YouSaid · the spoken record

Larissa MacFarquhar

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76

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2019-01-16

most recent

2019-01-16

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1

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1. “at that moment, you will see that lie and you will realize that you cannot trust that person. And what if that person is your only living relative? What if that person is your spouse? What if that person is the nurse who takes care of you every day? That is a devastation, that is an extraordinary tragedy that takes place in your life, and that's a risk you're always taking by lying. You know, I was very moved and convinced by the philosopher Cicila Bach, who wrote a book about lying several decades ago, and she said, you know, the only issue is not the person in front of you. It's very easy, I think, when you're taking care of someone with dementia or when you have dementia to think that the only thing that matters is kindness. The only thing that matters is kindness to that person whom you're taking care of. But she said, you know, that's not the only thing that matters. Because if other people hear you lying, if your children hear you lying, if other people...”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “You know, it's such a difficult thing because when I started thinking about this question, I thought I would be on the side of lies. I thought I would be on the side of just be kind, tell people what they want to hear, what's the objection, both as a person potentially being related to someone with dementia and as a person with dementia myself. But as I came to talk to a lot of people about it, I came to think it was much more complicated. I mean, first of all, there are practical problems. So it's not as though when you have dementia, your cognitive decline is predictable and smooth. It goes up and down. You may be lucid one morning and not at all the next morning. You may be lucid in the afternoon and completely bewildered in the evening. And so there are all these practical difficulties that if someone thinking of you as they last saw you lies to you, but you're lucid.”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Instead, the person in front of them, the person they loved, the person, the member of their family, and was not like Mrs. Jellybe in Bleak House always looking to suffering people far away.”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I think that there is it's as though high status fiction, as you say, high culture fiction is a kind of culture of its own with its own set of values, and those values consist among many others of complexity and also a great privileging of the intimate, the person in front of you, the humanness of individual humans. And so it came to feel to me as though a love of universal humanness was something that fiction had an antipathy towards. It seemed too abstract and therefore was not appealing, that the kind of person that was always valorized in, or not always, I should not say always there, as I said, there are exceptions, but tended to be valorized in novels was the person who rejected large universal abstractions about humans and values.”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Shared a fellowship with me, so I saw him every day, and I said, What is wrong with you, novelists? Why don't you write about heroic characters who are moved by a sense of moral duty? Because I found these people fascinating, and that's one of the reasons I wrote my book is it was almost an advertisement to novelists. You should write about these people. They're not simple. They're complex and fascinating. He gave me this look of total contempt like I had asked him to write about bunnies or butterflies. And I found that this was a feeling that many fiction writers shared. I talked to another friend of mine who's a novelist and he was trying to write about a heroic character and he said it was so difficult to write a novel about someone who was unambiguously admirable. It was almost as though the form itself was resisting.”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “No, I'm so glad you asked that. I think that science fiction is full of heroic characters. So a romance is, I think this is one of the things I concluded that the absence of unambiguously altruistic, heroic characters is one of almost one of the things that marks highbrow fiction as such. And I think, well, of course there are many, many exceptions, and there are heroes in higherbrow fiction. I think over the past hundred years, it has become noticeable that genre fiction is filled with far more heroism than higher culture. And it's such a noticeable pattern that it's almost as though there is something pushing against that kind of character. I mean, when I started talking about this with people, I talked about this first with a novelist who shared.”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “I just don't know. I mean, you know, what seems to be true is that in one very narrow sense of morality, we are becoming concerned about a wider circle of creatures than we were before. So whereas three centuries ago, let's say, very few people cared about the well-being of slaves, very few people cared about the well-being of animals, very few people cared about the well-being of really anyone outside their own community, however they defined it, maybe by their church or their village or whatever. And now through a combination of discussion and technology, people have learned to care about more people. Does that make us more moral? I think that's an incrediblely complex question that I'm not equipped to answer.”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “That will cure a child of worms and enable her to go back to school, or if you can buy a bed net that will prevent a family from getting malaria, those are such obvious short-term immediate goods that it's hard to resist them, and it's hard to take the gambles and take the risks of investing in less certain means of promoting welfare like lobbying for political change.”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “And I think in principle if you say, well, you effective altruists don't pay enough attention to politics, to governmental institutions, to human rights, to what people say they want, which is as often equality as material well-being. They will say, well, there's nothing in our philosophy that rejects those things. If we're for well-being of whatever form it takes. And if you convince me that going into politics is a better thing to do than going into banking, I'd be happy to do that. So they can in principle avoid the traps that, in fact, I think are preventing effective altruists from being as effective as they should be because in practice it's very difficult to resist a short-term surer bet in terms of doing good. So if you can spend a small amount of money and buy dewarming medicine,”

   2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Oh gosh, things become a calculation? Well, no, I mean, effective altruism is essentially a utilitarian doctrine. And I think in principle, there are far fewer objections than there are in practice. In practice, I've talked to many, many effective altruists over the years that the movement has been in existence. It was more or less founded in 2009 by the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “I love his book, and I think, you know, I mean, he gave the book an especially provocative title for obvious reasons. I don't think he thinks that empathy is useless, but I do agree with him that people could do a lot more good if they didn't rely solely on impulse and emotional attachment to issues that may be there just because they've heard of them, as opposed to trying to do research, trying to figure out how they really can do the most good with the resources that they're willing to give. And I think organizations like Give Well, which do research into various charities and show you which charities are more likely to succeed at their missions than others are incredibly helpful.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “And that was obviously an unconventional thing to do, but it wasn't the only one. So Mr. Badot, Hector Badot, stayed home. He was the one who changed the diapers. He made the breakfasts. He made the lunches. He cooked the dinners for the most part. And Sue, his wife, was the one who went out to work and earned the money to keep the household going. And this was a long time ago. I mean, they started out life together, I think, oh my gosh, I'm forgetting. It was many decades ago. I'm forgetting the exact year that they got married. And they just didn't care that other people thought they were weird because they knew that was the price of doing what they thought was right to do.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Thing they did, like how they dressed her. Things like that. I don't mean they didn't care about anything about what people thought because obviously they cared about making other people's lives better. But yes, in terms of opinions of themselves, they were much less sensitive to that than most of us. So, for instance, there was a couple who, the Bedots, who now live in Philadelphia, who adopted 20 special needs kids in addition to the two bio biological kids that they had.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “You know, it's funny you should say that because one thing that I have noticed about the extreme algebra, oh, you know, I don't want to call them extreme altruists. I mean, I think they're people with a very strong sense of duty. And one of the things that they have in common, the people I met were very, very different from each other. One thing they had in common is they really, really barely cared about what other people thought. They had to feel that way because almost everyone they met thought they were at best weirdos and at worst, you know, dangerous megalomaniacs. So they were unconventional in their degree of duty, but also in many other ways.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Yah, and I don't I don't agree with that. I mean, I think, you know, he likes to judge only on the results, but I think because the world is as it is, we can never fully anticipate the consequences of our actions. The important thing is to try our best to do so and not to be feckless about ignoring likely consequences, but to ignore the difference between someone who is trying to do something that is genuinely good and someone who is doing the opposite seems to me deeply wrong.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Are and how able they are to judge their actions and successfully anticipate whether they will produce wrong or not. And so you can blame someone for having a terrible idea of the good. That is part of how you judge them. And therefore, even though it may be because you grow up in a society where terrible ideas of the good are predominant and you somewhat haplessly find yourself swept along in them, you're still held to account.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “What if he'd been a terrible painter? That wouldn't have made a moral difference, but it would have made a difference to how we would judge him. So in that sense, he had moral luck. With extreme altruists, you know, there's this sense that I think most of us have that morality should be judged by motive, and therefore it is to some extent divorced from luck. That's why Bernard Williams' idea of moral luck was so strange and so startling to many people. The idea is if you try to do good, that's what counts, and whether you are able to infect do good is a result of luck of various kinds like your own ability, the situation in the world that you find yourself in, all kinds of things like that. But it's more ancient notions of morality find this paradox less strange because they believe that you can hold someone to account for how wise they are.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Well, I mean his classic example, I love Bruno Williams. I think he's a beautiful, beautiful writer and a very interesting thinker. And his classic example in this regard was Gauguin. Here is a painter who abandons his wife and I believe children to go to Tahiti and paint and find his artistic muse. Fortunately for Gauguin, he had the moral luck to be an excellent painter, so everyone forgives him. They say, how wonderful that he did what he needed to do to make this extraordinary art”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “My husband actually wrote about the Rwandan genocide. He has sometimes explained that to some of the killers it felt like a community building exercise. It was a way to support and cohere their own people. No, I don't believe that they could be extreme altruists because I think that genocide is wrong and I don't think that's a very controversial position. However, it is certainly true that people who do very terrible things can consider themselves extreme altruists and throughout history as we know it's very obvious that people have sacrificed themselves as often for terrible causes as for good.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Free in the sense of freely chosen, devoid of any cause from your childhood does not mean that they are wrong. So imagine here's what I try to persuade people who tell me that all altruists are mentally ill. About a kid who grows up with two lovely parents who try to persuade them that taking care of other people is the right thing to do. And because of that upbringing, they also grow up to feel an outsized sense of duty and responsibility, to take care of other people in the world. They are no more free than the person who came upon such a sense of duty because of their bad parents, so is one more free or worse than the other.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “The situation. They may take care of their parent. They may try to be a perfect student. They may take care of their younger siblings. They try to fix their family. And the idea is that this parentified child, the child who takes on the role of a parent as a young person, may grow up to have an outsized desire to fix the world, a sense of responsibility for the world in the way that they felt responsible for their family as a child. I thought about the people I'd met who I'd interviewed for my book. And not all of them, but lots of them had that circumstance. One of their parents was either an alcoholic or is mentally ill or was an addict of some kind. So I thought, okay, maybe there is something to this particular theory. However, I do want to push back on the idea that this therefore makes somebody pathological because just because your altruistic tendencies may not be”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Well, I have met a lot of them. I think they're fantastic. I mean, you know, of course, there are annoying altruists just like they're annoying golfers and annoying dentists. But I think I wrote about people I 100% wholeheartedly admired. But I'll say one thing. So I read a lot of psychological and psychiatric articles about altruism, and nearly all of them, as I've suggested, pathologized altruism in some way. And I became quite annoyed by this. And I read one article that described altruists in terms of parentified children. The idea here is that if you grow up in a household where at least one of your parents is not functioning as a parent, either because they are mentally ill or they are an alcoholic or an addict. They're not functioning as a parent. Obviously, in many cases this just messes the child up. But in some cases, the child responds by trying to fix”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Virtuous spouses did was actually not just unlikely to be helpful, but could be part of the same addictive behavior as drinking itself, as alcoholism itself. It was a sickness and one that needed to be gotten over. And I think this notion that trying to help people, sacrificing yourself to help people was a sickness became very widespread, especially in the 70s and 80s under the better known term codependency. And I think it's part of our now unconscious culture, the way we look at altruists when we hear about them. Many people think first, are they sick?”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “I think it comes from many, many sources, and I tried to unravel some of them in the book. I think it comes from a sense that has trickled down from many academic disciplines that humans are fundamentally egotistical, and therefore that insofar as they are not, it must be some kind of pathology or perversion, psychoanalysis is especially suspicious in that regard. But it also comes from so many areas of popular culture. I mean, for instance, one of the things that I became really intrigued by was Alan, because Alan, as you may know, is the organization founded in the 50s by the spouses and partners and family members of alcoholics. And it was designed to help people understand that trying to prevent someone from trying to help someone stop drinking, which used to be an unambiguously great thing to do. It's the thing that longs suffer.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “It was very surprising to me. I understand, of course, that not everyone is going to be an extreme altruist, but I didn't realize the extent of the hostility and suspicion of them until I started writing about them. And I became fascinated by that. I became a major part of the book, trying to figure out where this comes from, because I don't think it exists in every time and place in the same way.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Not to me, but to many others. And this was actually news to me when I embarked on the book. I went into it wanting to simply understand the drive and the motives of people who could sustain the kind of extraordinary sense of duty and altruism that some of us have some of the time moved maybe by a poignant photograph or somebody in front of us, but can't sustain without those cues in front of us. But there's other people who can, and I wanted to know what made them tick. But in my first foray into this field, I was writing about people who donated one of their kidneys to a stranger. And I discovered I was talking to people about the people I was meeting, and they would say, those people surely are all meant. Or they have some problem, or they are probably very, very sensorious or judgmental.”

    2019-01-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Larissa MacFarquhar on Getting Inside Someone's Head · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source