Aphantasia and Other Stupid Human Tricks, Part III
Building institutions that connect across deep pluralism.
This is the final post in my aphantasia (aka “deep pluralism”) series. Catch up on Part I and Part II if you missed them.
When I was waitressing in grad school a fellow waitress mentioned that her boyfriend was gone that weekend, cleaning out silos. I remember being struck by two realizations. First, it had never occurred to me that silos needed to be cleaned. Second, I had never actually thought about silos in my entire life other than as a pleasing part of bucolic scenery.
It’s not like western NY or rural Tennessee or rural Illinois, all of which I’ve spent considerable time in, don’t have silos. I saw them all the time. But they were part of the background landscape in a way that required no origin story or ongoing maintenance. Even if I had thought about silo cleaning I would have drawn a blank because without knowing what silos entail I couldn’t even make an educated guess about whether they need to be cleaned or how one would do it or whether it’s a manual task or something machines do.
It turns out that some silo cleaning is pretty gross (according to my coworker), sometimes involving shoveling decomposing animals and rotting grain out of the bottom of the silo in preparation for (presumably) some kind of more detailed cleaning. It’s hard, dirty and unskilled work. And thousands of people across the country do it every day.
Pluralism and Tradeoffs (Exist)
Pluralism, like most things in life, comes with tradeoffs. In my case, there are definitely downsides to aphantasia and/or hypophantasia. Research into the phenomenon suggests it might be why my long-term memory sucks so badly.
I don't remember giant chunks of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. My grandmother still remembered the name of her 2nd grade teacher when she was 93 and I can't even picture what mine looked like. I think her last name started with an H. The primary ways I access memories are by looking at pictures or by someone telling me about the event in question. Even then, I'm not entirely sure whether I'm truly remembering or if my brain is sort of writing over the VHS tape of my memories and inserting that new memory in there after the fact.
I can’t pull up pictures of my kids in my head.
I can’t draw things without seeing them, which is probably what stymied my attempt at an art minor in college.
My lack of mental images and the associated impact on memory might be why I don’t really miss people when I’m away from them, at least not until I hear their voices or look at pictures of them.
A lot of this is obviously a bummer, but it might also come with some benefits people don't think about. There might, it turns out, be tradeoffs.
In some sense we’re always alone and we’re always together, all at the same time.
One that's relevant for radical moderation: it’s possible that because my memory sucks I don't really hold grudges. It's very easy for me to move on from conflicts because I don't seem to store those memories or at least not in an emotionally latent way. If I can't recall what the conflict was about or visualize an argument I can't spend a lot of time ruminating over it. So I don't.
More broadly, people with aphantasia may be better at abstract reasoning and verbal skills, which may in turn translate into different and unique ways of thinking about common problems.
In a similar way, deep pluralism generally comes with both costs and benefits.
The costs are somewhat obvious. Pluralism requires navigation. Diverse spaces often have more conflict precisely because understanding across difference requires time and energy. People tend to prefer to spend time with people who share similar norms, values, and expectations and, as a result, people voluntarily segregate along economic, class, occupational and political lines. These divides are even more powerful today than those across race, gender, or religion, which are often our default ways of thinking about diversity and pluralism.
But deep pluralism also creates strengths. Occupational diversity, as a basic example, is absolutely necessary for a flourishing society. Even though I didn’t know silo cleaning was a thing, I’m glad there’s someone doing it. I need to buy the stuff stored in silos and I need it to be stored safely so we don’t all die of mycotoxins. I needed silo cleaners without even knowing they existed.
More broadly, diverse groups, while they experience more conflict, also tend to be more creative and come up with more robust solutions to seemingly intractable problems. That’s probably even more true when we look beyond racial and gender diversity to the other kinds of diversity out there in the world.
Again, It's Political Realism, Not Relativism
Like with aphantasia, there exist deep limitations in our ability to know our fellow citizens. These other limitations often have nothing to do with cognitive wiring, but instead have to do with what kind of job you have, what educational level you have or what social class you occupy. Economic and occupational pluralism, for example, can have people living within a mile of each other leading such divergent lives that they don’t even know what they don’t know about each other. And of course it doesn’t occur to anyone to ask. If you don’t know silos need to be cleaned you’re not going to spend time thinking about who cleans them.
This kind of pluralism is a reminder that how we experience the world is necessarily and fundamentally idiosyncratic in ways we don’t think about.
This pluralism has deep political import. It’s a warning to utopian thinkers on the one hand who imagine we can engineer perfect political solutions. It’s also a warning to ideologues who think that with enough persuasion or force we can eliminate the "other side."
Politics isn't going away. People will always have different views, values, and goals—partly because the way they interpret and interact with our shared world is influenced by how their brains are organized, their economic and their personal history, their current social environment, and their future aspirations. The guy cleaning silos likely has justifiably different views than I do about everything from taxation to healthcare to criminal justice.
This reality doesn't mean abandoning the search for truth or giving up on moral reasoning. But it does mean accepting that contestation over values and goals will be a permanent feature of human life, at least until we all join the Borg and I can finally see the amazing images everyone else apparently sees all the time in their minds.
Navigating Diverse Realities in 4D
A major part of human social life involves navigating a social and political landscape where people's inner experiences, value systems, and ways of processing information are often fundamentally different from our own.
Rather than trying to eliminate disagreement or pretending it doesn’t exist, we should focus on creating institutions and norms that allow people with genuinely different ways of experiencing the world to coexist peacefully and productively.
In some sense we’re always alone and we’re always together, all at the same time. I can’t get other people out of my head anymore than I can fully welcome them in.
That’s the paradox of living as a member of a deeply social species that’s nevertheless characterized by deep pluralism.
What do we do with deep pluralism? Turns out, a lot! But given how long this has gotten, I’ll end with some basic advice.
Start with humility. Assume you don't fully understand how other people experience the world, think through problems, or arrive at their values. This doesn't mean accepting all viewpoints as equally valid, but it does mean approaching disagreement with genuine curiosity rather than certainty about others' motivations. For tangible approaches to curiosity, try out steel-manning, looping, or a Pluralist Lab.
Model robustness in your personal and political lives. I talked about the robustness principle a while back, but the short version is that you should be liberal is what you accept and conservative in what you put out into the world. This means that you assume at baseline that you might be wrong about where other people are coming from. This is another way of thinking about humility, but I like that it creates a bias toward grace and curiosity too.
Focus on shared challenges, not shared experiences or identities. Instead of assuming we all see the world the same way (we don't), identify concrete problems we need to solve together, things like crime, education, economic opportunity, environmental protection. People with very different lives, mental architectures or experiences can often agree on practical solutions even when they disagree about underlying philosophies.
Design institutions for deep pluralism. Rather than trying to create consensus on values or experiences, build systems that can accommodate genuine pluralism. This means protections for minority viewpoints, federalism that allows for different approaches in different places, and civil society institutions that bring different perspectives into productive dialogue. Designing for pluralism is a big part of the universal learning design community in education and should also be taken more seriously in most human contexts, including healthcare, criminal justice and, you guessed it, political life.
Resist the pressure to conform. Just as my husband briefly questioned his own visual experiences under social pressure, we all face pressure to conform our political and moral views to our tribes. By focusing on 4D decision-making (including the twin realities of humility and trade-offs) radical moderation supports our ability to think independently and the wisdom to know when we're being influenced by group dynamics rather than evidence and reasoning. It's easier to identify 1D tribalistic thinking if you're used to working in all four dimensions.
Remember the limits of understanding. Even with the best intentions and most sophisticated perspective-taking, we probably can't fully understand what it's like to be someone whose brain, experiences, and values are fundamentally different from our own. This should make us more modest about our political prescriptions and more open to learning from people who see the world differently.
Deep Pluralism is Freeing
The discovery of my a/hypophantasia (who knows what it actually is) was kind of funny and even a bit liberating. A while back I read some internet judgery about parents taking too many pictures of their kids and in doing so missing out on fully experiencing the moment itself. Fair enough. But what if those photos are my only long-term connection to that memory? If I’m going to have a really hard time recalling the amazing moment I watched my kids play against the backdrop of the Austrian Alps without a pic, maybe it makes sense to snap one without guilt. I still take a lot of pictures of my kids and now I do it without feeling like I’m violating some commandment of mindful parenting. Turns out not all good advice applies to all people.
The same is true for our political life. We don't need to see through the same mind's eye to build a society that works for everyone. We don’t need to know anything about silos. We just need to remember that there’s an almost infinite variety of experiences in our shared world and those experiences matter, even when we can't imagine (at least not perfectly) what they might show us.
Your Turn
Tell me what you think! Do you have a "silo cleaning moment" to share? Parents, do you have a piece of parenting advice that just doesn't work for your family? I'd love to hear your thoughts, including anything you think I’ve got wrong (there’s probably a lot!).
I’d also love feedback on this format. These didn’t end up super short, but I’d love feedback on breaking longer pieces into shorter episodic posts and/or posting shorter pieces more frequently throughout the week. I’m also mulling a monthly digest newsletter, which could take some of the pressure off those who prefer fewer communications. But I need your input!
And as always, if you like what you read, leave a comment, subscribe, and share!