4.13.26 - Having a Dog & Efficiency Culture
Having a dog is funny because it really shows how some of the most meaningful things in life are fundamentally pointless, which I think calls into question a lot of the driving narratives in our culture today.
I would say that from the 2010s to around now (we’re at the tailend), we’ve seen something like an optimization culture emerge. There’s a lot of reasons for this. The first I think is the decline in Christianity as the organizing value system for our society, and the deeply materialistic worldview it leaves us with (very online people will say that’s reversing already, but this may be over-reading an online culture war fad––I don’t know if the future is everyone becoming catholic or orthodox).
People are no longer living a substantial portion of their internal life on a spiritual plane, they are not contending with their sins, with right or wrong, grappling with the gap between their desires and what’s morally permissible. I can imagine that if we could look into a normie’s mind in say, the 40s, they’d be preoccupied with guilt about being horny or something. Now that’s gone, everything is “valid.” People are instead preoccupied with the “RoI” of what they’re doing. People are riddled with guilt about wasting time, wasting money, not seizing opportunities, etc. This is what gives way to our society’s fetish for optimization.
But optimization to what end?
For Andrew Tate its status. For Clavicular its looks. For Bryan Johnson its longevity. Rationalists/Effective Altruists/and that space you’ll get to something like allocative efficiency and maximizing some social welfare function. Amongst the trad types it’s something like civilizational greatness––which is a little distinct from the previous examples, but has the same logic in practice. But whenever you ask “why” to these worldviews long enough, you eventually encounter fundamental emptiness.
If you ask “why” to a Christian worldview long enough (or to be a lib, any religious system), you are at least **meant** to encounter some profound truth. But if you ask “why” to these materialistic value systems you’ll get to an idea something like, “what else is the point of being alive other than being the best?” The best on what dimension? Tate and Clavicular have their theories on why their lanes are preferred. But if you press them hard enough, they’ll concede that people should just “mog” on whatever dimension they really care about, revealing that the heart of their philosophy is defined by voluntarism. You aren’t **meant** to encounter any profound truth. The point is just, if the point of life is to do what you want, why not just maximize your ability to do that (in the aggregate) by making massive investments and shortterm sacrifices into yourself?
I think that basically all of our problems can be traced back to trading a religious value system with a materialistic one (I’m the first to think of this).
Anyways, what does a dog have to do with this? Well, I think if you have a dog, you get an intuition of how silly all of this is. First of all, there is no “point” to most dogs’ life. They are essentially a huge cost to our society. They just ball out. They are not trying to maximize anything.
And with respect to their relationship to us, I do think that for the most part the pleasure they bring is outstripped by the costs they impose on us. Yes, they’re fun sometimes. I enjoy having mine. But they’re a huge headache. Lots of time, money, and stress. If you’re trying to optimize on any lane other than like, having a dog, it never really makes sense. I know an economist would have no problem just adding a dog to an individual’s “utility function,” but at the end of the day that’s just very silly. Because you can do that with anything.
Also, almost none of the redeeming qualities (in the eyes of efficiency culture) which apply for having children apply to having a dog. Dogs won’t be part of your legacy. For the most part, dogs won’t take care of you in your old age.
Now, I can think of a lot of counterarguments, but I think that having a dog just doesn’t fit vey well into efficiency culture. But many of us do it anyways. A lot of people have dogs, it seems like dog ownership is increasing even as efficiency narratives get a grip on our culture.
I think that’s a clue that the point of life, the only dimension worth “mogging” in is love. Maybe the point of it all is to just take care of things and be taken care of. Humans taking care of dogs, spending lots of money on their comfort and health, is evidence that we have a much greater capacity for love than can be accounted for by its reproductive advantage or its returns on any dimension.
I read something somewhere, on why aborting down syndrome and other retarded people is bad, and I think that aligns with what I’m trying to say here. Having people in our society who require a lot of us is just good for us. Sometimes, I (and I’m sure others), have looked at some individual who is just so horrifyingly disabled, who requires such immense cares, and have involuntarily thought "jeez what’s the point of that.”
I don’t claim to have an answer on the ethics of keeping very cognitively disabled people alive and spending immense resources on them. But I know that the instinct that would lead to their “removal” is intrinsically evil. It views humans as purely material, it views our concerns as purely material. There is no material “point” to keeping a non-verbal autistic paralyzed person alive and comfortable as long as possible. But if you follow that logic long enough, there’s no fucking point to any of this.
I’ve been grappling with this thought as my elderly dog requires increasingly expensive and time intensive care at a rather sensitive time for my academics and career (I’m doing a very valuable internship, preparing for finals, and staring at the bar exam). My entire family has mobilized capital to make sure this very tiny thing is okay. My roommate is helping me push medicine down his throat as he prepares for a surgery. I just spent a thousand dollars on blood tests and he’s getting tested for lymphoma. He got an ECG for like three thousand dollars last month.
I was having a conversation with my friend last night, talking about how fundamentally funny it is to have a dog have a cardiologist and an oncologist. We were joking about whether even makes sense to do all of this for a creature whose life has no “point” other than our pleasure and amusement.
Again, I don’t claim to have an answer as far as the ethics of the resource allocation. That money could be used to buy malaria nets and wells in Africa instead. It could probably save many human lives. There is a senselessness at the heart of all of this when you think of allocative efficiency.
But that line of thinking calls into question the lives of retarded people, disabled people, lazy people. It’s not a human way to look at things. There is a senselessness undergirding all of civilization that can’t be answer in materialist terms. I think the efforts to answer the senselessness in material terms is basically how you get to eugenics and fascism.
In my eyes, the only point is love, and love alone can make sense of senselessness.
Warm regards,
knxnts