On sincerity

2.1 Some words

The word “sincerity,” here, isn’t perfect. In particular, I think it over-evokes something directly social – e.g. whether you are accurately presenting your beliefs and motivations to others. Google says: “being free from pretense, hypocrisy, and deceit.”

I think something about pretense is important here, and I discuss it below. But sincerity in the main sense I have in mind is compatible with lying (indeed, this is one of the dangers I discuss in the final section).

Suppose, for example, that per grand thought-experimental tradition, you are living amongst the Nazis.¹ You hate Nazism and have total, steely internal clarity about this. When you lie to your boss about your loyalty to Hitler, you are clearly being insincere in one sense – but it’s not the main sense I have in mind.

Also, “sincerity” tempts you to group candidates for sincerity into only two buckets: “sincere” and “insincere.” But much of life is neither actively sincere (at least in my sense), nor especially insincere – consider, for example, a casual greeting.²

Still, despite these issues, “sincerity” is the term I actually use. And I don’t think this is an accident. So I’m going to keep using it.

Another word is “earnest.” This might be closer – though it can sound a bit breathless. The idea of being “in good faith” seems related, but also too social. “Genuine” is also too social. “Authentic” is too interested in the self. I’m tempted by “good will,” but unsure (more below).

So we’ll have to do without an ideal word, here – and without easy reliance on everyday linguistic intuitions. And all this stuff is a mash of hazy cluster-concepts anyway. Still, I’m hoping that with some examples, and some different angles of attack, we can bring something important into clearer focus. 

2.2 Some feelings

Another way of trying to point at what I mean by sincerity would be to talk about related feelings. For example: there’s some experience, in my own life, that I associate with returning to a place of greater sincerity, after having been lost in some fog, some agenda, some background clinging I wasn’t seeing. It’s a feeling kind of like relief. Something unhooks and unblocks. Some space re-opens – one that feels receptive, responsive, and somehow restful, even if the circumstances are difficult and uncertain overall. There’s a feeling of renewed internal clarity and harmony; and also, a renewed sense of self-trust, non-shame, of being “on my own side,” of being willing to look myself and others in the eye.

It’s also a space that feels ready to collaborate, negotiate, figure stuff out, make stuff happen. It feels engaged, and like some sort of energy is flowing smoothly.

And beyond this, it feels good; like coming home; like something falling into its proper place.

There are hazier feelings, too. It feels like sincerity is the doorway to real life. It’s the thing that sees the real stakes. It’s the opposite of playing pretend.

Hopefully some of these words and feelings can serve as initial pointers. Now I want to look at five different and more specific associations in more detail. 

3.1 “Should I do X?” – fake and real

Consider veganism. Whether you’re a vegan or not, try asking yourself: “should I be vegan?”

No need to answer. I’m interested in what it’s like to ask. In particular: I think there’s a way of “actually asking” this question, and a way of “fake asking” it.

The “actually asking” version aspires to actually end up a vegan, if you should be a vegan; and to actually end up not-a-vegan, if you should not be a vegan. That is, it’s an effort to make your behavior genuinely sensitive to something. The “should” at stake is one your decision-making process is really trying to track, reflect, respond to. 

The fake version does … something else. It resists opening the question fully.³ It’s not willing to end up going either way. Rather, it constricts; tightens. It has a flavor of threat-response. Maybe it says the words, but it says them slant – in a mental posture contorted, at some level, by something hard and closed. It’s not fully on board with the “should” at stake; not ready to follow this “should” wherever it leads.

Indeed, perhaps it’s so off-board, at some level, that it barely needs to tighten up. Rather, the question it mouths is stillborn. Conversation on the topic would be barely a game. So there’s no force for tightness to counteract; no risk of changing your life.

Vegans and non-vegans can both go fake, here. The non-vegan fake version is most familiar. Giving up meat and dairy is a direct and visceral cost. So is guilt about not doing so. The question threatens both. So it’s easy to tense up or shut down.

But vegans can end up tense/dead here, too. Probably, they’ve already paid lots of costs, to be vegan. Maybe they’ve built an identity around it. Maybe they’ve evangelized; announced; been a bit righteous. So the question threatens to deflate and disorient a core narrative; to make their sacrifice unnecessary; their activism, misguided. And the possibility that veganism – once noble and pure – is actively wrong is even more jarring to consider.⁴

And there are other ways to end up in fake-mode for questions like this – especially if you’re asking them in social contexts. Sometimes, a social context doesn’t allow certain questions to be answered in certain ways – at least not without punishment.⁵ Maybe a part of you wants to say “yes, look, I value my own transitory pleasure and convenience more than I disvalue the severe suffering of these animals.” Or maybe a part of you wants to say more extreme or selfish or disruptive things. Stuff about dogs eating dogs and what lambs say about eagles; about which number one ultimately looks out for; about the sick hypocrisy of our pretenses of purity. “What is honor? Air. Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday.” But perhaps polite company does not permit you.

Perhaps, indeed, the polite company is not so polite. Perhaps the polite company is structuring the conversation and concepts in adversarial ways; pressuring you to use a “should” that is not really yours. Perhaps you cannot see this directly; but a part of you senses coercion, and that part shuts down, clamps up, rebels.⁶

For this reason, I want to focus on what it’s like to ask this sort of question when you’re alone. To ask it just to yourself. To not be overheard. (Though even so, to be alone is not a simple thing. We are always overhearing ourselves. We have internal company, too — whether polite or impolite. And just as we can deceive ourselves, so too can we coerce ourselves. Indeed, the two are sometimes closely intertwined.)

The vegan example has a moral flavor, but you can ask fake “should” questions in less moralized contexts, too. “Should I quit my job?” “Should I break up with my partner?” (Or, maybe more likely, you can perpetually fail to ask.⁷) Even relative to some more purely prudential “should,” such questions can implicate stuff it’s hard to hold or look at. The stakes can get high and scary. It’s easy to flinch away.

I don’t have a full story about the difference between actually asking “what should I do?” and fake asking. But something about this difference matters a lot to me. And it feels closely related to what I mean by sincerity. Sincerity actually asks its questions. And it risks changing its life in response.

3.2 The proper object of agency

Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you

Matthew 7:7

Suppose we ran with this example. What sort of abstract characterization of sincerity would it suggest? Here’s a first pass.

Recall “scout-mindset”: the orientation towards belief-formation in which you’re genuinely trying to get to the truth. If you’re in scout-mindset, you’re not writing your conclusion first, then trying to argue for it. You’re not treating the process of belief-formation as a game, or a performance, or a status contest, or a dressing room for a new identity-costume. You’re trying to understand what your situation really is; what’s actually going on. 

Scout-mindset and sincerity seem to me very closely connected – and they seem especially intertwined in the veganism example above. Scout-mindset is trying to follow the evidence where it really leads. Sincerity is trying to follow something where it really leads, too.

And they feel similar. Above I mentioned openness, responsiveness, and non-clinging. These are classic scout-mindset flavors. There’s something restful about not needing the conclusion to be one thing or other; something freeing about being able to just really listen for clues about what’s true; to just be trying to get it right, rather than to defend some agenda. Sincerity has a lot of that.

Indeed, I’m tempted to see scout-mindset as a part of sincerity. Specifically, the belief part. That is, scout-mindset is sincere inquiry.⁸ And sincerity is like scout-mindset, but for agency as a whole.

What does that mean? Well: truth is the proper object of belief (or so many scouts assume).⁹ So scout-mindset gives belief its proper object. Thus, if sincerity were to agency as scout-mindset is to belief, then sincerity would give to agency…

Does agency have a proper object? What’s a “proper object,” anyway? Sounds a bit prim.

Still, philosophers often talk as though agency aims at something. Something about normativity, value, “reasons,” “what you should do,”; the thing that the onrushing movement of your mind tries to reflect and respond to; the thing that can make choices into mistakes; the thing the veganism question above was about. So I’m tempted by an abstract characterization of sincerity that appeals to something like this. For example:

First-pass definition: Sincerity (in the non-standard sense I have in mind) is actually trying to do what you have most reason to do.

That is, just as scout-mindset actually tries to get your beliefs right, sincerity actually tries to get your decisions right. 

We can break this into two parts. The first is epistemic: it’s scout-mindset, applied to the question of what you have most reason to do. The sincere person asks: “what, actually, should I do?” And they really try to figure it out.

The second part is motivational: it’s the readiness – indeed, the desire – to act on the answer that the first part supplies. That is, when sincerity asks “what should I do?”, the “should” in question has real pull and force. If you talk with a sincere person about what to do, it feels like a real conversation; like the part of them that will make the decision is “in the room” – speaking, listening, trying to see.¹⁰

I’m interested in this definition partly because if, in my own life, I start to feel like I’ve lost touch with sincerity, I find questions like “what, actually, should I do?” a helpful prompt. It’s a way of inviting all the considerations, and all the parts of myself, to come to the table and speak openly. It’s a reminder to myself that ultimately, there’s no sense in making mistakes. By choosing the worse option – the option that I’d ultimately regret choosing, if I really understood — I’m not “getting away with something”; I’m not successfully defecting on my values, but winning some other, better prize. I’m just choosing stuff I care about less over stuff I care about more. I’m just fucking up.¹¹

3.3 Is sincerity the opposite of weakness of will? (No.)

No soul would knowingly choose evil.

Proclus

Perhaps one asks: if sincerity is “actually trying to do what you have most reason to do,” why would anyone be anything other than sincere? Why try to do something else?

Why indeed.¹² And yet. Indeed, perhaps the veganism example is a reminder.

Socrates, famously, thought that no one errs on purpose.¹³ Rather, all evil stems from ignorance: a mistake about what’s good.

But people often claim to be erring even as they err. “I shouldn’t have this extra drink.” “I should be working right now rather than doom-scrolling.” “Evil, be thou my good.” And so on. Thus, that inspiring literature on “weakness of the will,” and the like. 

Is sincerity, then, “strength of will”? Related, but wrong vibe. Too militaristic, disciplinarian. “Harmony of will” seems closer (though not everything – more below).

Indeed, once we’re led into talk about “weakness of the will” as akin to the absence of sincerity, I start to think that the first-pass definition above is missing something.

For starters, weakness of will and the absence of sincerity just seem like different things. But also (though I feel a bit confused here), some cases of weakness of will seem compatible with sincerity. In particular: some weak-willed agents have genuine guilt/regret about what they’re doing/not doing; and a genuine desire to change. If they could hit a button that would help them change – help strengthen the relevant will – they would.¹⁴ And this seems like it recovers some dimension of sincerity – and maybe, most of it.

The first-pass definition above also raises questions about Huck Finn cases – another classic from this corner of the philosophical literature. Huck Finn helps free the slave Jim, out of sympathy for him, despite believing that it’s wrong to do – and philosophers tend to like Huck regardless.¹⁵ Naively, this looks like a failure of “scout-mindset, but for agency.” But was Huck sincere in my sense?

I’m open to “no,” here – especially once Huck starts going into how “so I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about [doing right], but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.” But the case feels complicated, and it gives me some additional pause about the first-pass definition above. That said, I don’t want to go into it too much, as “scout-mindset, but for agency” isn’t the only angle I’m interested in.

3.4 Fake weakness of will

I do, though, want to make one other note about cases of weakness of will where someone feels a lot of heartfelt guilt, regret, and so on. In particular: I think people often talk like that’s what’s going on when it’s not – and this seems sincerity-relevant.

For example, in response to stuff with “demandingness” vibes, like veganism or drowning children, one sometimes hears stuff like: “I know that it’s wrong that I keep doing X. But you see: I’m a bad person. I’m selfish. So, I don’t do what I should do.”

And sometimes, indeed, there is real pain in their voice. But sometimes there isn’t. Rather, something seems suspiciously casual, cheerful, dead.¹⁶ Perhaps a certain discourse (“let’s systematize bourgeois western morality”) is being placated, in a conversational context that cows quickly to self-criticism (even when costless and perfunctory). But we would not say such things, in such tones, about other wrongs; “real wrongs”; wrongs where there are social punishments, for example. And I do think this sort of case prompts questions about sincerity, in the sense I have in mind.

(See also Caplan on “missing moods” – a classic red flag about sincerity.)

(Here I’m not trying to take a strong stand on how to deal with demandingness, though see here for some of my thoughts, and here and here for some other relevant discussions. And I’m especially not saying: that people saying stuff like the above should shape up and do that super-demanding and coercive and totalizing thing that a bunch of themselves really hates. Also: I do think it’s good to be able to be clear about when you don’t endorse your actions, or are failing to live up to your values — rather than being forced into distortions – even if you know your behavior isn’t going to change.¹⁷ So the case seems complicated in lots of ways.)

Note, though, that we should be careful with our “shoulds,” here (and also with our “wrongs,” our “bad persons,” our “my values” and so on). In particular: in a previous essay, I distinguished between two kinds: “shoulds” that would necessarily harmonize with your deepest values on reflection (often called “internalist”), and “shoulds” that might not – that even after arbitrary reflection could remain fully and forever alien to everything you love and care about, despite their authority (somehow) over your deliberation (these are often called “externalist”).

I like the former better, and they’re the ones I’ll typically have in mind when I talk about “the proper object of agency.” But we might attempt to understand “I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing, but I’m fine with that” in terms of an externalist “should” – i.e., the person is saying “yes, by some external standard that I expect to remain alienated from even on ideal reflection, I shouldn’t be doing this; but I have no loyalty to this standard” (compare a paperclipper, acknowledging that it is “wrong,” in human language, to turn people into paperclips). If that is what they mean, diagnosing an absence of sincerity is more complicated, even on the first-pass definition above. And perhaps conversations about e.g. drowning children have more of this – or at least, more confusions in this vicinity, and a more mixed set of loyalties – than we often think.

7.1 How close is the connection between sincerity and goodness?

To bear and not to own;

to act and not lay claim;

to do the work and let it go…

Tao Te Ching

Notably, though: these sorts of associations seem especially ill-suited to the “healthy staple-clipper” model I discussed above, at least if we wish to extend that model across a sufficiently diverse variety of possible agents. The class of “healthy staple-clippers” – that is, agents who have resolved conflicts between their different motivations, and formed a well-functioning internal government – is quite wide: it includes egoists, sadists, status-maximizers, paperclippers, and all the rest. The class of healthy staple-clippers we might want to call “serious,” in a given context, is somewhat narrower, but plausibly, various egoists, sadists, status-maximizers, and paperclippers will still qualify. Here I think, for example, of the world of Game of Thrones – hardly a scene of Christian virtue, but plausibly, a place with lots of agents who are in the relevant sense “serious” running around (cf the Lannisters, Littlefinger, etc). And various villains in our own world, and our own history, seem unfortunately “serious” as well (though not all: indeed, much of the worst contemporary stuff seems insultingly unserious).

What’s more, depending on your meta-ethics, such agents need not be diagnosable with any failures of “scout-mindset-but-for-agency.” Anti-realism/subjectivism famously admits that the paperclipper is guilty of no irrationality: when it asks its equivalent of “what should I do,” the answer is to max those clips. So too the equivalent for some egoists, sadists, status-maximizers, and the like. Various anti-realists hope that in the real world, the problem with such agents is that they aren’t well-enough-informed, or that their parts aren’t playing nice with one another. But the hope rings a bit wishful – and even if it’s true, it’s contingently so.

For anti-realists, then, is Cersei Lannister as sincere as Jon Snow, with his doe-eyes? Is the scheming sadist as sincere as the diligent public servant? If we wish to build in some conceptual connection between sincerity and goodness/altruism/non-ego, we might look for ways to say “no,” here – and in the next section, I’ll discuss some. But I’m not sure we should do that. I feel the temptation, but I’m wary of trying to make all my favorite things one thing – of trying to shoehorn all virtues into a single core.³⁵ And I do think there’s a sense in which Cerseis and sadists can be sincere – albeit, sincere about bad stuff.

Still: in practice, and in the actual world, I have strong associations between sincerity and stuff like goodness/altruism/non-ego. Other things equal, I prefer analyses that vindicate or explain this connection.  

8.1 True paths

These are the words we dimly hear…

Rilke

To my mind, the biggest problem for unifying 1-5, at a conceptual level, is some of them are about process – that is, about the “structure” of your agency — and some of them are about content – that is, about, roughly, what you value, and how much. Specifically, I think of 1-3 as process, and 4-5 as content. We saw this, in the last two sections, when we encountered healthy staple-clippers who weren’t “serious” or “good” in a 4-5-ish way. It’s that classic issue for anti-realism.³⁶ People often want their favorite stuff – morality, goodness, etc – to fall out of something structural-to-all-rational-agents.³⁷ But the anti-realist’s ontology doesn’t cooperate.

Now, one option here is to go realist. Thus, we might say:

Look, you know that thing where we traditionally think that the “what should I do?” at stake in scout-mindset-but-for-agency leads to things like goodness and altruism and morality and stuff? That’s because it, uh, does – and not just for you, with the contingencies of your brain and evolution etc, but for all agents worthy of the word “rational.” Jon Snow is more sincere than Cersei Lannister because Jon is listening harder for the wild and windy call of the true path; whereas Cersei’s soul is closed and hard, and she has ears only for her own desires.³⁸ Thus: 5.

And also, with respect to 4, the true path is serious. In fact, it’s basically the least-joke thing there is. Listening for it, what you hear is just: the entire world, in all its glory and beauty and pain. And to hear truly is not compatible with flippancy, or ironic detachment, or living your life as a troll. Too much is at stake.

Indeed, we see instincts in this realist direction even in the therapeutic paradigm most closely associated (among my friends) with healthy staple-clipping: namely, Internal Family Systems (IFS). Thus, in IFS, the thing that happens when your parts play nice is you return to The Self – a centered, open-hearted, peaceful version of yourself, which is implicitly treated as the “true version” (you know: your, um, soul), obscured by the distortions of your parts. The possibility that The Self might be a sadist, or an egoist, or a paperclipper, does not seem to be countenanced by the IFS tradition, at least in my (quite limited) exposure. To the contrary, The Self gets loaded up with specific, “content-y” compliments: notably Compassion, but also, Courage, Connectedness, Playfulness, Patience, and various others (see the “8 C’s” and the “5 P’s” here).³⁹

This is importantly different from the more Humean, mini-agents-with-utility-functions picture that many of my anti-realist friends bring to their staple-clipping aspirations, and which we’ve been working with thus far. On the Humean picture, there is no “true self” (and certainly no soul, or capital-letter-thing) that the parts distort; rather, there are just the group dynamics of the different parts interacting, maybe fighting for resources, maybe getting gains from trade, etc (you know, like game theory — game theory can’t be woo, right?). If the parts are sadists and egoists, then so too is the gains-from-trade, compromise-utility-function agent some sadistic-egoistic mix. Compassion, Courage, Playfulness, and so on don’t bloom out of nothingness.⁴⁰

If we reject this Humean picture for a more IFS-ish one, then we might try to bridge the process-content gap via properties of The Self. That is, on this picture (it’s basically moral realism), getting your parts to play nice (3) leads, also, to seriousness (4) and non-ego/altruism/goodness (5) (along with the other C’s and P’s). To the extent this is a prediction about all rational agents (just give the paperclipper therapy!), it looks rough, though. And one wonders, even, about quite-nearby agents, like Cersei.

8.2 What type of not-playing-pretend does the social world care about?

In some sense, all sorts of empirical hypotheses might serve to unify 1-5. At a high level, given blah conceptually distinct things, one can just hypothesize that in practice, they often come together. Thus, perhaps: “in practice, there is some reasonably joint-in-nature-ish cluster of psychological traits in the vicinity of what Joe is talking about with sincerity, which tend to give rise to 1-5-ish stuff.” Or more narrowly: “in humans, getting your parts to play nice together often leads to seriousness, altruism, less self-deception, and more scout-mindset-for-agency.” (EDIT 12/28: See also Paul Christiano’s suggestion here for another possible empirical-ish account.)

I’m especially interested here, though, in a more specific tack: namely, one that hones in on “not playing pretend” as the core feature of sincerity, and tries to explain the other associations via the contexts where questions about “pretending” tend to arise.⁴⁶

I’m drawn to this approach partly because “not pretending” is what sincerity, like, actually means, according to the dictionary. And the clearest cases of insincerity, even in my non-standard sense, involve some element of pretense. So it seems worth testing how far just this one factor can take us.   

Thus: how might we get to “seriousness” and “non-ego/altruism/goodness” from “not playing pretend”? Well, suppose that we take as a baseline expectation that many people care a lot about certain familiar and “selfish” things: things like their time and energy, their pleasure and pain, their social status, and their ego’s story about themselves. There is a sense in which we expect almost everyone to be “sincere” about these things: e.g., if you put someone on a sinking ship, you would expect them to be sincere in their concern for its sinking, and their efforts to not die. But it’s so taken-for-granted that people want these things that we don’t, often, need to really wonder about it.

Rather, we’re more interested in questions about sincerity when some more pro-social good is at stake, the pursuit of which might in principle come into conflict with more self-regarding incentives. Indeed, often a given social practice comes with some tacit expectation that the pro-social good is what the participants are after, even when everyone knows all sorts of other motivations are likely swirling around.⁴⁷

Thus, for example: public conversation about some important topic X (say: the minimum wage) often comes with the tacit expectation that participants in the conversation are actually trying to get to the truth about X.⁴⁸ So in a sense, if your participation in this conversation is centrally motivated by e.g. the desire to raise your social status or to signal loyalty to some tribe or something, you are “playing pretend” relative to the tacit expectation of truth-seeking – even if this sort of playing pretend is quite common and unsurprising.  

Similarly, if you are participating in some practical altruistic endeavor, like a campaign to save the whales, there is often some tacit expectation that you actually care about saving the whales. If you don’t, and are instead just there for virtue-signaling or something, there is a sense in which you are playing pretend – and doing so in a way that would ruin the signaling, if revealed.

Indeed, why is virtue-signaling even a thing? Why care about showing that you have “good character”? Because it matters, to our pro-social outcomes, who can be trusted with what; who will defect on the group behind its back, or in subtle or unsubtle ways; which sorts of motives and commitments actually predict someone’s behavior, when push comes to shove. So we want to know who actually has blah pro-social goals, commitments, patterns of norm-obedience, etc, and whose motivations are more purely and naively selfish, status-y, and so on.⁴⁹

Thus, questions about sincerity arise, in practice, centrally with respect to more pro-social commitments. We associate sincerity with things like non-ego/altruism/goodness because these are pro-social things. And we associate it with “seriousness” because seriousness, in the relevant sense, is (sort-of) a pro-social thing, too. After all, how do we tell whether someone is serious? Plausibly, because they are visibly expending certain more standardly “selfish” resources – e.g., time, mental energy, risk, social capital – for the sake of some goal.⁵⁰ We take for granted that people are “serious” about conserving such selfish resources: the interesting question is whether they are serious about anything else – whether there is anything in their life that they view as more important than the stuff we expect everyone to treat as important. (We also talk about “seriousness” with respect to selfish things – e.g., planning a good vacation, setting yourself up for a good retirement – but we’re still generally judging this via someone’s expenditure of resources like time, energy, money, etc.)

This sort of analysis of sincerity is centrally social, but it can extend to our inner lives as well. Thus, per The Elephant in the Brain and similar vibes, the line between our presentation to others and our presentation to ourselves is blurry. In particular: we’ve evolved as translucent creatures, in a context responsive to the fact that our inner motives leak out into the social world in ways we can’t control. So if, in your heart, you’ve got some non-pro-social aim – some aim where, if the tribe could see it, they’d lose trust in you, or punish you, or stop granting you some kind of status, or whatever – this creates a kind of inner tension: some shame, some need to hide, some sense of not being fully cooperative and above-board.

One option, in response to this tension, is to try to push this non-pro-social aim under the rug, outside the awareness of your official narrative. But this creates a lot of frictions for your internal government (cf “healthy staple-clipping”), and it messes with your ability to deliberate, wholeheartedly, via the official conscious channels (cf “scout-mindset-but-for-agency”).

But another option is to arrange relations between your motives and commitments such that you’re not ashamed of them. And because shame is such a centrally social thing (even if you’re alone), and because the social world is especially invested in the relationship between your pro-social motives/commitments and your more selfish motivations, this is easiest if some substantial portion of your motivational landscape is actually pro-social, and/or if the structure of your commitments is such that the relevant “tribe” would recognize and accept it (though there are other routes to non-shame, too).

Here, the “tribe” you’re responding to need not be the actual concrete humans surrounding you. Indeed, plausibly, we are often attempting to arrange our motives and commitments in a way that some more idealized set of peers – maybe the “moral community,” maybe God, etc – would view as justified and defensible. And if we feel like we have done so, some part of us relaxes, and we breathe a sigh of relief. Thus, perhaps, that feeling of resolved internal tension that I, at least, associate with returning to greater sincerity. The idealized fantasy tribe is no longer upset. And perhaps, as well, this is where my sense that sincerity requires more than an accurate internal narrative comes from. Maybe you’re not lying to yourself about your motives; but if the idealized fantasy tribe would be upset, some problem persists.

Of course, all of this is just handwavy, armchair speculation. Still, is it enough to unify 1-5 in a satisfying way? I dunno. It seems like there’s at least something there, even if it’s not especially clean and tidy. Indeed, perhaps the cynics (if they’re still reading) have been thirsting for this sort of explanation all along.

One thing about this approach is that to the extent we use “not playing pretend” as the actual core thing for sincerity, and explain the rest of 1-5 via more contingent social and psychological factors, we’ll end up saying that Cerseis and status-maximizers and flippant socialites and the like are actually, at bottom, sincere, provided that they’re suitably free of pretense. Maybe even trolls and ironists, too (though this gets a bit complicated, insofar as some kind of pretense is built into trolling and irony). But maybe this is OK. Maybe sincerity comes pretty cheap, especially once we move beyond the social realm and into someone’s internal world. Or maybe: some kind of self-directed pretense or hiding or looking away is sufficiently common that it can explain the sense in which sincerity seems non-cheap. Saying this will likely require to me to get more specific about the type of sincere people I’m especially excited about (i.e., “sincere about blah altruistic thing”) – but perhaps that’s OK too. And there is something nice about dealing with pretense-free Cerseis and status-maximizers as well (though if we’re focused on internal sincerity, they may not be pretense-free with respect to me).

8.3 Living with disunity

Overall, while I’ve set up “can we unify all my hazy and maybe-inconsistent associations with sincerity into something clean and nice” as the driving dialectic of this essay, I don’t think it’s actually that important. I’m interested if there’s some clean joint-in-nature, here – some single core trait that my associations are responding to – and it seems worth checking. But no big surprise if not, and I don’t want to get especially hung up on how we use the word.

I do think there’s something important in this vicinity, though, even if it isn’t simple or clean – indeed, something I view as very precious. My hope has been that by looking hard in this broad direction, from a variety of angles, we might become more sensitive to what this thing is – how it’s structured, what it looks like and feels like, what propels it and constrains it. Perhaps, when we look extra close, we see, instead of one thing, many closely related things, overlapping to different degrees and in different combinations, interacting and supporting and complementing each other. Indeed, when I think of all my friends, with their different forms and flavors of sincerity, it becomes less tempting (though still not entirely un-tempting) to look for some simple, single core.