of the people who went west took this approach. The rest? Well, the church ran out of money and they still wanted to come over, so they became their own oxen, loading up everything they could carry on carts and dragging their belongings and their kids all the way to Deseret. (Per the Book of Mormon, it means "honeybee").

Okay, I can't resist a bit of a digression here. Did you know Mormons once created their own alphabet? It's true. They wanted a more phonetic approach than the standard English alphabet to make it easier for immigrants to learn the language. Didn't catch on, but it's pretty fun to look at.

Anyway, the first three handcart companies that went west did surprisingly well, with "only" around a 3-5% fatality rate. You had the standard range of axle breakdowns, illness, and low rations, but by and large, everyone made it through. Emboldened by these successes, two other companies got together in 1856, sailing across from England that May and running headlong into what would become disaster compounding on disaster. It started with miscommunications with the church's agents in Iowa City, which meant delays in throwing together carts, and flowed into more delays as they tried to repair poorly built carts. It was mid-August by the time they were ready to leave, a start late enough in the year that they worried they would run into trouble with winter weather on the trail.

Or at least Levi Savage, who had previously made a similar trip marching from Iowa to California as a member of the Mormon Battalion, was worried, and told the rest it was foolish and dangerous to leave so late. The rest? Eh, divine intervention will protect us, right? What could go wrong?

Everything. The answer is everything. Here's a description from the rescue party sent to meet them a few months later, as they were hunkering down in Wyoming:

It is not of much use for me to attempt to give a description of the situation of these people, for this you will learn from [others]; but you can imagine between five and six hundred men, women and children, worn down by drawing hand carts through snow and mud; fainting by the wayside; falling, chilled by the cold; children crying, their limbs stiffened by cold, their feet bleeding and some of them bare to snow and frost. The sight is almost too much for the stoutest of us; but we go on doing all we can, not doubting nor despairing.

First, they had traveled to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, arriving in October and expecting to be restocked with provisions and finding nothing. Then they tossed some "extra" clothing and blankets to lighten the load. In mid-October, a blizzard struck. They ran out of food and had to slaughter their cattle. River crossings became freezing death-traps. Hypothermia and frostbite spread through the camps. People began dying in droves. Finally, rescue parties arrived from Utah and saved them from further disaster.

A folk Mormon story talks about how three eighteen-year-old boys from the rescue company carried nearly everyone from the Martin Handcart Company across the Sweetwater River in Wyoming, all dying from side effects of the exposure in later years. This story took several liberties with the truth, which is a shame, because a rescue company dragging a group of frost-bitten, starving pioneers across a river is dramatic enough without the embellishment.

In the end, 68 of the 404 members of the Willie Handcart company died on the trail, as did at least 145 of the 576 in the Martin Company.

One of the many ways this was weaved into a "faith-promoting story" was a line etched into Mormon folklore:

... did you ever hear a survivor of that company utter a word of criticism? Not one of that company ever apostatized or left the church because everyone of us came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with him in our extremities.

Immense sacrifice leading to certain testimony of God's existence, carried as a memento throughout their lives? Powerful stuff.

Shame my own family story told me differently.

The Story of Jane Brice

Every Utah Mormon has at least one pioneer story. It might be my bias talking, but I've always thought my family's was the best. Let me introduce you to Jane Brice, a ten-year-old member of the Martin Handcart Company who traveled to Utah with her father, mother, and older brother. Some of it might be exaggerated, but to the extent it was, the exaggerations are hers: she dictated the story personally in 1916. The factual outline is easily verifiable.

Her family was converted in Wales and sailed over as part of the Martin Handcart Company in 1856. You already know the outline of the Martin Handcart Company's journey. After the first snowstorm, her mother fell ill. Later, at one of the Sweetwater River crossings, her mother died and the company buried her. I'll leave it to Jane's account for some of the details of the journey afterwards:

Our progress became so slow that we sometimes traveled only a half a mile a day. One night it thundered and lightening so terribly that we were forced to camp and to go to bed without anything to eat. It was now November and so cold that nearly everyone had frozen feet. One man had both feet frozen so badly that he had to have them amputated. When I took my shoes off one night after a very cold day’s travel, my feet were black with blisters, and in the left ankle was a big hole which had been caused by the frozen condition of my feet. (The hole in her ankle remained the rest of her life—a reminder of the ordeal on the Wyoming plains!) One toe was frozen so badly that I thought it would surely come off. My feet were so terribly swollen, that I could not wear my shoes, so I had to wrap them in old rags and sacks in order to walk at all. To keep my hands from freezing, I would clasp them at the back of my neck and with the aid of my thick black hair, prevented them from freezing.

At least it was a happy ending when they reached Salt Lake City at the end of November, right? Every member of the company remained faithful and true and lived happily ever after.

Not so much:

When on the thirtieth of November, my father saw the barren winter valley that Salt Lake City was in 1856, he said, “And this is Zion—the Zion we have suffered and lost so much to reach—Why this is nothing but a God-forsaken desert! I’m going back to England with the first company that travels East.”

Whoops. Two years later, her father gathered her and her brother up to head back to England and give up on the whole affair. That's where the story would end in most cases: a sad, pointless trip that led to the death of his wife over a religion he no longer believed. But Jane wasn't keen on returning. Instead, when the wagon train was ready to leave and go east, she ran off to hide in a woodpile. As she tells it, she sat there sobbing, knowing she would never see her father again. He looked around for her, then when he couldn't find her, asked a friend to take care of her and left. Her reasoning for staying, in her own words:

"Because Mother said this is where we should be and she died trying to get here. I know this is where I should stay!”

Her first-person account ends there, but the transcriber notes details of her later life: how the family she was adopted by turned out to be a bit nasty and worked her to the bone, how another man adopted her a few years later, how she never heard from her father again and received her first letter from her brother ten years later, how she later became the first polygamous wife of one of the settlers, and a bunch of fond recollections from the transcriber, her granddaughter.

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Reflections

When I was growing up, this was one of my favorite stories. I asked after it, and reread it, and retold it often. The faith of a ten-year-old child who knew her mother had died to get her somewhere, then stayed there despite her father's abandonment and built a life for herself, is quite the moving story for her descendents who share her faith. It's so perfectly inspiring. I remember, when I doubted my faith, being able to cling to it and think that whatever my own concerns, her sacrifices and her faith must mean something. The pioneer story was my founding myth, and Jane Brice my personal connection to that legacy.

And now here I am, having walked away from all that.

What do you do, when reality creeps in to a beautifully formed myth, and you view a set of actions that seemed so inspiring in the new light of disbelief? Here is the reality: My ancestors traveled from all over America and northwestern Europe to Utah, throwing away their old lives (and for some, their lives, full stop) in pursuit of a dream woven by a charismatic, grandiose story-teller who caught them up in his fantasy. Jane Brice's mother did not need to die. The pioneers did not need to walk to Utah. Mormons did not have a divine calling to sweep in, start wars with the people who already lived in the territory they claimed, and colonize Utah.

But here, too, is the reality: Jane Brice was sincere in her belief, and she made sacrifices for it far beyond what we're used to in this day and age. The pioneers as a whole were operating from the most compelling information they had access to at the time, and they built institutions and cities and a society that persists through today. There's a certain dark humor to her father being correct about Mormonism, but she did only what he and her mother had taught her was right, and he abandoned his child rather than stay a moment longer in Utah. And in the end, my family has by and large lived happy, fulfilling, good lives in Utah, building on what she did.

The founding myth, in its pure form, is untenable with what I now know. Even with that, though, there is something genuine to respect here. For one who believes, as I do, that there is value to building positive mythologies, it's not a stretch to construct a new founding myth of the same story, one which I can still hope to live up to: a willingness to work and sacrifice and build for what you believe in, even when that means choosing a different path than your family and your culture before you. Proceed from the best information you have, and then work for it. To get a bit cheesy: A ten-year-old girl sailed across the ocean, walked a thousand miles, and later hid in a woodpile and watched her father abandon her in order to do what she perceived as right. What's my excuse?

Happy Pioneer Day.

The following short essay has gotten some attention on Twitter, so I wanted to preserve a lightly edited form in a more permanent location. To flesh the post out a bit, I’ve added a few notable replies and related thoughts in separate sections. I expect to continue using this format to port Twitter posts to Substack if it works well—as ever, I welcome feedback.

Quick take on Vance: Trump’s choice of him as vice president suggests that the GOP is looking to make an appeal to anti-woke Silicon Valley or finance types to fill the void left by the Republican Party's competency crisis.

Right now, there is tremendous asymmetry between the parties in policy positions. The Democrats have a massive bench of people whose traditional qualifications are through the roof. The Republicans simply don't, and historically Trump has been pretty repugnant to what calls elite human capital. But you need to fill political appointments from somewhere.

The Thiel-adjacent wing is one of the few exceptions here, and it's expanding. You're seeing endorsements from, and overtures to, Elon Musk, the All-In Podcast guys, and Bill Ackman. Republicans offer a sort of Faustian bargain to ambitious anti-woke secular sorts: make your peace with the evangelicals, pander to social conservatism, and gain sway in a coalition crying out for policy competence. More than a few will take that bargain. People are drawn to power voids.

Vance is of that class. He's smart, ambitious, Thiel-aligned, and in tune with the online right. He's cynical enough to flip 180 degrees on a dime, and the Trump-populists are desperate enough for competence that they'll accept his flip. He knows more than almost anyone about the right's human capital problem. If I had to guess, I suspect that whatever he talks about, from day 1 that will be the problem he focuses most on solving.

The key trick anti-elite populism can always try to lean on is appealing to the portions of the elite who feel slighted by extant power structures. It’s a neat trick, if one can manage it.

All in all, his appointment makes me take seriously the possibility that Trump's second term will focus seriously on setting a policy foundation for the future versus just being cult-of-personality stuff.

Part of me wants to imagine I like who Vance is deep down, but I don't actually know who he is deep down.

I'm wary.

Worthwhile replies include:

Matt Yglesias: “This read of Vance as appealing primarily to businessmen radicalized against wokeness is much more correct than views of him as the harbinger of a new anti-capitalist GOP.”

Noah Smith: “Education polarization left the GOP without a competent elite, and now they're trying to figure out ways to rebuild.”

Mark Cuban: “SV always overestimates their impact. Trump won’t take the bait. But he is smart enough to take their money and influence in SV circles, while offering a policy here and there as bread crumbs. Bottom line, DJT will eat them up and spit them out.”

Corie Whalen: “I know the corporate community and the finance community aren’t one in the same, but reports suggest the Vance pick has CEO types worried since a lot of his economic policy proposals are actually to the left of many Democrats. It would be like the worst of Biden’s policies on steroids.”

VB Knives: “Anti-elite populism kind of unavoidably collapses from inability to attract high functioning staff. Have to draw from some other well than its natural adherents.”

For those who want to understand Vance more, the inimitable Matt Lakeman’s review of Hillbilly Elegy is an excellent place to start.

The end feels particularly relevant:

While reading the book, he came off as entirely earnest and honest to me, but when I checked his Wikipedia afterward, I felt a slight twinge of skepticism. I mean, it’s probably nothing… but within months of the book’s release, Vance got hired by a Peter Thiel-owned venture capital fund, then became a contributor at CNN, then opened his own Ohio-based non-profit, and is now publicly considering a Senate run as a Republican.

Once I read his Wiki, it dawned on me just how clean Vance comes off in his own story. In a tale packed with alcoholics, drug addicts, and philanderers, in a rough part of the country, Vance seems a little too good. He mentions occasionally underage drinking, and smoking pot a handful of times, but no hard drugs. He never once mentions women until he reaches his adulthood in the story. He yells at his eventual wife, but it’s excused by his bad upbringing. Maybe I’m being cynical, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if Vance left out some details just in case he ran for office one day.

So… take of that what you will.

You can also listen to the article below, thanks to .

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Hillbilly Elegy – The Culture of White American Poverty - By Matt Lakeman

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See also Ross Douthat’s wide-ranging New York Times interview with Vance from last month.

Someone pointed out to me via DM that Vance’s Wikipedia page has also been on quite a journey over the past couple of days. The start of his policy section yesterday:

The start of his policy section earlier today:

This isn’t terribly surprising; it’s inevitable that people will be more motivated to shape someone’s public image after a VP nomination. It’s still in flux, but worth keeping an eye on. Current as of writing:

This serves as a sort of follow-up to my article on the Republican Party last year. I don’t think this fundamentally alters any of the analysis around their human capital problem, but it does suggest ways they’re aiming to address that problem.

Welcome to The Archive, a series of posts aimed at collecting my writing from scattered corners of the internet, then editing and republishing it on Substack. Generally speaking, these posts will be less formal and briefer than my written-for-Substack articles. If you prefer to receive only my new articles, you can choose whether to subscribe to this section separately.

Intersectionality is interesting: independent-minded liberals who reject much of progressive social justice still often use it as an example of an obviously true and useful concept.

I disagree.

Intersectionality, as described by its proponents:

The concept of intersectionality describes the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects. For example, when a Muslim woman wearing the Hijab is being discriminated, it would be impossible to dissociate her female* from her Muslim identity and to isolate the dimension(s) causing her discrimination.

All forms of inequality are mutually reinforcing and must therefore be analysed and addressed simultaneously to prevent one form of inequality from reinforcing another. For example, tackling the gender pay gap alone – without including other dimensions such as race, socio-economic status and immigration status – will likely reinforce inequalities among women.

There is a way, to be clear, in which it is adjacent to truth. It is true that different facets of an individual's identity interact in sometimes unpredictable ways, ways that can be greater than the sum of their parts, and ways that can create unique disadvantages. If that is where the concept of intersectionality started and ended, I would consider it true, but trivially so. I can give it more credit than that, even: I think its creation in the context of analyzing feminism through the lens of black women interested in it made sense and yielded some useful insights.

But intersectionality is designed with a view only towards different forms of perceived oppression, not through any of the rest of what makes an identity. Kimberlé Crenshaw, when designing it, did so to explore the experience of black women and their experience of both racism and sexism. It centers on discrimination law and presupposes a clearly defined matrix of oppression, marking groups as either dominant or oppressed. Men? Dominant. Women? Oppressed. White people? Dominant. Black people? Oppressed. Straight people? Dominant. Gay people? Oppressed. In both of these structural elements, it flattens and distorts human experience, making us into caricatures of ourselves. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's outright false. But it's misleading. It clouds as much as it elucidates.

I find this immensely frustrating, because I think approaching a similar idea from a sounder background could be powerful, and would be directly useful for me.

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To illustrate, I'll lean on my own experience, and the degree to which intersectionality as written and used is insufficient to understand it and an adjacent concept could yield insight. I'll start with identity labels, attempt to provide an "intersectional" analysis of my experience, then wrestle towards what a proper description would take.

I am, per the labels of one who would use intersectionality as their framework: a "cis gay white middle-class ex-Mormon American man". Start, as one instinctively does from within that framework, by marking each label as privileged or disadvantaged: cis (P), gay (D), white (P), middle-class (P), ex-Mormon (D, oppressed specifically by Mormonism), American (P), man (P).

How would an academic focused on intersectionality analyze my situation? They would, I suspect, zero in on the way being gay and leaving Mormon culture carries unique disadvantages over and above what either causes alone, while pointing out that those disadvantages are ameliorated in many ways by my experience as a cis white middle-class man. They would sympathize with how hard it must have been, and must still be, to face down the ignorant bigotry of my home culture, and would perhaps praise my bravery in being myself regardless. They would be able to pinpoint specific attitudes as "internalized homophobia".

They would be adept at noticing every time my experience as a Gay Man was made worse by Utah culture and Mormonism, from the impossibility of having a church-sanctioned wedding had I wanted to, to the ways many within the faith search constantly for any and all evidence of gay people being miserable mentally ill perverts, or find affirming stories of gay men marrying women and living happily (for a time). They'd note how even sympathetic Mormon family members would carry a hope in the back of their heads that I would return and marry a woman in a Mormon temple "for time and all eternity", and how my wedding would carry a bittersweet tone for some in my family.

These observations aren't all wrong. But I find them unsatisfying. A True analysis must, I would argue, contend with advantages and disadvantages alike, and do so with nuance I have not seen from academics like Crenshaw. It would need to wrestle with the defining "oppression" of my youth being my recognition that openness about my faith and beliefs outside my insular local community was met with near-universal ridicule, whether via a smash Broadway hit or open hatred online. It would have to address the value of being part of a tight-knit minority community united by a deep-felt common purpose and shared history.

It would need to unravel the peculiar knot of my experience with sexuality: the isolation I felt as one who noticed no sexual attraction to anyone in a world obsessed with sex, my worries I would never understand what it was like to love someone, the immense relief of realizing I had a crush—an actual crush!—on a male friend of mine. The difficulty of finding dates when I intended to date women, the ease of finding incredible men, the complexities of starting a family due to nature's limitations rather than mankind's oppression.

And gender roles! It would examine a lot there, from struggling to figure out how I ought to find my footing in the traditionally woman-dominated fields that compel me (education, psychology), to the relative ease with which I would be able to meet my family-oriented goals had I been a woman, to the ways my being a man has provided me advantages in male-dominated spaces like Mormon missions, computer science courses, or the military.

It would discuss the waves of social affirmation both when I stepped away from my tight-knit minority community united by what turned out to be a heartbreakingly false common purpose and distorted history, and when I began to tell others I was attracted to men, alongside the complex and difficult wedges both decisions introduced with my family. It would need to cover both the value and the mental distortions attributable to my childhood faith. It would cover the way my upbringing in that culture may have led me to suppress or redirect my potential budding attraction such that I never noticed it, sure, but it would do so alongside an acknowledgement of how that same culture provided countless models of healthy long-term relationships for me to build towards. It would certainly dwell on the joys of my own “intersectional” wedding—a gay wedding full of Mormons, where the religious community of my family helped immensely for things like finding a photographer or wedding planner, and where my religious family and childhood friends joined in the celebration.

In short: the identity factors intersectional analysis looks for are not unalloyed positives or negatives. In framing identity factors as oppressed or not, it creates a blind spot towards the genuine advantages that accompany them. It deceives by exclusion, presenting a pinhole view poorly suited to serious analysis of how identity traits actually interact in people's lives. This isn't a matter of debating how oppressed any one group truly is, it's a matter of true oppression (if one chooses that word) being tied inextricably to true advantages, and being hopelessly muddled up with disadvantages and advantages that are nobody's fault.

In my eyes, intersectionality's crime, such as it is, is not essentializing identity groups and analyzing how those groups interact. Nor is it the act of acknowledging ideas like racism and sexism. No, its crime is in reducing the intersections of those groups to the extent to which they can be seen as marginalized, rather than rising to the more difficult and more valuable task of addressing groups in all their richness and complexity.

Something that could be called intersectionality is obviously true and straightforwardly useful. Intersectionality as coined by Crenshaw and used in academic circles, not so much, and we are poorer for its prominence.

This article was written for, and originally discussed, here and here, where I also expand on my thoughts on privilege framework and why individualism is incomplete. I received thoughtful pushback from several people, notably including the brilliant and relentlessly charitable progressive writer behind the newly launched Folded Papers.

Folded Papers

A personal substack with musings on philosophy and politics.

By Gemma

Note: This book review was initially published to reddit as a four-part series. The first part can be found here or here. I have lightly edited it and consolidated it for republishing here.

Intro

We believed in socialism, in fair shares for all. Later, we learned that personal motivation and personal rewards were essential for a productive economy. However, because people are unequal in their abilities, if performance and rewards are determined by the marketplace, there will be a few big winners, many medium winners, and a considerable number of losers. That would make for social tensions because a society's sense of fairness is offended. ...Our difficulty was to strike the right balance. (95)1

What happens when you give an honest, capable person absolute power?

In From Third World to First, Lee Kuan Yew, in characteristically blunt style, does his best to answer that question.

Lee Kuan Yew's politics—and by extension Singapore's, because he really did define the country—are often, I feel, mischaracterized. In We Sail Tonight For Singapore, for example, Scott Alexander characterizes it as reactionary. This is agreeable to the American left, because it's run so differently to Western liberal ideals, and agreeable to reactionaries, because Singapore is preternaturally successful by almost any metric you care to use.

The only problem is that the claim reflects almost nothing about how Lee Kuan Yew actually ran the country or who he was.

I get the impression it's a mistake to frame Singapore alongside a partisan political axis at all, because the second you do, half of what the country does will seem bizarre. Lee, personally, is open about his party's aim to claim the middle ground, opposed by "only the extreme left and right." (111) With that in mind, what works best to predict Lee's choices? In his telling, he is guided continually by a sort of ruthless pragmatism. Will a policy increase the standard of living in the country? Will it make the citizens more self-sufficient, more capable, or safer? Ultimately, does it work? Oh, and does it make everybody furious?

Great, do that.

From Third World to First is the single most compelling political work I've read, and I'd like to capture as much of Lee's style and ideology as possible. He divides the book (or at least the half I'm reviewing; I'll leave his thoughts on world affairs alone because there's so much to cover as is) into sections based on specific policy problems and how he approached them. I'll focus my attention on a few:

• Citizen welfare & development

• Free speech & free press

• Approach to political opposition

• Handling of racial & cultural tensions

At the end, I will link to my notes in full, and those who are interested are welcome to ask for more details. Depending on interest level, I may write a follow-up review of topics I don't have space to cover here. Note especially that LKY spends huge chunks of the book praising the politicians working alongside him and emphasizing their role. Ultimately, though, the decisions for the country flowed through him and so I am comfortable approaching all these as his policies.

LKY's writing is thoroughly readable and often hilarious, so I will quote it extensively throughout.

Part One: Citizen welfare & development

I.

To even out the extreme results of free-market competition, we had to redistribute the national income through subsidies on things that improved the earning power of citizens, such as education. Housing and public health were also obviously desirable. But finding the correct solutions... was not easy. We decided each matter in a pragmatic way, always mindful of possible abuse and waste. If we over-re-distributed by higher taxation, the high performers would cease to strive. (95)

There are two major questions LKY had to answer when it came to developing Singapore. First, how could the country develop a strong economy? Having achieved that, how could they ensure the welfare of all citizens? Or, as he put it, he wanted to leapfrog the region and then create a "First World oasis" (58).

LKY's strategy for the first was simple: provide goods and services "cheaper and better than anyone else, or perish." (56) He was proudly adamant about his country's refusal to beg, describing on every other page how he would go to his citizens and say things like "The world does not owe us a living." (53) or "If we were a soft society then we would already have perished. A soft people will vote for those who promised a soft way out, when in truth there is none. There is nothing Singapore gets for free." (53)

This is one of many areas where he was adamant about rejecting conventional wisdom. In his telling, development economists and other third world leaders of the 60s described multinational corporations as "[neocolonialist] exploiters of cheap land, labor, and raw materials... but... we had a real-life problem to solve and could not afford to be conscribed by any theory or dogma." (58)

So, instead, he threw his country's arms open and said, "Exploit us!" Image was everything. To attract tourism, they invented the merlion symbol and scattered it through the country. Places were renamed. My favorite—"Blakang Mati" (behind death), an island formerly used by a British battalion, was reinvented as "Sentosa" (tranquillity), a tourist resort. (54) To inspire confidence and demonstrate his country's discipline and reliability, LKY focused on planting trees and developing parkland in the center of the city and between the airport, his office, and hotels. For one Hewlett-Packard visit, when an elevator wasn't yet powered to take them to the sixth floor of their planned headquarters, Singaporean officials extended a cable from a nearby building to power it day-of. (62)

In the 70s, as the country's economy stabilized, that confidence manifested in other ways, as with this interaction:

When our... officer asked how much longer we had to maintain protective tariffs for the car assembly plant owned by a local company, the finance director of Mercedes-Benz said brusquely, "Forever," because our workers were not as efficient as Germans. We did not hesitate to remove the tariffs and allow the plant to close down. Soon afterward we also phased out [other protections]. (63)

The whole thing, at least from a distance, follows a pattern of initial tight control, caution, and centralized planning, followed by a slow move towards a freer economy as long as everything seemed to be working. Worried about government starting industries and running them at a loss, LKY insisted that state-run corporations stay in the black or shut down. As they succeeded, they privatized—telecommunications, the port, and public utilities all started within the government and became independent profitable companies over time. (67)

II.

From a Labour Party meeting in June 1966: "Lee Kuan Yew [is] as good a left-wing and democratic socialist as any in this room." (34)

I could go on for a while longer outlining Singapore's growth, and part of me wants to, because the story is fascinating. It's hardly unique, though, just the story of a well-managed economy. Everyone already knows about the growth of Singapore's economy. The work it took is worth noting, but much more compelling for me is what they did with all that new wealth. The United States had a hundred years or more to manage a jump Singapore went through in a couple decades. Growth brings all sorts of questions: How do you shift people to a new way of life? How do you get people invested in their country's success? How do you handle welfare, health care, transport? This is where Singapore excels.

Not without controversy, though, aided and abetted by Lee Kuan Yew himself. As much as I tend to appreciate his approach, his bluntness sometimes gives me pause. Here's a sampling of his thoughts on welfare:

We noted by the 1970s that when governments undertook primary responsibility for the basic duties of the head of a family, the drive in people weakened. Welfare undermined self-reliance. People did not have to work for their families' well-being. The handout became a way of life. The downward spiral was relentless as motivation and productivity went down. People lost the drive to achieve because they paid too much in taxes. They became dependent on the state for their basic needs. (104)

And:

There will always be the irresponsible or the incapable, some 5 percent of our population. They will run through any asset, whether a house or shares. We try hard to make them as independent as possible and not end up in welfare homes. More important, we try to rescue their children from repeating the feckless ways of their parents. We have arranged help but in such a way that only those who have no other choice will seek it. This is the opposite of attitudes in the West, where liberals actively encourage people to demand their entitlements with no sense of shame, causing an explosion of welfare costs. (106)

So—welfare bad. Got it. What's his alternative?

Funding Prosperity

The foundation for his strategy was laid before Singapore left colonial rule: an compulsory 5% pension fund (the CPF) with employers matching 5%. This fund became a major tool to support LKY's value of self-sufficiency. As he says, he "was determined to avoid placing the burden of the present generation's welfare costs onto the next generation" (97). So how did he fund welfare plans?

As Singapore's economy grew year by year, workers' wages went up. As wages rose, knowing that people would "resist any increase in their CPF contribution that would reduce their spendable money", he increased mandatory CPF contribution rates with part, but never all, of that increase. At its peak in 1984, mandatory contribution increased to 25% with full matching. Every working citizen was automatically saving at a 50% rate. This decreased to 40% over time. (97)

Every aspect of citizen welfare becomes easier when every worker has that large a guaranteed savings account.

Following the pattern of initial strictness, followed by expanding rights, the government expanded CPF investment options over time. One illustrative example: when they privatized bus services, they allowed citizens to spend up to S$5,000 to buy initial shares in the new transport company so "profits would go back to the workers, the regular users of public transport" ...and, as LKY adds in the same tone a moment later, to reduce incentive to demand cheap fares and government subsidies. (103)

This strategy repeated when they privatized Singapore Telecom, as they sold shares at half price to all adult citizens, with bonus shares every few years provided people held onto initial shares. Again, LKY describes this desire to redistribute surpluses and provide people a tangible stake in their country's success. He reports that 90% of the workforce owned Singapore Telecom shares. (103)

Neither the CPF fund nor HDB housing, incidentally, can be taken by creditors.

Sense of Ownership

Aside from pensions, LKY's initial major vision for the fund was a way to allow citizens to buy their own houses. He talks a lot about the value of people having a stake in their country, how a "sense of ownership [is] vital for [a] society [with] no deep roots in a common historical experience," (96) the ways home ownership increases civic pride and a sense of belonging. So the government constantly bought land up, built high-rise public "HDB" housing (up to 50 stories!), and then sold apartments to citizens. At its peak, 87% of Singaporeans lived in this public housing.

Some design decisions of HDB housing are worth examining. In some, LKY asked developers "to set aside land... for clean industries which could then tap the large pool of young women and housewives whose children were already schooling" (98). When older housing started decaying, the government created a program to upgrade and refurbish older apartments at the cost of S$58,000 per home, charging owners S$4,500 of that cost (100).

It's easy to get lost in policy details: decisions, reasoning, numbers. What about the humanity behind those policies, though? What was life like on the ground for the farmers and market vendors who abruptly found themselves moving from wooden huts to modern high-rises in the middle of a rapidly developing city? There was exciting progress, yes, but much of the time it was tragic, hilarious, and absurd.

LKY highlights some of these moments. Pig farmers, nudging their pigs up staircases to raise them in high-rise apartments. A family, gating off their kitchen for a dozen chickens and ducks. People walking up long flights of stairs because they were afraid of using elevators, using kerosene instead of electric bulbs, selling miscellaneous goods from ground-floor flats. (99) He grows somber as he talks about resettling older farmers, how even generous compensation money didn't matter next to losing "their pigs, ducks, chickens, fruit trees, and vegetable plots," and how many of the older farmers never really stopped resenting the change. (180)

He's quick to point out other changes, though: In riots in the 1950s and early 60s, he recalls, people joined in, breaking cars, lighting fires, reveling in chaos. Later in the decade, after home ownership started to spread, he mentions seeing people carrying scooters to safety into their HDB apartments. In his words, "I was strengthened in my resolve to give every family solid assets which I was confident they would protect and defend, especially their home."

"I was not wrong." (103)

I laughed when I got to that line, because I'm pretty sure this picture holds pride of place in LKY's mind. He presents this blithe sense of self-assurance throughout the book, with every controversial policy and scornful dismissal.

Health care

Speaking of blithe self-assurance and scornful dismissal, he dismisses the British National Health Service as idealistic but impractical and destined to cause ballooning costs, then takes a shot at the American system with its "wasteful and extravagant diagnostic tests paid for out of insurance." He reports that at least in Singapore, the ideal of free health care clashes with human behavior. Doctors prescribe free antibiotics, patients take them for a few days, don't feel better, and toss them out. Then they go to private doctors, pay, and take the medicine properly. (100)

The first solution was a token 50-cent fee to attend outpatient dispensaries. The full solution, and part of the reason Singapore's per capita health care costs are half the UK's and less than a quarter of the US's, once again went through the CPF pensions: 1% set aside into "Medisave" for health care costs at first, gradually increasing to 6%, capped at S$15,000. "To reinforce family solidarity and responsibility", LKY reports, accounts could be used for immediate family members as well. (101)

That's not to say he wanted no subsidies. At government hospitals, patients chose wards subsidized up to 80%, moving to more comfortable and less subsidized wards as they desire. Medisave funds could be used for private hospital fees in order to compete with government hospitals and pressure them to improve, but not for outpatient clinics or private general practitioners. Why? LKY didn't want to encourage people to see doctors unnecessarily for minor ailments. (102) This constant tinkering and fine-tuning around incentive systems is core to LKY's planning.

From there, Singapore added optional insurance for catastrophic cases, then added a fund from government revenue to provide total waivers for those who lacked Medisave, insurance, and immediate family. Per LKY's reporting, "no one is deprived of essential medical care, we do not have a massive drain on resources, nor long queues waiting for operations." (102)

Pragmatism.

Taxes

So how does this welfare structure reflect in taxes?

Every few pages in The Singapore Story, Lee Kuan Yew makes some grandiose statement about Singapore's successes, and so every few pages I would rush online to see what was exaggerated or cherry-picked and what has faded in the years since LKY's time. The tax structure was the point where this yielded the most fruit—not because of any cherry-picking, but because almost everything has gotten better in the 19 years since LKY wrote his book.

Here are some details on Singapore's tax structure, both as LKY reported and at present, in pursuit of an overall goal to shift from taxing income to taxing consumption:

• Top marginal income tax rate decreased from 55 percent in 1965 to 28 percent in 1996 (now 22 percent).

• Corporate tax rate of 40 percent reduced to 26 percent (now 17 percent)

• No capital gains tax

• 3% GST (goods and services tax, equivalent to VAT (now 7%)

• 0.4% import tariff (now duty-free)

• Inheritance/estate tax was cut from 60 percent to 5-10 percent in 1984, leading to increased revenue "as the wealthy no longer found it worthwhile to avoid estate duty" (now abolished)

In addition, they collect non-tax revenue from a range of charges, aiming for "partial or total cost recovery for goods and services provided by the state" to "check over-consumption of subsidized public services and reduce distortions in the allocation of resources." (107)

How has this reflected on overall government expenditures?

At the time of LKY's book in 2000, annual budget surpluses had been recorded every year but the 1985-1987 recession. Since then, 2002-2004, 2009, 2015 also recorded deficits, but the government is still running at a comfortable surplus overall.

Here's what the budget looked like in 2016.

Ultimately, as LKY points out, his strategy relied heavily on a unique set of circumstances leading to steady growth, but they capitalized on that growth, made long-term decisions early, and set themselves up well for the foreseeable future as a result. I don't share a ton of his skepticism towards Nordic-style welfare states, particularly since they remain comfortable and successful twenty years later, but I'll admit to more than a twinge of envy when I compare Singapore's approach to welfare with that of the US.

Interlude

Having made the claim that Singapore really isn't reactionary, I'm left to defend it after a string of quotes and choices that, if not reactionary, at least seem tailor-made to pick fights with leftist thought. This is one reason I quoted the British Labour Party members at the start of section II. Lee Kuan Yew started the PAP as a socialist party, driven by trade unions, opposed to British colonialism, aligned with British progressives. Again and again throughout the book, you see LKY pause to note potential unintended consequences of a choice, to approach major decisions with caution, and to change his approach when presented with sufficient evidence, but threads of progressive ideals are persistent throughout and essential to his decision-making.

Those threads should become more apparent as I progress through more of the review, fitting naturally with Lee's overall bluntly pragmatic approach. Singapore is unlike any other country in the world, and while nothing done there can copy 1:1 over to different settings, there's a lot worth noticing.

Part Two: You are Free to Agree

Are you a fan of free speech? Are you eager for everyone to have a platform? Are you in favor of an open, unconstrained press?

Lee Kuan Yew isn't, and he's probably poking fun at you.

Free Press

Here are a few of his choicest quotes on Western-style free press:

My early experiences in Singapore and Malaya shaped my views about the claim of the press to be the defender of truth and freedom of speech. The freedom of the press was the freedom of its owners to advance their personal and class interests. (186)

And:

I did not accept that newspaper owners had the right to print whatever they liked. Unlike Singapore's ministers, they and their journalists were not elected. ...I do not subscribe to the Western practice that allows a wealthy press baron to decide what voters should read day after day. (191)

And, when he got into an argument with the US State Department:

The State Department repeated that it did not take sides; it was merely expressing concern because of its "fundamental and long-standing commitment to the principles of a free and unrestricted press"—which meant that "the press is free to publish or not publish what it chooses however irresponsible or biased its actions may seem to be." (192)

All that's pretty straightforward, and clearly goes against the principles of free speech, right? Then you get to the next quote:

We have always banned communist publications; no Western media or media organization has ever protested against this. We have not banned any Western newspaper or journal. Yet they frequently refused us the right of reply when they misreported us. (191)

Here's a question. You're a tiny city-state occupying valuable territory, trying to stay independent. You are watching the cultural revolution sweep across the homeland of three-quarters of your people, and you keep noticing them funding your newspapers. Meanwhile, other superpowers are locked in an all-out ideological struggle with those forces, a struggle that's shaping policy around the whole world. The country's dominant English-language newspaper at the time of gaining independence was "owned by the British and actively promoted their interests." (185)

What's the right level of freedom of press?

Keeping in mind that the book is telling things from LKY's perspective and so naturally seeks to cast his decisions favorably, his position has some nuances that make it easy to be sympathetic. First, there's a different standard for local and foreign media: "We had to tolerate locally owned newspapers that criticized us; we accepted their bona fides, because they had to stay and suffer the consequences of their policies. Not so 'the birds of passage who run [foreign-owned papers].'" (187)

Second, as he mentions above, he didn't ban non-Communist foreign press. Not exactly. Instead, every time a paper refused right of reply for a story he felt was misrepresented or slanted, he just restricted sales licenses to smaller numbers, with an eye towards reducing advertising revenue but not towards outright banning the ideas. This led to occasionally amusing exchanges. In one back-and-forth, after the Asian Wall Street Journal (AWSJ) published an alleged defamatory article and had sales restricted, the AWSJ offered to distribute its journal free to its deprived subscribers to "forego its sales revenue in the spirit of helping Singapore businessmen". Singapore's government agreed, as long as it left out advertisements. The paper backed out, claiming cost issues. Singapore offered to cover half the additional costs. When the paper refused, Singapore gave an official response: "You are not interested in the business community getting information. You want the freedom to make money selling advertisements." (193)

Third, well, it's only paranoia if you're wrong. In addition to facing consistent attempts at covert communist influence, I learned post-reading that Lee Kuan Yew had at least one memorable run-in with the CIA (h/t /r/singapore). In 1960, they offered him $3.3 million to cover up a failed attempt to buy information from Singapore intelligence officials. Lee's response? "The Americans should know the character of the men they are dealing with in Singapore and not get themselves further dragged into calumny. ...You do not buy and sell this Government." Never one to ignore leverage, he requested that instead of covert bribes the US provide public foreign aid. They complied.

Dystopian information lockdown, or prudent defense against foreign influence and misinformation? LKY is convinced, rightly or not, that it is the latter. Read with modern US politics in mind, it's easy to compare it to deplatformings from tech websites, concerns about Russian infiltration of social media, or the controversies around fake news. The context changes, the challenges stay the same.

Free Speech

I frankly have much less sympathy for LKY's eagerness to sue people for libel. It's worth mentioning that Singapore has avoided one obvious concern about relying on courts here: corruption is almost non-existent in Singapore, and deliberately so. We may come back to corruption later, since LKY does spend some time on it. Still, there's something unsettling about the leader of a country keeping a hawk's eye watch for anything that misrepresents him, then turning the power of the courts on the individual or newspaper who went after him.

He talks about a fair number of legal battles with evident satisfaction, about taking this opponent or that who accused him or corruption or lied about him to court, then winning the battles. He anticipates the obvious criticism about this practice, and defends against it:

Had I not sued, these allegations would have gained credence. ...Outrageous statements are disbelieved only because they are vigorously refuted. If I failed to sue, that ould be cited as proof that there was something in it. ...Wrong ideas have to be challenged before they influence public opinion and make for problems. (130-131)

And:

Far from oppressing the opposition or the press that unjustly attacked my reputation, I have put my private and public life under close scrutiny whenever I appeared as a plaintiff in court. Without a clear record, it would have been an unnecessary hazard. Because I did this and also gave the damages awarded to deserving charities, I kept my standing with our people. (131)

Left unspoken, though, is that he's the one who's in charge of this whole system of lawsuits. Vigorous refutation of an idea can happen in writing, in speeches, in any number of official channels. If he wants to keep his public and private life open to scrutiny, he can do so however he chooses. Electing to wage time-consuming and costly legal battles against people who putforward unsavory ideas is hardly the only choice for the most powerful man in a country, and it's a choice that I feel warrants skepticism.

I'm much more fond of his response to a London Times reporter who made accusations he disputed (emphases mine):

I wrote to invite Levin to a live television debate in London on his allegations. Levin's editor replied that no television station would be interested. I had taken the precaution of first writing to the chairman of the BBC, my friend Marmaduke Hussey, who had agreed to provide half an hour and a neutral moderator. When I informed the London Times of this offer, the editor on Levin's behalf backed off, arguing that my response should be in the same medium in which Levin had attacked me, namely the Times. I wrote to regret Levin's unwillingness to confront me. When the Times refused to publish my letter, I bought a half-page advertisement in the British daily, the Independent. Interviewed on the BBC World Service, I said, "Where I come from, if an accuser is not prepared to face the person he has attacked, there is nothing more to be said."

Levin has not written about Singapore or me since. (196)

There's something delightful about the image of a politician going up to a reporter and saying, in effect, "Heard you were talking smack. Debate me, you coward."

Another instance shows up, by the way, in which it's hard to make assumptions about Singapore. Given LKY's desire for control over media messaging, you might expect some sort of overreaction to the internet. Instead, his message comes with characteristic bluntness: "Countries that try to block the use of IT will lose." (196)

On nanny states

One last topic remains to be covered here. From banning everything from drugs to tobacco advertising to chewing gum to eating durian in public spaces, Singapore has inevitably faced accusations of being a "nanny state."

LKY has this to say on the subject:

Foreign correspondents in Singapore have no big scandals of corruption or grave wrongdoings to report. Instead they reported on the fervor and frequency of these "do good" campaigns, ridiculing Singapore as a "nanny state." They laughed at us. I was confident we would have the last laugh. We would have been a grosser, ruder, cruder society had we not made these efforts to persuade our people to change their ways. We did not measure up as a cultivated, civilized society and were not ashamed to set about trying to become one in the shortest time possible. First, we educated and exhorted our people. After we had persuaded and won over a majority, we legislated to punish the willful minority. It has made Singapore a more pleasant place to live in. If this is a "nanny state," I am proud to have fostered one. (183)

To rephrase: "Yep, we're a nanny state. Works great. Any questions?"

I'll repeat my above explanation of LKY's approach: Will a policy make people more self-sufficient, more capable, or safer? Ultimately, does it work? Oh, and does it make everybody furious?

Great, do that.

On a world scale, I think I would be uncomfortable with this sort of standard. I believe in the importance of creating robust societies where a wide range of ideas can thrive, and this sort of deliberately limited culture doesn't really provide that. But part of creating robust systems is questioning assumptions and experimenting with dramatically different approaches. I'm from Utah. I grew up in a similarly self-restricting and proud "nanny state". While it wasn't right for me in the end, for a lot of people I'm close with, those unambiguous strict standards work really, really well in a way that "eh, just do what makes you happy" doesn't. A single city of five and a half million people seems to me just about the right size to run that sort of experiment.

Interlude Two

While reading the book and looking a bit into Singapore, I came across a few pieces of info that don't fit naturally into a review but deserve at least a moment's attention. One is the matter of Singapore's airport.

You might recall from my first review a brief mention of Lee Kuan Yew's focus on first impressions so people would "know that Singaporeans were competent, disciplined, and reliable... without a word being said" (62). Singapore's Changi airport takes that to its natural conclusion. He was determined to make Singapore a transport hub of the region and decided to write off their investments in an older airport to perfect Changi in a number of details. After seeing Boston's Logan Airport, for example, he reported being "impressed that the noise footprint of planes landing and taking off was over water" (203) and adjusting plans accordingly. In the end, they spent six years and $1.5 billion constructing the airport in a sort of anti-Brandenburg approach.

And (h/t elsewhere on reddit): The airport is wild. Features include: multi-story slides, a massive playground of climbing nets, an indoor playground and waterfall, hedge mazes and canopy bridges, and, well, just about everything else. Oh, and it has airplanes too. It's been ranked pretty consistently as the best airport in the world.

Part Three: Race, Language, and Uncomfortable Questions

Here's a tricky governing problem for you.

Imagine your country had historically encouraged a minority group to segregate into lower income communities with poor living conditions.

Picture, too, that that minority group had historically underperformed in school compared to others.

Say that your country had faced large-scale riots in the 1960s over concerns about perceived government discrimination and oppression.

To spice things up, let's add that they're the country's indigenous people, and that they speak a different language and practice a different faith than everybody else in the country.

...and that initially, they formed the vast majority of the military and the police force, and the majority in your much larger neighbor country. It's hardly going to mirror other countries exactly, after all.(12)

How do you ensure justice for them and for all citizens?

Singapore has its advantages over other countries, true. It's... what was the quote?... "a single city with a beautiful natural harbor right smack in the middle of a fantastic chokepoint in one of the biggest trade routes in the world." 1

But demographically, it's complicated, to say the least. 75 percent of Singaporeans are Chinese. Of that majority, about a third speak English at home, half speak Mandarin, and the rest speak other dialects. They split between Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, and irreligious. 15 percent are Malay, and almost all of them speak Malay (90%) and practice Islam (99%). Another 7 percent are Indian, and they tend to speak Tamil and practice Hinduism, but there's a long tail of other languages and faiths. That's after 50 years of coming together. To pull one example of the past, in 1957, 97 percent of Chinese Singaporeans spoke a language other than English or Mandarin at home.

What LKY did to ensure his country's economic prosperity was remarkable and prescient, but where he truly cements his legacy and confounds expectation, in my eyes, is the way in which he handled the most sensitive issues around race and language.

The Malaise of the Malays

Let's return to the governing problem introduced at the start of this section, the complex situation of Malays in Singapore. Assuming absolute power, how do you get a nation to stop self-segregating, particularly when a minority group you're not a part of is concentrated in a slum?

A month after independence, LKY promised the 60000 Malays living in shanty huts in one area that "in 10 years all their shacks would be demolished and [the area] would be another and a better 'Queenstown,'" then their most modern housing. (207) Rather than approach them himself and create a sheer top-down push around difficult decisions like replacing mosques, he spoke privately with Malay members of parliament (MPs), got buy-in from the Muslim governing body of Singapore (MUIS) to allow an old wooden mosque to be demolished, and set up a building fund for the MUIS to build replacement mosques. Compensate homeowners, give them priority in new housing estates, take the 40 families who refuse to vacate to court... done.

...and then, when he realized that people would naturally re-segregate, he got the support of minority parliament members to create race-based quota ceilings for government apartments so that people would have no choice but to intermingle.

You should be used to the pattern by now. Every solution on the table, go for the most direct and efficient way to achieve a goal, push forward regardless of decorum. That part's predictable. What I found more compelling was his emphasis on working with and through minority government members each time he worked with minority communities.

Which raises the question: how could he guarantee he would have minority representatives, given that citizens would naturally prefer MPs who empathized with them, spoke their language, so forth? What's the most Singapore way to solve that particular problem?

That's right, snap your fingers and merge constituencies into clusters of three or four, require candidates to run as groups, and mandate that each group include at least one minority candidate. After all, LKY reminds readers with what sounds like a shrug, "To end up with a Parliament without Malay, Indian, and other minority MPs would be damaging. We had to change the rules." (210) To quote online commenter /u/lunaranus: "For an American politician this kind of change would be the legislative achievement of a lifetime. For LKY it was Tuesday."

So that's segregation taken care of. Is there another, more controversial issue to bring into focus?

"To have people believe all children were equal, whatever their race, and that equal opportunities would allow all to qualify for a place in a university, must lead to discontent. The less successful would believe that the government was not treating them equally." (210)

I'll let that quote speak for itself.

Again, though, the interesting part isn't the blunt diagnosis of problems. The interesting part is the solution. He privately gathered Malay community leaders together, provided them the test results, and promised them the government's full support as they sought solutions. Every time a Malay-focused issue came up, he emphasizes, he would consult with his Malay colleagues and get their input and buy-in. This approach upset some of his senior ministers, one of whom he mentions "was a total multiracialist [who] saw my plan not as a pragmatic acceptance of realities, but as backsliding." (211)

I'll keep his own wording for his response to the concerns:

While I shared [the minister's] ideal of a completely color-blind policy, I had to face reality and produce results. From experience, we knew that Chinese or Indian officials could not reach out to Malay parents and students in the way their own community leaders did. The respect these leaders enjoyed and their sincere interest in the welfare of the less successful persuaded parents and children to make the effort. Paid bureaucrats could never have the same commitment, zest, and rapport to move parents and their children. ...On such personal-emotional issues involving ethnic and family pride, only leaders of the wider ethnic family can reach out to the parents and their children. (211)

In the end, the Malay leaders formed a government-assisted council to help struggling students with extra tutoring in evenings, and the government provided funding for them and a group of Muslims who wanted to approach the same objective more independently of government. Indians and Chinese community leaders followed with their own similar associations not long after.

As of 2005, Singaporean Malays have shrunk, but not closed the gap with other Singaporeans, and leapfrogged most non-Singaporean students in educational outcomes.

LKY's handling of these issues is one reason I see it as futile to place him on a traditional US-style left-right axis when looking at his decision-making. His approach blends traditional, family values and blunt realism easy to associate with the right with a determination to work with affected minorities and concern for their welfare that pattern-matches more clearly to the left. That mixture of familiarity and foreignness in his approach, and that tension between traditional and progressive values, is one reason this work was so refreshing for me, coming from a US background.

When he discusses Chinese schools and the transition to English education, he reveals more about his personal life than anywhere else, and some of that mix begins to make sense.

Chinese schools, English language

Lee Kuan Yew describes his education, in English-language schools and then overseas in England, in mixed terms: "deculturalized," textbooks and teachers "totally unrelated to the world [he] lived in," "a sense of loss at having been educated in a stepmother tongue," "not formally tutored in [his] own Asian culture... not belonging to British culture either, lost between two cultures." (145)

He talks about his decision to send his children to Chinese schools to give them a firmer footing in their own culture, and talks about his appreciation of the "vitality, dynamism, discipline, and social and political commitment" in those schools. English-language schools, on the other hand, "dismayed" him with the "apathy, self-centeredness, and lack of self-confidence" in their students (149). Later, he speaks with regret about Western media and tourism eroding "traditional moral values" of Singapore's students, about how "the values of America's consumer society were permeating Singapore faster... because of our education in the English language." (153)

But they had a common culture to build, an English-centric business world to look towards, and a need for unity in their armed forces and elsewhere. So English, as LKY tells it, was needed as a common language, his concerns and those of his countrypeople aside. In Chinese, Malay, and Tamil schools, he mandated English courses. In English schools, he mandated the teaching of mother tongues. Malay and Indian parents shifted quickly to English schools, but Chinese parents were less satisfied and a hard core of resistance formed.

In this issue, again, some of the reasons for LKY's success as Singapore's leader become clear. At times, he opted for simple authoritarian solutions: arresting newspaper managers for glamorizing communism, deporting Malaysian leaders of student demonstrations, removing a union leader who "instigated his fellow students to use Chinese instead of English in their examination papers." (148) But then he talks about how his English education allowed Malays and Indians to see him as Singaporean rather than a "Chinese chauvinist," and how his "intense efforts to master both Mandarin and the Hokkien dialect," and the experience of his children in Chinese-speaking schools, let him relate to and be accepted by the Chinese-educated (149), and it becomes clearer that something more than authoritarianism was at play.

That sensitivity became critical when issues with Chinese-language education came to a head. Students in the Chinese language Nantah University—the flagship symbol of Chinese language, culture, and education, fundraised and built by the Chinese community—struggled to find jobs. He describes the decision to switch the university and most Chinese schools to English in conflicted tones, emphasizing that he could speak with authority and "[maintain] the political strength to make those changes" primarily because he had sent his children to Chinese schools.

It bears repeating that Lee Kuan Yew is pretty dismissive of a lot of Western traits. He cites Japan approvingly as a culture able to "absorb American influence and remain basically Japanese," with their youth "more hardworking and committed to the greater good of their society than Europeans or Americans" (154). In an effort to preserve the best in Chinese schools and retain that sort of cultural influence, he set aside the top nine Chinese schools as selective institutions, admitting only the top 10 percent of students.

So—did LKY successfully lead his country to a new common language while preserving culture? Sort of. Even now, the policy has had mixed impact, and LKY sounds more torn here than in any other part of the work:

Bilingualism in English and Malay, Chinese, or Tamil is a heavy load for our children. The three mother tongues are completely unrelated to English. But if we were monolingual in our mother tongues, we would not make a living. Becoming monolingual in English would have been a setback. We would have lost our cultural identity, that quiet confidence about ourselves and our place in the world. ...

Hence, in spite of the criticism from many quarters that our people have mastered neither language, it is our best way forward. (155)

Later in life, LKY expressed regrets about his insistence on bilingualism: "Nobody can master two languages at the same level. If (you think) you can, you’re deceiving yourself."

I had a Singaporean friend a while back who sometimes joked that you could tell she was Singaporean because she spoke bad English and bad Chinese. I wasn't in a place to judge the truth of that, at the time speaking no Chinese myself, but there was a hint of sadness behind the joke that stuck with me and comes to mind with LKY's eventual hesitance around the policy. Since then, I've expended a lot of effort on learning Chinese myself, and the same distance between the languages is clear and discouraging. It's a tough problem, and I don't know that there was an ideal answer in a society as multicultural and multilingual as Singapore's. I get the sense from this section of Singapore, at least in LKY's eyes, sometimes reflecting his own torn feelings, between languages and between cultures.

Still, Singapore made it through the shift and has developed a strong culture and its own satisfying twist on English, so it would be unfair to mark the policy as a failure overall. To find a true failed policy, we need to turn to a different topic.

The limits of tweaking culture

A paraphrasing of Lee Kuan Yew to the Malay community: I am not one of you, but I will listen to you. I will ensure you have equal opportunity to the rest of our citizens. I will push to allow you proportional representation. Every step of the way, I will listen to you and your leaders when deciding on policies that affect you. When I need you to make changes in sensitive areas, I won't enforce it top-down and bureaucratically, I will approach your trusted family and community leaders and ask them to take charge.

The same, for the Chinese community: I recognize your fears about your culture being lost if your language fades. I lost it myself, educated in foreign schools and a foreign language, and have since fought to regain it. It is a priority for my children. I love the best parts of our culture and want to preserve them. Understand that the only reason I am asking you to make a difficult transition away from it is because that is what our country needs in the world as it stands.

It's in light of those two cautious, thoughtful, empathetic approaches that this third story frustrates me so much.

Singapore, more than any other country in the world, is facing a birthrate crisis. Current numbers place its fertility rate at 1.14, lowest in the world. It's a pressing issue, tricky and multifaceted, one reflective of trends around the world. It's also deeply sensitive, tied into people's sense of self-determination and autonomy, their most personal goals, and a whole lot else. Further complicating it is the uncomfortable reality that education and birthrate typically have an inverse correlation. As of Singapore's 1980 census, "the tertiary- [and secondary-]educated had [a birthrate of] 1.6, the primary-educated, 2.3, and the unschooled, 4.4" (140).

Lee Kuan Yew noticed the issue, because he noticed every issue. He also noticed that women tend to prefer "marrying up", men "marrying down", because of course he did, how a lot of the country's graduate women were remaining single, and how that could impact his nation's future talent. So, how did a leader who relied so much on his ability to inspire trust react to the challenge?

I decided to shock the young men out of their stupid, old-fashioned, and damaging prejudices. (137)

That's right, by telling everyone they're stupid and trying to strong-arm a change:

On the night of 14 August 1983, I dropped a bombshell in my annual National Day Rally address. Live on both our television channels, with maximum viewership, I said it was stupid for our graduate men to choose less-educated and less-intelligent wives if they wanted their children to do as well as they had done. (135)

In the comment thread of my first review, commenter /u/Greenei pointed out that LKY sounds "like a nerdy, rationalist, technocratic dictator. Disregarding society's irrational feelings, speaking the truth plainly, and changing your views with new evidence." I agree. In this instance, though, it's easy to see in him the caricatured side of that image: a stubborn insistence that everyone be convinced by a waterfall of pure facts, eagerness to phrase those facts in the bluntest possible way, and deliberately apathetic to the role emotion plays in changing minds.

Genetic influences on intelligence remain just as controversial as they were in LKY's day. To avoid getting caught in those weeds, I'll proceed assuming he was entirely correct. Given his track record, it's not a stretch. Even granting that, even granting the difficulty of the problem, I can't help but feel his approach was dead wrong.

First: Provide preferential school selection for children of graduate mothers who have at least three kids. He mentioned expecting nongraduate mothers to be angry at being discriminated against. Instead, graduate mothers rose up against the change, saying things like:

"I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that some miserable financial incentives will make me jump into bed with the first attractive man I meet and proceed to produce a highly talented child for the sake of Singapore's future." (137)

Next: Establish a government matchmaking system to "facilitate socializing between men and women graduates" (138).

Finally: Support both of the above with repeated reminders of statistical analyses, genetic research, assertions of cultural prejudices, and round condemnation of misleading but politically correct Western writers.

The results were predictable. Western media, of course, rose up against him. His party, famously leading an effective one-party state, lost 12 percent of the vote in the next year's election. Half his cabinet condemned his decisions. Only those who already saw the same issues he did—the "hard-headed realist[s]" in his cabinet (140), along with writer R. H. Herrnstein—really stood by him. Eventually, he gave up on the policies and rested his hopes on immigration instead.

It's easy to look at the whole saga and conclude that he was pushing against impossible trends that not even the most prescient could avoid, ready with a bluntness and willingness to speak hard truths as a lonely, brave Cassandra. That certainly seems to be his portrayal of his approach. But I can't help but feel that, in this case, all he accomplished was poisoning the well for every future attempt to address the real problems he identified. While it's impossible to say whether another approach would have succeeded, this one emphatically did not.

Conclusion

One of LKY's greatest strengths that comes through as I read the book is his relentless determination to follow the facts where they lead. Just as important, though, is leading others to follow those facts. In some incredibly sensitive situations, like when he helped his Malay citizens and led the charge towards English as a common language, he did a fantastic job of this—not just by leading with his head, but by demonstrating good faith and doing what it took to build genuine trust with others.

But no leader is perfect, and it's as instructive to learn from failures as from successes. When people feel misunderstood, insulted, or attacked, it doesn't matter how sure you are of the facts. They will withdraw and entrench. LKY admits to his own impatience here: "Intellectually, I agreed... that overcoming this cultural lag would be a slow adjustment process, but emotionally I could not accept that we could not jolt the men out of their prejudices sooner." (141)

As someone with my own tendencies in the same direction, I feel inclined to translate: I knew I was making a mistake, but they were wrong!

Interlude Three

One of my favorite small moments from the book comes when LKY discusses the process of greening Singapore. As he points out, "Singapore's size forced us to work, play, and reside in the same small place, and this made it necessary to preserve a clean and gracious environment for rich and poor alike." (181) From their independence in the early 60s, they made planting trees and cultivating greenery a priority. When LKY noticed some planted trees were dying off, he presented the quintessentially Singaporean solution of a government department "dedicated to the care of trees after they had been planted" (175).

The best bit, though, comes when he mentions how a friendly competition started among Southeast Asia in the 1970s. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines all got involved. In LKY's telling:

No other project has brought richer rewards to the region. Our neighbors have tried to out-green and out-bloom each other. Greening was positive competition that benefitted everyone—it was good for morale, for tourism, and for investors. It was immensely better that we competed to be the greenest and cleanest in Asia. I can think of many areas where competition could be harmful, even deadly. (177)

Greening is the most cost-effective project I have launched. (178)

As for the results? Judge for yourself.

Part Four: The Pathway to Power

So far, my review has mostly left out one massive elephant in the room. Lee Kuan Yew was Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. When he stepped down from office, he went straight into a close advisory role, sticking around the government in some official capacity until 2011. How was he in power so long? What was his approach to opposition and to political disagreements, beyond lawsuits? Where did he fall on the scale of democratically elected leader to dictator?

As with every other topic, LKY is pretty candid about this all. The best place to start, though, is likely not with the overt political battles. Instead, I'll focus where he focused early: the unions.

Unions

This section will dive into the weeds a bit more than most of my writing. It's for a good cause, I promise.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Singapore had, to put it bluntly, a union problem. Between July 1961 and September 1962, the country faced 153 strikes. In LKY's telling, most unions were under communist control, and all "had turned combative," having learned from British trade unions "all the bad habits and practices of how to squeeze employers for more pay and benefits regardless of the consequences to the company." (83)

So Lee Kuan Yew, ardent reactionary that he was, tore unions down, stripped protections and regulations away, and ushered in a new and gloriously productive era of unfettered capitalism.

Those of you who've followed this review so far won't be surprised to hear that's just about exactly not what happened. This chapter came early in the book, and it's where LKY's personal story started becoming really, really interesting to me. Why? Well, it's when he casually mentioned his political experience before becoming Prime Minister:

He was a legal advisor and negotiator, fighting on behalf of trade and student unions (and, unrelated to our current focus but fun to note, moonlighting as a free speech defender when a university socialist club published a "seditious" article). You might remember the quote from part one of my review, when a Labour party leader emphasized how committed a socialist LKY was. What did that mean when he took charge and faced trouble with unions? As he was urging unions to abandon some destructive practices, he was facing down against policies he was responsible for, protections he had fought for when his country's workers were being exploited, but that were damaging his country enough he regretted his decision.

He cites as an example triple pay on public holidays, which "led to cleansing workers deliberately allowing garbage to accumulate before public holidays to ensure that they would have to work on these holidays." (84) Elsewhere, he cites the trouble of employers investing in expensive machinery to minimize need for workers, leading to "a small group of privileged unionized workers getting high pay and a growing band of underpaid and underemployed workers." (84) With these and related concerns in mind, he went in 1966 to a meeting of union leaders from around Asia, asked them not to "kill the goose whose golden eggs [they] needed," (84) and got to work encouraging changes like pay for performance over time on job.

Union leaders objected. He pushed forward, but "took care to meet the union leaders privately to explain [his] worries... [in] off-the-record meetings [to] make them understand why [he] had to get a new framework in place." (85) That actually worked for most. Step one, then: come up with a careful plan, explain it in private, draw support. Step two?

Well, it's Singapore. One "irrational and ignorant" (85) union leader over cleaners and other daily-paid workers delivered an ultimatum asking for a pay raise and then called for some 2400 cleaning workers to strike. LKY ordered the dispute to arbitration to make the strike unlawful. When the union went on strike anyway, the police arrested the leader and 14 others. The union registrar issued notices of potential deregistration to the union. The ministry of health told the workers they had sacked themselves and could reapply for employment the next day.

And, the next day, ninety percent of the workers applied for reemployment, LKY had the support of the public, and union culture started to shift to a give-and-take. He went first to the union leaders, then to employers, urging cooperation and fairness, and emphasized that "unless [they] made a U-turn from strikes and violence toward stability and economic growth, [they] would perish" (88).

On to step three. In 1968, Singapore passed comprehensive laws covering leave, bonuses, and other points of contention. In 1969, they had their first full year without strikes. In 1972, they established a council between union members, employers, and government to determine annual wage increases. LKY requested his colleague Devan Nair return to Singapore to lead the union congress, and under his lead union delegates decided to focus their attention on setting up co-ops in taxis, supermarkets, insurance, and afterwards a strikingly broad array of industries.

The whole thing, at least in LKY's telling, was a spiraling and mutually beneficial arrangement. As union leaders got experience directing co-ops, they gained greater appreciation for the role of good management. To help "reduce the feeling that workers belonged to a lower order," (91) the government subsidized union land purchases for clubs, resorts, and other facilities. To nurture talent, the unions set up a labor college per LKY's urging, and he encouraged talented students returning from overseas to work in the unions and strengthen them.

Why do I emphasize this in so much detail? Primarily to underscore this quote:

Strict laws and tough talk alone could not have achieved this. It was our overall policy that convinced our workers and union leaders... but ultimately it was the trust and confidence they had in me, gained over long years of association, that helped transform industrial relations from one of militancy and confrontation to cooperation and partnership. (88)

And later, this reminder of his guiding ethos as he discusses the checks and balances of unions:

The key to peace and harmony in society is a sense of fair play, that everyone has a share in the fruits of our progress. (93)

As in tensions around race and language, as he approached the unions Lee Kuan Yew balanced strict, hard policy with the reassurance that he understood his people and wanted to help them—and, we Westerners don't fail to note, a side of authoritarianism. Reason and careful negotiation for most, coordinated and overwhelming force when negotiation breaks down, and pragmatic, prosperity-centered policy in the aftermath. It's a pattern you can see again and again. This pattern is one major reason to focus on the unions. The other is that both LKY and his greatest early rivals had their roots in that movement.

Communists

I:

Disclaimer: I am entirely unqualified to provide a thorough, balanced account of Lee Kuan Yew's rise and the controversies in Singapore's early history. My intent here is to present the story largely as LKY writes it. For other sides of the story, consider this BBC article, Wikipedia on the opposition Barisan Sosialis, biographies of those LKY names as communists in his book: 1 2 3 4 5, a couple of reddit threads 1 2 3 plus a journal article (Scihub) if you're feeling particularly ambitious. tl;dr: There was definitely strong communist influence in Singapore; some LKY accuses of being communists vehemently deny it and likely shouldn't be considered communist; even these non-communist leftists were heavily influenced by Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

Here's an understatement for you: Lee Kuan Yew was not fond of communism. Understandable, given that China went through the full sweep of the Cultural Revolution as he rose into influence. Throughout his book, he speaks of communists with a fascinating mix of fear and respect.

In his telling, the early history of post-colonial Singapore is framed almost entirely as a struggle between his People's Action Party (PAP) and communists. In the 1950s, there was a sort of uneasy alliance between LKY's moderate wing of the PAP, a left wing headed by Lim Ching Siong, and the underground communist organizations in place in Singapore, all eager for independence from Britain. As soon as the PAP became the majority party in 1959, though, that alliance splintered. By 1961, the PAP expelled its left wing (13 of its 39 members), which became the Barisan Sosialis. That's where the real fun began.

If you ask the Barisan, they were non-communist leftists. If you ask LKY, they were a front organization for communism. He takes evident delight throughout a chapter of his book outlining the rise and collapse of their party. The government was contested through the 60s, in and out of an attempted union with Malaysia. In 1968, though, the Barisan declared Singaporean elections illegitimate and refused to participate, electing instead to take inspiration from Mao and call the people of Singapore to "smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation" (Cheng 226). The people did not smash the trammels. Instead, the Barisan left the PAP virtually unopposed, granting it uncontested control of the government, and faded quickly from relevance. LKY mentions that it was this "costly mistake... [that] gave the PAP unchallenged dominance of Parliament for the next 30 years." (110)

From there, as he tells it, communist influence shifted into terrorist attacks and bombings during the 70s and a relentless "hardcore following of some 20 to 30 percent of the electorate" (111), as Maoist organization worked throughout the Chinese-speaking part of Singapore. LKY rushes through this, preferring to more specifically outline the falls of several of their leaders (and a few overt communists). Each spent years to decades in jail or exile, only permitted to reenter Singapore upon cutting links with the party and disclosing all past activity.

That may be too passive. Put more bluntly: LKY tossed them in jail, with British approval but without trial, and makes no secret of having done so. He is extremely open about his willingness to take whatever measures necessary to stop communism. His description of their conflicts sounds, simply, like an all-out war:

We learned not to give hostages to our adversaries or they would have destroyed us. (112)

And:

Could we have defeated them if we had allowed them habeas corpus and abjured the powers of detention without trial? I doubt it. Nobody dared speak out against them, let alone in open court. (113)

And:

They were formidable opponents. We had to be as resolute and unyielding in this contest of wills. ...Their ability to penetrate an organization with a cadre of influential activists and take control of it was fearsome. (114)

And:

Despite ruthless methods where the ends justified the means, the communists failed, but not before destroying many who stood up against them, and others who after joining them decided that their cause was mistaken. (119)

From 1963 to 1989, Singapore detained some 690 people, often holding them for years without trial. They required any political actors to affiliate with parties explicitly to "force [communists] out into the open and make them easy to monitor" (115). LKY spoke of the impossibility of progress while "communists retained their baleful influence" (108). In short, he did everything he possibly could to stamp communism and Maoist influence out of Singapore. Your level of comfort with these decisions will likely depend either on your opinion of communism or your commitment to free expression. Charitably, LKY saw the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and determined to stop it within his sphere. Uncharitably, he saw an opportunity to destroy his opposition and take absolute power, and he took it.

For me, though, far more compelling than his opposition to communism was his commitment to learn from their methods.

II:

See, even while LKY lays out his fight against communism, you hear fascinating hints of respect in his descriptions of them. He describes how the PAP, when they took office, were "sickened by the greed, corruption, and decadence of many Asian leaders" (157), and how a similar disgust led Chinese-school students in Singapore to support communism. They "saw the communists as exemplars of dedication, sacrifice, and selflessness, the revolutionary virtues displayed in the spartan lives of the Chinese communist leaders." (157) Later, when describing his conviction that "candidates must not need large sums of money to get elected" (164), he again cites communists, pointing out that they didn't use money to win votes.

Much earlier, when discussing his own need for security, he mentions that while "threats from racial fanatics [were] unpredictable... the communists were rational and calculating and would see no benefit in [attacking his family]" (5). And return to his description of communists failing. He mentions "the skillful and tough methods of the unyielding communists... were unforgettable lessons in political infighting." (112) When dismissively comparing a later opponent to them, he mentions they were "formidable adversaries... serious men, committed to their cause." (125)

Why am I harping so much on this point? Well, much has been made of Singapore's near–one-party system. From a two-party system like the USA, or the multi-party systems in much of the rest of the developed world, it's hard to picture a setting where one party wins every election, time in and time out, without assuming corruption. Lee Kuan Yew provides an explanation for it, and as with many of his lessons in the groundwork of politics, it comes straight from his encounters with the communists. This next quote is pretty long, but I'm sharing it in full because it strikes me as one of the most important insights LKY provides, one that is relevant for every ideological movement:

We had learned from our toughest adversaries, the communists. Present-day opposition leaders go on walkabouts to decide where they will do well, based on the way people respond to them at hawker centers, coffee shops, food courts, and supermarkets, and whether people accept the pamphlets they hand out. I have never believed this. From many unhappy encounters with my communist opponents, I learned that while overall sentiment and mood do matter, the crucial factors are institutional and organizational networks to muster support. When we went into communist-dominated areas, we found ourselves frozen out. Key players in a constituency, including union leaders and officials of retailers' and hawkers' associations, and clan and alumni organizations, would all have been brought into a network by communist activists and made to feel part of a winning team. We could make little headway against them however hard we tried during elections. The only way we could counter their grip of the ground was to work on that same ground for years between elections.

I emphasize this quote so strongly because it speaks directly to my own frustrations with ideologies. Anyone who steps away from an ideology because they believe something in it is untrue will almost inevitably notice, and grow frustrated, with just how many people brush off those same untruths. Lee Kuan Yew doesn't present a new concept here, but he articulates it clearly and directly: Absolute truth is mostly disconnected from success. Organized ideas thrive; scattered ideas fail. People need rallying flags. They lunge for teams. Truth matters a bit, yes, but much more importantly, what are you doing for people? Good organization beats a good idea every time.

If you want the best ideas to win, organize for them.

Did Lee Kuan Yew have good policy ideas? From my angle, yes. There's nothing remarkable about that, though. Plenty of people have those ideas. What truly sets him apart as a figure worth studying, in my eyes, is not just the quality of his ideas but the way he combines them with a depth of understanding of institutions and power.

And in part, he had his deepest adversaries, the communists, to thank for it.

So how did he do it? Why, 60 years later, does the PAP still hold 83 of 89 seats in Singapore's parliament?

Staying in power

I.

After winning all the seats, I set out to widen our support in order to straddle as broad a middle ground as possible. I intended to leave the opposition only the extreme left and right. We had to be careful not to abuse the absolute power we had been given. I was sure that if we remained honest and kept faith with the people, we would be able to carry them with us, however tough and unpalatable our policies. (111)

Our critics believed we stayed in power because we have been hard on our opponents. This is simplistic. If we had betrayed the people's trust, we would have been rejected. (121)

What do you do, as a new political party struggling to gain a foothold, then an abruptly dominant force, to get the trust of everyday citizens? How do you organize?

One tool LKY used was the People's Association (PA). He intended the association to be a hub, not just of political activity, but of useful community resources in general: literacy classes, technology instruction, cooking courses, so forth. To aid in this, he invited influential community members from "clan associations, chambers of commerce, recreational clubs, and arts, leisure, and social activity groups" (122), and set up more than a hundred community centers throughout Singapore.

Next came the "welcoming" and "goodwill" committees—activists in local communities called up to discuss things like road improvements, street lights, and drains on the one hand, delicate race relations on the other. Successful and eager members of these turned into leadership for community centers and "citizens' consultative committees" who received funds to provide public works, welfare grants, and scholarships.

None of these institutions were explicitly partisan. They were aimed at the maintenance tasks of community life, the uncontroversial but useful background structures. LKY mentions that many wanted to avoid active association with political parties, largely as a holdover from colonial times and threats of retribution. These institutions allowed the government to work with "elders who were respected in their own communities" (123), making it easier to reach out to people at all levels. Recall the time LKY worked with Malaysian community leaders to create plans for education—this structure was the means by which he managed it.

Add government housing to this (with its own "residents' committees", and you begin to see the strength of this soft power: layers and layers of semi-political community figures, helping people day-to-day, working alongside the People's Action Party even when not directly affiliated with them. As LKY puts it, "Opposition leaders on walkabouts go through well-tended PAP ground." (123) He credits his own political strength to public speaking skill, which he took advantage of in an annual unscripted address in Malay, Hokkien Chinese, Mandarin, and English, and in rallies around the country.

Voting another party into power, then, would mean in part needing to figure out a whole new system of organization at all levels. The PAP wasn't shy about using this sort of advantage, either. LKY rather proudly mentions one election where they promised priority public housing upgrades for constituencies that voted more strongly for the PAP, then follows it up with one of those lines that could only come from him:

This was criticized by American liberals as unfair, as if pork barrel politics did not exist elsewhere.

Honest. To a fault.

Viable opposition came in a few districts, eventually. That, too, he aimed to turn to his advantage. He spends time on one opponent voted into one precinct in 1981, a "sound and fury" (124) demagogue who took mostly opportunistic stands and who "probably kept better opponents out" (125). Realizing that some MPs hadn't ever faced serious opposition, LKY says, he "decided he was useful as a sparring partner" (125). There's a great "fifty Stalins" moment, too, when he mentions a "shrewder" opponent who apparently reflected the population better by saying the PAP was doing well, but "could do better and should listen more to criticism." (125) In response, the PAP was respectful, aiming to encourage "nonsubversive opposition."

II.

As much as my American instincts lead me to look at this all and want to talk about how controlling and oppressive the idea of this sort of single-party rule is, I find it difficult to do so without proving too much. The US, after all, has two major political parties and a bunch of nearly inconsequential competitors, choked out by organization and history and election rules. On Singapore's scale, one-party leadership isn't unusual here. My home state of Utah has voted for the Republican party since 1968. Chicago, only a little smaller than Singapore, has been under one party since 1927. Organizing, providing services to encourage people to keep them around, criticizing opposition, and promising to help those who support them sounds like, well, every political party on the planet. And when measuring corruption, Singapore compares rather favorably to the US—and, well, almost anywhere else.

Take one element LKY focuses on: money and special interests in politics. Singapore made voting compulsory in 1959 and has enforced strict spending limits in elections throughout the PAP's time as majority party. LKY mentions that neither communists, nor the PAP, nor opposing parties have ever spent much money to win elections. In 2015, the PAP spent $5.3 million between 89 general election candidates. Sticking with Chicago as a point of comparison, their most recent mayoral elections saw a single candidate raise more.

LKY is dismissive as well of the idea of anchoring ministerial salaries low. He explains: "Singapore will remain clean and honest only if honest and able men are willing to fight elections and assume office. They must be paid a wage commensurate with that men of their ability and integrity are earning for managing a big corporation or a sucessful legal or other professional practice." (166) He points out with distaste the "revolving door" system in the US, where high-paid private sector workers are appointed to posts by the president, then return to the private sector with "enhanced value". Part of avoiding this was the decision to remove most perks and allowances and provide benefits as lump sums. The rest was a gradual process: freezing ministerial wages until 1970, then raising them from S$2,500 to S$4,500 monthly while his own was "fixed at S$3,500 to remind the public service that some restraint was still necessary." (168) In 1995, after periodically raising wages, Singapore fixed salaries of senior public officials at two-thirds of their private sector equivalents.

Despite this relative high pay, he shares several stories of times he persuaded people to take salary cuts for government work: a bank GM making S$950,000 per year who he persuaded to become minister of state at a third that salary; a chief justice who went from making S$2 million a year as a banker to S$300,000 in the court, who according to LKY "accepted [the] offer out of a sense of duty" (218).

III.

Most interesting, for me, is how LKY closes his chapter on maintaining control in the political system:

Will the political system that my colleagues and I developed work more or less unchanged for another generation? I doubt it. Technology and globalization are changing the way people work and live. ...Will the PAP continue to dominate Singapore's politics? How big a challenge will a democratic opposition pose in the future? This will depend on how PAP leaders respond to changes in the needs and aspirations of a better-educated people, and to their desire for greater participation in decisions that shape their lives. Singapore's options are not that numerous that there will be unbridgeable differences between differing political views in working out solutions to our problems. (134)

I get the sense that in aiming to maintain power, as in all else, LKY was a pragmatist. He did not aim to set up a dynasty that lasted generations or seek to obtain glory at all costs. He found a system that suited his country's needs at the time and put it in place, anticipating that Singapore would change as it needed to. Make no mistake: he wielded near-absolute power, and he knew it. But he did not abuse it.

Conclusion

One last question remains to be answered, not about Lee Kuan Yew, but about this review:

Why have I spent 12,000 words and the better part of a month poring over the policy of a tiny country of five million, and a leader who hasn't formally been in charge since 1990? What's my agenda?

Put simply, I think it's worth paying attention to. Not the specifics of the policy, so much: Singapore is a unique country, and solutions adapted to its culture and position are unlikely to translate perfectly to other environments. More than that, I am fascinated by the way LKY's approach cleaves at right angles the modern Western political landscape. Three points stood out from Lee Kuan Yew's achievement in Singapore:

1. It was not inevitable. It's easy to frame things like this in retrospect as certainties of history, but I honestly think that's the wrong view of Singapore. It came close to collapsing in the 60s, and while it used its unique advantages as a port city to the full, LKY took it where he did with a series of careful, rational decisions. Policy specifics like welfare and health care, measured approaches to racial and political tensions, and the others detailed through the book could have gone a myriad of other ways under different leadership, resulting in a very different city even if it still developed. His political power came because he organized and planned for it.

2. It was not evil. Growing up, I knew little about Singapore, but what I heard could be summed up as "clean place, pretty developed, freaky authoritarian, canes people, bans chewing gum." I've heard it referred to as "China lite" and generally seen, if not outright dismissal, at least heavy skepticism. I think some of that is unwarranted. Lee Kuan Yew had some 50 years in a position of influence to show his true colors, and from what I can see seems to have spent that time sincerely and single-mindedly focused on his country's welfare. Don't get me wrong, his approach has flaws and clearly doesn't align fully with US values, but I cannot find more to object to in his politics than in any other politician's.

3. It was not reactionary. I said this before and deliberately emphasize it again. Lee Kuan Yew was not looking to the past and pushing against social change. He stood at the vanguard of his country's growth, mixing traditionally progressive and traditionally conservative ideas in surprising ways. One of the most consistent of LKY's messages was a focus on the future: short-term sacrifices for long-term gain, relentlessly pushing to apply new ideas and change his approach rather than seeking to preserve or return to the past. Framing it as reactionary instead of pragmatic leads to poor predictions and a distorted view.

We focus on political issues through the lens of our own culture. For Americans like me, that means viewing things in terms of constitutional rights, red and blue states with their increasing cultural divide, and confidence that we are positioned neatly at the center of the world. I enjoy looking at Singapore both to see when its challenges and responses mirror US ones and to notice where they diverge. For someone like me, dissatisfied with political systems close to home, not fitting cleanly into any local political subculture, feeling disenfranchised, it serves as both an example and an admonishment.

As an example, it is more personal. Lee Kuan Yew is one of the first politicians I've found who almost always discusses and solves problems in a way that makes sense to me and aligns with my ideals. While there are meaningful criticisms to aim towards him, I am mostly not the one to make them. I admire him and believe the world would benefit if more political movements shared his level-headed approach to difficult problems. If the US had a political party with principles similar to LKY's, I would join.

The admonishment, though, should speak to all who would like to see the world change somehow. I repeat it from above. The sheer frequency of people gaining power only to abuse it should warn against any notion that LKY gained and won influence because he was good or right. He gained influence because he understood influence, and his country was fortunate that he chose to use it for their good. Movements don't win influence because they are true or good. They win because they organize to fill people's needs. So what should you do if you want truth, effective policy, or your ideals to gain ground? Organize. Build structure. Help people.

Thanks for sticking with me through this review! My notes can be found here, for anybody who wants yet more and is curious about Singapore's military, banks, or other areas I didn't touch on. If you're interested in reading the book for yourself, particularly if you'd like to see the extensive foreign policy review that takes up the latter two-thirds or write a more scathing critique, I'd encourage you to go pick it up.

I'll close my review quoting Lee Kuan Yew one last time, this time the final paragraph of his book:

The future is as full of promise as it is fraught with uncertainty. ... That we have succeeded in the last three decades does not ensure our doing so in the future. However, we stand a better chance of not failing if we abide by the basic principles that have helped us progress: social cohesion through sharing the benefits of progress, equal opportunities for all, and meritocracy, with the best man or woman for the job, especially as leaders in government. (691)

Cheers!

Elsewhere, I dive into a study (context, archived) that, as it turns out, basically says the opposite of what it claims in its abstract. The study made me more angery than I initially expected, which means it’s time for a mini-rant about what I’m calling Drunk Mormon Hypotheses.

In short: If a group sets a specific goal, the default hypothesis should be that they are not further from the goal than they would be if they did not have that goal.

The titular example is Mormons and alcohol. It should surprise nobody that Utah has the lowest alcohol consumption in the nation, because Mormons famously don’t drink alcohol while just about everyone else in the US doesn’t have a problem with it. If you spot a report that mentions a lot of drunk Mormons kicking around, it should register as something odd and unexpected.

Climate change is another example. Since the Republican Party has no stated goal to reduce carbon emissions, the default hypothesis should be that Democrats are more likely to reduce carbon emissions than Republicans. This should be the default whether or not you consider reducing carbon emissions to be an important goal.

A Drunk Mormon Hypothesis, then, is one that states the opposite: A group is worse at achieving their own goal than they would be without that goal. It’s completely possible for this to be true, of course, but it requires a heavy burden of proof. If a claim like this is made in the absence of proof, doubt it.

This is applicable in a broad range of contexts, but because of the study linked above, I’m thinking primarily of examples surrounding online claims about socially conservative policies.

Examples:

• Prohibition was a failure (well, it decreased exactly the things it meant to decrease)

• Conservative policies don’t decrease abortion rates (except when they do)

• Ability grouping doesn’t help advanced students (many words to say “teaching someone specifically what they’re ready for does, in fact, help them”)

And, returning to the claim that started me off on this whole chain, the initial question of the linked study:

• Why do states with larger proportions of religious conservatives have higher divorce rates than states with lower proportions of religious conservatives?

Then you dive into the study and find out that the answer, according to their own data, is: all religions seem to provide a strong influence against divorce compared to a lack of religion, but evangelical faiths as a group are somewhat less effective than other religions at achieving this goal. Also, regions that exhibit strong compliance with religious values such as high proportion of marriage versus cohabitation tend to have dramatically lower divorce rates. This is almost the direct opposite of the claim they were strongly implying.

That’s why I’m angry right now, to be clear. I don’t think the writers were being actively malicious, but burying the largest effects (religious unaffiliation, cohabitation rates) in a few paragraphs in the data section while structuring their entire paper around the implication that conservative religious people have higher divorce rates than everyone else is about as extreme of narrative stretching as you can get without actively falsifying data. “People in cultures strongly opposed to divorce will likely divorce less than people in cultures with weaker opposition” should be a deeply unsurprising observation, but it gets obscured by things like this.

Now, it’s important to emphasize something obvious here. A group setting a goal doesn’t mean that goal is good. It doesn’t mean working towards that goal won’t cause terrible consequences for other goals. It doesn’t mean they’re working towards the goal in the most efficient possible way, or that other methods won’t also work to progress towards that goal. Accepting that they’re progressing towards their goals, then (or not regressing), is not tantamount to saying, “You’re right and I’m wrong.” It’s largely just the first step towards a meaningful conversation about which goals are important to pursue and what we should do in pursuit of those goals. So—religious people tend to get divorced less than others. What tradeoffs and costs are associated with this? Do they have higher rates of unhappy marriages? So forth.

In addition, some Drunk Mormon Hypotheses are right, and they’re incredibly important when they are. If someone genuinely wants to accomplish something, and what they think is helping is having the opposite effect, they should want to know. My commentary about them isn’t intended to demonstrate that every counterintuitive result in this vein is false, only that if you see a situation where it’s claimed that a group working towards a goal is actively worse at it than those without that goal, you should demand a particularly high burden of proof.

Drunk Mormon Hypotheses have an innate strong appeal, since there’s something incredibly satisfying about uncovering outgroup hypocrisy. “We’re better than them at the things they care about” plays really well in just about every group, and if broadly accepted, it kneecaps the opposition. My instinct is that, because of this appeal and rhetorical strength, a lot of these ideas stick around without ever being seriously investigated. They often become absurd on closer examination, but they’re useful enough that nobody really cares to look deeply at them.

For contrarians like me, that’s actually pretty useful. It means you can make a surprising amount of progress towards interesting ideas pretty quickly simply by noticing things that might be Drunk Mormon Hypotheses. If done right, your conclusions should appear blindingly obvious to everyone in the group being discussed (“Look, of course we don’t drink much. It’s a huge sin!”) while countering some prevailing wisdom elsewhere. I would say around half of the things I like to dive into lots of obscure data on arise only because I spot a Drunk Mormon Hypothesis in the wild and get really irritated.

After all, it means that someone’s wrong on the internet. And that simply cannot stand.

Cheers!

This is the second installation of a three-part series originally published on reddit.

Part 1: Postman's Past: Boston and Typographic Culture

Part 3: Postman's Future: Silicon Valley and Internet Culture

This section is written in the present tense, but it is concerned with Postman's present, not ours. I've maintained it as-is because it strikes me as vital to understand what has stayed the same and what has continued to shift. "What has continued to shift" will, of course, be the question attacked in part 3.

Before laying out his case against television culture, Postman lays out a few caveats: First, that changes in media do not need to alter our mental structure or cognitive capacity for his argument to hold, only that they encourage distinct uses of intellect, favor distinct definitions of wisdom, and enable distinct kinds of content. He does not care to claim that TV makes people stupider, to put it bluntly. Second, that the change he is concerned with is a gradual one, with old epistemologies existing alongside new. Third, that he is concerned primarily with the public discourse. The book is not a screed against "rubbish programs, "theater for the masses" and pure entertainment, none of which he minds. Rather, he is focused distinctly on serious television. It is that for which he reserves his scorn (p.27)

1.

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." -Henry David Thoreau, Walden (p.65)

Postman doesn't reserve his ire for television and television alone. First, as any good postman would, he sharply criticizes the telegraph, herald of what he calls "the Peek-a-Boo World", which "not only permit[s] but insist[s] upon a conversation between Maine and Texas. The true shift of the telegraph, he remarks, is the legitimacy it (alongside penny newspapers, which had a head start but, he grants, were at least local) granted to context-free information: information tied not to locality, decision-making, or action, but mere curiosity. Gone, he says, was the central position granted to the local and the timeless. Ushered in was the sea of information, from nowhere and to nowhere: the dreaded "news of the day."

How often, Postman asks in a time when people still cared for the morning news, does that news alter your daily plans, take actions you would otherwise not have, or provide new insight for your daily problems? We've had a spate of it recently between COVID-19 and the protests, an uncommonly active period, but most daily news, Postman points out, is inert: interesting for conversation, irrelevant for action. Only three more months of news before you spend a few minutes to cast a ballot. The "information-action ratio" in life shifted dramatically with the advent of the telegraph, and has never gone back. (p.68)

The other key shift he addresses is one to a world of "broken time and broken attention": Where a book is ideal for accumulation and organization of a unified set of ideas, telegraphs and their successors are fragmentary, impermanent, and lacking all continuity. Pay attention for a moment, then flit away and on to the next. Why did the crossword puzzle rise when it did? How better to answer the question of what to do with all the disconnected facts brought by the telegraph and accompanying photos?

The telegraph and its successors, Postman claims, struck blows against typographic culture, began to introduce the peek-a-boo world he dreads, self-contained, endlessly entertaining, asking nothing from us. But the world they called into existence, that of endless disconnected distractions, took until the advent of television to work its way to the heart of culture. Television, Postman contends, speaks first and foremost in the voice of entertainment, "transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business." (p.80)

Will we like it, he asks? Oh, very likely the transformation will be delightful. Just as Huxley envisioned.

2.

What, then, is the epistemology of television? Postman remarks that in his time, it had faded into perfect normalcy, part of the unquestioned background machinery of the world. He spends some time exploring quixotic uses of the television, perhaps as a light source or bookshelf, that could serve as supports for the literary tradition. "Rear-view mirror" thinking, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, the same sort that says a car is only a fast horse. But each technology carries an agenda of its own, distinct from those of the past, with inherent biases. The printing press could have been used exclusively for pictures, but had a bias towards language. And television? Entertainment. Pure entertainment.

Postman points to the news as an example, where beautiful and amiable newscasters flash scenes of "murder and mayhem" in between banter, commercials, and upbeat opening music. The signals are not ones of seriousness or education. Instead, even grim footage becomes part of an attention-grabbing milieu that, at the end, cheerfully invites you to tune in tomorrow. (p.88) More specifically, he hones in on an eighty-minute discussion on ABC, chosen as a pinnacle of "serious" television: A gathering of Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Carl Sagan, and more, to discuss the possibility of global nuclear war. What did the discussion look like?

Each man had some five minutes to speak. Most focused on their own positions, with minimal attention to the others: Kissinger reminding of books he had written and negotiations he had conducted, McNamara mentioning his own arms reduction proposals, Sagan providing a measured argument in the center, but one with assumptions there was no time to examine, as the host pushed the "show" forward step by step. "I don't know" doesn't play well on TV, nor does the act of thinking or hesitance as a whole. It's a performing art. So each played their expected role, and at the end, the audience applauded, and Culture was achieved.

Given the context of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it's no surprise he raises the 1984 presidential debate as well. Each candidate got five minutes to answer questions before facing a one-minute rebuttal. The tone, he says, was that of a boxing match: Who KO'd who? Who got off the best one-liner? Who put on the best show? Was the performance a success?

Postman pauses to note a few programs that buck the trend towards casualness, ones like "Meet the Press" or "The Open Mind" that aim for "intellectual decorum"... and are then carefully scheduled far away from flashy entertainment, since otherwise they simply will not be watched. Things other than sheer entertainment can fit on TV. But they are not its native forms, and the medium by its nature pushes against them.

3.

"Now... this."

Postman is fond of order, of meaning, of cohesion. As such, the words "Now... this" terrify him. What do they signify? A separation of everything from everything else. A woman was murdered. Now... this! An earthquake in Indonesia. Now... this! Consider these cute puppies. Now... this! Time for a toothpaste commercial. As he puts it, "the newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it, and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.

The sensory intensity, Postman suggests, is part of the problem. Music is used to create a mood and provide a leitmotif. Pictures, he says, overwhelm words and short-circuit introspection, and events with clear visual documentation, as they are more fascinating than those without, gain center stage. Newscasters play a poised role: "marginally serious but staying well clear of authentic understanding" (p.104). The ever-present rhythm of commercials undercuts the seriousness of whichever messages come before.

Video Speed Controller is perhaps the best add-on I've ever taken the time to download, letting me steadily push my video content faster and faster on any webpage. The webcomic Schlock Mercenary finished recently after twenty years of daily, typically excellent, updates without a single late upload. If you're looking around a podcast to listen to, consider 99% Invisible, which does a brilliant job breaking down the hidden beauty of everyday objects.

Where was I? Ah, yes. Postman asks us to imagine how strange it would be if he paused in the middle of his book to talk about United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank a few times each chapter, how it would make the whole enterprise seem unworthy of our attention. Some media (books, film) we expect to maintain a consistency of tone, a continuity of content. But the bizarre juxtapositions on television are part-and-parcel of the experience, again encouraging unseriousness and distraction.

Part of this is the preponderance of opinions without real information. Postman points out that the Iranian Hostage Crisis received more focus from television than almost any other. Surely, he says, Americans would know everything there is to know about it. So: How many know what language Iranians speak? The meaning or implication of the word "Ayatollah"? Any details of Iranian religious beliefs? A rough shape of their political history? Who the Shah was, where he came from? (p.107)

No? Isn't that odd, though, to have heard all about something without knowing the first thing about it? Disinformation, Postman says, all of it. Not false information. Misleading information. "Misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, superficial." The illusion of knowledge with no backing substance. And then pollsters swoop along, collecting the opinions of the day, and cycling them back into the next story.

For one more example, he points to a 1985 New York Times article: "Reagan Misstatements Getting Less Attention". Some older than me might remember Reagan's mental decline in office, mangling statements or missing facts as he aged. The article points out that for a time, those got attention, but soon enough they became old news, just part of the backing fabric of how things are, and as the public lost interest the coverage drifted away. What is not amusing, not entertaining, becomes irrelevant.

The key here, Postman points out, is not necessarily television itself but the way it shapes everything else in its image. It is the paradigmatic medium of the time, defining the form for the rest, encouraging a shift further towards the same decontextualization and entertainment focus elsewhere. USA Today, full of bright colors and short stories, the third largest daily in the US. From the Editor-in-Chief, a few words: "We are not up to undertaking projects of the dimensions needed to win prizes. They don't get awards for the best investigative paragraph." (p.112)

Ever prophetic, Postman quips:

Mr. Quinn need not fret too long about being deprived of awards. As other newspapers join in the transformation, the time cannot be far off when awards will be given for the best investigative sentence.

Seems unlikely to me, but you never know.

4.

I almost feel like it would be trite to go into Postman's description of the ways television, and political ads in particular, shape political discourse. He points out that ads, in moving beyond propositions to images and emotions, moved beyond the sphere of truth. You can like or dislike a McDonald's ad. You cannot refute it. (p.128) He laments a campaign in which a thoroughly informed politician carefully articulated all his stances, drawing on all relevant facts, which his opponent relied on vague ads presenting image and image alone, and won, naturally, in a landslide. He laments the ways politicians need to become celebrities, in which "those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be" (p.135), a refusal to remember.

He then goes into a description of the way we prepared to oppose censorship, crying out against all bannings of books from school curricula, and so got blindsided instead by a glut of distractions. "Television does not ban books," he adds, "it simply displaces them." (p.141) Censorship, he posits, is only necessary when tyrants must assume the public knows, or cares, about a difference between serious discourse and entertainment. Why censor, when all discourse is a jest?

I could linger on that, yes. But it commits the great sin of being unsurprising, and worse, it would take space I can instead use to ramble about education. It's an easy choice.

From Postman:

Education philosophers have assumed that becoming acculturated is difficult because it necessarily involves the imposition of restraints. They have argued that there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories. (p.146)

He describes television as a curriculum because of its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of young people, a system designed to "influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth." Entertaining. Compelling. Completely useless as a learning tool, despite all the best efforts of "Sesame Street", "The National Geographic", and beyond. He isolates three reasons, or as he puts it, three commandments:

Thou shalt have no prerequisites

No, or little, continuity can be assumed. Programs are designed as self-contained units, allowing people to enter and exit freely, without a requirement or assumption of background knowledge. Television is designed to be maximally inclusive of viewers.

Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt

What use does television have for arguments, hypotheses, discussions, reasons, refutations, and all the rest? Remember the old film adage: In late, out early. The more you bog things down with exposition, the less interesting your program will be. So television educators cut it in favor of the fun and fascinating.

Thou shalt induce no perplexity

This is not the study I want to include here, but it's brilliant and close enough. The study I want to include, but can't find for now, is one that described an experiment in which students were shown a couple of different explainers for a scientific concept. In one, the concept was covered, and it was left at that. In the other, the explainer went through examples of standard misconceptions as it explained.

The first rated much more popular with students, and they expressed confidence in their understanding of the topic before going forth and bombing a knowledge test. The second was unpopular. People reported feeling confused by it and not learning very much. And then the test came around, and they showed significantly better performance than the others.

That is the paradox of learning: what feels the best works worst. Postman points out that in television teaching, perplexity is a fast track to low ratings. In learning, it's vital.

As a case study, Postman examines a twenty-six-unit television series, funded by a $3.65 million grant from the Department of Education, titled Voyage of the Mimi and accompanied by a set of exercises to help students pick up academic themes of "map and navigational skills, whales and their environment, ecological systems and computer literacy." It was hailed, as many things have been, as the future of education. Research suggested, we were told, that "learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic setting."

It doesn't, if you were wondering. Postman cites a number of studies to make his point here: Jacoby et al noting that only 16% of students passed a comprehension quiz on one of two commercials they were shown, and only 3.5% passing two quizzes in a row; Stauffer et al finding that viewers recalled fewer than 25% of news stories shortly after watching; other research affirming that recall and comprehension are significantly better from print sources. All true. All damning.

More to the point, though, Postman asks: Why whales? How critical are navigational and map-reading skills to city students? Is the subject of whales and their environments worth an entire year's curriculum? Hardly likely. He posits that the project was a result not of asking "What is education good for?" but "What is television good for?" Whales make good TV. The end result is entertaining. It's flashy. It's big. It is a triumph of television, and a failure of education. The main thing students learn is that learning is a form of entertainment.

And so learning, as everything, gets conquered by mere entertainment when we attempt to harness television culture for productive ends.

I could go on. Postman does. I'm sure you get his point, though. Again and again, he paints a bleak picture of television- and entertainment-driven culture, a world driven to hunt for novelty and discard depth, minds trained to jump from one topic to the next, freely grabbing and dismissing, a world of banality calling for attention that absorbs attempted seriousness into itself rather than being broadly harnessable for higher, more serious ends. It's a compelling case, and one I find myself wanting to be thoroughly convinced by.

Here, I've mostly uncritically presented his case, and his vision of his own time and where it was leading. At least as interesting for a book of social commentary like this one, though, is the chance to peer back from the future and explore how we have and have not lived down to his vision.

That's what I'll tackle next.

Part 1: Postman's Past: Boston and Typographic Culture

Part 3: Postman's Future: Silicon Valley and Internet Culture