On the Origin of Lying
First peace treaty in history, text & subtext, and frame control
Today’s piece is part of a first series I wanted to do when I started this blog in 2024, where I identify my “formative memories”. These are memories that are emotionally salient, that I remember very vividly, and often exist on a “memory island”. Like it’ll be like I remember all the details about one particular day, but very little detail about anything else that year. A kind of spike on the graph.
I had a theory that if I could identify all such memories, I could write down my “core psyche DNA”. That like I could find these 7 or 8 “core memories”, and they would alone explain 80% of my behavior or core loops. I imagined finding others with “isomorphic” memories, a system that could match me with someone who shares a completely different life circumstance but one where the subjective takeaway was the same as mine from specific incidents, and we could see if they ended up doing similar things in their life to me. This was the first time I started thinking about “the human memome project” & “psychohistory”, even though I did not have the words for it at the time.
When I was 12 years old, a new girl came to class in the middle of the school year. She was Indian, and this was Egypt, so no one wanted to talk her. She was “filthy”, and treated with suspicion.
We had some homework assignment that had a printout. She didn’t get one, since the teacher had not printed extra. I went home, photocopied the thing, gave her one copy, and kept one copy.
At some point my mom sees me doing this and asks me if I gave her the original, or the photocopy. I hadn’t paid attention to that, thought about it, and told her that yeah I gave the original.
Here I remember my mom exploding with anger, in a way that was completely baffling, and terrifying. How could I give her the original? Why would I give away the main thing to a stranger? If I am going to help someone, I should keep the original to myself, and give them the substandard photocopy.
This was very confusing to me. I didn’t know why it mattered so much, I didn’t know why she was so upset, or how to make it better. I fucked up, I was in trouble. I didn’t want to be in trouble. I wanted to be good.
Then a thought occurred to me: the original itself WAS a photocopy! There is no way that anyone could tell which was the original. I could just tell my mom I gave her the original. Even if she called my bluff, went to school, demanded to see both, the lie would be pass. I would be safe either way. No one would ever know.
So I said: oh y’know what, no no, of COURSE I gave her a photocopy.
And my mom calmed down.
Immense relief washed over my body.
I do not remember anything else that day, or that year.
Did you know1 that the first peace treaty in history was between the kingdom of Egypt, and some other kingdom, and its contents read something like
“we have triumphed over the enemy, the other guys fully concede that we are the greater, more nobler kingdom, and that they are losers compared to us”
But that it said that for BOTH sides. It was translated to the two languages and most people couldn’t read / speak the other language, so each side could pretend they won and feel good. They lived and co-existed peacefully as a result.
To be sure: the two kings lied to their people to make this work. They lied about the concession, but they did not lie about the peace. The (false) text of the treaty said “we won, they lost” - but the subtext was “these guys won’t attack us again, we don’t need to kill every soldier, woman, and child to ensure it. We can live peacefully in the same world”.
The subtext was true. The proof is that they did live peacefully afterwards. The text was not true, but it was engineered to imply the good, true subtext. They did this because they could find no true text that could generate the true subtext. The public admission of guilt & humiliation is the signal that the public needed to see to feel safe, and not attack the other side out of preemptive defense.
Side note:
I think this is what Michael Smith describes in the “hostile telepaths problem” - except instead of two kingdoms lying to each other to achieve global peace, it’s two parts of your own mind lying to each other to achieve some goal (in his case study, it’s to avoid danger from another human who can read one part of your mind, but not all of your mind).
The “text” is the rational, precise, factual thing.
The “subtext” is everything else leftover.
You can litigate text. You cannot litigate subtext. It is slippery. This is a feature and a bug.
I think my audience is aware enough now for me to describe it in these terms: Anatomy of an Internet Argument is a game about lying at scale, “for good”. I think this is why very few people can do it effectively, but seem amazed when they watch me do it (even people like Guy who know just as much as me about all the topics I write about). It took me a long time to understand that the answer was because it only works when I intentionally misread what the angry internet person is saying. The goal I have in mind is not surfacing the truth of the text that they write, it is surfacing the best possible subtext that I can make fit.
The correct answer to that is not known ahead of time, it is created. It is made up. It is fiction. I read their words as saying something they did not originally intend, but when they read it, it FEELS better than their original intention, and it FEELS like something they COULD have meant. It gives them a way to save face and exit the argument with grace. Maybe SOME part of them meant it that way, maybe it only “fits” retroactively. But either way, it succeeds when they “accept” the frame, when they choose to step in, and voluntarily use it themselves and maintain it going forward.
I think this is what Aella has described as “frame control”. And I think this is why (1) she calls her research work “survey artist” (2) why a lot of people get very angry at her surveys, despite them having more data, from wider population samples than most (all?) academic sociology on those specific topics.
They criticize her work by criticizing the text (the methodology, blah blah) but the text is sound - what they don’t like is the subtext (it changes how people see themselves, which creates more of the things they DONT want to see more of)2.
I am inspired by Aella. I do the same thing, just in a different direction/with different subtext. Each person that does this searches for whatever true text they can find that can help give shape to what they believe is the good & true subtext. And all these people compete. And their competition is over the shape, makeup, and undetermined future of the human memome.
Just like Vsauce and Hank Green are also doing:
Source: some history podcast. I think it was “Fall of Civilizations” but it might have been another one.
Here is the first time I articulated my understanding of this:
>>>It took me a long time to understand that the answer was because it only works when I intentionally misread what the angry internet person is saying. The goal I have in mind is not surfacing the truth of the text that they write, it is surfacing the best possible subtext that I can make fit.
the word intentionally feels a bit off. my experience is more like being enspirited by a daemon of sorts like Socrates. or what ppl call yidams now. it's not intentional as much as receptive to a way of being that obviously fits the situation. and the fun part is that if the other side does it, you don't drop it, but it's more effective, bc now it's more aligned with how they see the world now too.
is it possible to decode these core memories into learned functions of the behaviors (e.g. lying is primarily about avoiding unwanted threats, as opposed to being employed in gain)
A girl told me once about how she tricked her parents into getting her a dog at about ~6 years old by making drawings about “her dog” and turning in stories about her life with her dog to her teachers, who then told her parents to get her a dog and she subsequently got one
this would imply a fundamentally different lesson and relationship to dishonesty, though she recounted it as shattering her world in much the same way realizing I was meaningfully smarter than my parents did around age 12