21 tweets · August 2023 · 62 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
*squints* O.o great question! afaict... A) two-way total loyalty = total honesty + total *collective* control B) one-way total loyalty is not, afaict, compatible with the boss/guru/etc being totally honest. not a stable attractor, collapses to dishonesty or disloyalty
I'll elaborate below. to be clear, the elaborations will also be oversimplified. also they'll only be true for certain meanings of the words, of course. and it's all a sketch of how it seems to me rn I have a peculiar & precise ontology here. tho "loyalty" is still fuzzy for me
"honesty" as I'm using it here does NOT refer to "uttering only true statements" or similar. paltering is dishonesty. lies of omission are dishonesty. honesty here ≈ - openly saying what is relevant as it seems to you - not allowing important misunderstandings to persist
so in practice I think all unilateral total loyalty is created via dishonesty: someone represents themselves (perhaps unknowingly) as somehow flawless or whatever else in most such cases they aren't even fully honest internally (the exceptions are psychopaths)
but suppose I found myself in a situation where someone were 100% loyal to me even though I was being 100% honest I would, by virtue of that honesty, need to acknowledge that given the asymmetry (that I'm not 100% loyal to them) their loyalty is necessarily naive/misguided/false
and there's a paradox right near here, where if they fail to hear what I'm trying to point out, then even though I have "been honest", my point has not gotten across, and either I persist in trying to get it across or I let the misunderstanding slide—a form of dishonesty!
and if I succeed in getting the point across, it will produce a drop in loyalty *ideally* because the person will recognize that due to the asymmetry, them being 100% loyal to me is actually a liability to both of us
less ideally, it might be that the only way for me to be honest with this person is to burst their projection-perception of me as a 100%-trustworthy guru, which might cause not just a small drop in loyalty but it might make them angry and distrustful towards me
thus, as I said at the top: > "one-way total loyalty is not, afaict, compatible with the boss/guru/etc being totally honest. not a stable attractor, collapses to dishonesty or disloyalty"
why is one person being 100% loyal to another when the other isn't 100% loyal to them a liability to both of us? (80% vs 60% isn't such a big deal, btw! things get extreme around 100% because it makes betrayals infinitely bad)
ahh I guess it's not about a lack of loyalty in return, but about a lack of meta-trust.
loyalty seems to combine (meta-)trust with something like putting the others' needs first but symmetrical high-loyalty looks more like a superorganism where the parts are caring for the wholes' & parts' needs on all scales
note that this isn't a discontinuity with asymmetric high-loyalty. in order to be the perfect servant, one must also care for oneself impeccably! otherwise one fails to be able to continue to serve but in the asymmetric case the will of the boss steers aside from that
either kind of loyalty comes from a sense that given one's options, this relationship is the best way to meet one's needs this could be a coercive situation, (extreme of which is a chattel slave who doesn't run because they'd get killed) or it could be security of loving family
anyway, if I don't have meta-trust with you then I am anticipating that at some point something I do will be experienced as a betrayal by you that is outside the bounds of what our relationship can handle, which would drop your loyalty suddenly and immensely
this would be problematic in part because the sudden drop in loyalty might blow up our lives, if eg it results in a breakup or mortgage default or company scandal or community schism but could also be intrinsically dangerous to me—blowback on gurus once naive-trusted can be big
and intrinsic to this situation is that I also do not know what will produce this sudden betrayal or why I may have guesses, but my knowledge is necessarily incomplete or confused, otherwise I'd be able to resolve this with you
lest it sound like I'm talking about mundane stuff here, well, I am—betrayals can come up around things like kitchen norms or being late but also I'm not. meta-trust breakdowns invariably are downstream of people living in seemingly-incommensurate worlds
but this produces a huge paradox. as the person who has found their way into the guru role, my attempts to be honest can, as described above, *themselves* produce the very blowback that my honesty is attempting to warn about!
all that to say, this is tricky and complex, and there are no right answers but I would suggest not try to have total loyalty or trust! err towards amiable distrust & respect others' distrusting you, even if you don't like it
ah fuck, re-reading this thought after writing the rest of the thread, I figured out how to decompose the trust stuff out of loyalty you can loyally TRY to do the best for someone else, but with inadequate honesty and safety and mutual trust, you'll fail