Preventing Paternalism

Signal that you understand the consequences of your choices

A lot of people hate paternalism, especially when it’s directed at them. Not all paternalism can be avoided, but if you want to do things on your end to minimize its likelihood, I have some ideas. Paternalism varies in the population, both givers and receivers; not everyone receives as much as others, and there are predictable levers that govern this (like gender). People who don’t read or understand other people very easily tend to be on the receiving end of paternalism a lot. Their lack of understanding of social realities is fairly plain to the average person, and some people respond to this by providing advice, some of it well-meaning, some of it less so.

Paternalism, like many social realities, is often the result of incentives. It often emerges in response to one of two impressions given: the person does not know the consequences of their choices, or they’re in denial about them and doing a lot of pointless thrashing about trying to find a way to avoid the reality they’re in. If you wish to avoid paternalism, you’ll want to show that if there’s a connection between your approach and the negative outcomes you complain about, you know that it exists, and you’re comfortable with that tradeoff.

For example, if you claim the mantle of troll but consistently complain that people hate you, others are incentivized to point out this incoherence. Troll and accept that people will treat you as bad faith more often, do not troll and have greater claim to complaints about your lack of popularity. Both of these paths provide more dignity than complaining about being a hated troll who still clearly chooses to troll, due to the superior coherence of their position. The problem is not necessarily the trolling, it is being perpetually surprised, upset, and flustered, in public, about the natural consequences of trolling.

If you seem aware of and ready to accept the tradeoffs of your choices, fewer people will tell you what to do. Demonstrating that your goals are consistently aligned with your actions and awareness of and acceptance of tradeoffs is a reliable way to get most people to leave you alone about your choices. If they don’t, it might be because there are obvious discontinuities between these axes, and you are not speaking as if you are aware of them.

Of course, there are plenty of people who understand the consequences of their choices and make that clear to others and still receive feedback on what they should do differently. These people tend to have sufficient internal grounding to find the feedback less annoying than those who are in denial about the negative consequences of their choices. These people also still receive some paternalism! Sometimes paternalism comes from other sources than incentives from the paternalized - a status play, a natural emotional overcorrection, people with difficulty managing their anxiety, and so on. This has given people the mistaken impression that paternalism is an unfortunate accident that betrays the paternalist’s limitations alone. Not always, unfortunately.

If you act like you’re a victim of randomness, rather than experiencing tradeoffs that other people can easily connect to your own choices, you will absolutely hear about it from other people, probably a lot. When you react defensively when others connect dots that you’ve been treating as distant planets, other people grow more concerned that you don’t know (or worse, refuse to accept) that your choices have downsides that could be managed differently. You want to show ownership of the consequences of your choices, which requires the ability to identify them and honestly reckon with them.

The same rules that apply to preempting criticism in your writing are useful for navigating social rules, because almost all writing has a social element and almost all socializing has a verbal element:

As far as writing while having critics (which is to say, being a writer at all), this is a solved problem going back centuries if not millennia. Preempting criticism is something good writers do to make their own lives easier - you think of common counterarguments, formulate the best version of them (knowing you will get dinged by people who don’t agree with you already if you do this poorly), and explain why they do not change your position. A failure to include preemption of reasonable criticisms is a sign of believing you have no reasonable critics, or worse, an intentional piece of propaganda.

Writers make their comments sections less annoying and more interesting by preventing the same three criticisms from showing up in every reply; they do this by dealing with those criticisms themselves as much as possible. This works socially too! In both cases, you require a key skill: the ability to predict what other people are most likely to object to in what you have to say.

Competence involves awareness of and pricing in tradeoffs. You are performing a social action when you talk about your plans with other people, when you talk about your difficulties, when you complain about confusing outcomes. They are not a silent sounding board, and if they notice that you don’t seem aware of the connection between what you’re complaining about and what you’re doing, many people will indeed find a way to point it out to you. Good preemption of criticism (and good prediction about paternalism) requires you to model what other people hear when you open your mouth, not just what you feel like saying

Part of the social dance is demonstrated understanding of the connection between outcomes you dislike and the choices you’re making, and comfort in paying that price. Note that this changes the tenor of your complaints. You might find that people find it much less trying to listen to you complain the more you implement this. People relax and listen to your stories and laugh at all the right parts when you tease yourself for the negative consequences that predictably follow from your own behavior, they don’t jump in to correct you when you say that you’ve chosen something that has downsides. People get paternalistic when they believe you’re passing on the social cost of your ignorance or denial to them by asking for their sympathy - they want to pass that right back to you by informing you that you can stop having that experience altogether if you so choose.

The more you show that you think carefully about how your choices lead to your outcomes, even while complaining about outcomes, the less people will hop in to tell you to do something else. You want to show the machinery of your decision making, at least if you’re going to show your wounds and seek comfort for them. When people see that you’re accepting the costs of your choices, they often won’t bother to alert you to them.